Stephen Baxter: Anti-Ice

She punched away my arms and clutched her rifle against the oily remains of her dress. “Nothing has happened to me.”

“But your manner… this gun—”

She laughed. “What is so strange about a gun in the hands of a woman? I am French, and my country is in mortal peril! Of course I will use a gun.”

“But…” The stink of dust and cordite, the shriek of the shells, the shuddering of the Deck—all of it rattled loudly in my head. “I thought you might have been killed when the funnel exploded; or, if you survived, perhaps you had become a prisoner.”

She leaned closer to me and peered into my eyes; her face, which once had seemed so beautiful to me, was a mask of contempt. She said, “Once I thought you and your like… sweet. Harmless, at worst. Now you seem criminally stupid. Ned, listen to me. I was not injured in that funnel explosion because— after I set the funnel stopcock, during our tour with that dour engineer—I made sure I was in a far, far corner of the ship.”

I knew, now, why I had determined to come to this terrible place. I had come to confront the truth at last: and here it was, in all its bare horror. I could scarcely speak. An approaching shell shrieked, more loudly than ever; over its noise I shouted, “Françoise… come back with me.”

Now she opened her mouth and laughed out loud; I saw how spittle looped across her perfect teeth. “Ned, you Englishmen will never understand war. Go home.” She turned away from me—

—then the Deck lurched beneath me, and I was thrown to my back; a great shout filled my ears.

The Albert was hit. The land liner ground to a halt. Traveller had been right: one accurate shell had been enough to stop the ship. Four funnels still pumped out steam, but from the fifth there came only ominous black smoke; and from somewhere in the depths of the craft there was a low, agonized grinding, as if the ship’s metal limbs still strove to propel it over the earth.

The Promenade Deck was bent into great metal waves. Plates had been torn apart from each other, their rivets snapped.

Soldiers and guns had been scattered like toys. But all around me there was already purposeful movement, as men climbed over their companions to seize their fallen weapons.

Of Françoise there was no sign. She may have recovered before me—or she might even now be lying sprawled and broken among her countrymen, a new Maid of Orléans.

There was nothing I could do for her now—it seemed there never had been—and I must concentrate on saving myself. At the far end of the deck the Phaeton still stood, a little crazily; as I ran toward her the land liner was racked by a second explosion, and I was thrown again to the bloodied deck. It seemed the Prince Albert would tear itself to pieces without further aid from the Prussians.

Steam belched from the Phaeton’s nozzles. I scrambled up the rope ladder, dragged it in after me, and slammed home the hatch; then, with what was left of my strength, I hauled myself into the Bridge.

Traveller lay in his couch, his face a grotesque mask; for his platinum nose had been smashed away, and the gaping socket was a pit of dark, still-trickling blood. From above this hole his cold eyes flickered over me once—and then he wrenched at his control levers, and the Phaeton shot without ceremony into the air.

But even as we rose the Bridge was flooded with light. I clung to the deck while the vessel bucked in the roiling air like a frightened horse!

The Albert’s Dewars had failed. The anti-ice energy they contained was released in a flood, and the fragile frame of the liner burst like a paper bag. A gust of heat like a wind from hell rushed up and caught the Phaeton, hurling her upwards like an autumn leaf over a bonfire. For long seconds Traveller fought with his controls, and I could only wait, thinking that we should surely flip over and fall crashing at last into the earth.

…But slowly, as one emerges from a storm, the boiling of the air subsided. The Phaeton’s bucking settled to a gentle roll, at last becoming still.

I stood cautiously; every inch of my body felt as if it had been systematically pummeled, but I remained intact and unbroken, and once more I offered grateful prayers to God for my deliverance.

Traveller turned his terrible mask of a face to me. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. I… Françoise is a franc-tireur.”

“Ned, she is certainly dead now. But she chose her own path… As must I,” he added darkly.

I looked out of the glass dome. The French and Prussian infantries had joined now. Below us was a bowl of dust, splashed blood, and a thousand small explosions: it was a field of battle from which we were mercifully so aloof that the cries of the wounded and the stink of blood were lost.

Traveller pointed, off to his left. “Look. Can you see? The trail of Gladstone’s shell from London.”

I looked up into the sky. By squinting hard I could make out the strange line of vapour which stretched across the sky, a little more ragged now. Was it only minutes since I had stood on the deck of the Albert, studying that trail?

“Traveller, where is it going?”

“Well, it’s surely intended for the battlefield. What better way to demonstrate His Majesty’s displeasure than to flatten the pride of Prussia and France with one blow?… But Gladstone’s bunglers have made a mess of it. They’ve overshot. I knew I should have stayed home to get it right for them. I knew…”

His voice was steady and rational, but it had a strange undercurrent; and I sensed that his control was about to snap. “Traveller, perhaps the shell’s inaccuracy is a blessing. If it falls harmlessly into an uninhabited area—”

“Ned, the shell will be tipped by a Dewar containing several pounds of anti-ice. It is unlikely to be ‘harmless’… and in any event, I have observed it long enough to be sure of where it will fall.”

“Where?”

“It will be any second now, Ned; you should shield your eyes.”

“Where, damn you?”

“…Orléans.”

First there came a flowering of light, quite beautiful, which fled along the ground in all directions from the center of the old city. When that had faded, and we were able to open our dazzled and streaming eyes, we saw how a great wind was scouring after the light across the plain; trees snapped like matchstalks and buildings exploded to rubble.

Within seconds of the impact a great bubble of cloud formed over the city center. The cloud lifted to the sky, a monstrous thunderhead growing out of the ground; it blackened as it rose, and was lit from below by a hellish red glow—undoubtedly the burning of Orléans—and from above by the flickering of lightning between plumes of cloud.

It was all quite soundless.

I became aware that the clashing armies below had grown still, that their guns no longer spoke; I imagined hundreds of thousands of men straightening, facing their erstwhile opponents, and turning to this monstrous new apparition.

Traveller said: “What have I done? It makes Sebastopol look like a candle.”

I sought words. “You could not have stopped this—”

He turned to me, a bizarre smile superimposed on his travesty of a face. “Ned, I have dedicated my life since the Crimea to the peaceful exploitation of anti-ice. For if I could get the damn stuff used up on peaceable, if spectacular, purposes, then men would never again use it on each other. Well, at least the stuff will be exhausted now by these follies of Gladstone’s… But I have failed. And more: by developing ever more ingenious technologies for the exploitation of the ice, I have brought this day upon the Earth.