We Sail For Celestia

Dearest brother,

I have a medal! The Crimson Teardrop, for wounds received in combat. Not the medal I was hoping to win, but still! I cannot tell you too much about the circumstances just yet. Needless to say, the Kirin have played one of their dirty tricks. No doubt it will be all over the national press soon enough, to stir up outrage, and rightfully so. They have taken the barbarism of war to heights that none of us wanted it to go. War is a bloody thing at the best of times, but it seems they are keen on making it even more so. Let us hope this was the first, and last, of such things that we saw from this foreign beast.

The city is surviving, just about. The Kirin shell us every day, though whether from the land or the sea, I cannot tell from my hospital bed. I have been here a week, on board the Salvation. A mighty vessel in her way, larger than any of our battleships. A former ocean liner I understand, now tending to the sick and wounded of the fleet. They painted her white, of course. Big medical insignia on the sides of her hull. From my porthole I can see my ship, moored at one of the piers (I won't put the name down in case the censors decide to remove it again). How I long to be back aboard! The doctors say I should be fit for service in another three or four days.

Stay safe, wherever you are, little brother. We shall meet again, I am certain of it.

Greenwood

Greenwood put down his pen and rested his head back against the cleanly-starched pillows. The Salvation was the Northern Fleet's hospital ship, a converted ocean liner as he had mentioned in his letter to Greenshield. It could house five hundred patients, and would accompany the fleet on any major deployment to tend to the sick and injured. Naval operations tended to produce fairly high numbers of relatively minor casualties; diseases spread rapidly among the crew if they happened to be picked up ashore, and working with machinery and scalding-hot steam pipes and boilers led to frequent burns, cuts and bruises. While each ship had an infirmary, they could only handle a couple of serious cases at any one time, so patients requiring surgery or long-term treatment would be shifted first to the hospital ship, and then to a shore hospital when the fleet reached port.

Greenwood had lain in his bed for the past week. None of the doctors had treated chemical warfare patients before, but an industrialised society like Equestria used chemicals and gases for all kinds of non-warlike purposes, and there was no shortage of knowledge in how to treat phosgene inhalation, as it was used to make pesticides for agricultural purposes. They had seemed confident that Greenwood, having taken in only a relatively small dose of the stuff, would make a full and relatively swift recovery.

And he did indeed feel much better. Not quite to full strength, but not far off. Tracer, too, was recovering well, in the next bed over, sharing one of the cabins as they did on the Defiant. Others, however, had not been so lucky. Four of the sailors they had led out to the fort had died in the infirmary there, choking on every frothing breath. Two others were unlikely to ever recover to full service, and would probably be invalided out of the navy once they were well enough to go home.

Home.

Not for him. The Defiant was out there; he could see it from his porthole. That was where he needed to be. Not the fort, not home, but at sea, where his true calling lay. Not that the destroyer was going anywhere; the fleet was still bottled up in the harbour, awaiting the aid of the Home Fleet, whenever that might come. But at least when that moment did come, they would be ready. Ready to surge forth from the port and strike the Kirin from behind while they were engaged with Blueblood's armada. That was the hope, at least, in Greenwood's mind. A glorious battle and a crushing victory, a tot of rum to celebrate, and then, eventually, hopefully; then he could go home.

Greenshield's feet were tired. Sore, swollen, blistered. The soles of his boots were wearing away from all the countless miles they had covered. They were advancing on the Kirin, but it was rough going. Though they were no longer in the mountains, they were still very much in the grip of a Northwick winter, and the tracks were an awful, debilitating mixture between thick, cloying mud and deep snow, depending on where exactly they were. The winds were biting and icy, cutting through the winter uniforms of the 45th Regiment. This was not campaigning weather; in days of old, armies would simply make camp for the winter because they knew they could not operate successfully in the frost and snow and rain, and they knew their enemies could not, either.

