In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

A Squadron At Dawn

FFMS040

The predawn darkness was anything but silent. The slips and the shoreline echoed to a positive roar of thumps, creaks, tromping and assorted cacophony. Thousands of ponies and donkeys wrestled with dozens of hulls along miles of shingle and shore. The vast night-skies shone full of uncountable stars, crisp with the chill of late autumn nighttime clarity. They twinkled like the mane of the Spirit in one of her more majestic moods. The bright starlight cast slight shadows over us as we crowded around our individual ships, heaving and dragging at them, pushing their weight into the waters of the lagoon.

The splashes of long hulls slipping into the still waters broke their stillness. The ponies delegated to hold the ropes struggled to keep each ship steady as the marines and the crew chivied their respective oar-slaves aboard. Our bank-captains guided each cadre of slaves into their respective benches, telling off pony by pony into each designated seat, following the practice and the methods laid out by endless training in the brief day-light and the infinite dream-galleys of the Spirit's deep night.

As the last of the oar-ponies made their way over the crude nets into their seats, the crew-donkeys holding their ships stationary upon the shore let drop their ropes, leapt for the nets, and scrambled hoof over hoof to follow the slaves onboard. As the last crew drew in their tying-off ropes, the ship-masters bellowed and beat and cajoled all members of each ship's crew and oarponies into their respective places as keels ground against the shingle or shore, the weight of the ships working them naturally forth into deeper water.

The predawn gloaming had begun to banish the night's stars by the time the crew of the first of the dromons had pulled out their oars, and made headway away from their slips along the shore. Our hoof-full of smaller row-barges, called pinnaces, had sprinted ahead to scout forward in front of the rest of the fleet. They were already awaiting the signal to the southwest, barely visible in the distance where they were waiting, drawn up along the line of the Braystown boom.

We, in our mid-sized dromons, formed up in the vast open waters of the Lagoon, between the great docks of the Arsenal and the distant darkened quays and buildings of that modest shoreline town beside the great hulking fortress. Behind us, the vast war-galleys were still being dragged into the waters by their crews and their oar-ponies. The greater weight and size of the war-galleys had slowed down those heavier vessels through no fault of their own. In the meantime, a swarm of dromons had formed up – more than a dozen ships in four squadrons – by the time the rising light of dawn had revealed to the world the activity on Coriolanus's Lagoon. A distant creaking heralded the effort of the Company, as they cranked in that great boom that protected the lower entrance to the Lagoon from the middle Housa River and its scattering of rebel ships.

Our pinnaces darted out into the contested waters before the artillery-platforms of the Braystown Shambles, their oars flashing as they hauled their small, light, swift hulls through the opened gates of the Lagoon into the outer river's waters. A distant thumping and the high glinting of pegasi wings in the air over the fortress announced to the rest of the fleet just how closely the enemy had posted their own scouts to the eastern end of the long reaches. That fleet had recently become more aggressive in dominating the upper waters of the middle Housa, and even in the darkness before dawn, they lurked just beyond the boom. The war-machines of the Company, emplaced in the artillery platforms of the Shambles, were making that old, grim sound – flinging death and destruction at the White Rose's own pinnace-like cruisers, maintaining their forward post against this very sort of sortie upon which our pinnaces were intent.

Nearby the ship upon which I had embarked, a leather-lunged squadron-captain bellowed across the waters between her ship and the rest of her squadron, screaming her commands with very little in the way of mechanical aid. The four dromons of this squadron huddled so close that one might almost have run out along one bank of oars across to the oars of the nearest neighbor, clambered over the narrow top-decks, tumbled back down over the far set of oars, leapt across to the next dromon's spray of oars, and so forth, springing easily from ship to ship. We sailed almost oar-to-oar in the suddenly crowded waters of the western Lagoon.

The sweeps of our dromon began to stroke in unison as the drum-majors offered the beat, and the squadron moved as one, all the drums beating like a single heart. I hung over the deck in the lines with the rest of the crew, awkwardly trying to help as they pulled the sails into place. Only my slightly geased glamour saved me from the irate hoof-blows of the frustrated sail-master, who simply could not understand why his salts were so cack-hoofed that day. The morning winds were blowing out of the east, perfect weather for a sprint down-stream. The sails belatedly filled with the wind, and pulled the ship behind the oarponies' stroke, multiplying our velocity with a sudden, startling celerity.

I leaned back in the sheets, watching the squadron and our sister-squadrons move rapidly westward, the eastern glow chasing us as we raced away from the Arsenal which had been home for six weeks. We had not managed to get all of the ponies of the Order into the available hulls. As crowded as the benches of the galleys were, we were still too many to fit in what was available. Nearly five hundred extras were still in the slave-barracks, along with the 'guards' which had protected our privacy and our secrets. The other loyalist witches had smuggled themselves into the city. They were in place, to help keep our secrets for a little longer, and when that was no longer possible, to sneak out those we couldn't take with us. They would sneak them out of the city into sanctuary with the Company, well away before the news of our performance worked its way back to the Arsenal and its city.

I should have been with them, but our recruitment project was ongoing, and my presence was required here, among the ponies and donkeys of the grand fleet. This dromon in particular, for instance. We had several sleepers here, but nothing among the officers of the deck. I was here to seduce the crew on an individual basis, if I could, somehow, in between any clashes on the river.

Clashes such as we could hear in the distance. And as the light strengthened, almost see. Screams began to overwhelm the howls of ponies with their blood up, and then we could see the pinnaces of both sides clashing just outside of the firing range of the Shambles' batteries. The pegasi and griffins of the Company dipped and rose over the clash, and you could sort of see the glint of weapons rising and falling between the contending forces.

