//------------------------------//
// Cabin Fever 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
//------------------------------//

SBMS170

The wrecks burned downstream from the fortress, here and there where the pinnaces had come aground in the aftermath of the sudden dawn slaughter.  Furthest downstream smoked the shattered bulk of the enemy galley, its right rear bulwarks smashed in by one of our own galleys, having put a period to that doomed ship's death-spasms with one of those cheap pot-iron rams I hear the shipwrights were making in place of the proper bronzed beaks that doctrine prescribes.

I stood on the westernmost firing platform of our new fastness, beside three silent bolt-throwers and their muttering crews.  We had been barely more than bystanders to the fight, having done nothing more than drawing up the great boom to let loose the loyalist fleet upon our startled enemies.  Now the crews were just hanging around, marking time in the evening coolness.  The flaming wrecks were about the only interesting things going on that night in our neck of the woods.

Very few casualties had reached my surgery.  Supercell was still missing, and I feared that she had drowned somewhere nearby where she had been last seen, burning as she fell over the river.  The tiny little flecks of light in the distance marked the lanterns of the search-party looking for her.  They had been sent out in rowboats to quarter the downstream, but as the light and the hours faded, hope went with them.  To be honest, those ponies should have been back hours ago, but I guess diligence is better than the opposite, even if it was fruitless.

The losses onboard the fleet were the problem of those ships' surgeons, if they had any.  I'd trained up a small swarm of emergency or field medics among the hidden Order ponies on board the great fleet, but they could hardly pursue their training while under the gimlet eye of their respective ship-masters and slave-overseers.  The casualties in the fleet would have to fend for themselves until the Order could reveal itself to the world.

The mystery of Obscured Blade returned to the front of my mind, as I puzzled at it again.  After the skirmishes and pitched battles of the last mud-season of the year, I had expected Blade to be finally chased to ground, along with his few remaining followers.  His mistake in continuing his campaign of ambushes and sneak-attacks into the rainy season had come aground in his followers' reduced mobility, and we'd caught or killed so many of them.  We had wiped out his ghoul forces almost entirely, by my estimate.  Two reported incidents of his ponies assaulting isolated civilian homesteads – and being driven off with losses! – had almost certainly demonstrated his insurgency's faded capacity for mischief.

And yet Obscured Blade himself never quite came to bay.  Three times we missed him by the scorched ends of his foreshortened tail, and then – silence.  Nothing.  We'd heard nothing from the traitors in three weeks, and now we were out of time. 

The fleet was on her way, and all the season's preparations and deceits were in motion, barreling down-stream with that great armada of enormous, deadly galleys, swift pinnaces, and savage flame-throwing dromons. The bolt was in flight, and there was naught we could do to summon it back to the machine, nor arrest it in its flight.

It was now time to turtle up for earnest, and pull back the sections and cohorts of the Company into our new fortress.  The Shambles was large enough to hold all the swollen membership of the new Company, even including the cadre of Order ponies who'd not been able to plausibly squeeze onto the narrow decks and oar-benches of the fleet.  We had done nothing so far which would have evoked the curiosity or suspicion of our fellows in service to the Bride and her Imperial policy.

They'd twig to the double-game soon enough.

In the meantime, Company ponies were working on improving the half-wrecked defenses of the landside fortress walls, clearing firing ranges and kill-zones, moving shifted stonework into a more aesthetic arrangement.  I wasn't sold on the idea that the improvements would actually make the fortress any more defensible.  That old, paradoxical hulk was such that the more you wrecked it, the better-situated it was for further resistance.  He was a stubborn old bastard, the Shambles, and had not been taken by force of arms, but rather betrayal and the sneakiness of an evil old witch too nasty to be seen by innocent ghoul eyes.

Blech, now I need a bath.  Hold that thought.

And so it was, that a position whose main purpose was the housing and defense of heavy artillery to protect the entrance to Coriolanus's Lagoon, became our sanctum.  We had a number of  prisoners hidden away here and there, and as time went on, the ponies being held by the Company had increased.  The guards stolen away in the course of inserting our brother-Order into the Arsenal, for instance.  Although that group of detainees had proven startlingly fertile grounds for recruitment into the old Company.  Apparently prison's boring enough that some donkeys will spontaneously join a cult militant rather than tolerate another minute in the stony darkness.

