Chapter 1
AMS Predator, Colony Spire
Dependence
Captain Francis Madison Grimm,
commander, AMS Predator, strode down the length of the deck, doing what an
airship's captain all too often found a necessary duty-waiting calmly. The
ship's crew had gone to general quarters in predawn, nearly eight hours before,
with breaks for no more than two men at a time, and those only for biological
necessity.
Mists hovered thickly over the
ship, for it was barely more than a thousand feet above the lithosophere-that
elevation where the growing things of the hellish surface world reached out
branches, tendrils, and various other structures that could threaten a ship's
physical integrity. Grimm could scarcely see from one end of Predator to the
other, much less what might be happening to the armed away team of the
Spirearch's Guard currently deployed to the colony Spire below.
Grimm climbed the steep ladder to
the bridge and strode over to where the ship's pilot, Mister Kettle, leaned
easily back against the pilot's brace, his wrists draped over the ship's
steering grips, fingers hanging loosely. He was relaxed despite the hours of
waiting. Kettle was a brawny, bearded veteran aeronaut. The skin around his
eyes was permanently a bit lighter than the rest of his face where his goggles
had shielded him from the glare of the light of the open sky far above. His
forearms looked like ham hocks, and he wore his fleece-lined cold-weather
aeronaut's coat unbuttoned and open in the warmth at this altitude. Sweat had
run tracks down his face and neck.
"Skip," Kettle drawled
easily as Grimm approached. "We should have seen or heard something from
the team by now."
In response, Grimm calmly,
deliberately removed his pocket watch from where it resided in his waistcoat,
and he consulted its face before polishing it, closing it, and returning it to
its pocket. "They're barely outside the mission window, Mister Kettle,"
Grimm said. "I think we shall not wail and gnash our teeth quite
yet."
"Aye, Skip," Kettle
replied. "But beggin' the captain's pardon, I'd be happier if Sir Benedict
had sent up a rocket by now."
"I'm sure if Sir Benedict
had need of us, he would have done so," Grimm replied. "Meanwhile,
I'll not leave us sitting fat and happy on an unguarded docking platform. Any
Auroran who ran a patrol past it would blow us to splinters."
"If they could see us in
this soup," Kettle growled. A boarding ax, his weapon of choice in most
ship actions, hung from a loop on his belt, and on his left hand he wore a
gauntlet-a cage of copper wire wrapped around a heavy leather bracer and
connected by straps and wires to the heavy leather strap that held the weapon
crystal against his palm. "If the enemy comes close enough to see us in
this, we'll be biting one another's noses off before anyone can aim a
cannon."
There was a sudden hiss, followed
by a swift trilling sound that seemed to embrace a rapid series of sharp clicks
in its volume. Something flashed by in the mist off the ship's prow, a lean,
sleek mass almost five yards long supported by an impossibly fine-looking
webwork of glittering wings. Its body trailed a pair of long, fine talons
beneath it.
Kettle's breath exploded out of
him in a huff of surprise, and his gauntlet came up so he could track the
creature's path as it glided by through the mist-and was gone.
Other trills echoed those of the
first creature, somewhere out of sight, hauntingly sourceless in the endless
grey.
"That's the fourth time that
one's come by," Kettle said, his voice pitched low. "And I've seen
half a dozen more, one of them even bigger. Skip, if we're down this low when
it gets dark, we'll lose a dozen men to mistsharks."
"We'll be back in the
aerosphere in time to see the sun set," Grimm assured him. "XO to the
bridge, if you please, Mister Kettle."
"Aye, sir," Kettle
replied firmly. He leaned over to one side to swing a copper-clad speaking tube
to within range of his mouth so that he could bawl, "First officer to the
bridge!"
In less than half a minute, there
were firm boot steps on the main deck and then the sounds of the XO coming up
the staircase to the bridge, at the prow of the ship, where the pilot could see
the most sky around the vessel. Predator was a light, armed transport outfitted
a little more heavily than the average Aetherium Fleet destroyer. Swift and
agile, she was equipped with both an etheric web and wind sails for running
outside the main etheric currents-and her guns could speak with an authority
that could have challenged the batteries of a minor colony Spire like
Dependence. Even now her own guns were trained down in the general direction of
the colony, and they had been for hours, their crews waiting suspended in a
state between fear for their lives and utter boredom.
