Jacob threw the door open and reeled away from what waited on the other side. Pieces of the airship cascaded through the air below them, falling into the Crystal Sea.
The corridor was almost gone, with only a fragment of steel hanging onto the opposite wall.
“We can jump,” Furi said, “take the gliders.”
Jacob shook his head. “Not from here. You open the glider in that, and the debris will cut the wings to pieces. And if you’re lucky enough not to hit any of the falling metal, pretty sure the impact would still kill you.”
He glanced at the room behind them. No other way out. No passage, no hatch, no ladder, nothing. But one thing he was sure of, the longer they waited, the less likely they were going to survive.
“Come on. Keep your toes against the wall and fall forward until you can prop yourself up on the opposite wall. Follow me.” He turned to Alice and took some measure of comfort in the calm on her face. However worried she was about the ship collapsing around them, she looked more determined than anything else.
“Wait! We need a translator.” Furi rushed back to the alcove, reaching up to tear something off the wall and stuffing it into a pouch at her side.
Jacob grabbed the doorframe and swung out over the bottomless corridor, letting his heels slam into the outer wall. It didn’t move under the impact. With the frame of the ship bending farther, he could see that the steel beneath their feet was part of a larger plate. The force of the blast had sheared away a great deal of the floor, but a sliver framed each side above the abyss.
He took a deep breath and let himself fall forward. The hall was narrow. Narrow enough he could touch either side with his arms outstretched, but his heart still hammered before his palms caught the far wall and he stared into the falling field of debris.
Jacob didn’t look back, only moved one leg at a time where his heel and toes balanced on the remnants of the floor. One hand, one foot, next hand, and he continued that way, inching down what remained of the hall as the ship rattled all around them and started to list to one side.
He spared a look to Alice and Furi. Both had their palms on the opposite wall and were shuffling as quickly as he had. Every foot they covered gave them a less severe debris field. If they could just make it to the end, they could be off that ship with ease.
But even then, could the communicator survive the sea? Jacob cursed under his breath and carefully pressed the transmitter in his cuff.
“Skysworn, we have a problem.”
“Go ahead,” Mary’s voice answered.
“Might have blown a hole in the target. Trying to get out now, but package won’t survive the water.”
“Smith, engines, now. Where are you? How do we find you?”
“Supply ship to the northwest of the dock. It’ll be the one raining metal and fire and crashing.”
Mary cursed. “What can we do, Jacob?”
“We just have to keep Furi out of the water. Get as close as you can.”
“On our way.”
A horrible screech echoed through the hall, and Jacob felt the wall slipping away beneath his fingers.
“Hurry!” Alice shouted.
And he did, as best he could, one foot, one hand, and another over and over as the wall grew farther away. And he knew Alice and Furi didn’t have the same reach he did.
Jacob threw himself to the side, bouncing onto the surviving plates of the corridor before he spun to reach for Alice. She jumped past him, nearly to the ladder, when the wall finally gave way.
Furi slipped, her eyes going wide as gravity did the rest.
With only a second to spare, Jacob reached out to grab Furi’s glider pack. But the angle was awkward, and it dragged him forward, showing him the long fall to the sea once more until Alice grabbed his pack and leveraged him back, leaning against Furi’s inertia with all her weight.
“Don’t drop me!” Furi cried out as the debris falling away became a dripping inferno and smoke began to fill the corridor.
Slowly, by inches, they dragged Furi into the corridor, and she rested her cheek on the cold steel floor.
“Come on,” Alice said, giving them no further time to recover. “Up the ladder.”
Jacob followed her, his breath ragged as he raced up the rungs, offering a hand to Furi as they reached the deck and the pool of blood they’d left behind. He ran to the rails at the stern of the ship, skidding into them as the entire vessel tilted further.
They had moments before the ship either exploded or fell from the sky. Moments before the Skysworn appeared in the distance, and Mary dove close to the sea. But she couldn’t get closer, and Jacob knew it. Either the gliders would take them far enough, or they wouldn’t, and the exercise would be a waste.
A boiler ruptured near the front of the ship. There was no mistaking the boom of a tank under too much pressure, or the arc of steam and shrapnel as it billowed into the sky above. The deck shifted violently beneath their feet.
