Infrastructure: Part Two Hundred and Twenty Three

The Drow charge was smashed, inflicting only minimal damage on the Infrastructural line of battle with their forward chase guns. The remains of the Drow blockade scattered to get away in every direction they could to avoid destruction. A few of these fleeing ships went in pairs so they could make the most of what little wind their mages could muster, but more broke off and stayed away from each other working on the logic that the greater the space between ships meant that any pursuer would have to spend longer moving from kill to kill even with their damnable long range guns. Once the last warship in the advance was sunk the Infrastructural warships turned to pursuit.

Even with six recon drones flying overhead tracking the Drow fleet and radio communication, it took some time for Admiral Petrov Miles to assign each of his ships a mark, relay it and get under way. Even so they managed to catch up with a few of them. While the loan drow ships were in no posistion to fight back, destroying them was a bit tricky as hitting a single small target was a difficult manner. Most of the shells that Admiral Miles' ships fired that day were expended in this mop up operation. For every burst of smoke, flame and flying timbers the crews of the Infrastructural ships saw at this stage there was more than a dozen eruptions of water. In addition to the steaming armored floating fortresses which pursued them, a floatilla of forty four Shchuka Boats had established itself thirty kilometers from the city. Unlike the Ironclads, these boats were armed either built of wood or thin steel plate and their armament was short ranged. A few of them met their fates when hit by a 10 Vaul roundshot or in a couple cases arrows which had been infused with range and fire spells, but even so they managed to claim their share of stragglers.

Even though the sailors of the Infrastructural Navy cheered the sinking of every Drow warship some of the captains wondered why they were focusing on eliminating stragglers one by one when there was a big cluster of Drow transports sitting just a bit along the shore which the Admiral told them to ignore for now, even if they yielded when they heard that said orders originated with Drive himself. The reasons for this was twofold. The first reason being the fact that the importance of neutralizing as much of the Drow naval forces as they could so they would not be a threat in the future verses the opportunity of sinking some lightly armed and crewed merchantmen. The second reason being the fact that destroying the Drow escape fleet would leave the remnants of the Drow Army without a path to escape and in so doing forcing their warriors to fight to death in a bloody guerrilla campaign. In any case, it was a more efficient use of shells and shchukas to sink them once they had taken on passengers.

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