Path of Dragons 17 - Chapter 62 - Disaster (Patreon)

Abandoning the fight had been a difficult choice.  It should not have been.  The downed aircraft was mostly destroyed, and to the point where the surviving crew had been forced to retreat to the most well-defended part of the hull.  That was the fuel tanks, which had been built with the Comet’s payload in mind.

The Engineers responsible for designing the plane had known the task it was intended to carry out, and they had built the Comet to withstand all the punishment that came from detonating such a massive and destructive bomb.  The first line of defense was pure speed.  They wanted to drop the bomb and outrun its detonation.

That hadn’t worked.

The Engineers had anticipated that, and they’d built the thing as sturdy as possible.  Extra armor on the hull was the first major step, but the shields were the most important.  They were as strong as any Earth’s Engineers had ever built, only possible because they were able to find a mine full of crystals that could channel far more power than their size seemed to indicate.

Those shields were probably the only reason any of them had survived.

But as powerful as they had been, they weren’t meant to stand up to a long-term assault from deity dragons.  They’d failed.  Slowly, but surely, they had begun to flicker out under the assault.

They’d weakened enough to get Wendell killed.

Then a few more followed soon after.  At present, there were only about thirty members of the crew left alive, and they were holed up inside the highly shielded ethereal tanks, hoping against hope that the dragons wouldn’t come looking for them.

If they did, everyone aboard would die.

“Here,” said January, nudging Lara’s shoulder.  The young Engineer reminded Lara of Wendell, who’d been on her mind for the past two days.  Sitting inside that tank and trying not to make too much noise gave her plenty of time to replay the incident.  To remember his sacrifice.

He had saved her.

There was no doubt about that.  But she couldn’t help but wonder if his efforts hadn’t been in vain.  After all, they were probably going to die anyway.  Maybe she should have given the order to abandon ship and scatter across the island where they’d crash landed.

Lara looked down at the offered bundle.  Rations, and not the sort anyone would eat unless there was absolutely no other choice.  She shook her head. “You keep it.  I’m not hungry.”

“You have to eat,” insisted January.  “For when we make a break for it.  We need our strength.”

Lara suppressed a sigh.  Even if January hadn’t accepted it, she knew the reality as well as anyone.  There would be no grand rescue.  No daring escape.  No valiant fight.  They were all dead.  Some of them just hadn’t realized it yet.

A braver person might’ve said as much, but Lara just took the rations and mechanically ate the tasteless but highly nutritious bar.  As she did so, she looked around the tank.

Despite the darkness, she could see perfectly fine.  One of the curses of being a Pilot was that she could see in just about any condition.  Pilot’s Vision, it was uncreatively called.  The system must have been phoning it in with the naming.  Everyone else got abilities and spells with evocative names.  But Pilots?

Pilot’s Vision was just one example.  The others followed suit.  Pilot’s Instincts.  Altitude Sense.  Augment Munitions.  They were simple, practical names that some found comforting.

Lara wished they were more descriptive.

She chuckled bitterly.

January asked, “What’s so funny?”

“Just thinking about the system,” she answered, her voice barely more than a whisper.  “Do you ever wonder what you’d have done if you would’ve been born before all of this?”

“Robots.”

“Huh?”

“I was doing some research while at university,” she answered, referring to the preeminent engineering college in the world.  Seattle had gone to great lengths to establish that place of learning, largely for its own benefit.  The city was the most technologically advanced on Earth, and they hadn’t gotten there by accident.  It was practically their identity now.

Other cities embraced a medieval fantasy aesthetic, with stone castles, swords, and tall towers that wouldn’t have been out of place in an old movie.  But Seattle had gone in the other direction, reaching for the future instead of clinging to the past.  That had driven the city’s development, both militarily and culturally.

The university was only one example of how.

Lara only half paid attention to the young Engineer’s explanation of robotics and how it had developed just before the world had changed.  “A lot of that research ended up being useless, but there was plenty that we adapted to ethera,” she said.  “But in a way, it all feels too easy.  It’s not, but I sometimes wonder what it would’ve been like to solve problems without the system or magic.”

She looked at Lara. “What about you?” January asked.

“Pilot.”

“Really?”

“I was born to fly.  Doesn’t matter if the planes are powered by burning old world fuel or ethera,” she explained.  Then, she pointed upward, adding, “My place is up there.”

Or at least it had been.  Now, she was stuck inside an empty ethera tank and waiting to die.  She knew it could come at any moment.  All it would take was for a dragon to decide they were worth digging out. 

She clutched her rifle.

It wouldn’t do much good, but when the time came, she intended to make the enemy hurt.  Didn’t matter if it was just a sting, she wouldn’t go down without a fight.

That thought was comforting, after a fashion.

Those good feelings lasted right up until she really took in the sight of the crew.  They were all bandaged and injured. A couple were missing limbs.  One had lost an eye.  And even then, they were better off than the ones who hadn’t made it.

Like Wendell.

Or maybe a quick death would have been better.

She wasn’t sure. 

                          *

“We can’t keep this up, Captain.”

