Chapter Two Hundred and Forty - Cry Havoc, And Let Slip the Lasers of War

The Beaver swooped down towards the town, like a whale plunging down to nibble at some plankton.

“All sails!” Clive called out, and--across both decks--a bunch of us tugged back on ropes at the same time. All around the Beaver, the ship’s sails unfurled fully, snapping in the wind, and slowing the Beaver down enough that I suddenly felt a lot heavier, as if I was on an elevator shooting up.

“Moonie! This is it,” I shouted. We were only a couple of hundred metres above the town, the pretty cry towers in the centre looming closer. I squinted, and could make out the bobbing blue forms of at least a dozen cry.

“Take care, everyone,” Moonie said as they hovered by the edge of the deck. They had our makeshift parachute held in a telekinetic grip, and around them was a satchel filled with the tubes Awen had jury-rigged. “You were enjoyable companions, and fair friends. Thank you.”

I grinned. “Thank you too! It was a pleasure having you aboard the Beaver Cleaver.”

Moonie bobbed up and down one final time, then they slid off the side of the ship while we cheered them on.

“I hope they remember your half-baked plan,” Amaryllis said.

“It’s an excellent plan,” I countered before half-turning to Clive. “Let’s get some altitude!”

“Aye-aye,” Clive said. He pulled a lever back and, as planned, let the engine slow down, so that we were flying mostly on momentum and what speed we could get from the engine idling. The wind, at least, was in our favour.

Seeing as how there wasn’t much to do but wait, I hung off the side of the Beaver and looked down.

The parachute was working. I could make out the big, rounded-ish tarp floating down a ways behind us. Moonie must have been using their hovering ability to aim it, because it seemed to be heading towards the five towers in the centre of town. Some of the cry hovering around there were grouping up, maybe curious about their new airdropped friend.

“It’ll be fine,” Bastion said.

“You think?” I asked.

“The cry after us must have seen Moonie dropping; they’ll want to slow down if their goal is to recapture them. We’re no longer their target.”

“But Moonie is, and we basically just threw them overboard,” I said.

“We threw them into the hands of allies more capable of protecting them,” Bastion said. He patted me on the shoulder. “You’re a good person, Broccoli, and a surprisingly competent captain and leader, but you still lack a bit of experience. It can be hard for an officer to learn that sometimes things are beyond your control.”

“I know that,” I said, and if I was pouting a bit as I said it, Bastion didn’t comment. “It just feels wrong.”

Amaryllis moved over, looking fairly smug, or at least more smug than usual. “Moonie’s landed,” she said. “I think she’s handing out Awen’s little telescope devices.”

“Really?” I asked. A glance over the edge revealed that Amaryllis was right, at least as far as I could tell. We’d moved past the edge of the town already, and it was hard to make out details from so far away. “Great! Clive, circle us around!”

Clive nodded, and with a spin of the helm, set the Beaver to making a big, wide turn. We’d be drawing huge circles in the sky by the edge of the town soon enough.

“We could just keep going,” Amaryllis said. “In fact, that’s very much what we should be doing.”

“I... maybe, but I want to see how things play themselves out.”

Amaryllis shook her head, but she didn’t protest any more than that.

I watched, biting my lower lip, as the distant cry airships became not-so-distant. On the ground, the cry were starting to hover back up around their towers, and I saw parts of those towers being moved aside to reveal the crystalline blue of large cry within. More cry like Towerhidden then.

The three cry ships split apart, two of them veering off towards our right, the third the left.

A bell started to toll in the town below, and I felt a pit in my tummy as I saw people running around in a panic. We had scared so many of them. Or, well, we had brought the things scaring them with us. Same difference, I figured.

One of the airships fired ahead, a thick red beam that zipped down towards the base of the towers only to be met by a shield wall.

And then the cry on the ground fired back.

It was easy to tell who had Awen’s new toys. Those beams were tighter and faster while the more normal ones tended to dissipate in mid-air.

I gasped as a few beams raked across the underside of one airship, leaving blackened lines behind on the wood.

The airships started to circle around the town, beams lancing out towards the towers and being met with hastily thrown shields.

And then the towers opened fire.

The magical lasers they shot out were nothing like the little beams from the small cry. They were as thick around as I was tall, ears and all, and when they shot past, it was with a roar that made the air vibrate.

Shields sprung up around the cry airships, gigantic crystalline snowflakes that instantly went from a pure, bright blue to a darkening purple as the beams impacted them. They reddened more and more, and even from afar I could see the clouds of superheated air wavering off of the shields.

Then one of them broke, and the airship in the lead juked violently to the side as a laser rammed into its prow.

The five beams from the five towers stopped, the air stilling once more with a quiet that was somehow louder than the attack itself had been.

