Warp Token 2 Update

2k words

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The water curled over her, and kicked her legs in panic, but she couldn’t escape its reach. As the wave came down, Skyseeker held her breath.

-xXx-

Roderick dashed up the steps of the galley two at a time. Halfway up, he had to stop to deal with a descending Skaven, blocking an overhead and then riposting with a slash. He slashed the ratman’s knees, and Roderick sidestepped his tumbling body without a look back.

At the end of his climb, the bastion that was the forecastle loomed overhead, the cannons on its port side firing in a thunderous volley. They were firing upon the clanship point-blank, the Skaven ship’s masts crumbling down to its ruined deck, storms of splintered wood flinging through the downpour.

The frantic crew of rats were diving overboard, their furry bodies illuminated from the back by a giant inferno billowing across the clanship’s stern. The insane rats had strapped some kind of boosters to their ship, and whether from overuse or a lucky shot from a cannon, they had malfunctioned, and the flames had grown out of control.

Roderick’s attention was caught by approaching footsteps. He raised his weapon, but lowered it when he saw Von Kessel and his procession of guards approaching from around the forecastle.

“Captain,” Roderick said. “I was told you were being overrun up here.”

“We were, but the Skaven made the fatal mistake of trying to pin us inside the bastion,” Von Kessel replied. “Numbers are all for naught when you get caught in a bottleneck.”

“Have you seen Skyseeker?” Roderick asked. “She was headed this way, last I saw.”

“Your rat would be hard to pick out in all this mess,” Von Kessel said, shaking his head. “I’ve not seen her for some time.”

Roderick was about to defend against the slight, but the sound of crunching would distracted him. He turned, watching the last filmy sail of the clanship snap like a twig, the cloth falling into the firestorm that was the deck. The vessel resembled more a bonfire than a sailing vessel now.

“We need to leave,” Von Kessul urged. “Lothar, Goswin, go down and put every rower to the starboard side. Pick up an oar yourself if you have to, just get us moving.”

The two men hurried off, Roderick glancing back the way they’d come. He went to move off, but Von Kessel placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Roderick, I need you back on the deck. You’ve got more fighting experience than most of my men, they’ll need your help clearing the ship.”

“I must find Skyseeker first,” Roderick protested. “The lass could be in trouble.”

“If the Skaven take control of my ship, we’ll all be in trouble, your SKaven included. If we don’t put distance between us and the rats, we’re going to burn up right alongside them. Let’s worry about that first.”

Roderick wanted to protest, but in the end he relented. “Aye, Captain.”

Putting his worries aside, he returned to the deck, the Captain following him towards the middeck, where a few more skirmishes were still taking place. Von Kessel gave them a wide berth, instead moving up the ship towards the rear. Roderick watched him move up to the steering wheel, shouting orders to the navigators up there.

The Captain placed his gloved hands on the wheel, spinning it about to full lock. The two ships had been mated ever since the Skaven’s initial burst of speed, and the collision had ploughed an entire section out of the portside, but now that the crew had reorganised, the wolfship was coming about.

Roderick lurched as momentum pulled him to the side, the sails above his head raising into the half-position, the great cranes holding them aloft swivelling at a steep angle, the two ends pointing directly forward and backward. The shifting canvas made a sound like the giant flapping wings of a gryphon.

Wind pulled the ship to the right, and the great thumps of the drums warned the rowers below to start adding their strength. Roderick watched as the clanship slid from right to left, its pointed nose grazing the hull, dragging across it with a scraping noise, like fingers scratching at a chalkboard.

The clanship steadily began to distance, and the Skaven who noticed this began to shout in panic. Some tried to leap across the narrow gap, a few unfortunate rats missing and plunging into the sea. Roderick wasn’t sure who he pitied the most, the ones who would become food for the sharks, or the ones that would go down on their burning clanship.

Pockets of resistance were still scattered about the deck, Roderick taking to helping the closest cluster of sailors. His sword fell upon the rats, swift and deadly, cutting them down with practiced ease. It never ceased to amaze him how brutally unforgiving Skaven battle tactics were. Fighting them was almost trivial, one could kill a dozen rats within the span of a few moments, but the Skaven cared nothing for the cost of their losses, relying on sheer numbers alone to overwhelm their quarry. Only a race that was millions, or even billions strong could sustain such strategies, and Roderick wondered if ending a war against the Skaven would ever be possible.

The clanship began to recede, to damaged to give chase, the sails above Roderick’s head hoisting to their fullest lengths. They struggled to contain the torrent of the storm, the thunderheads roiling angrily in the black sky. It had been late evening when they’d spotted the clanships, and now moonlight was barely able to sift through the cloud layer.

Roderick scanned the horizons, wondering what had happened to the second Skaven vessel. The storm was reflected in the seas, waves the size of small hills creating humps in the water. The wolfship’s nose rose into the air as they crested one of these waves head-on, the residue spilling into the deck and drenching men and rat alike.

The Skaven were thinning, at least here on the deck. Without the support from their ship, they were cut off and hopeless. Some tried to jump overboard, but those who didn’t were utterly wiped out, and bodies two deep tall littered the deck in places. The sheer amount of rain diluted the pools of blood, spreading them until a viscous layer obscured the wooden flooring.  

The sailors took a few brief moments to catch their breaths, but the respite was cut short by calls to action. Officers shouted to man the starboard cannons, Roderick turning to see the clanship cruising through the waves, maybe three hundred meters away.

Along its hull, ports opened up, emerald points of light collecting within, the eery glow reflecting in the thrashing waves. The Skaven warp-lightning guns unleashed with electrical static, lances the size of carriages arcing across the sea.

