Peeking his head over the rim of the barrel he'd crouched behind, Grady scouted the deck for the pyurgist.  The man in the motley coat had his back to Grady, his attention of the [i]Aleph Null[/i] and the havoc he was wreaking on its ventus sails.  Wincing as though experiencing sympathetic pain for his expensive, expensive sails, Grady pondered the open expanse of deck between him and the pyurgist.  He could make a dash for it - firearms were no good of course - and hope to get his trench knives within range before the fireater noticed him... ...remembering Kimbull's horrific death, Grady discarded the idea.  He'd make a charge if he had to, but only if he knew someone else was working in tandem with him.  Confronting a superior force from multiple angles they stood a chance, but a lone man's charge was simple suicide.  The captain took another furtive look for any crew to coordinate with.

[i]What the fuck is Cally doing!?[/i] he thought, seeing the girl poised at the freighter's railing as though about to hurl over it.  Then he saw her lean back, hauling the doctor up over the railing like a fisherman's shittest catch.  Another quick glance and he caught Van Williams' eye.  Plans formulating even as he was moving, Grady bolted across the deck toward the doctor and the girl, while signalling for his first mate to join too.

"Glad you could join us," Grady huffed while sliding to a halt next to the pair, making sure to position himself behind a capstan for cover.  "Alex - you and I are taking that gobshite down," he spat, gesturing to the pyurgist.  "You circle around and wait for my charge, then come in from the side."  As he spoke his hands were making subconscious signals from his days in the Sorrowars - [i][on me; flank left; pincer attack][/i]  "He gets me I want you to gut 'im."

"Doctor, juice us up.  That fire hits either of us I expect to live to tell the fucking tale."  He didn't know if the Doctor had anything ready-made to take care of such a request, but a genius Solurgist with a clutch of aidkits and 6 ounces of the purest aurum crystals had better be able to fucking improvise.

He turned to the girl, poking a finger at her chest.  "Cally, the lads are getting fucking routed.  Round 'em up and hold the line - you and the doc.. I need those boarding ramps clear by the time Balder joins us."  He didn't know why he trusted her to be able to handle it - she was just the hanger-on from a promise he oughtn't to have made in the first place, but it took grit to leap across an airship gap with a fireater running amok, and he'd seen the girl practicing with her blade before.

Grady paused, squinting in confusion as he looked at the [i]Aleph Null[/i], its sails still more or less intact, the fires diminished if not outright extinguished.  He scanned his own main deck, made out the form of his sailing master, clutching her stannum necklace and practically swaying from the exertion of putting out the fires.  "Atta girl," he muttered.  It was hard to put into words the feeling of seeing his crew rising to these challenges.  As a young man, fresh out of officers' school and joining soldiers from all across Allevent in the trenches, he'd been petrified of battle despite his training.  Over weeks of bloodshed he'd come to see war not as the glamorous adventures of his childhood imagination, but as nightmare made living.  It wasn't for several months of pitched battle at the height of the Sorrowars that he finally came to see war as neither high adventure nor terrible tragedy - it was merely the crucible in which you forged your character anew, tempered to ever-greater hardness.

That was when he first started feeling the honest, indescribable satisfaction of leading his men and seeing them grow along with him in the forge-fires of war.  On the other side of the world, nearly twenty years after his own desertion and disgrace, he was seeing it again with his crew aboard the [i]Aleph Null[/i].

"Right, let's move it," he growled, nodding at the three alongside him before turning to peak over the capstan.  Seeing an opening, he darted to a new position, knowing Van Williams would do the same in the other direction, so they could attack the pyurgist in tandem.  Hoping the doctor's solution was capable of resisting those terrible flames, Grady spun his trench knives about his hands into a reverse grip, and then charged at the man in motley.