being beaten because we actually made it back from said pointless mission; thank you master may I have another? It’s a no win kind of existence, isn’t it? Makes one want to crawl back inside the ooze you’d been summoned from.”
Whatever Ship was going on about, I could hardly hear as the torn speaker had rendered his voice in little more than a fuzzy whisper. I just focused on peeling away the duct tape from the thruster air supply hose.
“Look, what I’m trying to say here is I never flew so fast or soared so high as when I was your flycraft, Jazz’s Ship. And even though it ended in a horrible flaming failure riddled with pain, folly, and shame, I’m glad you bound my soul to this wacky machination. Thank you, Jazz.”
The water inside the cabin was up to my knees. I got the tape peeled away and the hose sections separated. I used the tape to secure the supply end of the hose to the back of my chair frame.
“Well, don’t you have anything to say?” Ship asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “full power to the starboard thruster.”
“What?” Ship screeched through the crackly speaker. “Did you hear anything I said? Were you even listening to me?”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Why you skinny, hairless orange monkey butt! You dire daughter of a demented scrudd leper! You ungrateful lout of a birthed life-liver! If I ever get my body back, I will inflict upon you a pain of torture so intense entire new languages will be created just to describe how indescribable the pain you suffered was!”
Now there was the demon I knew and hated. I glanced at the chrono-timer on my wrist. I had two and a quarter hours until backlash and I had to keep Ship focused, no matter how touching a speech he’d made. “Okay, pause the insults until after our bloody flaming failure and give me that thrust.”
Ship’s voice modulator speaker kind of buzzed. I took it for a, Humph. “I already told you that the automatic controls are off line, and already told you that the starboard thruster’s been destroyed. Apparently you really don’t listen to me at all.”
I didn’t intend to, but a smile broached my face. “I hear more than you think. Hold on.” I grabbed the starboard yoke and jammed the throttle to full. High pressure air poured into the cabin.
“What do you think you’re doing now, you moron?”
“Not sure,” I said. “Thinking like a submarine.”
“A what?” Ship asked, his voice ascending in an impressive display of pitch despite the failed speaker.
“Forget it. The plan is that the incoming air will semi-pressurize the cabin and keep some of this water from coming in.”
“What a brain,” Ship said in the most sarcastic tone he could manage.
The water level seemed to be holding and I felt like our decent had slowed. I rotated the imager screen closer to me as the cabin had grown very dark. “Okay, let’s see what we got on the imager.” The screen was blank.
“Low mallow-power systems are off line—keep up.”
Well I’ll be, Ship was sulking. I smacked the top of the instrument panel with an open palm. “Come on you rusty bag of bolts,” I said then smacked it again.
“I don’t see what that’s—”
On the third smack the instruments came to life, filling the cabin with an eerie glow. “How about that?” I gloated.
“Well,” Ship said, “you didn’t have to hit me that hard.”
I stared at the screen. “All I see here are lots of blobs.”
“It’s not made for underwater use, dum-dum. You have to use the heat pattern mode.”
“Funny,” I said in the most sarcastic tone I could manage. “Too bad I can’t see colors then, isn’t it?”
“Oh dear, yes, I’d forgotten all about that, such a shame.” Ship paused to enjoy his quip. “Whoa.”
“Whoa, what?” I asked.
“Something warm and really, really enormous is headed this way.”
“Oh great, probably a ginormous squid, or a blue dragon, or a kraken, or, oh hey I know, a zombie kraken. Maybe I can bring that back to life too.”
“It’s not,” Ship said, “no tentacles, and too big.”
“Too big. What on Mirth is bigger than a kraken?” I asked more to myself then it dawned on me. “Wait. No. That’s perfect.”
“I don’t see how any of this is perfect.”
Tons of air bubbles were escaping though the cracks in the canopy. “The LeVioletathan, our air bubbles would have attracted her, like the bubbles she uses to force food to the surface. Here we go.”
I maneuvered Ship slow ahead and watched out into the near blackness all around us. It took longer than I thought it would have, but a massive cloud of bubbles rose up and enveloped us.
“Lords of the firery realms!” Ship shouted. “It’s making a feeding rise, we’ll be devoured!”
