The Mercenaries’ Tale – 1.19 Airship Inferno

Gratin hadn’t remained in freefall for long. He began to fly, soaring upwards to find his way back onto the ship.

He didn’t make it, Abaddon dropping out of the hole to meet him halfway, raining death from above with fire lances. Gratin took evasive action, dodging in mid-air in a range of aerial manoeuvres, zipping between the flames as he raced towards his attacker. Abaddon watched as Gratin closed in on him, smirking wildly as the mage approached. Gratin was charging a fire blast but Abaddon was prepared. He gathered his energy and clapped his hands together, creating a static sphere that rapidly expanded until it was five metres in diameter, engulfing Gratin as he closed in on his target. The moment the attack hit him, Gratin’s muscles seized up, paralysis taking hold.

He began to fall, gravity once again the reigning force. He tried to move but his muscles refused to respond. It was as if his limbs had been filled with lead, the tissue unyielding.

Abaddon was following his descent, rapidly catching up until he could reach out and grab Gratin by the hood. Gratin swung violently as Abaddon caught him, the crimson monk raising his prey to eye level.

“I must apologise, Brother, for using such a dirty trick. You put up a worthy fight though, of that you can be proud,” Abaddon told him, adjusting his hold so that he was gripping the merc by the arm. Gratin could only grunt a response as Abaddon began the journey back to the cruise liner.

—

The air mage grunted in frustration as he tried to make the engines start. He had cleared the turbines of the largest chunks of hull but they were struggling to spin. The pilot decided to try giving them a jump start, quickly re-exiting the craft and taking up a position in front of one of the wings. He let out a long breath in a bid to clear his thoughts before moving his arms forward and summoning a gust of wind that battered the turbines’ rotor blades, forcing them to turn. He then manipulated the slipstream so that it looped back over the ship and hit the turbines on the other side, causing them to begin spinning as well. He kept the air flowing, pushing the blades to pick up more and more speed until he was confident enough to attempt the next stage of his plan.

Casting his mind out, he focused on the cockpit and the ignition key still waiting in there ready to be used. With a very careful thought, he concentrated on making the key turn, the air in the cockpit doing his work for him. The key turned and the engines began to splutter, struggling to decide if they wanted to work or not before finally roaring to life, the turbines turning due to their own volition.

The pilot dropped his arms, panting heavily as the magical slipstream dissipated. He found himself chuckling with relief as he jogged back to the cockpit and took his seat at the controls. The plane began to move backwards at his command, the edges of the craft scraping against the walls of the larger ship as it sought to free itself. Slowly it edged its way backwards outside, the end beginning to tip as more of its bulk emerged into the daylight until finally it tipped all the way, the craft falling like a stone as gravity took hold.

The pilot wrestled with the controls, struggling to right the plane and prevent it from plummeting into another crash site. The plane wobbled as it fell, its nose slowly raising up from its descent and barely avoiding smashing into the desert below as it shot upwards, back towards the cruise ship. Elated, the pilot looped around the larger ship a couple of times before coming in for a smooth landing on the deck to wait for his compatriots.

The two mages landed on the decking nearby, Abaddon dropping Gratin unceremoniously on the wooden floor, attracting the attention of the pilot mage who had left the confines of his ship to try and apply some further repairs to his craft.

“Prepare the binding spells! I want Brother Gratin secured. Then contact our client and tell them we’ll be arriving in Galmanoc within the hour to make the trade,” Abaddon barked, the pilot immediately ceasing what he was doing.

“B-but sir! I don’t have the equipment! Jenkins is the Binder!” the pilot protested.

“Well then find him. Quickly,” Abaddon replied with just the right amount of menace in his voice to send the pilot running for the exit. Abaddon sighed in annoyance as he watched the fleeing acolyte leave, folding his arms across his chest.

“To think, these cretins are what the Monastery is filling its ranks with these days. And they may very well advance far enough to become a Finder. The institution’s going to the dogs,” he idly muttered to his captive. Gratin didn’t answer and Abaddon paid him no mind.

One of Gratin’s fingers twitched. This prompted Abaddon to kick him in the face.

—

The crackling in the hallway outside the door was becoming the loudest noise in the room. Blaise had stuffed the bed’s blanket under the chest of drawers against the door to prevent smoke from getting in. She was nervously attempting to chew a fingernail without even realising, instead working away at the tip of her leather glove, a minor indication of a recurring phobia regarding being trapped in burning buildings she’d had since childhood.

The two suits were focused on the one slim window in the room. Gun suit was giving suit-who-had-thrown-crowbar-into-hallway-

“What’s your names, guys?” said Doug, flexing his bionic arm having reattached it. He was fed up of thinking of them collectively as ‘the two suits’, and the latter as variations of ‘the guy with no crowbar’.

