It’s 1846, in an alternate fantasy world where the Fey have rubbed shoulders with humanity for centuries. A world where Napoleon’s Empire of France unified Europe under its control. At least until the Elven Dominion emerged from the shadows and launched a deadly war against humanity, starting with magically engineered plagues, and then following up with a wave of conquest. Now, the Dominion rules the skies of Europe with its deadly airship fleets.
Except for a few intrepid pirates who prey upon their shipping and cause havoc wherever they can.
Germaine Gavreau and his bodyguard orc, Yagnar, are aboard Isabel Moreno’s pirate airship to test a secret gadget on a real mission. They get a far more thorough test than they bargained on.
Check out Chapter 1 of Storm Chaser…
Chapter 1: Hunting
Germaine Gavreau was thankful for the shelter of Vingador’s bridge, cramped and drafty though the ten-foot-by-twelve-foot space might be, as storm winds lashed the Portuguese airship and sent rain pelting against the bridge’s windows. Far better to be inside fiddling about with Leblanc’s bastard contraption than outside like the sodden crew members he could see at the bow, huddled around Vingador’s bow chaser cannon.
Shaking his head, he turned his attention back to Leblanc’s etherial detector. The device was a hodgepodge of seemingly mismatched components, with pipes and silk-wrapped wires running between the wooden cabinet that housed the device’s viewport and its power source, a greenish glowing orb about a foot in diameter mounted within an intricate, rune-covered metallic framework.
The invention was the product of Italian and French scientific developments shoehorned together with a salvaged Elven power crystal. The viewport displayed the presence of nearby objects, like other airships, within a range of three miles. In practice, though, anything beyond two miles was iffy and generally tended to be large, like the Alps, which towered above their current altitude of about 6,000 feet.
All Germaine had seen in the viewport were big yellow shapes that represented the nearby peaks and a much fainter yellow fuzziness that represented the ground far below. Which was why he was surprised when he spotted a small shape coalescing out of that fuzziness near the two-mile circle.
“I’ve got something,” he called out.
Captain Isabel Morena glanced over from her position at the helm next to the pilot, Nuno Rego. She was a slim, muscular Portuguese woman in her early thirties wearing a dark brown peacoat, black trousers, and a white tunic with ruffles down the front, with her signature twin Lefaucheux six-shot revolvers holstered at her hips. “About time,” she said, smiling. “I swear I was starting to wonder whether that little contrivance of yours had any use a’tall.”
“Me, too,” Yagnar rumbled behind him. The orc loomed over Germaine as he leaned forward to peer at the viewport.
Germaine rolled his eyes at his bodyguard’s comment, though he was relieved to have finally detected something, too. Section Six, the clandestine organization for which he worked, had arranged this extended field test of the device. It was also his first mission in the field, so he was doubly eager for the effort’s success.
The captain had earned the attention of Section Six thanks to her success as a pirate—although she preferred the term privateer. She’d spent the last five years harrying the airships of the Elven Dominion that had conquered Napoleon’s forcibly unified Europe back in 1841.
Isabel ambled over for a look. “I think your bodyguard craves excitement, Monsieur Gervais,” Isabel said, chuckling merrily at the towering orc. “So, have you got me a fine, fat prize for the taking?”
“Look over here, just inside two miles…”
“That yellow blob?”
“Yes.”
“Five points starboard and down, Nuno. We’ve got a fish to catch.”
“Aye,” Nuno responded. “May I remind you, we are well below the peaks of the Alps?”
Isabel laughed merrily. “Where else would we play hide-and-seek with our enemies?”
***
Minutes passed as Vingador closed with the target. Through the bridge windows, Germaine saw the boarding party lining up on the starboard side of the deck under the command of Lt. de Camp, Vingador’s executive officer. They were a rag-tag lot, a mix of nationalities garbed without any semblance of a standard uniform. Some of the men hung fenders over the side of the airship.
Germaine rechecked the viewport. “We’re approaching level with the other ship,” He felt the shift as Nuno reduced the airship’s descent angle. He still found himself amazed at the mobility and responsiveness of modern airships, a far cry from the ungainly balloons and stately dirigibles he’d seen in the air above Paris as a child. Humanity’s newest airships sported bottom-mounted lift panels that leveraged magitech stolen from the Fey.
A minute or so later, Nuno said, “Enemy in sight!”
Isabel gave them both a sharkish grin. “Right, let’s see if we can scare these bastards into surrendering. Nuno, I’ll signal from the bow.”
She bustled out into the rain. A few seconds later, she was gesticulating as she talked to the gun crew for Vingador’s fore-mounted cannon. She made a signal with her left arm that Germaine couldn’t interpret, but Nuno reacted by leveling even more.
The enemy ship coalesced out of the curtains of rain, looking like a pregnant duck with half-furled wings. Most Elvish cargo ships mounted their lifters on the end of massive struts that extended out from each side of the craft.
Smoke billowed from the cannon as a warning shot headed downrange. The deck shook as the cannon slammed back on its metal track. The wind of Vingador’s passage quickly dispersed the smoke.
The cargo ship began slowing as it turned sideways in front of Vingador. Germaine estimated its length at about 220 feet, almost three times as long as Vingador at 80 feet. As it turned, somebody aboard pulled down its Dominion flag. Cheering erupted outside.
Isabel burst through the flaps. “They’ve surrendered; let’s sideslip so we can grapple them. “Aye, Ma’am,” the pilot responded.
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