But war had changed. Mechanisation provided the means for logistical success. Trains, airships, and the new motorised trucks and cars permitted much smoother transport of both ponies and equipment. Unlike donkeys or wild horses, distant relatives of the pony race, vehicles did not need feeding, other than with gasoline. They did not need rest, they did not panic at the sound of gunfire, they did not tire out and get sick and buck their riders. For the frontline infantry, however, things were much the same as they had ever been- march, march, march.

Greenshield knew they were on their way to Harmony Bay. He had said as much in his last letter to his brother, sent out in the postbag a week or so ago. What he did not know was how far away they were. Everywhere they were travelling through looked the same, just another tiny Yak village with wide-eyed foals peering from windows. Just another snowy forest, another babbling mountain stream. It was beautiful, like an image from a Hearth's Warming card, but it was so impersonal, so alien, almost, from what he knew. The whole of Northwick seemed that way. It was a strange, directionless place. If a pony got separated from their unit, alone out here in the thick and silent pine forests or the wide snowfields, they would likely never find another living soul before they died of exposure.

It was nothing like genteel Hoofbury, where he had been born and raised, or rowdy, raucous Baltimare, where he had worked as a dockhand part-time during his final school year before, ironically, joining the army instead of the navy. Baltimare had a nice, sensible grid pattern to most of its civic architecture; you could follow the street numbers and know exactly where you were. Out here, even with a compass, a clear night and a fine map, you would be hard pressed to navigate your way to anywhere.

It was the nights that unnerved him the most. Even without the prospect of a sudden Kirin attack, there were distant howls from timberwolves, the hoots of snowy owls, the cracking of twigs in the forest or the slight slumping sound of snow falling from an overloaded branch, and apart from that, complete and utter silence. No rowdy revellers going home from the tavern, no clattering motorcars on the street or clanging tram-bells. Nothing.

No civilization at all.

There were Yak hamlets here and there, but they hardly constituted a civilization, not in Greenshield's mind. Civilization meant bustling streets and big brick buildings, the smell of smoke from a hundred belching furnace-chimneys, a plate of oysters and a pint of beer. The Yaks were...quaint? No, not quite the right word. After all, they had once been mighty warriors, a fearsome race, and still were if you deigned to engage them in combat. But their lifestyle, still semi-nomadic for the most part, seemed ancient, like something which, by rights, should have already been lost in the mists of time. The landscape they inhabited seemed no less primeval, all towering, jagged mountains and snow-swept plains. He could almost picture dinosaurs striding through the province millions of years ago.

The 45th Regiment had been marching since two days after the battle of Yakfrost Pass. It seemed like a lifetime ago, a lifetime of snow and cold. They had not marched directly toward Harmony Bay, but rather south for a considerable distance to link up with reinforcements. Several divisions which had been dispatched from Equestria had arrived, and they joined the 45th Regiment and the other units which had defended the mountain pass. A powerful force, they now had enough troops to prevent any further Kirin attacks to the west or north. Yakyakistan province was safe, but Northwick was still under Kirin domination, with the exception of Harmony Bay. Once the Equestrians had been able to build up an even stronger presence here, they could launch an attack and drive the Kirin back into the sea.

Greenshield's thoughts turned quite instinctively to his brother. He had still not received a single letter from him, though that was not too surprising, given that Harmony Bay was under siege. But was that the only reason for the lack of contact? Or was the news out of the port city, on a more personal level, even worse than he knew? Was his brother alive or not? The thought tormented him as they marched, endless miles under his boots. Was he the only surviving sibling? Maybe Greenwood had been captured. How did the Kirin treat prisoners? He didn't know. There was not much he did know, in truth.

Such was the inevitability of being frontline infantry.

