The Aeronaut's Windlass Read Online Free

Ship-to-ship combat was the most destructive violence known to man, and everyone on Predator knew it.
    Grimm played his role as he always did. The men were permitted to be nervous and fearful—it was the only sane response to their situation, after all. But fear was a disease that could swell and spread, incapacitating crews and bringing on the destruction that had been dreaded in the first place. The captain was allowed no such luxury as fear. The men had to be sure—not only suspect, but be absolutely certain —that their captain knew precisely what he was doing. They had to know that their captain was invincible, infallible, immune to defeat. That sure and certain knowledge was critical to the crew—it allowed them to ignore their fear and to focus their minds upon their duties, as they’d been trained to do.
    Men who functioned as trained, even in the hellish fury of an aerial battle, were absolutely vital to victory. Such a crew tended to suffer far less injury and loss of life—and Grimm would sooner hurl himself off Predator ’s ventral mastworks than needlessly spend a drop of his crew’s blood. So he did what he could to make them fight as efficiently and ferociously as possible.
    He did nothing.
    Grimm stood calmly on the deck, his lifelines neat and taut, his hands folded behind him. He stared ahead and allowed himself to show no emotion whatsoever. He could feel the eyes that shifted to him from time to time, and he stayed steady, a reassuring and confident presence.
    Creedy attempted to emulate his captain, with limited success. He clutched one rail so tightly that his knuckles had gone white, and his breath was coming too hard through his flared nostrils.
    “XO,” Grimm said quietly, smiling. “Perhaps your gloves?”
    Creedy looked down at his hand and hurriedly removed it from the rail. He spent a moment fishing his gloves from his pockets and donning them.
    Grimm couldn’t blame the young man. This would be his first battle aboard Predator , a civilian vessel. Built of little more than wood, she was not clad in the sheets of brass and copper-shrouded steel armor a military vessel boasted. Should enemy fire penetrate her shroud, every blast would inflict hideous damage upon the ship and her crew alike—and a lucky shot could destroy her core crystal, unleashing a blast of energy that would spread both ship and crew across miles and miles of sky.
    Creedy’s fears were grounded in years of experience upon warships of Spire Albion’s Fleet. Everything he knew told him that he was about to engage in a battle that could very well end in mutual annihilation, that Grimm was taking a horrible risk.
    It wasn’t the XO’s fault that he had never fought upon Predator before.
    It was time. His ship was in position, perhaps a mile and a bit more above the Auroran vessel.
    “Sound maneuvers!” Grimm called.
    The ship’s bell began to ring in a rapid staccato, a last warning to the ship’s company to secure safety lines before Predator went into battle.
    Grimm felt a wolfish grin touch his mouth. He reached up to tighten the band of his peaked cap in preparation for the dive, and nodded slightly to one side. “Mister Kettle,” he said, “you may begin your dive.”

Chapter 2
    AMS Predator
    G rimm stood firm as Journeyman cut the power to the lift crystal’s suspension rig, and Predator dropped from the sky like a stone.
    An attack dive was a small vessel’s maneuver. The actual fall would inflict little damage on a vessel of any size, but the sudden reduction of speed on the far end of the dive could be a severe strain upon her timbers. Larger ships, with their far heavier armor, suffered more from such pressures, and in order to decelerate slowly enough to ease those strains, a large ship had to lose so much altitude that it often could not return to the level of the engagement effectively. A truly efficient combat dive required a brief, severe period of reduction in speed, and Grimm had read