The pirate who'd doubted her before turned on Captain Sally savagely and bellowed out, "It's the Sea People! I told you they were a danger! They've undermined the city and fried our propulsion units with their lasers!"
"Shut up! What exactly have they done? Are they cutting holes and sinking the city?"
Another of the possessed crew spoke up, "No, they've focused on rendering us without navigational power and they've destroyed the underwater mooring system. The city can't be re-submerged! They've cut all the mooring lines but one. They mean to cast us adrift!"
"Why? What purpose would that serve?" Captain Sally bellowed out in question, but she spied her answer when she glanced out a side window of the control room. There beyond the drifting smoke of war was the beginning evidence of what the Sea People had been about from the start.
An electric storm was fast approaching. The city adrift and without navigational power would be broken up into pieces by such a storm.
The city had to remain moored or there was no chance of survival, as the Sea People had seen to it that the city could not re-submerge beneath the safety of the waves.
In frantic alarm Captain Sally turned back to the others and screeched out, "Heat up the water at the last mooring junction! Fry their lungs out! We must stop them from cutting that last mooring cable!"
Power was redirected to the one corner of the city still moored and dumped into the seawater in an electric fury that soon caused the seawater to boil intensely. The Sea People hard at work with their one technological attainment being the lasers that they had fashioned out of focalized crystals were pushed back by the suddenly scalding water.
The pirates were on to them. Some tried to push through the hot water to finish the job of severing the last mooring cable, but the water was too hot and several perished as their lungs were overcome by the heat of the water that they breathed.
They had no other option but to pull back and help their brethren, who were busy rescuing as many of the sailors in the water as they could.
"They're pulling back! It worked!" Said one pirate looking up from his screen and Captain Sally's new controlling spirit knew a moment of savage joy.
The city would go on! Their manifest destiny was not over yet!
Laughing with fiendish joy she saw that the city had pivoted enough on its last mooring cable to put the still firing battleship within range of the surviving towers. She pivoted the attention of all of the towers onto the battleship and awaited in anticipation of watching its destruction.