Also, I didn't exactly research anything about ships or anything. Anything specific to the airships was either made up or previous knowledge from Pre-Calculus or reading The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle years ago.
Kavo stood tall, gazing across the wide expanse of endless blue sky. A breeze of cold, white mist ruffled his hair and ruddied his cheeks as he stood there, in the one place where he felt safe and at home. To him, home was high in the sky with no strings attached, where he could close his eyes and simply soar. Home was where he could breathe in the scent of rain as he glided above the fluffy white clouds and through the clear azure sky. Nothing else ever had compared to his home here on the airship he captained.
Even as a child, Kavo had wanted nothing more than to fly. He and his neighbours would play pretend “pirates,” and Kavo would race after them like the good government official he had always planned to be. Now, twenty years later, here he was: captain of one of the best airships their homeland had ever seen, and second-in-line commander of the largest fleet in the world. He lived to fly and to rid the country of every pest and villain known to man, from swarms of pirates to invading foreign troops to the occasional cloud of irritating and irritable birds. Kavo adored his job.
“Captain.” One of the men greeted him with a quick, respectful bow of his head. “We’re approaching the pirates, sir.”
Kavo glanced down at the radar before him, crammed between all sorts of gauges— pressure gauges, speedometers, wind sensors, thermometers, and countless sorts of blinking system lights and flashing updates and a series of lights that told him all the emergency escape pods were ready for use— and surely enough, three menacingly bright red dots were crawling toward them. The pirates clearly had not updated their stealth technology. Not that they’d use it if they had— they were pirates, and they enjoyed the attention that their flashy habits brought them.
“I can see that,” Kavo half-muttered to himself; he was often annoyed by inane interruptions such as this one, when he clearly had the very same gauges a half a foot from his face that the other airman had recently checked. Nonetheless, he stood straight and spun on his heel to face the rest of the long ship.
The floor, metal plates laid across a wooden interior, was painted a brilliant white that seemed to glow, especially from long distances. Contrary to logic, it camouflaged quite nicely; the clouds were the perfect backdrop for such a creation. From the white floor sprouted three masts; the single central one loomed over the other two. Each of the masts held up a fin of papery cloth, the sails that steered the ship. Atop the middle one was a conventional lookout post that looked like no more than a wooden bucket from beneath. Kavo had never seen the inside or the top of one, but he knew that they had been constructed in case the technological radar systems failed; it was always better to see enemies approaching rather than to face them later and hope for the best. Kavo knew that from experience. He also knew that his crew always needed a moment to steady the cannons which stuck out from the sides, and so he looked upon them with a stern face.
“Ready the arms!” he ordered. Almost instantaneously, they set to work, running about and across and above and beneath like madmen. The first time he had seen the chaotic mess, Kavo had nearly laughed; today, he did little more than roll his eyes and turn round to face his wheel and gauges.
Kavo squinted down at his radar. The pirates were going to circle them if they didn’t take evasive action.
“Turn sails 45 east of north!” he shouted again without turning to ensure his orders were followed to the t; both he and his crewmen knew that if they weren’t, there would be all sorts of hell to pay. For one, if his instructions were ignored or disobeyed, they risked defeat, capture, or death; if their enemies didn’t get them, Kavo and the higher-ups would. The squeaks and whooshes of the sails swinging into place told him that he had not been mistaken, and the airship soon turned in the wind.
One of the ships appeared through the misty gray air. It was old-fashioned, with no metal plates and nothing but a flimsy protective shield to cover its brittle and shoddy wooded boarding. This fight would be a piece of cake, Kavo could tell. If it stretched past much long than an half an hour, Kavo would be astonished; the government’s armaments were much more advanced than anything some ridiculous pirate band could have ever hoped to come across.
Behind the lead by only fifteen seconds or less was another, even smaller and cheaper airship. Kavo had thought that the pirates were better at pillaging than this, to be able to afford only so tawdry a “fleet,” if it could even be called that. The third and the smallest, poorest ship came into view behind, and Kavo looked to the man beside him. This would be no problem at all.
“Feel free to take the reigns on this one,” he instructed. That said, he slipped onto the deck to join the fight.
Kavo loved fighting almost as much as he loved flying. Firing cannons lit a spark in him somewhere that was difficult to extinguish. Even so, he enjoyed the feel of a heavy blade in his hands even more; there was something thrilling about being that up close to someone and watching their twisted light dim before your own eyes, about knowing that you saved the lives of children, that you improved the world, with just your bare hands and polished scrap metal.
