Guerrilla (The Invasion of Miraval Book 2)

by Justin Bohardt

  Apeniv nodded and ordered, “Get us out of this smoke.”

  The Godsfury rose out of the lingering smog that had surrounded it as Apeniv strode to the skyscope and searched for his target. He spied them the near the entrance to the ravine and saw further that the Dominion army had been carpet bombed by the captured airship. Not only had the rats managed to destroy his fleet, but they had set all of his well-laid plans to utter ruin. Apeniv’s career might be over with this crushing defeat, but there was still a last opportunity to grab vengeance.

  “Move us into firing range,” he ordered. “I want that airship rent asunder.”

  36

  “Aria, Kayleigh, Logan, get to the interceptors!” Dag ordered. “Kryski, get everyone else to the air-to-air deck. Move!” Picking up the radio, he hailed the Dominion airship, the beginnings of a rather reprehensible plan forming in his mind. When he did not receive an answer, he broadcast, “We have over fifty Dominion prisoners on board this airship. If you shoot us down, they come down with us.”

  “Hostages, sir?” Markov asked.

  “Just stating the facts,” Dag replied.

  The militiamen had scrambled to get to their gunnery positions, and Dag jumped into the radar station as there was no response on the radio. A series of new yellow blobs joined the one representing the Dominion dreadnought as a high-pitched warning klaxon warbled through the conn.

  “So much for that,” Dag muttered before shouting, “Incoming! Go evasive!”

  “Aye,” Markov shouted back from the pilot’s station.

  The faster corvette moved to the starboard hard, but Markov only had a narrow corridor to work with. The airship was almost at its height limit and the rocky hills and tall forests of the Crest were not offering him much of an alternative other than to try to move laterally away from the incoming projectiles as they raced to the east, away from Rainer Ravine.

  The Intrepid was not fast enough though. The gun crews were still getting into position when the Godsfury’s first salvo struck. Fortunately, most of the projectiles shot past the stern of the ship thanks to Markov’s maneuvering, but the Intrepid was rocked by a series of explosions against the aft of the ship.

  A dozen lights suddenly lit up on the damage control board and Markov let loose a shrill curse. “Engine one just went out,” he said. “Speed is dropping. The rest of the damage seems to be concentrated in the brig area.”

  “Well, that’s irony,” Dag muttered as he saw another salvo launched from the pursuing airship. Grabbing the internal phone handset, he dialed in the weapons deck and demanded, “Kryski, where the hell are my interceptors?”

  “Stand-by one,” the sergeant replied.

  “I can’t,” Dag retorted.

  37

  Kryski dropped the phone and jumped into one of the hatches leading from the gun deck, sliding down the ladder which ran diagonally from the deck to the gun turret. He came to a hard stop as he reached the bottom of the chute and jumped into the gunner’s chair. A massive rotating gun barrel emerged from his keelmount and there were multiple levers in front of him that controlled the direction and firing of the weapon. A small radar screen showed the incoming projectiles and he could see the Godsfury in the distance, looming to the Intrepid’s starboard aft. Several of the phalanx batteries were already firing and Kryski moved his gun to where the radar said the projectiles were coming in and opened fire.

  38

  In the conn, Dag watched as the number of projectiles surging toward them diminished and then nearly vanished. Still, a few slipped through and the Intrepid was shaken hard by a series of explosions. The Godsfury gained on them easily with one of the Intrepid’s engines gone, and a third bombardment ripped into the Intrepid.

  “I’ve lost a turbine!” Markov shouted as the Intrepid began to lose altitude.

  Dag felt a sickening feeling as the airship hurtled downward, Markov frantically working the controls to try to bring it back up. The Godsfury’s next attack sailed over their bow as the ship continued to drop.

  “Shouldn’t we have crashed by now?” Dag demanded.

  “I’m compensating for the drop in lift,” Markov reported. “We’re now holding steady, but at twenty-five hundred feet. That’s below the elevation of the Crest. What the hell?”

  Dag raced over to the terrascope and laughed when he saw crystal clear blue below him. “We’re over the sea,” he said. “We must have just missed the cliffs.”

