Chapter 4 – RSS Strongwind

Mould and rotting wood, tinged with rust filled Roland de Comp’s nose as he stood amongst the nobles in the captain’s office of the Royal Sky-Ship Sunseed. He was disgusted by the filthy vestal. It was an old wooden ship, and the cheap iron that the captain insisted on bolting to it just trapped steam and let mould grow. He also had no doubt that the old fool had used cheap paint and doubted that the metal plates weren’t already rusted through. It was a blessing that the steam would at least kill off any termites, otherwise nothing in the world could have gotten him onto that fly pile of scrap.

As things were, he was only serving there to advance his career. The Congress of Lords was open to anyone of noble blood, but it was an open secret that only those with military service were listened to, and only those with actual rank would be taken seriously. His family was prestigious; directly, if distantly, related to the Queen. His family was wealthy; their land control several silver mines and a firestone mine that was just small enough that the Crown hadn’t seized it. Even with his older brother set to inherit, Roland would still be able to live a life of abject luxury. The teachings of their father made that impossible. That which is given has no merit. The duty of nobility is to be a spear and a shield. Serve those who serve us. Those phrases were heard on an almost daily basis, and he knew his father would be disappointed if he didn’t strive for something, even if it was never spoken.

His own brother, despite being the heir, served as a marine on a ship of the line, The Queen’s Spear. That was a prestigious service. One he had no doubt was granted out of consideration for their father. Despite that, when it came time for his own service, he was dumped onto a rotting death-trap under the command of an old man waiting for death while burning his wealth trying to keep the ship afloat.

The maddening part was that he was serving as an officer-cum-calculator on that floating death-barge. Fitting his social rank, he had attended private tutoring since he was young. That allowed him the knowledge of history and tactics to serve as an officer, but also gave him the basic competencies to operate as a calculator. Competent calculators were needed throughout the fleet, and there was no way a competent calculator would even stand downwind of the Sunseed. That meant any officer that was able to count past ten had to work the outdated fire-solution machines. The captain had said they were one of the things he had purchased himself, but they were second-hand and replaced for a reason. It was only able to handle the most basic of measurements, and each cannon had to be calculated individually. By the time the target’s movements were reported, the calculations would have to start again.

They were maddeningly large compared to the accuracy of the results they produced. He had seen the machines that modern ships were using, and the same performance was achieved with half the size. His brother’s ship had even had a machine that was powered by steam and didn’t need to be hand cranked. Each and every time the machine was used, he would have to take the numbers yelled down the pipes, look them up in a book of tables, put the table results into the dials on the machine, and crank the heavy wheel. But it wasn’t that simple; the machine was very temperamental and would give bad results if spun too quickly or too slowly. The machine would then display numbers on dials, which needed to be looked up in another book of tables, and the results yelled down the pipes. While the calculations of the tables were simple, they were mind-numbingly so. Especially when that would have to be repeated time after time for hours in which combat happened. It shocked him that something as inherently exciting as battle could become boring through the use of the machinery.

The actual effort of the machine wasn’t much of any issue, he had been training his body from his earliest days and never missed a day. To be a noble is to be a shield for the commoners who supported the leaders. As such, he needed his body to be as strong as the best iron. That was especially true during the ship’s most recent mission. One of the Aulin Republic’s new iron-clad sky-ships was cut off from supplies, and every ship in the eastern fleet was sent out looking for it. There weren’t enough ships to cover the area, and it had turned into a miserable slog keeping track of the other ships to make sure there were no gaps in the search. That was what meeting he was attending was concerning, they were nearing the end of their supplies and the captain was calling for ideas on how to make things stretch further.

As far as Roland was concerned, that was a wasted effort. He had watched the crew grow slacker and less disciplined with each week that passed. Not that they were the embodiment of organisation before they departed. He could understand the commoners succumbing to their base desires, but he was disappointed in the nobles who were meant to be providing the example for them. The marines in particular were disgraceful. Some of them had gained enough weight around the waist that they were having a hard time fitting into their tailored armour. They were outshone by even the commoners amongst the fighting men. There was one man in particular, a tall, black haired man who wore his uniform with pride. Roland never caught his name, but the man seemed particularly together, for a commoner.

The main problem was, like most things with the Sunseed, the captain. He treated the crew like a family. He took the time to learn their names and treated them all like his grandchildren. In Roland’s mind, that was the root cause of the breakdown. The captain didn’t fill them with awe. He didn’t fill them with fear. They were all loyal to him, but loyalty wasn’t the same as control. They liked him as a man, but they questioned and doubted his every order. They followed his words, but they were slow to do so. With that kind of atmosphere, the captain would have made an excellent merchant or supply ship captain. He should not, however, have been placed in the command of a combat vessel.