“This guy here is Benny ‘the Ballache’,” said gun suit, who was currently stood with both hands wrapped around Benny’s shoe, with Benny’s other foot on his shoulder. Benny had smashed the glass out of the thin horizontal window at the top of the room and was trying to look outside for a means of escape, or someone to call out to for help. Benny glanced down briefly at gun suit, annoyed.

“…‘Ballache’?” repeated Doug. “What, he kicks people in the nuts a lot?”

“Nah, he just doesn’t stop complaining,” explained gun suit. Benny shifted his weight, accidentally clipping gun suit in the ear using his foot on purpose.

“Shaddap,” said Benny. “It’s Benny Spigotoli.”

“And I’m Bert Benolli,” said gun suit. Doug smirked.

“Doesn’t sound very Italian. ‘Bert’.”

“What, you expect us all to have names like ‘Frankie’ and ‘Tommy’? You sir, are a stereotypist¹. I’ll have you know that I’m quite proud of my name,” said Bert, haughtily.

“It’s short for ‘Cuthbert’,” stated Benny, apropos of nothing. Bert accidentally jerked his hands, intentionally bumping Benny’s head on the ceiling.

“Can we get out up there?” snapped Blaise, not listening to any of the small talk and currently engrossed both with the window and the task of gnawing the coating off of the end of her gloved finger. Benny stuck his head sideways in the gap, and then pulled back out.

“It’s not looking good. All I can see is blue sky outside. Guessin’ it’s a long way down, even if we could get out of this tiny gap.” Bert lowered Benny down, and Benny leapt to the floor, landing on his feet. Doug began feeling the wall next to the bed with his human hand.

“Gotta plan,” he said, drawing back and then punching his bionic fist through the wall. He pulled it back out and peered through the fresh hole. The walls were made of two thin boards of wood with a slim cavity between them. With his bionic hand he tore a few chunks away from the gap, the plaster and the wood flimsy to the robotic touch.

“Wanna hand?” asked Benny.

“Nah, I’ve got it.” Doug picked up the fire extinguisher on the bed and began slamming the bottom of it against the edges of the hole. It made for an effective battering ram, and within a few minutes the small hole had grown into something just big enough to climb through. Smoke was drifting in from the adjoining cabin they’d broken into.

“Ladies first,” said Doug, stepping back and gesturing with his hand to Blaise, who didn’t need any prompting.

—

Abaddon circled the prone body of Gratin, glee etched into the curvature of the sneering grin currently sitting on his lips. When he tensed the left corner of his mouth, the rough skin that was once his cheek and lower eyelid would droop slightly, revealing the many cracks of red around his bloodshot eyes.

“You’ve had this coming for a long while, Brother,” he mused. “You were the only one who ever provided real sport when it came to sparring. And then you decided to leave, for some reason.”

One of Gratin’s fingers spasmed. Abaddon lurched over and casually placed one of his feet on the gloved fingers in question. He was fairly certain that Gratin was unconscious, but you could never be too careful.

“Did you think that the Order wouldn’t eventually catch up to you?” said Abaddon, deep in rhetoric. “Perhaps you just didn’t care. Mind you, I can sympathise. It gets so boring, when you’re ahead of the curve, ahead of all the other students. It’s not much of a living, inside the walls of the Order. So closeted, so confining.”

He paused, only to briefly nudge Gratin’s head carefully with his foot. Turning the rogue mage’s head over, catching the light, Abaddon chuckled at the deep piano black of Gratin’s skin under the mask.

“You never did fit in.” Abaddon ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it back, and grinned widely at nothing in particular, bar his own thoughts. “But then, neither did I!”

—

The corridor was now completely aflame. The acolytes had used the self-burning carcass of their colleague, the one who had been first assaulted with a crowbar and then shot in the face, and assisted it with a little extra fire in igniting the corridor. The wallpaper was peeling and bubbling, the air veiled in thick smoke.

At the end of the corridor, at the landing around the top of the stairs, a group of four of them stood, not entirely sure what to do next.

“Job’s a good ‘un²,” said one acolyte, wearing an earring in the shape of an ankh. He clapped his hands together theatrically, as if removing the dust off of them after some particularly dirty work.

“Abaddon’s going to be pissed if he finds out we didn’t kill them personally,” said another acolyte, this one wearing a nose stud.

“Screw Abaddon,” replied the first, “we’ll just tell ‘im that we burned ‘em so badly that their ashes were all that was left, and that they were swept away with the wind.”

