The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Forty-Three

"What are you doing? Are you waiting for me? Don't! I can make it! Just slow down enough for me to keep you in my sights!"

Moving like a cyborg gazelle, she was abruptly forced to leap over a geysering eruption of superheated titanium jetting from the ruin of the ship's central foredeck passageway. A blistering cloud of steam followed the spouting discharge upwards, dissolving a hole through the passage's ceiling as the wounded vessel pitched to port, beginning a gravity-defying roll despite the many firings of the directional mini-thrusters to correct equilibrium and keep the ship's axis horizontal. She landed lightly on the water-slickened floor, her acrobatic athleticism unaffected by her wounds, and continued her charge away from the transversal egress into the ship's smoke-filled engine room.

Following closely, but a lot less surefootedly, Vandessha'Jai lunged after Pnoom-Aig, taking extra care not to damage or to trigger the bulky, particle beam half-cannon he'd taken from the wreckage of the ship's armory. It was getting hard to see and even harder to breathe as the mangled vessel rode through the savage buffeting of the cyclonic storm outside.

Air from external to the vessel's hull whistled as it slid across the ruptured exoskeletal skin of the Aerieakon. The vessel shimmied and rocked, seized by irregular convulsive quakes as the various avionics systems for flight-control and collision avoidance fought to keep the vessel aloft and on-course. Silvery-white light vied with the sickly-yellow glow of haze-masked moonlight streaming through large open rips in the metal casing while the loud, repetitive bleats of structural alarm klaxons resounded throughout the airship's ruined interior.

If left to ride the sky under their own power, they weren't going to stay aloft for much longer.

They'd been running for a while, dodging in and out of darkened corridors, down and across flaming mezzanines, and scrambling up and down partially collapsed stairwells. The internal lift tubes were all down, so moving from one level to another inside the mighty craft had become akin to running a gauntlet. Pnoom-Aig and Vandessha-Jai were tracking Captain Wyyng's location through intership bio-locator telemetry, although the signals passing through the interior structure were weak and spotty due to the extensive damage to the ship's network infrastructure.

"We're almost there, Chief Mate Jai! Two decks down, easterly, and about sixty nautical meters lateral... be ready for anything! Remember to watch your periphery!"

Vandessha'Jai drew in a deep draught of air as he ran and shouted his response past wheezing gasps. "Yes, well, maybe you should remember that I'm a human being and can't run as fast as you! You keep moving at that speed and you'll wind up separating us! If we get separated, we're both dead!"

While Emaris Staurqe and Zhe-Kai Chah had battled throughout the ship, recklessly bursting through its structural barriers and interior bulkheads, Pnoom-Aig had stepped back from the fray to analyze and strategize. Defensive reaction through brute force and physical savagery weren't going to win the day. No ship was designed to stand up to the superhuman strength of a massive, mutant anthropoid saurian like The Dragon. And certainly, the craft was likely to experience all manner of structural failures caught in the titanic pounding it would undergo while caught in the grips of a towering, tornadic waterspout for an extended period of time. No, in order to save the Aerieakon and what remained of its small crew, Pnoom-Aig's superior artificial intellect apportioned and dissected the chaotic, battle-torn environment around her into its separate component parts and rationalized predictive alternatives to the inevitably catastrophic crash-event in their immediate future. And she came to the realization that she could secure and defend the remaining, actively operational parts of the ship from further damage by isolating, limiting and containing the battlezone to one area.