If he weren’t careful, that one small skimmer would turn his destroyer to a sieve.
With one last angry glare at the departing Andros Pak, Kim gauged the approach of the Naga and flung his wheel hard to starboard. The Elemental keeled over smoothly as the Naga flashed past again, MACs roaring, but this time most of the rounds hit low on the bigger vessel’s port armor where the thicker plates could take the beating.
“Gunners! Get that thing locked in!”
“No need, sir.” His second shook his head. “He’s done what he set out to do. He’s not coming back around.”
Indeed, Kim looked and spotted the Naga already starting to vanish into the distance. Only its sails were still clear, and even they were beginning to fade into the deep-blue sky.
He seethed for a moment, but there wasn’t much he could do. He’d lost his window of opportunity with the Andros, and the Naga that cost him the chance was pulling away faster than he could pursue. He had a ship down and likely injuries on board.
“Let them go,” he said. “I’m bringing us around. We need to check on the Thunderbird.”
Brennan’s heart was roaring in his ears, something that hadn’t happened to him since he first made a solo flight. He kept twisting around to check behind him, unable to quite believe that they weren’t being pursued, but it seemed that the destroyer was actually turning away.
Unbelievable.
“You can relax, kid,” Kennick said calmly from the front seat. “They can’t catch us and they know it, and now that the Andros is clear, they’ve got other problems.”
“It happened so fast.” Brennan blinked, confused.
“Battle is like that, kid. Sometimes an hour feels like ten seconds, and sometimes ten seconds feels like a lifetime,” Kennick answered. “We lived, we did our job, and we’re still flying. Can’t ask for much more. Nice flying, by the way. Good approach. You lined me up just right.”
“We didn’t do much on the second pass,” Brennan said, not sure if he should be glad or disappointed.
“We did what we needed to. We made them flinch. Head for the Andros. Let’s call it a day.”
“Yeah,” Brennan mumbled, nodding in agreement. “Sounds good.”
The stubby Fire Naga rolled a little as he twisted the sails, which spun up behind them and cut into the winds as they headed for where the gleaming sails of the Andros were beginning to be obscured by the ever-present mist.
CHAPTER 17
Corian stood on the open deck of the Caleb Bar, looking down over the site where the destroyer Thunderbird had plowed into the rocky terrain below.
It hadn’t been a total loss. Many of the crew had survived the crash. The captain had managed to slow his ship’s descent using the remaining sails, but the crash was still bad enough. An Imperial destroyer taken out in the opening moments of battle by a glorified luxury yacht. He didn’t care who was in command of the damned yacht; it was a disgrace.
“This woman is becoming intolerable,” Corian grumbled, half turning to look at the aide waiting behind him. “What of the depot?”
“Our team located the Cadre cache, sire, but it had already been picked clean aside from some restricted but easily acquired equipment.”
Corian nodded.
Of course it had. She’d had hours at least, perhaps longer, to accomplish her mission. He needed intelligence on this woman, blast it all. He needed the Cadre files.
“Increase the reward on her head, and put a bounty on every known member of her crew,” he ordered. “I want them alive, to be tried as pirates and traitors to the empire.”
“Yes, my lord. Double her reward?”
“Multiply it by ten.”
The aide bowed. “It will be done.”
“And have the commander of this pathetic squadron clapped in chains and sent to the palace,” Corian said as an afterthought. “This incompetence will not stand.”
Missed them, William thought.
But he wasn’t surprised. He’d had late notification while the Bulls had a head start, and even they’d almost missed them.
He’d stashed his skimmer miles away and hiked in to where the legion was still milling about. The dark airborne fortress Corian named the Caleb Bar was on site now, floating in defiance of every physical law William could claim to understand. No sails, no thrusters, just … floating in the air.
That ship was Corian’s trump card.
It was too heavily armored to shoot down, and the weapons it was armed with were staggering. He knew that it had to be the results of a black project backed by Edvard, but by the endless mist he didn’t know what the emperor had been thinking. There was no enemy out there that required a hammer like the Caleb Bar to put them in their place.
Only the Imperial palace and a few other Redoubts, all controlled by the empire as well, were a realistic threat to the ship.
Why, Edvard? Why would you have such a thing built? You were never that stupid.
It was one question that he would have to get used to not having the answer to, but it was also one that burned deeply within him. Without the Caleb, he was certain that he could have turned back Corian’s coup.
William shifted his listening equipment, pointing it at different groups he could see through his lenses and picking up bits and pieces of conversations. Some of it useful, most not, but it was all information, and you never knew what information might save your life.
One conversation, however, made him straighten up.
“She was a cocky one,” a legion colonel grumbled as William listened in. “In the middle of the fight she dumped supplies to the refugee camp over the ridge. Had the nerve to fly a black crossed guard banner as she did it … oh, and the Scourwind colors.”
Delsol flew the Scourwind colors?
That didn’t make sense. Even the loyalists wouldn’t fly the personal colors of the Scourwinds. It wasn’t done. Not unless …
The twins. She has them, one at least.
William packed away his gear.
Now he had to find Mira Delsol.
The Andros Pak rested along the edge of a cliff, one of the oddly smooth sections where the land jutted up straight and true like it had been cut by an industrial laser. There were several places in the empire like that, formations that no one had ever been able to explain.
The empire and the domain within which it existed was a confusing one for the scientists who studied natural law. There were several things within the kingdom that simply didn’t fit within any set of equations they’d come up with to describe the universe they saw, which included oddities like the glass cliffs and the metal floor that ran under the empire in its entirety.
Mira had been privy to a few of the mysteries. In her early days in the Cadre, she’d been tasked with infiltrating a smuggling group. Left to her own devices, she’d attached herself to a well-known researcher and spent a few months learning the ins and outs of the land, eventually using her connections and knowledge to set up a few small trade routes that caught the attention of her targets.