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almost before it could be seen.
    But her shroud held, stopping the worst of the enemy fire no more than a dozen feet from her hull, and bathing the ship in the sharp smell of ozone.
    Creedy’s scream broke off in a shocked, choking sound.
    Grimm would laugh about that later, if he survived the next few moments. For now, he had a maneuver to complete—and then a trap to escape.
    “Kettle!” he boomed, signaling with his hands at the same time, “complete the dive and take us into the mist!”
    “Aye, sir!” answered the veteran pilot; then he set his feet and hauled on the steering grips, his teeth clenched, his neck straining with the effort.
    Predator had stooped upon the Auroran from above her and to her starboard. Now, as they dived beneath her, Kettle rolled the ship again, far onto her port side, presenting her starboard broadside to the Auroran’s lower hull and ventral rigging.
    Again Predator ’s guns howled their fury, but this time there was a difference. Leftenant Hammond, the starboard gunnery officer, had spotted the enemy’s shroud, and in the bare seconds between that stunning revelation and his crews’ chance to fire he had reassigned targeting. Now Predator ’sguns fired in a rippling sequence, one after another—each aimed exactly amidships on the Auroran.
    Ripple fire was an old tactic for hammering through a ship’s shroud, though it took tremendous training and skill to pull off. The first shot blew aside a portion of the shroud, creating a cavity in its defenses. The second lanced in deeper, into the opening created by the first, before it also claimed its portion of the shroud. Then the third and the fourth and so on.
    The number six gun’s blast left black scorch marks on the enemy’s hull.
    Number seven’s shot exploded almost exactly in the center of the enemy’s belly.
    There was a roar of released energy, a flash of hellishly bright light. A section of hull a good thirty feet across simply vanished, transformed into a cloud of soot and deadly splinters that flew up through the ship above them, hurled like spears by the force of the blast. Fire consumed the hull around the hole, and roiled and boiled through the vulnerable guts of the Auroran ship above them. Shattered ventral web-masts fell from the ship, only to become tangled in their own rigging and in the finer, nearly invisible shimmers of her ventral web. The sudden drag and the abrupt absence of her ventral web changed both the ship’s propulsive balance and her center of gravity, and she began listing heavily to port. The blast had also smashed one of her two ventral planes to splinters, and as she rolled, she began to yaw as well.
    Creedy, Kettle, and every crewman on the deck let out fierce, savage cries of triumph. Though they had by no means dealt the Auroran a mortal blow, she was, for the moment, severely lamed. She was still deadly, with her more numerous guns, bloodied but whole behind her mostly solid shroud, but in a duel between the two ships, Predator would now have the upper hand.
    Grimm didn’t watch the secondary explosions in the other ship, as flickering discharges of etheric energy found volatile crystals aboard the Auroran, probably upon the gauntlets in a weapons locker. He had already flipped his telescoptic back down and was raking the surrounding skies with his gaze and the telescopic lenses, searching for whomever the Auroran had been signaling.
    The second vessel rose out of the mists of the mezzosphere, murky clouds roiling off of her spars and rigging, boiling down off of her plated flanks and leaving her armored sides gleaming as she rose into the harsh light of the sun. The banner of the armada of Spire Aurora flew bold from both dorsal and ventral masts, two blue stripes on a field of white, with five scarlet stars spangled between the blue stripes. Across her prow was painted in gold: ASA Itasca .
    Staring at her, Grimm felt his bones turn cold. Itasca was a ship of legend, with a battle