Icebreaker: A Fantasy Naval Thriller by Glynn Stewart

Author:Glynn Stewart [Stewart, Glynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faolan's Pen Publishing
Published: 2022-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

Seventy hours and seven hundred kilometers after they’d entered the ice pack, the continual grinding and cracking sound of Icebreaker smashing her way through the ice was starting to wear. For most of those hours, Coral had seen nothing of interest.

Well, she’d seen one herd of six-legged wildlife that had bolted as Icebreaker had approached. A distant relative of either horses or silkcows; even her sight hadn’t been enough to see details before they had crossed the horizon.

The ice pack was getting thicker every day. Every hour. It had gone from under half a meter the first day to over two meters now. But still the battleship made her way forward, the ice giving way before them.

“Sir, we have a problem,” the lookout shouted down.

“What kind of problem?” Coral demanded as Nevin turned to reply.

“Storm on the horizon, approaching fast from the west.”

Coral traded a look with her flag captain.

“It shouldn’t matter at this point,” Nevin pointed out. “We’re already at minus thirty and in the middle of the ice. What’s a few flash-frozen floes in the channel we’re breaching?”

“Another twenty-degree temperature drop isn’t going to help much,” Coral warned. “But I see no reason not to continue. We’re close.”

“Agreed.” Nevin stepped away to give further orders, and Coral turned her gaze to the west, to see if she could spot the storm.

There was a familiar dark smudge on the horizon, and a chill ran down her spine. There was always a sense of malevolent power to the hellfrost storms—and now they had to be approaching their destination. It couldn’t be coincidence that a new storm was bearing down on them now.

Turning away from the storm, she realized there was something else on the horizon. A different smudge to the north.

“Lookout, what’s to the north?” she shouted up.

There was a moment of quiet and then a surprised voice shouted back.

“Land, sir! Or maybe a cliff made of ice…but it looks like land!”

“Shout if you spot any kind of shelter,” Coral ordered, then turned back to Nevin.

“Captain?”

“I heard. A sheltered bay, even if it’s already covered in ice, will give us a starting point. And, well…” The Captain shook her head. “We’re about where the Commander said the Great Fleet came from. If there’s land…the City may exist after all!”

“The City exists, Captain,” Coral assured the other woman. “It might not be here, but it exists. And we will find it—but right now, those cliffs are potential shelter from the storm, and even if we think we can handle another round with the hellfrost, I’m not going to turn down shelter!”

They could survive the storm either way—assuming the storm passed, and from some of what she was seeing around them, she wasn’t taking that bet—but the cliffs would turn the odds further in their favor. They hadn’t lost anyone from the battleships yet.

Coral would risk her crews when she had to. But if fate gave her a shield for them, she was damn well going to take it.

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