Grimm noted several members of
the gun crews nervously tracking the XO's progress with their eyes instead of
doing their duty, and he scowled them back down to their posts as the heir of
the House of Lancaster came clomping up the stairs, her boots striking the deck
beneath her far more sharply than was strictly necessary.
Gwendolyn Margaret Elizabeth
Lancaster was a petite woman who had acquitted herself ably in a trade where
few females tried their hands-yet were always about in small numbers. Granted,
most of them were warriorborn and outcasts from society in the first place, but
Gwen had thrown herself into the work with a will, starting two years ago,
after Predator's role in the capture of the Itasca, the storied Auroran
battlecruiser now rechristened the Belligerent in a clear signal to her former
masters of Fleet's intentions toward Spire Aurora.
Miss Lancaster wore an aeronaut's
leathers that matched Grimm's own. The pattern was based upon the Fleet
officer's uniform but rendered in black leather with silver skull-motif
fittings rather than the dark blue and gold of the Fleet. The garments made her
look like something out of a melodrama-and she had, in fact, been portrayed as
a melodramatic heroine of Spire Albion in a number of productions about the
opening conflict of the current struggle.
One that hovered precariously
upon the brink of open war.
Miss Lancaster attained the
bridge, came to attention, and snapped off a proper Fleet salute to Grimm. As
per usual, there were smears of engine grease upon one of her cheeks-even after
her elevation into the illustrious ranks of the aeronaut officers' corps of
Albion, she was frequently to be found arguing with the chief of engineering,
Journeyman, over Predator's systems. "Captain. We've had reports of
mistsharks circling the ship from all quarters now, and the ship's glass makes
it less than an hour to sundown."
"I'm aware," Grimm said
calmly. "I'm going to consult with the etherealist, XO. Take the
conn."
Lancaster braced to attention.
"Aye, Captain, I have the conn."
Kettle glanced back at them both
with naked skepticism.
"Problem, Mister
Kettle?" Gwen asked.
"No, ma'am," Kettle
drawled. "It's just that every time you're on the conn, things seem to get
interesting, Miss Lancaster, ma'am."
"I beg your pardon, Mister
Kettle," Gwen said sweetly. "But what exactly are you saying?"
"Just saying we didn't have
to go in on those pirates at three to one, ma'am," Kettle said. "We
might have tried another way."
"I said, 'Take me down their
throats, so I can blow their guts out,' and that's precisely what we did,"
Gwen replied firmly.
"Usually, it's ships what
got all that armor that do such things, ma'am," Kettle retorted.
"Since if the pirates had been a bit faster to get back to their guns, or
the shroud had failed, we'd have been blown to tiny glowing pieces at that
range."
"But they weren't faster,
and it didn't fail," Gwen said. "And we all made out like bandits on
the salvage of the two that didn't explode, and here you are complaining."
Kettle looked back and grinned.
He'd added more gold teeth in the past few years, one of them set with a tiny
lumin crystal that glowed like a star, and the gold hoop in one ear had gained
a red gemstone the size of a baby's eye. "There, now you sound like a
proper officer, ma'am."
"Eyes out, tongues in,"
Grimm said, giving Kettle a glance. "If the away team has encountered the
enemy and been unable to signal us, then the enemy could know of our presence
and could be in the process of hunting for us. Let's not make it easy for
them."
Lancaster frowned. "Do you
think that's what's happened, Captain?"
"It is one
possibility," Grimm said, and lowered his voice pointedly. "One
easily enough ensured against, eh?" He put a finger to his lips and
climbed down from the bridge.
The temperature had dropped
noticeably, and through the mists, the quality of light had become warmer as
the sun headed for the horizon. Night would not be far away, and the ship would
need another thousand yards of sky beneath her to climb up out of the regions
where the aerial predators of the surface world cruised. That distance would
carry them out of range of the signal rockets of the away team. Grimm would be
willing to leave the team overnight if he could be assured of their safety, but
the communication would have to happen before night fell. Otherwise, he'd have
to assume that nothing had gone terribly wrong.
And that was an assumption that
Grimm would rather not make.
He knocked at the door of the
passenger cabin, waited a beat, and then opened it enough to say, "Miss
Folly, a moment of your time?"
