Spear of Destiny by James Baldwin (little bear else holmelund minarik .TXT) 📕

We lunged for the nearest rails as the airship dipped sharply to one side. Warning claxons went off: Karalti and I were used to turbulence, but Rin, overwhelmed by the noise, screamed and sunk down with her hands clamped over her ears. The engines roared as Gar gunned the ship to full throttle and swerved to the right, descending toward the crescent of brilliant green growing larger on the horizon: Meewhome. We were close enough to land that I could see a thin, glinting blue dome rising over the island. The translucent shield of energy didn’t prevent the all-out aerial warfare now raging between the ravenous horde of blue dragon slugs and the armada of Cloud Emperors, who were gassing the monsters out of the sky and descending en masse toward the mountain-range sized waves below.

“HECTOR!” Suri’s voice blasted through my HUD. “The hell is going on out there!?”

“Brace for a crash! It’s fucking World War Jellyfish  out here. Literally, jellyfish fucking.”

“Hold on to your panties, ladies!” Gar whooped, steering us through the flying-slug-on-flying-jellyfish tentacled dogfight of the century. I heard the engines cut as we entered one of the heavy gas clouds, then stutter back to life as we shot past, trailing a cloud of brilliant blue sparks.

“Karalti! Get ready to teleport out of here in case we go down!” I pulled myself along the railing to Rin and threw an arm around her shoulders, holding her tight. She sobbed with terror as the turbulence thumped us around. “Take Rin if you can!”

“I’ll take both of you, dummy. And Suri, if we have time.” Karalti clung to the rail on Rin’s other side. “Don’t worry, Rin! It’ll be okay!”

“C’mon, baby! Don’t stall, don’t stall!” Gar wheedled to his craft as he expertly swung us one way, then the other, and broke through the jellyfish pack to streak toward the island. As he escaped the gas cloud, the ship’s mana engines roared back to life, and we sailed out of the dive before we lost momentum and entered a fatal tumble to the ground. “YEE HAWW! Feel that lift! Feel that-”

There was an earsplitting boom, followed by the screeching and gnashing of turbines splintering and being crushed inside of the left-side engine.

“Emergency backups! Now!” Gar yelled, suddenly all business. “Get that right engine cooled down! We overclocked the damn thing because of the fucking argon! Someone come help me with the damn throttle!”

“Stay with Rin!” I pushed off from the rail and ran over to clamp my hands over Gar’s. The two of us hauled on the controls, battling the terrible force of gravity outside the ship as the emergency engine flared to life. The Strelitzia wobbled, diving at an angle toward the trees lining the cliffs ahead of us, but the backup engine gave us just enough lift to avoid stalling. We were coming in fast, though, and there wasn’t a lot of clear room to land. Meewhome was heavily forested, a lush jungle of the kind not seen on Earth since the Cretaceous. We shot over a village, a grassland packed with running dinosaurs, a small rise of rocky hills, and headed straight for a bare meadow cut from the jungle like a football field.

“Brace! Brace!” Gar barked. “We are gonna butter that bread, so help me God!”

The Strelitzia was still going too fast. The engines were reverse-thrusting to slow the descent, but that only did so much for an aerodynamic wedge of metal and wood travelling at nearly a hundred miles an hour. We hit the ground and slid over the damp jungle mud like a sled, leaving the grass and careening straight into the trees. Glass shattered over us, but death never came: the ship smashed through rotten logs and then came a smoking, groaning halt, its nose buried in a small swamp.

“Shit! Woo! Well, what do you know?” Gar got shakily to his feet, looking back at us all. “Everyone alive?”

Navigators stuck their heads out from under their consoles. Ambrose leaned out and gave him a thumbs up. Karalti helped Rin to her feet, hugging her tightly against her chest. Miraculously, no one on the bridge had died.

“Suri! You alright?” I called to her via PM, already moving for the exit.

“Yeah. Banged up, nothing serious. And… Cutthroat… God help us, Hector. Cutthroat really is laying  eggs.” Suri’s voice was high and thin with stress. “The crash rolled her off them. I counted three, and now she’s hopped straight back on ‘em and is still going.”

“Check Engineering!” Gar ordered Ambrose. “Make sure Li-Li’s okay! The rest of you, let’s get the hell out of here. If that second engine blows, it’ll Strange the hell out of us.”

“I... I can help with the engines. Once I can see straight.” Rin clung to Karalti’s arm as we grouped together. Hopper and Lovelace skittered through the door I was about to enter, crawling over to her. She sat down on Hopper’s back, putting her face in her hands.

“What did I say in Taltos, Karalti? I swear to god, there’s a law.” I grumbled to myself, jogging back toward the cabin deck.

I found Suri looking pale but composed, her arms looped around Cutthroat’s neck. The hookwing began to hiss as I approached the open door, setting one of her mantis-like claws forward, then the other. She growled, but she didn’t move as Suri rose up, came over, and threw her arms around me.

I hugged her back. “Baby hookwings, huh?”

“Baby hookwings.” Suri sounded strangled. “I don’t know what we’re gonna do, Hector. She won’t leave the nest. The Wiki says she’s gotta sit on the damn things for two weeks. If she stops sitting them, the eggs will die.”

“Then I guess Gar and his ship are coming back to Kalla Sahasi with us.” I kissed her on the cheek. “Don’t worry, okay? We got this. But we’ve