The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Thirty-Seven

Her coughing fit finally passed, but it left her watery eyed and cursed with an angry ache in her chest that caused her to grind her teeth against a fresh onset of pain.

The vessel around her violently shuddered, the fractured hull and superstructure emitting high-pitched keening wails in protest to the abrupt change in axial pitch against its former position, and then took a sudden lurch to starboard as it dipped a full quarter kilometer below its original altitude. Everyone aboard went into momentary free-fall as the ship struggled to stay aloft, the normal low-pitched rumble of the Wavehammer engines briefly turning into a keening screech before regaining equilibrium.

She fought to catch her breath and to retain her already shaky balance as she skulked around a bend in the ship's central traffic corridor on the third level. Ruefully she acknowledged that the crazy-quilt trans-horizontal skid the vessel was taking through the sky did at least manage to suck out the dark blanket of ash and smoke from assorted minor electrical fires and the metallic slag of inner plating along the longitudinal frame. Frictional heat scorching and swiftly dissolving metal degraded the ship's devolving structural integrity. Things were rapidly falling apart and there was precious little she could do about it.

And then, too, there was the problem caused by that damned inconvenient, grapefruit-sized wound in her left side...

Rae'vynn Wyyng reluctantly admitted to herself that it was looking more and more unlikely that anyone aboard the Aerieakon would survive Zhe'Kae-Chah's devastating assault.

She'd lost six more members of her crew as they'd valiantly fought to contain The Dragon's rampage, but the reptilian warrior-king's berserker fury was not something that could be contained through any application of conventional weaponry, no matter how ruthless, possessed by her crew. He was a juggernaut of destruction, wantonly tearing through plate bulkheads and heat-tempered flooring, pulverizing dense framework support columns, slicing through bunches of insulated cabling as thick around as an adult man's torso with razor-keen talons..., and all the while ignoring pulse-rifle fire and shrugging off as superficial what normally would have been mortal wounds from laser-ray projection guns. The Dragon's supercharged regenerative healing factor was horrifically effective. It made him damn near invulnerable.

She was out of options. She could no longer concentrate and focus enough to explore any immediately accessible, if exotic, means by which to turn the tide of the slaughter. And she wasn't any longer able to contact the bridge crew, so she had no up-to-date situational intel through which she could devise an action strategy. There was only one viable option left open to her and she was loathe to use it because she was completely unsure it would have any effect other than to bring the situation aboard the Aerieakon to a conclusion, neglecting having any impact on the terrorist-insurrectionist war playing out on the city streets below. That option was to blow the ship, to self-destruct. However, as unfathomable as it may seem on surface consideration, there was no guarantee that destroying the ship would be enough to ultimately kill Zhe'Kae-Chah. Cripple him, yes, almost certainly, but kill him? Based on what she'd seen and experienced this day, Rae'vynn seriously had her doubts.

But, even though the Aerieakon was a relatively immense planet-based skycraft, measuring just under the length of two football fields on planet Earth, and forty eight meters wide and six stories high, it wasn't a battleship-class or a destroyer-class vessel. It was little more than an armored steel splinter when compared to The Dragon's fortress home base, the gravity-defying, fourteen and a half kilometer-wide, spherical micro-moon suspended some one hundred and thirty-eight kilometers over the storm-tossed harbor waters between Peravendath and Ometh Nastreq. Over the recent last few orbital solar heliars, the surface of The Ke'Tareveel had been completely weaponized by Zhe'Kae-Chah's techno-military engineers. Intelligent-targeting Super-Titan plasma cannons and graviton-bolt artillery projectors dotted the slow-spinning micro-moon's surface while mobile long-distance, molecular-attraction Swarm-class phase-missile launchers roved from one strategic position to another under computerized remote command-positioning. The Saurotetramorph nation had prepped for the eventuality of a ruthless war of aggression for quite some time. And during that time, the territories of the Pang Xa'Omathra region and the armories of the Naval Command of the Pnahrryian Sea Fleet had been busily decommissioning the weaponry of their industrial war machine in order to shrink and redirect those finances to upkeep and upgrade of their complex metropolitan infrastructure. If a war had been foreseen at all, it had been a war between Peravendath and Ometh Nastreq, not a species-racial war between human mammals and humanoid reptile-folk. The Dragon had known that and had capitalized on the complacency of the humans who had unofficially and subconsciously, but nonetheless effectively, exiled his people to the confines of an isolated and segregated megatropolis on an arid rock spinning in the sky.