the brow as she banked round for an attack. The force of the blow snapped her head around as if she had come to the end of a string. Her wings fell limp and, tumbling backward in the air, she plummeted like a lead weight. With a tremendous thudding splash, she followed Sir Grumdish to the cavern’s flooded floor, a storm of bubbles hissing and popping on the surface long after the waves of her impact had subsided.
With a victorious roar, the giant then turned on Captain Hawser and Chief Portlost, still inside the mechanical crab. They backed away, waving their one remaining claw before them. The giant limped across the sand and retrieved its club, then turned with a snarl and charged. Captain Hawser threw the crab forward, and the two came together with a deafening crash and roar.
Commodore Brigg had seen enough. Without aiming, he shouted “Fire!”
Conundrum slammed both buttons at the same time. The
Commodore Brigg sighed with relief and turned his attention to the crab. It lay in a tangled heap of metal against the wall, no sign of life within its twisted remains. A thin blue exhalation of smoke curled up from its midst. Brigg’s breath caught in his throat, and he turned and slid down the ladder to the bridge.
He landed with a thump beside Conundrum. “We’ve got to get to shore!” he cried, then turned and shouted down to engineering, “Engage the main flowpellar!”
The ship lurched forward.
“Steer her into shore,” the commodore ordered, pushing Conundrum toward the wheel. “Run her aground. It doesn’t matter.”
“What’s wrong?” Conundrum asked.
“My brother,” the commodore answered, his voice tight with emotion, “and the chief. I’ll get Doctor Bothy’s spare kit. Just steer her in and put her on the beach.” With those words, he ducked through the forward hatch and disappeared.
Conundrum gripped the wheel nervously, staring out through the porthole at the carnage on the beach. The giant lay with their arrow sticking out of its back like a tree. Beyond it, resting against the wall with a tendril of smoke rising from its midst, lay a heap of metal that Conundrum recognized after a few moments as the crab.
The sandy shore slid toward them, and Conundrum held the
A dozen yards from shore now. A half dozen. Then the shore vanished in an explosion of water as Charynsanth rose up before the ship, like a leviathan, wings spread wide and streaming water in sheets. The
Charynsanth forced the ship’s nose down into the water as he she leaned over the conning tower. The giant’s boulder had only stunned her, but Sir Grumdish’s sword was still embedded in her neck, her life’s blood flowed out around it. She was dying, but she would see to it that everyone and everything died with her.
The conning tower hatch was still open. Charynsanth leaned over it, sucking her last breath in through nostrils frothing with her own blood. The fires boiled in her belly. Staring up through the hatch, Conundrum saw her jaws part, blood streaming out between her long cruel fangs to fall hissing on the deck of the bridge. He smelled the brimstone. He saw the moment of his death arriving.
And then he knew what he had to do. He crossed the bridge in three bounds as dragonfire boiled down through the conning tower. He leaped, grabbed the handle, and released the ram.
It shot out, impaling Charynsanth on its cold steel spike. She reared back in pain, screaming the dragonfire from her lungs in a white-hot plume that fountained upward. In her death throes, she kicked the
Conundrum’s action had bought them only a little time. Enough of Charynsanth’s dragonfire had poured into the bridge to set everything on fire, including Conundrum. His white guild robe went up in flames. He screamed and fell to his knees as the deck cracked and split underneath him. A column of fire shot up from belowdecks, and the floor dropped away beneath him.
Commodore Brigg picked himself up from the deck of the sick bay where he had fallen when the ship lurched to a stop against the dragon’s belly. At first, he thought that Conundrum had run the ship aground, but then he heard the Toaster engaged and the dragon’s roar of pain. He rushed to the door, jerked it open, and got a face full of fire for his trouble. Flames roared down the passage from the bridge and licked around the open doorway. Quickly snatching a blanket from a nearby examination table, he wrapped it around his body and lunged out into the inferno, his only thought to save his ship.
He arrived at the bridge to find half the floor vanished, swallowed up by a column of fire roaring up from below decks. Of Conundrum and his remaining crew, he saw no sign. The conning tower and its escape hatch were well within the flames and out of his reach, but through the forward porthole, he saw that the ship was still moving, that its engines were still engaged. Knowing that he had but one choice, he staggered through the flames to the dive control station. Grasping the scorching bronze levers in his hands, he jerked them down, opening the ship’s fore and aft ballast tanks. Immediately, the burning wreck of the
The surface of the water crawled up the glass of the forward porthole. It seemed to take forever for the ship to submerge. Commodore Brigg gagged and choked on the smoke, waiting for what he knew would happen, what he knew was his only chance to save the ship, while flames crowded closer and closer around him.
Finally, the
Even as the fires were extinguished, the interior of the ship grew dark, dark as the blackest cavern in the deepest bowel of the earth. Commodore Brigg looked up. Outside the
And she was still sinking.
Chapter
32
Conundrum awoke in a small bed, lined with soft white pillows, covered by a white blanket with blue ticking. A window near the bed was thrown open, and outside, a gentle afternoon shower pattered against the wall, falling in a hush through naked gray treetops stretching away into the distance. A cool wind flowed in through the window, stirring the filmy white curtains hanging to either side. The room contained seven other beds like the one in which he lay, but they were all empty, their linens neatly folded and stacked on the corner of each mattress. He sat up on his elbows and looked around in wonder.