As he listened to an officer explain how they could try to make strains for removing salt from ocean water out of spare sail cloth, in a bid to try and reduce the build up of crystals on the boiler, a voice rang out from the pipe system. Each pipe was set up in different parts of the room to reduce confusion of where the speaker was coming from. With all the time they had each spent working there, they all immediately turned to the correct pipe, the one for the lower lookout. A man listening to the pipe started to frantically write down what he was hearing, the covered it and yelled out to the captain.

“Sir, black ship spotted by the lower lookout, position being confirmed by the second sighter and upper lookout now.”

Tense moments later, the other spotters confirmed the sighting and the whole room burst into action. The captain broke out his personal telescope and pointed it to the co-ordinates given. He then went over to the master pipe, the communication pipe that was connected to all other pipes in the ship, and started giving orders. That began Roland’s mind-numbing next hour. He kept listening, looking through tables, cranking the machine, and yelling down the pipe. As the ship dropped into the clouds, he calculated. As the ship came under fire, he calculated. As the mast broke and the ship twisted, he calculated. As the ship fell from the sky, he calculated. When they shot up to the sky, he calculated.

Hours had gone by and he felt like his brain had turned to mush. As the ship was falling and they were looking out for the black ship, he finally noticed that the captain had collapsed, leaving the second in command to take over. The fall was going to need to be too quick to be meaningfully calculated, and certainly too short to be done by the machine. As the call come in with the location, he saw the others in the room scramble to try and get the machine to work. Roland didn’t bother. He recognised the numbers; he had done similar numbers for hours. He trusted his intuition and yelled them down the pipe. They’d get a shot off before the other side even if the other side had the best machines possible.

The cannons fired and the ship’s fall was momentarily halted. Lumps of metal tore through the black ship’s armour, causing steam to vent. From where Roland watched, looking through the telescope, he could see which of the cannons went wide. As the other ship returned fire, He started to yell corrections to the cannoneers, trusting his own judgement while the rest of the crew worked the machines. They would have exact answers by the time the slowest to load were ready, but those who were fastest would be delayed, and the calculators had no way of knowing which that would be. If their luck were bad, they could do their calculations last and waste the most time possible. His guesses would at least give them the best chance of hitting if the calculators were too slow. He was also confident that the experienced cannoneers would realise that the numbers came in too soon and know what he was doing, and would be able to apply their own judgement, and the inexperienced cannoneers who might apply their judgement wrongly wouldn’t even notice the discrepancy.

The fight was not a good one, as both sides were crippled. A cannon shot tore through the supports on the boiler jutted it forward, sending debris through the office. A piece of wood struck him against his head, and he could see some of his scalp and blond hair fall to the floor and he found himself laying there next to it. With each time he blinked, the room seemed to rearrange as time lost all meaning. He could hear the yelling of those around him, but the words didn’t seem to make any sense. After he blinked again, the faces of those around him likewise started to blur, he could clearly see them and all their features, but he couldn’t get them to click together. The only person he could make out was the obese medic, whose body was wholly unique amongst the crew. He blinked again and the ship was torn to shreds, holes everywhere cleanly cut through the whole ship and venting steam was filling all spaces. The fat medic was carrying him over his shoulders in a fireman’s hold. Roland could see blood pooling on the floor behind them.

As they arrived at the edge of the ship, and a hole that a cannon had opened, the medic hooked him into a slow-fall vest; a harness attached to a kettle sized ball by a wire. When the ball was slammed against a wall, it started to float. The doctor used his own weight as a leaver and threw Roland as far as he could. His body felt the sensation of falling and his instincts shook him from his stupor.

After his panic passed, he started to understand his situation. He was falling slowly under the power of the stone. Below him was the cold water of the open ocean, far too far from land to swim. The stone was unable to sink, and as such he would be able to avoid drowning. Likewise, the heat it put out would make freezing to death a slow process, especially in the tropics. That just left exhaustion, starvation, and thirst. Ordinarily, there would be supplies attached to the vest, but when he reached for where they should have been, he only found a severed rope.

As he worried about that, the remain of the ship fell past him. He could see it crumble to pieces as it fell, bodies and equipment falling from it and getting grinded under the weight of the wood and metal. The boiler shattered and the contained stoned shot upwards like shrapnel from a bomb. That was repeated when the ship hit the water and every stone in the ship was activated, shooting up. Material from the black ship’s deck fell past him, some striking his floater and sending him into moments of free fall followed by jerking stops. When the skies were finally clear, he could see the black ship start to float away. It was moving at such a slow speed that it could almost be called limping.

