Chapter Three Hundred and Thirty-Eight — Abandoned Ship
Chapter Three Hundred and Thirty-Eight — Abandoned Ship After grabbing a few supplies from the Remiges Crown, we got back onto the ponies and headed out. Calamity pointed us towards a hill to the south of our position. It looked almost like a shelf of earth that jutted out of the ground with a sharp edge. The space beneath it had a small forest’s worth of trees growing where the wind couldn’t reach them.We switched things up, Amaryllis rode with Awen, so I had Shanks all to myself as we rode across the plains. I kind of wished that I was riding with one of my friends, sharing a saddle was a great excuse to get my daily dose of cuddles in.The hillside wasn’t too far away, but it still took an hour to get to it. The ground being so muddy didn’t help any. The poor ponies had splashes of mud all the way up to their tummies, and my shoes were caked in it by the time we reached the hill. A bit of Cleaning magic worked it off, but it was still kind of annoying.Calamity found a switch-back path dug into the side of the hill. “Is this a natural path?” Amaryllis asked.“Hmm? Oh, nya, this is ancient. I don’t know who dug this out, but it’s been here forever. There’s a wider, newer way down further south, with some railings and all, but it’s a bit far to travel for us when all we want’s a spot to see from. I heard that these were made by an earth mage a long while back. Some folk say that a magic cockatrice that could move earth made them, but I don’t rightly believe those tall tales.”Once we were at the top of the hill, I took in the great vista below us. It was, for the most part, just grass. Lots and lots of grass, as far as my bun eyes could see. Some places had muddy pools of water where there was a dip in the land, but even those had grass pushing through the mud, and I didn’t doubt that by mid-afternoon it would all dry up and be absorbed by the thirsty ground.Calamity had mentioned, in passing, that it only rained once every couple of weeks, but when it did, it was always strong.“That’s the Hunter’s Eye,” Awen said as she pointed. I followed her gaze to the distant form of the ship’s keel. “And that over there’s the other half of the Eye and the Remiges Crown.”The other ship wasn’t too hard to spot, being a bit bigger. Though the way it was resting against a hill meant that it would probably be much harder to find for anyone coming from the other direction. Once the grass straightened up post-storm and the ship sank into the ground a little more, it might actually be hard to find.I didn’t doubt that the wind would toss some dirt onto the deck and then grass would grow from that, until it melded into the verdancy. But that hadn’t happened just yet and wouldn’t happen for a while.“So, that’s two ships in three parts,” Amaryllis said. She scanned the horizon. “I don’t see any others. I wish we had a spyglass.”“Oh!” Awen said. She brought her hands up, as if holding an invisible tube, then frowned. Glass formed between her hands with a faint crackle, like crystals growing but a thousand times faster. She focused harder, then squinted as her creation took form. It was a telescope! A single piece of glass forming lenses with bars to hold them in place. “I’m going to need to fiddle with this, and I don’t think anyone else will be able to adjust the focus, but...” she looked through it at the distant form of the Remiges Crown.“What can you see?” I asked.“The... ship I’m looking at?” she answered, a bit confused. “There’s nothing really new. Uh, having this only helps me see, it doesn’t really help me find new things to look at.”“Oh, right,” I said.We squinted out into the distance, looking for anything that stood out. Unsurprisingly, it was Calamity who spotted something strange first. “That way,” he said. “Along the ridge we’re on, about two hours ride south and east.” He was pointing a bit behind us.I spotted what he was talking about. It was maybe two kilometres away from the crash site for the Hunter’s Eye’s fore-section, just a little bit behind the ridge we were standing on. Or maybe it was another ridge? It was hard to tell, but I suspected we were on the lip of a very big, very old crater.“I see it,” Awen said. The telescope clinked and cracked, like someone stepping on a wineglass with heavy boots and shifting their foot around. The lenses twisted a bit, and the telescope adjusted itself minutely. “Got it.”“So, what do you see?” Amaryllis asked. “It looks like a dark lump to me.”That was a pretty accurate description for me too, there was something black in the distance, but because it was barely peeking out of grass, I had no way to get a sense of scale. I had probably looked right past it a couple of times already.