by Tammy Salyer
The three other flight leaders aye-ayed, and Cote turned to Jaemus. “I need you on the celestial stone talking to the Knights. Let them know what we’re doing and make sure they tell the local militia to keep their cannon fire directed away from us. It doesn’t look like the Dyrrak ships’ weapons have much punch, but I don’t think the same is true of those, what did you call them?”
“Emberflare cannons.”
Cote gave a single nod, then toggled the wave-speaker. “On me, Glisternauts.”
And like that, Jaemus found himself a member of what he would have guessed was the most improbable and unconventional air force Vinnr would ever see. It wasn’t until after the fight was over that he realized his assumption was much too limited in scope. A winged metal ship was just a winged metal ship, after all, essentially the same in any world no matter what shape or size. An invincible, winged, fire-breathing dragør, on the other hand, was Vinnr’s own unique version of flying terror, one which he was about to discover.
On their initial approach of the Dyrrak fighters, Jaemus gritted his teeth hard enough to make his jaw muscles twinge and gripped his copilot controls. Vibrations throughout the Horizon’s hull rang from a barrage of at least a dozen emberspark guns and slowly dissipated.
“I was wrong! Reclaimers on full, everyone!” Cote was yelling into the wave-speaker. Turned out that despite the Dyrrak attackers’ diminutive size, their weapons were truly a force to be reckoned with.
Not needing to be told twice, Jaemus had already toggled the reclaimer field for the Glistering Horizon. From his vantage through its forward viewscreens, he saw another cavalcade from the attackers as it was launched, clenched his seat armrests involuntarily in anticipation of the impact, then, moments later, relaxed completely with a lazy, pleased grin spreading across his face. The Dyrrak weapons had struck again—and failed to do more than make a sparkly light show for the Glisternaut crew to view.
“Full ahead,” Cote said, his voice as calm as a distant star.
As the four Glisternaut squadrons accelerated, a mass of a hundred Dyrrak fighters bunched up some three thousand yards ahead, letting loose a full barrage. The Glisternauts closed in irrevocably, a tsunami of inevitable metal, gaining speed. They were close enough for Jaemus to see the slack Ravener faces of the attackers’ pilots before the Dyrraks realized the Glisternaut ships were not only unaffected by their weapons but were also not going to turn, slow, or stop before—
With a great cracking heave, the Horizon impacted dozens of the relatively insignificant fighters. They exploded against the much more massive ship’s viewscreens and hull in a festival of red and orange flames. The Glisternauts inside their ships were not even jiggled this time thanks to the impact dampeners that automatically came online when the reclaimers were activated. Even though the enemy ships had seemed to realize at the last minute that the Glisternauts had no intention of diverting from course and had begun to veer off, they’d been too late. In a single attack, Jaemus estimated that the Dyrrak airships had lost perhaps a hundred fighters.
Leaving, based on the swarm he could still see, some untold hundreds more.
To distract him from this bad news, he had the uncomfortable sensation of Scintilla climbing his spine like a fishhook intent on fighting back. “Off, get away! Go to your captain, creature of needles!” he cried, detaching the flittercat and holding it out toward Cote. The cat squirmed and, without warning, bit his thumb. Its talons had been piercing, but its teeth were pure knife blades. “Ah!”
His scream, or perhaps the taste of him, did it, and Scintilla launched from his outstretched arms to take residence on Cote’s shoulders. Once stilled, it lowered its head and glared at Jaemus with eyes that glowed with grave-fire green, promising, he had no doubt, vengeance of the highest order.
“Easy, easy,” Cote said to the beast steadily, his face and voice utterly languorous with unbroken concentration. He stroked Scintilla’s neck a moment, then returned his hands to the platform of screens that controlled the rest of their squadron. “Form up again, Glisternauts. We got lucky, but there’s still so many of them that this is going to take some time. Drustim and Joburg, you get over the city and protect them. Drustim, you’re unit leader. Mye, you and your crew come with us.”
Flight Leaders Drustim and Joburg gave their affirmatives, and Flight Leader Mye said, “Where are we going, Captain?”
