52 Searing 115
The Queen Bitch zipped across the skies, arcing up like an energetic fish and lurching towards the clouds. The crew aboard grunted their protest, but each held their tethers and jacklines tight. The freshest of the Bitch's crew lost their footing and fell backwards on the airship's deck, rolling end over end until their tether finally brought them to a stop and a more skyworthy mate could bring them back to their feet.
“You daft, lass?” The bos'n shouted over the roar of winds. He was a broad shouldered grim looking man covered in scars and ink. He clapped his captain on the shoulder, and Vanessa merely grunted as she wrenched a lever back and brought the nose of the airship higher.
“You can't mean to chase her, aye?” The bos'n said “She's gone, Cap'n. Give her up.” He added. Vanessa snarled, and snapped her head around to glower at him with a dire expression.
“I ain't letting a prize like that just skip off. Get the lads ready for a dive. Grappling hooks, canister, anything we got. We're hitting her fast.” Vanessa's voice was iron, and though she was the bos'n's junior by nearly a decade, he nodded quickly and raced off to prepare the boarding party.
“Spool the hooks, angle them down. You, Percy, Get those damned four pounders ready to fire!” The shouts from the bos'n caused a riot of cheers and howls to rise from the crew, and even those unused to fighting were ready to do their part.
They rose higher and higher, their prize becoming just a memory down below. A fat, broad cargo-hauling airship sailing alone that had yet resisted all attempts for Vanessa to close the distance, and the lower deck had enough cannons that raising the black flag from too far away would spell doom for the Queen Bitch and her crew. Yet the prize called to Vanessa by name. It caused a familiar thundering in her chest, and Vanessa forced the vessel to ascend at a painful angle, the gasbag groaning under the strain but refusing to disobey. They pierced the cloud cover to break line of sight, and Vanessa leveled the ship out once more.
“Loose all to the wind!” Vanessa shouted, and the crew surged around her to obey. “Tops, gallants, royals!” Vanessa shouted in turn, with the crew shouting the same words back to her as the sails unfurled. Catching the wind, the airship jumped forward and cut through the clear skies unhindered. They had to outpace the merchant ship and drop into a dive at just the right time. The merchants were surely on edge, and she had already seen them begin to change course, twisting to starboard and pitching slightly in its haste to outmaneuver Vanessa's much smaller sloop.
Luckily, Vanessa knew precisely where the vessel would be, having tracked its speeds in the days prior that they'd hunted her. Vanessa punched another lever beside the ship's wheel, and the gasbag begun hemorrhaging air. Momentum carried them forward for one last sprint, but then the Queen Bitch begun to fall. It was a slow, drifting fall at first, the gasbag still capable of supporting her deck and crew, but as more air escaped and the sails drew back in, the fall became perilous. Tears streaked Vanessa's cheeks as the wind buffeted her eyes.
They again broke through the clouds, though this time they screamed like a meteor across the evening sky, the nose angled directly down at the merchant's ship.
The crew had tethered themselves to the rails at their battle stations, and she had to trust them to know when they ought to fire. Her voice was lost among the howling winds. Luckily, her crew were smart, and waited until they could pick out individual forms on the ship's deck down below. Once they could, their cannons roared in a furious anger, each carrying a canister of dragonshards jammed down the barrel haphazardly. The scream the cannons gave was ghastly, but the shards flew true, each one burying itself into the merchant vessel's and puncturing her gasbag. The cargo ship was in the middle of a sharp turn, and the sudden loss of air sent it pitching on its side. Unsecured deckhands fell overboard, bodies smashed on the ground countless feet below.
Then Vanessa gave the signal to fire the grappling hooks, and dozen modified harpoon guns fired from the lower decks of the ship. The hooks bit deep into the deck of the merchant ship itself, heavy chains anchoring the Queen Bitch to her prize now. She could hear the screams now, and the sound of gunfire bouncing harmlessly off the bottom of her ship's hull. She wrenched the lever back again, re-sealing her own gasbag and bringing her ship to a lazy float a dozen meters above the merchant ship that now hung like a dead fish impaled on her hooks.
