“Lilia… How many Dragons are left?” Demi huffed when he saw the beasts swirl around the towers.
“I read... thirty… still counting…but most of them don’t seem to be going for us. They’re leaving.” Lilia sighed back. Around her, the supporting crew hammered commands into turret controls for the side of the Cerberus. Their bullets climbed the trails of fleeing Dragons, into the sky.
“Captain Demi,” Howard surprised all other listeners by tuning in, “Draw them up. Sophia, stay low, and out of sight.” Both Demi and Sophia nearly asked what he had in mind. Both stopped themselves when they realized they knew already.
“Let’s do it,” Sophia nodded. She dialed back her jets to sink below the tops of the city’s tallest towers. Demi’s ship screeched upward at his command. He kept a keen hand on his turret controls. He rained a cone of Chrysum light down over the legions of scaled wings below. He took out four, then five, before the rest converged their own counter-flames of silver fire on him.
Demi rocked from one side to the next. He spiraled around silver storms and flipped backward over light beams from hot throats. He fired back whenever he could, but rarely struck his mark with the sheer volume of Dragon flame. Jupiter’s floating city shrunk beneath him. He strafed and shot as one, if only to attract more attention. A swarm of beasts converged in a tornado of scales, wings and fire beneath him. Demi’s craft rattled with the impact of a single Chrysum breath.
“Howard, now!” he screamed at the fatal signal. Howard slammed his fist on audio controls of the Cerberus. The high-pitched tone of Chrysum disruption rang through the artificial atmosphere around Nimbus. The shriek of fifty Dragons followed just after. Demi’s trigger seized, unable to fire another Chrysum bolt.
Sophia, however, was out of range below. She turned her ship’s nose up. She aimed and fired every weapon at her disposal until empty, in immediate succession. Silver light surged up through the Dragons in innumerable forms. Rays, bolts, cannonballs and bullets of searing Chrysum tore every beast in the sky to cooked hunks of scale. The exchange ended as abruptly and spectacularly as it had begun. Silence befell Nimbus, along with a deluge of bloody reptilian body parts. The Chrysum frequency ended. Demi, Sophia, Lilia and Howard hung frozen at the sight of what they’d done.
“No…Dragons in the atmosphere,” Lilia ended the long quiet. That, however, didn’t change the ones that had fled beforehand. Lilia could see them
, just faintly through her viewing screen, silver streaks ripping across the abyss.
“They use the immense gravity of a Gas Giant like Jupiter and their own Chrysum fire to travel that way. I’ve read about it in other analyses, but never seen it…”Howard muttered, more to himself than Lilia. “We’ll never catch them now. Unless we know where they’re going.”
“Great! Now get over to the Launch Station,” Kalus tuned in, panting, “Cause there are still Faders on our tail and a whole bunch of civvies that want off this floating hell.”
Chapter Seventeen: Deepcloud Pillar
“This is the last group,” Kalus told his sister. Lilia smiled as they walked past her, from the roof of the SkyLine Launch Station to the open boarding hatch under the Cerberus. Every room in the ship was filled to the brim with refugees from Nimbus.
“How… How do we decide that?” Lilia murmured. Her grin faded with her strength as the downtrodden survivors of the silver fire from below filed past her. “There are still signals around the town.”
“They could be Faders, right?” Kalus countered.
“I guess,” Lilia considered, though her face wasn’t half as sure as she hardly sounded. Kalus grabbed her shoulder to jostle her from the trance.
“How many times did we run that announcement? They’ve had all the time we could give them. If anyone’s stuck somewhere, they’ll still be there when you get back. You get them then,” Kalus assured her.
“You know… I hate this. I can’t believe you’re making me leave,” Lilia growled. Her sea green eyes latched onto her Captain as he escorted the last stragglers into the Cerberus. “You really think you can handle this down a man?”
“I think the higher degree of danger is somewhere else. Wherever those other Dragons were going when they fled the battle. I suspect we’ll find little more than a clue of where to go at their base,” Demi explained to her, which he’d already done twice.
“See, Lil? You’re the one with the important job,” Kalus piled on before she could object again. “If I could fly a clunker like that, I’d do it myself.” Kalus thumped a fist to the side of the Cerberus. Lilia turned to watch the very last of the refugees file inside - a child no older than six.
“Alright,” she sighed her resignation at last.
“So where is it?” Kalus asked her a second later. He held out the black inscription of his invitation from Donellanus as a gesture alone. Lilia had long since uploaded the coordinates into the computer of the Cerberus for a search. She grabbed Kalus’ arm to point to the bottom row of numerals.
“The coordinates didn’t make sense to me at first. I plugged them in time and again, and it was Nimbus. Then I realized what this number at the bottom is. Altitude. Their base is beneath the city. Somewhere in the clouds.” Kalus and Demi shared a nod of confirmation with one another, then Sophia, who stood guard a few feet back from them.
“Hey,” Kalus called to his sister, just as she turned to leave. It was so slight a gesture, the twitch of a hand, yet it carried more weight than either of them could reconcile. Hey. We should say something, since we’re separating in a life-threatening situation. “I love you, Lil.”
“Stow it till you’re back on the ship,” Lilia snapped at first, but she lightened as he stared. She opened her arms to squeeze her brother one last time, like she used to every time she returned from a scrapping trip. “Love you, little brother.”
“This is that place you mentioned. A while back,” Kalus realized. “The one they’re building down instead of up, toward the hypothetical surface of Jupiter.”
“Yeah. Deepcloud Pillar,” Sophia reminded him. She led the group across the bridge to the circular platform that bobbed around its base. The only sound as they crossed the eerie city was the eroding crackle of Chrysum Fire. Even that muted now, as they departed the furthest outskirts of Nimbus to the most unsettling building any of the Dogs of War had ever seen.
The way most of the towers in the city were built in one direction gave it a certain illusion of orientation. Where all others climbed the way of Nimbus’ up, this one plunged straight down. It reached past the edge of the city’s terradome, and into the solid wall of swirling storm clouds below. There was but a single floor above the base platform around it, containing only a door and stairwell. Kalus’ stomach went the way of Deepcloud Pillar as he followed Sophia inside.
The entry chamber consisted of a platform of brushed glass, a brass railing, a survival suit pickup station and a staircase spiraling down. Sophia went to the pickup to slide the door open. She tossed a suit to Kalus, Howard and Demi before pulling on her own.
“Is this building not regulated?” Demi asked. He pulled his sleeves on tight and hooked them into the accompanying gloves.