  “A little early for a celebration, sir,” Markov said as the Godsfury opened fire again.

  39

  In one of the bombard deck’s keelmounts, Aria had had too clear a view of the Intrepid’s descent as the bottom of the airship scraped over the woods and just missed hitting a wing on the cliffs of Aerin before it leveled off. Aria turned her gun to the next attack, trying to shoot missiles out of the sky as they raced toward her, but she was beginning to realize that it was a useless gesture. They had no ammunition left that could hurt a ship of that size, the Intrepid was wounded and felt like it had slowed even more, and there was nowhere to go. The airship could not climb high enough to get to friendly territory, and they were headed in the wrong direction if they wanted to try to get help from the rest of Miraval. The airship was going down one way or the other, it seemed.

  With a sudden surge of speed, the Godsfury swarmed upon the Intrepid, but did not fire. Aria turned her guns to it, but they did no damage on the massive armor that protected the airship. The enemy was matching velocity and course, preparing to pull alongside to deliver a massive killing broadside Aria realized. This is how she died, she thought to herself as the steel goliath readied itself to deliver the Intrepid’s deathblow.

  “All hands out of the gun turrets,” Dag’s voice resounded over the intercom. “All hands out of the gun turrets! Move!”

  Not even thinking to question the unusual order, Aria leapt out of her seat and grabbed hold of the ladder and slid from the turret back to the central bombard deck. Kayleigh and Logan arrived not a moment later, both looking confused with young Kayleigh looking terrified.

  “Let’s get to the conn,” she said just as she and the others were thrown off their feet. A sound of metal sheering metal screeched throughout the ship, a noise so shrill Aria was forced to cover her ears until it stopped.

  “That didn’t feel like an explosion,” Logan managed as he pulled himself back up to his feet.

  “Didn’t sound like one either,” Aria said.

  “All hands report to the bridge,” Dag’s voice came over the loudspeaker again. “Fully armed.”

  40

  The most recent blast from the Godsfury had blown out most of the instrumentation, the starboard maneuvering thrusters and the second of the airship’s three aura diesel engines. With the radar screen now dead, Dag used the skyscope to see the dreadnought easily match speeds and move alongside the Intrepid.

  “You may have won the battle, mountain rats,” a voice with a heavily effete Dominion accent came through the radio. “I hope your lives were worth sacrificing to achieve your grand endeavor of delaying the inevitable.”

  “That arrogant bastard,” Dag spat, the annoying condescending tone of whoever was on the other end of that radio fueling a rage that was already reaching a boiling point.

  The murdered men and women who served under him should never have been killed, and there was no reason for them to be forced to kill hundreds of Dominion soldiers or to lay down their own lives in the defense of their country. If the thrice damned Dominion had just stayed out of Miraval, none of this would ever have happened, Dag thought to himself. And things with Aria… they never would have happened the way they did. Maybe he would have married her years down the road and had a family, but now they were going to die together in a captured Dominion airship as they were either blown up or sent careening into the depths of the Averillian Sea. He could not accept that. If it was indeed his time to be sent to the hallowed halls of the gods, then he sure as hell did not want it to be jus
t after he had given up on any hope of victory.

  “The hell with it,” Dag spat. “Throw it hard to the starboard.”

  “What?” Markov demanded.

  “Quickly, close the distance before they can fire,” he ordered.

  “And then what?” Markov demanded as he engaged the port side thrusters momentarily, pushing the Intrepid closer to the dreadnought.

  “We ram them,” Dag said.

  “Sir, are you insane?” Markov shouted as he threw a look back to Dag, an incredulous expression on his face.

  Dag jumped up from the captain’s chair, raced over to Markov’s station and hit the controls that fired the portside thrusters once more. Markov quickly strapped himself in as Dag hit the intercom and ordered all of the Miravallians to get out of the gun turrets. With the radar dead, they could not see where they were headed, and Dag could only hope that the Godsfury was too slow to get out of the way.