“Now!” Alice said as she hopped onto the railing and dove.
Furi followed, and Jacob did the same as he regained his footing.
Alice kept her arms tight and sped toward the water before throwing her wings open and swooping up into the air. It was a maneuver they knew, but Furi couldn’t possibly have known.
“Do what Alice did!” Jacob shouted over the roar of wind and the staccato of explosions above them. The first traces of burning debris fell around them as Jacob opened his wings, and Furi followed.
She didn’t have the angle quite right and nearly flipped backward before getting her glider under control, but they were airborne, and in moments had crossed out of the debris field with nothing more than a few singed bits.
Alice angled toward the Skysworn as Mary adjusted her position, tilting the ship slightly toward them to give them an easier target. Alice folded her wings at the last possible second, crashing onto the deck and rolling to a stop before she hit the railing.
Jacob followed, stumbling on the high angle of the deck before spinning to watch Furi. He could see the fear on her face as she dove hard toward the deck, pulling up a little too hard at the last moment as she collapsed the wings and squeaking as she dropped some seven feet to the deck below.
The deck’s angle probably saved her a broken bone as Mary shifted the bow back toward land, and they sped away from the supply ship as it finally broke in two, casting a tower of flame skyward before it crashed into the sea below.
Jacob flopped onto the deck and took a deep breath.
Alice rolled over to grin at him. “Sorry about that.”
He laughed quietly and let his head fall back against a coil of rope.
The hatch opened next to Furi, and Smith poked his head out. “Anyone dead?”
“Not yet,” Furi muttered, rubbing her elbow.
Alice pulled Jacob up to his feet before Smith did the same for Furi.
“Into the cabin, all of you.” Smith herded them forward along the railing, past the coils of landing lines and lockers, before pulling the cabin door closed.
“Are you all okay?” Mary asked.
“Okay enough,” Alice said. “A few bruises and burns here.”
“Same,” Furi said, and Jacob agreed with a nod.
“What happened on that ship?” Smith asked. “I have never seen a modern supply ship torn apart like that.”
Jacob raised an eyebrow and turned to Alice, who gave Smith an awkward smile as she shook out her hair.
“I might have thrown one of the compound bombs into the hold.”
Mary spun around in her chair and gawked at Alice. “That would have blown a hole straight through the hull.”
“I’m aware of that,” Alice said.
Smith choked back a small laugh.
“Pretty much tore the ship in half,” Jacob said. “Unfortunately, we were still inside it.”
“Well, yes, I didn’t expect it to do that.”
Furi blew out a breath as she shrugged her glider pack off her shoulders and unfastened the leg straps. “We’re alive, they aren’t, and we have what we went for. It was a good day.”
Jacob could see the small scorch marks on the edge of one of Furi’s wings that hadn’t fully retracted yet. It had been close. Too close.
“You got it?” Mary asked.
Furi pulled the communicator out and passed it to Smith. He turned it over in his hands and frowned. “This looks ancient. This is what they use to communicate?”
Furi nodded and opened the pouch that had been strapped to her leg. “And this is the translator.” She unrolled the parchment to show a document written in Mokuskrit, Standard, dots, and lines.
Smith’s eyes widened. “That is Ohm’s code. Targrove used to talk about the code. It was more common before the Deadlands War.”
“I’ve never heard it called that,” Furi said. “We just need the translator to read it. We couldn’t get the antenna, but I think if you wire this into your transmitter, it should be able to receive.”
Smith ran his fingers down the length of wire and nodded. “I believe I can weld this to a clamp. If we leave it attached, it would be able to transmit?”
“I don’t know,” Furi said. “Oh, but if it tried to send your voice instead of a simple code, I don’t know what it would do. It could tell them something is wrong.”
“Exactly. I will get to work on this.”
With that, Smith made his way out of the cabin, headed to his workshop below decks.
Jacob and Alice slipped out of their glider packs, and Jacob went to work investigating the damage. None of them were burned through, which was a lucky thing, but his own pack looked the worst. He’d need to replace the wings as soon as he could. For now, patches would hold, but he wouldn’t want to rely on that for too long. The extra stress from the stitching around any patch could tear a hole.
He glanced at Furi’s scorched wings. It had been close.