"What the hell happened down there?" Cecil demanded when Palom exploded out of the air on the deck of the Drifting Star. But the question was forgotten as soon as he took in the wizard’s injuries. He looked to the elder, but he and his niece, Ophelia, were still busy with oncoming projectiles. Cecil grimaced, then bent his own magic to the task. He wasn’t very skilled, but he was certainly better than Caitlin had been. It wasn’t a perfect job, but at least Palom stopped looking like he might kneel over any minute now.
"Thanks," Palom muttered when it was done. He struggled to get up, but Cecil pushed him back down.
"No, don’t try to get up, you’ll just hurt yourself even worse. Now, what happened?"
"I think," Palom grunted sourly, "that whoever the hell this guy is, he’s corrupted more than just engineers. I was attacked by a wizard."
Palom related what had happened to the four of them gathered around him. For once, he didn’t embellish it at all.
"Caitlin’s still down there," he finished, bitterly.
"We know," Cecil told him in a pained voice. Palom took a closer look at him; it was clear that only incredible self-control kept him from doing or saying something precipitous. Vashin was biting his lip. Kain was expressionless, which was a bad sign; twenty years ago, that would have been normal. Not anymore. Corvin looked like he was fighting back tears.
"She’s still alive, right?" the latter asked weakly.
"I don’t know," Palom told him sadly. "I just don’t know."
The ship sped on in near-silence. None but the crew spoke at all for the duration of the trip back to Baron.
"Are you going to be all right?" Ophelia asked him later as she sat down, long after the fleet had returned. She and Corvin were in the dining hall. They’d been talking on the ship, once the ninja realized that she wouldn’t stand for empty compliments and other such flirting. It was odd; up until now, girls had been mostly just objects to be admired. Corvin was a great deal like Palom in that respect.
"Yeah," Corvin told her, but he wasn’t sure if he really would be. He had been almost detached since they’d gotten back, not partaking in meaningful conversation or even replying to greetings from people he knew. Even now, instead of eating he had spent the last half an hour picking at his food. Cid had tried to bring him out of it earlier, as had Jurgander. Apparently, now the wizardess was going to take a try at cheering him up. Well, Corvin wasn’t buying it. Right now he just felt like wallowing in his own self-pity.
But where Corvin had expected her to try and get him to talk, instead Ophelia just sat there, eating. Saying nothing. He looked at her closely; black haired and green eyed, a little older than Corvin himself, she reminded him a great deal of Porom. Not in appearance, just temperament.
"Well?" Corvin said eventually.
"Well, what?"
"Somehow, I don’t think it’s an accident that you’re sitting at my table."
She raised an eyebrow at him. "Are you looking for another slap?"
He scowled at her. "You know that wasn’t how I meant it."
"Try not to be so ambiguous, then."
"I’ll be as ambiguous as I want. I’m not in a good mood right now, and you’re not helping any." Corvin knew that sounded petty. He didn’t care.
"On the contrary, I’ve done you more good in the last ten seconds than Cid or that pet monster of yours managed."
"He’s not a pet. He’s a friend. There’s a difference."
She just continued eating silently. Well, that suited Corvin just fine...or so he thought.
"And what the hell do you mean, you’ve done me good?" he asked, finally remembering exactly what it was she had just said.
"You’ve said more to me just now than you have to anyone all evening. Think about it," she told him, getting up. Corvin didn’t have a chance to say anything more before she was gone. He looked down. Another good thing; he’d actually eaten something. He left the last of it there on the table; a servant would get rid of it.
She was right - he actually felt better now than he had in a while. He wondered why she had cared enough to try and snap him out of it.
Corvin headed upstairs. His father and Cecil were supposed to be planning the next move somewhere up there. In the conference room, he thought he’d heard it said. It was time he’d gotten involved in adult matters. A servant directed him to the room, but didn’t follow him in.
Most of them ignored his entrance, but his father saw him when he quietly closed the door. Corvin didn’t say anything, but simply looked Edge in the eyes. I have a right to be here, his eyes said, Don’t try to turn me away.
Edge understood. He didn’t say anything, just motioned to the next chair over. Rydia’s chair. Corvin didn’t know why she wasn’t here, but he wasn’t about to decline the invitation. He sat down, and listened.
"Where are they now, then?" Cecil was asking. He had noticed Corvin sitting down, but didn’t seem to see anything wrong with it.
"East of Damcyan, in the mountains," Porom told him. "At least the one that I marked. There’s no telling if they’re all there.
"All right." Cecil said. "We don’t have time to ask anyone else for help, except maybe Damcyan itself, since it’s so close. Get as many of our troops as possible on the ships, as soon as they’re all repaired. Land them at Damcyan’s eastern port...damn, I forget what it’s called."
