A fast shadow shot by over his head. Teldin instinctively ducked and started to run, crouching over Gaye to shield her. He heard the distant shouts of gnomes in hand-to-hand combat, wild cries and curses from nonhuman throats. Another shadow passed by overhead, and something dropped from it to strike the roof of a large warehouse to his left. A wide ball of orange fire splashed upward from the oily impart, the muffled whoomp of the blast stinging him with its heat.

Sirens were going off everywhere. The air was filled with echoing cracks and thumps as the air-defense engines fired. A chorus of screams sounded above and behind him, followed by a tremendous crash and the shattering of wood as a spelljammer fell and pancaked upside-down into the pavement near the infirmary.

"Teldin Moore!" came a loud, nasal shout. Teldin looked around and saw Dyffed waving at him from the low, wide door of a gnomish troop barracks. He instantly ran for the gnome, Gaye held tight against his chest. Dyffed's neat brown suit was ripped and burned, and he clutched a pair of pistols. As Teldin came up, the gnome stepped out of the doorway to let him by, then raised both pistols and fired them simultaneously into the air. A hideous cry rang out, and Teldin turned in time to see a body fall from a snakelike spelljammer passing overhead. Dyffed stepped back into the barracks as the body smacked the stones a short distance away.

"Damned inconvenient time for an air raid," Dyffed said conversationally, picking up two more loaded pistols from a table that appeared to be covered with them. Teldin noticed then that two other gnomes were in the room, loading pistols from chests full of smokepowder, shot, and weapons as quickly as their short fingers could move. The hazy air stank of burned powder.

"I was just going over for supper," Dyffed went on, squinting into the sky from the doorway again. "The cooks, Reorx bless them, had promised me a hot bowl of their best seven-weed soup. Never got as far as the third armory. I heard the alert siren and was told to set up an ambush point here, and then there were ships all about me, falling right out of the sky through the clouds like hail. How's the kender?"

"Her ankle's cut badly," Teldin said, laying the kender down on a gnome's child-sized bunk bed. He banged his head on the bottom of the upper bunk as he tried to straighten up, swore, then carefully stood and rubbed his head. "I've wrapped the wound, but she needs a spell or potion to heal it. I couldn't find anyone in the infirmary, not even the patients."

"That's because they're all at their antispelljammer stations. Didn't you hear the warning siren?" Dyffed looked at Teldin, then looked back outside. "Ah, I forgot. You're a human, of course, silly of me. Haven't got the same range of hearing as we do-a shame, too, if you ask me. We do have sirens that humans can hear-and elves and goblins and everyone else can hear them, too, for that matter-but we always sound the high-pitched gnome sirens first, as it gives us a leg up, you might-oops!" Dyffed instantly raised both pistols and fired, aiming them straight out the door. The loud reports stung Teldin's ears, but he still heard the clatter and thump of a body falling on the pavement outside. "As you might say, I was saying," Dyffed finished, tossing the pistols on the floor and grabbing two more from the table. "It makes the enemy think we didn't know they were coming. I could use a hand here, if you don't mind."

Teldin grabbed for two pistols himself, torn between watching Gaye and fighting. Dyffed didn't look up as Teldin joined him. The gnome merely raised his pistols and fired out the door. Teldin raised his weapons and found himself staring right at a wounded humanoid warrior in studded black armor, looking vaguely like a pig-nosed man, not ten feet away. It staggered toward the door with a curved sword clenched in his gloved fist. Teldin's fingers tightened on the triggers, guns aimed at the humanoid's head. The sharp double crack snapped off his hearing, filling his head with a painful whine, and acrid smoke instantly obscured his vision and stabbed his nostrils. Dyffed shoved Teldin in the legs, pushing him out of the doorway and back into the room as the black-armored humanoid collapsed across the doorway, sword clattering into the room. Bloody droplets splashed across the floor at Teldin's feet.

"The gods made us all," said Dyffed, grabbing two more pistols, "but smokepowder made us all equal. Old gnome saying, you understand. Seemed appropriate."

Teldin grabbed two more pistols himself from the huge stack of them now on the table. The two gnomes loading them worked madly. A figure suddenly appeared in the doorway. Teldin snapped his pistols up-and froze just before he could squeeze both shots off.

It was Sylvie, her clothing splattered with blood, clutching a messy, long dagger in her hands. He lowered the pistols at once. "Teldin!" Sylvie called, out of breath. "Teldin, we've got… we've got to get to the Halibut! The gnomes are taking off! The base…"

Dyffed shoved at Sylvie's legs and forced her into the barracks room, then fired twice out the door again. Teldin tried to get to the door and listen to Sylvie at the same time, but she stopped him with her free hand.

"There are…" she finally said, after swallowing hard. "There are humanoid ships, apparently orcish, landing all over the place. We have to get out of here. Aelfred's been looking for you, and Gomja. Gomja had brought us back to the hangar just before the orcs came. We're going to get into wildspace, where they can't catch us, before it's too late." A low, muffled boom echoed across the port.

Teldin nodded back at the silent form on the bunk bed. "Can you carry her?" he shouted, too excited to think that Sylvie was right in front of him. The half-elf navigator saw Gaye and gasped, hurrying over to the kender's side and sheathing her dagger without wiping it off. In a moment, she had Gaye cradled in her arms.

"I'll never get my seven-weed soup tonight," Dyffed said sadly, stuffing four pistols into his wide belt and carrying two more. "First the hamsters, then this. Not my day at all. Shall we be off?"

Teldin nodded, taking a deep breath. Sylvie came up behind him. "Teldin, she's still bleeding," she whispered.

Teldin glanced at Gaye's pale face, then looked outside, across the broad, clear pavement, to the far-away hangar where the Perilous Halibut waited. Fires leaped into the sky everywhere, and black clouds rolled and drifted across the whole base. Few figures were visible in the open, most dodging from building to distant building. The sky was clear of spelljammers. They've all crashed or landed, Teldin decided. The ores must be down and waiting for us, too.

"Let's go," he said, then dashed out of the building, pistols up, running for the distant hangar. "Come on!" he shouted back, waving Dyffed and Sylvie on as they followed him.

Behind them, oblivious to everything, the two gnomes loaded pistols until there was no place left to put them.

*****

Twenty minutes later, the Perilous Halibut, its helm having been installed by accident two days earlier, burst through the thin wooden roof of the hangar. Cracked lumber and splinters sprayed through the air behind it. Sylvie was at the helm, there being no one else with the spell power to fly the ship as fast as she. The Halibut roared along beneath the cloud cover for many miles, leaving the naval base and a mass of pinned-down and burning humanoid ships far behind it. Borrowing an idea from Dyffed, Sylvie had the cloud-concealed ship simply fly off the edge of Ironpiece, where enemy ships were not likely to look for it. Luck was with them. The sky was overcast right to the edge, and they saw no sign of any humanoid ships when they sped away into the void. The ship's dark, nonreflective color proved to be a marvelous asset in hiding it against the black backdrop of wildspace.