Aethosphere Chronicles: Storm of Chains

by Jeremiah D. Schmidt

  A couple members of Bar’s pirate crew stood in waiting as well. Two of them were holding gas torches, whose flames reached up to lick the underside of the arched ceiling, which hung not more than a few centimeters above their heads. Among those who’d joined this second rescue attempt, Drish recognized Rook, O’Dylan, Tanner, and Lance; who was still fiddling at the dials on his mechanized turtle shell.

  “Getting lots of chatter, Cap-i-tain,” reported the radioman. “Empire knows the base’s been compromised, and they’ve issued an all-hands-on-deck shoot-to-kill order for anyone matching your-guy’s descriptions.”

  “Thanks for stating the obvious, Lance,” grumbled Bar as he came squeezing out the hole in the wall to land in a panting heap on the chamber floor. “What’s the condition of the skiff?”

  “Ready and waiting in Thresher’s Valley.”

  “And the Chimera?”

  “The first mate’s seen fit to remain in the Smuggler’s Redoubt to await our arrival…or, for word of our death, which ever’s the case. As was agreed.”

  “Agreed,” scoffed Bar, as though to suggest it was anything but, “just as well. That pompous piece of work would just get in the way with all that pirate codex B.S of his.”

  “Where are we?” butted in the noble in fatigued tones. He was sick of being dragged all over creation, and he just needed to know there was some end to all of this in sight. In fact, he would have given anything at that moment just to be back home, instead of this blackened mouth to the abyss.

  “This,” Bar gestured to the brick walls encasing them. “It used to be an escape tunnel back when the fort was smaller. It was bricked up centuries ago as they expanded, but engineers managed to dig it out during the Siege of Throne… Heard Admiral Lockney died fighting against a Nocshatten raid on the Cloudfortress herself, in those early hours of fighting. Died defending that morgue so vital personnel could make their escape. Stories say he intentionally stayed behind to deflect suspicion, so that when the last man through replaced the bricks in the back of the locker, those armored goons didn’t know any better; thought they killed everyone. Quite a few men owe Lockney their lives, after making it safely to airships waiting in the valley; the way I hear it.”

  “What about you, Bar,” asked Abigail, “how did you manage to survive the invasion?”

  “Me? Well the Chimera was still in the dockyards in Brasstown when the battle began, getting fixed up after our spat with an Iron hunter-killer in the Barrier Shoal. But once Hierarchs started striking we launched to backup the fleet, but when the Nocshatten took Ragnarok, and turned the Cloudfortress’s big guns on us, we ended up dispersed with the rest of the royal navy. After that we flew for a spell—on the run—striking out where we could, until finally cornered. We’d no choice but to flee into the Shoal, where we happened upon the pirate haven of Black Blood…”

  “And the rest is history,” finished O’Dylan for the captain.

  Bar’s expression turned monstrous in the dark, the frustration plainly evident in in the hard lines cut into his face. “Anyway,” he said, sighing away the old defeat, “fortunately for us, those Iron bastard haven’t taken notice of this passage in the last three years, so we utilized its function for our little endeavor here and now. Got a cloudskiff waiting back in Thresher’s, just like the evacuation, and that’ll fly us to an escape tunnel in Throne.”

  “Another tunnel,” bemoaned the noble.

  “Tunnel’s a kind word,” snickered O’Dylan with a wolfish grin.

  “Anyway, we’ve got a guy who’ll lead us back to the Redoubt; where my airship’s docked and waiting, so we can put off from this godforsaken hornets’ nest.”

  “And the sooner the better,” agreed Tanner glumly.

  The trek through the stony heart of the High Crown didn’t take long, but it gave Drish a moment to catch his breath. The rest of the pirate band kept quiet as well, leaving the darkened caverns in peace while their torches painted the rocky walls ahead of them, and just as well. Drish needed this time to think anyway; to reason. Disturbingly, he had begun to grow sympathetic for these scofflaws; and his mounting affections for Abby had him wondering if the life of a resistance fighter might not be all that bad after all; and that inevitably had his thoughts drifting to Arvis. Though Drish still hadn’t come to grips with his father’s death, the more he sympathized with this rabble, the more keenly it became a reality.