"Nestenna," Corvin volunteered nervously. The port had been built when he was a child; in fact, he and his sister had been called on to help build it. Edge had felt that manual labor would be good for him. Corvin had believed otherwise - not that he’d had any say in the matter.
Of the nine others seated at the table, only Vashin looked askance at him for speaking out, and he didn’t mention it.
"Nestenna, then. We’re going in on the ground," Cecil finished.
"Why?" Palom asked.
"Because the ships are going to get overhauled," Cid informed him. "We don’t expect to catch all of them here, and their ships outnumber ours. We can’t keep them from escaping. But if this works, it’ll buy us time while they recover. I’m going to use that time to add a few things to the Red Wings. Corvin, I’ll want you to help with that."
The young ninja wanted to sink into the ground...but at the same time, he was shocked and pleased to have been mentioned in matters of such importance.
Another moment, and he realized that everyone was looking at him. Waiting for him to say something.
"Me?" he asked in an almost unrecognizable voice.
"If you’re old enough to be in here," Cid told him seriously, "then you’re old enough to take part, the same as everyone else."
At the moment, Corvin wasn’t sure if he was ready. A few moments ago, he had been sure. Now, he wasn’t. But, he thought, there’s no way in hell I’m going to turn back now. I belong here.
"I’ll help," he said, in a stronger voice than before. "I’ll help."
"Just one more thing, then," Cecil continued as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened. Corvin thanked him silently for that. "Edge...talk to Rydia. I want her to ask Bahamut to follow them when they leave. He can do that without being seen. I want to make sure that if they split up or do anything else, we’ll know about it. But I don’t want him participating in the actual battle. Too many people would die that way. The idea here is to unbalance them, drive them off, until we can figure out a way to snap them out of it."
"Right," Edge acknowledged. And then again, under his breath, "Right." It was low enough that no one but Corvin could hear, and he abruptly realized why his mother wasn’t here.
There still wasn’t any way of knowing if his sister was still alive.
Damn.
Work began the next day, even before the army was mobilized. For the first time, Corvin became a regular part of the work in the castle. In the mornings, he practiced with his father; the afternoon was less active but no less grueling, as he and Cid experimented with a hundred different devices that might or might not work exactly as planned. After the second time the two of them blew up the workroom, a wizard was kept on hand at all times to deal with whatever injuries might come up. After the third time, they took to working outside to avoid unnecessary structural damage. Airfoils were added to the fleet, metal slivers that made flight much more stable. Weapons were designed specifically to disable an enemy ship rather than destroy it. Insulation was placed around the engines. Together with the magic that kept excessive rotor noise from becoming a problem, it made it almost impossible to hear where a ship was coming from. If one couldn’t see it directly - if, for example, it was hidden behind a mountain or large structure - it might as well not be there. Cid called it "flying silent," and the name stuck.
On the third day, the army was transported to Nestenna, northeast of Damcyan. Sixteen ships was more than enough; three of them were triple-sized vessels designed for just such a purpose. Not much in a fight, but useful. And Cid had plans for those three.
"Have you ever wondered," Cid asked Corvin the day after they reached Nestenna, "What would happen if we made airships smaller?"
"What would that do?" Corvin objected. The two of them had set up a temporary workshop on the outskirts of the city; frequent explosions had convinced the mayor to request that they not work in the middle of town. It was in that workshop that the two of them were now sitting, with Jurgander lounged on the floor, as usual.
"Well, they’d be faster, for one thing. It’s almost impossible for an airship to turn or dodge at all in a fight; the last battle proved that. We just set up shop opposite them and blasted away. If they had had any kind of magical support at all, to counter our defenses, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here right now."
Corvin flinched at that; Vashin’s search party hadn’t seen anything of his sister. He wished he was with them, but he knew that his place was here, this was where he could do the most good. The knowledge didn’t make it any easier, though.
"Okay, so they’d be faster and more maneuverable. But they still couldn’t pack the firepower that a full sized ship can."
"They don’t really need it, not if we have a lot of them. Put two good men in charge of each, and give them one rotor and an underslung cannon. They’d be able to get in closer, strike more accurately. It’s very hard to aim a cannon accurately, but at point blank range there’s no way you can miss."
"No way for them to miss, either."
"Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. Cannon ports aren’t very wide; you don’t have a good field of vision. There’s no way they’d ever see you coming. A group of these things could come up from under a ship, spin around, blow out a whole row of cannons, and be gone before anyone could return fire."
"One hit would be all it takes, in a ship that small. Someone could get lucky."
"Maybe. I want to figure out a way for a crew to bail out safely, if that happens. Some way to get them down without getting killed. But what do you think of the idea?"
Corvin thought about it for a moment. It might work. Then again, it might not.
"I don’t know," he said. "What do you think, Jur?"
"I think that Wrinkles over there knows what he’s doing," Jur replied. "I also think that he’s getting excited. I don’t know what it is about blowing things up that makes you two enjoy it so much, but it sounds like that’ll get you a lot more of it. If it works," he added on the end of it.
