"What are you doing? Are you waiting for me? Don't! I can make it! Just slow down enough for me to keep you in my sights!"
Moving like a cyborg gazelle, she was abruptly forced to leap over a geysering eruption of superheated titanium jetting from the ruin of the ship's central foredeck passageway. A blistering cloud of steam followed the spouting discharge upwards, dissolving a hole through the passage's ceiling as the wounded vessel pitched to port, beginning a gravity-defying roll despite the many firings of the directional mini-thrusters to correct equilibrium and keep the ship's axis horizontal. She landed lightly on the water-slickened floor, her acrobatic athleticism unaffected by her wounds, and continued her charge away from the transversal egress into the ship's smoke-filled engine room.
Following closely, but a lot less surefootedly, Vandessha'Jai lunged after Pnoom-Aig, taking extra care not to damage or to trigger the bulky, particle beam half-cannon he'd taken from the wreckage of the ship's armory. It was getting hard to see and even harder to breathe as the mangled vessel rode through the savage buffeting of the cyclonic storm outside.
Air from external to the vessel's hull whistled as it slid across the ruptured exoskeletal skin of the Aerieakon. The vessel shimmied and rocked, seized by irregular convulsive quakes as the various avionics systems for flight-control and collision avoidance fought to keep the vessel aloft and on-course. Silvery-white light vied with the sickly-yellow glow of haze-masked moonlight streaming through large open rips in the metal casing while the loud, repetitive bleats of structural alarm klaxons resounded throughout the airship's ruined interior.
If left to ride the sky under their own power, they weren't going to stay aloft for much longer.
They'd been running for a while, dodging in and out of darkened corridors, down and across flaming mezzanines, and scrambling up and down partially collapsed stairwells. The internal lift tubes were all down, so moving from one level to another inside the mighty craft had become akin to running a gauntlet. Pnoom-Aig and Vandessha-Jai were tracking Captain Wyyng's location through intership bio-locator telemetry, although the signals passing through the interior structure were weak and spotty due to the extensive damage to the ship's network infrastructure.
"We're almost there, Chief Mate Jai! Two decks down, easterly, and about sixty nautical meters lateral... be ready for anything! Remember to watch your periphery!"
Vandessha'Jai drew in a deep draught of air as he ran and shouted his response past wheezing gasps. "Yes, well, maybe you should remember that I'm a human being and can't run as fast as you! You keep moving at that speed and you'll wind up separating us! If we get separated, we're both dead!"
While Emaris Staurqe and Zhe-Kai Chah had battled throughout the ship, recklessly bursting through its structural barriers and interior bulkheads, Pnoom-Aig had stepped back from the fray to analyze and strategize. Defensive reaction through brute force and physical savagery weren't going to win the day. No ship was designed to stand up to the superhuman strength of a massive, mutant anthropoid saurian like The Dragon. And certainly, the craft was likely to experience all manner of structural failures caught in the titanic pounding it would undergo while caught in the grips of a towering, tornadic waterspout for an extended period of time. No, in order to save the Aerieakon and what remained of its small crew, Pnoom-Aig's superior artificial intellect apportioned and dissected the chaotic, battle-torn environment around her into its separate component parts and rationalized predictive alternatives to the inevitably catastrophic crash-event in their immediate future. And she came to the realization that she could secure and defend the remaining, actively operational parts of the ship from further damage by isolating, limiting and containing the battlezone to one area.
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.
Truth be told, she was anything but blind.
It still made her lips curl in a tiny, thin smile as she thought of how bitterly he'd opposed her being the one of them to take the risk of an untethered extravehicular action outside the craft. The thought of putting her in physical danger made him extremely anxious, even though she was an experienced mercenary warrior. When they'd first encountered one another, he'd been an outcast, outlaw sellsword and she'd been a slave in iron shackles, used as a passion-thrall in the back of a dirty, ramshackle gambling parlor where her sex was the currency used to settle debts. But a great many things had changed in the time since then. It wasn't that he discounted her skill or her courage, and it wasn't that he in any way considered her anything less than his equal. He just cared. She liked that he cared. They never overtly discussed their affections for one another, but it was undeniably there, undeniably real.
