The concept behind the Shrieker was not new.
How could it be? Mages in maneuver suits already made use of bursts of aether as a means of propulsion. It was aether they produced themselves rather than from a core, but the concept stood. If anything, the notion of simply firing aether out the back of a shard as a means of propulsion was actually a more intuitive leap than the propellers and ballasts had been.
No, the idea of an aether-propelled shard was not new. It was proposed at the inception of the shard a number of times since.
And each time the concept ran into the same issue; that a shard-core couldn’t produce enough power to generate sufficient thrust to make the idea practical.
Of the the solution to that issue was of course, obvious.
‘Install a bigger core.’
And that was just as obviously impractical.
No family, no matter how wealthy, would be willing to risk losing an entire airship core by putting it into a frame as flimsy as a shard. And even if they were willing to take the risk, no shard would ever be potent enough to justify not simply building another airship instead.
At least until now, Karla thought as her own far more conventional Shard lifted off from the Indomitable. All because somehow, airship hulls have become more valuable than airship cores.
A state of affairs that would be entirely temporary. Whatever windfall the Queen had gathered by raiding Kraken nests for gathered mithril, those nests were still ultimately finite. The war might delay it some, but eventually the supply of airship hulls would catch up with – and ultimately surpass – the supply of mithril.
The current imbalance would be over in a blink as far as history was concerned.
But while most people – herself included if she were honest – were still caught up in the old and future paradigm of mithril scarcity, William hadn’t hesitated for a moment to take advantage of this new state of affairs.
To justify building the most insanely wasteful shard the planet’s ever seen, she thought as she watched her law-son shoot straight up towards the clouds in a maneuver that would have seen her own craft stalled out almost immediately.
He’d wanted to use two airship cores! Two!
Fortunately, the twins had somehow managed to talk him down to just the one.
Because even with just one airship core powering the thing, Karla had no idea how any conventional shard could deal with it short of taking a head on approach or using another shard as bait.
Ignoring its speed, its climbing ability was an issue unto itself.
Oh, she could inflate her ballasts and achieve the same heights the Shrieker could. She could even use the same approach angle. Just pitch her nose up and let the aether-ballasts do the rest.
She wouldn’t though - because it’d be practically suicide in a contested airspace. Speed was life in a shard fight and unlike the Shrieker, her own shard would be reduced to little more than a balloon on the wind as it floated upward. An easy target for any pilot worthy of the name.
…Still, she thought. It’s not exactly subtle is it?
At nearly thirty five kilometers away, the shard had been little more than a spec in the distance to her when it and she took off – just as the distant Apple River and Plumgarden shards currently were – but she could pick it out easily now by the long blue-green trail it left in its wake.
Perhaps if we had blue skies it might be camouflaged a bit, but it’s overcast, she thought.
And if the Plumgarden and Apple River pilots had half a brain, they’d have already figured out something was afoot just from that clue.
…If they had more than that, they might have even worked out how the Shrieker was moving.
Again, the aether trail was not subtle and the notion of an aether-rocket craft was not new either.
Unfortunately for them, there’s still fuck all they can do about it even if they have figured that out, she thought.
Because at his current altitude William was essentially untouchable. Unless either of the other two opposing shards were willing to pitch straight up for him and turn themselves into sitting ducks like she’d mentally warned herself against, they’d need to wait for him to come for them.
Unfortunately for me, there’s still one person they can come after, she thought as she watched the two distant dots turn almost as one.
They were coming for her.
“So this is it,” she murmured.
She’d thought she was ready – yet the hammering of her heart revealed that to be a lie.
She was terrified.
But she didn’t change course.
“Karla, it seems we were right. Both Apple River and Plumgarden are working together and they’re coming for you,” Janet’s voice crackled in her ear courtesy of the new ‘radio’ William had installed into her shard.
Somehow. How he found the time while building an entirely new shard, she wasn’t sure, but he’d done it. Which was doubly impressive given that while aether-propelled shards had definitely been conceived of before, none had ever gotten past the theoretical stage once the thrust issue became obvious.
Yet somehow, a total lack of blueprints or plans to work off hadn’t slowed William down at all. He’d just… drawn some up in an afternoon. Invented an entirely new airframe like it was nothing.
As if he was reading off blue-prints in his head, she thought with a frown.
She shook her head. She didn’t want to dwell on what that meant. On what she privately suspected.
That William was harrowed.
Though she’d never breathe a word of that theory aloud. Nor would any member of the family – of those others that suspected. And she knew there were others, even if they never spoke of it.