The gunfire subsided, and Vanessa left the wheel to the bos'n, striding with confidence over to the railing. She looked down, and saw the terror dark as pitch on the faces of the crew. Good, she wouldn't need to make much of a performance of this.
“Prepare to be boarded!” She shouted down to the crew, and she could see the fear rising among them. “Let's not be pricks about this, yeah? Hands on your heads, guns on the fucking deck, and don't a single of you pisspots go being a hero.” She spat the words with venom, but in truth it was helpful to prep them for what was to come. This was a robbery, not a slaughter.
Vanessa dropped down onto the deck of the floundered merchant's vessel, rappelling down from over the railing of her own ship. Dressed in a well-tailored coat and patterned breeches, Vanessa almost looked noble, though the illusion surely wouldn't last. The rest of her men were already at work controlling the crowd above. Some of the captured sailors spat insults, others begged for their lives. Though for the most part, they had cooperated with her demands and left their weapons more than an arms length away
“Empty their fucking pockets. Every single one. I want anything worth a damn.” She shouted so that the captives could hear, then held up a hand to give the illusion the next thought had only just occurred to her. “Leave them anything sentimental.” And so half of the burly crew begun to harass the captive sailors while the other half moved with Vanessa towards the lower decks to begin offloading the cargo.
“Please, I have a wife, and three children!” One of the captured sailors blubbered, holding his hands up in desperation after having been forced to his knees. Vanessa gestured for her men to continue below decks while she stepped over to him and crouched down to meet his eyes. Callously, she begun rummaging through his pockets and relieving him of his jewelry.
“Just keep quiet and remember to breathe, lad.” Vanessa said coldly, pocketing his earrings and the few coins he kept on his person. “Think of your wife. You want to see her again?” She grabbed the man by his hair and forced him to nod. “Course you do. So let's both do our part to make sure you get back safe and sound.”
He was crying now, trying to speak through the sobs. Vanessa backhanded him hard enough that he fell over onto his side, gasping. This seemed to shock him into obedience though, and he no longer begged for clemency. She stepped over him, giving him a swift kick in the groin as a parting shot before continuing towards the cargo hold.
Before Vanessa could pass the threshold to the guts of the ship, she heard a desperate, feverish scream just before her. A frenzied man came hurtling down the steps from the captain's wheel, sword raised high above his head and eyes and shot with blood. He was a portly man with a patchy white beard and arms covered from wrist to shoulder in ink. Vanessa noticed enough of the symbols to immediately identify him as the captain. An ambush, and not a very good one. He hadn't even thought to stab her in the back or wait until her arms were full.
“Brainless shit!” Vanessa hissed under her breath as she drew her cutlass off of her right hip with her left hand. It was an ornate thing, a jewel embedded in the pommel and the guard etched with filigree. The blade blazed in the orange evening light, and she held it low with the curved point directed at the man.
Immediately the captain was left on the back foot, unused to fighting a southpaw. Heedless of his fear, he continued hurtling himself forward. He was poor fighter, and Vanessa easily sidestepped his desperate charge. The blade whistled past her and cut only air. Once he had committed to his wild swing, Vanessa swung hard for his gut. Her blade carved through both bravado and flesh, and the captain screamed badly. Momentum carried him stumbling forward, and he tossed away his weapon to instead desperately hold his stomach. He tried in vain to staunch the flow of crimson, though only succeeded in bloodying his hands. Vanessa kicked his weapon away, and followed the dying man like a buzzard until he was clutching the ship's railing. Blood pooled down the side of the airship, staining the deck.
“Look what you fucking did. What did I say?” She thumped him on the back of the head with the pommel of her sword. He groaned dully, further slumping against the rail. “No heroics. Look where it got you.” She then leaned to the side to assess the wound she'd made in him. A clean cut across the belly, and she'd cut through his fat and muscle into his intestines. It'd fester before he got home. A slow, miserable death. She'd seen it before, and had no desire to inflict that on him.
