Sexy Skyship Babes: Chapter Four (Patreon)

While the Misty Grave was by most standards a fairly large ship, it was not so massive that certain rooms did not have to pull double duty. Much like her crew, a number of compartments within the vessel performed dual functions.

Such as the officer’s mess, which doubled as the officer’s rec-room.

And while the captain had the means to take her evening meal within the privacy of her own quarters – as she had for the previous three nights - it was not at all uncommon for her to be found dining with her fellow officers.

Something she couldn’t put off any longer. Fortunately, Roger seemed rather energized by his trip to the Arrogance and as such would be fine dining alone in her cabin.

“I met your boy today.”

The words cut through the commotion of the drawing room like a hot knife through butter. Cutlery and quiet conversation fell silent. Leona paused in the act of cutting her steak, but resumed a moment later.

“He’s hardly ‘my’ anything, Elsa,” she said stiffly. “He’s a guest of the Avernorian government who happens to be aboard our vessel.”

“Hostage, you mean,” Mary opined in her highland brogue, a certain relish in her tone. “Guests can usually leave if they ask nicely enough. He can’t.”

Leona ignored her. The Highland woman’s antipathy towards the Kingdom was well documented by now.

“How did you even come across him?” The Avernorian asked. “I thought you were overseeing repairs to the launch catapults?”

As useful as that little bit of sabotage had been, Yin had in some ways done too good a job. The thing was a mess.

The captain eyed her subordinate. “You better not have snuck out to sniff around our guest.”

While she allowed a certain amount of laxity aboard her ship, a natural concession to the rather eclectic makeup of the crew and the ship’s role, she still expected her people to see to their duties properly. Proper uniforms or not, they were expected to conduct themselves as professionals.

“Hardly.” The cowgirls shrugged. “I was as surprised to see him as anyone. Stepped out of the connecting hall to find him standing on the wing of one of the Drakes, bold as you please.”

“He has an interest in Shards?” Leona quirked an eyebrow.

While it was hardly the most outlandish thing she’d ever heard, it was a little at odds with the soft spoken young man she’d shared a cabin with.

Then again, he can be surprisingly bold when chooses to be, she thought, blood heating at the thought of their first conversation – and what followed.

Never mind that he’d been the one to initiate things, she’d never been with a lover quite so… eager. Clearly the rumors about the quiet ones being the most feisty in the bedroom were not all hearsay.

“You realize he was probably trying to escape right?” Mary deadpanned. “We’d just scoop him up once he touched down on the ocean if he clambered aboard a glider, but a Shard? We’d have no chance of catching up with him if he got a decent head-start.”

Leona’s heart skipped a beat at the mere thought of that scenario, before reminding herself that they had provisions in place for an eventuality like that.

“Yeah, I thought of that too.” Elsa snorted. “On day one. Which is why all but the Dragon are re-keyed to me and me alone. Hell, I’d let him leave if he managed to get the thing flying – if only so I could see a man flying a craft without any aether in it.”

“Is there anything stopping him from simply transferring aether from the other shards to the Dragon?” Sirrah said offhandedly, the thus far silent doctor’s attention still almost entirely on her meal. “Once it is repaired?”

“Different grains,” Mary said, just a moment before Elsa could. “It would work for about thirty seconds, before catching fire and becoming an incredibly shitty glider.”

“Hmmm,” the mage acknowledged before once more losing interest in the conversation.

“I assume he lost interest after he realized that using the shards to escape was impossible?” Leona asked, pondering whether some form of punishment was in order, before deciding that it was ultimately pointless.

Even if she had thought he was enjoying himself as her captive, it would be a little strange if the man didn’t at least think about ways to arrange for his own escape.

“That’s the strange thing.” Elsa swirled the wine in her glass. “He didn’t. In fact, he stuck around and asked me if it was possible for him to help fix our busted dove. The one with a cannon ball currently sticking out the side of it.”

Mary nearly spat her drink. “He what!?”

Leona leaned forward, intrigued as well. Even Sirrah looked up from her meal with some semblance of interest.

“He wanted to repair the Dragon we got. To help ‘pass the time’,” Elsa said, her Colonial accent coming through strong.

“The high-born twit would be more likely to wreck it further than not.” Mary all-but shouted. “It’s not a piece of furniture for his mother’s summer home. It’s a complex warmachine – and you and he would be well advised to leave jobs like that to people that actually know what they’re doing.”

“That was my plan,” Elsa said with feigned casualness as the glanced at the ship’s engineer and quartermaster. “Before you turned me down.”

The Highland woman scoffed. “With good reason. There’s plenty of real jobs that need doing aboard both our boats after that little scrap. I’m not wasting my or my people’s energy on fixing a dud plane that’s slated for storage or the scrapyards the moment we hit port.”

