Chapter 1

The thunderous crack of the moisture freezing in the old hull planks echoed throughout the decks, made all the louder by the thin iron plates that were bolted to the hull clanked together and sent the sound inwards once more. The cold was bone-deep, as the wood would doubtlessly testify, and Fredrik pulled his thick wool coat tighter around his body. He could see some young sailors stare enviously at his treasured coat, not just for the warmth, but also for what it represented. He had earned that deep red coat with years of service on that boat, having worked on its decks since it was first commissioned, and he was only their age.

At the time, the RSS Sunseed had been a post that any young lad could have dreamed of being posted; the pride of the S-Class sky-fleet and more than a match for anything in the ocean bound. Now he was twice their age and the Sunseed was fighting off being mothballed. They would have converted it to use as a supply escort years before if not for the captain putting his own money behind fitting it with at least some of the latest standards. The iron that made the cold all the more bitter and deafening was one such improvement, along with the improved boiler which ought to be preventing it. He could see in the eyes of the brats that the ship was a source of shame to them, even if they took pride in its uniform. Regardless of what they felt, he could only hope they survived long enough to earn their own jackets, even if they did so on a different ship.

As he pulled himself down a deck-ladder, Fredrik wondered why he felt so melancholic. He knew it wasn’t the cold; he had been a sailor for as long as he could remember, and been in the royal service for only a handful of years fewer, and for most of those years he had worn the same simple hemp pants and shirts as the lads. It might have been his age; he had seen many turn sullen when they reached the age of decline, but he had reached that age a few years prior without noticeable effect. By the time he reached the lower deck, he could only attribute it to the time he found himself with; with nothing to do but to think.

The skies were vast, and it wasn’t unusual for there to be weeks or even months that passed without event. While a lot of that time was spent seeing to the ship, there was still plenty of time where they’d have to each find something to do. On a normal trip, they’d fill that time with hearty songs and those few men with the talent for instruments would play along. There were also those who took to bettering themselves, learning to read and count from the officers who found fulfilment in teaching. Others learnt the finer points of a trade, such as carpentry or weaving, from the more experienced sailors, or those who were seeking a promotion would learned about the jobs of their seniors. Their current trip did not have that luxury, as the captain had ordered silent running for nearly a full week, and not for the first time.

On silent running, they ran the float boiler at the minimum they needed to stay afloat and propelled themselves with sails. While speaking would hardly carry enough to give them away, there was a superstition about it that no one would break. Even those who know best, the calculators in the captain’s deck who worked out their firing arcs, didn’t speak louder than a whisper. In those conditions, only dice or cards would pass time. The loudest thing at such times were his thoughts.

He trusted the captain. He was a man worthy of respect. He had been the ship’s sole captain, and sunk most of his wealth into the ship, though he had no obligation to do so. With his many accomplishments, the captain could have easily transferred to one of the newer ships, maybe even a ship of the line, but stuck with the Sunseed through its decline. That was why the cold hurt him so much, the float boiler should be able to keep the whole ship heated at their high altitude, but instead Fredrik had to watch the old captain he admired shiver. The layers of coats he wore hid it somewhat, but Fredrik had served under the captain too long not to notice. He doubted any man wearing a red coat would not notice. Some of the officers, who wore thicker navy coats, were new enough to the ship that they might be fooled, but not those who wore red.

While they had to watch their captain suffer in silence, they weren’t even told why. That wasn’t out of the ordinary, per se, there was no reason to keep every lowly sailor informed, but there was a curtesy in briefing the crew on the very basics when the mission was abnormal.