“The Dyrraks won’t make the same mistake again. Now they know they’re vulnerable, and they knew we know they’re vulnerable, so they’ll change their tactics and make themselves harder to hit. As long as they’re able to recharge their weapons, the Magdastervians are going to take casualties. So we’re going directly for their resupply ships before they can prepare something we can’t fight.”
“You—you mean like that?”
Jaemus had spotted it the moment he’d handed off the flittercat, a wall or mass of something airborne coming from south of the city. It reminded him in a distant part of his brain of the Glister Cloud, a roiling miasma curling across the horizon in a wide swathe, filled with tiny flickers of light. Only, instead of the kaleidoscopic gases and glittering asteroids composing the Glister Could, this miasma was the color of smoke, deep gray and thick as lava. Even as Cote had been giving orders, it had been getting closer, and now Jaemus saw that the mass was smoke, and the flickers appeared to be embers bursting from the source of the flying conflagration.
Jaemus pointed toward what was coming, and Cote followed his finger. The gray cloud began to thin as what was creating it broke from its tight formation.
Jaemus didn’t need to ask what they were. They were so alike the slangarooks, but with huge leathery wings instead of waving gossamer fins, that for a moment he forgot to be afraid. The slangarooks were friends to the Creatress, his mind rationalized, so it stood to reason these Vinnric versions of the creatures had to be the allies of Vaka Aster. Allies that breathed fire and spit embers. Allies who, he could see even at this distance, had teeth and talons so large and hooked that he had no doubt they’d cut right through the hulls of the Glisternaut fleet.
But would Vaka Aster’s allies have eyes the color of old stone, as blank and opaque as Balavad’s Raveners?
He seized the Fenestros he’d placed between his thighs with one hand and channeled fervently to the Knights: I think we may have some unexpected, er, issues.
After what we just saw from down here, novice, your Glisternauts can handle it, Stave sent, his voice practically jovial.
Weeellll, maybe? But could you ask the Magdastervians to target their cannons a touch differently? These look a smidge hardier than the airships.
What it is, Jaemus? This time, Stave’s voice was not jovial. In fact, if his voice could take shape, it might have been a hammer.
Dragørs. You know, just some flying, firebreathing harbingers of destruction, he finally eked out. And as he did, a beast even larger than Hither shot like a meteor from the center of the cavalry toward the Glistering Horizon. Before a wave of fire washed over the viewscreen, Jaemus saw several others veering toward their chosen Glisternaut targets in the same way, every bit as deliberate and organized as his own fleet had been moments before when attacking the Dyrraks.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
He, Cote, and Heleina braced themselves, counting on their lightning reclaimers to absorb or deflect the dragørfire as the Glisternaut fleet was bombarded by the world-melting inferno of a horde of red dragørs.
Jaemus finally had to admit he may have been a little too confident in his engineering abilities the moment the Glistering Horizon started its dive-bombing descent toward the middle of the Howling Weald, completely engulfed in a ball of fire.
“Balancers full throttle! Keep juicing the thrusters!” Cote, forehead clenched in painful concentration, yelled.
“Which ones?!” Jae and Heleina both cried.
“All of them!”
Scintilla seemed to find the raised voices—or perhaps the eyeball-melting fall—unenjoyab
le, and Jaemus just caught a glimpse from the corner of an eye of the creature flickering from Cote’s shoulders to somewhere unknown. At that moment, he envied the “somewhere unknown” part of that sentiment. Anywhere would be better than the center of a fireball. Panicked, Jaemus gazed overhead, certain the hull must be burning away. It looked like it was still intact, but he didn’t trust his eyes to tell him the truth, at least not about this.
Instead, he peered forward through the viewscreen, seeing nothing but a red haze. He had a duty, though—Cote was keeping them flying, and his role right now was to handle his share of their remote ships. Quickly, he discovered only one of his had suffered an attack, but the wave-speakers were exploding with alarms from the other crews whose squadrons had worse luck. As Jaemus took inventory, Cote expertly finessed the Horizon’s controls and, miraculously, the ship’s dive evened out to a flatter horizontal plane. Jaemus had never felt happier to have his weight settle onto his bum.
