Shadow Road: Book 1 of the Shadows Rising Trilogy

16. After

23rd of Uirra, Continued

I had no idea how many times we were hit, or where, and I only found out how bad it was afterwards. As long as the Ang kept floating, and the Captain kept fighting, and I could still move, I kept working.

It wasn't a matter of being brave. I was simply determined to do something. To fix something. To be perfectly honest, at the bottom of everything I did was the thought that maybe, if I saved someone who would have died without me, I would deserve to live. I would make my own survival worthwhile. It was self-serving desperation that drove me.

Dr. Turragan was the real hero. His courage was genuine, and selfless. He discovered his wife a few minutes after I did. I was helping one of the other women roll the mother of the little boy onto a stretcher so we could carry her to the galley, when I saw the doctor stumble over that pile of fallen decking.

He noticed the lacey nightgown and that bare foot, and went down on his knees, pulling more of the wood off of his wife, the life draining from his eyes as he realized there was nothing he could do. He bent and rested his forehead on hers, framed her face in his hands, tenderly smoothing her hair back. Another exploding round hit then, rocking the Ang and bringing new screams from somewhere above us. Dr. Turragan lingered a moment more, then he pushed himself to his feet and went in search of those he could still save.

We held on for what felt like an eternity, dragging ourselves up after every hit, clawing and fighting our way forward again, driven by a madman who refused to let us stop even when survival seemed impossible. We would have died if Arramy hadn't taken the Ang to Porte D'Exalle himself. That man refused to go down easy. Whoever decided it would be a good idea to sink the Angpixen while he was on it must have had their brain in crooked, if they even made it out alive.

As soon as that first high velocity round came screaming toward us, the Captain stopped playing by the rules.

For every shot that found its mark on the Ang's hull, the Captain managed to evade five, while every shot he returned did an astounding amount of damage. That first round he sent back would probably have been deemed illegal by a peacetime court. It hit the Erristos' quarter deck dead center, tore through half the Erristos' command and nearly wrecked the helm. Every shot after that took something else. One of their two state-of-the-art long-rail incendiary guns was reduced to kindling by another heavy round. The heated shot set fire to their mainsails, and sent their crew scrambling to keep the ship's magazine from blowing up beneath them.

Still, Arramy was fighting a losing battle.

We left Lordstown with only enough crew to keep the Ang moving. He didn't have enough men to handle more than a few guns at a time while successfully keeping out of range of the Erristos, which gave the Erristos an advantage. Although she wasn't as well armored as the Ang, she was one of the Coalition Navy's newest fastships, sleek and maneuverable. She was also well-stocked with those horrible incendiary rounds, and manned by a full, battle-ready crew.

Her Captain started off by sneaking up between the Angpixen and the shore. There was a cold wind whipping out to sea from the peninsula, and she took it, turning to attack us from our port side, obviously intending to drive us farther out where no one would find the wreckage.

Brilliant, really, if Arramy had done what any normal ship's captain would have and fled leeward ahead of her.

But Arramy was not a normal ship's captain. In what felt very much like a fiery game of tag-the-mouse, he turned downwind just long enough to make the Erristos alter course to come after us. Then he kept turning, bringing the Ang across the wind and around to face Lordstown. The Erristos had to scramble into a tight turn of her own to keep herself parallel with us or lose the upwind attack position.