“I think it’s a ship,” Awen said. “No, it’s definitely a ship. There’s a balloon, I think that’s the black part. It’s a bit behind the curve of the hill so I can’t see much of it.” She passed her telescope to Amaryllis who plucked it and stared into the distance as well.“That does look like it might be a vessel of some sort. A smaller one. Could be one of the lifeboats. No, no it couldn’t be.”“It couldn’t?” I asked.“Harpy lifeboats don’t have their own balloons. That looks more like a skiff, like the Shady Lady.”Abraham’s little ship? Flying on the Shady Lady had been a blast! Though it was also kind of terrifying. That ship had been held together with tape and happy thoughts.“Do you think it was part of the delegation or the pirates?” I asked.“Hard to tell,” Amaryllis said. She passed me the telescope while Awen made another in about half the time it took her to make the one I now had. I squeezed one eye shut and looked through to search for the ship.It really was hard to spot, even with a zoomed-in view. The craft looked like it was pretty even with the ground, but its balloon was draped across the hill as if it was ripped, which was probably exactly what had happened.If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.“It doesn’t look like it crashed,” I said. “It looks like it’s mostly in one piece.”“We’ll see once we get closer,” Amaryllis said.That kind of decided our next destination for us, though only after looking around for more points of interest. We patted down the ponies, I cleaned off the mud from their shoes and flanks, then we headed out once more. Calamity had us walking a little ways away from the cliff-edge. He said that while it was great for keeping track of where you were going, he’d also seen the cliff fall apart a few times and we didn’t want to trigger a landslide.Calamity’s guess about the distance was spot-on. It took a bit over an hour to get close enough to the ship to see it without Awen’s telescope, and another half hour before we were basically right on top of it.“That’s not a harpy design,” Amaryllis said as we got closer.The ship was long and narrow, maybe a third as long as the Beaver Cleaver but thin enough that it could easily fit between the Beaver’s two hulls. Its hull was shaped a bit like a teardrop, with the rear section being larger and the front tapering to a curved point.It wasn’t made of wood the way harpy ships were, or flat metal panels like the sylph preferred. This was all sleek, curved metal, carefully shaped and riveted together.“That’s a Snowlander ship,” Awen said with obvious glee. “Oh, these are super uncommon outside of the Snowlands. They’re the best airships, period.”I could see why Awen was excited. The ship reminded me a bit of pictures of old World War Two aircraft. Compared to this, every other airship I’d seen had more in common with a Blériot or a Wright Brothers’ aircraft.The front of the ship lacked a figurehead, instead, the metal wrapped around to a semi-enclosed turret with a fixed crossbow mounted on a ring. It looked as if someone could stand inside and turn all the way around while aiming the bow. The crossbow was also... high-tech wasn’t the right word for it, but I couldn’t think of anything better. It had big metal bars and a box under it, with a large, visible spring and a chain with linked-together bolts dangling from the side.Behind that, the ship was mostly enclosed until the larger section at the rear where a wheel sat in a tiny booth with glass around it and there was some walking space to access the posts and winches the ship likely needed to tie itself at dock.The rear of the ship contained a mostly-enclosed propeller. There were openings around it to suck air out from the front and all the way to the propeller itself.“Oh, look at that!” Awen cooed as she rode closer. She jumped off her pony, leaving Amaryllis to catch the reins. “The air is pulled through those vents on the underside, see, and I bet they’ll pass next to the engine. Not only pulling air through, but using it for cooling! It’s so simple, but so clever!”I dismounted my pony, then gave its reins to Amaryllis, who stared at them, and the other reins, then huffed a very clear “Why am I taking care of these?” huff.“What kind of metal is this?” Awen asked as she tapped the skin of the ship with a knuckle to produce a hollow clunk. “Even tin would make this way too heavy.”“Aluminium?” I asked. “It’s very light and pretty strong. They use it for airplanes where I’m from, I think.”