She opened her mouth to shout a warning, but Wind Sabre bucked beneath her.
The aliens were firing on her ship. On the goddess floating above its deck.
Onaya Bone turned her head toward the barrage, momentarily distracted as the beams of yellow-hot light cut at Wind Sabre’s port, across the hull and the midship lift line.
A narrow path of flame danced along the blackened trail left behind by the weapons fire. There was a groan and then a snap as the line severed. The other lines took on the weight, an unevenly distributed burden on those that remained. The deck sloped toward the broken line.
Wind Sabre couldn’t take much more of this.
Hankirk moved, taking advantage of Talis’s distraction. He clenched his jaw, roaring through his teeth, and pushed up against the blade. His left arm was in ruins, the blade deep in the bone and stuck there, but he threw Talis off balance enough that he got his right hand free, and it went for her throat.
She clawed at his hand, abandoning the immovable blade, and pried at the fingers that compressed her airway.
Sophie ran to her aid. She didn’t slow down as she got close, instead wound up and kicked Hankirk hard across his face. He lost his grip on Talis as he was propelled against the deck. Dug’s scimitar slid out of reach, but Hankirk didn’t go after it. He lay on his side, clutching his arm weakly. His head lolled back, and he groaned as his eyes fluttered and closed.
Crouched on all fours, Talis coughed and gasped for air. It did not make her abused throat feel any better, but it was beyond her control.
She saw Sophie grab the scimitar and wondered where Dug was.
The deck beneath her was covered in Hankirk’s blood. She slipped a bit as she turned to look behind her, back at the scene that had distracted them all in the first place.
Dug kneeled before Onaya Bone, his arms crossed in front of his chest. His head bowed before his goddess. His creator.
And she certainly made an impression that demanded worship, exuding confidence and righteous pride. She gently settled onto the deck, her smile fierce and hungry. Her dark eyes watching Meran.
The simula held her arms aloft, fingers splayed.
The alien barrage continued, but it no longer rocked the deck. A blue glow ran along the grain in the wooden hull, filled the space between the planks of the decking, and coursed through the air. Like feeling the warmth from a campfire on her face and the night’s chill at her back, Talis could sense that the power emanated from Meran. It pulsed out of her.
As though Wind Sabre had turned to air, the weapons fire from the Yu’Nyun ships passed through the hull without leaving a mark. Talis looked down at her hands, saw the tiny veins beneath her skin glowing blue, just as one of the alien energy beams passed through her torso, passed through the deck beneath her and off into the empty skies beyond. She felt a tickle of electricity, and her skin prickled and itched, as though she were too close to lightning.
She looked up again. At Meran’s posture, her concentration. It was not Onaya Bone who was defending them.
Meran was their salvation now.
The sky around Wind Sabre flashed. The moving shapes of Nexus, ships both alien and Imperial, and battling gods filled Talis’s vision over the ship’s port-side railing.
The Veritor line had taken critical damage, their hulls dangling from their lift balloons like useless limbs. They had neither the alien weapons nor their shields, and so were open to the gods’ attacks. They tossed about in the high winds, their buoyant envelopes tugging the hulls beneath in jerking bursts of movement. They fired their cannons, but the shots either went wide, or struck impotently against the gods’ defenses.
If the aliens had the kind of control over Silus Cutter’s wind that Onaya Bone suggested, they’d spared no thought to protect their purported allies from it.
Lindent Vein punished the Veritor fleet. With a roar that seemed to come from every direction, tendrils of icy water whipped outward from the bands surrounding Nexus and sliced through their lift balloons. Through their hulls. Splinters exploded from the airships as the onslaught ripped through the wood. Frigid saltwater spray misted across Talis’s face, even though they were outside cannon range.
One Veritor ship dangled, nose-down, from the last line of its lift envelope, the balloon pulled vertical. Lifeboats deployed, only to be smashed back against the ship’s hull, bursting in showers of wood and bodies.
The remaining airships attempted to pull back, only about a third of the fleet still sky-worthy. Some that could stay aloft had broken keels and rudders. The ships that were able left their crippled allies to die; made no attempt to rescue the crews from the foundering ships. The lashing of water sliced through those that trailed behind.
The lift envelope of the hindmost ship took a direct hit and all its heated air escaped, steaming into the skies. The full weight of the hull did the rest, its flaccid canvas flapping over the heads of the panicked crew. Buoyancy faded like a mirage, and gravity claimed them. Their ship fell out of the sky, trailing the last of the envelope’s released steam: wisps of vapor that braided with black smoke from the engines.
Arthel Rak and Helsim Breaker each attacked the alien ships. Talis knew next to nothing of alchemy or the extent of the gods’ abilities, but as a fighter she was keen enough to see that their attacks were uncoordinated. Movements borne of anger and frustration, with no sense of tactics.
Arthel Rak enveloped the ships fully in ballistic flames. The temperature of the air rose around Talis, though the fight was far off and the spouts of flame that shot from Arthel Rak’s armor-plated hands were directed away from Wind