With a sigh, Vanessa reached down and grabbed the man's ankle. He was in too much pain to so much as try to kick out of her grip. She then yanked up, sending him over the railing and hurtling down to his death. His screams faded into nothingness as he fell. Then she clicked her tongue, and wiped the blood off of her cutlass with her sleeve before sheathing it again. “Whoever is the damned quartermaster is now the bloody captain. “ She hocked a gob of spit over the railing. “And don't anyone else get any ideas. I can do this all day.” She then trudged down below decks while the shocked captives now rushed to comply with their captor's orders.
Without even a moment spent considering the man she'd just killed, Vanessa begun pilfering the crew quarters. Petty gold and silver, trinkets and baubles, she even stole empty journals for their paper. She pocketed soaps, candles and clothes, tossing them all into a sack to be properly sorted and divvied out among her crew later. Loose dragonshards were snagged as well, and Vanessa also took a peek at what the merchants had been traveling with once she was through with her own ransacking.
The whooping of her crew told her half the story. She spotted wines by the crate, and already the rowdy crew had wrenched one of the boxes open, smashed the neck of a bottle on the wall and were passing the drink around. She took a mighty swig when it was offered to her, and passed it back down the line. The wine was excellent, the fruity flavor almost entirely masking the alcohol. She loathed to admit it, but the upper crust did know a thing or two about hooch.
“Proper work lads. Don't drink too many afore we get them aboard, yeah?” She said, patting a pair of them on the shoulders and leaving them to polish off the bottle. There was a choir of 'aye's and some of them filed back to work.
There were spices, too. Far less interesting to the crew, but far more valuable to Vanessa. She looked at the labels, and recognized some of them from prior heists. The actual lettering on the crates made no sense to her, but she knew enough pattern recognition to understand she was looking at cinnamon and black pepper by the crate, along with smaller inventories of a dozen other spices . She'd have her quartermaster identify them while he inventoried their haul. She had a few of her crew begin ferrying the spices above deck, and she grabbed a pair of smaller boxes under each arm to help them along.
The Queen Bitch had been brought around and made level with the merchant's deck, and all of Vanessa's crew had guns trained on the captives. The guns were unloaded of course. Even using two volleys of dragonshard canister could have been financially devastating if this vessel had been carrying something of less value like clothing. They wouldn't bother wasting it on a group of blubbering swabbies, even if they outnumbered them three-to-one.
Passing the cargo over was easy and it was late evening by the time they were done. They hadn't been able to steal everything, the cargo ship outclassed the Queen Bitch in size by a few orders of magnitude, and her own stores were left full to bursting after taking only half what the merchants had been carrying.
Once all of her own crew were back aboard, Vanessa cut a few of the captives loose so they could untie the others, and crossed the gangplank back to her own vessel.
“Going east from here will get you to the nearest port in three, maybe five days. Patch those holes in the meantime.” Vanessa said almost as an afterthought. Then she had the grappling hooks wrenched out of the wood, cranking them back to their readied positions. “It's a pleasure doing business with you pricks. I hope we can all do this again soon enough.” She barked a laugh and returned to the wheel, peeling her ship away from the floating wreck and back to the open skies. In only a matter of hours, she could no longer see her victims. Even then, she switched back on herself countless times to make her more difficult to track, cutting through low clouds and even sailing within them until she was making her way back towards the docks of Zaichaer. It would be days before they reached them, but still there was a satisfaction in returning to port. Even if it was a port so vehemently opposed to her continued existence as Zaichaer's.
“Forge us an inventory, would you, Jorge?” She said to her quartermaster, a tall, thin man with a face hard as steel. “Port authority knows something's up. Make it your best work.” She added. Jorge nodded, saluted unnecessarily and set off for his cabin to begin the painstaking work.
Damned military had the docks more or less locked down for the past few months. Her crew managed to sneak out a few times in the dead of night and returning just the same, but this time they'd been stopped and their ship's departure time, cargo, and crew recorded. Coming back with a full load after leaving with nothing just weeks before was going to raise suspicion, but already Vanessa was concocting her story. It wouldn't be perfect, but with a bit of bribery it just might stick.
