The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Forty-One

Wilder nodded. "The very one."

Ryonne pursed her lips as she reached up to adjust the red-tinted visor covering her sensitive eyes. "They're in serious trouble. Their ship does not look to be skyworthy any longer. Despite the straining of their powerful engines, they're rapidly losing altitude. I think the force of the cyclonic storm is the main force keeping them airborn. Do we offer to save them -- or do we let them fall to their deaths, as they no doubt deserve?"

Wilder's answer chilled her. "Not going to happen. I've got unfinished business with her and her crew. No damn storm gets to decide her fate. That bitch is mine to kill. Ready the targeting range-sensors and initiate the grappling attenuators. We can snare her. The jetellin has power enough to keep their craft aloft if we hook her and pull her along, out and away from the effects of the vortex eyewall."

"Can we trust they won't open fire on us? Ship-to-ship telemetry sweep shows their weapons system is still online."

"Their weaponry isn't close to being equal to the weapons we have aboard the jetellin. The Aerieakon is a well-armed, armored gunboat, a raider mainly built for speed and altitude. Not to mention their weapons technology is outdated by comparison. This jetellin is a full-scale battleship, a Devastator-class ship built for anti-aircraft warfare. If their own scanning telemetry is still working, they'll see that. They won't dare fire on us."

Ryonne sighed. "I don't like this, Whyelle-dur. This is a very bad business. We should just leave while we still can."

The Traveler in Red uttered a sound that resembled the hoarse cough of a forest predator stalking its prey.

"I'll line us up alongside them. You launch the grappling hooks and reel them in as close as safety deems prudent. We'll get out of the grips of these winds and then I'll find us a place large enough to accommodate our landing..."

It was getting hard to breathe and what air there was in the compartment was sooty and made his eyes burn. The wheelhouse compartment off the central bridge was thick with the smell of melting optical fiber, scorched plastic, and superheated metal. Moreover, the small volume of breathable air inside the bridge command center was humid and hot, sucking the vitality out from the few remaining command crew who'd remained aboard the crippled craft after the life-pods had ejected.

Durkka-jan was regretting his decision to remain on the Aerieakon. Even though the ship had been his home and refuge for many a long and exhausting solar orbital heliar, it was unarguably a very restricted and highly regulated environment both physically and socially and its clockwork reliability had sanded a lot of the hard edges from off his primal survival instincts. The ship had been his world for a long time and now that world was literally coming apart at the seams. He'd gotten used to depending on the intermeshing talents of a coordinated support crew to fill in the gaps and lapses in his own training and performance, become dependent on them, and the catastrophic circumstances he currently experienced fiercely tested his abilities. And in responding to those tests, he was coming up short. He'd already been tired when all this began, he'd never had the opportunity to rest after the events at the Ureeon Skycraft Dockyard, and he felt bruised and pummeled after the combat in the skies over Ometh Nastreq. But after and during The Dragon's personal assault on the ship, keeping control of the helm had thrust Durkka-jan into a life and death battle to keep the huge craft aloft. Making things even worse was the fallout from Emaris Staurqe's aggressive defense against the mighty reptile king's destructive rampage.

He wished he knew what was happening in the rest of the ship, but deck-to-deck communications were offline and propulsion engineering had sequestered themselves behind the bulkhead security seals inside the Systems Dynamics Ops room and weren't answering internal hailing frequencies. Though he had some input from visual prompts, Durkka-jan was dependent on the limited optical data he could glean from the closed circuit camera displays.