And then the hunter-killer came crashing straight through a reef’s dense trunk directly ahead of them. Bar could scarcely rationalize what he was witnessing. One moment there was a solid rocky surface, the next, a fractured plane; like a window struck by a rock; and then an entire section exploded into a shower of falling boulders and spurting lava. Like a demon tearing its way from hell, the hunter-killed squeezed through the devastation with lava flecked over her gouged and dented hull in thick rivets. A mechanized roar—sounding like a wounded animal’s cry of agony—followed, filling the tormented skies. Where the molten rock touched, the metal beneath heated rapidly from black to burning white, before losing its shape entirely and melting away into dripping slag. Flashes of lightning and steaming billows of smoke followed; forming around the disturbance like a dense and sinister fog.
On the bridge of the Chimera, the air became sweltering as the room filled with the burning red light radiating off that gushing lava. In seconds Bar found his shirt soaked in sweat, and his heart beating wildly beneath it. The sight left him gaping in disbelief, his eyes locked on the Iron behemoth as it dripped molten metal. Behind it, lava continued to pump out from the reef’s shattered limb, looking like a waterfall of death, terrifying, yet oddly beautiful in its elemental fury, and the captain could have watched in dumbfounded amazement for hours…had the hunter not intervened. She was wounded to be sure, but hardly defeated. Now, more determined than ever to seize her prey, the imperial guns thundered in angry retaliation. Inflicting bites all across the Chimera’s flank. That enemy captain seemed undaunted, even that horrific crash had not stifled his tenacity. He was glancing around, lining up his portside to run parallel to the Chimera, even as the lava turned her starboard to ruin.
Bar had wounded that savage bird. There was no doubt about it. Its front armor had been laid bare, peeled and melted away so the tender insides of her decks could be seen blazing with sporadic fires. A reef collision may not have wholly finished the job, but it had opened the way for the Royal Air Navy’s finest to do so. And Bar meant to do just that, to finish it, and satisfy his thirst for violence. He would sink her; even if it took them down with it. “Hard to port,” yelled Bar savagely. “Cut in front of her and put our stern gun in line, Gryph!” and then he yelled into the tubes lining his station, “Tolle! This is your chance to live up to all that boasting you’re prone to, mate. We laid her guts bare, and now it’s up to you to put one into her and finish this.”
“I got a visual…and a beastly sight it is…kind of reminds me of my last wife actually. I can see its blood-eyed core flashing out through its busted maw…and you can expect one right down the gullet as soon as I get the seventy-five in line.”
Bar waited for the attack, the anticipation of it setting his nerves on fire; his ears to ringing. Sweat coursed freely down his back and sides…and he waited, and waited…nothing. Worse still, in the interim, they took another hit from the imperial hunter-killer. The ensign squeezed his fists—felt his nails dig into his palms—and he snarled. “Tolle!”
“Sorry, Bar,” the reluctance and disappointment plain in the weapons officer’s voice, “she’s breached—useless.” Another shot came barreling into the ship to punctuate that point with insult; tearing across the starboard outdeck and blowing apart one of the cranes.
Bar’s only hope for victory had been swept away. All that was left to him was blind rage. “Let that bastard come in as close as he’s willing…then give me a full emergency stop!”
“Emergency… that’ll most likely seize the engine…we’ll be dead in the air, sir,” protested Gryph.
Bar knew full well an emergency stop meant reversing the engine, and that had unforeseeable repercussions for its mechanical integrity, but then what choice did he have? It was the only way to come to an immediate stop, and after what he had planned, there wouldn’t be a need for it anyway. He meant to allow that imperial to plow into them…maybe the Chimera can act as a projectile and drive straight through her fuselage and pierce her atmium core. That also ran the very real possibility of going down with her…but if that’s what it took to win…to save that transport of refugees, then so be it. His eyes went wide as coins, reflecting the madness outside…and within. “We only have to worry about making right by the gods now, Gryph. Just do it!”