The boy had invented too much too quickly. There was genius and there was… what he was doing. The only reason the rumours swirling around him hadn’t translated into action was that the Queen would never allow it.
Not while she needed him.
Again, it helped that he seemed normal. Normal enough that sometimes Karla doubted her own suspicions.
…It made sense though. Too much sense.
For years now William had been the most awful combination of helpful, kind, reckless and disobedient. To a frankly… insane degree. And looking back, she now wondered if the start of his erratic behaviour was a result of some kind of harrowing.
He changed after we told him of the betrothal, she thought as she idly adjusted her heading.
Prior to that he’d been quite well behaved. Almost unnaturally so. Then he seemed to change almost overnight. At the time they’d put the change down to simple youthful rebelliousness. Now though. Karla wondered if maybe William had done something… foolish after it was made clear he wasn’t getting out of his betrothal.
He’d hardly the first boy to react poorly to an unwanted engagement, she thought. Nor would he be the first to seek aid from an unfortunate quarter.
Glancing at the two oncoming shards, still little more than dots, she sighed.
“I guess I won’t be finding out one way or another,” she muttered. “Still if it is the case that my law-son did harrow himself and I just never noticed, then it’s just one more sin I’m paying for now.”
The radio crackled again – though not in response to her words as she’d not pushed the button to ‘transmit’. Which she thought was way better than communication orbs, which were always on when they connected to each other.
“Karla? Is this thing working?” Janet asked, sounding panicked. “Both Plumgarden and Apple River are heading towards you. Can you hear me?”
“I hear you. I just didn’t see much point responding given you’re not telling me anything that isn’t blatantly obvious,” she said, finally hitting the button,
Under different circumstances, she knew those words would have garnered her a tongue lashing – and not the fun kind.
“Right,” Janet responded without a comment on her own words – which was in some ways worse. “Well, we estimate you’ve got about six minutes until they enter engagement range. Maybe a little more if they move to link up more closely.”
Which they definitely would.
“Got it,” she responded, before taking her thumb off the button. “Six minutes to live, huh? Why does that seem like way too long and not nearly long enough at the same time?”
The pilot ignored trepidation building in her chest as she-
A muffled thump rang out through her shard, sending vibrations through the frame and her. Suddenly, the throttle in her hand went slack.
“Fuck!” she hissed, desperately pulling the now slack stick back and forth as she glanced out searching for any kind of threat.
The skies remained clear though.
“Karla!? Are you ok!?” Janet’s voice squawked through the radio. “There’s aether spilling from your craft.”
“I’ve lost throttle control,” the pilot hissed. “I’ve got no pressure. Throttle’s entirely gone. Where’s the aether spilling from?”
“The bottom of your craft – though we can’t see any holes from here.”
What? How?
She pitched slightly to the left as she tested the controls. “Flaps are fine. Controls are fine. I can still sense the core, so it’s still producing aether. I think the main aether-pipe is leaking though.”
Her props had already died. The ballasts were already emptying.
“Did you see what hit you?” Janet asked.
“No! One minute I’m fine, the next… this,” she grunted. “It’s possible Plumgarden or Apple River have some kind of new long range weapon.”
Just because Indomitable couldn’t see a hole didn’t mean there wasn’t one. Something punched a hole through her pressure system!
“You need to warn William!” she continued.
“We already did,” Janet told her. “He said he’d… take it under advisement.”
“What!? No! Tell that brat to take this seriously. Super-Shard or not, he’s not immune to being punched full of holes!”
She was still searching for what might have done this – and a few moments later, Janet responded.
“I did. He said he will. He’s also advising you to bail out.”
“Bail out?” Janet coughed as aether had now started leaking into the cabin. “What about the plan?”
“He said he’d be fine,” Janet repeated, her voice decidedly dead. “And if you truly have lost power, I don’t see that you have any other option.”
And that was the truth of things.
Still, Karla scowled and cursed as she wrestled with the throttle, trying to get pressure back in her props or her ballasts. Nothing happened though – beyond more aether filling the cockpit.
“Do you have an earth or a metal charge you could use to fix your craft?” Janet asked.
“No!” Karla responded.
Most pilots knew a little mage-crafting for situations just like this, but she’d not prepared any charges of it. Mostly because she hadn't expected to live long enough to need to make repairs.
She’d brought all lightning charges instead.
“Karla?”
The pilot slammed the dashboard, before pushing the button.
“I’m bailing out. William’s on his own.”
And hopefully his super-shard would be able to defeat whatever she’d just been hit with.
------------
“Am I crazy or is the Ashfield shard going down!?” Pellin heard over the orb in her cockpit.