“Oh... but how did they shape it like this? Is every single part cast individually? Unless they have a whole factory making just this kind of skiff, that’s a lot of work. It doesn’t look hammered.”I watched Awen go. It was cute how enthusiastic she was about the mysterious Snowlander ship.While she poked and prodded at it, I walked around the ship and took in its position. There were three large landing gear deployed below and sunk into the mud a little. One looked a bit bent, as if the landing was rougher than ideal, but they weren’t broken, I didn’t think. So the ship didn’t crash.“Is there anyone in there?!” I called out, hands around my mouth.My friends paused. I don’t think they’d considered that possibility.Noone made a sound, so if someone was hiding in the ship, well, then they were hiding, not just waiting onboard.“There’s a ladder here!” Awen said.She’d found a panel on the side of the ship which could be opened. It revealed two ladders, one mounted to the hull, and another on rails which dropped with a clack and stopped half a metre off the ground.Awen was the first to climb aboard, but the rest of us followed soon after, with Amaryllis taking up the rear since she had to tie the ponies to a stake.The ship’s interior was a lot sleeker than any ship I’d seen, with wooden floors and walls that were padded with leather. Some of the walls had little cabinets built into them for tools and supplies. The ship was too small to have any more than the top deck, but there was a set of trapdoors that Awen pulled open to access the engine below the command console.The console, with the wheel at the back of it, was in the centre. There was a whole heap of levers and gauges within easy reach. It looked like the sails could all be controlled from that one place by a single pilot.In front of it was the covered section of the hull, which looked like a tight tunnel all the way to the crossbow emplacement at the very front. I poked my head in. There were bunks along the sides, and a tiny compact kitchen and sitting area.Something felt off about the ship but I didn’t figure out what until I came to stand behind the wheel. This was a ship designed for someone taller than I was. The bunks below were like that too. About as wide as a normal one-person bunk, but longer.Whomever had built this thing knew how to pack every necessity in tightly.“Pirates,” Calamity said, pulling me out of my reverie. He was looking up, towards a flag hooked to a ladder that would have reached the balloon if it hadn't collapsed. The flag was black, with a grinning skull.
* * *
Chapter Three Hundred and Thirty-Nine — Finders Keepers
Chapter Three Hundred and Thirty-Nine — Finders Keepers “So, how bad is it?” I asked as Awen pulled herself out of the engine bay. She had a bit of grease on the tip of her nose and some sweat on her brow, but she looked happy all the same.“It’s fantastic,” Awen said. “It’s also so, so simple. Well, no, it’s complicated, so many little parts interacting, but it’s like whoever designed it wanted every part to be easily replaceable. I think I could make half the parts here out of glass and they’d still work. Nothing’s under a lot of strain when everything’s operating properly. There’s nothing new here, exactly, it’s all just executed so cleanly.”“That’s nice,” Amaryllis said. Usually when she said that it was sarcastic, but this time it didn’t sound that way. “But will the ship work?”“Oh,” Awen said. She pulled out a hankie to wipe her nose, but before she could I knelt down, licked my thumb, and rubbed the grease off with a bit of Cleaning magic. She made a face before replying. “If we can get the balloon refilled, then yes. Even without, I think this one can fly, though it’ll be under a lot of strain and we might not get far on the fuel we have.”“Flight-capable without a bouyancy device?” Amaryllis asked. “That’s impressive. We’ve been trying to crack that one for a while, but we always run into issues, at least when it comes to anything larger than a raft. You need a lot of fuel to manage it, which means more weight, which means bigger engines, which means more fuel.”Awen nodded. “They’ve figured it out here. Which I guess isn’t too surprising, the Snowlanders are supposed to be some of the best mechanics around, and it shows. I don’t even think this was a mass-produced ship. It’s got a few little personal touches that I wouldn’t expect from something being built in a factory.”Artisanal ship crafters? That was neat. The more I heard about these Snowlanders, the more I wanted to visit them. Although, the flag still concerned me. “Nothing piratical in there, right?” I asked.Awen shook her head. “I don’t think a motor can be piratical.”Calamity had found a seat atop the covered part of the hull. Now that I was thinking about it, the ship was kind of shaped like a very sharp shoe with a hole on the end. “So, are we going to leave this here? Seems a shame to leave a working airship behind.”