The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Forty-Three

The ship's defensive energy shields. The shields were projected photonic force walls meant to further enhance the protective effects of the outer hull's armor. They were elastic enough and strong enough to mitigate most the destructive effects of many varieties of assault weaponry for limited time periods. She could turn them inwards. She could, at least for a short while, redirect and manipulate the force walls to produce a cage or envelope in which to trap The Dragon...

... and she could, theoretically, move the field and its contents away from the interior of the ship to outside the hull. But to do that, she would need to be agonizingly precise --- and incredibly swift --- in generating the protective envelope inside the hull structure to grab The Dragon in an invisible photonic fist that wouldn't further compromise the ship's physical integrity. It could not be done remotely, from the relative safety of a command center or an engine room master console. There wasn't network infrastructure to support such a gambit. The process had to be via a physical mobile relay... like through the modified particle beam half-cannon in Vandessha'Jai's possession.

They would have to put themselves on the firing line to make this work.

The airship bucked, the floor tilting dangerously upwards at an angle that had the pair running uphill on slick floors, and then the fuselage abruptly oscillated at a counter-clockwise spin and they awkwardly grabbed for the handles of the nearest travel-niche's in the passageway as they fought to stay upright.

"Stay with me, Jai! Hang on!" Pnoom-Aig shouted over the loud, deep-throated groaning emitting from the craft as it endured a renewed round of wild, gusty pummeling.

The Chief Crew Mate's response startled her as she heard him bellow, "By the Iron Savior's Bloody Beard, Aig, look, look through the hull-breach at half-deck...! Is that another skyship out there?"

Pnoom-Aig arrested her fleet, breakneck charge only long enough to lock in on Vandessha'Jai's sight line and saw, through a gaping longitudinal bulwark rent, the image of a mammoth flying vessel. The mountainous skycraft eclipsed the scythe of the distant moon as it moved through the storm alongside the Aerieakon.

And its side-mounted, rotating turrets were lining up the barrels of its cannons...

                                                                                                * * *

There were times when being sightless in the traditional sense worked to her advantage. All things considered, if she could actually optically visualize what it was she was presently doing, she'd probably be frightened near to death.

Ryonne was standing on a docking platform outside the pilothouse gondola of the jetellin, the winds whipping at her clothes and the cold spray of the storm peppering the exposed flesh of her upper arms. She had taken a moment to hastily don three-quarters of an external environment flight suit, composed of boots, leggings, protective chest and back flex-vest, and forearm covering work gloves. An exo-half helmet with visor covered her face and shielded her somewhat from the nastiness of the water-sodden whirlwind through which the jetellin soared. The segmented finger-spikes on one hand of the suit's gauntlets grasped the braided thickness of a length of anchoring cordage while her other hand was wrapped around a rectangular metal box, the case of which was inscribed with circuitry tracings and a row of small distended buttons.

The jetellin's multi-arm grappling mechanism was not responding to the commands relayed from the pilot's console in the gondola. The massive electromagnetic static from the storm was negatively impacting the operations of the ship's navigational and targeting systems. Someone had to execute the procedure manually. It made sense that it be her, since, although Adam Wilder's piloting skills with Teshiwahurian aircraft weren't as extensive as her own, he was much less experienced with operating the more esoteric and intricate ship's peripherals than she. He was quite capable of flying the ship, but he'd never operated a multi-appendaged docking-winch before and certainly not while acrobatically balancing himself on a narrow moving platform. Outside the interior of the vessel's undercarriage gondola, Wilder's lanky height and body mass would work against him in the blustery currents of the airship's slipstream. Moreover, normal human occular vision would be worthless penetrating the dark depths of the tumultuous night. The limited acuity of the human eye was unreliable under circumstances where rapid, unpredictable non-linear motion occurred in conditions of low illumination. Ryonne, however, was not reliant upon standard optical and neural retinal translation. Her "visual translative sense", through which her mental extrasensory abilities allowed her to siphon external physical data through the light receptors of humans and machines nearby, let her "see" the radiant field disturbances cast against a backing field of spectrum wavelength opaqueness.