Wheezing and panting from his long exertion, Bitterlich switched back into bat form and swooped around the ship as it finished capsizing. He landed on its side as a furry lizard and peeked in the gunports. Within was the sort of carnage bloody-minded poets and propagandists dreamed of: crushed bodies and blood from stem to stern. As saturated as he was in the humors of battle, Bitterlich could find no pity for them; they had attacked l’Empire. They had attacked Isabelle. There would be survivors—there always were—but they would rue the day they had attacked Bitterlich’s people.

Bitterlich scampered along the outside of the ship until he reached the cabins, then he bounded into the chartroom. With the whole ship flipped sideways, everything that hadn’t been secured, including the navigator, had slid to the lower wall. The officer had been crushed by sliding debris.

Bitterlich perched on the orrery’s pedestal, now sticking out horizontally from the floor. It was an older design, without a vaporgram tank or an anisometric pressure array, the sort of thing that had stopped being built in l’Empire half a century ago. The whole ship was aged, and while it was true that some ships stayed in service for a century or more, it was only due to constant care. This brig plainly hadn’t seen a refit in quite some time. Its boards were warped and infested with puff worms. Perhaps slaving was not good business in Skaladin these days.

The orrery had been depressurized, and Bitterlich was not surprised to find that the hyperbaric sympathy berths had been emptied, the chartstones taken to prevent precisely the sort of looting Bitterlich had in mind. Bad luck if they’d been destroyed.

He dropped down to the smashed navigator, who presumably had been in charge of disposing of the chartstones, and hoisted the bloody beam off his chest. A search of his person turned up no chartstones there, either. Whatever had happened to them, they were out of Bitterlich’s reach now.

Bitterlich flew back to the Thunderclap. Despite the horror and the gore that painted their legs to the ankles, the aeronauts on deck whooped and hollered with the joy of their victory. Bitterlich’s heart lifted to see Isabelle prowling the quarterdeck, shouting orders, surrounded by her firefly escort of pink and purple sparks, Marie at her side. She’d lost her wig somewhere, but her voice was clear and strong. He floated in on spread wings and pulled on his erstepelz as he lit beside her.

“Capitaine,” he said, ripping off his crispest salute. “I’m glad to see you up and about.” When he’d heard she’d felled herself saving the ship, he’d been all but beside himself, but there was nothing he could do except take out his dread on the Skaladin.