“No we won’t. Hold on!” I drove Ship forward letting the natural turn from his single thruster move us into a big circle. Sure as ice something, the very biggest something on all of Mirth, slid past us making a direct rise for the surface. I waited, my palms sweating on the yoke handles, my heart pounding. This would take perfect timing. I teethed my bottom lip, rashly calculating precisely how long it would take for her to pass. I eased the throttle back a bit. I’d seen her from afar several times, but up this close, watching her immense body glide past us, it was truly impressive, and daunting. Mirth’s only violet whale this side of the dimensional gap, a leviathan the size of thirty blue whales. And something of a hero as she’d stopped Allahzilla’s attack on the Eastern lands. She ate him.
It was like waiting for a freight train to pass, watching car after car roll by and trying to guess exactly when the caboose would roll into sight. “There!” At last the massive tale cruised by and I pushed Ship into its wake.
“What in all of Hades’ glory do you think you’re doing?” Ship asked, his voice desperate.
“Just keep your eye on the imager screen. We need to know where we stand the moment we’re out of the water.”
“You idiot. We’re never getting out of this lake. With all this water inside and only one operational engine—we’re too damn heavy.”
“Not for her,” I said holding Ship’s blunt nose right behind her hundred meter wide tail. The controls were heavy in the water, and the single thruster kept wanting to push us into a turn. I grunted and gritted my teeth with the physical strain. If this was going to work, I had to keep us in the center of her wake and as close as possible. Of course the closer we were the more danger we were in of her accidentally tapping us and smashing Ship to bits.
“Whoa!” Ship and I cried out simultaneously as the LeVioletathan’s tail suddenly moved up. We spun in its wash and bubbles flooded the canopy, blinding me further. I felt a new rush of water, probably her tail flapping back down, and we spun in the opposite rotation then, caught in her draft, breached the surface.
I had to admit, it was magnificent. I was glad I’d lived to see it. The whale’s tail fin was just ahead of us; gallon sized drips of water trickled off. We were free flying, making a slow turn. She outstretched her hundred foot long flippers like wings, though they looked tiny compared to the rest of her. Her immense head arched down.
Ut-oh. When this thing breached it made tsunami sized waves; we needed some distance.
“Ship, what’s on the screen?” I shouted and hit the starboard thruster for one short, full power blast. I let that and the momentum we’d picked up from drafting the whale shoot us into as steep an accent as I felt we could handle.
“Nothing’s on the screen except the big guppy.”
With a crash unlike anything I’d heard, louder than thunder, louder than an erupting volcano, the LeVioletathan reentered the Greater Lake. Water shot up and caught us beneath our wings, forcing us higher into the air. “Holy scrud!” I cursed, struggling to keep control as Ship rocked and rolled in every direction. We were riding an untamed geyser. The cracked canopy was awash with water and foam. “Ship, help me out, I’m blind here!”
<
br /> “Me? I can’t see a thing and you have the controls, so do something already!”
“As you wish.” Despite the danger of flying straight into a cargo vessel, a passing flycraft, or Toerang’s line of sight, I hit the throttle hard. “Woah!” I shouted, pressing back into the seat. I held the damaged rudder hard to port trying to compensate for the single thruster, but instead of turning, we were kind of sliding sideways so I leg go of the throttle and activated the docking thrusters.
I hit the manual canopy release and raised the enclosure, letting the water spill out. Then I pulled the safety clips, removed the canopy slide pins and, with a good shove, pushed the ruined canopy off and watched it fall. I saw the circle of massive waves rolling out from where the whale had dived. The water scoops would protect the city, and it really was quite a thing to have seen.
“What the Hades? Why are you dissecting me?”
I gave Ship another burst of thrust, just enough to keep us flying but not enough to spin us around. I got my feet back in the pedal straps and worked his control surfaces. I looked all around. With the canopy off my line of vision was clear.
“Oh Jazz,” Ship sang like he was calling me home for dinner. That meant bad news. “Might want to check your six.”
“You might just want to tell me since I can’t check my six because your ass is so huge.” Okay, I’ll admit it, I gloated.
“Toerang,” we said together; not hard to guess. Now clear of the water, the image on the screen sharpened into focus and sure as sludge