Aethosphere Chronicles: Storm of Chains (12 page)

Just a couple meters ahead, Drish could see
that the back of the locker had been removed, and the brown brick
making up the morgue wall had been pulled away, leaving a jagged
hole just big enough for a man to squeeze through. So like a worm,
Drish wriggled his way to safety, and spilled upon the stone floor
of a small, dark chamber; a chamber painted orange in the
flickering light of a fire. Within, he found Abigail kneeling next
to the tunnel, waiting to assist, while Fen stood behind her,
dusting off his britches; but they weren’t alone.

A couple members of Bar’s pirate crew stood
in waiting as well. Two of them were holding gas torches, whose
flames reached up to lick the underside of the arched ceiling,
which hung not more than a few centimeters above their heads. Among
those who’d joined this second rescue attempt, Drish recognized
Rook, O’Dylan, Tanner, and Lance; who was still fiddling at the
dials on his mechanized turtle shell.

“Getting lots of chatter, Cap-i-tain,”
reported the radioman. “Empire knows the base’s been compromised,
and they’ve issued an all-hands-on-deck shoot-to-kill order for
anyone matching your-guy’s descriptions.”

“Thanks for stating the obvious, Lance,”
grumbled Bar as he came squeezing out the hole in the wall to land
in a panting heap on the chamber floor. “What’s the condition of
the skiff?”

“Ready and waiting in Thresher’s
Valley.”

“And the
Chimera
?”

“The first mate’s seen fit to remain in the
Smuggler’s Redoubt to await our arrival…or, for word of our death,
which ever’s the case. As was agreed.”

“
Agreed
,” scoffed Bar, as though to
suggest it was anything but, “just as well. That pompous piece of
work would just get in the way with all that pirate codex B.S of
his.”

“Where are we?” butted in the noble in
fatigued tones. He was sick of being dragged all over creation, and
he just needed to know there was some end to all of this in sight.
In fact, he would have given anything at that moment just to be
back home, instead of this blackened mouth to the abyss.

“This,” Bar gestured to the brick walls
encasing them. “It used to be an escape tunnel back when the fort
was smaller. It was bricked up centuries ago as they expanded, but
engineers managed to dig it out during the Siege of Throne… Heard
Admiral Lockney died fighting against a Nocshatten raid on the
Cloudfortress herself, in those early hours of fighting. Died
defending that morgue so vital personnel could make their escape.
Stories say he intentionally stayed behind to deflect suspicion, so
that when the last man through replaced the bricks in the back of
the locker, those armored goons didn’t know any better; thought
they killed everyone. Quite a few men owe Lockney their lives,
after making it safely to airships waiting in the valley; the way I
hear it.”

“What about you, Bar,” asked Abigail, “how
did you manage to survive the invasion?”

“Me? Well the
Chimera
was still in
the dockyards in Brasstown when the battle began, getting fixed up
after our spat with an Iron hunter-killer in the Barrier Shoal. But
once Hierarchs started striking we launched to backup the fleet,
but when the Nocshatten took Ragnarok, and turned the
Cloudfortress’s big guns on us, we ended up dispersed with the rest
of the royal navy. After that we flew for a spell—on the
run—striking out where we could, until finally cornered. We’d no
choice but to flee into the Shoal, where we happened upon the
pirate haven of Black Blood…”

“And the rest is history,” finished O’Dylan
for the captain.

Bar’s expression turned monstrous in the
dark, the frustration plainly evident in in the hard lines cut into
his face. “Anyway,” he said, sighing away the old defeat,
“fortunately for us, those Iron bastard haven’t taken notice of
this passage in the last three years, so we utilized its function
for our little endeavor here and now. Got a cloudskiff waiting back
in Thresher’s, just like the evacuation, and that’ll fly us to an
escape tunnel in Throne.”

“Another tunnel,” bemoaned the noble.

“Tunnel’s a kind word,” snickered O’Dylan
with a wolfish grin.

“Anyway, we’ve got a guy who’ll lead us back
to the Redoubt; where my airship’s docked and waiting, so we can
put off from this godforsaken hornets’ nest.”

“And the sooner the better,” agreed Tanner
glumly.