They camped that night in a railway siding, where no trains had run for weeks. Since the Kirin cut the line, there had been nowhere for the trains to go. Instead they had been terminating up the line at Saltborough since the war began. Only now that the Equestrian Army was advancing again were the trains moving farther eastward, keeping pace with the advance and staying several miles behind the frontline, bringing vital supplies and ammunition to the soldiers. Harmony Bay was still out of reach, but they were pushing forward all the time, probing tentatively. Greenshield knew that other units had made contact with the Kirin, and had engaged in hard-fought combat in the woods to their north. But for the most part, the advance seemed to be uncontested. The Kirin were content to let the Equestrians claw back some of the frozen land they had abandoned; why? Lack of strength to fight off the counterattack, or were they luring the ponies in to some kind of trap?

As he lay curled up in his bedroll in a trackside shed that night, shivering and shaking against the winter chill, Greenshield did not know which of those scenarios might be true, but he hoped fervently it was the former.

The transit between New Zebrica and the Equestrian port of Summertown had been long. Bypassing the Griffon-controlled city of Bridgeport had meant adding almost fifteen hundred miles extra to the Home Fleet's journey before their next coaling stop, which was why Admiral Blueblood had been so keen to load up as much of the filthy black stuff as he could back in New Zebrica. It also explained his eagerness to depart, despite many of his vessels needing repair after the hurricane. New Zebrica was a neutral port, a foreign nation in control of who came and who went. Kirin spies and, potentially, saboteurs were sure to be present in significant numbers, with nothing the fleet could do to control such matters. At least Summertown was friendly.

Blueblood had pushed his sailors hard, and they were not happy. Even with the mutineers sailing back to Manehattan under armed guard, the mood in the fleet was not good. The exertions of sailing through the hurricane, followed immediately by heatstroke and struggle as they loaded coal in New Zebrica, had exhausted many ponies. So far from home, their alcohol and cigarettes still on half-rations as per the Admiral's orders, the threat of submarine attack a constant unwelcome companion, the fleet's morale had plummeted to a new low.

This was evident in the second gunnery practice that the Admiral ordered. The fleet's performance was even more dire than the first time they had tried it, just out of New Zebrica. A disconsolate Blueblood took to his cabin and self-medicated with caviar, salmon fillet with potatoes and asparagus, and a large quantity of whiskey. The rest of the fleet enjoyed boiled rice with pickled cabbage, tinned carrots and some dried-up rye bread.

They met no more enemy submarines, despite keeping a constant lookout and minimising radio contact, as they had done the entire way down from Manehattan. After the attack which sank the Fillydelphia and the fleet oiler, Blueblood had become even more paranoid about the possibility of losing more ships, of his force being whittled away, one by one, until he arrived outside Harmony Bay with just the Chevaline. A fanciful notion, though one which repeated and repeated in his nightmares. The Kirin, of course, would target his flagship as a priority if they were to get the chance. The likelihood of the Chevaline being the only ship to arrive was essentially nil.

Blueblood imagined it was his own good tactical planning which was keeping the Kirin at bay. But a nagging voice told him that maybe it was just circumstance. The Kirin were probably shadowing his fleet. After all, one submarine against an unsuspecting battleship was a very tempting proposition for any Kirin captain, but the entire fleet together, with its masses of destroyers and escorts carrying hydrophones and depth charges, was an altogether different beast. It would be like a ferret attacking an entire pack of very hungry wolves, and would end in much the same way. The Kirin, Blueblood had learned, were not stupid. Admiral Strongbow had learned the same thing up in Harmony Bay. They would not waste a submarine in a pointless and bloody attempt to sink one or two ships. The storm had provided the perfect operating conditions for the underwater boats, because it had torn the fleet from its formation and scattered the vessels across a wide swathe of sea. Isolated ships were easy potential prey.

Summertown, their next stop, was the final coaling station before the Home Fleet would reach Harmony Bay. It was not very summery, especially not now, being positioned halfway up the eastern coast. It derived its name from the fact that, compared to the more northerly reaches, it actually was relatively summery. Residents of Northwick and other chilly provinces would decamp to Summertown in winter to avoid the absolute worst of the cold. The harbour was overlooked by headlands which were dotted with holiday homes, moderately rich and influential ponies owning most of them. Those who had the funds would travel somewhere much nicer for the winter, but Summertown would suffice for those of middle income.

