Nathaniel’s gut was a snarled knot that churned and twisted itself around his ribs. He forced down the fear and made himself stare into the great, lightning-fractured wall known as the Redan.
Twenty-seven years earlier, a renegade group of outcast guild mages, greedy for limitless power, met in a secret convocation and proceeded to rip a hole in the universal fabric that separated worlds, a small tear but one that grew like a lesion on a plague victim. What squirmed and crawled through made the worst nightmare conjured by a human seem a sweet daydream by comparison.
The Guild responded, using a magic similar to that which made the dimensional rift to build a barrier wall called the Redan . Half the guild mages in service to the Queen died in the effort. Since then, countless airships and crews from every nation defended the wall and the countries it shielded against monstrous abominations known as horrifics. In Nathaniel’s opinion, Hell’s levels didn’t go deep enough to hold these spawn of some dark, pustulant god.
The Terebellum swung to port, and he got his first look at the crippled ships. Two were missing engine gondolas or propellers, another a portion of the control room gondola. They hung in the air, the catastrophic loss of power turning them into helpless prey unable to avoid or flee a strike from the rift’s abominations. A fourth ship spewed black smoke from its forecastle engine. The bow section of its steel envelope was flensed away from the hull from top to keel.
Lightning flashed across the Redan, illuminating a kraken-like thing with multiple bulbous eyes, tentacles edged with barbed spines like harpoons and three mouths. Those gaping maws were big enough to swallow the Terebellum whole and ask for more. Fangs filled the mouths like sharpened menhirs, eager to shred anything that drew too close.
The thing crowded against another equally giant horrific that raked a seven-finger clawed hand along the Redan. The barrier held but tore in spots. Before it could heal itself, a claw inserted into one of the tears and casually gouged away the control gondola from the airship spewing black smoke. Bodies plummeted toward the ocean below. The broken airship yawed first to port before pitching back on her stern to follow those who sailed her.
Nathaniel’s knees turned to water at the sight. The Terebellum was too far away to hear the screams of the falling, but he heard them in his head, memories of his last minutes on the Pollux. They made his ears ring. The weakness didn’t last. Rage, with a hard thirst for revenge, took its place, incinerating every fear and hesitation. No one aboard this ship would die like that. Not the crewmen, not him, not Nettie, and most definitely not Lenore.
Nettie’s voice crackled down the receiver tubes issuing orders. A burst of activity followed her commands. Nathaniel didn’t wait for her to request his help. He bolted for the ship’s center, bypassing the ladder connected to the B deck where the keel-based weapons platform was located. The newly made spirits of crewmen from the other ships flowed behind and in front of him, their ethereal chorus firing the already hot gehenna inside him and making his armor sizzle and smoke.
“Shred them, gunner. Destroy every last one.”
A junior gunner standing by the turret’s entrance gaped at him. Nathaniel halted in front of him. “Where’s the control room speaker tube?” The gunner pointed to a tube attached to a girder.
Nettie’s long pause traveled the entire length of the tube when Nathaniel told her “Captain Widderschynnes, this is the Guardian requesting permission to enter and man the weapons platform.”
He waited, muscles thrumming in anticipation of seating himself behind the pair of Dahlgren guns to blast away at the horrifics lurking in the rift.
“Permission granted.” Nettie’s voice held an odd note—of both pride and a touch of fear. Despite her assurances that he’d have to be the one to bell the cat, she did it for him. “Nathaniel Gordon, if you die again, I will take your sorry carcass and hang it from my ship’s shield spike!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lenore clutched at one of the bed frames bolted to girders in the sick bay as the floor beneath her feet vibrated from the cannon fire the Terebellum spewed into the Redan from her gunnery deck and the rotating turret housed in the weapons platform under the keel.
“Nathaniel Gordon, if you die again...”
The shock of Nettie’s statement booming across the entire length of the airship made her reel.
Nettie had lost her mind. Too many years fighting in the Redan had done this to her, made her see ghosts of loved ones aboard her ship. Lenore was certain of it. Nathaniel Gordon had died five years earlier. No one died twice, not even him.
It can’t be. It can’t be. Horror battled with hope inside her
Everyone knew the renegade scientist-doctor who called himself Harvel had created seven Guardians—men brought back from the brink of death by unnatural experiments, made inhuman and forever changed.
The Guardian of Highgate had fascinated her from the first moment she met him. And he looked nothing at all like her lost Nathaniel.
He tipped his imaginary hat just like Nathaniel. He’d called her Lenore when he thought her unconscious or too far away from him to hear.
He told her he once served aboard an airship.
He recited Tennyson right before he kissed her and brought her numb spirit back to life.
Anyone could chalk those things up to coincidences or her seeing and hearing what she wanted to hear, a woman still grieving for her lost lover. She might have even agreed except for one thing.
“Do I know you?”
She’d asked the question by her father’s grave, confused why such a thing might fall from her lips when logic dictated that acquaintance with a Guardian was an event none would forget. Lenore’s soul had instantly recognized what her eyes had not.
Oh God, Nathaniel. He’d come back to her—resurrected by methods she could only imagine and that made her shudder. Now he courted death again, housed in a gun turret under an airship’s belly, taking aim at the abominations that had ripped him away from her.
A hard bang sounded over the thunder of artillery fire, and the ship jolted sideways. Lenore fell against one of the metal medicine cabinets. She righted herself and searched for the doctor. The impact to the ship had knocked him to the floor. He clambered to his knees before gaining his feet with the help of his white-faced assistant.
“What was that?” the other man asked in a quavering voice.
The doctor, equally pale, straightened his coat and adjusted his skewed spectacles on his nose. “I don’t know, but it can’t be good.” He gestured to the cabinet behind Lenore. “And there’s nothing we three can do about it. Kenward,” he ordered,” see to the contents in there and make sure nothing is broken or spilled.”