And wasn’t that a kicker. Her Gryphon didn’t normally have an orb in it, but the big lady had insisted on it for this fight.
So she could work with her temporary ally and hopefully have a contemporary to the Whitemorrow and Ashfield ‘radios’.
Whatever the fuck those were…
The sailors they’d managed to bribe or threaten into talking over the past week hadn’t known much. Just that the radios existed on their ships and that they functioned like communication orbs.
And that the Corsairs on the Jellyfish had them too.
And if the ‘peasants-at-arms’ had them, there was no way that new shard of Redwater’s didn’t.
A fucking super-shard, she thought. Of all the fae-shit he could have pulled out of his ass.
And that was definitely what he was using. There was no way a regular shard could pull that kind of ascent angle at those speeds.
Pulling her gaze from the now fading aether-stream that had shot up into the clouds, she turned to see that sure enough, the Ashfield shard was leaking aether. Even as she watched, it started to spin as the pilot ejected.
And just like that, they were one opponent down.
“How the fuck did that happen?” Her Apple River opposite number continued.
“A maintenance fault maybe?” Pellin said. “Maybe the Redwater boy did something we couldn’t see.”
“And took out his own ally?”
She shrugged. “Maybe they weren’t actually allies. I heard he got passed over for heir in favor of his sister. Maybe this is his revenge?”
Of course, that still begged the question of how he’d hit the other shard. It was fast, but it shouldn’t have been within gun range of its ally already. Not after going straight up.
Her fingers tightened around her flight stick as she continued watching the skies, licking her suddenly dry lips.
“Huh, can’t say I’d be surprised if that’s the case. Fae fear a lad who’s been scorned.”
“Aye,” Pellin said. “Though don’t think to follow his example. Neither of us are in a fucking super-shard. And I’d rather deal with that before we finish each other.”
“Don’t worry about me. When I come for you, you’ll know it,” the other pilot said. “And what the fuck’s a super-shard?”
“It’s a shard with an airship-core,” she said, suddenly reminded that not everyone was as well read as her.
“Bullshit. That’d be against the rules.”
Pellin nodded. “It would be.”
What made something an airship or a shard wasn’t defined by its hull size after all, but by its core size.
“Unfortunately,” she continued. “I’m not about to risk losing by calling an end to the match now on the assumption he’s cheating. For all we know, that’s what he wants. To trick us so he can win on some kind of fae-shit technicality.” She shook her head. “We can let our liege ladies argue about the technicalities later. For the moment, we’ve got to figure out a way to deal with it.”
A difficult feat that had just been made harder and easier. Easier in that one of their opponents had just bailed out. Harder in that the second might have been what caused the first to do so, and they had no idea how.
“I can get behind that,” the other pilot said. “Like fuck I’m backing down from a green-ass boy. Even if he is in a fancy toy.”
Pellin didn’t disagree. Lady Plumgarden had chosen her as their champion for a reason – and Pellin didn’t intend to disappoint.
“Now where is that-”
Pellin’s head snapped left just in time to see the bright sparks dancing along the fuselage of the Apple River craft - rounds punching through metal and glass like tissue paper.
She got to hear them too – though she wished she didn’t.
As soon as the thuds stopped, she heard other pilot’s voice cut across the orb-link in a wet, choking gurgle - half scream, half rattle. Her shard rolled drunkenly, trailing aether, before tumbling away toward the distant ground.
Though Pellin didn’t stop to watch that bit.
She was already moving.
“Fuck!” Instead, she wrenched the stick hard.
Even as she moved to dodge, she realized what had happened.
She’d thought the super-shard had been showing off when it shot upwards. Some brat boy playing with a new toy he didn’t really know how to use – and giving away a weakness of his craft in the process.
Oh, she’d definitely noticed that long aether-trail it left, and she’d been looking for it ever since to better pinpoint where the craft was now.
Which was what the Super-Shard had been counting on. The damn thing must have cut the engines once it reached altitude, silently gliding through the clouds to get over and behind them.
Right into their blindspots.
Now though, with the element of surprise spent, its aether-rockets hummed to life with a piercing shriek that sent a shiver up her spine.
Even as she threw her Gryphon into a desperate roll, she craned her neck to watch the ugly little craft rocket forward on a pillar of blue smoke, bolt-repeaters making the strangest crackling sound as they sent bolts streaming at her.
Bolts which stitched past her canopy close enough to make the glass sing as the super-shard shot by in a blur of grey metal, so fast she barely registered the shape before it was gone.
