The hull started to rock, began to spin laterally. Tisker tore his eyes away from Dug and Onaya Bone and made his way back to the wheelhouse. With blistered hands, he seized the wheel to fight the wind, and his face flashed with pain.
Sophie gave Talis’s hand a last squeeze and ran back to help him.
Meran turned her focus beyond the railing, to the Yu’Nyun starships. She reached out with one hand, keeping balanced with the other, and Talis anticipated the blue threads of light. Nothing happened.
Yellow-green beams struck Wind Sabre as the Yu’Nyun weapons fired again and again. The deck rocked with the impact, and the air smelled of scorched wood.
Talis nearly fell to her knees again with the shuddering of her ship beneath her. Her gut wrenched, not only with the sickening turn of the deck, but with her own abject failure. She was going to lose her ship. They were going to fall. Dug, Sophie, Tisker. Her mind tortured her with images of their faces frozen and encrusted with ice.
She had failed them.
A section of decking burst in a spray of splinters. Dug curled his torso tighter around Onaya Bone, wordless as shards of wood railing and planking struck him in the side and across his back.
She had failed a god.
A single large piece of wood, cracked as sharp as a blade on one side, split up from the railing and spun into the air.
All this for twice her slight weight in gold and gems. Her reward sat heavy in the cargo hold. Dragging them down from the moment it had been loaded aboard.
Talis watched, frozen, as the chunk of railing speared the lift envelope above them.
The canvas tore with a shredding hiss. The air it contained escaped in a whoomph. The rip opened itself up until it reached the nearest seams, which held. Strained, but held.
And thank the gods, it was on the underside of the envelope. The heated air within stayed at the top of the balloon. Air would escape as it cooled, and they’d lose the recycled water as it re-condensed, but as long as the engines still worked, and if the lift lines held.…
They might limp back to civilization. If they survived this.
Meran pushed up from her crouch and wavered on legs that seemed barely able to support her. The alien flagship was approaching, but the simula was weakened after deposing the goddess, and Wind Sabre was hopeless against another attack. Talis resisted the urge to shut her eyes.
Cradling Onaya Bone with one arm, Dug scooted backward using his free hand and feet to retreat from the center of the deck to the dubious protection of the engine house. His jaw was set. His eyes were on Meran, who fought to maintain her balance against the pitching deck.
A new sound, grating and dry, interspersed with a wooden tapping, caught Talis’s attention. From around the engine house, dragging xist-self with xist arms and one leg, Scrimshaw appeared. From the blood on Hankirk’s clothes Talis had assumed the worst. The truth was not much better. Scrimshaw’s right leg was broken, the calf and foot missing beneath the ragged ruin of xist knee. Xe was covered in xist own blood, yet xe pressed forward across the deck. In one hand xe gripped xist tablet.
Xist voice was heavy with the alien accent as xe called out. “Here, bring it to her!”
Talis, startled out of her reverie of self-admonishment, crossed to xist side. Meran joined them, stumbling on unsteady feet. Together the three of them clung to each other to maintain their balance. Scrimshaw reached out a hand for Meran, and rested it on her knee.
“Your body is the same technology as that ship.” Xe paused for breath and xist nictitating membranes half-closed over xist eyes. “Compatible. The being ‘Meran’ is too weakened by the absorption of Onaya Bone’s energies to fight them, but the device that contains her is fully functional.”
Sophie had run to Scrimshaw’s side and took the Yu’Nyun device in both hands as she kneeled beside the broken and bloodied alien. Readouts on the cracked screen indicated the presence of the nearby alien ships and provided rotating lists in Yu’keem characters. Scrimshaw’s skeletal fingers danced across the display, which Sophie held out for xin, and the view split. The outline of a bipedal figure appeared in the right half of the screen, blinking. Xe tapped the figure, and both images turned blue, pulsing with light in a synchronized blink.
Meran’s eyes went from blue to brilliant white, and a detached smile dawned on her lips. She raised one hand toward the ships, as if reaching to caress them.
“I am inside them,” she said, and with Sophie’s help, she rose to her feet.
The Yu’Nyun flagship was only a length away from Wind Sabre’s hull now, dwarfing the defenseless carrack. The gleaming pointed ends of its bizarre cannons trained on the deck and crackled with building energy.
Meran gracefully turned her hand around, palm out.
All the weapons went dark.
“I have interfaced with their systems,” she explained. “I am free to explore their mechanical pathways. I am a virus, a poison in their veins.”
As if to punctuate the point, an explosion rocked the flagship. The ventral weapons lowered, drooping with a low moan.
The sky was silent except for the wind.
Talis looked back at Sophie, who caught her eye and smirked. “Can’t be too jealous of those systems now, can I, Captain?”
Talis was going to reply, but both Sophie’s and Tisker’s expressions shifted into surprise. What now, Talis thought, turning back to Meran and the Yu’Nyun ship.
Meran had pulled the ship right up to Wind Sabre’s port railing, and moved to meet it there.
