Apostles of Doom

“Very well.” Arg-nargoloth suddenly smiled; Barabus felt an odd chilling sensation at seeing that smile. “I was hoping that would be your position. Our engineers will be quite pleased! You shall receive a friendly warning; you will then leave or we will get serious.”

The mirror went blank for a moment before returning to a view of the volcano a few leagues away. Captain Cranshall shook his head. “Use all sensors to detect D’Orcs coming for us, and raise the shields as soon as you spot anything. In the meantime, we—”

CRUNCH!!!

The mirror suddenly went pitch-black, and then everything went dark, all light on the bridge extinguished. Barabus felt himself suddenly, agonizingly crushed to the point where he could not draw a breath, his heart could not beat. The crunching and shrieking of overstressed metal assaulted his ears even as his breath suddenly returned, and he found himself flung into the air, bouncing agonizingly off the ceiling of the bridge. Light flared out as the bridge was suddenly lit with colorful glowing runes; every surface was covered with them, flaring brilliantly as loud klaxons drowned out the very thoughts in his head.

Barabus slammed into the wall and console to his left, once more taking away his breath, as the ship suddenly tilted forward and to the right. He saw people screaming orders in panic as the world careened around them. Crew members were flung willy-nilly about the bridge, arms and legs broken as they crashed into pipes and railings. The navigators were scrambling to strap themselves into their seats and regain control of the Inferno.

Captain Cranshall, with a bloody gash on his forehead, lurched to the command chair and shouted into the horn to engineering, “What in the Abyss just happened?”

Sir Samwell was helping Dante get to his feet, his right arm twisted in a very unhealthy manner.

Barabus looked to Sir Lady Serah, who nodded to him. “I’m going to the cargo hold where the wizards and priests are. That place has got to be a disaster!”

It would have to be; it was the largest open space in the ship with a large ceiling. He was sure that the priests, wizards and all their apparatus had just been sent flying. What a disaster!

Suddenly he found himself careening across the room as the ship suddenly shook and there was an incredibly loud noise that sounded somewhat like a gong. Metal screeched and groaned as the Inferno seemed to collide with something.

“Captain! The forward keel hit the ground!” one of the navigators yelled as the captain tried once more to strap himself into his command chair.

“Forward geomantic propulsion is down; port propulsion is restarting using backup mana pools. Starboard is online, but primary pool is at one-third capacity. Rear propulsion appears to have been overloaded but is now recovering!” one of the engineers shouted.

“All wards and reflectors to full!” Captain Cranshall yelled.

“All shields and reflectors at full current capacity,” an officer replied. “However, forward geomantic repulsers are offline with the forward geomantic drives.”

“Rat’s lice!” Captain Cranshall cursed. “What in the name of Ponchas Pilas hit us?”

“First Geomancer Komanskus here, sir. It appears to have been some form of geomantic wave or distortion. Whatever it was, it has strained our geomantic systems to the limit. Our drives were able to naturally deflect most of the attack, but they are severely damaged. It’s going to take us some time to repair them,” Komanskus reported over the ship’s internal communication system.

“Can we get out of here using the remaining drives?” the captain asked.

“In theory,” Komanskus replied. “The navigators will need to compensate with the port and starboard systems to lift the front of the ship. We can then use geomantic attraction to reverse our way out of here. At the moment there is no feasible way to propel the ship; not until we get the forward system repaired. Propelling with the rear drives will most likely drive us into the ground, and obviously we can’t push with the front drives; we need the port and starboard to keep the nose off the ground, so all that’s left is to use the rear geomantic drives in attraction mode to pull us out of here. It is going to be extremely tricky as is, since we don’t have much to attract to.”

“Do what you can to get us out of here before they fire again,” Captain Cranshall ordered. The bridge went silent for a moment as people continued to pick themselves up and the navigators and engineers tried to get the ship moving.

“Very, very impressive,” Sir Samwell suddenly said, nodding.

“Yes. A bit more than I would have expected from orcs or demon orcs,” Heron said, shaking his head in wonder and disbelief.

“I suppose,” Sir Samwell said, “but I was actually referring to this ship. Most of your defenses were lowered to search for Talarius, and yet we survived a gravity cannon blast. That is quite impressive.”

Dante looked at him in confusion. “A gravity cannon blast? Is that what that was? What is that?”