She didn’t hesitate though. Pulling on her flight-stick, she brought the nose around to snap off a quick burst at the things stubby little tail.
None of them hit. She’d misjudged the distance because the damn thing was so much faster than she was used to. She hadn’t lead it enough.
I’ll not make that mistake again, she promised.
Though even as she did, she wondered if she’d get the chance.
“Come on. Come on. Turn and fight me. You got my buddy. You’re in a super-shard. You can take me too,” she muttered.
Yet rather than submit to her fervent wish for a dog-fight, where she might have been able to make use of her craft’s clearly superior agility, the thing just kept going – before pulling off another near vertical maneuver.
“That’s bullshit,” Pellin growled as she watched the thing claw its way up into the sky with almost casual ease.
The damn thing almost seemed to be taunting her as it started to circle – wide fat things – just out of reach of her.
It was tempting to pitch her nose up and fire off a few shots. He wasn’t entirely out of weapons range.
Of course, she knew that was what he wanted. The second she did that, it’d down around her nose, before swooping down for an easy kill the moment she ran out of energy and stalled out.
“A smart brat, huh,” she murmured. “I suppose I should have seen that coming.”
She’d thought the Redwater boy’s reputation to be mostly propaganda. An attempt by the Queen to drum up some kind of morale boost after her flight from her capital by championing an attractive young man.
Now though?
Well it was clear that brat or not, the kid knew how to fly.
Of course, he was cheating outrageously with that bullshit super-shard, but she knew she’d have done the same if she’d thought of it. And had the means. Which as a lowly mage-knight the dwarven woman most certainly did not.
“I’d also need to figure out how you plan to get away with this without being disqualified for cheating,” she muttered.
Again, that assumed he had a plan – rather than just the expectation that the queen would cover for him.
…Which she might, but she’d need to expend a lot of political capital to do so. War or not, the South would make her pay through the nose for that kind of interference in a succession.
“Of course, if that does happen, it won’t do me much good, because I’ll still be dead.”
Which meant she had to figure out a way to beat this beast.
To that end, two options flashed through her mind.
One was to wait for the next pass, roll out of the way at the last second, and try to tag it in the razor-thin window before it rocketed out of range again. Ideally it’d get close enough for her to launch a spell.
Basically, a repeat of what she’d just done, but this time she wouldn’t have an ally taking the hit for her.
The other option was to wait for him to come around again and commit to a head-on.
It didn’t take her long to decide.
She figured the head-on gave her fifty-fifty odds. Which were likely the best she was going to get. The gulf in their frames performance was just too wide.
Eying the other craft, she started to circle, practically tempting it.
“Come on,” she muttered, circling slowly, eyes locked on the clouds above. “Take the head-on, you little shit.”
The super-shard responded almost immediately, diving toward her like a stooping falcon. And for a heartbeat she thought he would oblige her wish as she started to bring her nose up.
But at the last possible moment the asshole turned away, staying high overhead.
The fucker had just baited her into burning more of her energy state. Pulling the nose up had slowed her.
For a moment, she considered circling again, before deciding she needed to get her speed up more.
“Dammit.” With a curse she leveled out, shoving the throttle forward to rebuild speed.
And of course, that was when he struck.
It was what she would have done.
She’d hoped he was stupider than that.
Instead, could only watch as the ugly shard dropped out the sky, guns already hammering towards her. Pellin tried to turn inside him, stick slammed hard over, but she knew it was pointless.
The boy had timed it perfectly.
“Kid’s got some killer instincts,” she muttered with a grim smile. “I’ll give him that.”
She braced for the impacts that would end her – just as they had her wingmate.
They never came.
Instead a savage line of bolts walked across her starboard wing. Rivets exploded. Spars sheared – and the entire wing tore away in a spray of shredded metal and fabric. Pellin could do little but curse, her neck was yanked to the side as Gryphon slipped into a violent spin, the world wheeling crazily outside the canopy.
Someone else might have panicked at that point.
Pellin just laughed.
She was out. She’d lost. But she’d survived.
…Assuming she could bail out before this thing hit the ground. And she’d have to do that manually given that trying for the ejector seat right now would be… ill-advised.
Ignoring the spots dancing in her vision, she promised to buy that kid a drink after all this was over.
You know, after punching him for pulling this bullshit.
Shame he’d be a duke-consort by that point. A position that would put him thoroughly out of her league.
Then again, there was a chance he’d get disqualified for cheating.
Which means there’s still a chance! she thought as she finally managed to yank open the canopy – and not a moment too soon.
She was pretty close to blacking out.