"Oh, yes, do tell the
captain he is welcome, of course," came a young woman's rather breathless
voice. "Please, tell him to come in."
Grimm opened the door to find the
table in the little cabin set for tea for two. One of the seats was empty,
though the teacup before it had been filled and prepared. In the seat opposite
was the ship's etherealist, dutifully wearing her safety straps, which were
attached to the chair, which was itself secured to the ship's deck.
She wore an odd mishmash of
clothing: a quilted buckskin Piker jacket with merry-colored holiday trim over
several layers of tunics of Atlantean silks in various unlikely colors, and a
hooped, petticoated skirt without an overdress. Her hair had been divided into
two halves starting at the part in the center of her head. One side had been
dyed with a flat black ink of some kind, and the other bleached almost white.
Both sides had been drawn back into a braid that formed complicated whirls of
light, dark, and shadow. Between the asymmetry of her colored hair and her
different-colored eyes-one pale blue, the other apple green-it was enough to
make her direct gaze disconcerting to those who did not know her.
"Miss Folly," Grimm
said, "I have come to a quandary, and I wonder if you might help me
resolve it."
After listening to Grimm's words,
Folly straightened in her chair, then turned to address a jar of small,
expended lumin crystals sitting on the table next to the teapot. "Of
course. Tell the captain I am at his service." Folly smiled at the empty
seat across the table. "I do beg you to forgive this interruption- Oh, so
very kind."
Grimm drew up cautiously, looking
from Folly to the empty seat and back. Etherealists were well-known for their
uniquely unstable personalities, but Grimm had seen enough to know that Miss
Folly's madness had a great deal of method to it, and he was not prepared to
discount her strangeness as simple oddity. "Am I interrupting? I do beg
your pardon . . . um . . ."
Folly smiled and shook her head.
"Please let the captain know that I'm taking tea with Predator this
afternoon. She seemed so tense and to need someone to talk to."
Grimm saw no evidence of anyone
in the chair, but that didn't mean that the etherealist was out of her mind-or
at least, no more so than at any other given time. Before now, Folly had
certainly coaxed performances out of the ship that seemed to indicate that the
vessel was more than merely the sum of her parts-that business with the ship's
shroud withstanding the broadsides of three enemy vessels, for example. And no
airship captain, no matter how educated or refined, could entirely escape the
superstition of shipboard life. All in all, he found it wiser never to
disrespect Miss Folly's oddness. "As always," he said, "please
convey to her my ongoing gratitude and admiration."
"The captain knows perfectly
well that Predator is entirely sensible of his feelings and supports his
command," Folly replied, her tone fondly reproving. "But she's
worried that the men haven't had a proper meal and that there are several mistsharks
coming far too close to the ventral lookouts as shadows lengthen."
Which was information Miss Folly
should have had no way of knowing, Grimm mused. The quiet words passed up the
line to officers would not have reached this cabin, and the door had been shut
all day. And yet somehow the young woman knew what was happening around the
ship. Her awareness should have seemed damned unnatural, but after two years'
worth of her regular presence aboard, he tended to regard such matters much as
he did the effectiveness of the ship's grapevines-word would get around
regardless of what anyone wished. It just so happened that in Miss Folly's
particular case, the only other apparent participant in her grapevine was the
ship herself.
"Part of my problem,"
he assured her. "I need to know if the ship can show us anything of the
shore party. We can't remain at this altitude for much longer, and we should
have heard from them by now."
Folly put down her teacup with a
sharp clink. "Oh, goodness. That is worrisome." She turned to the
chair across from her and leaned forward, speaking in a confidential murmur.
Then she paused and tilted her head as if listening to a similarly pitched
reply. Then she addressed the jar of crystals again. "Please tell the
captain that Predator will be able to display significant sources of etheric
power to him-the weapons crystals of the shore party's gauntlets, for example.
She will show them to you as sources of red light upon the inside of the ship's
shroud as she has before."
"Excellent, Miss
Folly," Grimm said. "Thank you."
Running with Predator's shroud up
would put wear on her core etheric systems, but the additional knowledge to be
gained by the vision those same systems could offer (with Miss Folly's
assistance) was priceless. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
Costumes, Candy, and Characters 
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