Pirate Wars by Kai Meyer Page A

can’t go to the bottom. It’s too deep.”
    “Nevertheless, we aren’t going to just look on and do nothing.”
    He shook his head sadly. “It’s madness to confront the kobalins in their own element.”
    “One has to do something.” The corners of her mouth twitched slightly, but no smile followed. “And you?”
    “D’Artois has assigned me to the ray riders.”
    Suddenly the princess walked up to him and hugged him. “Then take care of yourself, Griffin. Don’t make me be the one who has to tell Jolly when she comes back that the kobalins have torn you to pieces.”
    He returned the embrace and blushed when she gave him a kiss on the forehead.
    “I’ll leave you alone up here now. And give Jolly a nice greeting from me when you think about her.” With a wink she went out into the corridor and pulled the door closed behind her.
    Griffin stared at the door for a long moment. Then, with a heavy heart, he turned to the window again. Over the fog the rays were moving in their majestic orbits.
     
    It was Soledad’s ninth dive, but she’d been told that the constricted feeling in the diving suit never diminished, even by the fiftieth time. True, she could breathe for fifteen to twenty minutes through hoses that ran to the bubblestone in a metal container strapped under her chin. But the air was already thin and stuffy after a few minutes.
    Soledad had never seen anything like the bubblestones before her arrival in the sea star city, and she wondered where they came from. The other divers seemed not to know the answer to that either. They explained to Soledad that the stones were kept in a cave near the core and carefully protected. When a stone had given up all its air, it needed several hours to dry out completely and absorb new oxygen. Because there were only several hundred of these stones in existence, the supply would inevitably run low during the battle if the fighting under water lasted too long.
    Soledad and a handful of others dove down along the furrowed underside of a sea star arm. The princess had been able to sleep for a few hours to gather strength, whichshe would urgently need in the days to come. Although the sun was shining on the water above, it was very dark down here below. Only where the mighty anchor chain emerged from a complicated tangle of steel and branching coral was there pale light. Shafts had been driven through the sea star point and within them, above water level and at regular intervals, were placed torches. A yellow glow fell from them but was soon lost in the depths. Enough light to recognize attackers and to oppose them—but too little to, say, read the print in a book. The murky soup would make the battle down here even more difficult.
    The anchor chain was so broad that it would take twenty men to encircle one of the powerful links with outstretched arms. Next to the rusty chain links, a human was as lost as a fish. Disheveled water plants floated on invisible currents and settled around the metal in many places like dense shrubbery.
    Every time Soledad looked down into the deep from the chain, she grew dizzy.
    It was true that the endless ribbon sank down to the edge of the field of light, out of the torchlight into darkness, but the idea that it reached to the bottom of the sea turned her stomach. Even though she was underwater, that thought gave her something like acrophobia. So much emptiness beneath her, so much nothing.
    Walker had argued with her when she told him that she was going to join the divers. She hadn’t let herself be budged from her decision, however, not even by him.
    Soledad knew what she was letting herself in for. Shecould have chosen the easy way and fought on the barricades, and no one would have reproached her for that. But she wouldn’t be her father’s daughter, the future empress of all the pirates between Tortuga and New Providence, if she watched passively as the kobalins streamed onto land. She wanted to fight the creatures of the