Alarm klaxons echoed through the fog of spilt steam and the screeching of burst valves as the skyport tumbled from the sky. The noise could wake the dead, Breyla Endrinsdottir thought, but was little help to the living. The neat, glum thought, like the stern and stoic duardin it came to, was born in disaster as she had been and reared by necessity. She leapt forward with a surprising agility to evade a blazing aetherpipe, uncoiling like a drunken serpent from the melting ceiling.
Behind her the two Thunderers she had chosen only minutes ago blasted a steel vat to pieces before it could fulfil its spitting, surging promise to fall into her path. The Captain of the Skyguard had not even had time to learn their names, but their actions had spoken for them. Honest deck-sweepers and jack-tars, they were exactly the sort she would need in the coming days. They were as much a part of the Skyguard now as any of them, she thought grimly. Even as much as her own mentor, the sponsor of her back-breaking rise; the aged, irascible, generous-hearted Admiral Theogrimm Framscalfen.
On any other day, the destruction of the container the Thunderers had just decommissioned so efficiently would itself have counted as a disaster that merited the immediate response of the skyport’s sharpest warrant officers. This was no ordinary day, however. Unless she did something fast, it was likely the last day of Barak-Drak. Breyla vaulted over a cache of spare parts, so much soon-to-be slag metal, and adjusted her aether-illuminated goggles. The deepening gloom of the ever-smokier Endrineering Room lay before her.
Where was it?
Somehow this last and desperate search had fallen on her. Breyla was no Endrineer or Aether-Khemist. She was not even a full Admiral, with the far-ranging training and authority of that rank. The Skyguard were meant to be peacekeepers, tracking down criminals and keeping order on the skydock. It was only by technicality that she was on the Admiral’s Council, an honorific title due to tradition and little else. Then the sky had changed. Theogrimm had taught her well that life was never fair, not to her, or him, nor to any other tough-minded duardin proud to call themselves Kharadron. Nonetheless, she doubted Theogrimm or any of his fellow Admirals presently on the Bridge could ever have anticipated the problem she now faced.
“Ware to starboard, Captain!” Breyla flung herself aside as the Code-knew-what aetherdamned diallogram erupted into gold and amber flame. As she landed she felt her endrinsuit take punishment in half a dozen minor but intricate places. Cracks spread across her goggles, leaving her groping through the debris like some unweaned, unsoared beardling.
‘Light,’ she cried in the deck-clearing clarion of the Skyguard. The second Thunderer had the swift wit to answer, firing the lumicarbine he had first picked up not an hour before.The projectile struck her suit harmlessly in a well padded sector of her back and a greenish pale yellow radiance spooled about her. For the first time in her career, Breyla had cause to bless the lumicarbine’s precocious Endrineer.. He was a young and well-connected Admiral, genuinely brilliant, and profoundly arrogant. She wished with all her heart he was alongside her, lending her some properly informed aid in this mess.
More than that, she wished Theogrimm was with her. He would understand, of course, what she had to do. He would have to.
Life was not fair, he had taught her. It was not fair that they had hit this wound in the realms at just this moment. It was not fair when the errant ironclad Grungni’s Breath crashed into Barak-Drak’s command tower, sending the Admiral’s Bridge toppling down across the endrincore’s release doors. She shook her head. For the first time in her many years as Captain of the Skyguard, she had not been in attendance at the Admiral’s Council, ceremonial though her role was. It was not fair that she was here, now, facing this decision, and not trapped there with her mentor and those she had sworn to lay down her own life to protect.
It was a cruel fate that had left her, Breyla Endrinsdottir, orphan of the Skycleave Disaster, the lone Admiral not trapped aboard the bridge she was about to doom.
There it was. The endrincore release valve, weirdly, almost enticingly clean amid the contortions and shadows of the conflagration. Crashing with the cores aboard risked the lives of everyone on the skyport. Ejecting them would destroy the bridge. She thought of Theogrimm, trapped there, and what he would tell her to do. What the service demanded of her.
Breyla stood, and struck down onto it with everything left in her. Metal screeched against metal, fighting the release, and then the hollow tolling music of the ejecting endrin cores rang through the chamber. Distant detonations sounded from the bridge, the destruction that would liberate what was left of Barak Drak at a price no one had ever conceived of the need to pay.
When the last sickening boom faded, Captain Breyla Endrinsdottir of the Skyguard arose and staunched the urge to vomit. She was harder than that. She had purchased the survival of her people, for now, amid strange and threatening skies, and the people needed the last Admiral they had left.