A fleet doesn’t die when its ships are broken. It dies when its faith collapses.
Five hundred yards to the northeast, hovering above the jagged gray spires of the Devil’s Needle, the two surviving light cruisers of the Third Sky-Flotilla—the Adamant and the Caelum—hung motionless in the morning mist. Their propeller screws turned slowly as their bridge officers stared in numbed disbelief at what was unfolding over Cloud-Rest.
The Vitreous Giant beast, the three-hundred-yard pride of the Grand Senate, the unbeatable aerial dreadnought that had subdued four rebellious provinces without ever touching the earth, was pinned to a mountaintop like a dead moth impaled on a needle.
She was listing fifteen degrees to port, her stern pulled downward by the inexorable tension of the heavy dark metal cable. Her three huge propellers were throwing sheets of white steam and scorching oil as their bearings overheated. Meanwhile, her forward keel groaned with the sound of tearing iron plates. She was no longer a warship. She was an eighty-yard-tall trap that was slowly pulling her own frames apart.
From the bridge of the Adamant, Commander Voren hoisted his signal flags, demanding orders from the flagship.
The only response that came from Malakor’s sound megaphone was a series of garbled, frantic screams:
