Read Chapter 5: First Blood in the Clouds

Dawn bled pale gold across the Channel when Pip’s voice crackled up the speaking tube from the engine room. “Deck to bridge, Captain. Three masts bearing ten degrees off starboard bow. Looks like a fat merchant and her little friends.”

Elias crossed the Vagabond’s narrow bridge and pressed his eye to the brass spyglass fixed to the forward rail. There she was—the Marie-Anne, a tubby, high-sided merchantman riding low in the water. Two escort cutters flanked her like nervous sheepdogs, their guns small but numerous. And hanging back, black-hulled and bristling with twelve-pounders, the corvette.

He counted her gunports twice. Thirty. Maybe thirty-two.

“That’s a lot of iron for one chest of cargo,” MacReady said from the helm, squinting at the formation. His weathered fingers never left the wheel. “Mira’s information say anything about a warship?”

“She said the escort was one corvette and two cutters.” Elias lowered the glass. “She left out the part where the corvette outguns us five to one.”

“Then we go home,” Sable said from the aft hatchway, stepping onto the deck with her long musket slung across her back. “There’s a difference between bold and stupid. The Syndicate won’t collect debts from a corpse.”

Elias turned to face her. Her dark eyes held his without flinching, the way they had for every moment since she’d joined the crew. “You’re not wrong. But we’re not going home.”

“Captain—” MacReady began.

“She’s carrying thirty guns. We’re carrying six.” Elias tapped the rail. “So we don’t fight her on her terms. We fight on ours.”

He pulled out the worn chart of the Channel shipping lanes. The French convoy was hugging the coast, using the dawn light to screen their approach through the shallows. But the morning breeze was still—too still for the corvette’s full spread of canvas.

“Wind’s dying,” Elias said. “She’s too heavy to make way in a dead calm. Her cutters are lighter, faster. They’ll come for us if we close.”

“So we don’t close,” MacReady said slowly. “We let them come to us.”

Elias grinned. “Now you’re thinking. Sable—get amidships. Corbin, you’re on the forward swivel. Everyone else, I want every spare weight we can cut on the deck before we engage.”

“Weight?” Pip’s head appeared from the engine hatch, soot streaking his round face. “What’re we dropping, Captain?”

“Everything that isn’t nailed down. And some things that are.”

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The French cutters spotted them twenty minutes later.

They came fast, tacking into the light wind with the arrogance of hunters who’d cornered a wounded deer. The Vagabond hove to as if panicked, listing slightly to port while Elias’s crew scrambled across the deck in apparent disorder.

“Steady,” he muttered, watching the enemy’s approach through the glass. “Let them get close. Closer.”

“They’re hailing us,” MacReady said.

“Wave back. Look desperate.”

Sable fired first.

Elias hadn’t ordered it. But her shot cracked across the water, and the nearest cutter’s helmsman pitched backward, hands clawing at his throat. The enemy vessel veered hard, its broadside coming around in confusion.

“Now!” Elias roared.

MacReady spun the wheel, bringing the Vagabond’s bow into the wind. Ahead, barely visible in the shallows, the sandbar glittered beneath a thin skim of water—the same sandbar they’d used to escape the French patrol the day before.

“Cut the anchors!” Elias shouted.

Corbin’s ax bit into the port anchor rope. The heavy iron plummeted, catching the seafloor, and the Vagabond yawed violently. The sudden drag flipped their hull, and Elias felt the deck tilt beneath his feet until the sky tilted with it.

“Ballast drop!” he shouted.

Pip yanked the release valve. Water and sand poured from the ballast tanks in a cascade of white spray, and the Vagabond surged upward with a lurch that slammed Elias against the gunwale.

Below them, the second cutter was already firing. Iron shot tore through empty air where the Vagabond had been a heartbeat earlier. The first cutter, still reeling from losing her helmsman, swung too wide and scraped against the sandbar, her hull groaning as she heeled over.

The Vagabond climbed. Elias felt the cold slap of altitude, the thinning air biting his lungs. Below, the corvette was turning, too slow, her heavy guns elevating with agonizing deliberation.

But they weren’t aiming at the Vagabond anymore.

They were aiming at the Marie-Anne.

Smoke puffed from the corvette’s bow chasers, and Elias watched the shot arc across the water—not at him, but at a dark shape that had just slipped out from behind the merchantman. A long, sleek courier, fast and low, cutting for open water.

“What the hell is she running from?” MacReady asked.

“Not us,” Elias said. “Her own fleet.”

He didn’t have time to puzzle it out. The Marie-Anne was dead ahead, her crew scrambling to raise sail now that their protectors had scattered. The Vagabond came down on her like a falcon, Sable’s musket cracking twice more, and Elias could already see the chest lashed to the merchant’s deck—a plain oak crate, unmarked.

“Grapple!” he shouted.

The hooks flew. The Vagabond’s hull ground against the Marie-Anne’s side, and Elias was over the rail before the crew had finished tying off. He landed on the Frenchman’s deck in the middle of a shouting, terrified crew.

“This is a Syndicate vessel,” he bellowed in French. “Throw down your arms or die where you stand.”

They threw down their arms.

Corbin were already at the chest, prying the lid with a crowbar. Elias shoved him aside and lifted the lid himself. Inside was a stack of rolled charts, oiled silk wrapped around each one. He pulled one free and unrolled it.

Ink lines traced a route through the high atmosphere, above the cloud layers where no ship had ever been charted. Waypoints marked with French naval stamps. Notes written in a hand so small and precise it had to be an engineer’s.

“Maps,” Sable said, appearing at his side. “Just maps.”

“Not just maps.” Elias pointed to the top of the parchment. A single column of figures ran along the margin, recording altitudes higher than any balloon had ever reached, speeds that seemed impossible. And at the bottom, a name he recognized: the Amber Crown’s mark, the same emblem etched into the broken chronometer still locked in his cabin.

“This isn’t cargo,” he said slowly. “This is a roadmap for something. Something they don’t want anyone to find.”

Aboard the corvette, signal flags fluttered.

“She’s turning,” MacReady shouted from the Vagabond’s deck. “Full broadside, coming about!”

“We’ve got what we came for,” Elias said, stuffing the charts into his coat. “Cut the lines! Cut the lines!”

The ropes snapped. The Vagabond staggered away from the merchantman, sails cracking as MacReady threw the wheel hard over. The corvette’s guns came to bear—

And the courier ship that had fled, that sleek dark shape, swept low between them.

Elias caught a glimpse of the man on her deck. A French officer in a coat of dark blue, standing straight-backed at the rail, watching them with an expression that was less fear than calculation. He was young. Too young to carry that much weight in his gaze.

A flag flew from the courier’s mast.

The same Amber Crown.

Then the courier was gone, cutting north at impossible speed, and the corvette’s captain was left with a choice: pursue the raiders who’d taken the cargo, or the officer who’d just abandoned his own fleet.

The corvette turned north.

Elias watched her sails shrink toward the horizon, then turned the charts over in his hands. The French officer hadn’t been escaping the Vagabond. He’d been waiting for them to take the chest. He’d wanted them to have it.

The question was why.