The Orithyia descended through the clouds like an avenging angel. It scattered them, trailing fluffs of cloudstuff from its fins like cotton snagged on a bramble in the woods. A haunting choir of violins and cellos sang the airship’s praises; beams of sunlight chased it down, spotlighting Rainbow Dash as she stood on the prow, chest thrust out, scimitar clenched in her jaws as she prepared her attack.
“Alright, nice and steady,” Nutmeg said. He stood behind the wheel, making minor course adjustments with his hooves. “Nice and slow and steady, that’s how you win this game. Hold on Miss Dash, I’m going to increase power by point-one percent. You might feel a very slight shift as the…”
Whatever else Nutmeg said was lost as Rainbow Dash flung herself from the prow. The wind screamed in her ears as she sped faster and faster, wings beating the air into submission, every muscle locked against the terrible force of her acceleration. Her jaw tightened around the scimitar’s grip to keep it from flying free.
Ahead, the iceberg loomed closer with every passing second. It was white around the edges, fading to a faint sea green in the center, riven all throughout with cracks and crevices and seracs a hundred yards high. A shadow thousands of feet across blotted out the landscape beneath it, and a faint, winding path of frost and snow betrayed the iceberg’s slow progress as it drifted over the valley.
Almost there! The iceberg filled half the world now. Rainbow Dash put on a final burst of speed before flaring her wings, crashing to a stop. Her hooves kicked up a spray of ice chips and sent cracks rippling dozens of feet into the glacial surface.
“Aha!” she shouted. “Take that!”
The scimitar sung with each swing. Ice broke and turned to powder beneath her blows. She stomped and kicked and stabbed the iceberg with all her might, until minutes later, exhausted, panting, she sheathed her sword and sat.
Not bad. Not bad at all. She looked at the little circle of chipped and scratched ice around her and nodded.
A coil of rope landed beside her, and a moment later Nutmeg shimmied down from the airship hovering overhead. “Report, Miss Dash!”
“Objective secure, sir!”
“Excellent.” He pulled a railroad spike from his vest and drove it into the ice with a blow from his hoof. A quick knot of the rope secured the airship to the iceberg, and their capture was complete.
Her first capture! Rainbow Dash found she was grinning and couldn’t stop. “What now, captain?”
Nutmeg shrugged a satchel off his shoulders, setting it on the ice with a metal clank. “Start setting anchors, Miss Dash. Keep them about fifty feet apart. I’ll drop lines from the Orithyia for you.”
Hm. That seemed like a lot of work. Dash frowned at the satchel. “How many do you need?”
“All of them!”
* * *
Hours of backbreaking, grueling work later, Rainbow Dash finally drove the last of the spikes into the ice. Another rope fell to dangle beside her, and she grabbed it in her teeth before the wind could carry it away like the last one. She wrapped it around the protruding end of the spike, tied it off, and finally collapsed onto the ice with a groan.
Around her, dozens of slack lines rose from the ice, all converging on the Orithyia sedately hovering overhead. She heard the thrum of its engines change pitch, and the ropes gradually grew taut, and beneath her the iceberg groaned as the airship began to drag it up higher into the air.
They needed to get it at least a thousand feet higher, Nutmeg had said, in order to crest the mountains to the south. That would probably take the rest of the day.
Rainbow Dash pushed up onto her hooves and brushed powdery ice from her coat. A hot bath sounded like the best idea in the world, perfect for her aching wings and hooves. She took flight, quickly crossing the empty sky between the ‘berg and the Orithyia.
Nutmeg was back at the wheel, fiddling with the elevators. He waved as she approached.
“Good work, Miss Dash. Any difficulties?”
“Nah.” She stretched, her spine letting out a series of loud pops, and she sighed with relief. “Tired and cold, though.”
“Try doing it with one pony! Then you can be cold, tired and lonely, too.”
“Yeah, but then you keep all the bits,” she said. She bounced over to the rail, peering down at the iceberg below. Even from hundreds of feet away it filled half the sky. The rest of the world was a greenish blur along the edges of her vision. “Speaking of bits, where are we selling this one?”
“We’re not.” He pointed at the dusting of frost still clogging her primaries. “Try licking your feathers.”
She blinked at the order but did as he asked. Immediately she spat and made a face. The ice was briny and sour, like drinking the juice from a pickle jar. “Ugh! What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing’s wrong, per se, but this iceberg formed from seawater, not freshwater. We’re being paid to haul it back to the ocean.”
“Really?” She glanced back down at the iceberg. The greenish color, like frozen sea foam, suddenly made more sense. “Who pays for that?”
“Anypony who doesn’t want saltwater falling on their crops. Ruins fields for years.”
Huh. Reasonable. Rainbow Dash didn’t know much about farming, but she knew how protective Applejack was about her orchard. Having a giant salty iceberg dripping on her apples would certainly ruin her day.
“Cool,” she said. “Hey, listen, I’m gonna soak for a bit. You okay up here?”
“I believe so.” He stepped on one of the innumerable pedals surrounding the wheel, and the deck shifted slightly beneath their hooves. “Try not to fall asleep in there again, hm?”
* * *
If there was one thing the Orithyia had in plenty, it was hot water. The twin gem-fired engines mounted on either side of the hull were cooled with water, and as a result they had more hot water than they knew what to do with. Fortunately, they were also in the practice of hauling millions of tons of ice around with them, so cold water was also in plentiful supply.
Rainbow Dash was aware of none of these specifics. All she knew was that Nutmeg had said she could never use up their hot water, no matter how hard she tried. Obviously that was a challenge, so try she did.
The wood tub was small, like everything else on the airship. Rainbow Dash suspected it had started life as a barrel that somepony had simply cut in half. Their washroom, if one could call it that, was little more than a closet lodged near the fore of the ship on the single level below the deck. There was barely enough room in the tub for her to sit without cramping, so she leaned forward, forelegs crossed on the rim, head resting on her legs, wings splayed out on either side, slowly dripping as they thawed.
She was certainly not asleep when the door opened and Nutmeg squeezed into the room. His coat was streaked with carbon, and he stank of engine grease.
Privacy was a fiction aboard the tiny airship, Dash had learned, so she merely raised an eyebrow at Nutmeg’s arrival. “Your turn?”
“If you don’t mind.” He pressed himself against the wall, leaving just enough room for Rainbow Dash to haul herself out of the tub. Getting past each other was an awkward dance of wings and legs and heads, but with a bit of effort they managed to swap positions, with Nutmeg in the tub and Rainbow Dash slowly dripping dry in the doorway.
“We’re almost high enough. We’ll start toward the ocean tomorrow morning,” he said as he settled into the water. He was a bit larger than Dash, but his wings were small enough that he could tuck them against his sides and fit them in the tub. The water turned his coat a dark brown, and he immediately got to scrubbing at the ashen stains that dappled his legs and chest.
“How long will that take?”
“Just a few days, probably. Then we’ll head to Cloudsdale for a port call. Maybe spend some of those bits.”
That would be nice. Maybe find a bank, too – Dash had never had so many bits at one time that a bank had seemed like a necessity, but iceberg wrangling was turning out to be a surprisingly lucrative field of work. Her mind drifted to the pile of money sitting beneath her hammock in the airship’s single shared cabin.
“Cool, cool.” She snagged a towel from the rack and draped it over her back. It was thin and threadbare and nowhere near large enough to dry her, but at least it cut down on some of the dripping. “I’m gonna get chow started. Oats okay?”
“Oats are fine. Use some of the honey, too.”
Ah, the honey. That she could definitely do. She gave Nutmeg a little salute and vanished toward the galley.