Carrot Cake had been active in the fighting with Blade's traitors.  I guess he had taken it amiss when they tried to ambush his lady.  Which probably explains why he approached me on the artillery platforms that night as I watched the burning wreckage of the enemy's scouting squadron lighting up the downstream darkness.

"I want to get Cup Cake out of this stinking hole," he began.

I turned to eye the tall, lanky earth pony.  "This stinking hole is a near-perfect defense against further ambushes from Blade, no matter what evil shit he has in his saddlebags.  And he's already demonstrated that he has a hate on for our little baking spy.  Where is she, anyways?"

"Didn't want that thing between the two of you to get in the way of this.  I want to take her out of here.  She's not happy.  This place makes Dance Hall feel like a happy home, you know? Too much history, all of it bad.  Yeah, we'll be alive. But not living.  She don't even want to bake in here. Damn, have you seen the kitchen?  Even the rats don't want to go in there."

"I don't know what you're asking," I complained. "What can I do about you two getting cabin fever?  I'm not in charge of anything, and I wouldn't know where to send you if I could."

"Don't be like that, doc.  You want something to happen, the officers make it happen.  Everypony wants you to be happy.  Your impulses drive half the decisions in this outfit.  And I want to take her down with the fleet.  When the shit comes down, she won't be able to send in her reports from here anyways.  You can tell we're getting set for a siege.  Against who, nobody will say.  Against the world in general?  Screw that.  We'll have to start rationing when that happens, and where will she get her sugar then?"

"Wait, back up there.  Why the fleet?  They're going into crazy danger, and all sorts of wild weirdness.  You two will stick out like a sack of baking flour in an armory!" 

"Come on, doc," he grinned.  "Look at the two of us.  Just another pair of earth ponies in a rebellion full of ‘em.  And yeah, our accents are a bit off for the west, but I know how to keep my mouth shut when I need ta.  And Cup Cake's got that gossip-sponge thing going for her.  She sounds like she's chattering, but you'd be amazed how much she gets other ponies to do her talking for her."

He paused, as both of us watched the last mast on the distant, dying galley fall inwards into the unseen depths of the wreck.

"And we need to follow the story.   See how it ends.  I think she's justifying her… truce with the Mistress by calling it research, an investigation.  She's still a good pony, so long as she's doing this thing, investigating us.  Watching us.  And we won't be doing much stuck here in this bloodstained stone shell. Twiddling our hooves until ponies elsewhere decide our fates. Tartarus, I'm surprised half the Company isn't clamouring to get transferred to the outfit that's going to have all the fun."

"You're a strange pony, Carrot Cake."

"Aw, I figure I'm young.  World doesn't seem to be ending on schedule like I thought.  Why not see a bit of it before settling down?  If we don't die, I figure there might be a world to live in after all."

He paused again, a stormy look crossing his muzzle.

"And if I can keep us busy enough, I can forget about the rest of it.  And let it go.  They say revenge ruins a pony, and I can feel it.  Twisting in my gut.  Well, the hay with that. I'd rather go adventuring, then sit and stew!"

"You know you're the standard-bearer.  We can't have you taking the heart of the Company away from the Company."

"I never gave a toot about that pig-sticker, Sawbones.  You want it?  Hay, anypony else wants it? They can have it.  Mistress can have some other pony to play pageant, I don't want to do that for the rest of my life.  Let us go, doc.  We'll go bad here in the dank and dark."

"This is the Company, corporal.  We are the dank and the dark."  But I smiled at him.

How could I resist an appeal like that?  Tam Lane took over as standardbearer.  The little donkey had grown up into an enormous, towering percheron of an equine, and fit the role perfectly.

And we shipped the Cakes down to the fleet as they prepared for their production's opening night.

The rest of us could hold down the fortress.

Now I'm positive that someone weeded these manuscripts before they got to my desk.  There's clearly material missing out of the SB manuscripts, they're definitely not the complete work! - Faded Palimpsest, 2nd Grade Archivist, Restricted Archives