(EVENT)

Written in the style of Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo:

“I need eyes outside this damnable storm,” the captain barked into his speaking tube. “Aft station, how long before we clear the bulk of it? Can you—”

The deck lurched. Jean grabbed hold of the railing, the gravity nearly wrenching her arm out of its socket as the floor angled sharply downward. She clambered back to her feet as the floor stabilized. Beside her, the captain was staggering to his own feet, his own fall arrested by the bulk of the aerographer’s table. A trickle of blood leaked out from under his cap, which remained miraculously upon his head.

The speaking tube still clutched in his hand, he lifted it and shouted, “Engineering, what in damnation was that—”

The nearest cloud erupted with light, followed by a booming roar. Jean thought it was thunder at first, until the volley of rounds slammed into the Greyhound’s side, ripping into its thin canvas hull. The floor shook and metal screeched as the airship’s superstructure held. From somewhere came the hiss of rapidly escaping air.

“No,” the captain cried. He was bracing himself against the table, gaping out at the holes ripped all across his airship’s hull. “No.”

Something cracked. Jean turned in time to see spidering patterns appear across the viewing glass, a moment before the glass exploded and blew away in glimmering chunks. Wind and rain whipped against her face. Behind the nearest thunderhead, the bow of the Dreadfall emerged like the mouth of a shark.

A brawny arm wrapped across her chest. She heard a click of a para-pack being inserted into her flight-bag, and then suddenly she was being lifted up into the air, hauled across the deck until she dangled through the broken viewing glass, legs hovering over nothingness. “Tell them,” the captain yelled over the wind. “Tell them it was Dreadfall that came for us!”

He let her go and she was tumbling through the air, the cold frigid wind and rain snapping up at her as she fell into the void.

(INQUIRY)

First sentence inspired by Skyward by Brandon Sanderson:

Fifty leagues away in a secluded watch-post along Islemore’s gloomy western coast, a lonely radarman sat hunched over his listening equipment. A heavy logbook lay before him with the scrawled names of various airships and their current positions. He had been following them for the better part of the night, marking positions as they changed, and eagerly waiting for his replacement to come on during the day shift.

He was listening to the pipping beeps of the airships when suddenly one completely dropped out of existence. This did not engender much alarm at first. Stormy days tended to interfere with the watch-post’s echotubes, but it was nothing a skilled technician couldn’t handle. The radarman adjusted the dials on his panel, which set the bounceback to higher frequency. Still, there was no sound. He checked the logbook. FH-471 otherwise coded as the Greyhound, a cargo zeppliner. Still no pip. Where had it gone?

He considered waking his replacement, but Collins wouldn’t have any better suggestions. He considered notifying the War Department, but the spooks frightened him. He checked the logs again to make sure the last bearing was correct, and that he wasn’t pointing the listening tubes toward an empty patch of sky. he shortwaved the nearest watch-post to see if they had picked up FH-471. Nothing. With no other choice, he fired off a gram to the War Department, and then went outside to get better reception.

The radar shield was a lattice-work of cables and steel bars. It revolved slowly enough so that he managed to climb up by grabbing onto the lattice-work, lugging an amplifier and his audiophones along with him. At the apex, he held up the amplifier at the general location and strained for sound.

He heard it. The distinct ping of a zeppliner. And then with it, a distinct and foreboding crackling that every technician recognized and feared. Fire. FH-471 was afloat but burning. There was a crash in his audiophones. Presumably, a piece of the airship had broken apart and fallen down onto the countryside below. More clunks as other pieces rained down on the landscape. He listened for a few more minutes in transfixed horror, then set the amplifier down and went inside.

His hands were shaking as he made a steaming cup of tea. Then he sat down and sipped it, uncertain how to react. In this state, he nearly missed the chatter of the gram-device firing off a response. He set down his tea, ripped off a piece of the message and read it. it was from the War Department.

Anomaly confirmed. Do not broadcast. Sending over agent to investigate.

He cupped the tea in his hands and stared up at the sky.

(MILLIEU)

Style inspired by Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett:

Coleridge Ames leaned out the driver’s side window of the mobile-car, as it trundled across the rough dirt roads of the Western Aislemore countryside. The car was an aging two-seater steam-coupe, courtesy of the Aislemorean War Department and leased to Ames for the duration of his assignment. Which was, of course, to locate the crash site of one Greyhound, which had been reported destroyed by one of their listen-posts in the region.

Destroyed. Not crashed. Not downed from engine failure. Destroyed. The misanthropic radar-attendant had been very adamant about that point. Destroyed. That implied intentionality. Which in turn meant that the enemy had breached the airwall and come to the homeland.

He was following the radarman’s instructions now, cruising along the country roads to find the zeppliner’s remains and hopefully collect evidence. that would have been easier except the radarman’s directions had hardly been precise. Cor, pretty sure she went down somewhere’s round the Ramkins Estate, the man had said, jabbing a tobacco-stained finger down on a hand-drawn map of the nearby countryside. Big smoking wreck. Shouldn’t be hard to find.

Which would have been true, except that the countryside was fucking enormous. That’s what people didn’t appreciate, Ames thought. It was one thing to fly over the land in a flugcraft. From there it looked so small; the entire island looked small for that matter. It was another thing entirely to have to traverse it from the ground, where searching for even a massive zeppliner was like locating a grain of rice in a dirt field.

A gate with two horns over the mantle. That was the sign of the Ramkins Estate, the radarman had said. Can’t miss it. Except by now he’d been traveling for over two hours and still hadn’t been able to find the estate, much less the zeppliner that was presumably crashed in the middle of it.

Several times, he got turned around on the narrow country roads. The map he carried was more than useless. At every rural farmhouse he passed, Ames stopped and checked for directions; half the time, no one answered—even though he heard movement inside—the other half, the rural folks’ accents were so thick he barely understood what they were saying. At last, he managed, after a lengthy interrogation of one fellow with a particularly rogue brogue, to discern that the Ramkins Estate was just a stretch further down the road. He was nearly there.

Half an hour later, Ames pulled the steam-coupe over to the side of the road where it led through a gate onto a dirt path. Sure enough, two horns marked the place where the gate opened up. He reverse the steam-coupe, then went on through the gate, the sides of the wall clipping his mirrors as he passed.

He had assumed that once he found the estate, locating the zeppliner would have been simple enough. In that he was wrong: the Ramkins Estate was enormous. For a good ten minutes he drove through rolling hills dotted with mooing bovines. The air smelled of manure. Gradually however, the lowing of the cows was supplanted by a different sound: crackling fire. The biodigestant scent replaced by the smell of smoke. Bits of burning wreckage stuck out of the fields like metal candles. Then the steam-coupe crested the hill and he saw it.

The Greyhound had come to rest in the middle of a cow pasture. It had broken up into three pieces, one of which had smashed what might have once been some sort of storage barn. Fires consumed the zeppliner’s silken canvas and little flames ate up the Ramkins pasture.

He slowed his car to a stop. The door screeched as he opened it and planted his boots into rich Aislemorean soil. My God. He said, when he saw what lay among the wreckage. A young woman in a flight jacket, lying in the center of a deployed para-pack as if it were a queen’s mattress-bed. Ames got closer, unable to believe it. There was no way she had survived. But if she had managed to deploy her para-pack, well then, there was a witness, which would make his job all the easier.

His boots crunched the ground. The girl shuddered, her arms jolting up like those of a startled infant. Her eyes fluttered opened. “Are you alright?” Ames said, unable to think of anything better to say.

The woman opened her mouth. And screamed.