For now though, Vanessa enjoyed the rush that came with a successful hunt, and basked in it. She ordered a member of her crew to fetch her one of the wines, and she polished it off herself while she flew her vessel back towards home.
If only she knew what awaited her there.
“You daft, lass?” The bos'n shouted over the roar of winds. He was a broad shouldered grim looking man covered in scars and ink. He clapped his captain on the shoulder, and Vanessa merely grunted as she wrenched a lever back and brought the nose of the airship higher.
“You can't mean to chase her, aye?” The bos'n said “She's gone, Cap'n. Give her up.” He added. Vanessa snarled, and snapped her head around to glower at him with a dire expression.
“I ain't letting a prize like that just skip off. Get the lads ready for a dive. Grappling hooks, canister, anything we got. We're hitting her fast.” Vanessa's voice was iron, and though she was the bos'n's junior by nearly a decade, he nodded quickly and raced off to prepare the boarding party.
“Spool the hooks, angle them down. You, Percy, Get those damned four pounders ready to fire!” The shouts from the bos'n caused a riot of cheers and howls to rise from the crew, and even those unused to fighting were ready to do their part.
They rose higher and higher, their prize becoming just a memory down below. A fat, broad cargo-hauling airship sailing alone that had yet resisted all attempts for Vanessa to close the distance, and the lower deck had enough cannons that raising the black flag from too far away would spell doom for the Queen Bitch and her crew. Yet the prize called to Vanessa by name. It caused a familiar thundering in her chest, and Vanessa forced the vessel to ascend at a painful angle, the gasbag groaning under the strain but refusing to disobey. They pierced the cloud cover to break line of sight, and Vanessa leveled the ship out once more.
“Loose all to the wind!” Vanessa shouted, and the crew surged around her to obey. “Tops, gallants, royals!” Vanessa shouted in turn, with the crew shouting the same words back to her as the sails unfurled. Catching the wind, the airship jumped forward and cut through the clear skies unhindered. They had to outpace the merchant ship and drop into a dive at just the right time. The merchants were surely on edge, and she had already seen them begin to change course, twisting to starboard and pitching slightly in its haste to outmaneuver Vanessa's much smaller sloop.
Luckily, Vanessa knew precisely where the vessel would be, having tracked its speeds in the days prior that they'd hunted her. Vanessa punched another lever beside the ship's wheel, and the gasbag begun hemorrhaging air. Momentum carried them forward for one last sprint, but then the Queen Bitch begun to fall. It was a slow, drifting fall at first, the gasbag still capable of supporting her deck and crew, but as more air escaped and the sails drew back in, the fall became perilous. Tears streaked Vanessa's cheeks as the wind buffeted her eyes.
They again broke through the clouds, though this time they screamed like a meteor across the evening sky, the nose angled directly down at the merchant's ship.
The crew had tethered themselves to the rails at their battle stations, and she had to trust them to know when they ought to fire. Her voice was lost among the howling winds. Luckily, her crew were smart, and waited until they could pick out individual forms on the ship's deck down below. Once they could, their cannons roared in a furious anger, each carrying a canister of dragonshards jammed down the barrel haphazardly. The scream the cannons gave was ghastly, but the shards flew true, each one burying itself into the merchant vessel's and puncturing her gasbag. The cargo ship was in the middle of a sharp turn, and the sudden loss of air sent it pitching on its side. Unsecured deckhands fell overboard, bodies smashed on the ground countless feet below.
Then Vanessa gave the signal to fire the grappling hooks, and dozen modified harpoon guns fired from the lower decks of the ship. The hooks bit deep into the deck of the merchant ship itself, heavy chains anchoring the Queen Bitch to her prize now. She could hear the screams now, and the sound of gunfire bouncing harmlessly off the bottom of her ship's hull. She wrenched the lever back again, re-sealing her own gasbag and bringing her ship to a lazy float a dozen meters above the merchant ship that now hung like a dead fish impaled on her hooks.
The gunfire subsided, and Vanessa left the wheel to the bos'n, striding with confidence over to the railing. She looked down, and saw the terror dark as pitch on the faces of the crew. Good, she wouldn't need to make much of a performance of this.
