Shadowland

Chapter 09 - Knowledge - Part 01

The deck lurched sideways, tilting precipitously. Kass stumbled across it, her boots sliding against the rough-hewn planks, and barely managed to catch herself on the polished rail. Her body bent over, and she was treated to a vision of open sky, clouds scudding past, and the long drop to the ground below, a patchwork of fields and tiny farmhouses barely visible. Her arms strained against the rail, and she managed with great effort to push herself up and away from the dizzying edge.

All around her was chaos and noise, a cacophony of wordless shouts and the cracking retort of guns. The broad wooden deck stretched out in front of her, narrowing several dozen feet away to a point terminating in a long bronze spike. Behind, a raised quarterdeck backed by a pair of throbbing propellers. Above, wrapped in thick cables of rigging, was a massive gas-bag. All over the deck were men and women dressed in a riot of different clothes ranging from canvas sacking to frivolous-looking flaring pantaloons and lace-adorned shirts to full corseted gowns. All of them were holding some sort of weapon, a sharp-bladed cutlass or thin rapier or flared blunderbuss. To her right, across a swiftly narrowing gap crossed by ropes anchored to the rail with clawed grapnels, was another similar floating ship, its deck covered in similarly dressed people brandishing similar weapons. Kass fell to her knees, overwhelmed by the noise, the riotous colours, and the blank looming gap in her memory. "What the hell is going on?" she screamed into the pandemonium.

"Gods damn it, Kass!" a voice thundered behind her. "Get your legs under you! They're about to board us! Stand like a true pirate and defend your ship and crew!" She managed to turn her head, and saw a bronze-skinned man in lacy finery and a velvet coat, a massive black tricorn hat decorated with an embroidered horned skull and crossed rifles adorning his head. Calmly, he aimed a long gun and fired at the people who were starting to vault across the gap. Kass, she thought, my name is Kass. I'm a ... pirate? But there was clearly no time for this kind of navel-gazing; if she didn't move quickly, she would soon be spitted on a corsair's bloody blade.

She staggered to her feet, just in time to see a haggard white man in tattered clothes leaping toward her across the rail, sword drawn. With a sudden burst of unsuspected reflexes she jumped backward several steps, nearly staggering into the man who had shouted to her and barely avoiding the aggressive pirate's swinging sword. Feeling weight dragging at her shoulders, she instinctively reached back and pulled forward the stock of a large and unwieldy weapon, a long tube surmounted by a delicate confection of clockwork and an open-sided magazine of large bullet cartridges. Affixed to the underside of the barrel was a long, thick, round-ended blade with a sharply beveled edge, and with a tendon-straining heave she was able to swing it up and block the ragged pirate's overhand swing. He jumped back, his waist catching against the rail, then rushed forward again, cutlass thrusting. Kass swung the gun barrel in a tight loop and knocked the sword away.

A flat, buzzing voice sounded in her ears, and she realized that she was wearing some sort of headpiece with speakers clipped to each ear. "Engage enemy neutralizing protocol, yes/no?" the voice queried.

"Yes!" she shouted. From the air above her, a small machine of some sort swooped, a copper sphere about a foot in diameter with a cyclopean black camera eye and a buzzing propeller on each side. A long needle ribbed in ceramic disks slid from some concealed orifice as it dived toward the snarling pirate, and as it stuck into his shoulder, it discharged a blue bolt of electricity. The man's body convulsed and he was thrown backward, his body flipping over the rail and tumbling into the clear air below.

"That's my girl!" the pirate who had brought her to her senses bellowed. "Now get that lovely gun of yours in gear and clear my gods-damned deck!"

She turned to see knots of pirates clashing sword to sword all over the ship, with more jumping from the other vessel every second. Each pirate was different, all races and genders and vastly different styles of clothing, and she recognized none of them. "I'm sorry," she bellowed over her shoulder. "I can't tell which ones to shoot!"

"What's this?" the coppery-skinned pirate growled. "You don't recognize your own mates? Have you gone mad, girl? Gods be damned, just shoot the ones that are coming over from the Black Heart! Now, by thunder!"

Much more calmly than she felt, she took aim with steady hands and depressed the trigger. The gun jolted against her shoulder, and a pirate's body jerked as he jumped over the rail and fell like a rag doll to the deck. Her heart wrenched at the thought that she had just coldly murdered a man, but she clearly had no choice; she fired again, then a third time, hitting a target with every shot.

The staticy voice sounded in her ears again: "Caution. Electrical buildup detected." With barely this much warning, a searing bolt of lightning lanced across the deck, barely missing her and crackling over the body of her pirate companion, knocking him backward against the quarterdeck. She looked for the source, and saw a man swathed in voluminous robes of black leather. Blue discharge crackled around his hands, then burst outward in a toroid, throwing several attacking pirates away from him. This is the biggest threat, that calm part inside her said. You need to take him out, now.

She aimed carefully. He looked up, caught sight of her, and held out a hand, crackling bolts building up around it. She fired, and his body was thrown back by the force of the impact; bolts of electricity arced out from his hands, playing for an instant over the rails before disappearing. She breathed deeply as the pirates defending the ship roared and redoubled their efforts. Whoever she was, whoever these people were, and whatever mad situation she had managed to get herself into, at least she had managed to keep herself alive and keep the ship from being destroyed.