The Ballast Vents

The starboard grav-prism groaned under the belly plates, its sapphire glow pulsing thin and sickly against the mountain fog. Vasco Tenreiro gripped the brass spokes of the helm, fighting the port drag where the shattered steering spar trailed shredded canvas into the empty air. Ahead, where the jagged teeth of the northern gorge should have opened into the dead zone, three iron-hulled imperial corvettes hovered in tight echelon, their copper prow-lanterns cutting sharp yellow cones through the cloud.

"Prism output down eighteen percent," Tiago called from the binnacle grating. He hauled on the starboard trim tackle with both boots braced against the deck coaming. "The resonance field from Monte Sombrio is dead. We are flying on residual charge, Captain."

Vasco adjusted the elevation lever by two notches. The rudder shuddered, wood groaning against iron pins. "How much water in the lower tanks?"

"Four hundred gallons forward, three hundred aft," Bento yelled from the companionway hatch, his apron soaked with brine and grease. He held a brass sounding rod in one fist and a heavy iron cleaver in the other. "If we dump the tanks now, we won't have enough drinking water to reach the western spires!"

"We won't need drinking water if those corvettes put twenty-four-pound roundshot through our forecastle," Vasco said. He turned his head toward the chart table lashed behind the mizzen mast. "Ysabel. Give me a floor."

Ysabel did not look up from her drafting slate. Her fingers, stained with ink and damp chalk, traced a sharp descent curve across the parchment. Wind whipped loose strands of dark hair across her brass-rimmed goggles. "The fortress logs show a thermal shelf twelve hundred yards below the gorge rim. It is unanchored air, completely outside the beacon network, but the moisture gradient creates a dense cold pocket. If our prisms catch the heavy vapor down there, they will bite."

"And if they don't?" Tiago muttered, eyes fixed on the imperial warships drawing closer.

"Then we discover how deep the mist really goes," Ysabel said, setting a brass weight squarely over the coordinate line.

The lead imperial corvette fired a ranging shot. The dull thump of black powder rolled through the mist, followed by the high shriek of iron tearing through the wind. The ball skipped fifty yards above their maintop, ripping away a secondary signal halyard.

"Clear the bilge lines!" Vasco roared. He spun the helm hard to port, letting the wounded frigate slide into the lee of a drifting cloud bank. "Bento, knock out the emergency release pins on both reservoirs! Tiago, take the wheel and hold her dead center. When the weight drops, do not fight the dive."

Bento vanished down the hatch. A second later, the sharp clang of an iron mallet echoed from the hold, followed by the deep, rushing roar of seven hundred gallons of water bursting through the bottom scuppers.

The Esperanza leaped upward for a fraction of a second as her deadweight fell away, then gravity took its tax. Without the counter-mass to balance the failing prisms, the frigate rolled forward on her beam-ends. The nose pitched down forty degrees, fifty, then sixty, pointing straight toward the roiling white abyss below.

Wind screamed through the shroud lines. Vasco threw his weight against the main throttle lever, locking the grav-prism apertures wide open. The blue glow along the hull flared violently, fighting the sudden plunge, but the thin upper air gave no purchase. The frigate dropped like a stone slipped from a sling.

Behind them, the imperial corvettes fired a full broadside. The smoke blossomed orange against the upper cloud deck, but the iron shot passed harmlessly through the empty pocket of air the Esperanza had occupied three seconds earlier.

The ship plummeted through the cloud ceiling. The gray mist turned to a blinding white wall of driving moisture that soaked the decking and coated the canvas wings in glistening frost. Vasco felt the cold press of the dive against his chest, the sheer vertical speed pinning his coat against the bulkhead.

"Six hundred yards!" Ysabel shouted, her arms locked around the chart-table stanchion. Water streamed from the brim of her oilskin coat. "Approaching the thermal floor!"

"Prism coils are cooling!" Tiago screamed over the roar of the wind. "Moisture is choking the core!"

The sapphire light beneath the floor grates flickered, then dimmed to an ember. The deck dropped another hundred feet in dead fall, the stomach-churning lightness of total weightlessness lifting Bento halfway out of the hold hatchway, clinging to the ladder rung with his apron fluttering around his ears.

Vasco did not reach for the trim lever. He waited, watching the needle of the barometric pressure dial sweep past the red mark. The moisture here was thick, heavy with mineral dust from the sinking plateaus.

"Now," Vasco muttered.

He slammed the lower vent vanes shut with his boot heel, trapping the cold, dense air inside the keel induction ducts.

The effect was instantaneous. The grav-prisms hit the high-density layer and resonated with a sound like a cathedral bell striking underwater. The sudden return of lift slammed the entire crew against the decking. Wood groaned along the frigate's keel as the hull flattened its dive, skimming barely fifty feet above the deadly, impenetrable mist of the void floor.

The Esperanza leveled out, slicing a broad furrow through the fog, safe beneath the visual range of the high imperial fleet.

"We have steerage," Tiago gasped, wiping frost from his eyelashes as he pulled himself up by the wheel. "Prisms holding at forty percent resonance."

Bento dropped back onto the deck with a heavy thud, gasping for breath while checking the iron cleaver still clutched in his hand. "My split peas survived the ceiling, but my knees are finished."

Before Vasco could answer, a high-pitched metallic scream tore through the fog bank directly above their wake.

A small, single-winged imperial patrol skiff burst through the cloud deck at terminal velocity. Its blue keel prism was flaring wild, erratic sparks of violet light, trailing plumes of black smoke from its burned-out steering manifold.

"Hard to starboard!" Vasco yelled, grabbing the wheel beside Tiago.

The frigate lurched, but the runaway skiff was falling too fast. The light craft clipped the Esperanza's aft outrigger with an ear-splitting crash. Pine spars snapped like dry twigs, and rigging lines whipped across the quarterdeck in an explosion of severed hemp. The skiff's iron prow lodged deep into the frigate's stern gallery, wedging tight against the deck rails.

Vasco drew his short boarding cleaver from his belt, stepping cautiously over the tangled cordage. Bento scrambled up behind him, raising his cleaver, while Ysabel sheltered her slate against her chest.

The crumpled canvas canopy of the skiff popped open.

A man in a singed gunner's coat tumbled out onto the wet deck planks. His uniform bore the silver chevron of the Fortaleza da Agulha fortress battery, his hands blistered with charcoal burns and his knuckles bloodied. In his left hand, he held a heavy brass-bound slate covered in fresh firing calculations and beacon telemetry.

The intruder pushed himself up onto one knee, coughing up gray mist. He looked past the leveled blades of Vasco and Bento, his dark eyes locking onto Ysabel's charts.

"I need to speak with your navigator," Lucano Pereira said, his voice raspy against the damp wind. "Your steering spar is gone, your lift is dying, and the prince's cruisers have locked the high corridor. But I have the coordinates for the dead zone crossing."