“He’ll say that we should’ve scooped up the ashes and brought them to him,” said the second, worriedly playing with their oversized sleeves.

“Just because we’re fire mages, doesn’t mean we’re fireproof,” a third acolyte remarked, this one wearing trendy black tortoiseshell glasses.

“Tartarus is,” said the fourth mage, this one sporting some amazing acne. The hipster mage with the glasses squinted at him, signalling disapproval.

“The point is,” he scoffed, “unless you want to head into that blazing inferno and check for the bodies yourself, we’ll just assume the best.”

“We’re supposed to confirm the kill,” said the second mage with the stud. “Oh bother.”

“Look, we’ll just lie. They’re not gettin’ out o’ there alive,” said the first mage, trying to reassure his comrade (and himself). “Abaddon will have to come check himself if ‘ee’s that worried about it. Come on, let’s get back to the airship.”

“Going back to Abaddon’s the other thing I’m worried about,” griped the nervous mage with the stud. The third mage with the glasses rolled their eyes.

“Look,” he said, crossing his arms to intentionally err on the side of patronising, “it’s not like they can just break down the walls-”

He was interrupted by the sudden loud hammering on a nearby wall, which caused all four acolytes to flinch or startle. It was a repetitive dull thud, something heavy and hard against something not so sturdy. The fake and tacky-looking lacquered woodwork effect in the middle of the wall opposite them began to peel and crack.

“Son o’ a bitch,” gasped the first mage, “what the ‘ell is that?”

“Oh crap, oh crap,” panicked the second mage, hopping up and down and chewing on a knuckle as nerves overtook them. The mage with the glasses grabbed him by the sleeve and began dragging him towards the wall where the noise was coming from, loud even over the creaking of expanding floor beams and buckling walls in the corridor of fire.

“Come on, let’s take a look!” he ordered. The first and fourth acolytes joined, the fourth jostling the nervous one forward as they attempted to wrestle from the hipster’s grip. All four stood in front of the wall as watched dumbly as an outward lump formed in the centre of it, cracked lacquered walling and plaster vibrating with every thud.

“Someone’s trying to get out, I think,” said the fourth mage, scratching at the large spot on his temple. The hipster mage scoffed a snort of derision.

“They’re not going to get out through a solid-”

There was a muffled cry from behind the wall, not of despair, but of anger. Two of the mages gulped in surprise.

“I think,” said the hipster, now beginning to question their own certainty, “that someone really wants to get through-”

There was a burst of plaster and shredding lacquer, and the end of a red cylinder punched through the wall. It quickly retracted, and a shiny clawed hand began pulling at the edge of the hole, breaking off bits here and there. The hand disappeared back in and was quickly replaced with a man’s head. He had a chipper smile on his face, and seemed really happy for a guy trying to break through a wall to escape a fire.

“How’s it hanging, tossbags?” he asked. The mages didn’t know how to react to this, resorting to confused horror. “Hold that thought,” added the man. His head disappeared back through the hole, and the red cylinder returned, sitting snugly in the hole it had created. The mages looked at the cyclinder, then each other, and then back at the cylinder. The first mage coughed awkwardly.

“D’ ya think we should be gettin’ out o’ the way-”

There was a loud bang, and then suddenly the world was filled with white smoke, red metal and pain as the cylinder leapt from the hole, punched the first mage in the face, bounced off a wall, took out the fourth mage’s legs, bounced off another wall, broke the hipster’s ribs, hammered the second mage’s spine irreparably out of shape, span across the floor and then settled and rolled away.

In the confusion the hole had been kicked open bigger by three men, two in suits and the third, the happy laughing man, in a leather jacket. The acolytes didn’t see much beyond this, as a woman with hair the colour of fire hurriedly clambered out of the hole, drew two guns and shot them all. She seemed more concerned about the fire in the corridor to her left. Hipster mage managed to snort derisively as they died, thinking that she could have at least cared a little more if she was going to kill them.

“That was a laugh and a half,” said Doug, wiping the sweat off of his forehead with the back of his normal hand.

“Great, whatever, let’s get out of here,” said Blaise as she ran for the stairs. Left alone with the suits, Doug just shrugged and smiled.

“Offer of a drink is still on if you two are up for it?”

—

The corridor fire quickly leaked over into the rooms lining it, and spread over through open windows outside, where it got the taste for fresh oxygen and quickly took to engulfing the entire top floor of this part of the ship, wreathing it in fierce orange flame. The fire and smoke attracted the attention of practically everyone else on the ship, and the various decks quickly became filled with tourists and travellers running around; some were looking for an attendant to inform, others looking for a way off of the ship. Some simply ran around because that’s what everyone else was doing.