“Why?” Elsa whined. “Because it’s out of Aether? We’re sitting on crates of aether from the Arrogance. Can’t we use some of that to fix it?”

Leona coughed, interrupting the two. “Aether that isn’t ‘ours’. Just as our guest is a guest of our government, that aether is now also the property of our government. It is not for us to decide how it should be employed.”

She paused, scratching her chin sheepishly. “Besides, it’s the same problem we’d have with the dust in the Drakes, only bigger. The stuff the Arrogance was transporting is unrefined. And Aether-cutting or grinding requires equipment and expertise we don’t have on board.”

Mary waved her drink idly. “Bleh, even if we had the aether to fix it, we’d still be just as liable to scrap the frame the moment we hit port anyway. The Dragon-2K design was obsolete when it was new. Sure, it can carry a lot of weight, but good luck reaching your target with that top speed and turn rate. I genuinely don’t know why the Kinks keep buying them year after year. It’s outclassed in just about every field by our new Long-Horns. Putting it back into service would just be a waste of good aether.”

Leona was a little amused that the prototypical Highland woman referred to the Avernorian built craft as ‘our’, despite being a foreigner until a few years ago.

The diminutive redhead tapped the table. “Literally the only reason I’d see us keeping it would be if the factories back home had a truly massive backlog and the focus was now on just getting more shards into the air as fast as possible.”

Which was incredibly unlikely this early into what was set to be a fairly brief border conflict. Realistically a few ships would be shot down or captured on each side as both countries rattled their sabers, before finally returning to the negotiating table.

War is just diplomacy by other means after all, Leona thought with just a touch of grim cynicism.

Mary sniffed disdainfully. “The Drakes might stick around. Not on our vessel, of course, but somewhere. They’re both intact and fairly decent for Kingdom craft.”

Leona privately agreed, even as Elsa pouted at the loss of her trophies. The Drakes would likely end up being repainted in Avernorian colors and sent to a rearguard position, where they would used until they broke.

The crew’s only pilot finally sighed, giving up the argument. “Well, scrap to be or not, the boy wants to work on it. Knowing that it’s destined for the chop-shops just makes the decision easier as far as I’m concerned. Even if he messes it all up, it won’t matter. It’ll keep him busy and out of trouble.”

“And in a position where you can harass him on a regular basis,” Mary noted.

Elsa just smiled.

Leona sighed. “Well, this isn’t ideal, but I think it’s better that we keep him busy with this than seeking out trouble.”

Some part of her felt a little guilty about effectively wasting her man’s time like this, but that part was squished by the much bigger part of her that was the captain.

“Bleh, you’re all far too permissive of the chit. Letting him work on shards.” Mary shook her head. “Is he too good to make a chair or something?”

Leona rolled her eyes. Woodworking was the currently fashionable thing for men stuck at home to do. Much of the furniture in her childhood home had been made by her grandfather and father.

“He’s just really eager to work on something a bit more interesting than a table. And we, being gentlewomen, are willing to accommodate that desire,” Elsa teased. “Something our boy was so grateful for that he decided to… compensate me for the trouble.”

The captain’s eyes widened as she barely managed to avoid choking on her drink. “You’re joking.”

“I’m dead serious,” the pilot said with a shit eating grin. “In fact, if I hadn’t heard him wax poetic about the designs, I’d say he was using it as an excuse to get close to yours truly, the little shard-satyr that he is.”

Leona was not alone in giving the blonde a deadpan stare, making the Colonial get defensive. “I’m serious. He was clearly interested in more than just shards. He kept staring  at my tits when he thought I wasn’t looking.”

“Didn’t you say the same thing about that tavern worker in Hellsai?” Sirrah noted absently. The one your swore was also a ‘shard-satyr’.”

“The one that turned out to be gay,” Mary finished with relish.

“Yes. That one.” Sirrah smiled happily, utterly ignorant of the angry flush that spread across Elsa’s face.

“He was just saying-”

“I also thought we were supposed to be ‘hands off’,” Sirrah continued. “With the noble boy, I mean. Not the tavern worker.”

Elsa huffed, both at being interrupted and at her reminder of her past folly. “Well, that was the plan, till old cap here went cunt crazy. The pair have been going at it like rabbits since we picked him up, so I’d say that order is pretty well defunct from where us officers are sitting.”

Leona would have flogged an enlisted for speaking about her like that where she could hear them. Hell, she would have had stern words for even an officer if they were said in public.

In private though, especially under the aegis of the rec room, things were much less formal.

Not least of all because what Elsa was saying wasn’t… untrue. In her defense, Roger just seemed to have a way of bringing out the beast in her. Just the way he looked at her when they…

She flushed, before collecting herself and turning her attention back to the conversation just in time to catch the tail end of Elsa’s argument.