  There was a horrible metallic crunching noise and then Dag was thrown back into the wall. He saw stars for a moment but he still managed to hear Markov shout, “I’ve lost all of the starboard turbines.”

  Dag was still dizzy, but he did not have the feeling that in the pit of his stomach that they were falling. “What’s keeping us up then?” he demanded.

  “I have no idea,” Markov replied.

  Dag made his way over to the sky scope and managed to focus his eyes on a sight he barely could believe. “The starboard wing is gone,” he said to Markov. “And we’re hung up.”

  “On what?” the engineer asked.

  “On the dreadnought,” he replied.

  The Godsfury’s rear-most portside wing had punched a hole straight through the Intrepid’s weakened armor when the corvette had attempted to sideswipe the larger craft. The starboard wing had broken away in the crash, but the dreadnought was managing to keep the smaller airship aloft, precariously balanced on its wing. The Godsfury was firing its thrusters, trying to shake itself free of the Intrepid.

  “We’re not going to be hooked on there for long,” Dag said as he grabbed the intercom again and ordered all hands to the bridge with their weapons. He picked up his hunting rifle, slung it over his back and grabbed a pair of Dominion standard issue machine guns out of a weapons locker in the conn. “Let’s go,” he said to Markov as he tossed him the weapon.

  They made their way up two decks via the ladder and emerged at the hatch leading to the bridge. Kryski and his gun crew were already there and the sergeant offered Dag a hand up. A quick count showed that Kryski was one short, and when Dag asked him about it, he just shook his head. One of the gun turrets must have been destroyed. Aria, Kayleigh and Logan were the last out of the hatch and they were all pulled into the suddenly crowded bridge.

  “What are we doing up here?” Aria asked.

  “Boarding them,” Dag replied, wearing the same wry grin he always had on his face when he was planning something insane. He pointed to the bow of the Intrepid. With the loss of its starboard wing and being impaled by the dreadnought’s wing to the stern, the airship had turned at a diagonal angle to the Godsfury and was now contacting the front of its foremost and smaller of the two triangular portside wings. “We make our way over there and jump onto the wings of the dreadnought,” he said.

  The militia gave him a collective look that was generally reserved for the ramblings of the most insane.

  “The Intrepid’s going down either way,” Dag said. “We do this and we stay in the fight a few moments longer.”

  Markov was the first to speak up. “We can’t jump over where the end of the wing is touching amidships,” he said pointing to the middle of the Intrepid. “Those turbines will suck us right down. We need to get to where the wing meets the hull,” he added, pointing to the bow of the Intrepid.

  “Alright, let’s do it,” Dag said as he slid under the bridge’s railing and grabbed a ladder which led down to the mechanic’s spine, a railed walkway that led from one end of the ship to the other, designed to allow engineers to make necessary repairs to exterior components mid-flight.

  A high tensile wire paralleled the hand rails and there was a box with carabineers mounted on the hull next to the ladder. Markov passed one out to everyone before grabbing another bundle of the nearly indestructible wire. The militiamen in turn hooked their carabineers through their belt loops and then onto the wire, before following Dag down the mechanic’s spine at a near sprint. Once they reached the front of the airship, it was a mere jump of ten feet down to the dreadnought’s wing, but there was a gap of about twelve feet in between the two airships.

  Markov started unbundling the rope. “Who’s going first?” he asked Dag.

  “I am,” Dag answered as he started tying one end of the flexible wire to his carabineer.

  “Who taught you how to tie knots?” Aria demanded over the sound of wind whipping past them. In just a few seconds, she had undone his knot and replaced it with something that looked more likely to hold.

  “Thanks,” he said as he looked over to see that Markov had threaded the wire around the hand railing before passing the second end of the line to Aria. She tied the second end around a second belt loop as he said to her, “Here goes nothing.”

  She pulled him close to her and kissed him. “Try not to miss,” she said once she had broken away from him.