Jessup didn’t look at Corporal Diaz.  Instead, his eyes remained on the giant screen through which he’d watched the battle.  He hadn’t slept since that first attack, and it had left his eyes red-rimmed and a little watery.  He hadn’t eaten, either, save for a ration someone had forced into his hand. 

There wasn’t time for things like that.

He’d spent most of the intervening days responding to one crisis after another.  If it wasn’t failing shields, it was the decimation of the air force.  The loss of the Comet.  The deaths of more than a few good soldiers.

Strangely, the Vyrin deities had been hit the hardest by casualties.  Jessup reasoned that was because they refused to accept the reality of the mismatch.  Instead, they threw themselves into battle, repeatedly and with a fervor Jessup considered on the edge of insanity. 

People had told him that the Bound Sky’s deity trial was something of a dumping ground for talented but slightly unhinged dragons.  The sorts of people who, when part of a real organization, ended up getting people killed.  They were all powerful.  There was no doubt of that.  But their approach was far from conducive to any real military strategy.

When he’d asked how that worked, he had been told that disciplined dragons ended up in much better structured armies.  But oddly enough, the true defenders of the Empire of Scale weren’t dragons at all.

They were drakes and serpentors.

No one had outright said it, but draconic society seemed to accept that true dragons were largely uncontrollable.  They were best left to fight however they wanted to fight, while the real soldiers accomplished truly important objectives.

Jessup had no context for whether or not that was actually true across the entire empire, but what he’d seen in Orveth Kaal was enough to make the claims ring true.  Dragons could follow orders, but their preference was to fight their own individual battles. 

In another situation, it might’ve been possible to exploit that weakness.  However, with the disparity in power between the two sides within the ancestral world, there hadn’t been a chance. 

As much as he hated to admit it, the dragons were winning.

Slowly.  Surely.  Inevitably, they were pushing the Earth expedition’s forces to the brink.  So many had already been lost, and that was just the human cost.  The material price had been much steeper.

As much as he didn’t want to consider the two on equal footing, the fact was that Z-14s were almost as important as their Pilots.  The crystals powering the shields were as vital as the men and women responsible for keeping the cannons going.  On and on it went, and Jessup had to consider each factor as it was, not as he wished it to be.

And every factor told him something he desperately wished wasn’t true.

They needed to abandon the Vengeance and retreat.  Orveth Kaal contained a wealth of resources, both in terms of leveling and materials they could send back to Earth.  However, none of that was worth losing every single person under his command.

That was what would happen if they stayed.

Dragons didn’t habitually take prisoners.  To them, the idea of fighting a war by any sort of rules was absolutely laughable.  If they did take captives, it was to use as leverage against the enemy.  Not because they took issue with the notion of killing people who had surrendered or were incapacitated.

It all added up to his previous revelation.  Either they fled, or they died.

“Begin preparation for withdrawal.  Root holders need to be gathered.  Everyone must retreat to the Vengeance to await exodus,” Jessup stated, his voice even and seemingly calm.

It wasn’t the first time he’d ever ordered a retreat.  But it was the first time he’d admitted complete and utter defeat.   It was all he could do not to slam his fist into the nearest console.

He constrained his anger, though.  It was important for a commander to maintain the proper demeanor, even in a crisis.  Especially in a crisis, he amended in his own mind. 

Not for the first time, he wondered if he’d gotten the job on false pretenses.  After all, he’d met Elijah Hart decades before.  Back then, he’d been working for Seattle, trying to tame the Painted Wastes. 

That had to have factored into the decision to put him in charge of the Vengeance, even if Hart hadn’t overtly said as much. In fact, they’d only spoken a handful of times, and the Druid had never mentioned their connection.

But they both knew.

Jessup only dwelled on that subject for a second or two before turning his attention to the retreat he had just ordered.  Getting everyone back to the Vengeance was the first order of business.  As the combatants, pilots, and dragons fell back, he would need to organize the chain of Root wielders – those people with access to the teleportation system that had brought everyone there. 

Then, they would need to work out a system for who went first.

It wouldn’t be an easy or quick job, but they’d drilled for similar situations.  Nobody had ever expected an all-out defeat, but they at least acknowledged that retreat was a possibility.

“Move, people.  Let’s get this done,” he ordered.

After that, everyone sprang into motion.  The communications array whirred as hundreds of messages went out, and everyone went about their jobs with the utmost efficiency.  It was almost endearing, seeing them so focused.  But then, Jessup thought about why it was all necessary, and any good feelings he’d harbored faded into despair.

The only solace was that it was absolutely necessary, and he intended to save as many of his people as he could.  Even if it left the sour taste of cowardice in its wake.  That was just the cost of survival, though one he definitely didn’t want to pay.

Then, just as their forces began to retreat, one of the radar technicians announced, “Sir, you’ve got to see this!”

Jessup hurried to that technician’s terminal, only to see what amounted to a red blob on the man’s screen.

“What am I looking at?  Malfunction?”

“No, sir.  Machine’s working fine,” the technician responded, tapping the screen.  “I think…”

When the man trailed off, Jessup said, “Spit it out.”

“I think it’s the orcs, sir.”