The two to his immediate right were Five and Six, the sacks in absolute ruins. He glanced over to his right at the envelope and saw the sewn-up tear in the side of the envelope. It was rather substantial, but it was very clear that the dragon had not done it intentionally or else there’d be three or four additional great tears in the structure and along its length. That would have caused a catastrophic loss of helemnite gas and their ship to plummet to the earth and lead to their deaths. Either way, the claw had reached in far enough that it had cut across the ballasts as they were filling with air and torn them open as the ship was descending. The pressure system in the upper decking of the ship, which Handy now stood on, was a complicated affair. It used the steam pressure to manipulate a series of reinforced brass pipes throughout the deck to create artificial vacuums temporarily to forcibly suck in air from the atmosphere outside the ship through a series of vents and push it up into the ballasts. The ballasts, increasingly filling with pressurized air, increased the ship’s weight as they filled the interior of the envelope’s space, allowing the ship to be raised or lowered as the crew desired.