“Airboat, technically,” Amaryllis pointed out. “And... yes, actually, you’re correct. Under most international treaties, capturing a pirate’s vessel means that the vessel is now, in part, your property. You have a legal duty to communicate with its previous owners in most countries, whereby they have the right to purchase it from you at half its market value. Which should be covered by any halfway competent insurance. So, having technically captured this vessel, we can lay a legal claim on it.”“Really?” I asked. “We didn’t even beat the pirates ourselves though, so would that be fair?”“Broccoli, the nice thing about pirates is that they don’t show up in court to argue with you,” Amaryllis said.I pouted, a bit of warmth clinging to my cheeks. “Okay, fine,” I said. “It still feels wrong to just up and take this ship.”“Take a quarter of it,” Calamity said.We glanced up to him and the catboy grinned a very Cheshire grin. “We are, of course, splitting the find four ways, right? It’s only fair.”I nodded. “Yup, that’s true.”He blinked. “You’re not going to argue it?”“No, it’s fair, why would I?” I asked. “Besides, without your help we wouldn’t be here. Did you want me to teach you a bit about handling a ship? I’m not an expert yet, but I think I can qualify as an experienced novice.”“Oh, I’d like that, sure,” Calamity said. “But if we’re going to take this thing up, how’re your sylph friends going to reach us?”“We could reach them in midair,” Amaryllis said. “It might even simplify things greatly.”Calamity nodded along. He was clearly excited, but then his shoulders fell. “We can’t. The ponies.” He gestured off to the side where the three ponies we’d ridden along were grazing at some of the taller grass.“Oh, right,” I said. “What do we do with the ponies? Could we bring them aboard?”Amaryllis wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know about that. Most ships that carry livestock are designed around the idea that they’ll have to carry livestock, with stables and cages that have straps designed to hold them in place without too much motion.”“This ship should be able to lift them,” Awen said. “They’re heavy, but not past the total load we could carry.”I looked over at the ponies, who were just happily munching along. “They seem pretty tame.”“I’ve got a skill that'll keep them from panicking,” Calamity said. “We can tie ‘em up here, and maybe cover their eyes, just in case. They won’t mind the noise, I don’t think.”I was pretty sure that Calamity just really wanted to ride on the airship. “What would we need to do?” I asked Awen.She gestured to the balloon. “It’s deflated, but not entirely. So we need to look for holes, and if there are any, we need to plug them. Then we need to inflate the balloon. There’s a pair of tanks under the hull, I’m guessing they’re filled with whatever the Snowlanders use for their buoyancy.”“It’s a mixture of helium and a few magical gases,” Amaryllis said. “They keep the formula somewhat hidden, but not as hidden as their methods for sourcing helium.”It made sense. Helium was pretty much the best gas for airships, with hydrogen being a bit way too explosive and other gases having their own problems. If the Snowlanders had easy access to helium, that would give them a leg up. Then again, looking at the little ship, it was clear that helium wasn’t their only advantage. I had no idea what the magical stuff was, but it didn’t seem as rare, somehow?The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.I wasn’t that well-versed in history and stuff, but it was pretty clear that this vehicle was a few decades ahead of any other airship I’d seen so far. “Have the Snowlanders always been so far ahead?” I asked.“Technology-wise?” Awen asked. She nodded. “I think so. I remember uncle talking about them when I was young.”“But that was a few years ago,” I pointed out. “Have others caught up?”“It takes time to catch up,” Amaryllis said. “Time which they’ve used to progress even more. But the technological edge won’t hold forever. The Snowlands have plenty of resources, but they’re cold and rather hostile at the best of times. In a few decades we’ll catch up to them, I’m sure.”