It didn’t seem, though, that he would need his knife; the pirates would be exterminated with their cannons in mere minutes, before they could get close enough for either side to board the other’s ships. Even thinking about it was almost laughably ludicrous; the others were vastly outmatched, as they would soon see. It wouldn’t take long for them to rue their poor decisions in attacking a government-owned airfleet.
“Cap’n, fightin’ today?” asked one of the others.
Kavo grinned his signature arrogant grin. “Who ever said I didn’t enjoy a bit of play before mess?”
The man snorted. “Tell ‘at ta ol’ Toadstool,” he replied as he loaded a cannon, referring to the older, scruffy man called Toadstool by the rest because of his interestingly discoloured bald head. Kavo simply cast him a long-suffering look and aimed the cannon for him.
“Ready!” he shouted above the clank of metal and the chatter of teasing insults and jibes; the men hushed and stood alert. “Aim!” As the men did so, he checked his own aim— perfect, as always— before giving the famous last words of, “Fire!”
And they did. Both sides exploded in a haze of gunpowder smoke, fiery explosions, and flying lead spheres. Every neuron in Kavo’s body sparked to life, filling him with a giddy exuberance not unlike a child’s countenance on Christmas morning. It had been said that armies were bloodthirsty, but those people who had claimed such things had never been out here, high up in the air with an enemy warship and with nothing else to stop them. Kavo had, and he knew the likelihood of getting out of it without having a hunger for blood; the odds were next to zero. Bloodthirsty, if that were the word that must be used, was one of the best things to be, so Kavo didn’t mind much what people called him. He was well on his way to becoming commander of the world’s best fleet, and there was nothing that was going to stop him.
The first ship spiralled out of control as a cannonball struck its rudder. One more pierced its largest sail, but it wasn’t until yet another hit its defence mechanism— the one that controlled the translucent shield— that it plummeted to the ground. Kavo helped the crewman reload the cannon in anticipation for the next approaching airship.
It was even easier than the first to destroy. Kavo had taken the liberty of aiming the cannon he controlled at the front of the ship to steer it off-course, and doing so aided in its mad spinning and swerving.
“Cap’n! Another’s coming in on the west!”
“Then se— wait, the west!?” Kavo nearly dropped his cannonball. He looked back out to the sky and then behind him for a moment. From the west… that didn’t make any sense; he could see the third one in the east, and only three had appeared on the radar. Clearly his airman had made a mistake.
Kavo shoved the ball in his arms into someone’s stomach; they could deal with reloading. He had to check the radars.
Only one dot was showing up— the one on the east, the side that they’d been attacked from. But Kavo could see another ship on the west “horizon,” clear as day.
Apparently the pirates had upgraded their stealth equipment.
“Shit… west attack!” he alerted, but there was no time; the other airship was already almost close enough to board. Kavo would have to take action, and fast. He grabbed three other men and pulled them to begin stocking the cannons for battle, although it was readily apparent that there was no way that everything would be prepared in time to use them. By the time even a single cannon was ready to fire, the pirates would have boarded; shooting them would only result in even angrier pirates on their ship.
Kavo unsheathed his blade and kissed it for good luck. It seemed that he would, in fact, need it for this battle.
He stepped back into a wide stance in anticipation. The breathing exercises he began to attempt did little to calm him, as always. Every breath he took, every movement, every spasm or twitch of his muscles, was ready to fight to the death. So he would.
The first pirate leaped onto the airship. Kavo all but charged at him immediately, brandishing the silver blade that was clenched firmly in his hand. The man, a lean and wiry young adult whose bald head glinted in the nearby sunshine, evaded him with ease. Kavo, surprised, took a moment to react with another swipe at the man.
The pirate reacted more violently at this offense, stepping sideways out of reach and grabbing onto Kavo’s forearm tightly. He put Kavo into an armbar, but before he could gain the necessary footing to have enough leverage to put Kavo to his knees, Kavo stomped on one of his feet as hard as he could. The pirate groaned in pain so suddenly intense that it forced his grip to weaken, and Kavo took that chance to slip out of the hold. He swung his arm in a back-slashing arc, and the pirate, too consumed in lamenting over his hurt foot, didn’t react quickly enough to avoid it entirely this time; the knife slit a crimson streak across the hollow of his sun-stained cheek. Kavo moved to plunge the knife into the villain’s stomach, and that was when something hit him.
Literally.
He stopped dead in his tracks, raising his hand to the stabbing pain. An arrow had stricken his shoulder. That couldn’t be. Who still used arrows anymore?
He cast his eyes upward, to the lookout post of the other ship. A dark-skinned, mysterious-looking man with shadowy hair and the eyes of an eagle drew his bow. Kavo’s vision stuttered, and then he collapsed.
No comments:
Post a Comment