The trek through the stony heart of the High
Crown didn’t take long, but it gave Drish a moment to catch his
breath. The rest of the pirate band kept quiet as well, leaving the
darkened caverns in peace while their torches painted the rocky
walls ahead of them, and just as well. Drish needed this time to
think anyway; to reason. Disturbingly, he had begun to grow
sympathetic for these scofflaws; and his mounting affections for
Abby had him wondering if the life of a resistance fighter might
not be all that bad after all; and that inevitably had his thoughts
drifting to Arvis. Though Drish still hadn’t come to grips with his
father’s death, the more he sympathized with this rabble, the more
keenly it became a reality.

When the light of an atmium vein punched
through the walls around them, it helped loosened the tongues of
Drish’s pirate saviors, and that held the benefit of distracting
the noble away from his doubts, his desires, and his sadness. His
eyes inevitably drifted to Abigail, and no matter how hard he
fought his heart, just seeing her in the shaft’s ghostly glow left
him yearning for her, now more than ever.

She looked enamored by all the glowing
crystals. “Isn’t it beautiful?” her voice echoed in wonder, “I’ve
never seen atmium up close before.” And she brought a fingertip up
to lightly trace its luminous contours. “It’s wet, and warm…and
soft. I hadn’t expected it to be so soft.”

“You’d think staring up at your Gods’ Bind
would have gotten you over this, girl,” brooded Tanner.

“Seeing it up in the Gods’ Bind is different
from being able to reach out and touch it,” she responded
defensively. “And there’s enough here to lift a hundred ships at
least…the wealth—”

“Typical crowny…you hold a Hierarch’s regard
for this most sacred of elements.”

Abigail turned from her wonder and placed
her hands firmly on her hips. “Excuse me?”

“You all see it as a thing simply to be
coveted,” accused the dark-skinned northerner. “Its use to you is
in how it can be shoved away in your airships.”

To that statement, Drish agreed with the
sinewy Glenfinner. Accounting for atmium had been his life for the
past two years now; ever since joining the Imperial Protectorate’s
ranks. As a clerk in the Atmium Administrative Bureau, he cataloged
Hanns Company production quotas and refinement rates, and that had
stripped away all the grandeur, leaving this anti-gravitational
material as nothing more than a commodity in his mind; a commodity
that had brought Hierarch and Candaran into the conflict of the
Great Skies War.

“Instead of stopping the Empire, it was
crownies who chose to violate the Great Convention just as they
had; mining the mineral for technological gains. Had your
forbearers sought to protect the law, we might never have faced the
Iron monster that now plagues these skies.”

Abigail attempted to steel her expression,
but her demeanor confessed a wounded indignity, and eventually she
turned away from Tanner and continued marching along the tunnel
without giving the atmium a second glance.

“Elwyn mumbo-jumbo,” sneered Lance as he
plodded along, speaking more loudly than need be because of the
headphones he was wearing. “There’s always some band of religious
fanatics eager to decry the progress of technology. Ain’t no man
around that can say the ACS hasn’t made our lives a great deal
better. Sometimes, Tanner… I dare say your ol’ finny views are
about as backwards as those of the Gardayan Republic.”

Drish wasn’t at all surprised when Tanner
took insult in light of the radioman’s dismissal towards his native
isle. “Watch what you say about the isle of my birth.”

“
Psh
,” Fen dared to interject, “you
Ascellan Candarans all get so bent out of shape over these isles of
yours.
King’s Isle
,
Glenfindale
,
Moon Fall
,
Sepia
,
Borada
; blah blah blah; what’s really the
difference between these twelve kingdoms of yours anyway? You all
act like your home isle is the only places that ever mattered.”

“Speaks the Hierarch,” grumbled Rook.
“You’re of a species who believes only in the importance of
Junction.”

“Shows what you know,” snapped the teenager
defiantly, “I don’t give a crap about that place. I got out of
there three years ago with my hide intact, and I ain’t never going
back there ever again; so there.” Fen finished by sticking out his
tongue and giving the scarred Candaran brute the raspberry.

“Enough chatter,” instructed Bar, “We’re
getting close to Thresher now, and I don’t need your loud mouths
getting picked up by seismic detectors.”

When the fugitives finally emerged from the
mountain, it was to find themselves on the precipice to a steep
valley; one not much wider than the Administrative square Drish had
fled from a couple days ago. About a kilometer down its slope
Thresher’s gave way abruptly to empty sky; a sky streaming in the
aura of an intense blue light.

