Chapter Two Hundred and Thirty-Nine - They're Going the Distance!

The Beaver was, in my humble and ill-informed opinion, the best ship.

We were making good time sailing across the Lonely Island. Clive set the engine to a speed that wasn’t so fast we'd need to worry about overheating in the long run, but was still much faster than usual. It strained the ship a little, but I knew the Beaver could handle it just fine.

That was, if the ships behind us didn’t catch up.

I stood on the aft castle at the rear, eyes straining to make out the tiny pinpricks way out in the distance. Towerhidden had to have good eyes. Or maybe... well, they were a giant eye-less crystal, so whatever they used for seeing had to be good. I couldn’t see anything but three faint pinpricks.

“Ah, Broccoli?” Awen asked as she climbed up the steps to join me.

I half-turned and grinned at her. “Hey! I’m trying to see the baddies before they get to us. Not that they’re necessarily baddies. I guess just... hmm, misunderstood? At a cultural crossroads with our own way of thinking and our current goals?”

Awen giggled. “I think it’s okay to call them baddies.”

“I don’t know. You start calling people baddies, and the next thing you know, whatever they do you see in a bad light. It’s a great way to listen less.”

“Well, maybe if you could see them better, that wouldn’t be a problem,” Awen said. She eyed the deck for a moment, then pulled her hands out from behind the small of her back. “Here.”

She was holding up a tube. A cylinder of what looked like worked brass, with some sort of guiding rod on one side with little screws next to it, the sort that ended in knobs. It was about the size of a soda can, but looked like it could expand.

“Is that a telescope?” I asked.

Awen nodded. “It’s a spyglass. It’s not perfect; the focus is a bit hard to handle, and the adjustments are a bit fiddly, but, well... I hope you like it?”

She pushed it towards me, so I grabbed it, then I grabbed Awen and gave her the best thank-you hug I could manage. “This is so cool!” I cheered. “Thank you!”

Awen laughed. “You’re welcome!”

I pulled back and immediately brought the spyglass up--calling it a spyglass was also way cooler--and I tried to sight it on the ships in the distance. I had to extend it, of course, which made a satisfying clunk sound. Awen was right; the spyglass was a bit fiddly, but I figured it out and was able to make out the three ships following us in much greater detail.

All three of them were much bigger than the Beaver. Or at least, they were wider. They had a long, flattened balloon, likely to keep it a little bit more aerodynamic, and their entire foresection was thin and wide. There couldn’t be any space for rooms beneath.

Maybe that made sense, if cry didn’t need sleeping quarters and food and such. Rooms to handle that stuff would all be wasted space, so their airships just didn’t have anything like that.

Instead, they had what looked like large ballistae on their front deck.

“That looks like trouble,” I said.

“May I?” Awen asked.

I passed her the spyglass, and she looked through it, then adjusted it a tiny bit. “Oh, those look dangerous.”

“And the cry onboard can probably do the laser thing,” I said.

Awen passed the spyglass back, and I glanced through it again. Either she’d adjusted it better, or the cry ships were a whole lot closer. The image was much clearer, which didn’t inspire much confidence.

“I don’t want to have to fight them,” I said.

“I don’t think it’ll come to that,” Awen said. “At least, I hope not. I only have a dozen good bolts left, and a bunch of plain ones. Those ships look more dangerous than what we can take on. Maybe if there was only one?”

“I can’t think of a way to split them up,” I admitted. And even just one would probably be enough to cause all sorts of trouble.

“You’ll figure something out,” Awen said.

“Yeah,” I replied. I hoped that she was right.

Turning, I collapsed the spyglass, then looked for a place to stow it. My bandoleer had one pouch that was just big enough, so I emptied the emergency tea I had in it and tucked the telescope away for the moment.

“Clive!” I called as I walked closer to the harpy pilot. “Is there anything we can do to move faster?”

“Unless we do some downright dangerous things to our engine, I don’t think so,” Clive said. “Are they catching up?”

“They are,” I said. “And they look like they’re way better armed than we are. I think we could take one of them on, but not all three.”

“Aye, I understand, captain,” Clive said. “I don’t know how reasonable they are.”

“What do you mean?”

Clive rubbed a talon under his chin. “Pirates often want the booty aboard a ship more than they want the crew dead. It’s bad form to steal, but far worse form to kill for things. A captain ought to know when to surrender their cargo to keep the crew safe and hale, but I don’t think they’re after any cargo.”

I chewed on my lower lip. They were after Moonie.

Surrendering the cry wasn’t an option, of course. That would be just so mean. At the same time, we couldn’t fight back well enough to scare them off.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said.

Clive reached down and pushed the throttle up just a pinch. The engine roared just a tiny bit louder. “We’ll get you a bit more time,” he said.

I nodded. “Thanks, Clive. Awen! Can you check on the engine, make sure it’s still running fine?”

“Aye, aye, Broccoli!” Awen said before running off.

“There’s a town ahead!” Joe called from the front of the ship.