“Prepare to be boarded!” She shouted down to the crew, and she could see the fear rising among them. “Let's not be pricks about this, yeah? Hands on your heads, guns on the fucking deck, and don't a single of you pisspots go being a hero.” She spat the words with venom, but in truth it was helpful to prep them for what was to come. This was a robbery, not a slaughter.
Vanessa dropped down onto the deck of the floundered merchant's vessel, rappelling down from over the railing of her own ship. Dressed in a well-tailored coat and patterned breeches, Vanessa almost looked noble, though the illusion surely wouldn't last. The rest of her men were already at work controlling the crowd above. Some of the captured sailors spat insults, others begged for their lives. Though for the most part, they had cooperated with her demands and left their weapons more than an arms length away
“Empty their fucking pockets. Every single one. I want anything worth a damn.” She shouted so that the captives could hear, then held up a hand to give the illusion the next thought had only just occurred to her. “Leave them anything sentimental.” And so half of the burly crew begun to harass the captive sailors while the other half moved with Vanessa towards the lower decks to begin offloading the cargo.
“Please, I have a wife, and three children!” One of the captured sailors blubbered, holding his hands up in desperation after having been forced to his knees. Vanessa gestured for her men to continue below decks while she stepped over to him and crouched down to meet his eyes. Callously, she begun rummaging through his pockets and relieving him of his jewelry.
“Just keep quiet and remember to breathe, lad.” Vanessa said coldly, pocketing his earrings and the few coins he kept on his person. “Think of your wife. You want to see her again?” She grabbed the man by his hair and forced him to nod. “Course you do. So let's both do our part to make sure you get back safe and sound.”
He was crying now, trying to speak through the sobs. Vanessa backhanded him hard enough that he fell over onto his side, gasping. This seemed to shock him into obedience though, and he no longer begged for clemency. She stepped over him, giving him a swift kick in the groin as a parting shot before continuing towards the cargo hold.
Before Vanessa could pass the threshold to the guts of the ship, she heard a desperate, feverish scream just before her. A frenzied man came hurtling down the steps from the captain's wheel, sword raised high above his head and eyes and shot with blood. He was a portly man with a patchy white beard and arms covered from wrist to shoulder in ink. Vanessa noticed enough of the symbols to immediately identify him as the captain. An ambush, and not a very good one. He hadn't even thought to stab her in the back or wait until her arms were full.
“Brainless shit!” Vanessa hissed under her breath as she drew her cutlass off of her right hip with her left hand. It was an ornate thing, a jewel embedded in the pommel and the guard etched with filigree. The blade blazed in the orange evening light, and she held it low with the curved point directed at the man.
Immediately the captain was left on the back foot, unused to fighting a southpaw. Heedless of his fear, he continued hurtling himself forward. He was poor fighter, and Vanessa easily sidestepped his desperate charge. The blade whistled past her and cut only air. Once he had committed to his wild swing, Vanessa swung hard for his gut. Her blade carved through both bravado and flesh, and the captain screamed badly. Momentum carried him stumbling forward, and he tossed away his weapon to instead desperately hold his stomach. He tried in vain to staunch the flow of crimson, though only succeeded in bloodying his hands. Vanessa kicked his weapon away, and followed the dying man like a buzzard until he was clutching the ship's railing. Blood pooled down the side of the airship, staining the deck.
“Look what you fucking did. What did I say?” She thumped him on the back of the head with the pommel of her sword. He groaned dully, further slumping against the rail. “No heroics. Look where it got you.” She then leaned to the side to assess the wound she'd made in him. A clean cut across the belly, and she'd cut through his fat and muscle into his intestines. It'd fester before he got home. A slow, miserable death. She'd seen it before, and had no desire to inflict that on him.
With a sigh, Vanessa reached down and grabbed the man's ankle. He was in too much pain to so much as try to kick out of her grip. She then yanked up, sending him over the railing and hurtling down to his death. His screams faded into nothingness as he fell. Then she clicked her tongue, and wiped the blood off of her cutlass with her sleeve before sheathing it again. “Whoever is the damned quartermaster is now the bloody captain. “ She hocked a gob of spit over the railing. “And don't anyone else get any ideas. I can do this all day.” She then trudged down below decks while the shocked captives now rushed to comply with their captor's orders.
