She clapped him on the biceps, and her icy fingers stung. Fixed him with a wry smile. “Let’s see if we can’t get away quietly this time, my friend. But you help Tisker get us out of here and I promise, you and me will go get into a nice brawl somewhere after this. First three rounds are my treat.”
He slowly nodded, and his hungry grin hardened into something else. A brawl with Cutter civilians was a paltry trade for the chance to deal a blow to some Imperial ship. “Of course, Captain. I was referring to their presence at this particular location, at this particular moment.”
“Yeah,” she said, dropping the smirk. “I was thinking about that on the way up. Jasper certainly didn’t mention we should expect a party.”
The deck pulled under her feet and she instinctively shifted her weight to compensate for the motion. Tisker had stayed at the helm rather than greet her return, no more willing to linger than she was. He was getting them out of there, now that Wind Sabre’s captain was back aboard.
They reached the weather decks, and Talis held out her hand, her gaze fixed on the pair of ships hanging silent in the sky off to port. Dug, without pause, handed her the glass scope he kept in a leather pouch on his belt. Raising it to her right eye and closing the left, she examined their guests.
The silver sphere hung in the sky, silent and surreal. It looked more like the finned and glowing sirenia that grazed open atmo than a vehicle meant to convey passengers. Any other day, Talis might have been eager to finally get a true glimpse of the Yu’Nyun ship. Everything she knew about the aliens and their vessel came from newspaper illustrations and scuttlebutt in the ports where they stopped for trade. She hadn’t gotten a clear idea of what the visitors looked like, just heard unsettling descriptions that had to be half fiction.
The aliens came from somewhere far beyond the thinnest edges of Peridot’s atmosphere, and their ship’s hull was sealed tight to keep the air in. There was only a small line of translucent portholes on the top half of the round hull, at the wrong angle to allow Talis a view inside. Instead, the bubble windows were silhouetted against the skies, lit from within, like the glowing eyes of some amphibious cave dweller.
The airship—only that wasn’t right; the papers called it a ‘starship’—had no external markings. No flags or banners. No lift balloon, sails, or rigging. No propellers or turbines. Talis wanted to ask Sophie how she figured the thing could stay aloft, but there was no time to get her engineer started. Get that girl close enough, and give her a screwdriver, and Sophie’d have the ship in pieces. Then maybe she could tell Talis how it worked, if Talis could follow what the young woman offered in the way of explanation.
The sight of the starship was unsettling and mesmerizing at the same time, but the Yu’Nyun weren’t the real threat here. Despite the long, thin ventral cannon mounted on the starship’s bow below its nose, Talis had never heard of it actually attacking, or even posturing. Enormous, yes. Sent shivers up Talis’s back, for certain. Still, the aliens were only a potential nuisance, not the prime threat.
Talis pursed her lips as she fixed the scope on the Imperial ship. It was one specimen of the enormous fleet deployed across this half of the world by the Cutter government, and a far more immediate concern. Patrol ships, hunter ships, service ships, and war ships peppered the skies like acne. Ostensibly their presence protected the Cutter folk, aided stranded airships, assisted in civil emergencies, and guarded the borders of the Cutter territory.
But it wasn’t just because Talis was perpetually on the wrong side of the law that seeing them up close put a knot in her gut. The Imperials were bullies. Guardians of the status quo. They kept rich bureaucrats rich and paupers poor by enforcing not only judicial law, but moral and trade laws as well. Taxes, tolls, and tariffs. Fines for indecency or disturbing the peace. All of them excessive unless you knew the right bureaucrat. The Cutter folk who couldn’t eke out a living for themselves and their families got overtaxed on the barest profit and fined when they couldn’t pay. Bankrupt, they’d be compelled into mandatory labor (or civil service, as it was called by those who’d never have to serve it) to pay their debts.
The alien starship blocked enough of the view that Talis couldn’t see the Imperial ship’s designation, but she wouldn’t know the airship by name anyway. The design of the hull and rigging was unfamiliar. Something new. It was larger than most patrol vessels she’d encountered since she left the service. Gun ports were packed tightly in neat rows across five decks, almost enough for a warship twice its size.
Dozens of small maneuvering and stunsails were rigged along the equator of the airship’s twin lift balloons. Six turbines crowded around its rudder—more than enough power to rip their own ship apart if they gave her all she had. Add the excessive propulsion to the size of that lift system, and it was a safe bet that the wooden hull was reinforced with iron, and strong enough to take any beating that Wind Sabre’s nine-pound cannons could dole out. It had twice as many securing lines leading from the hull to the lift balloon, and so many sets of ratlines leading up to it, that the deck reminded Talis of a cage for some flighted animal.
The Imperial ship was outfitted for a fight, not a patrol. It could easily staff seventy hands, maybe a hundred, plus rifles enough to arm them. And from the silence that hung in the short distance between it and the Yu’Nyun, it was clear that it wasn’t the starship they were looking to engage.
Both ships sat motionless a