The foremost cry airship had a hole in its prow that cut a tunnel all the way out to its opposite side, the edged blackened and smoking. It was still able to fly though, and as it demonstrated a moment later, it was able to fire back.

“This is awful,” I said.

“Yeah,” Amaryllis agreed simply.

Another volley of lasers were exchanged, with a few burns left in the stone walls of the towers below, but it was the airships that suffered the most. The burns across their hulls caught fire in a few spots, and the lead ship’s engine seemed to explode as something important was hit.

Rocket powered airships required rocket fuel to work. It seemed like a terrible idea, all of a sudden.

Fortunately, the ship’s forward momentum carried it out past the edge of the town, where it plowed through the top of a hill before skidding to a flaming stop.

The other airships relit their engines and started to regain some speed, but not before the towers returned fire again. The leftmost ship wasn’t prepared for it, a thick beam slicing across its balloon before cutting into its deck and burning a line across the side of the ship from top to bottom.

The balloon, torn nearly entirely in half, spewed out gas into the sky even as it started to spin around.

I would have called it a victory, only the ship was veering towards the Beaver.

“Clive!” I screamed.

The old harpy took one glance at the ships, then spun the wheel around and slammed the gas lever up to full. The Beaver turned sharply away from the town and the falling cry ship, our boost of speed giving us plenty of space to spare even as the falling ship dropped below our current altitude.

And then a trip of beams shot up from the ship’s deck and punctured through-and-through our balloon.

“Oh no,” I said.

“Captain!” Clive called. “We’re losing altitude.”

I froze for a moment. We were going to crash? Like that ship?

I imagined my friends being thrown around, the Beaver being dashed apart on the ground, wood tearing and our home being ripped apart.

“Broccoli!” Amaryllis snapped.

I shook my head. “Full power to the grav engine! Clive, slow us down. Awen! See if you can’t get the engine to give us more time. Everyone, all sails out! Steve, check the balloon—can we patch those holes?”

I got a chorus of “aye ayes” and some “okay, Broccoli’s,” then I jumped to help my friends.

With all of his sails angled to act as parachutes, the Beaver was a fair bit slower in the air, and the gravity engine reduced our weight by a whole bunch, but that wasn’t enough to stay buoyant.

A glance off the side revealed the ground approaching. Not too quickly, but approaching all the same.

Steve waved at me from across the deck and shook his head. “Clive, we need to land. What are we looking for in a landing space?”

“Something flat,” the harpy pilot said.

I rushed to the side and started to look for just that, but the town was surrounded by hills and forests. There was some room between some patches of trees, but nothing that was even remotely flat.

I glanced back to the town, where the remaining cry airship was retreating with a plume of fire bursting out behind it. It wasn’t even returning fire, just focusing on keeping its shields up to weather the angry lasers coming from the ground. I even noticed other magic being flung up. Lightning bolts and fireballs and even the occasional arrow.

The town was flinging everything it had at the cry, and the cry were scampering off as quickly as they could manage it.

I wanted to cheer them on, but I had more important things to do, like... like noticing that the centre of town, where the five towers were, was mostly empty, with a large paved area in the centre of the five towers that could very easily fit a ship the size of the Beaver.

“Clive! Centre of town, near the towers. There’s a space in the middle. It’s all flat and paved. Can we land there?”

Clive craned his neck to see what I was talking about, then turned the helm a little bit, angling us more towards the centre of town.

We were still losing altitude when Clive reversed the engine and we came to a gentle stop in the middle of the towers. We soon dropped under the tops of the towers, all five of them rising around the Beaver on all sides, like the fingers of a stone giant’s hands.

“We’re dropping a bit faster than I’d like, Captain,” Clive said. “We need to lose some mass.”

“Weigh the anchors!” I called. Those were pretty heavy already. “And, uh... oh shoot, what else can we do?”

I ran to the side, and saw a few cry hovering closer, some of them with Awen’s laser focuses near them. Laser focuses aimed at us.

“Hey!” I called out, an arm waving above me. “We need to slow down more! Can you shield the ground?”

That seemed to do the trick. People who were going to attack or something didn’t usually ask for help. At least, I hoped not.

A few cry summoned shields that the Beaver rammed into, shattering them a moment later. Still, the heavy lurch of it all did slow us down, even if I worried that it was causing a lot of damage to the keels.

More cry came over, and soon a dozen of them hovered next to the Beaver. I wasn’t sure what they were doing until I felt us slowing down.

Telekinesis. One cry could lift a bit, so maybe with a dozen of them pushing back together...

Then one of the towers glowed from within and the Beaver’s descent slowed down even more.

Carefully, with an almost gentle clunk, our airship touched down.

And then the tarp of our balloon draped itself over all of us.

Congratulations! Captaining is now Rank E!

***