  When the light of an atmium vein punched through the walls around them, it helped loosened the tongues of Drish’s pirate saviors, and that held the benefit of distracting the noble away from his doubts, his desires, and his sadness. His eyes inevitably drifted to Abigail, and no matter how hard he fought his heart, just seeing her in the shaft’s ghostly glow left him yearning for her, now more than ever.

  She looked enamored by all the glowing crystals. “Isn’t it beautiful?” her voice echoed in wonder, “I’ve never seen atmium up close before.” And she brought a fingertip up to lightly trace its luminous contours. “It’s wet, and warm…and soft. I hadn’t expected it to be so soft.”

  “You’d think staring up at your Gods’ Bind would have gotten you over this, girl,” brooded Tanner.

  “Seeing it up in the Gods’ Bind is different from being able to reach out and touch it,” she responded defensively. “And there’s enough here to lift a hundred ships at least…the wealth—”

  “Typical crowny…you hold a Hierarch’s regard for this most sacred of elements.”

  Abigail turned from her wonder and placed her hands firmly on her hips. “Excuse me?”

  “You all see it as a thing simply to be coveted,” accused the dark-skinned northerner. “Its use to you is in how it can be shoved away in your airships.”

  To that statement, Drish agreed with the sinewy Glenfinner. Accounting for atmium had been his life for the past two years now; ever since joining the Imperial Protectorate’s ranks. As a clerk in the Atmium Administrative Bureau, he cataloged Hanns Company production quotas and refinement rates, and that had stripped away all the grandeur, leaving this anti-gravitational material as nothing more than a commodity in his mind; a commodity that had brought Hierarch and Candaran into the conflict of the Great Skies War.

  “Instead of stopping the Empire, it was crownies who chose to violate the Great Convention just as they had; mining the mineral for technological gains. Had your forbearers sought to protect the law, we might never have faced the Iron monster that now plagues these skies.”

  Abigail attempted to steel her expression, but her demeanor confessed a wounded indignity, and eventually she turned away from Tanner and continued marching along the tunnel without giving the atmium a second glance.

  “Elwyn mumbo-jumbo,” sneered Lance as he plodded along, speaking more loudly than need be because of the headphones he was wearing. “There’s always some band of religious fanatics eager to decry the progress of technology. Ain’t no man around that can say the ACS hasn’t made our lives a great deal better. Sometimes, Tanner… I dare say your ol’ finny views are about as backwards as those of the Gardayan Republic.”

  Drish wasn’t at all surprised when Tanner took insult in light of the radioman’s dismissal towards his native isle. “Watch what you say about the isle of my birth.”

  “Psh,” Fen dared to interject, “you Ascellan Candarans all get so bent out of shape over these isles of yours. King’s Isle, Glenfindale, Moon Fall, Sepia, Borada; blah blah blah; what’s really the difference between these twelve kingdoms of yours anyway? You all act like your home isle is the only places that ever mattered.”

  “Speaks the Hierarch,” grumbled Rook. “You’re of a species who believes only in the importance of Junction.”

  “Shows what you know,” snapped the teenager defiantly, “I don’t give a crap about that place. I got out of there three years ago with my hide intact, and I ain’t never going back there ever again; so there.” Fen finished by sticking out his tongue and giving the scarred Candaran brute the raspberry.r />
  “Enough chatter,” instructed Bar, “We’re getting close to Thresher now, and I don’t need your loud mouths getting picked up by seismic detectors.”

  When the fugitives finally emerged from the mountain, it was to find themselves on the precipice to a steep valley; one not much wider than the Administrative square Drish had fled from a couple days ago. About a kilometer down its slope Thresher’s gave way abruptly to empty sky; a sky streaming in the aura of an intense blue light.

  “Is that the Gods’ Bind,” Drish pointed to the nebulous glow.

  “That it is,” replied Bar, and then redirecting the noble’s attention, he said, “but our ride off this rock is that way. So, if you’re done gawking, maybe you can join the rest of us, before the Empire has the sense to begin an aerial search for our whereabouts.”