I ran over, leaning against one of the Beaver’s figureheads to see out ahead. Joe was right; there was a town. Nothing too big. Maybe something between Insmouth and Needleford in size. Not a town, but not quite a city yet. No port that I could see, and a lot of trees all around it.

I tugged out my spyglass again, and squeezed an eye shut to take in the town in more detail.

The houses looked like they’d all been built by one of two people. Some were squat stone buildings, others were much taller and made of wood. They at least shared the same roofing material. It made sense, if both cervid and sylphs had joined up here, then they’d both build homes in the way that they were most comfortable with.

Then I noticed the towers in the centre of the town. Some five of them, with familiar bright blue dots around them that could only be more cry.

“Right, I need Moonie,” I said.

I had something of a plan, and not very much time to implement it.

Awen, Amaryllis and Bastion soon joined me, along with a pile of tarp. When I was done explaining my idea, the three of them looked skeptical, but not altogether doubtful. I figured that meant that we had a good chance of succeeding.

“It’s stupid,” Amaryllis said. “But it’s the kind of stupid that might work.”

“I’ll do my best,” Awen said. “But there’s really not much time.”

I nodded, understanding. “Your best is all I can ask for, Awen, and as for the other part, that’s only if Moonie agrees,” I said.

Which meant explaining things to the cry in question. I left my friends above, where Amaryllis recruited the Scallywags to help her with her bit of the plan, then ran down to the deck below. Moonie was hovering in the dining room, a book floating before them.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hello, captain,” they replied.

“So, we have a plan. It’s not a very good one, but it’s better than nothing. How good are you at hovering?”

“I am capable enough,” Moonie said. “Though it depends on the circumstances.”

“And if the circumstances are jumping off the side of the Beaver to land in the middle of a town?”

“We... might not be that capable. We can slow down a fall, certainly, but we need something to push off of, and to orient ourselves. A more whole shard would be able to hold in place, though at the cost of great mana. As is, we can hover here by anchoring ourselves to the room. It takes less mana than we naturally regenerate.”

“Okay,” I said. “Next question, do you know what a parachute is?”

“No?”

“Well then! I think you’re about to find out!”

We returned to the top deck to find Awen sitting on the ground with a bunch of tools laid out around her. She had a few tubes out already, and more items that looked like a jumble of rods held together with wire and a few screws.

“Ah, Moonie, I need your help,” Awen said as she bounced to her feet. “Can you fire a laser out? What’s the range of your laser attacks?”

“The range is limited based on the amount of mana used,” Moonie said. “The more I use, the further it goes, but even then, the beam will dissipate after some distance.”

“Lightning magic does the same,” Amaryllis said. “It’s only partially natural, and the attack will either ground itself, or just fizzle out once it’s outside of the caster’s range of control.”

Awen nodded. “Can you fire a normal attack? Just out in the air.”

Moonie bobbed up and down, then I felt a faint stirring in the air, and a reddish beam lanced out. It travelled a good fifty or so metres before it sort of faded away, losing its colour and becoming a blur in the air that went on for a little ways longer.

“So that’s why they’re not shooting at us now,” I said.

“Long-range magic is complicated,” Amaryllis said. “And mana-intensive. Spells that are held together without contact with the caster can travel much farther. A fireball will outrange a beam-like attack nine times out of ten.”

“Huh,” I said. I wondered what that meant for ship-to-ship combat and the like. Fireballs weren’t that fast, after all. Maybe that was why ballistae were preferred over hiring a good mage.

“Can you try with this?” Awen asked as she raised her tinkered-up device to Moonie. It was basically three glass discs held in place with three metal rods that had holes cut into them and screws fitted through those. “This is Broccoli’s idea, but I think it might work.”

Moonie’s magic grabbed onto the focus and spun it around. “What do I do with this?” they asked.

“Shoot the laser through it,” I said.

The cry aimed the device out towards the empty sky and fired.

The beam scattered, travelling all of a metre as a wide unfocused burst.

“Ah, let me see that,” Awen said. She tugged out one of the bits of glass with a few twists of a screw, then frowned a moment before a new disc formed over her palm and she tucked it in. “Try with this.”

Moonie fired again, and this time the beam was a lot tighter, though it did fire off at an angle. Still, I guesstimated that it had travelled quite a bit farther. “I think it’s working,” I said.

“I’ll calibrate it some more,” Awen said. “We don’t have a lot of time to figure out what’s optimal though, and I have to make a bunch of these.”

I patted her on the back. “Do what you can,” I said before jumping over to where Amaryllis was trying to direct the Scallywags. The parachute they were making looked... somewhat functional. A bunch of cords connected to a round-cut sailcloth with a little hole in its middle. The cords converged on a rope harness that Oda was stringing together with surprising ease.

“This thing looks like a mess,” Amaryllis said. “I understand the principle of it, but still.”

“Moonie can mostly slow themselves down, I think,” I said. “This just needs to slow them down a little more than that. It’s aiming them towards the centre of town that’ll be tricky.”

“This plan is stupid; I have said that, right?”

“You did,” I replied, “but maybe it’ll work!”

“Hmph,” she said. “We’ll see.”

***