As such, the whispered rumours and pieced together guesses were spread amongst the men. They knew they weren’t the only ship out there, as they had seen another S-Class ship a week prior, though they hadn’t gotten close enough to read which one. They knew they were trying to find something, as they had doubled back and turned around in a rough grid, as much as the winds allowed. They were fairly sure that it was another sky ship, powered glider, or balloon, since they regularly dove below the clouds, either to hide from discovery or to observe. They guessed that whatever it was, it had to be armed with modern cannons, or else they wouldn’t be silent running, but not heavily armoured, or else they wouldn’t bother sending out the S-Classes. Naturally, the only conclusion that they could come up with was that they were hunting down an experimental ship from one of the empire’s rivals, and by securing the ship they would all be made knights under the Queen’s direct service.

He saw the young lads took to those stories, and their eyes were alight with dreams of knights and princesses. He couldn’t remember ever being so naive, but he assumed he was, having been in their place before.

As he was about to pass by the ship’s small doctor’s clinic, with just five beds and ten bunks for the full crew of three hundred and fifty, he stopped in to grab one of the unused thick blankets to pass to the men on watch in the lower observatory. He had come to an agreement with the ship’s doctor, who was also the ship’s priest, to let him loan the goods without taking a record, as taking medical supplies would normally warrant lashes. Neither he nor the doctor saw sense in that when the blankets were not perishables, and their use would help prevent those on watch from catching ill and spreading it amongst the common hands.

Inside the room, he could hear the old captain’s voice, whispering so that Fredrik wouldn’t have heard if he were so much as a single pace further away. The portly priest-cum-doctor was likewise trying to whisper, though his naturally boisterous voice carried further still.

“That simply won’t do, Captain! As your doctor, I can’t have you staying out like this. We’ve been rising and falling too fast and too often for a man your age, especially in this cold.”

“Nonsense, I’m built of sterner stuff than you give me credit for. Those books of yours were written about old men who’ve never sailed a day in their life. The Sunseed will be the death of me, but not for a while yet,” the captain’s mirth was clear, even in his whispered voice, but then he let out a sigh. “To be perfectly honest, we don’t have much of a choice. We’ve been away from supplies for so long that we’ll have to start pumping sea water into the boiler to make up for the shortfall in the recycle and cloud capture. The boiler just leaks too much water as waste when it’s turned down so low. If we don’t find that ship before we hit that point, the salt could start building on the boiler’s crystal and we’ll start to burn it out and clog it. When we passed by the Strongwind, they were already headed try and land somewhere to try and scrape the caked-on salt off. They won’t have the power to make it back to the kingdom and will be setting down on the water.”

The doctor’s heavy footsteps could be heard pacing around, followed by the clinking of glasses being rummaged through.

“It really can’t be helped than,” he said in resignation. “Just keep this bottle on you and take two pinkie’s worth on each meal. And I do expect you to take meals. If we’re going on rations, then I will organise a coupe and turn this ship back to solid ground.”

Even through the joke, there was no doubting that he was serious about his concerns. He had been a preacher for much longer than a doctor, and he had a way of speaking that opened people up to him. No one would doubt that the good doctor was genuine in his concerns.

Fredrik could hear them moving towards the doorway, and pulled back out of the way, stiffening into a salute, with the palm of his open hand being placed over his heart. As the pair walked past him, the captain nodded at him and acknowledge him with a polite “Mr. Fredrik.” The doctor, knowing what he was there for, gave him a knowing smile as he followed behind their leader. When the two were gone, he grabbed a heavy blanket and made his way to the centre of the lowest of the ship’s three decks.

From there, he walked down a narrow oval stairwell, that ran along a mast that was attached to the bottom of the ship at a forty-five-degree angle. The uncomfortable shape was such that the ship could still function if a landing in ocean water were required. At the end of the shaft was the lower watch, a lookout and crow’s nest that was always manned. It was a wide space, and entirely open to the wind, a necessary feature for the functioning of the various pieces of equipment. Either side of the chamber was fitted with metal cones, that would capture sounds and condense it into the ears of the listening posts. Additionally, the forward and rear parts of the room were fitted with frog-eyed tubes, wider than the full span of his arms, which was used to find the range of a target. Fredrik had been trained on their use, though did not understand the mechanism behind it, but knew that any target would appear to be cut in half, and he would have to twist dials until its missing mirrored section retuned, then yell the numbers into the brass tube beside it for the calculators in the captain’s office to work out the firing arcs for the cannons. In that training, he had yelled until his voice was hoarse trying to ensure the nine numbers were each conveyed correctly.