By the time the ship was fully out of sight, lost in the clouds, he hit the water. The coldness struck him in a way that the altitude never had. The heat that the air sapped from him was nothing like what the water took. He pulled himself up the wire and wrapped himself around the floater. In his arms, it sunk down into the water, but it held him afloat and kept him warm.

He floated for hours, using his hands to approximate the time through the sun and the horizon. He let him mind wander, floating without a thought in him mind.

More time passed, and he stopped checking the time. Something bumped into his back and brought him back to reality. His mind filled with fear of shark and sea monster, but the pressure was constant, and he turned to look. A portion of the Sunseed was still floating, having drifted away from the rest of the wreck, and Roland pulled himself onto it like a raft. He managed to fish up some rope and dried it out using the floater’s crystal. The Floater had a smaller crystal at its base that could be unscrewed and used as a signal or a lighter. It was a little risky, but he lit one end of the rope and used the rest of the rope to shield it from the wind and the water. The smoke it generated was a useful tool in attracting attention, even if it didn’t give off much light.

When night came around, he was shivering while holding down the floater. The orb was warm, but the breeze pulled that warmth off. He had partially dried off, but the occasional wave would come along and dampen him once more. His head was still throbbing from the blow he had taken, but he had seared the wound shut and didn’t need to worry about blood loss. He knew he shouldn’t sleep, but as the night continued to sap at him, he found his eyes growing heavy.

Roland woke to the smell of smoke, like the smoked meats they ate on long trips and during winter. As his hunger pulled him into consciousness, he found half the raft was set alight and slowly burning towards him. It wasn’t the smell of smoked food; it was burning boat and ropes. As the fire drew closer, he grabbed the floater and jumped into the water. The sleep hadn’t done much to help him recover but it was better than nothing. The bitter cold of the ocean at night twisted through his skin like carnivores eating him alive.

Then, disaster struck. In his rush to escape the fire he had forgotten to screw the smaller firestone back in all the way, having left it loose to quickly restart the ropes if wind or water smothered it. The chamber it was in smothered, fully activating the crystal and building heat and steam. The lid burst open, tearing the bore of the screw, and making cracks along the whole body. The small stone launched itself up like a rocket, a line of red light that loomed ominously as it passed through the night-time clouds. The danger of the cracks in the floater’s main body was not so dramatic. The floater was designed operate with pure distilled water. When seawater mixed through it, the salt would crystalise and the firestone would eventually become an inert sinker. The more the pure water leaked out, and the more salt water leaked in, the sooner that would happen. And even if he were able to keep the seawater out, he would eventually have to intentionally pour it in. Those cracks slowly vented steam, losing water faster than it was designed to. The floater would normally circulate its own water and only lose a little at a time, able to float for as long as several days. At the rate it was losing steam, he would guess it wouldn’t even survive the night.

Thus, the night was sleepless for him, and he clutched the orb for warmth, being constantly vigilant for any sign that it might suddenly drop out, sinking and carry him down with it. In that stressful vigilance, time seemed to pass with every second taking hours. He was so focused on the floater that he hadn’t notice a boat pulling up near him until someone put a hand on his shoulder.

When he was warm and dry in a captain’s office, relaying the Sunseed’s fate to the officers there, he finally heard the name of what ship picked him up. It was the RSS Strongwind. They had their float boiler crust over and were forced to make an emergency ocean touchdown, just a couple days prior. They had been on their way to try and signal the Sunseed to cover their route and were then bound to return home for resupply. A spotter had smelt the smoke on the wind earlier in the afternoon, then they later saw what they thought was his rescue flair, the escaping firestone.

Roland had never liked his time on the Sunseed. It smelt of mould and rust, it was a hodgepodge of thrown together technologies, and the crew were unprofessional. Yet now, breathing in the iron and mildew of another S-Class, so familiar yet subtly different, he was struck by how much he would miss that ship. He would miss the captain he scorned, and the doctor who used the last of his life to save Roland’s. Yet he had survived when the ship went down, and he would have to be the one to remember the ship and its crew. When the Strongwind returned to a friendly port, he would continue onwards to brief the Congress of Lords on every detail he could remember. Knowing that, he set to work, with the captain’s leave and a tightness in his chest, trying to record everything he could remember, while it was still fresh.

Yet whenever he tried to think about that black ship, the IIC Whiskey Flask, what came to his mind wasn’t the physical features, but the ominous aura he felt from it. He wasn’t one to put much stock in such things and would definitely not include something so vague in a report, but none the less, nothing better came to mind when thinking of it. He could only conclude that the concussion he had taken had somehow affected his memory.