“I don’t think we’re gonna be able to take you up on that drink,” said Benny. The two Mafiosos and the mercs were on the lowest deck under the fire, looking up and watching it slowly envelope the structure above.

“Why not?” said Doug, “I figure we’ve got about an hour before the entire ship burns to the ground³.”

“There’s one reason,” Bert said, pointing across the deck. Two men dressed in shirts and waistcoats lumbered past at speed, their arms full of bottles. The bartenders were looking for a way out and were salvaging what they could.

“I’d take that to mean a free, open bar myself,” chuckled Doug. Blaise gripped his human shoulder with one of her hands, hard. Taken aback by such a gesture, Doug looked at her, only to realise that she wasn’t looking at him. Her gaze was affixed on some point on the floor in front of her, as if she was engaged in a staring contest with one of the nails keeping the decking in place.

“We have to get off this ship. Now,” she stated flatly. She said it with no emotion, as if just reading a fact out aloud. Doug placed his normal hand on hers, and she snatched it back, as if snapping out of a daydream. Doug realised that she hadn’t realised that she’d placed her hand on his shoulder, and the moment of fear in her eyes before her expression returned to her default frown of indignity was enough to tip him off as to not ask why she had an aversion to fire, other than the obvious reasons.

“I’d say that’s another reason,” said Bert, looking over Blaise with one eyebrow raised.

“Alright, alright, we’re leaving. Just need to grab Gratin and find the emergency escape on this thing. Dunno, perhaps we’ll ask one of the attendants what to do,” said Doug. On cue, the burly man in the ill-fitting uniform ran past, waving his arms and ranting hysterically.

“We’re all gonna die, the thing’s automated! They didn’t ever account for a massive fire! We’re doomed!” he raved, running through a nearby set of double-doors.

“Well, that sucks,” said Doug.

“What’re we gonna do to get off this tub? I don’t feel like burnin’ alive, pers’nally,” complained Benny.

“There,” Blaise said, jigging her finger enthusiastically towards the rear of the ship. “Way out. Let’s go.” Without another word she took off by herself, dashing away. The three men spotted what she’d been pointing at. Just above the line of one of the decks, near the conference area, was the rounded tip that unmistakably belonged to some sort of aircraft. Doug recognised it as the same one that had crashed through the side of the conference room, and noted the lack of explosions of flame around that area. Either the fight Gratin had got himself into had ended, or maybe they had decided to settle their differences with a quiet game of chess, which struck him as unlikely. Possibly an arm wrestling contest though. Do mages arm wrestle? he thought, getting completely off-topic.

Not typically, no, interrupted a foreign thought in a completely different voice inside his head. If you and Mistress Blaise could arrive and cause a distraction, I would be most grateful, said Gratin inside his head. I was going to contact the Mistress, but given the anxiety I can detect in her thoughts I didn’t intrude into her mind, he added.

Doug nodded, both in response and as a natural gesture towards coming to a decision on a course of action. He cricked his neck and flexed his arms, the bionic one clacking and clicking as metal rubbed against metal.

“So, guys,” he said, placing his arms around the shoulder of both mafia men in a friendly manner and giving them a friendly squeeze, “what line of work were you in before I completely fucked up your career prospects?”

“Us? We’re just low-level enforcers,” Bert replied as Doug began walking them in the direction of the aircraft. “Small-time stuff. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that we don’t have ambition, but get too far and you open yourself up for attention, you get where I’m coming from?”

“Not really,” said Doug.

“What he’s sayin’ is, climb the ladder too high and some idiot might step in and shoot you in the head. Possibly by mistake,” said Benny, with only a hint of sarcasm. Doug simply grinned and chuckled, and was reassured to find the two suits join in after an awkward pause.

“What’s your speciality, guys?” asked Doug.

“Breaking and entering,” said Benny. Doug thought this made sense, as Benny’s smaller stature was ideal for crawling through basement windows and clambering swiftly up drainpipes.

“Shooting people in the head,” said Bert. Doug remembered Bert’s big gun and felt it digging into his side.

“Hmm, how d’ya feel about grand theft aero?” Doug asked jovially. Bert cocked his gun, Benny cracked his knuckles.

“Feels pretty good,” replied both, at the same time.

---

Post by Sean Patrick Payne | November 16, 2013 at 12:00 pm | The Mercenaries' Tale | No comment

Tags: Abaddon, airships, Benny 'the Ballache' Spigotoli, Bert Benolli, Blaise, Dalminetti Mafia, Doug McCracken, Gratin, magic and mages, Tartarus, the Galactic Finders of the Tserulian Monastery, the Mercs

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