As the lower lookout would be lost entirely in a water landing, it was more lightly equipped then the lookout on the top deck. It was an unfortunate situation, but an understandable one. But that lighter equipment meant that the watch was a miserable one. The cold was bone-deep, the air was wet, yet somehow eyes would still dry out if goggles weren’t worn. Those one the top deck would be warmed by the boiler’s exhaust, and the rising body heat of the crew, but there was no such luxury for the lower. As such, the small mercy of a blanket was a godsend that anyone on the lower watch would not soon forget.

The main job during the watch was to constantly listen for any strange sounds, while sketching any noteworthy features of the landscape in the logbook, alongside a set off environmental data, such as temperature and humidity. That logbook would be returned to the captain’s cabin at the end of the watch, with the next watch binging in their own logbook. If something were to happen to the lookout, then the previous watch’s reports would be the only thing the calculators would have to do their work with.

Fredrik spent a few minutes chatting with them, not wanting to seem like he was leaving them to their fate, and when he was about to leave, one foot on the stairs, there was a sudden burst of moment.

“I hear something,” a man on the port side almost cried out, but somehow managed to still whisper. “It’s faint but it’s definitely a boiler.”

The man stood up and ran over to the rang-finder, cranking the dials to search for what he could hear. After some frantic movement, the operator seemed to start refining the dials, then moved to the brass pipe on the wall and started yelling down it.

“Lower Watch Forward to Control. Repeat. Lower Watch to Control. Unknown ship sighted at 042, 026, 432. Repeat. Unknown ship sighted at 042, 026, 432.”

As the first man finished saying that, the rear rang-finder had likewise found the target and yelled their own details down the tube. Each man began frantically filling out the logbook and reporting the numbers down the tube as they wrote. One of them broke off from their frantic work for the briefest moment to gesture with his head for Fredrik to help out. He recognised the gesture and pulled out a sketch pad and charcoal set from a watertight chest and started drawing what he could see down the telescope paired with the forward rangefinder.

The ship he saw was not at all like what he expected. The Sunseed, and the rest of the S-Class, were made as mostly wooden vestals, made from the hardest woods that the empire could harvest, and were only later fitted with metal armour. The black and red ship he saw didn’t have so much as a single plank of wood visible. Even the ironclad fleet of the U-Class ships that had superseded them had at least wooden masts and nests. That ship was something else entirely.

It had a conventional ocean-going ship shape, and he estimated that it wouldn’t have more than two decks. Its entire surface was black iron with red rust that made it look as though the thing were bleeding. Its top deck had two large bore twin cannons on heavy turret mounts. There were also mounts for medium bore cannons in singles along the side, below what would be the waterline on an ocean ship. The ship had a total of twelve cannons, each of which were larger than anything on the Sunseed. With no sails, its propulsion would be entirely based on its boiler’s output, and from the way the steam was escaping from it, he wouldn’t be surprised if the ship had a second boiler, one focused solely on movement. On a ship with only two decks, two boilers would take up most of the space in one of those decks. Each of the turrets would likewise consume deck space, especially having enough structure to withstand the recoil and turning mechanisms. He felt a strange kind of pity for the crew that would have to load the side cannons in particular.

By the time the sketch was done, the captain’s voice echoed through the pipes, loud enough for everyone to hear.

“All hands to battle stations. All hands to battle stations. Make ready for sudden drop. Make ready for sudden drop. Take in the sails and strap down fragiles.”

Hearing those words, he shoved the book and charcoals back into the chest and started to run up the stairs, taking in deep breaths and trying to keep himself calm.