  Drish swung his view around to where the pirate captain had indicted, finding a twenty-meter long cloudskiff moored a few dozen meters above them. There was very little the noble found impressive about this antiquated blimp, and even in its prime it would have been a miserable hulk. As it stood in the present, however, the atmium core system was about the only thing in good condition, but where it protruded out the sides of the hull like a glassy growth it showed signs of cracking. Things only went downhill from there. The steel sheath wrapped around it was blighted by scabs of orange rust, so pervasive in some places that the superstructure gleamed out like exposed bones, and the gondola’s peeling paint looked like hairs trembling in the wind.

  “That,” Drish baulked, “is our means of escape? It’s nothing more than an isle transport.”

  “And transporting us, is exactly what it’s going to do,” offered Abigail, giving a nudge to accountant’s ribs with her elbow.

  “I’ll admit, she certainly ain’t the Chimera,” agreed Bar, “but on short notice this is about all we could rustle up. Beggars can’t be choosers as they say.”

  “And stealing an ugly airship nobody gives a damn about is far easier than stealing something pretty,” crooned O’Dylan.

  “This is stolen?”

  “Temporarily borrowed with the intent to return,” justified Abigail with a coy shrug. “It’s all for the resistance anyway.”

  But the approaching drone of imperial bi-fighters quickly ended the moment’s hesitation, and Bar urged the company onto the airship with a taskmaster’s sharpened tongue. “Ready the boiler,” he barked as he galvanized his muscular frame towards the front cockpit, “cast off the mooring lines, and secure the passenger’s.”

  Behind the ship’s control center, Drish strapped himself down into one of the bucket seats lining the bulk of the cabin; the one right next to Abigail; while the pirates rushed around in preparations.

  At the front of the gondola, Bar planted himself in the right-hand seat and turned to the pilot. “This is probably going to get complicated, Gryph, you up to this?”

  At first, Drish didn’t know who the captain was speaking to. The pilot’s seat looked empty, but then it twisted around, and a small child took shape, nodding back, before he flipped one switch after another in preparation for takeoff.

  “That child’s our pilot,” blurted Drish, indignant. This pirate captain had the worst crew imaginable; what with Hierarch teenagers, indifferent henchman, and now this child-pilot.

  “Ay ent no chuld,” the pilot babbled back, incomprehensible. That’s when Drish spied the thick, salt-and-pepper mustache hiding the man’s upper lip. The small-statured Candaran was glaring back at the noble, fiercely, through a thick set of goggle-lenses, looking to be at least an inch thick.

  Realizing his mistake, Drish began a hasty apology, when Fen plopped himself down in the seat in front of him and kicked back to relax. The seat almost folded into the noble’s lap.

  “Cozy,” Drish grumbled into the top of the Hierarch’s scarred scalp.

  “Immensely,” responded the youth, just as the skiff’s system’s started whining to life. Next came the crackle of electricity, then the squawk of hydraulics, and somewhere in the rear, the steam engine began to chug up to speed, so that when the first imperial patrol came roaring overhead, the cloudskiff was just beginning to pull away from its secret dock in Thresher’s Valley.

  Drish straightened in his seat at the sight of the bi-fighter banking back around for another pass. “I think they’re lining up for an attack run, Bazzon, we’ve got to surrender. There’s no way we can escape.”

  “Bi-fighters can only track visually,” stated Bar with an unwavering confidence, and he tilted his head to look up into the cloud cover, “so this soup will work to our advantage—”

  “Got what looks like imperial hunter-killers pinging off the resonance stone too here, Cap,” interrupted Fen, and next to him, Drish spied the obsidian crystal and its tracking pings and waves of blue light. The youth was right. “Got them moving on an intercept course from Port Armageddon.”

  “Damn the Empire!” cursed Bar. “Alright, Gryph, we’re going have to try and shake ‘em in the air traffic over Throne, and then crash and ditch before they can close in… So much for returning this ship in as-is condition.”

  “Urt appens,” replied the pilot.

  “Crash and ditch?” Drish didn’t like the sound of that one bit. “But why not just break for open sky.”