The barrage slammed against the wolfship, Roderick feeling the impacts travel up his entire body. He ducked as debris cascaded over his head, Roderick’s stomach going queasy as a sailor landed nearby, his body missing from the waist down.

The sailors rushed to the cannons even as the Skaven barrage continued, the men grunting as they wheeled the cannons to the bulwark. Roderick rushed to help, his feet slipping in the bloodied rain as he lifted a cannonball off the deck, rushing over to a gun crew and hoisting it into the barrel.  

A gunner approached and plugged the ball with a swab, Roderick turning away and plugging his ears with his fingers. The wolfship erupted in powder and fire, a mighty salvo coursing towards the clanship.

The two vessel exchanged volleys, streams of lightning and cannonballs meeting at the middle before passing. The gunners timed their volleys so that as few shots as possible crashed into the water, which was rising high enough that sometimes the two ships could no longer see each other. The Skaven were not as cautious, firing continuous streams of lightning, the green currents creating little storms of their own as the energy conducted into the water.

The volleys traded, and everything was being destroyed. Chunks of wood were ripped from the deck, the Imperial flags raised above the sails were pockmarked with holes, and the ship creaked ominously as warp-fire continued to plaster the hull. Roderick was no nautical expert, but the extreme amount of punishment the wolfship was taking was starting to worry him.

Yet as much damage as they were taking, the clanship fared no better. The sailors kept their nerves in check, and the guns fired as one each time the order was given, and almost every cannonball aimed true. It became too much for the clanship, a terrible explosion erupting towards its rear, its source a cannon shot hitting some volatile material no doubt.

The Skaven vessel began to slow, its sails furling as raw damage ruined its masts, until only the monsoon was the only thing giving it propulsion. Now dead in the water, and one last glorious volley was all it took to seal its fate, the ship beginning to list to the side until it steeped too far to recover. It tumbled, laying on its side and gently sinking into the depths.  

With the Skaven defeated, Roderick expected celebration, and even though there were a few cries of joy, the men around him didn’t relish the moment for long. As quick as they manned the guns, they departed, some rushing below deck, others taking up buckets to scoop water from the deck.

Men emerged from the hatches carrying bundles of cloth, others hoisting planks and nails. Each man was either a carpenter or a sailmaker in addition to being trained in manning guns, and they all contributed to the repairs.

Roderick didn’t know the first thing about patching a hull, but he could help in other ways. He picked up the nearest Skaven and tossed him overboard, the ratman maybe fifty or sixty pounds. The weight probably wasn’t all that much in the grand scheme of things, but Roderick’s purpose was two-fold.

He found a couple survivors among the bodies, and he hauled them towards the back of the ship, out of the rain and closer to the medical wing, nurses already coming out to tend to the injured.

Roderick made a couple trips back and forth, searching the bloodbath. He had yet to see any sign of Skyseeker, a pang of worry digging into his chest. He checked the forecastle and its surroundings, the last place he’d seen her go, but he hadn’t come across anything. A couple of other sailors were doing the same as he, hoisting the dead rats over the edge. He prayed none of them had mistaken her body for one of the other Skaven…

Roderick decided to check inside the bastion, but as he scoured the first floor of guns, the ship began to list. The angle was slight, but noticeable, and any object not tied down began to slide over the incline. Even a few of the guns on wheels were rolling out of their mounts.

He searched the second floor, finding a few corpses, but no Skaven. He climbed the ladder to the third tier. Nothing. He doubled checked the entire bastion on his way down, that pit of worry in his guts growing. Ten minutes later, and he’d searched the entire bow twice over. Perhaps she’d gone below deck?

The list deepened, Roderick firmly aware off how high one foot raised above the other. He could hear alarmed shouts in the distance, along with a wooden groan that seemed to reverberate throughout the entire ship.

He returned to the mid deck, but the repairing crews had abandoned their tools, leaving giant squares of spare sail to be lost to the wind. Roderick got the attention of the closest man, asking him what was going on.

“We’re taking on too much water,” the sailor said. “the ballasts and stores are flooded. The Cap’s given the order. We’re leaving.”

The wolfship tilted further, as if to illustrate the point. Most of the crew was headed towards the stern, where the life rafts were located, suspended across the sides on pulleys, two to a side.

The wounded were being loaded on first, maybe ten or twenty people cramming into a raft that was designed to hold maybe eight at a stretch. Wilfred was there, his green robes soaked through with rainwater, and despite his frail appearance, he was lifting fully grown men into the seats without breaking a sweat.

“Wilfred!” Roderick called, shoving through the crowds. “Have you seen Skyseeker?”

“No,” the old man replied. “I thought she was with you?”

“We were separated,” Roderick said. “Damn it, where is she?”

“Check the other side,” Wilfred said. “They’ve already offloaded a raft, Miss Seeker may have been on it.”

He doubted she’d have gone willingly without him or Wilfred around, but he checked anyway. It took him a minute to fight through the crowds to the other side of the deck. It was more disorganised here, and with all the rain and the men, it was hard to see, let alone be heard.

He called her name, asked some of the sailors, but neither turned up anything. He glanced down the twenty-odd meter drop towards the ocean below, spotting a life raft being jostled by the storm. Men were compressed onto its tiny frame, if Skyseeker was on it, he’d have trouble seeing her at this distance.

The ship’s tilt worsened, all the water cascading down the deck and off the starboard side. Roderick had to be aware of each step, lest he lose his footing. Cursing, he made his way back to the forecastle for another search.