Summertown had been a naval station for a long time, as it was a fine spot for policing the trade routes all along the eastern coast, and also those that connected Equestria to the Kirin homeland. Ships of the line had been stationed here, their tall, towering masts and billowing sails a proud and stirring sight as they sallied forth to deal with pirates and privateers. The gunmetal-grey hulls and menacing silhouettes of the modern-day Home Fleet were somewhat less picturesque, though far more deadly.

Blueblood had ordered the ships to anchor in the harbour, and here they stayed for a fortnight. The ships which had been damaged in the storm- mostly destroyers and light cruisers, the smaller vessels more badly tossed by the sea- finally had a chance to complete necessary repairs. Every ship conducted a quick maintenance job on her boilers, condensers, propeller shafts and steering gear. A more in-depth examination would have to wait until they returned to port, either in Manehattan or in Harmony Bay, where dry docks, specialist fleet engineers and a much wider array of spare parts could be obtained.

Assuming, of course, they made it back to port at all.

Blueblood spent most of the days in his cabin, when he was not ashore at official parties in the mayor's house or the dockyard commodore's residence. Those who saw and spoke to him described his mood as sullen, like a stroppy teenager sulking after being told off for some perceived slight or misdemeanour. It was a marked change from the bullish and confident Admiral who had departed Manehattan. It was different even from the harried and angry Admiral who had departed New Zebrica after quashing the mutiny.

Flag-Captain Champagne Crown began to privately wonder if the Admiral was actually up to the task of leading the Home Fleet into battle, a subject he would never dare raise with anypony else. But he respected Blueblood greatly, and felt it was his duty to talk to the Admiral before they sailed. In his cabin, Crown confronted his Admiral.

"Sir, with the utmost respect..." Crown had begun, while Blueblood poured himself another tot of vodka. "This voyage has been long and arduous, for you as much as for any of the seaponies. Is it...conceivably possible that the fleet might benefit from...ah...from..."

"Out with it, then!" Blueblood had demanded, downing his vodka and slamming the glass on his desk.

"A change of leadership, sir?" Crown had pressed. "You are tired, I can see that. Everypony can see that. You have worked so hard to bring us this far, but I can tell something has changed in you. Perhaps Vice-Admiral Moonshot might be better suited, in the current situation..."

"I see," Blueblood replied, pouring another shot of vodka and consuming it calmly. Instead of clinking his glass down on the desk, he hurled it across the cabin in the direction of his Flag-Captain. "I am in command of this fleet, Captain, and I am going to remain in command of this fleet, and do you know why?" he bellowed. "Because this fleet needs me! We re going to sail into battle in a few days time and I am not going to delegate the fucking responsibility that was placed in my hands by the Sun herself!"

Crown ducked the glass and quickly retreated from the cabin, but Blueblood roared after him. "Where the hell are you going, Captain? I have not dismissed you!" Crown stepped back inside to face his Admiral's glowering, red-faced anger. "When I want your opinion on who should be in command of this fleet, I will ask you for it, but until then, there is only one pony who is in charge. Is that understood, Captain?"

"Yes sir."

"I will not put the responsibility for this fleet in the hands of that frigid bitch unless I am on the brink of death, and as for that glorified coastguardspony Green Haze, well, he does not impress me either! Neither of them have commanded a fleet in battle before," Blueblood continued his rant. Crown dared not interrupt to point out that, while neither of the Admiral's deputies had led a major fleet action, neither had he.

"Yes sir."

"Now I'll overlook this," Blueblood grunted, "provided you fetch me a fresh bottle of vodka and then get out of my sight."

"Yes sir." Champagne Crown turned smartly and stepped out of the cabin.

Two days later, the Home Fleet set sail on the final leg of its long and troubled journey to Harmony Bay.