Then they must have fallen back on a larger ship with a proper anti-air battery, because the terrible fires of a petits bâtard volley rose into the upper air after the scattering fliers. So much for the hope that the trick of that ugly answer to aerial support had died with the leadership of the Third Army! The rushing flights of fliers scattered in every direction overhead. One such flight rushed over my billowing sail, a scattering of two dozen petits bâtards chasing them as they fled. I nicked my hide and reached out with my magic, seizing hold of those horrors as they howled overhead. I couldn't hold them in place without outing myself as no sort of mundane salt-donkey, so instead I directed them into the broken waters roiling in the squadron's wake, extinguishing their unnatural fires in the process. It should have looked to onlookers like munitions having run out of their charge, falling away to boil away meaningless gallons of inoffensive river-water.

The other fliers didn't have the luck of that random flight which had passed over my ears. One or two were caught by their chasseurs, and I could see the flames as some poor damn pegasus gyred into the waters of the Lagoon.

I could only hope that somepony fished that unfortunate out of the water before she drowned. Sawbones would know her fate, I was too busy with tracking the Order's progress to find out what happened to that hurt Company pony.

As the pegasi and the griffins fled, our squadron exploded through the gap in the boom, and rushed into the fray. Our pinnaces had turned away from the fires of an alert and heavily armed war-galley, behind which the White Rose's own cruisers had taken refuge.

But they hadn't planned for a sudden rush of dromons, and I could almost smell the fear as we rocketed forward. The naphtha-throwers were spinning up as we came into range, and two ships of the squadron let loose in the same instant, their flaming arcs of burning liquid rising into the air over that hapless war-galley as the sun broke over the eastern limb of the world.

The pitch and wood of that afflicted ship caught fire more quickly than I thought possible. Our port ballista began thumping as it flung heavy bolts into the suddenly isolated war-galley. I watched the panic among the enemy sailors as we passed by, raking their decks with our fire. Their terrible ram quivered irressolutely back and forth between our ships as we passed on either side of her, our fires tearing into them on both sides.

As we spun in her wake, she was already losing control in the water, and I saw a scattering of oarponies falling, burning, overboard into the disturbed waters. But we could hardly pay attention to that stricken ship, as our ship-master raced us further downstream, falling in between the fleeing enemy pinnaces which their squadron-galley had failed to protect against our rush.

They peppered us with bolts and arrows from their small contingent of marines and those tiny bolt-throwers they had mounted on their narrow decks. The slight oaken armour of our outer shell held firm, and our heavier ballista thumped in reply, smashing ponies from deck and rudder as we continued our pass undisturbed, our sisters trailing behind us in perfect formation.

We didn't catch any of their pinnaces with our naphtha-throwers, but the dromons in our wake corrected that error, and the burning ships fell behind us as our oar-ponies and the strong easterlies drove us forward. We gave chase as the survivors fled before us and the dawn. The morning sun lit up our victims as we plunged westwards in pursuit. They threw every square inch of sail up onto their masts that they could find, and their desperate oar-ponies beat their hearts out, the terror of certain death driving them to marvels of effort and endurance. By mid-morning, the little pinnaces had somehow drawn out of range, and they continued their flight as our ship-masters called an end to the pursuit.

The chase had led us to a point a few miles west of Leveetown, and brought the squadron into that stretch of the middle Housa which had been burnt over by enemy ships and marine detachments, sacking both sides of the river. It was at this point that the squadron-captain had discovered that she was far ahead of the rest of the fleet. We were exposed to the enemy ourselves now, if there were any squadrons of proper galleys or dromons somewhere down here to take advantage of our isolation beyond the rest of the fleet. The old flotilla had cleared this region months ago, but that was before it had been smashed in by a sudden rush that had carried right up to the gates of the Lagoon, and a few weeks was an eternity upon the river.

We took down our sails in the face of ongoing strong easterlies, and our oar-ponies beat against the current, forcing the ships eastward back towards the rest of the fleet, cruising towards us, far in our rear. By noon, we crossed trails with our chastened pinnaces, who continued downriver to perform their proper screening function. The rest of the dromon squadrons greeted us in the wide, open waters of those middle reaches. Eventually the heavy galleys joined us there below Leveetown, but the wasting sunlight of a late fall afternoon put an end to our activities for that night.

We pulled our ships onto the shore in the last light of the day, and the tents of the crews went up beside their ships' hulls. The slaves were welcome to sleep beneath the drying, tar-black shelter of their ships' overhang, but the crew and the marines enjoyed proper canvas.

I circulated though the unaffiliated crew, and identified my targets. My night's work followed the day's furious work of battle. The slaughter of the enemy was the focus of all the ponies of the fleet, but my attention was upon the souls of my targets.

I couldn't spare the time to think of the souls of our victims, not when I had my own donkeys to spare from the eventual consequences of our plans and our conspiracies.

Comments

[Bookeater_otaku]

And the rockets launchers are back and we have confirmation that their use is now wide spread throughout the White Rose. I am not doubting they could have come up with the solution themselves but how did they manage to set up a production big enough in such a short time to outfit so many regiment and give them enough ammo? Don't they need rune casters to make and operate the seekers ones?

Either their manufacturing infrastructure are mightier than I expected and the rockets were already in development, seeing as they could be effective against more than just the fliers of the Black Company or the White Rose have an off-world supplier who is used to fight against flyers.