  Dag smiled and then took off at a run across the narrow top of the hull at the front of the airship. He leapt across the gap and felt a terrifying and satisfying rush of adrenaline as he was weightless for a moment, buffeted only by the wind. A moment later, he realized that he had put too much strength into the jump. He crashed against the Godsfury’s hull, just above a phalanx mount and fell down to the cold steel of the wing joint, his momentum almost forcing him to roll off the edge of the wing.

  Somewhat amazed that what he had just done had worked, Dag got to his feet and untied Aria’s knots. The dreadnought’s wing had a long mechanic’s spine running the length of the two portside wings and Dag tied off both ends of the wires quickly and waved his arm, signaling the next Miravallian to slide over. Markov came first and immediately re-tied the knots before waving the next man over. One by one, the militiamen slid down to the airship’s wing, more than one looking terrified and refusing to look below them to the tranquil waters of the sea several thousand feet below them.

  Aria was the last on board the Intrepid and was preparing to jump across to the Godsfury, when one of the dreadnoughts phalanx cannons opened fire, sending a cavalcade of burning hot shells down on the Miravallians who were forced to dive across the wing to avoid the downpour of spent metal. The gunfire ripped at the fore of the Intrepid, severing the section of the railing that the wire was threaded through and forcing Aria to jump out of the way. Just as she leapt, forward mortar cannons blasted into the corvette, attempting to force the airship off the dreadnought’s wing. The force changed the position of the Intrepid, and Aria lost her purchase, falling over the rail of the mechanic’s spine and landing on the curved hull. She started skidding down the side slowly, despite her attempt to slow her procession toward the twenty-five hundred foot drop.

  “Aria!” Dag bellowed as he got to his feet once more and grabbed one of the knotted ends of the wire, pulled it free, and knotted it around his belt loop as he ran toward the edge of the wing. Just as Aria fell off the edge of the hull, he leapt off the dreadnought’s wing.

  Time moved in slow motion for a moment, the look of horror frozen on Aria’s face, how she seemed to be so far away, her hand stretched back toward Dag’s. Their fingertips touched and then the wire caught, as he flailed out desperately for her, his hand grasping with vice-like power for whatever it could find. There was a sickeningly feeling of emptiness, and then he felt slender flesh and bone in the palm of his hand, and Aria was staring up at him, her eyes wide. He reached his other hand down as she stretched her hand up to him, but they could not reach other.

  “Damn it,” Dag growled as he reached down once more with his free
hand, but this time grasped her lower on the arm which he already held.

  With strength he was never aware that he had, Dag lifted her by her one arm until she was able to grab his belt with her free hand. Using it as leverage, she heaved herself up until she grabbed hold of the wire and had pulled herself to a secure position above him. Dangling from the line like bait on a fishhook, Dag took a second to recover his strength before starting up the line like Aria had. He could see the Intrepid in relief against the cliffs in the distance and saw how much damage the exterior of the ship had taken. How the Intrepid had seen them through this battle so far was amazing, he thought to himself. Just as an ancient prayer of thanks to Aeschal, goddess of light and air, came to his lips, he noticed that the bow of the Intrepid was swinging back toward him.

  “Aria, climb faster!” he shouted over the roar of the wind and the nearby turbines as he started to pull himself up hand over hand.

  They had kept the port thrusters engaged when they left the Intrepid, and they must still have been firing, Dag realized. Even though the force of the attack had knocked the corvette away from the Godsfury momentarily, the thrusters were pushing the airship back into the dreadnought, directly into where they now hung.

  Aria reached the top of the rope where she was pulled up by Markov and Kryski. With her weight off the line, everyone began pulling up on it, trying to get Dag to the top. Sunlight suddenly vanished and Dag realized that he was in the shadow of the corvette, just as Markov’s hands grabbed hold of his uniform. Markov and Logan pulled him up, just as the Intrepid crashed into the Godsfury. They were thrown backward into the hull, as were the two dozen Dominion soldiers who had appeared on the bridge located above them.

  Several of the Dommies were pitched forward over the guardrail and down to the wings, where one had the misfortune of rolling into the turbine. Kayleigh was the first of the Miravallian militia to her feet and she had the rest of the Dommies on the wings put down permanently before anyone else could react.