Cid just grinned, almost maniacally. "You know, I just realized something. We have one very big advantage that they don’t."
"What’s that?" Corvin asked.
"We have me! I designed and built these things, and I know them back to front. They don’t. They can’t do what we can." Cid just stood there grinning after that completely absurd and yet somehow completely true outburst.
"I think," Jurgander told Corvin, "that your engineer friend here needs to be taken to an asylum. His ego is becoming far too large for his head."
"Agreed," Corvin replied, as Cid adopted a crestfallen face, "Come on, Cid, off you go to the loony bin."
"Not a chance. Come on, let’s just see if we can do it."
Corvin grinned at him. "As long as we’re completely redoing the fleet, why not renovate the regular army as well?"
Jurgander grunted. "Reaching a bit far out, aren’t you?"
"Yep. Seriously, though, I had a couple of ideas."
"Shoot," Cid told him.
"Well...remember that rotorbow we were trying to put together a few days ago? If we could get it to work faster, it’d make a pretty good replacement for a crossbow, wouldn’t it?"
Cid sat back in a chair for a moment. "It might work," he said, "It might. But there’s more on your mind."
"Okay, so there is," Corvin admitted. "But I wanted to give you the least radical idea first."
"I like the sound of that," Cid said, grinning. "Keep talking, Corvin."
And he did, and the two of them planned it late into the night.
"I can’t believe you get to go along with the attack force," Corvin complained. He and Ophelia were standing at the east gate of Nestenna, not really doing anything, just walking together.
"I can’t believe you want to come along," she told him. She left unsaid the fact that Corvin could come along, if he wanted; in fact, his father had encouraged him to do so. The only reason Corvin was staying behind, was because he honestly felt he was of more use here, working with Cid.
Well, not really the only reason. There still wasn’t any word of Caitlin, and Vashin’s search parties were thoroughly scouring the coastal areas near where the Dawnrunner had plummeted into the sea. No one was willing to mention it to Corvin, but they knew that there wasn’t much chance she was alive. Not much at all. They didn’t tell him, but they said it with their eyes every time a new report came in, a new report of failure. The search would be given up, soon. Corvin didn’t know what he would do, when that happened. His thoughts had been bleak for so long that he couldn’t remember what it was like to be hopeful. It had only been a few days, of course. But it felt like years.
Cid wasn’t much help. Neither were his parents; they were in much the same state he was. Jurgander had tried to cheer him up, but then quit, saying it was too depressing even to try. Corvin had tried to cheer himself up, either by talking about it or blowing something up. Eventually, he turned most of his free time to practicing with his twin blades. It was calming. It made him forget. But the feeling never lasted. These walks around town for much the same thing - the young wizardess’s calm attitude and absolute serenity were contagious. He wondered why she put up with him - she’d slapped him twice in the last few days, when he forgot himself and started flirting. Strange. But he didn’t want to lose these calm evenings along the city edge.
"Well?" she asked him.
"Well, what?"
"Why do you want to go with us? It’s a battle. Blood and death. I certainly hope you don’t find blood and death entertaining."
"No, it’s not that. I just...I feel torn. It’s my place to be out there, as an Eblani ninja, fighting at my father’s side. But I’m more useful here. I’m not much with a sword. You know that." There was a bitter tone to the last part; Corvin’s family had always been the best, always had the perfect skill that other Eblani lacked. Except him. Although he was spectacular with thrown weapons, and could hit a two inch circle at half a hundred feet, he had never mastered the traditional Eblani weapon. Maybe that was what allowed him to become so involved in his practice. The desire to be what he was supposed to be.
The two of them walked on.
"Do you really think all those innovations will work?" she asked. Probably just to change the subject...but Corvin liked talking anyway, and so he answered.
"Who knows?" he said. "Most of them are theoretically sound. What I really want to see is how the new cavalry does; the soldiers we mounted on chocobos. If the things panic in a fight, well, I guess we can’t do much there. But it gives our soldiers a height and speed advantage."
"True," she told him, and that was it. Silence spoke louder than words.
"You don’t think it’ll work." It was not a question.
"No."
Corvin laughed. At least she was honest.
"Look," he said, "I’ll make a bet with you. If less than half of the new things work as planned, then you can laugh at me. But if they do, then I get to flirt with you as much as I want for the next week."
"I don’t gamble," she said. But she smiled. And at least she hadn’t slapped him, as he had half expected.
"Anyway," Corvin said when they made it back around to the workshop, "do me a favor, all right? Don’t get yourself killed out there." He wondered if she would catch what he hadn’t said, as well as what he had.
"I think I can take care of myself," she told him. Apparently not. But if there was one thing Corvin knew, it was how little he actually knew of how her mind worked. Misinterpretation or not, he was smiling as he set himself back to work.