“Is that the Gods’ Bind,” Drish pointed to
the nebulous glow.

“That it is,” replied Bar, and then
redirecting the noble’s attention, he said, “but our ride off this
rock is that way. So, if you’re done gawking, maybe you can join
the rest of us, before the Empire has the sense to begin an aerial
search for our whereabouts.”

Drish swung his view around to where the
pirate captain had indicted, finding a twenty-meter long cloudskiff
moored a few dozen meters above them. There was very little the
noble found impressive about this antiquated blimp, and even in its
prime it would have been a miserable hulk. As it stood in the
present, however, the atmium core system was about the only thing
in good condition, but where it protruded out the sides of the hull
like a glassy growth it showed signs of cracking. Things only went
downhill from there. The steel sheath wrapped around it was
blighted by scabs of orange rust, so pervasive in some places that
the superstructure gleamed out like exposed bones, and the
gondola’s peeling paint looked like hairs trembling in the
wind.

“That,” Drish baulked, “is our means of
escape? It’s nothing more than an isle transport.”

“And
transporting
us, is exactly what
it’s going to do,” offered Abigail, giving a nudge to accountant’s
ribs with her elbow.

“I’ll admit, she certainly ain’t the
Chimera
,” agreed Bar, “but on short notice this is about all
we could rustle up. Beggars can’t be choosers as they say.”

“And stealing an ugly airship nobody gives a
damn about is far easier than stealing something pretty,” crooned
O’Dylan.

“This is stolen?”

“Temporarily borrowed with the intent to
return,” justified Abigail with a coy shrug. “It’s all for the
resistance anyway.”

But the approaching drone of imperial
bi-fighters quickly ended the moment’s hesitation, and Bar urged
the company onto the airship with a taskmaster’s sharpened tongue.
“Ready the boiler,” he barked as he galvanized his muscular frame
towards the front cockpit, “cast off the mooring lines, and secure
the passenger’s.”

Behind the ship’s control center, Drish
strapped himself down into one of the bucket seats lining the bulk
of the cabin; the one right next to Abigail; while the pirates
rushed around in preparations.

At the front of the gondola, Bar planted
himself in the right-hand seat and turned to the pilot. “This is
probably going to get complicated, Gryph, you up to this?”

At first, Drish didn’t know who the captain
was speaking to. The pilot’s seat looked empty, but then it twisted
around, and a small child took shape, nodding back, before he
flipped one switch after another in preparation for takeoff.

“That
child’s
our pilot,” blurted
Drish, indignant. This pirate captain had the worst crew
imaginable; what with Hierarch teenagers, indifferent henchman, and
now this child-pilot.

“Ay ent no chuld,” the pilot babbled back,
incomprehensible. That’s when Drish spied the thick,
salt-and-pepper mustache hiding the man’s upper lip. The
small-statured Candaran was glaring back at the noble, fiercely,
through a thick set of goggle-lenses, looking to be at least an
inch thick.

Realizing his mistake, Drish began a hasty
apology, when Fen plopped himself down in the seat in front of him
and kicked back to relax. The seat almost folded into the noble’s
lap.

“Cozy,” Drish grumbled into the top of the
Hierarch’s scarred scalp.

“Immensely,” responded the youth, just as
the skiff’s system’s started whining to life. Next came the crackle
of electricity, then the squawk of hydraulics, and somewhere in the
rear, the steam engine began to chug up to speed, so that when the
first imperial patrol came roaring overhead, the cloudskiff was
just beginning to pull away from its secret dock in Thresher’s
Valley.

Drish straightened in his seat at the sight
of the bi-fighter banking back around for another pass. “I think
they’re lining up for an attack run, Bazzon, we’ve got to
surrender. There’s no way we can escape.”

“Bi-fighters can only track visually,”
stated Bar with an unwavering confidence, and he tilted his head to
look up into the cloud cover, “so this soup will work to our
advantage—”

“Got what looks like imperial hunter-killers
pinging off the resonance stone too here, Cap,” interrupted Fen,
and next to him, Drish spied the obsidian crystal and its tracking
pings and waves of blue light. The youth was right. “Got them
moving on an intercept course from Port Armageddon.”