“We’re all right, we’re in control,” Cote said a moment later. “Good job, Glisternauts.”
As unbelievable as it seemed, heat suffused the bridge, bringing it to a definitely un-Himmingaze-like temperature. Yet now that his fear of splatting into the ground had receded somewhat, Jaemus realized it was merely radiant—no fire had penetrated the ship. The hull was still there, and they were still flying. Sweat covered his face and oozed beneath his clothes.
Novice, novice! Stave sent. What’s going on? You still alive up there?
Alive, and flying, though I can’t believe it. As he spoke, the dregs of the dragørfire blew clear of the Horizon’s viewscreen, giving him a clear picture of the skies.
Yes, they were alive—for the moment. Their descent had not been straight down, and their long, sloping drop had taken them quite a ways from the heart of Magdaster and over the Weald. Luckily, they hadn’t been pursued, and Cote steered the Horizon around sharply to return to the fight. What they saw was nothing short of doomsday.
The wormlike flying dragørs were everywhere, red as fire themselves, streaking through the air like comets. Glisternaut ships were ablaze all over the sky. Those that weren’t falling were pursued by the relentless creatures. Using remote links from the cosmocruisers, their pilots zigzagged the ships in a volatile dance of inconsistent patterns, sometimes attempting to regain control, sometimes attempting to escape, and other times their movements appeared to be nothing but panicked madness.
The city below was no better. It looked as though the dragørs had split their factions—those engaging the Glisternauts, and those attempting, it appeared, to turn the city into ash. Already, new fires glinted through volcanoes of black, billowing smoke, far bigger and more potent than even those caused by the Dyrrak weapons.
“Captain Illago, what do we do?” Flight Leader Drustim cried. “The reclaimers barely stop the fire from melting our hulls. They won’t take that kind of force for long.”
For once, Cote suffered a moment of indecisiveness, but his uncharacteristic pause ended shortly. “Protect the city. Form your squads up in groups of five. Pursue from the rear, repeat, pursue from the rear. If you’re chased, try to get these… these—” He shot a look to Jaemus.
“Dragørs?” he offered. “Vinnr’s cousin to the slangarooks.”
“Flying ’rooks,” Cote said shortly, “and get them to—”
Before he could finish the command, the ship was hit violently by a blunt force that joggled it from its not-quite-steady course. Something in the engines screamed in protest, followed by an enraged, or terrified, animal yowl that definitely came from inside the ship.
Jaemus shot a glance at Cote. “Was that—”
“Scintilla!” Cote said, and for the first time since the fight began, his expression darkened with concern.
“We hear you, Captain Illago,” Flight Leader Joburg responded. “Lead the ’rooks into each other.”
“Acknowledged,” Cote grunted, most of his mind focused on trying to keep the Horizon on a steady flight course.
Then another turbulent strike bumped the ship, tilting it to one side and giving everyone aboard whiplash. Jaemus stared into the retreating back of the dragør that had hit them and saw its lengthy passing tail—half as long as the Horizon—whip so hard into the viewscreen that it cracked.
“A few more hits like that,” he said, his voice surprisingly casual, “and we’ll nothing but bolts united in a common fall.” Casual because my ability to feel fear is as broken as this ship is about to be, it occurred to him.
“I’ve never seen anything living that had so much sheer power,” Cote mumbled, his hands and eyes in a frenzy of keeping them and their seventeen-strong squadron in the sky. “Find me a target, Jae and Heleina. We’re going to show these worms what it feels like to get smacked.”
Heleina, who had experience striking things with a blunt instrument, pointed out a likely victim first. “Toward the ocean, tall tower. See those three dragørs heading for it?”
“Got it,” Cote acknowledged, and juiced their throttles. “Warn me if…”
His voice trailed away as they all witnessed the ugly but inevitable. Another cosmocruiser, the one piloted by Drustim and Jae’s new friend Saxton, was set upon by seven dragørs at once. It was like watching a school of piranha go after a whale—except the piranha were a tenth of the whale’s size, breathing fire and ripping it apart with talons. The horde dug their hooks into Drustim’s outer hull and held tight, necks curved down to emit torrents of flame directly onto the ship. All seventeen of Drustim’s squad were falling from the sky like soggy leaves, fighting to stay up, but without pilots of their own, the remote ships were at Drustim’s whim.