“…So, I’m just confirming that it’s ok for me to take a slice of fine Kingdom lad for myself.”

The avernorian frowned. She could hardly say ‘no’ after she’d already slept with him. Repeatedly. A good woman was expected to ‘share’ after all, and that went double on a naval vessel.

Damnit, she should have been subtle about the whole thing, but she’d just had to flaunt it. That was her avernorian pride coming back to haunt her.

“He’s still off limits to the general crew. We do not want him catching something.” She eyes the other women at the table. “I trust you’re all clean? Because if you’re not, we’ll all find out about it soon enough.”

And it went unsaid that the punishment for the woman from which the pox originated would be legendary.

“Clean as a whistle, cap.” Elsa grinned while the captain received quiet nods from Mary and Sirrah.

“And don’t be too pushy.” Leona continued, as if no one had spoken. “Regardless of my… indiscretions, he’s still a gentleman.”

“Oh? But I heard you had him walking around with an open shirt?” Sirrah asked innocently. “That doesn’t sound very gentlemanly.”

For just a moment, Leona wished her chair would open up and swallow her.

“Irrelevant,” she said, leaning on her privilege as a captain.

…Though she did privately make a mental note to get him a proper shirt tomorrow.

-------------------------

“You can’t be serious,” Elwin argued stringently, her voice no-doubt distorting through the spell she was using to communicate with home.

She was currently stood within the captain’s quarters of the fishing boat that had rescued her and her people. She’d spent a not-insignificant amount of time in here over the past few days, fielding scrying spells from the home office on the captain’s small comm-ball.

A strangely expensive thing for a fishing boat captain to have, one that undoubtedly had a story behind it, but Ewin was not about to ask for it. Not when she had more important topics to deal with.

“Do not raise your voice at me girl,” her mother said sternly, her projected image showing that she was sitting behind a familiar desk. “You may be an officer of the Royal Navy but I am the leader of House Miller and your mother besides. I will not be spoken to that way within my home.”

Elwin reluctantly fell silent, years of conditioning battling with her edge to say something!

Content, Lady Miller puffed on her pipe before continuing. “And you would be well advised to remember that your status as an officer in said navy is currently hanging by a needle’s thread, given that you lost not just your ship but her cargo and your brother besides on your very first solo voyage.”

Elwin resisted the urge to point out that said voyage was supposed to be a secret. Clearly it wasn’t. Someone had tipped off the Avernorian’s as to the aether’s presence aboard the Arrogance. They clearly had a leak in the Defence Ministry.

For god’s sake, Leona even had enough forewarning that she’d managed to slip a saboteur aboard.

She said none of that though. Instead she kept silent as her mother stared at her.

“Do you know that I had to waste a not-insignificant amount of political capital to keep that topic from becoming the subject of an official enquiry?”

“You didn’t need to do that, mother.” Elwin managed to mutter quietly.

On the contrary, she’d have welcomed it. If only to silence her own doubts.

She’d run through the scenario a dozen times in her head, but for the life of her she couldn’t see a way to come out on top once sabotage started happening. Redirecting her marines would have only caused them to be overrun sooner. Leaving them to act still saw her security forces cut down by Elsa and her damnable inhuman piloting skills behind a shard – the damn Colonial.

Truthfully, the only thing that Elwin could point to as an honest black and white mistake was not getting her brother to wait on standby – with a guard - near the life-gliders the minute an unknown ship had been reported.

If an official enquiry had found her guilty of gross incompetence… well, at least she would have known. For good or ill, at least she would have known.

“So we just abandon him.” The words felt like ash in her mouth.

“Yes.” The words were spoken without even a hint of emotion. “He’s used goods now in the eyes of the nobility. Soiled. Heavens know what diseases he’s picked up from those pirates.”

“Privateers, mother. And diseases can be cured,” she argued.

Her mother’s pipe left trails in the air as she waved it dismissively. “Yes, but everyone would know – and that means his value has dropped accordingly. To a level significantly lower than the price of his ransom. Now, if they send us a reasonable price for his return, we shall consider it, until then, he is on his own.”

“This myth that healing magic causes impotence is ridiculous.”

“I agree.” Her mother nodded. “Ridiculous or not though, it persists. And I do believe it’s rather self-perpetuating by this point. Men see healers in secret because of it, so women assume it has some basis in truth.”

Elwin felt her teeth grinding within her mouth.

“I suppose that’s that then.” She said quietly. “May I be dismissed?”

Her mother waved her away. “Just be ready for the courser I’ve sent for to pick you up. We have a lot of work to do in the days ahead.” She paused. “And do something about your appearance. You look awful.”

“Duly noted mother,” Elwin muttered as the spell ended.

“That’s that then,” Jenkins muttered from the corner of the room.

Elwin couldn't bring herself to argue.

Her brother was on his own.

"Damn it all."