Fregattenkapitän Rolf Jörg Heinemann had been cursing for nearly six hours now —steadily, in three languages and two dialects— as he paced the debris-strewn deck of Katzbalger, glaring murder at all about him.

His crew did their best to steer as clear of him as possible without hurling themselves overboard, working feverishly to contain the fires and keep the crippled vessel moving.

He paused again to look around himself and take stock of his ship, as he’d been doing every few minutes since he’d first come out on deck and seen the damage.

Of a type unknown outside of her home territory, and of a construction far in advance of anything their Untermenschen prey could grasp, the great, crimson ship appeared almost organic — all sweeping lines, fin-like wings, and a surface coating which more resembled a thick layer of skin than plating. She was an elegant, state of the art altitude buoyant aircraft meant to resemble a great predator slipping through the sky.

Or would have been had they allowed her to finish fitting and air trials before sending her out to be shot from the sky on her shakedown cruise.

One of the larger ships of the raiding flotilla, she was just over ninety-five meters from stem to stern boom, with a main deck that was nine meters wide at its widest and sweeping smoothly back to the narrow tail boom. Even her hull was more creature than ship, swelling to sixteen meters at her midline and culminating in a shallow keel, like a shark’s belly.

Her backward curving wings lay higher along her sides than an earth ocean shark’s fins, seeming to flow out from her upper deck just forward of ‘midships as if they’d grown from it. As long again and almost half as she was wide across the beam at her widest, they culminated in large teardrop engine nacelles housing great, eighteen cylinder radial diesel engines turning large, five bladed, variable pitch, pusher propellers that moved her through the air.

Her keel rose up along the last forty-two meters of her rear quarter, even as her deck narrowed, into a long, slender tail boom and an equilateral trio of shorter fins, each with their own nacelles, each of those with their own engines and propellers.

Her designers had meant for her to be swift.

Her deck houses, like everything else about her, were streamlined, with her wheelhouse raised to offer a view over the top of her forward turret and its pair of fourteen centimeter, fifty-six caliber guns.

A pair of gimbaled gun turrets inset within her bow and one in her stern showed the thick barrels of five centimeter L/50 autocannon, four to a turret. Smaller guns were meant to line her rails and hull, covering all quarters. Most of those remained crated in the hold awaiting mounting and fitting which might now never come.

At a quarter of the size of most escort destroyers, she was designed to carry almost as many guns. Slender, elegant and deadly, she was indeed a shark among sharks.

Normally. At this precise moment she was floundering, barely making headway, and still vomiting smoke and poisonous gas from belowdecks, though the fires had been largely contained.

Engine one, he had been informed, was damaged beyond repair, and engine three would need extensive time in a machine shop if it was ever to be expected to work again. There was no telling out here in the open sky how badly the cabling systems which controlled the boom and tail engines were damaged. They only knew the aft fuel lines remained intact by virtue of the ship having not yet blown up.

Engines four and five beneath the main wings might well still be functional for all he knew, but he’d had them shut down and isolated along with the main wheelhouse and all but the self contained emergency electrical generators. He’d had all fuel lines flushed with fire retardant as well.

All of those fuel lines and control cables passed perilously close to the compartments aft of the cargo hold where some fires still burned, and he did not want Katzbalger to share the Englisher destroyer’s fate if that could be avoided. Nor he or his crew, come to that.

He’d ordered the rudimentary aft wheelhouse powered up and manned, but control from that station was extremely limited, particularly on emergency power. If the enemy found them now, with the main guns offline and most of the secondary armament still crated, they’d be little more effective than a target drone, and with approximately the same chance for survival.

Engine two might last long enough to reach some sort of civilization if they nursed it along with sufficient tenderness, and if civilization were close enough. Always assuming they’d actually want to make for any pocket of civilization likely to be found in this vicinity. They were deep behind enemy lines in an undeclared war, and not likely to be welcomed warmly by anyone they happened across.

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gottverdammt that Inselaffe pilot! It was as though he’d been briefed on specifically where to rake Katzbalger to do maximum damage. In a single pass, he’d taken out two of their engines and the main radio mast as well as starting several fires belowdecks with his ruinously incendiary armor piercing ammunition.

That had been no MK IV Lamprey. Not with twin engines and an autocannon turret aft of her main wings. That neither the crew nor their aircraft had lived to finish their second pass was small consolation to the captain of the crippled ship struggling for altitude and headway far from home or any friendly force. One and a half passes had been more than sufficient.

The others had left them behind, of course. That had come as no surprise. There were very specific orders after all. Crippled ships were to make the best speed they could, or, if unable to follow, be scuttled, regardless of whether they were obsolete wrecks or the newest of experimental super weapons.