And Gryph…he did as ordered. He unscrewed the red caution bolt from the lever at his right; let the bolt clank to the floor as he discarded it. The safety latch fell away immediately after, freeing the mechanism, and then the pilot turned once last time and gave the captain a nod. Bar responded solemnly in kind.
When Gryph pulled the lever it creaked, and then the Chimera trembled briefly. A horrendous noise enveloped the vessel; the cry of stressed steel as the engine and props went from spinning one direction, to instantly spinning the opposite direction. It felt like one of the giant gods had taken their hands, wrapped it around the ship, and shaken it. And then all forward movement ceased. At the last instant, Bar reached over and grabbed the controls for himself, determined that their last bit of inertia be used to face their enemy, and he gave it a haphazard spin. It didn’t matter what compass point they stopped at, he just wanted to glimpse the look in that imperial devil’s eye one last time—to see the dawning realization in that ship’s arrogant face as they blundered into his trap…if only for the briefest of moments.
The Chimera rotated and stopped and the hunter-killer filled her viewport, bearing down on a direct collision course. Bar grimaced ruefully in the face of death, just as he was certain the captain of that other ship must be quaking with the fear of knowing the same fate had found him here in this shoal as well…at least Bar’s vengeful fury liked to think so.
Heedless of what the Iron captain may have been thinking, he moved his vessel to escape; pulling his wounded bird up; setting it struggling for altitude in a landscape that wouldn’t let him. Reef arms held him down, spilling the broken rock of their shattered limbs over the hunter-killer’s scabrous flanks. Its exposed belly lifted and its rear propeller mountings pulled into view, spinning wildly to speed. Airship neared airship. The hunter-killer’s bow disappeared above the canopy of the airbladder housing, and then they struck.
In the deafening roar that followed, Bar was thrown from his feet; his last view of the imperial’s port propeller was it disintegrating into a meteoric shower of iron and flinging blades. From the floor, he could feel the thunderous reverberations racking the Chimera’s bones; beams snapping, glass shattering, as the two vessels slid against one another. The smells of burning wood, stressed metal, hot oil, and fuel fumes mixed with the sulfur and ozone of the reef and its raging storm.
Bar looked up from the floorboards, only to duck and brace again when a shattered propeller blade came jack-rabbiting through the main viewport in a spray of glass and wood; chewing up the floor between him and Gryph, and then dashing the resonance table and its stone into a hundred thousand pieces. A rush of steamy air blew in with it; filled by the howl of the tempest and heated by boiling lava. Gryph—gods bless his short stature—gaped feebly, first to Bar, and then to the projectile buried into the floor. He bent over and slapped his knee as a bout of cackling overcame him.
Meanwhile, Bar pulled himself to his feet—dusting off his soiled white shirt and tattered trousers—all the while overcome with the growing sense of exhilaration that he was still alive despite all that had happened. Outside—to his approval—the hunter-killer was nowhere to be found. Did we sink her? He hoped, probing the cloudy swirl of storm and battle, but finding only the red-glow of lava radiating off the portside.
And then a roaring groan—the howl of a distressed ship—filled the bridge, dragging Bar’s attention starboard way, where the enemy vessel came falling into view trailing smoke and fire from its severed tail while lightning licked at its open wounds. The hunter-killer looked badly battered, two collisions, and a flow of lava had seen to that, but it wasn’t finished completely either, and that made it all the more dangero
us. It needed only to finish drifting to a stop, and then line them up with its gun turrets, to finish this encounter.
Bar swallowed hard. “Gryph…now might be the time for us to make good on our escape,” he said quietly.
“Can’t, Captain, the engine’s gone unresponsive… We’re dead in the sky.”
Chapter 11: Unity Under Fire
“Dead in the sky.” Bar’s heart nearly broke in two after everything they’d gone through. He’d been certain that Iron vessel wouldn’t have the time or space to alter course, but somehow it’d managed just that; maneuvering enough to avoid a head-on impact, and now it was lining them up in their guns. And all Bar could do was sit in these tortured skies and watch. “No no no,” he rebelled, “I’ll not just sit idly by.”
