Holy Land

The Wayward Son began its descent from dry dock at 1900. Before then the fleet sailed out to wait just beyond the harbor. Then the main street leading to the harbor was cleared and lined with rollers and hay bales. The segmented door of the four storey tall warehouse were opened by a team of earth ponies, first the bottom half and then the top. Gingersnap could hardly see them from the deck of the Nephthys.

The ship was gigantic, lumbering along without masts, sending out ropes in every direction. It was like a bowl of fireflies, with the crew providing the flicker by hurrying from one side of the deck to the other. Based on the hatches he could see Gingersnap estimated three hundred broadside guns.

“Good thing he’s on our side,” Coral Frond mumbled under his breath.

The three masts with sails already set rose from storehouses near the water. Dozens of unicorns on shore held them in the air while pegasi and griffins guided the ropes. In minutes the Wayward Son was fully assembled. Finally a signal was sent to the rest of the fleet via a volley of cannon fire that left Gingersnap with stars in his eyes.

“Set out!” Barked the watch commander, a unicorn mare from Fiddlehead.

Across the water the command was being repeated on every deck. The pirates had an unnerving habit that Gingersnap had not fully appreciated until now, with the big fleet assembled on calm water. They sailed without running lights. Within minutes lanterns were being lowered from the riggings and snuffed out. One by one the ships winked out of existence, returning as shadowy spectres like the backs of misshapen whales.

Gingersnap retired to his hammock an hour later, without undressing lest a taller ship ran down the Nephthys in the middle of the night.

Gingersnap awoke to the sound of ponies yelling on deck, but he was sure that there had not been a collision. No one had been sent to rouse the sleepers, but as he looked around from his hammock he noticed dozens of shining eyes.

There were orders to deploy extra sails and oars, but when a colt rushed down the hatch with a lantern swinging wildly between his teeth and started unpacking pumps everyone got up.

“What’s the matter?” Gerald growled, surging out of the darkness and startling the child.

“There’s a fleet coming from due north,” he reported quickly. “Captain Moonlight says they’re hydrofoils. All the hydrofoils we have.”

The quartermaster clicked his beak as a wave of raised feathers and fur passed from his beak to his tail.

“Come on,” he said over his shoulder. “Marines prepare to board, sailors on deck. Gingersnap, stay a while and place all the pumps. Pick ten sailors for yourself, and start pumping as soon as there’s a breach.”

Gingersnap picked his crew as they left the deckhouse. A steady drumbeat had been established on deck, and the grunting rowers pulled with all their might. The colt helped unpack the five oversized pumps, but could not help much to move them. Gingersnap placed them as he had been asked, and seeing that the colt could assemble them satisfactorily he rushed out onto a slurry-slicken deck.

Twenty long oars extended from the starboard side, twenty from port, rolling in unison. A pair of griffins attended the rudder, and barely balanced atop the masthead was a pegasus. Squinting towards the bow, Gingersnap saw another pony clinging to the golden cobra head. Marines were starting to assemble in their parties of five or seven, each party armed with a mix of spears, war scythes and machetes.

“Six miles!” Called the pegasus on the masthead.

Coral Frond’s team emerged, seven looking like three. If any were older than their leader it was not by much. For his part Coral Frond did not seem at all nervous. A calm grimness had taken hold of him, yet that made Gingersnap all the more worried.

“Five miles!”

The cry startled him. Under oars and sail the Nephthys must have been pushing ten knots. A ship at twice that speed could not close a mile so quickly.

“Four miles!”

A flash from half a mile to the stern made everyone jump. The tiny shadow of the fleet was burnt into the horizon, and Gingersnap thought he saw gigantic feathers sticking out of the sea. The sound of the cannons reached them a moment later, and it seemed mere seconds before the spotter called three miles.

“Twenty ships incoming!”

“Mortars! Fire!”

The deck recoiled. Without riggings the Nephthys had plenty of room for high angle mortars. Gingersnap had never seen this kind of battle before. Bright shells arched high overhead in a lazy arc, barely moving at times it seemed. About three quarters through their trajectory the brightest ones faded completely, and for seconds nothing happened.

Fire seemed to erupt out of the sea as the shells found their mark, but Gingersnap was not sure what exactly was hit. Four giant feathers burst into flames, revealing soft trusses that fell away as the canvas was consumed. It was a sail of some sort, but where was the ship? Nephthys was a low-floating ship, but the “hydrofoil” seemed to have no distinction between deck and hull. And as the sail burned away these ships seemed to dive beneath the waves, lurching as their own wake caught up to them. One was dragged down so suddenly that its stern was thrown into the air.

The six other ships appeared to fly above the waves, with slender split hulls raised almost entirely out of water. Their decks, if they had any true decks, were crowded with ponies. By the time the second volley was ready they were among the fleet.

Tongues of fire burst forth from the fast ships, and black shapes leapt onto the fleet like fleas off a dog. Gunfire flashed on the decks and in the air, and in seconds the attackers had caught and surpassed the Nephthys.

“Hard to starboard!” Moonlight ordered, blasting two pegasi out of the air before they could reach the deck. “Port rifles fire!”

A pegasus landed before Gingersnap, and he did not realize immediately that it was not one of his shipmates. He did think that the pony was rather clumsy to land in his way, and shoved him roughly aside in the direction of the marines. He jumped at the sound of blades piercing flesh and ducked against the deck.