What the crews of such scuttled ships were to do afterward had remained a somewhat more nebulous subject during the briefing. Presumably command had expected them to hold themselves stiffly at attention, saluting the whole of the way down into the mist sea. Belting out the HyperboräischLied at the tops of their lungs as they fell, no doubt.

Crippled she was, was Katzbalger, but whether she was unable to follow remained to be seen. He’d had a ship blown out from beneath him once before, and once was more than enough for Rolf Heinemann. He would not scuttle her lightly.

“Sir!” Kapitänleutnant Pfalz, the executive officer snapped to attention and offered a crisp salute.

“Yes?” the kapitän demanded hoarsely. He did not even bother turning fully towards the man.

“We have attained sufficient altitude to begin traversing the island,” the exec held his salute.

The kapitän looked up and past the exec, noting that the men had managed to inflate four of the eight auxiliary balloons. Glancing to port, he saw the lip of the island drifting slowly downward relevant to his line of sight. Almost no lateral movement at all. Traverse might be somewhat optimistic at this point, he thought. First they must reach it.

He withheld the curse he could feel rising in his throat. They were fortunate the island was there at all, he recognized. Had the freighter and her escort not fallen into the trap exactly when they had... had they been so much as half an hour earlier or later, it wouldn’t have been. One small kernel of good luck in a barrelful of bad.

He turned to peer at Katzbalger’s stern. Two’s propeller was barely rotating. They were all but adrift, matching speed with the island as the prevailing westerlies pushed both along together. Did they not get a handle on things soon, Katzbalger, with her considerably lesser mass, would be blown clear of the island before they were able to accomplish anything more than distant observation.

He glanced back to the exec and finally returned the salute. “Very good,” he said acidly. “Perhaps you might see to our sole remaining engine before we drift out of range?”

The exec saluted again and spun on his heel, racing to the stern, a cloud of invective trailing behind. Crewmen scrambled to heed him.

The kapitän turned back to the island. It seemed to host a rather imposing peak to windward. Unusual. But he’d already seen the island from below, with its great, eastward-jutting chin, so it wasn’t difficult to understand the orientation.

He wondered idly what had first torn it loose from its foundations at such an odd angle those many ages ago, but dismissed the thought almost immediately. No matter. The place held his interest only insofar as it might prove useful — either as a place to hide for awhile, or as a place to affect repairs.

“Bootsmann!” he called out abruptly.

The airship’s senior non-commissioned officer leapt to his feet, abandoning the task he was overseeing. Tearing the gas mask from his face, he hastened to the kapitän’s side.

“Raise the mainmast,” the captain ordered as the man came to a halt before him. “Get someone up there and leave us find someplace to put down before we fall down.”

“Sehr gut Mein Kapitän!” and the bootsmann turned to complete this new task, yelling out orders to his subordinates.

Engine two stuttered to a halt, and the kapitän squeezed his eyes shut, willing himself not to explode. But then it coughed two or three times and steadied out into some approximation of its old roar. He turned and beheld a pair of oilers —the ship’s mechanics— draping themselves over the nacelle, legs dangling over open air as they coaxed the thing to continued life.

Back in the aft wheelhouse, the helmsman had taken the helm, standing wide-legged between both of the old-fashioned wheels, bringing the smoking wreck delicately about. Katzbalger began inching toward the unknown island at something less than a slow walk.

Engine two had stopped and been restarted four times and the kapitän was considering ordering some sail deployed in spite of the tricky winds and inexperience of the crew in such endeavor before the call came from the masthead.

“Where away?” he demanded, almost overriding the call.

“Thirty points off the starboard bow!” came the reply. “Fifteen — perhaps twenty kilometers!”

“Helmsman!” the captain bellowed.

“Jawohl, Mein Herr!” the helmsman answered. “Changing course! Thirty—!”

“Twenty-five!” the captain corrected, calculating the wind correction on the fly. “We don’t want to come in right over them, you fool!”

“Masthead,” he called back up to the airman atop the mast. “What do you see?”

“A walled compound of some sort!” the airman called down. “Open fields on two sides, heavy forest on the others! It doesn’t look like a military base!”

“Do they have power?”

“Jawohl, Mein Herr, they appear to!” after a moment. “It is still too far to make out details, but there are lights, and they seem steady!”

“Good!” Turning to the helmsman, “Steer us clear of the compound. We want to bring the ship down before they get a look at us.”

Turning back, he found the exec at his elbow. He smiled grimly. “We’ll secure the ship above the trees and go in on foot,” he told the man. “Full compliment, side arms and rifles. We don’t want to give them time to call for help.”

“Jawohl, Mein Herr,” the exec answered and turned to set about issuing orders for the assault.