But next to him Gryph slumped against the wheel and shook his head in defeat. “There’s nothing we can do, Bar, no response from the controls at all…”
Bar slammed his fists down on the counsel in frustration and growled his rage into the display panel beneath the tip of his nose. When he opened his teary eyes to a crack of lighting, he stopped and then stared hard. Something in the brass and glass gauges beneath him wasn’t reading right, but he wasn’t sure he could trust himself at that moment, not with his emotions and tears muddying things up. “These gauges…?” he asked breathlessly, looking for confirmation.
“Aye…” The pilot muttered, “what about ‘um?”
“Yours…do they read the same?” The captain lifted his head and turned to Gryph, watching as the shorter-statured Candaran observed them carefully. A second later his eyes went wide with realization, and Bar had cause to hope.
“Aye,” said the pilot, nodding, “I’m seeing pressure, and rpms from the flywheel…”
“And if that is the case—” Bar’s voice rose with the hope swelling in his chest.
“Then it means we got an engine,” Gryph finished enthusiastically.
“Most likely we’ve just lost the main axle, right?”
“Aye,” agreed Gryph, “probably popped out or twisted under the torque…and that we can replace, and fairly quickly I might add.”
With the Imperial hunter-killer set to lining them up in its sights, Bar Bazzon couldn’t afford to waste even a second after that. “I got to get to the engine room. By gods, Gryph, we can still pull out of here! We can survive this!” The Chimera’s new captain whirled into action.
“Captain,” hollered the pilot, his voice surprisingly big despite his small stature. In his hands he held up the ship’s master key set, and Bar stopped just long enough for the pilot to toss them over.
They jangled through the air. “Thanks,” Bar replied as he caught hold of the collection. “I owe you one!”
Bar raced from the bridge, climbing down through the ship, determined to gather the men needed to help him with whatever task might be waiting in the engine room. From beyond the hull, the incapacitated hunter-killer impotently fired its guns, barking for the sake of barking for the time being, but each shot proved closer than the last. On the gun deck he found a world of char and desolation, but like strange spirits mulling through the apocalypse, Tolle, Tanner, Sato, O’Dylan, Sven, Al, and a few others approached. Bar felt a sudden joy just seeing them all safe.
“You’re bloody insane?” yelled Tolle, and it was hard to tell if he was angry or impressed, what with his face flushed red and his voice haggard from yelling. “Who needs imperials shooting at us when you mean to kill us all with your insane flying?”
Al butted in. “Naw, t’was brilliant, lad. I saw that imperial up in flames…”
The others wanted to offer up their own comments as well, but Bar silenced them with a gesture. “No time.” He looked over their battle-stained and expectant faces, “I’ll explain everything later…if we survive. Right now we need to concentrate on repairing the engine…”
“The engine,” called out a man in a mechanist’s jumpsuit. It was Morgan Dunkirk, who Bar had encountered earlier on the deck just before Moore had murdered Hastings. “What’s the issue?” he asked, and if any man had the answers it was a grease-monkey like this.
“We performed an emergency stop,” explained Bar in haste, “and now we’ve lost thrust…but the gauges read green, and we’re thinking it’s the—”
“Axle,” Morgan finished for him. “Yup, sounds about right if you did an emergency stop. The newer axles are designed to take the force and spare the rest of the mechanics—”
“Great, great, but we don’t need to know the specifics,” Al stated. “We just need to fix it. So what do you need us to do, Bar?”
The de facto captain looked past the cook’s squat form to the stout men gathered in the rubble behind him. They were a ghostly lot to be sure, shock drawn on their dower faces, but Kinglander and Glenfinner stood side by side without complaint. Bar looked to the engineer. “Well. What do we need?”
“Strong men—as many as we can get if we’re to muscle the replacement into position.”
“Good,” Bar folded his arms across his chest, and called for the men to rise to the challenge, nodding, he called off a few by name. “Dunkirk, Tanner, Sven, Sato…” and seeing the moment for what it was, he added, “Glenfinners, Kinglanders, and all you other men of the UKA; you all think you’re up to a little cooperation?”
