Seeker

Shinobu clung to the aft end of the ship, his tether holding him in place as the wind and rain tried to pry him loose. His job was to throw Traveler into darkness, then join Quin inside.Text property © Nôvel(D)ra/ma.Org.

He had torched his way through the outer layer of one of the ship’s engines. Just below Traveler’s exterior skin was a tangle of valves and wires and tubes feeding into the engine itself and snaking off toward the body of the ship. The one thing he’d forgotten was a flashlight, and it was difficult to see into the well around the engine—except for the moments right after a firework went off, when it was so bright, he became half blind.

Online he’d found suggested electrical schematics for the famous airship Traveler, but he now realized, when confronted with the actual ship, that those drawings were completely worthless. He would have to rely on his own knowledge of wiring, which was based almost entirely on cutting up old machinery while underwater.

Squinting, he found a network of electrical wires and traced these until he located a bundle as thick as a man’s arm. He reached in with the plasma torch and delicately sliced through the lot of them. Except there was nothing delicate about the torch. It wasn’t just the wires he’d severed. He’d cut through everything underneath them as well—nearly a foot of cables, valves, and other mechanical items that looked fairly important.

Immediately the engine beneath him began to make a stuttering sound, and through the windows off to his left, he saw the lights go off inside the ship. Then the entire vessel lurched, and an alarm began to sound, so loud he could hear it quite clearly out in the wind and the rain.

He waited, clicking the torch off as he checked his weapons in preparation for entering the ship. But the alarm died out a short while later, the lights came back on, and he felt the ship’s engines right themselves. There were undoubtedly backup systems, and backups for the backup systems.

He looked around for other items to cut.