How had this happened? Everything,
everything, from that fateful day onward, had been done to
avoid this...
Gripping the flight controls with desperate urgency, Captain Cordell of the pirate airship
Red Corsair willed her ship and herself to maneuver faster and more deftly than she'd ever done before. The stress of constantly shifting momentum would have battered her senseless against the cockpit had Delahaye not deployed a safety harness upon the first reckless maneuver Cordell had performed... and she was now somewhere between her fifth and her twelfth, having well and truly failed to keep track as her heartbeat thundered in her ears. Yet the enemy was keeping up, move for move... and an abrupt shower of sparks and warning klaxon going off suggested they might even have the upper hand.
"Starboard fuel injection system has been hit." Delahaye's computer-generated voice was perhaps the only calm and collected thing in the cockpit right now, standing in stark contrast to the ill-tidings she bore.
"Ring circulation compromised. Main engine efficiency dropping to 85%."'Damn it all!' Cordell thought, sweat mingling with blood on her forehead. The enemy had come seemingly out of nowhere, their sensor baffling leaving the Red Corsair blind until the first shots struck -- a complete surprise attack, and one that included a nasty collision with a bulkhead for the young pirate. She'd been too bold, too careless,
especially to come this far north over open waters. Now it seemed
painfully obvious that the rumors she'd been chasing down about illegal shipments of military-grade hardware from Atlas had been nothing but a trap from the start.
Well, not
entirely untrue. There was, after all, that other airship. The one keeping up with every twist and turn she made, tracking every tight zig-zag and calling the bluff on every feint. The one that looked almost
exactly like hers -- a cobalt-blue and smoke-gray painted devil straight out of hell. She knew Atlas still had old V-21 Arrowheads mothballed in storage, sure, and it wasn't impossible that the military could have upgraded them to the level pursued by Project Thunderbolt. What she was looking at through the rear cameras was
entirely possible... but it was also entirely
wrong. The other airship had no military markings, in fact it had no markings whatsoever. There had been no call with a demand to surrender; Cordell
knew Atlas military protocol, and her attacker was
not following it.
This was why her father had stolen the prototype and destroyed the plans.
This was why she'd never stopped poking about in the black market to see who would have wanted it in the first place.
This -- a swift, potent combat airship potentially ending up in the wrong hands. Apparently it had all been for nothing.
They hadn't prevented it. They'd just given it a
target.
"Del, is there anyone else in local airspace? Anyone? Even a gods-thrice-damned Atlas patrol?" She quickly keyed up the manual shut-off to the damaged connections and routed in the emergency backups, one hand dancing across buttons and flip-switches while her other jerked the flight stick hard left.
"One. A cargo carrier, ten clicks out. Scans indicate they may possess moderate-to-heavy armaments.""It'll have t' do. Lock in their coordinates an' send out th' following distress signal on auto-loop." He paused for a moment, focusing to pull the Red Corsair into a steep climb as she hit the under-slung wing thrusters at full tilt.
"Whomever's receivin' this -- this is Captain Cordell o' th' Red Corsair. I've come under fire from an unidentified airship an' sustained significant damage. Help get this bastard off'a me an' there's fifteen crates o' industrial-grade Dust in it fer ya, no questions asked. FIFTEEN. CRATES. Onboard me ship, goin' down with me if'n this backstabber gets their way." Despite whipping into a corkscrew and diving hard left, the Red Corsair took another hit from the enemy ship's guns, causing the Red Corsair to shudder from the impact and Cordell to lurch forward against her harness with a pained grunt.
"Damn iiiiit!"Turning in the direction of the cargo ship, the pirate switched off several safeties and accelerated for all her ship was worth. Gauges spiked, needles shot into the orange and teetered on the brink of red. She knew her ship could take this, even in its damaged state... but not for long. If this didn't pay off then she'd risk burning out the fuel cells and induction coils -- the Red Corsair could
literally overload and go dark, plunging into the churning, frosty waters below.
It was time to roll the dice...