Aethosphere Chronicles: Winds of Duty (16 page)

Straight as an arrow, they plunged deeper
into the Barrier Shoal.

Dead ahead, a reef tower came out of
nowhere, materializing from the very storm like a giant’s arm
reaching out to snare them with its blackened fingers. “Hard to
port!” cried Bar as the glassy-rock filled the screen, its smaller
branches already scraping and screeching against the hull. “Now
starboard!” The ship suddenly leaned and Bar leaned with it,
feeling the
Chimera’s
strength in his legs. She wasn’t ready
to give up either—not even in this tangled hell—and that
reinvigorated him. He laughed out loud once again, feeling the joy
of life beating in his chest. Nekros, Marak, and the rest of their
reapers would just have to wait a couple more minutes until Bar was
done having his fun dancing through the menacing shoal.

Off the port appeared another pillar of
stone, and then another off the starboard…and then came the densely
packed branches that weaved between them. Too late to change
course—too thick to fly under or over—they crashed headlong through
it all. Obsidian shattered like glass and bronzsteel and wood tore
away in groans. Bar was surprised when the main hull held, and
something about this wonton destruction stirred his satisfaction.
Smashing forward like this, like a powerful creature escaping
through the branches of a dead forest, made him feel not quite so
helpless anymore, and perhaps…just maybe they could lose that
imperial bastard in all this mess. They continued to weave a course
through the volcanic snarl, finding thinner patches to punch
through. Bar looked to the compass to get a sense of their course,
but it only spun in useless circles; confused by a magnetic field
driven mad. Even the resonance stone was of little use; its surface
having taken on a hazy red as though burning from within.

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
dangerous. 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.”

“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?”