  “Listen, the day we take aerial combat advice from a landstomper like you, is the day we all trade in our wings for lead parachutes, you keen? So let me spell this out for you; this bird doesn’t have the gumption to outrun a horsefly let alone an imperial hunter, and the first shot she fires will go straight through this barge like a hot knife through butter. So leave the strategy—”

  Rat-tat-tat-tat

  As though to prove Bar’s points, a second bi-fighter came soaring in at that very moment, strafing sidelong and punching a line of bullets from the bow to the stern. In the aftermath, a hundred beams of light steamed down through the cabin, highlighting the danger.

  “You couldn’t have found a better ship than this!”

  “This whole mission was supposed to be about stealth,” Bar muttered, as he aided the pilot in final preparations. “If it was about fighting our way in and out, you’d still be tied to that medical bed, and I’d be flying back to Black Blood aboard my own ship. Now barring hijacking an Iron vessel, there ain’t an airship made in these skies that can go toe-to-toe with the Empire anyway, so best synch your restraints up tight, and hold on…this is bound to get hairy.”

  Next to Bar, Gryph eased back the accelerator, and the skiff’s props began groaning up to speed.

  “I hate flying,” snapped the noble in exasperation. “If I go a lifetime without ever having to step foot on an airship again, it’ll be too soon.”

  Chapter 8

  Drish was to choke on those words, however, almost in a literal sense, when the small pilot with the big mustache suddenly punched the accelerator to maximum. The props outside responded with a roar, and beneath them, the skiff leapt from its perch and plummeted down into the narrow canyon below. From there things only got more harrowing.

  Drish’s constitution spun in nauseating circles as Gryph piloted the small airship like a child careening down a slide, swinging it from side to side, while rocky outcroppings zipped past the front viewport with mere inches to spare. The noble held his breath and dug his nails into the arm of his seat, finding he was unable to decide what was worse, the likelihood of crashing into the mountainside, or the fact his stomach had been left behind when the force of acceleration sucked him back into the crumbling leather of his seat. The addition of machinegun fire only added to that dread when it came bursting down into the valley around them, blasting apart nearby rocks in a hail of near-molten lead.

  It drew Drish’s leery gaze, and he looked out the porthole to his left, just as the ship’s starboard dipped right, giving him a perfect view of the underside of the clouds. Shockingly, they were peppered with circling bi-fighters, looking like a stirred-up swarm of gnats, with more appearing by t
he second. Those that came buzzing in took turns—one after the other—dive-bombing their prey. Rat-tat-tat-tat, the bi-fighters shrieked endlessly, and sometimes it was accompanied by a dull thwap, or twangy rattle, when a bullet, or series of bullets impacted the skiff’s flimsy hull.

  Gryph was taking them towards the isle’s edge, keeping as close to the valley floor as the madman dared, and as the mountains raced past the windows, the noble couldn’t help but howl his distress. “This is madness,” he cried mutely, his voice lost beneath the strained scream of the propellers, and the near-constant rain of gunfire.

  The end of the High Crown came more abruptly than the panicked noble could have wanted, and he missed the cover it provided the instant it was gone. They were in the open now and fully at the mercy of the swarming bi-fighters, and Gryph’s insane piloting. When it came to their pursuers, the only saving-grace was in the sheer number of them making it difficult to fly out of each other’s way; but as for the pilot, there was nothing about his erratic flight maneuvers that Drish found comforting.

  Outside, two Iron aircraft collided in the fray, bursting into flames, and tumbling through the overcast sky in a smoking rain of wreckage. Drish watched in wide-eyed awe, until the airship unexpectedly nosed down and he found the Sovereignhelm Highlands of King’s Isle painted across the front windshield.

  From the port, the Gods’ Bind suddenly appeared as Gryph put them almost vertical. The atmium feature’s brilliant glow turned the cabin into a blue sun, forcing Drish to shield his eyes from the glare, while screeching, “I can’t see!” He was completely overwhelmed by the terror of this aerial catastrophe. Had these fools just left me back in Armageddon, he wished, I’d be tucked safely in a bed; not about to die…