The Dragon Chase: A Tale of the Everburning City

Chapter 30: Lucille

"By the memory of the last flare before the endless night," Lucille heard her charge whisper, a rather poetic curse she didn't recognize. He was staring below, as the other airship whirled about like a leaf in a whirlwind, its cannons hammering the plummeting cannon caught in the eye of the ship's maelstrom.

He was awestruck, she realised. And grieving.

"May I burn so brightly," Gerald added. He turned to her, and she wasn't surprised to see tears in his eyes.

But when he spoke next, there was nothing but the sharp confidence of a man who knew the authority his words carried. "Maxwell is on his way up, to take the wheel. I'll need your knife and your assistance with the hatch. Four and a half seconds."

Abyss below. Six seconds and the bag goes out. At five, it doesn't inflate enough to generate enough lift to counter its own weight, let alone the ship's. There isn't a lot of wiggle room there. And even at four and a half seconds, they may as well be in free-fall.

All of this a stone's throw from the Spire, with two-hundred mile-an-hour winds. Never mind that the Midnight Songbird was less than seven hours old.

"Aye, sir," Lucille said. Her Captain right now, not her charge. And right now, she needed to be more than a shadow.

She stepped next to him, reached into his coat pocket, and took out another small pad of paper. "You're hoarding a fortune in your pockets, you know."

Gerald started to say something, but Lucille cut him off with a wave of her hand. "I need to get the crew ready for this. Just write on the pad if you need me," she said, and started down the stairs.

She headed straight to the pair of cannons hastily positioned on the side of the ship, and the half-dozen soldiers busy nearby. She picked out the gunnery specialist, Corporal Mia Vascel, as she crouched behind one of the guns. She appeared to be deep in conversation with the old sergeant, Valen Redgrave.

"Because the rangefinder is as useful as wings on a train, sir. All you see is cloud, and there's too much drift. We're on a moving platform, trying to hit a moving target," Mia explained as she waved a small piece of metal around in her hand.

"Anyone who isn't you is going to need the damn thing, corporal. And right now is a bad time to be indispensable," Valen replied. He looked up and saw her approach.

"Ma'am," Valen said, standing up and saluting. Mia followed suit, before crouching back down over the gun.

"Captain's preparing to take us down after the Dragon. I want some ideas about attacking the beast once we're in range. What can we fire out of these guns?" Lucille asked, looking at the ammunition stored nearby.

"We've been using round-shot, so far. Nothing else has the range. If we were hoping to hit harder, do more damage, we would use Incendiary. There's some Canister shot, but that's mostly for large groups of soft targets. Gloamtaken," Mia explained.

"We need something that can keep the Dragon from flying for a few seconds. Tangle it up, even. Can we fire chains at it, somehow? I thought that was a type of projectile."

Mia cringed and shook her head. "It would shred the rifling, and it wouldn't fire properly unless it had a cannonball behind it. Even then, we don't have chains, and it would just bunch together when it hit."

"It's called sweeper shot. We used it to clear streets and causeways of the Gloamtaken during the last invasion. Two cannonballs with a length of chain attached. But we don't have any or the facilities to make them," Valen added, as he glanced about.

Lucille glared hard at him for a moment, until he flinched and shook his head. "Mia, the commander is about to reprimand us for being stupid."

"Because we have spare chain, cannon balls aplenty, and a Crafter aboard? Yeah, I think we deserve it, sir." Mia said, standing up. She stared hard at Lucille and added, "Just remember that sweeper shot is incredibly inaccurate. If we use it, we have to be closed ."