Witnessing the calamity, Cote cringed but didn’t hesitate. “Joburg, Mye, take control of Drustim’s squads. Sweep them back toward the Deep Sea Gem and save her!” He tilted his chin at Jaemus. “Can you take one of their squads?”
“I’m on it.”
He activated his remotes and suddenly had five more ships under his control. They were linked to his console and required little more than eye movement and attention to control, but there was no way around the devastation of losing Drustim, Saxton, and their third crew member Fex. As they all watched, the Deep Sea Gem cosmocruiser barreled into the ground of Vinnr; there was simply no way to stop it. And if the ship exploded, it was impossible to tell with how alight with dragørfire it already was.
The Dyrrak fighters had thinned, letting the dragørs wreak their havoc without interfering. And there was no reason not to, really. The dragørs were superior in every way, from strength and size to ferocity and sheer literal firepower. They were devastating the Glisternauts and Magdastervians alike. But to Jaemus nothing could be more devastating than losing their friends and fellow Himmingazians.
“Jae, Jae.” Cote’s voice sounded a world away. “This fight’s not over yet. Jae?”
He blinked and looked at his lifemate. Pain and grief pulled Cote’s features into sharp angles and grooves. Jaemus knew his own face looked the same. “We can’t fight those things. They’re pure destruction.”
“Ask the Knights. There must be some way stop them. The celestials stones, or the Scrylle—something.”
He gave a brief nod and glanced toward Heleina. She had tears in her eyes, but her focus remained firm, unflinching. She caught his glance and scowled, despite the tears, her message seemingly: We are Himmingazians, and we are tough. We’ll get through this.
Yes, we’ll get through this, he thought. We don’t have a choice.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
No one could argue that Mylla’s life experience was typical, and she would be the first to admit she probably had a little more tolerance for the extraordinary than the average person. But no one, not even the Stallari himself, could ever have been prepared for the singular thrill of riding a dragør.
When Poppy’s Noble Inferno proposed—commanded was probably the more apropos term—that Mylla climb onto her back, Mylla had only done what would come
naturally to anyone with an ingot of a survival instinct: she hesitated. It wasn’t possible to vacillate when commanded by a dragør for long, however, given the alternative, and she’d timidly begun searching for the best way onto Noble Inferno’s scaled and wholly unsuited-for-human-comfort back. In the end, she’d been persuaded by one pushy talon to clamber the beast’s leg to her flank like a granite wall, finding the dinner-plate-sized scales rough and grippy like sandstone and surprisingly climbable.
The next challenge had been finding something to hold on to while in flight, as she suspected the ride would be both fast and rough. Her hands were hardly large enough to grasp the thick scales, and the beast obviously wore no harness. When Noble Inferno leaped skyward, Mylla grimly clung to her back—but only long enough to have reached deadly heights before tumbling indecorously off like a sack of wheat tossed from a wagon.
“Aaaahhh—!” she cried, then her spine struck something as hard as a tree—the tail she later realized—that knocked her scream silent. From there, she was free-falling like a stone, but only for a moment.
With uncanny gentleness, the huge taloned paw of the dragør’s hind leg closed around her in midair, enveloping her like a cage.
You specks are quite a lot of trouble… Noble Inferno grumbled, and carried on without so much as a whoopsie.
Once she got her breath back and collected herself, Mylla took in her new situation. They were flying into battle, and she now dangled like a worm on a hook. True, the dragør’s talons were harder than steel and her scales were impenetrable, but the spaces between those talons were still just spaces. Anything that slid between them would be stopped, but only because it struck the soft, easily perforated meat of Mylla’s body. Likewise, all Noble Inferno had to do was flex or relax her claw, and Mylla would end up crunched to bloody bone meal.
Master Inferno, she sent upon deciding aggravating the dragør was the lesser of two evils. I’ll be no good down here, and you’ll have one less talon to fight. Is there any way to fix me astride you?