Besides, the Traveler in Red did not possess the gift of her psychic affinity for simple machines. She could mentally "feel" their physical mass, even dissembling their anatomy and composition down to their very molecular structure where she could actually link with the metal. She could willfully manipulate small electrical fields that flowed through such devices. That extrasensory psychic link allowed her to influence the performances of minor mechanical constructs through a modest form of metallurgic telekinesis.
The jetellin pulled alongside the thinner, more streamlined Aerieakon and Ryonne gauged the position of the larger ship's cannons as they lined up with the hull of the other craft. The cannon were loaded with grappling claw ammunition spooled in bobbins set into launch-pots which replaced the optical photonics core-cartridges of the assault weapons. She could psychically feel the fields of electromagnetic gravity extend to include both vessels as one mass as their proximty aligned. The gravitational fields of the two craft situated and then blended as their speeds and trajectories became congruent. She could sense the enormity of the combined mass of the two airships, her perceptions unaffected by the surrounding storm.
Ryonne stretched out her free arm, the one holding jetellin's grappling mechanism and quickly depressed two of its buttons with her thumb.
Fire...
* * *
Exhausted and aching, Rae'vynn Wyyng stumbled as she dropped under the powerful sweeping backhand slash from Zhe'Kae-Chah. She managed to retain enough sense of self-preservation to duck as his fist smashed into a nearby bulkhead wall, creating an eruption of flying metal splinters that sailed through the air like a rain of razors. Her chest heaved from the effort of continuing her attack against the beast who towered nearly twice the height of her head and shoulders over her and whose thick, hyper-muscular frame was thrice the width of her own body. The mechanized chain-sword she wielded felt like it was anchored to the floor, the weapon's weight dragging her trembling arms further down with each swing while the dozens of sliding saw-teeth affixed to the long blade whined and buzzed. The Saurian tyrant was a raging engine of destruction set on full power. He showed no signs of slowing down, despite the wounds and the pummeling he'd received from Emaris Staurqe. She couldn't fathom the depths of the reserves of energy he obviously possessed. She'd fought against Saurotetramorph warriors before, two at a time on a pair of occasions, and yet she'd never experienced any living being close to The Dragon in regards of speed, ferocity and stamina. The bleeding bodies of a pair of dead crewmen lay in the passageway behind her. Staurqe was gone, mysteriously disappeared into the ether by that alien demi-god monstress who'd been haunting them. And Zhe'Kae-Chah was firmly in the grips of a homicidal frenzy, a fury that he clearly found intoxicating.
There was no stopping him. She knew she was going to die here, now, this cold and wet night.
The Dragon's muscular bulk almost filled the wreckage-strewn passageway and he loomed in front of her arrogantly, assured of his physical dominance, observing her in a strange and detached manner that hinted at a regretful melancholy.
"Can you hear me, girl?" The Saurian king queried.
Rae'vynn hesitated a slow moment and then sighed as she softly said, "Yes. I can hear you."
"Good. I need you to know that this was never personal. None of it. Like you, I do what I do for the betterment of my people."
Rae'vynn wearily raised an eyebrow and allowed herself a crooked smile. "Oh, while I'm sure there's some element of truth to what you say, I don't think your motivations have been as benevolent as all that..."
As the craft rocked and shuddered while it hurtled through the storm, The Dragon, his mass draped in shadow, snorted in amusement.
"I had heard tales regarding your combat prowess and determination from various sources and I had always believed the stories to be just that... stories," he rumbled as he regarded her with his baleful reptilian eyes. "But you have more than lived up to every rumor and myth that has been spun about you. Amazing, you humans. The tenacity and ferocity of your species is too often underestimated by we evolutionarily-alternate breeds. I have to salute you. You have been a worthy adversary, despite your obvious biological shortcomings, and even though the odds were stacked against you from the very beginning."
Rae'vynn's body shook as she was seized by a series of phlegmy, racking coughs. She took a moment to draw in a deep breath. To her amazement, The Dragon calmly waited for her to regain what was left of her composure. She could not tell whether or not the gesture was made out of respect or out of a sadistic desire to prolong the moment before the inevitable killing blow. Either way, he appeared to be savoring the quiet moment between them.
"If you're waiting for me to thank you for such a questionable compliment, you'll have to forgive me," the pirate captain said.