Without even a moment spent considering the man she'd just killed, Vanessa begun pilfering the crew quarters. Petty gold and silver, trinkets and baubles, she even stole empty journals for their paper. She pocketed soaps, candles and clothes, tossing them all into a sack to be properly sorted and divvied out among her crew later. Loose dragonshards were snagged as well, and Vanessa also took a peek at what the merchants had been traveling with once she was through with her own ransacking.
The whooping of her crew told her half the story. She spotted wines by the crate, and already the rowdy crew had wrenched one of the boxes open, smashed the neck of a bottle on the wall and were passing the drink around. She took a mighty swig when it was offered to her, and passed it back down the line. The wine was excellent, the fruity flavor almost entirely masking the alcohol. She loathed to admit it, but the upper crust did know a thing or two about hooch.
“Proper work lads. Don't drink too many afore we get them aboard, yeah?” She said, patting a pair of them on the shoulders and leaving them to polish off the bottle. There was a choir of 'aye's and some of them filed back to work.
There were spices, too. Far less interesting to the crew, but far more valuable to Vanessa. She looked at the labels, and recognized some of them from prior heists. The actual lettering on the crates made no sense to her, but she knew enough pattern recognition to understand she was looking at cinnamon and black pepper by the crate, along with smaller inventories of a dozen other spices . She'd have her quartermaster identify them while he inventoried their haul. She had a few of her crew begin ferrying the spices above deck, and she grabbed a pair of smaller boxes under each arm to help them along.
The Queen Bitch had been brought around and made level with the merchant's deck, and all of Vanessa's crew had guns trained on the captives. The guns were unloaded of course. Even using two volleys of dragonshard canister could have been financially devastating if this vessel had been carrying something of less value like clothing. They wouldn't bother wasting it on a group of blubbering swabbies, even if they outnumbered them three-to-one.
Passing the cargo over was easy and it was late evening by the time they were done. They hadn't been able to steal everything, the cargo ship outclassed the Queen Bitch in size by a few orders of magnitude, and her own stores were left full to bursting after taking only half what the merchants had been carrying.
Once all of her own crew were back aboard, Vanessa cut a few of the captives loose so they could untie the others, and crossed the gangplank back to her own vessel.
“Going east from here will get you to the nearest port in three, maybe five days. Patch those holes in the meantime.” Vanessa said almost as an afterthought. Then she had the grappling hooks wrenched out of the wood, cranking them back to their readied positions. “It's a pleasure doing business with you pricks. I hope we can all do this again soon enough.” She barked a laugh and returned to the wheel, peeling her ship away from the floating wreck and back to the open skies. In only a matter of hours, she could no longer see her victims. Even then, she switched back on herself countless times to make her more difficult to track, cutting through low clouds and even sailing within them until she was making her way back towards the docks of Zaichaer. It would be days before they reached them, but still there was a satisfaction in returning to port. Even if it was a port so vehemently opposed to her continued existence as Zaichaer's.
“Forge us an inventory, would you, Jorge?” She said to her quartermaster, a tall, thin man with a face hard as steel. “Port authority knows something's up. Make it your best work.” She added. Jorge nodded, saluted unnecessarily and set off for his cabin to begin the painstaking work.
Damned military had the docks more or less locked down for the past few months. Her crew managed to sneak out a few times in the dead of night and returning just the same, but this time they'd been stopped and their ship's departure time, cargo, and crew recorded. Coming back with a full load after leaving with nothing just weeks before was going to raise suspicion, but already Vanessa was concocting her story. It wouldn't be perfect, but with a bit of bribery it just might stick.
For now though, Vanessa enjoyed the rush that came with a successful hunt, and basked in it. She ordered a member of her crew to fetch her one of the wines, and she polished it off herself while she flew her vessel back towards home.
If only she knew what awaited her there.
