Bird and Cat Meet in the Clouds

Clang clang clang clang—“General quarters! General quarters! This is not a drill! All hands to action stations!”—clang clang clang clang, continued the alarm gong.

Red flinched up from her reading. Throwing on her jacket and sun goggles, she emerged topside and made it over the rocking deck in seven efficient strides. She arrived at her ballista with a bolt in hand from the locker and pumped the lever backward. Kachunk-pfwee-kachunk-pfweee…, the steam pistons hissed. She took a step safely back. “Ready!” she called to Lan-gang, the gunner.

A dark shadow passed over them. Red shuddered. A sky-leviathan, its snout lined with a hundred poisoned thorns, its body a curling serpentine. It would rend the Naughty Cat’s balloon like rice paper, and that would be the end of their airship. Even if anyone survived, nobody answered distress calls out here. Below, she could see sandbags falling away, then a few cargo crates. The supercargo would be very upset, but the bosun must have decided altitude was needed—fast.

Twang! Lan-gang loosed the bolt. Off the mark. The huge monster was turning around to make another pass.

“Free the steam,” came a soft but steady voice behind Red. It was that water-philosopher—from the something rats—who was hitching a ride into the Ten Fingers.

“What?” gasped Red in disbelief, but she pulled the emergency vent lever.

“Pure Heart Silver Cyclone,” said the small mousy-faced scholar, and the steam began to swirl around the ship. Just as the monster returned, it met a scalding hurricane.

Red had thought those mystics were useless. At least this one had been intent, it seemed, on hiding away from the noise and the machinery.

Blinded, the beast roared in agony and spun into the murk below. The engines growled and the ship continued climbing. Honk! came a short horn blast. “Stand down from general quarters, maintain readiness two.”

Red leaned on the railing, snatching a few more pages in the evening rays.

“Bubble Margin,” the scholar remarked with a nod, seeing her book. “108 heroes building a paradise down in the Green around a secret lake—I’ve always wanted to be like them.”

The Green carpet rolled on below unending. She shook her head. Down there was a venomous mist of spores through which marched things only known to hell. She was glad she was up in the sky, safe. But after all too short a journey they would land on all too solid ground, the same ground on which the Green crawled and reached its tendrils to grasp at the precious lives above.

She pulled the last candied hawthorn off the skewer with her teeth and sucked on it meditatively. She’d be on shift again tomorrow for landing, and it would be a long day. They made junior deckhands do all the heavy lifting.

Just one more day at work in the heavens.