“Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is Captain… of the heavy shipping vessel Boreas…”
The ship appeared half an hour after the transmission was first sent, rising out of the horizon, its lights like a new stars in the moonless night. It was a mid-sized sloop with a crew of ten. It circled the Boreas twice at a safe distance. Finding no immediate threat, it began its approach.
When the ship was only a few metres away, the ponies on deck threw hooks onto the Boreas. Two of them caught the gunwales.
Splash. Splash.
“Fenders are in!”
“Brace!”
The smaller ship shook violently from the impact. Boreas merely rocked, barely drifting at all. It was easily six times as long as the ship coming to its aid, and twenty times as heavy.
“This is Narwhal. Permission to board?”
Nopony answers.
“Permission to board?” Louder this time.
Nothing.
A rope ladder ending with heavy steel hooks is thrown upwards. It catches the gunwale on the third try. It made for a long and treacherous climb, only slightly easier than climbing a single rope. The Narwhal was truly a tiny ship.
Two ponies appear on deck, each one carrying a gas lantern on a pole. They are unicorns wearing identical blue wool jackets; decommissioned navy uniforms, not unusual in their trade.
“Hello?” One of them bellows, scanning the deck with his light. His brow twitches nervously as he takes in the scene.
The deck is clean; a pale line demarks the boundary of one final incomplete swabbing, though there is no mop or bucket to be seen. Deck boxes are closed and latched. Every life boat that he can see is covered with an olive green tarp. But the gigantic mast at middeck, the tallest of three…
His green eyes open wide, flashing once when his light passes over his face. He stumbles, but his brother catches him and follows his gaze. His lantern is unsteady.
“What’s going on up there?” A powerful male voice calls from the ship below, the same voice that first asked to board.
“Nothing, sir,” comes the breathless reply. “Just a loose sheet. There’s nopony on deck. Shall we search the cabins?”
“Wait right there!” Cries the captain. “Wayfarer, Sealight, go with them. Don’t split up. If you can’t find anypony, bring back the ship’s logs.”
The ladder creaks and bounces again. Two more ponies have boarded the Boreas, two mares this time: a grey pegasus and another unicorn.
“Lancer?” The pegasus calls, looking over the deck. “Fodder! Where did you go?”
“Over here, ma’am,” a muffled voice answers from within the middeck house. From inside, lantern light sweeps across the little round window in sporadic intervals, revealing dusty air. “Sorry… but we found their charts. Looks like there are some logs here too.”
“Anything recent?” She says as she approaches, keeping one hoof on her companion. The unicorn meanwhile was looking in every direction except the one in which she was going, her horn putting out a dazzling beam of white light.
“Nothing yet,” he replies. “Hey, Fodder, get me that green logbook from the top shelf.”
The ponies outside exchange uneasy looks.
“Everything looks good up here,” the unicorn whispers, though her horn continues to glow.
“Stay with me Sealight,” Wayfarer says in a low voice. “Come on.”
At that moment Fodder let out a sharp cry. Books, boxes and maps clatter onto the deck, followed by a dull thud, and finally the sound of shattering glass and a big poof.
If the noise didn’t alert the rest of the Narwhal crew, they certainly noticed the glare of the fire. The ladder is rattling, and several ponies are yelling at each other.
“Send up a hose!” Sealight yells over it all. “Hurry!”
A burly earth pony stallion in a stiff tan vest leaps aboard, his steel shoes leaving marks on the deck. Between his teeth is a dribbling green hose. The fire is easy enough to find; the window of the deckhouse is broken, and smoke has already darkened the wall above it.
“Start pumping!” He yells, throwing the end of the hose through the window.
Steam fills the air. The hiss of the smothered fire drowns out the sound of gushing water. Warm brine, blacked with ink and carrying bits of ruined books and charts seeps onto the deck through the doorway. The length of hose inside the deckhouse, about six feet long, continues to whip across the floor. Everything is thoroughly drenched: the broken lantern, the books, the radio… nothing salvageable remains.
The sailors in the little ship continue to work the pump, their manes glistening with sweat, until they see the dirty water dribbling down the red stripe of the Boreas’s otherwise black hull.
“Sunny?” The captain cries, waving for the pump crew to stop. “What’s going on? Report!”
There is no answer.
An uneasy silence falls over the remaining crew. The pilot, a dark blue pegasus mare, looks over her shoulder uneasily. She can see nothing but inky black water and the hull of the Boreas fading into the night. It is the hull that most concerns her.
“We should go,” she says in a throaty voice.
“Right,” the captain agrees shakily. Clearing his throat, he turns in a circle, looking over the terrified faces of his five remaining crew. “Right. Somepony has to go up there and get the others. They’re badly injured.”
“Are you crazy?” The pilot says, pulling on her silver braids in exasperation. “Nopony’s going up there! Something’s not right about that ship!”
“Calm down, Flint,” the captain says, easily louder than the pilot. “There is nothing ‘not right’ about that ship.”
“Fiddlesticks!” Flint spits in the direction of the Boreas. “Where’s their crew? Who sent the mayday? Huh?”