“Look sharp!” Moonlight called to her crew. A burst of magic from her horn threw all the pegasi still in the air hard into the water.

“Grenades!”

A dimly glowing bubble enveloped the ship just as the hydrofoils zoomed by again. The explosions were muffled, but Gingersnap noticed the unicorns of the crew stagger.

“Pegasi! Board!”

Lamps and spotlights and the beams from horns lit up the water for a hundred metres in every direction, and as two dozen marines made the leap onboard one of the hydrofoils Gingersnap finally got a clear look of its hull.

It was roughly half as long as the Nephthys, but had the deck space of a large canoe at best. Each of its hulls was not quite wide enough for two marines to safely stand shoulder-to-shoulder. An enclosed deckhouse was perched on the beams connecting the two hulls, directly below the feather-shaped sail. Its front of the deckhouse was rounded, and the whole thing could have housed six bunks and the wheel, eight if they were especially cramped. The craft yawed dangerously with the slightest movement. The windward hull rose free of the water entirely as it turned, crossing within an inch of the Nephthys’s bow. It was faster than any chariot on land, and faster than most pegasi could fly. Some of the Nephthys’s marines tumbled off the stern of the hydrofoil, narrowly avoiding the water as their wings beat frantically in the chaotic wake left behind.

“Grenades!”

The shield was raised once again. One of the returning marines flew headlong into it. Gingersnap thought he heard the pony’s nose cracking, but that turned out to be the least of his concerns. The hydrofoil flashed into existence behind him. Lined up on the leeward hull, roped in and knee-deep in water a dozen attackers were priming stick grenades.

“Go up!” Cried the marines on deck. The portside rowers lost their rhythm, a few of them dropping their oars altogether to wave frantically at the dazed pegasus.

He backed away from the barrier holding his nose. His eyes were squeezed shut. His wings were beating and he rose unsteadily, but too late.

Gingersnap stared petrified. It was cleaner than he expected, and somehow that made it more terrible. The pegasus seemed to drop without much fuss, without exploding into tiny, unrecognizable pieces. He was pushed against the barrier a few times, and his legs flopped around him like laces trying to tie themselves in knots. The most dramatic thing about it was the way his long blue feathers burst from his wings, and how those wings lost their shape. He dropped into the water amidst a rain of shrapnel, and only then was there blood.

“Keep rowing!”

Gerald ran from stern to bow brandishing a length of rope, shoving stunned rowers back to their posts. When he reached Gingersnap he threw him down the steps into the deckhouse.

“Start pumping!”

The colt was still inside with his lantern; that was the only light left in the deckhouse. He stared at Gingersnap with big, frightened eyes.

“Everything’s fine,” Gingersnap managed to say. “Don’t go outside. Just… keep looking for leaks.”

“There are no leaks,” said the colt in a hollow voice.

“Great.”

Gingersnap went up the stairs. His legs were bruised from the fall despite his padded suit.

“No damage!” He yelled to no one in particular, or at least he thought he did.

The Nephthys had slowed down, and the fleet was spread out. The gunwales of the Wayward Son was crowded with rifles, and three hydrofoils were bobbing inert in the water around that ship. Fire had darkened patches of the hull, but the damage was only cosmetic.

“Brace for impact!”

The hydrofoil appeared out of the night, its now-ragged sail suddenly looming over the deck of the Nephthys. Gingersnap reached out for the doorframe and missed. On The port side rowers extended their oars and held them straight out to catch the speeding ship.

The remaining ten crew of the hydrofoil leapt into the air, the earth ponies and unicorns among them lifted by pegasi. The last to leave threw down a torch, and something on the hull ignited like a pile of dry hay.

“TAKE COVER!” Gerald materialized at middeck to blow out Gingersnap’s right eardrum. Without waiting for a reaction he pushed past the earth pony and leapt into the deckhouse.

The world turned white, and the shockwave nearly toppled the Nephthys. Gingersnap felt his mouth and nostrils baked dry in the heat and immediately coated with ash. For long seconds the world was dark and silent, but one of the first things he heard was the distant squeaking of a single frantic pump.

“Who did that?” Demanded Moonlight.

Gingersnap blinked hard, trying to get some tears to wet his eyes. Each ship appeared a warm orange orb of light on a perfectly dark backdrop. It made him nauseous.

“Coral Frond?!”

Oars splashed into the water as rowers fled their post.

“Nobody touch him!” Moonlight ordered.

“What is that?”

“What’s happening?” Gingersnap tried to yell, but choked on soot. “Coral Frond? Is he okay?”

Gerald put a hand on his shoulder, brushing it a little to clear up some dust.

“Don’t you block the door,” he said gruffly. Gingersnap turned around, but the deckhouse was just a cavern of darkness. Gerald’s voice softened. “Here, go back to bed. It’s over.”

“Coral Frond.” Gingersnap coughed and spat out a solid glob of powder.

“He’s fine,” Gerald said. “You can talk in the morning. Come on.”

Gerald practically lifted him into the hammock. Gingersnap lay awake for an hour, his ears tuned to sounds of cannon fire and impacts. But the sea was quite once again, and soon ponies were returning to their beds all around him.

On the verge of sleep, he heard Moonlight whispering gently, and something hissing and gurgling in reply. It was a desperate, heartbroken sound. Gingersnap could discern which of the sounds represented screams.