The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Fifty-Seven

They were relentlessly buffeted by blasts of shrill thunder. The fearsome, dark miracle eclipsing his view of the sky was a dreadful brute that wouldn't stop its berserk roaring.

Pummeled by an unending stream of wind from the ship's forward momentum, magni-resonance attractor clamps kept Akkitus Orthwaine anchored onto the rigid skin of the jetellin's outer hull. The exo-mobile chassis that served as his new body was severely challenged by its lack of aerodynamic features. Akkitus' former body was taller, leaner, more slender, a humanoid shape specifically adapted for assorted light-gravity functionality in an aerial environment, letting air currents slide across its exposed surfaces. The more athletic, heavier armored exo-mobile chassis was designed for land-based combat, its squat muscularity architected to optimize strength and durability in any environment. The differences were, given the jetellin pilot's brief tenure in his new form, of the type aligned with fine motor skills and body-orientation balance. The ion artillery-cannon he was awkwardly cradling inside the crook of his right arm was throwing off the surety of his stance. It was a little difficult to adapt to given the extreme situation in which Akkitus found himself.

And the fact that the raging Rapturaenadex was shaking and rocking the entire airship with every beat of its immense, bone-spiked wings didn't help things one damn bit.

He'd already fired the cannon, detached from its trunnions and rimbases and its rotational mount, three times. Two strikes and one miss. The strategy had worked earlier against the vampiric Arbiter they'd encountered outside the floating phase-castle of Sutta Manek, but it had not worked in this instance. Both hits had impacted the creature's scaled, dead flesh at full concentration, but the energy from the beam had quickly dissipated into nothing more than a kaleidoscopic display of fading lights and hissing steam. The beast had remained unharmed. None of the shots had achieved any kind of arresting effect --- the reanimated prehistoric beast had continued its attack on the jetellin, seemingly immune to the coherent blasts from the particle ray weapon.

It should have worked. What the hell was he going to do now?

The electronically-projected voice of Pnoom-Aig had blurted through the auditory circuitry of his skull-plate's built-in communications headset.

"Akkitus, can you hear me? No, no, this isn't going to work! The beast isn't actually an organic target, it isn't really 'alive' in any normal sense. It is a chronometrical reanimation, a displaced re-imaging of an organic being. What you're seeing in front of you is mostly composed of packets made from hard-light, the light being an electron and positron matrix, a mathematical framework, projected onto our gravitational planar proximity," she explained, her voice sounding breathless as she rushed her words. The jetellin's defensive network was augmented by a web of closed-circuit cameras set into tiny nacelles set into the hull's casing. She could, from the bridge-pilothouse's interior, see what was happening along the outer length of the vessel. "It's made from hard light!"

"I hear you! So what is it you would have me do?" Akkitus queried tensely, fighting to retain his balance as the massive beast's assault on the vessel's hull roughly shook the craft.

"We need the hard-light to lose its coherency. Invert the frequency polarity of the cannon's emitter charge," she said through his earphones. "It's something you can do quickly and fairly easily. Open the actuator unit on the cannon's calibration module and find the series of seven mini-switches on the side of the subharmonic buncher, parallel to the mirror box. Flip the first three switches to a position opposite whatever they are set to now... then reset the calibration dial, to count from the second position forward. Close the actuator unit and set the weapon to recharge itself, but do NOT wait for it to recharge. Just fire it!"