Chapter Eighteen
Deceptive Drift
“The city is being destroyed!” Roared out one enraged pirate.
“Aye pipe it down.” Captain Sally said calmly.
The other pirates in the control room turned cat eyes to her in incomprehension as to her lack of concern as to the state of their coveted city that they had waited so long in order to recover from the waves that had sheltered it.
“What! You doubt my leadership? Was not I the one who came up with the idea of the scroll and thus the means by which we preserved ourselves? Did I not submerge the city so that it would still be here for us? Cities can be rebuilt and our numbers can be increased, but what is happening right now is priceless! Do you not see it? You accursed idiots look! The forces of this sunken world are impaling themselves on our energy bolts. In a few more minutes time we will rule here uncontested!”
“What of the Sea People? They have strong faith in the Creator and they’ve stood in our way before!”
“Hah! What Sea People! Do you see them out there dying? They’ve sent others to die in their place. We’ll deal with them when the time comes, but for now my brethren let’s finish what’s left of these pathetic humans who dare to oppose our will!”
The scene beyond the burning remnants of the city was a grim one. Both navies were almost gone and those not sunk were largely devoid of the availability to fire upon the city anymore.
The remaining battleship in the sea of conflict had managed to find a blind spot where the remaining towers could not get a clear shot at it. It had halted all forward progress as it pounded away unmercifully at the city.
Captain Sally gritted her teeth savagely as she felt the city shake beneath her at the impact of the sixteen inch shells. The truth was that the damage to the city was astronomical considering the antiquated technology that they had been attacked with, but the enemy fleets had pressed the attack courageously and the continued shelling was beginning to pay off.
Several systems were malfunctioning. Normally she could have rotated the city to take out the battleship located in its safe haven out of range of the remaining towers, but side propulsion was off-line.
She’d have to initiate forward primary propulsion, which meant disengaging the mooring anchors that held the city in place. She hadn’t wanted to do that because it meant the city would be free to drift upon the open water, but the battleship had to be taken out!
She engaged forward propulsion and warning indicators lit up everywhere. Pirates throughout the room lifted their heads in consternation as the screens came alive with red data lines.
The pirate who’d doubted her before turned on Captain Sally savagely and bellowed out, “It’s the Sea People! I told you they were a danger! They’ve undermined the city and fried our propulsion units with their lasers!”
“Shut up! What exactly have they done? Are they cutting holes and sinking the city?”
Another of the possessed crew spoke up, “No, they’ve focused on rendering us without navigational power and they’ve destroyed the underwater mooring system. The city can’t be re-submerged! They’ve cut all the mooring lines but one. They mean to cast us adrift!”
“Why? What purpose would that serve?” Captain Sally bellowed out in question, but she spied her answer when she glanced out a side window of the control room. There beyond the drifting smoke of war was the beginning evidence of what the Sea People had been about from the start.
An electric storm was fast approaching. The city adrift and without navigational power would be broken up into pieces by such a storm.
The city had to remain moored or there was no chance of survival, as the Sea People had seen to it that the city could not re-submerge beneath the safety of the waves.
In frantic alarm Captain Sally turned back to the others and screeched out, “Heat up the water at the last mooring junction! Fry their lungs out! We must stop them from cutting that last mooring cable!”
Power was redirected to the one corner of the city still moored and dumped into the seawater in an electric fury that soon caused the seawater to boil intensely. The Sea People hard at work with their one technological attainment being the lasers that they had fashioned out of focalized crystals were pushed back by the suddenly scalding water.
The pirates were on to them. Some tried to push through the hot water to finish the job of severing the last mooring cable, but the water was too hot and several perished as their lungs were overcome by the heat of the water that they breathed.
They had no other option but to pull back and help their brethren, who were busy rescuing as many of the sailors in the water as they could.
“They’re pulling back! It worked!” Said one pirate looking up from his screen and Captain Sally’s new controlling spirit knew a moment of savage joy.
The city would go on! Their manifest destiny was not over yet!
Laughing with fiendish joy she saw that the city had pivoted enough on its last mooring cable to put the still firing battleship within range of the surviving towers. She pivoted the attention of all of the towers onto the battleship and awaited in anticipation of watching its destruction.
“Look!!!”
Distracted by the shout of alarm Captain Sally glanced off from her intended focus of destruction. Her eyes found the new threat almost instantly as it surged toward the city out of the burning oil slick of the first battleship’s watery grave site.
“Switch all fire to that ship! Now!!!” She rang out in hellish desperation.
“We can’t! It’s out of range of the remaining towers!”
“What???” Captain Sally burst out with and then in dawning comprehension she realized that the slight drift of the city on its remaining mooring cable that had brought the battleship back into range had just made the approaching cruiser out of range.
In sickening horror she watched as the smoking cruiser that shouldn’t even be floating given how much damage it had taken, plow into the corner of the city where the last mooring line was located.
All of the pirates were knocked from off their feet as the cruiser exploded magnificently. The screens within the room went dark and all firing from the city’s towers ceased.
The pirates had but made it back up to their feet, when they were jerked flat on their backs again. The city was adrift and moving quickly as it was ferried along by some unknown source.
Captain Sally raised up to see that the city was but half its former size as the cruiser had split a large part of it off with its explosion. Looking back she could see that the cruiser and several parts of the city were already submerging beneath the waves. Looking forward she got a glimpse of the backs of several powerful underwater beasts. They were the Sea People’s dragons and they were dragging the city directly towards the fast approaching storm that ran the length of the horizon.
Moans of despair erupted around the control room as the realization that their long escape from the prison of the Deep was about to come full circle. There was no escaping from it this time by sealing themselves into an object of dark inspired thought.
The moans turned to wails as the storm picked the city up on a wave ridge only to drop it in the next moment into a deep trough. The city broke up under the weight of the downward crashing waves and sank forever into the deep.