“Pirates,” the captain said firmly. “They were taken by pirates along with their cargo! And our crew had an accident. We have to get somepony aboard and bring them back. The Boreas is abandoned. I’ve recorded our current location, and the weather is fine. We’ll get the coast guard to deal with this one tomorrow.”
Flint breathes deeply, cowering behind the wheel. The captain continues to look at her for some time; her pupils become pinholes when she finally realizes his intentions.
“N… no,” she stammers. “No! I’m not…”
“You want to get out of here, right?” The captain asks. “We’ll tie a rope around your waist; you can be back here in two seconds if anything goes wrong. But nothing is going to go wrong.”
“I’m not going!” Flint yells, startling the rest of the skittish crew. “You can shoot me right now, or throw me overboard, but I’m not going! Why don’t you do it, if it’s so safe?”
The captain sighs and steals a glance up to the darkened deck of the Boreas.
“You two,” he says to the earth ponies at the pump. “Will you go up there?”
“What do we get?” One of them asks.
“Five bits each,” the captain says after a second of thought.
“Ten,” the other one says.
“It’s not ten bits of work to climb a ladder,” the captain answers, sneering. “Get some rope for yourselves. Go, before I drive you up there with a whip.”
The two ponies made harnesses out of ropes and secured one end to the mast. Only then do they ascend the ladder. They are rather clumsy, and one nearly falls into the water.
“Anyone here?” One of them calls out as soon as he steps off the ladder. “Is everyone alright?”
“Here!” A powerful male voice replies. “Finally! Come over here! Something exploded in that map room! I’m down the stairs!”
“Sunny?” The other pony asks, peeking through the window of the wrecked deckhouse. The inside is completely dark, and the Narwhal can spare no more lanterns. “Where’s everyone else?”
“I don’t know,” is the reply. “Come down here! And be careful! I can’t see a thing!”
“We need some help over here!”
The voice is strained. The captain looks up once more, most of the anxiety gone from his face. Flint too seems more at ease than before.
“Go get a winch!” the other pony yells.
The hull of the Boreas shudders, sending little splinters of paint into the air. Flint ducks to the deck, covering her ears.
“It’s buckling!”
“Get up there!” The captain yells, leaping across the deck and grabbing the wheel. “Go get them! We’re leaving as soon as they’re onboard! Hurry!”
Even Flint does not hesitate now. She bypasses the ladder entirely, flying through the riggings of the Boreas before landing on top of the smouldering deckhouse without even a rope to bring her back. Meanwhile the two remaining earth ponies were not mountain goats, but laden as they were with ropes and pulleys they moved quicker than any of the ponies who had gone up before them.
The bigger of the two is the first one up. A stout black stallion with a square jaw, he carries at least fifty pounds of equipment. He flips his eyepatch and surveys the deck, now soiled with a slimy mixture of brine and ash. He grimaces as the timber screams beneath his hooves. Something else has given way.
“Over here!” Flint yells. “Hurry!”
“Wait!”
The filly doesn’t look to be much over fifteen. Her sandy mane is very short. The big pockets of her green vest were bulging with rope bits and scraps of sailcloth. She throws the lantern down rather roughly and opened the valve. Her hooves shake as she fumbles with the matches.
Another ear-splitting groan startles her. The matches fall into the puddle on the deck. She turns around panicked, reaching for the ladder.
“The ropes, captain! The ropes!”
Locking the wheel, the captain runs to middeck, takes the four rescuers’ ropes in his mouth and braces himself against the gunwales. He yanks as hard as he can…
And flies back three feet, completely off-balance, landing heavily on his back. The frayed ends of the ropes slither onto the deck as he writhes and curses in pain.
The Boreas is silent now. Bits of paper still crawl down the side, imitating snails.
So there he sits, a middle-aged unicorn stallion in a red woolen jacket. Not a particularly big fellow; not small either. His short black-streaked mane bedraggled, his light brown coat damp with sweat. He backs away from the side of his ship, his dark eyes scanning the Boreas, still seeing nothing unusual.
Laughter rises from the deck of the big ship. It starts as a low chuckle, and swells into a guffaw.
I must confess, captain! It was me. It was my idea! Oh… I’m sorry but I’m not!
“Sunny?” The brows furrow angrily on the captain’s blank face. He closes his mouth; he had not realized that it was open in the first place, and there is no dignified way to correct that problem. “Are… are all of you up there?”
Of course… ha… we are…
The captain stomps his hooves angrily, dancing in a small circle before slamming his head into the mast. His horn leaves a mark two inches deep.
“Get back here! All of you!” He screams at the top of his lungs. “You’ll all be tried for this!”
“Will we, captain?”
The new voice is low and crackled with static, but it’s clear as far as transmissions go.
“No more tricks!” The captain snarls, stomping into the radio room and unplugging the antenna. “Come on!”
Fine.
Fine. I will.
The captain backs away as I step into the light. His eyeballs look like they’re trying to escape. He backs all the way to the other side of his ship, but that only gives him twenty feet of space.
Ten feet.
“Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is Captain… of the clipper Narwhal…”
The ship took days to arrive. It is large, painted blue, with black cannons glistening in its many lamps. It circles the Narwhal (and the Boreas; the two are still linked) twice at a safe distance. Finding no immediate threat, it pauses.
Author's Note
Happy Halloween!
