The Dragon Chase: A Tale of the Everburning City

Chapter 25: Mia

"Piss in ash, they botched that badly," Mia whispered in a combination of awe and despair, as the distant but terrifyingly luminous explosions died away. As she watched, she let her fingertips linger absentmindedly on the Valkyrie she had been checking over.

"What?" her lieutenant, Amelian Rustov, asked from behind her. Mia rolled her eyes a little and shook her head. Bloody magnificent officer, but the woman had no head for ballistics.

"The gunners fired before their target was in range. That Dragon had them dead to rights. Their Crafter bailed them out," Mia explained.

"They're just specks still. How can you tell?"

"The first streaks of blue were the Valkyries firing incendiary rounds. The bright red plume was the Dragon's attack. The white flash that looked like an armoury went up must have been their Crafter, because their ship is still in the sky."

Amelian said nothing, and Mia turned back to watch the fires fade completely. Only then could she track the distant blot of the Dragon as it levelled off below the other ship.

Flaming hell, she thought to herself, that was terrifying. Probably a half-dozen Valkyries, by the looks of it, and it was the smallest, weakest attack in that exchange.

And that was five Valkyries more than they could use at any one time. The cannon she had been attending to for the last hour had never seemed smaller, and the horde of ammunition she had carefully assembled felt woefully inadequate.

She glanced at the series of neatly stacked rounds, thinking. Incendiary rounds were only useful to a hundred yards or so and packed less of a punch than the Captain managed with a Salamander. She had nearly a dozen canister shots; ball bearings packed into a large tin can, but the effective range was only slightly better than incendiary shot.

Canister shot also didn't dissipate, and ball bearings falling from this height would be lethal.

Round shot was the only good alternative to Incendiary. The Valkyries fired a twenty-four-pound steel ball with an effective range of over a mile. Over one and a half miles, depending on how much higher than the target they could put the airship.

However, round shot had the same problem canister shot did. And they were flying over Central; the most densely populated part of the City. Every miss or ricochet was a death sentence for someone below.

"Mia, load round shot," she heard Amelian say.

By the abyss and its fires.

"Aye, ma'am," she said simply, and saluted. Abyss below, that wasn't a decision she wanted to make, but she'd defend the need for it to any tribunal Amelian found herself in front of.

Well, Captain Raeth, actually. His ship, his ass.

"No objections?" Amelian asked, clearly a little surprised. "You know the implications better than anyone."

"None, ma'am," Mia admitted, grimly. She didn't even make the call, and it weighed on her like she was trying to lift the Valkyrie.

"I was afraid of that. Kinda wished I was wrong," Amelian sighed and shook her head.

In the distance, the Dragon began to fly towards the Bore, with the other ship flying impotently above it. It was just inside their extreme range, but the time the ball would spend in the air was almost long enough to reload the cannon. More than enough time for the Dragon to change its course.

Six hundred yards closer, Mia thought to herself. Draw closer, put the ship about a hundred feet higher, and double-charge the gun. Mia grinned as she thought to herself, and absent-mindedly let her fingers trace over the notches on the gun's sights.