There was a sea of nodding heads and open calls of agreement. Absent were signs of any dissention on those dirty and haggard faces. They had all become unified Ascellans once again, and Bar took command of them, leading this unified company into the depths of the ship by way of the starboard cargo hold. The extra time it took to traverse the hold was an unwelcome waste of minutes, but there was no choice. They made double-time rounding the corridor leading to the engine room just as another salvo of imperial fire boomed outside. Somewhere above, the shots made contact and Bar winced.
“Damn it, we got to hurry,” he muttered, taking to the engine room doors and fumbling with the master keys. He had no idea which was which. Trying one key after another, he found his hands shaking violently. Plain nerves, combined with grievous injuries, made sorting and selecting the keys difficult. His fingers felt huge and fat trying to manipulate the tiny bits of metal, and each one was more difficult than the last. More shots barreled into the Chimera and it sudden dawned on him that each impact vibrated less and less through the ship. Dread overflowed when he realized the Empire wasn’t targeting the main hull anymore… The Empire’s targeting our airbladder…and the atmium core housed within. “They mean to break the core!” Bar growled as he shook his fists. “Wounded, and yet still dangerous. Curse the bloody Empire!”
Finally, one unassuming key slipped into the hole, rotated the cylinder and sprung the catch. The ensign burst through the door with his crew in tow.
The engine room was surprisingly serene after witnessing the shambles that had overtaken the rest of the ship. Only a small amount of thin smoke hung in the rafters above, but the enormous engine, sitting down in its housing between the berth deck and the very depths of the orlop deck, gleamed within the lamp light dotting the bulkheads and cat-walks surrounding it. The giant flywheel hummed—the piston pumped smoothly—but the pulleys and gears it formally powered remained still; and the culprit to this stillness was one twenty centimeter in diameter steel rod lying twisted on the catwalk like a discarded piece of scrap.
“What now,” barked Bar, thrusting back an expectant glare on Skyman Dunkirk.
“We need the straps from the equipment locker first off,” Morgan offered while looking bewildered, though that might have just been his pursed face and close set eyes giving that impression. “Over here,” he urged leading them to a tin door, set off to the side of the main hatch. Inside stood an overwhelming collection of wrenches, screwdrivers, ratchets, crowbars, and a host of specialized tools that were too unwieldy to describe. Lying on the floor, coiled like flattened snakes, were a set of thick hemp straps, each weighing just over twenty kilograms, and those tasked with liberating them
struggled just to haul them out of the locker. “Next we’ll need a replacement axle. We’ve got one stowed close at hand…over there in the brackets mounted beneath the catwalk.” Morgan pointed to the starboard gantry running in a horseshoe shape around the engine’s tall metal form. “We’ll use the three straps, hooking one end to the pulley system overhead and the other to the replacement, and then it’s simply a matter of hauling it up into place. Actually, rather simple when you get down to it.”
While the engineer explained the procedure the storm outside raged on, growing in intensity, and the hunter-killer—not to be forgotten—growled and flung shot after shot at the derelict Chimera. Some rounds impacted, other did not. At least whatever distance and heading and drift were affecting it kept the imperial attacks random. It was a cold comfort, but it was something, even if it did little to ease Bar’s pessimistic outlook. Every moment, he expected to be their last. Every moment, he expected the reefs around them to capture them like a snare. Every moment, he expected a rogue eddy to sprout from the storm and pull them down into the Shrouded Abyss. Every moment, he was certain an imperial shell would destroy the crystal core keeping them afloat.
Bar worried while the men slid the strap loops into place, and once finished, they each took up position on the gantry; two on each end of the beam, and two in the middle. Morgan and Tanner meanwhile climbed the engine-casing to reset the emergency disconnect and guide the axle into place as the four and a half meter long cylinder swung in from the side.
Aethosphere Chronicles: Winds of Duty Page 12