The Aeronaut's Windlass Read Online Free PDF

record stretching back more than five hundred years, and the Aurorans considered her a fine prize to be given to veteran captains on the fast route to their own admiralty. Grimm couldn’t remember her commander’s name at the moment, but he would be one of the Aurorans’ best.
    Worse, Itasca was a battlecruiser, a vessel designed specifically to run down ships like Predator and hammer them into clouds of glowing splinters. She could take the full punishment of Predator ’s guns without flinching, and her own weapons—some four times Grimm’s own broadside, and nearly as heavy as those of a battleship—would slam aside Predator ’s shroud and destroy the ship and crew behind it in a single salvo. Worse, trusting in her armored plates and shroud, Itasca could stand off and fire accurately from a range Predator could never hope to match. Even worse, she had an armored warship’s multiple power cores, and could store, deploy, and charge a far greater length of web than Predator , so that even with her vast additional mass, Grimm might not be able to outrun Itasca before her guns brought the race to a premature conclusion.
    The only thing they had going for them was blind luck: The Auroran warship had come up from the mist almost two thousand yards away—though Grimm thought it worth noting that if Predator had come down at the standard angle of attack instead of at Kettle’s more daring dive angle, Itasca would have come up barely a hundred yards to port. Itasca ’s captain, whoever he was, had been lucky in positioning his vessel—after all, the Albion privateer could have dived down on the merchant cruiser from any angle, and Itasca ’s captain had no way of knowing from which way he’d come. But he’d outthought Grimm and predicted his attack successfully. That was the kind of luck a smart captain made for himself.
    “Kettle!” he snapped. “Dive, now!”
    The helmsman’s hand was moving toward the throttle in instant obedience even as he blinked in surprise—and then looked past the captain to see Itasca turning her overwhelming broadside to them.
    The ship dropped again, without any maneuvers warning, catching many off guard. There were screams. Grimm saw Leftenant Hammond fly upward from the deck, held down by only a single safety line—the gunnery officer had to have rushed up and down the line of gunners, giving his crews instructions in rapid succession in order to pull off his ripple-fire maneuver. Grimm thanked God in Heaven that the man had remembered to keep one line secure despite his haste.
    For an instant, Grimm thought he’d avoided engaging Itasca entirely—and then, just as Predator reached the top layer of the mists, Itasca opened fire.
    Grimm’s ship was a small target, as ships went: Predator was barely more than a destroyer in terms of mass. She was moving fast as well, and at an oblique angle. Considering how far away Itasca rode, it would take a fiendishly skilled or lucky gunner indeed to place blasts on target, especially with crews whose eyes were used to the dimness of the mists and now rose into the brilliance of the aerosphere.
    Someone on Itasca was skilled. Or lucky.
    The blast of the warship’s heavy cannon ripped a hole in Predator ’s shroud as easily as a stone hurtling through a cobweb. The round burst at the top of the rearmost dorsal mast, and only the steep angle of Predator ’s renewed dive saved her. The explosion tore her topside masts away completely, hungrily devouring her entire dorsal web in a lacework of fire as it went. Shards and splinters of wood went flying, and Grimm heard crewmen scream as a cloud of deadly missiles ripped into the starboard gun crews. Shrapnel hit the main crystal of the starboard number three gun, and it went up in a green-white flash that killed its crew and left a gaping wound a good twelve feet across in the ship’s flank. An aeronaut named Aricson in one of the adjacent crews screamed as the section of deck to which his