“Yeah,” I said. Then I gestured to the ponies. “So, are we going to get them aboard?”As it turned out, it wasn’t that simple, but my friends weren’t against the idea. Awen had Calamity and I clambering over the balloon, looking for rips or tears while she prepped other things aboard the ship and Amaryllis sent a message to the sylph with our new location and the new information we’d found.That the pirate idea was entirely verified (the not-quite-jolly-roger was a dead giveaway) was troubling. More troubling was that the pirates had access to some really high-tech Snowlander ships.“Found one!” Calamity said. He was poking a finger through a fist-sized hole in the tarp.As it turned out, there was a second hole on the opposite end.“It looked like the balloon got pierced through,” Awen said as she brought out a patching kit from one of the compartments. “Maybe a magical attack, or a ballistae bolt. It doesn’t look like it’s a big enough hole to ruin the ship, but it would have made it lose altitude.”“So they landed out here and abandoned it,” I guessed. “But why?”“Does it matter? It’s good for us, and too bad for them!” Calamity cheered.Patching the two holes took a good half-hour, even with Awen helping. The stuff the ship had for hole-patches was mostly tarp strips with glue on one side covered in a thin piece of paper. By using fire-magic on the paper (and burning it off) the glue became warm and very, very sticky, it could then be slapped over the hole and pressed in while it dried. The instructions called for cold wind or ice mana to be pushed against the surface, which Amaryllis helped with since she had the easiest time converting her mana to other aspects.Once I cleared the glue off of our equipment-it really was terribly sticky-we set to reinflating the balloon.“We don’t have enough gases to fill the balloon entirely,” Awen said. “We’re going to have to mix in normal air.”In the end, we inflated the balloon with what gases the ship had, then Awen and I undid the rather heavy tanks and tossed them off the side. They were designed to be easy to remove, so it wasn’t a big deal, and the weight difference would help.After that, Awen set up a pump to fill the rest of the balloon’s space with normal air while Calamity and I coaxed the ponies aboard up a lowered gangplank and then convinced them to lay down onto some blankets while we fed them the rest of the grain we’d brought.I could see why Amaryllis didn’t like the idea of bringing them aboard. They took up a lot of space, and if they panicked, then things would get really complicated really fast.“I think our first stop will have to be somewhere to bring the ponies,” I said.“We can return to the hunter’s,” Calamity said. “There’s a fairly large camp. It might have some supplies we need to keep this boat going too. I think a few of the machines we have at the camp use the same kind of fuel.”With that semblance of a plan in place, we spent the rest of the morning preparing to fly. There was probably a lot less to do to get this ship airborne than, say, the Beaver needed to prepare, but the ship was unfamiliar to us, and we didn’t have nearly as big a crew to help set things up.Awen got the engine started, then, with a box secured to the floor to give her some height, came to stand behind the wheel. “Alright. All hands on deck. Gravity engine to half and throttle at idle. Broccoli, sails to neutral. Amaryllis, Calamity, check the rudder sails and start winching the anchor up.”I snapped a salute to Awen, which lit up her cheeks brilliantly. “Aye, aye, Captain Awen!”“Awa! I’d much rather be the first mate, actually.”“Can I be the captain?” Calamity asked.“You don’t have the hat for it,” I replied. Cowboy hats were cool, but not what you were looking for when about to pilot an airship. Not nearly enough feathers.“This is a boat,” Amaryllis argued. “Which means we have no need for a skipper. Now, will we sit here and argue or are we going to get this tub into the air?”Calamity spun the winch which brought up the ship’s anchors, and Amaryllis and I busied ourselves adjusting the sails, which was surprisingly easy. They were smaller than those on the Beaver Cleaver so we didn’t need nearly as much effort to get them deployed and angled correctly.Awen kicked up the juice on the gravity engine, and then for just a moment, we hovered on the spot. I grinned at the familiar but still strange feeling of momentary weightlessness before we started to climb up very gently.“Engine seems buoyant at... sixty-four percent,” Awen said.“Is that good?”“It’s not exactly fuel-efficient,” Awen said, “but it’s enough to let us move, if slowly.”We rose up a few dozen metres, then Awen slowed the ascent down so that we were hovering on the spot.“Okay,” I said as I glanced over the edge. “Now we only have one more thing to do. What do we name this ship?”
* * *