"You fought well", Zhe'kae-Chah said, "But your failure was inevitable. It has always been the destiny of the kingdom of the Saurotetramorphs to dominate the coastal territories of the Pang Xa'Omathra region. It was always inevitable that both Ometh Nastreq and Peravendath fall as the last abandoned outposts of the World-Father's mad ambition to command and rule the seas off Qundin's shores. All my nation had to do was wait until the ancient and persistent hostilities between your two cities reached a tipping point, and then, when humankind least expected it, use the legendary, supposedly mythical, weapon in our possession to shatter the status quo. You mammals are so damned predictable."
And then something amazing happened, something shocking, unexpected and horrifying...
Several massive metal grappling hooks on thick metal cables punched through the outer and inner hulls of the airship, their wide, claw-like tines spreading open against any forces of retraction that would dislodge them from the skin of the ship.
One of the hooks had rocketed bloodily through The Dragon's chest, the notched, serrated ends of the large, three-tined grapple wedging firmly into Zhe'Kae-Chah's muscle and flesh. The gruesome hole it made in his ravaged torso was the size of a warrior's battle shield.
A startlingly elfin and ethereal warrior-woman with alabaster-white flesh stepped into the passageway behind the saurian warlord, her long white ponytail whipping like a lash in the wind, and she unhesitatingly drove the long blade of her sword through the back of The Dragon's throat and out the front, under his quaking chin.
Zhe'Kae-Chah gagged and gurgled and his thick, herculean arms began to whip this way and that as he sought to pummel and rend the body of this new adversary.
The athletically trim albino warrior-woman stepped nimbly around the thrashing king and drew a long-muzzled pistol-weapon of exotic design from a holster strapped to her leg.
She fired full into The Dragon's face twice, once into each wide-staring eye. The back of his head erupted into a steaming geyser of wet gore. His body jerked and then stiffened, falling onto its side. The braided cable of the grappling hook tightened and began to withdraw, pulling his broad, bulky body to the edges of the hole in the vessel's hull, where it lodged awkwardly into the ragged metal cavity.
Then without further ado and with a simmering calm that threatened more violence she turned to look down at Rae'vynn Wyyng's kneeling figure, locking eyes with the freebooter.
"My name is Ryonne. Eddim'Whyelle-dur, the Traveler in Red, would like a word with you," she said tersely.
* * *
"This storm is something, isn't it, Baron? Wild, violent, some would say even hellish... I wonder what could cause such a thing."
Baron Traytheq Farhoon, former Peravendathian Naval Baron and Oceanic Sciences Officer and current Dockmaster of what remained of the Ureeon Dockyard, shook his head dispiritedly. The Baron was looking out over the pentagonal cross-berth next to D-lock along the jetty wall of the secondary North Repair Pier on Dock Number 4, next to the slip for the Power Barge, in the shadows of the humungous mech-aerocranes, where he could see the unassigned area he and his crew had quickly cleared away for the mighty assemblage of visitors visiting the dockyard atop the Night-Widow's Crown. Heavy mist and the deepness of the evening's gloom surrounded the isthmus, but the blazing harshness from the dockyard's downward-facing, stacked stadium lamps provided illumination enough to reveal every detail of the outdoors inner basin field below.
It had been a very, very long time since the Emperium had sent representatives to the slumbering volcanic cinder cone called Terash Munyatt. This was not a good thing.
Farhoon was standing on the fourth-level's open-ceiling outdoor concourse next to a very tall and cadaverously lean man in tangerine and grape-colored tactical exo-armor. It was apparent from his militarily-erect parade stance and from his authoritative preening that he was a high-ranking member of some organized command structure. Standing a few steps to the armored man's right-hand side and to this rear, were a pair of green-cloaked men with shaven heads, the polished, copper-hued plates of their own exoskeletal protective gear flashing into view as a blustery gust of wind fanned the edges of the cloaks. The reserved and watchful bearing of the cloaked men, standing as if they were unused to being exposed to open sky and the glare of light, in no way defined them as being part of any military brotherhood.
The armored man was Supreme Battle-Marshal of the Emperium's Armor-Guard Prime, Manduryus Ha'akmar, and he had led his platoon, a contingent of troops known as the "Centaurius Emperii Primilion" to Ureeon on official business.
"We of the Crusading Forces of the Hegemonic Emperium do not travel out to the Pang Xa'Omathra region very much. Hardly at all, actually. In all its history, the forces of the Centaurius Emperii Primilion have visited the shores of the Pnahrryian Sea only once before. I'm sure you've heard the story of what happened on that occasion," the Supreme Battle-Marshal said. He did not deign to look at Farhoon as he spoke.
