Shipwrights in the age of sail had a lot in common with tailors. Fortunately, there was a unicorn around with the tools to put Nancy’s trousers back together. They had split along the seams and just needed to be restitched. She was still angry at herself for not anticipating something like that happening when growing a tail.
On the other hand, getting to swim like a mermaid for a few minutes more than made up for it. It was freaky - no denying that - and took a little while to adjust, but it also made Nancy feel for the first time she could actually touch the magic of this world. Otherwise, she’d mostly just been an observer.
Still, she was glad to take the necklace off and change back. Small steps in new experiences.
Nancy and the Equestrian guards spent two more days in the Hippogriff Kingdom, planning with the hippogriff forces their next move. They had a good - though not confirmed - idea where the pirate stronghold was, based on previous intelligence and how the attack against the guard had originated.
“They probably aren’t going to be looking for a fight after we destroyed or captured a few of their ships,” Captain Magnus said. “And with them being three ships down, we should have more of a decisive numbers advantage.”
They all examined a map, which had been marked with notes. Nancy wasn’t exactly sure why she was there. She was no strategist, but they were perhaps counting on her to offer up something that would only be obvious to an alien.
Captain Magnus traced a hoof along the coastline depicted on the map. “We’ll run nighttime recon flights along the shore to determine their concentrations. We have some reports already, and will have to get a few messages back to the general intel bureau in Canterlot.”
He sighed. “I had hoped to have more troops to put ashore. We hadn’t intended to start the operation quite so soon. This trip was only supposed to be for coordination. If it comes down to it, we may just have to blockade and siege, and that’s not good for anypony.”
The hippogriffs would be contributing twelve ships, all armed. The king smiled. “They have top crews. With no exaggeration, they are the heaviest-armed warships in the world.”
Nancy did not say “this world,” just smiled and nodded.
They managed to get a message to Canterlot, and the guard would be sending five airships. They were of the same class as the one that had been lost, but Captain Magnus had insisted on additional combat-rated troops for each of them.
“That should put us on parity for total pirate forces, if they were able to organize into a single fleet,” he said.
“What’s to stop them from doing that?” Nancy said. “A fair fight sounds like a mistake, not a goal, sir.”
“You’re right,” he said. “And that’s where a special magical detachment from Canterlot comes in. Getting ambushed on our way here could only have been accomplished by advanced knowledge of our plans. As part of our recon, we’re going to ferret out their own intelligence-gathering ability.”
“What if it’s not magical, just a leak?” Nancy wondered aloud.
Captain Magnus nodded, as if he expected Occam’s Razor from her. “Could be. But to get messages over great distances timely enough to be tactically useful, then the communication method would have to be magical, so we can intercept it.”
“What about radio?”
“It doesn’t work here,” said the king. “The distributed shards of the Pearl of Transformation around the kingdom had the unintended effect of fuzzing the airwaves. Everypony agreed that they’d rather have the ability to turn into seaponies than listen to music from a distance, though, so we kept the arrangement as-is.”
The operation went forward. There was a small ceremony when it came time to leave the Hippogriff Kingdom. The king gave a speech.
It was sober, but strong. If there was going to be a battle, then it was likely some of them would be killed. Some of them already had. Still, they were all here in service of something greater. And then there was Nancy, who was at least anti-pirate, so that counted.
The fleet set sail. The next day, they met up with the airships arriving from Canterlot. They had most of the recon ponies and equipment with them.
Teams of pegasi pulling low-profile chariots with unicorns aboard would sweep the night skies, passively looking for magic signatures while concealing their own presence. It struck Nancy a little bit like human signal-gathering aircraft.
Not that Nancy didn’t know how to wait, but staying up nights wondering when a crucial piece of the puzzle would arrive and kick the operation into combat did leave her a lot of time to think.
The recon units did seem to be doing their job, with some success in observing how pirates reacted. It became clear that the pirates did somehow have an awareness of the allied fleet. There were no outgoing signals from the ponies or the hippogriffs, so it was decided that there must have been some other way that information was getting through.
After four nights of running the pirate coast, frustrating because they never managed to pin down any vessels, the recon teams finally came to a conclusion, based on magic signatures in the area.
“We think they have a clairvoyant, or some object that allowed remote sight,” Captain Magnus said in front of the planning table aboard the flagship. “And, we’ve pinned down the approximate location.” He indicated one of the tiny coastal villages, one of them named Seaweed Shoals. “It’s not a good fix, but we’re sure the magic is coming from inside this town. It turns out it was some sort of active spell, not a leak on our part.”
“There are a couple of ways we could neutralize this,” he said. “Bombardment is not a good choice if there are any innocents around. A ground raid with pegasi covering the rear could work for a capture, but we don’t know the full capabilities of this foresight. We’re going to have to come up with some subterfuge.”
He talked with the other officers, both pony and hippogriff, and eventually came up with a plan. Small units of guards would go ashore in other coastal villages, publicly asking about pirates. Whoever was commanding the enemy forces had maneuvered pirate ships out of the area, so the threat to a small ground unit should be low, particularly with the allied fleet right offshore.
The question team would work their way up the coast towards Seaweed Shoal. Of course, the pirates would have to know about it by word of mouth about strange ponies asking where the pirates were. The signature of the clairvoyant magic would either move, or stay put. Either way, it would give them a better idea of what it was and who was behind it.
As it turned out, the pirates must have been confident in themselves, because when the question team came through Seaweed Shoals, the magic signature didn’t move. That allowed a few embedded diviners to narrow it down to a single house.
They didn’t approach closely, feigning ignorance, but marked it down on a map and that night recon was at it again. It was one of the nicer places in town - almost a mansion, really, and situated close to the coast.
With focus on it now, a couple of things had become obvious. A few times per day, a shadowy figure would appear in a glassed-in cupola. Hippogriffs making stealthy night swims were able to get more intel from relatively close, taking a few subtle peeps above the waves with spyglasses.
At a central meeting, Captain Magnus laid it out for everyone. “We believe this pony has a crystal ball. We don’t know the exact capabilities, but it seems to be powered by their magic - so likely a unicorn. It glows in the dark enough to distinguish. We don’t know who this pony is, but they seem to have quite a talent. They’re somehow able to keep an eye on our fleet from a distance. Our teams have discovered the signatures of magical wards around their residence. We’ve seen indications that they are not alone in that house.
“We could likely take the place by force, but there’s also a high likelihood of resistance if this pony is so important, and we have no way of knowing their true power or what magical traps may be in play. One of our recon teams experimentally dropped a pebble and it actually bounced off an invisible protective dome over the house. A couple of the swim teams took one of our unicorns close and they’ve determined that it’s a barrier strong enough to knock back somepony who walked into it, but probably wouldn’t stand up to a true attack. Being fairly low-powered is how the barrier remains invisible.”
Captain Magnus looked around the room. “At the moment, I would be happy with just breaking that orb. We can lay a contingent of guards outside the house to make sure no one leaves while we go to hunt the pirates now lacking their command and control. We need something strong enough to get through the barrier, but still able to make a precision attack from range.”
Nancy raised her hand. “What about a piece of lead moving two thousand miles per hour?