Stephen shoots it, but the scales clearly provide effective armour. It swipes with its tail, and there’s a nasty crunching sound from the bows; various red lights come up on Diamond’s console, showing that the bilge pumps are running at full speed. Diamond keeps the power on but steers the boat closer in to the aquatic dragon, forcing it to rear out of the water and expose its belly, which is a paler blue, and perhaps less armoured – certainly when Stephen puts a burst into where the vital organs ought to be, he reckons he’s doing some real damage, though Thorfin’s crossbow bolt doesn’t seem to add very much. David projects a copy of Stephen to a different part of the deck, to distract the dragon, but instead it breathes a blast of steam over the whole yacht, scalding everyone (though being heroic they can regard it as just a flesh wound).

The Uvwe have hurled themselves off the boat to escape the steam, and the dragon scoops one of them up, swallowing him nearly whole. Stephen keeps up bursts of fire, and Thorfin tests his will against that of the dragon and (to everyone’s surprise) comes out slightly ahead. Stephen gets a shot in on its eye, and the creature writhes, rolls over, and starts to sink.

The next problem is the water that the yacht’s taking on; Stephen and Diamond find timber below-decks and are able to do some basic shoring-up, at least enough that the pumps can get ahead of the leakage. They won’t be able to make as much speed as before, but it should still be faster than the longship.

The longship has, of course, got out of sight, and the yacht is now thoroughly fog-bound. David gets back to work on the navigation radar, while Stephen speaks with the Uvwe and pours a bottle of good whisky into the water for their fallen comrade.

David picks up three contacts: one is clearly the longship, but two further away are getting closer: one is probably another longship, but the other is much easier to spot, probably a metal ship.

As the yacht gradually gets closer to the longship, Stephen takes a carefully-aimed shot at the steersman. The response, after a few seconds, is a massive fireball, one that envelops the yacht; Diamond’s careful steering keeps the deck out of the worse of it, but at the cost of the fibreglass hull taking the brunt of the heat, and it starts to burn. Her response is to shove the throttles full forward, heedless of the hull damage, on a ramming course with the longship.

Amethyst isn’t visible on the deck: everyone’s wearing horned helmets. But Stephen picks off one of the figures that isn’t rowing (though he thinks his bullet was deflected by more than the storm winds, it still hit). Thorfin yells intimidatingly across the waves, and at least one of the vikings looks worried. David sets the projector to produce multiple flickering images of Stephen all over the deck.

Stephen’s able to glimpse the other two ships in the distance. One is another longship; the other is a Norwegian corvette. But the last time he saw it, he’s fairly sure the Norwegian naval ensign didn’t include a bleeding skull.

The boats collide, doing significant damage to both: the longship’s still just about seaworthy, but some fire has spread to her tarred hull. The yacht is clearly going down very shortly, and the heroes leap onto the longship, with varying levels of grace. The vikings who had been in cover behind the gunwales join the fight with axes and swords, and first Diamond (who manages to shake it off) and then Stephen find themselves suddenly weakened. It’s gun-to-axe combat as our heroes go up against some twenty Vikings and who knows what magical support…