"Yes, I know the history of this region. I know what the Armor-Guard Prime did back then," the Dockmaster said evenly, taking efforts to control his rising ire.
"Royal Commander Duke Archarya Bak'usfane, and his associate, the sorcerer, Viscount Kollachaim, went through this facility half a heliar ago, traveling to The City, an unincorporated urban protectorate which once was known to the Emperium as Niyaddour. Both men are Soldiers-Honorius in service to His Imperialness, The World-Father. That means that they were important. They were on diplomatic assignment and there has been no communication from them. They were to meet with the senior staff of the Ambassadorial Corp. Those Ambassadorial diplomats work for the supreme military leader overseeing civilian governmental disposition there, a rogue named Kolag Y'phree. Both men are now officially considered missing. The Emperium's Territorial Supremor, Byltran Parlenna, friend and comrade to the World-Father, wants to know where they are."
Manduryus Ha'akmar's tone was clipped and precise. He was a linear thinker and dealt only in facts. He would tolerate no non-specific theory nor any hypotheticals for answers. He would not tolerate any attempts at circumlocution or obfuscation, accepting nothing that would waste his time. He wanted what he wanted and he wanted it now. Cause and effect ruled his limited set of mission responses. Basically, if he didn't get what he wanted, head's would roll.
Literally.
"If they're in The City, then they're beyond my concern," Farhoon said. "Your business is with Kolag Y'phree. Not with me."
"You're certain of that? You've never engaged in any exchanges of secretive or special information with Kolag Y'phree or any representatives of his outlaw government? Just because the Emperium does not make its presence known in a heavy-handed manner, doesn't mean we aren't watching and are aware of what is going on..."
"I don't track the comings and goings of every visitor passing through this facility," Baron Farhoon said. "Frankly, I refuse to. I have too many things to do. Managing traffic and ship repairs and mercantile interactions among the motley multitude of trans-continental and interspecies travelers coming though the dockyard allows me very little time to spy on anyone, were I ever of a mind to do so."
Knobby fists clasped behind his back, Manduryus Ha'akmar nodded and asked, "Do you know who these men are behind me?"
"No."
"They are Acolytekk-Codiseers, conscripted military Tech-Mages, temporarily conscripted into the Emperii Primilion forces. Their names are Jeremuth and Wyndfevre. They can each remotely read the details of computer networked digital data without benefit of physical technological interface. Intuitively, they visually and psychically perceive streamed binary data from any computer-tekk in their immediate geophysical proximity. They are mutant abominations."
"So?" Farhoon said cautiously.
"Well, since they can see such data, they are familiar with data patterns and sequences. A kind of inductive reasoning. This means they can also see when other such data is purposefully hidden from them, seeing where there could likely be omissions and redactions. Since we have been standing here, they have been 'reading' your admission logs, transit logs and trafficking data," Ha'akmar said. "They've noticed your data has been scrubbed. So, in the interests of keeping things civil, and relatively bloodless between your forces and mine, I will ask again: Duke Archarya Bak'usfane and the Viscount Kollachaim, we have definite confirmation they reached Niyaddour, but we have no trace of their whereabouts now. Do you have any information about where they could be?"
Farhoon sighed miserably. "Well, if they went to The City to meet Kolag Y'phree and they weren't invited --- well, it's likely the Warlord may have either imprisoned them or killed them. Dependent on what the details of their mission entailed, I'm betting on the latter. But I can't say for sure. Kolag Y'phree is no friend to the Ureeon Dockyard facility nor to its command staff, meaning me."
Supreme Battle-Marshal Ha'akmar kept his own counsel for a long moment and again nodded. "Have you ever heard any rumors of the existence of an alien creature called 'Ka'esh-Woganhi'e'?"
Farhoon rolled his eyes and licked his dry lips. "An alien...? Well, yes, hearsay and speculation only. I've heard whispers, but I don't see..."
The Battle-Marshal swiftly drew his photon las-pistol and shot Farhoon three times through the chest, immolating his heart inside his body. He re-holstered his weapon as Farhoon's corpse fell to the floor.
"It appears we have an appointment in Niyaddour to see Kolag Y'phree," he said as he turned towards the glass doors leading back to the interior of the dockyard's main complex, walking past his eerily silent Acolytekk-Codiseers.
* * *