A Break In The Night
A loud explosion woke Purse Strings from a dead sleep in his hammock. He didn't rate a private cabin like the officers or the master sergeant had - although as far as Purse could tell, Gilda used her 'cabin' as a squadron office, and it didn't even seem to have so much as a hammock to go along with the hammock-hooks the griffish builders had installed in the space.
If you wanted to find the master sergeant, you would do better to look in the operations room, or the major's cabin, where she'd installed her hammock to hang over the major's bunk like a Hen of Damocles.
No, Purse Strings slept in the front office of the number two forward hold, hanging over pallet-loads of dry goods and spare coils of rope. Which meant that a banging noise like that couldn't be the ship's engines back-firing. It was far too back in the ship, half the squadron would be yelling right now if…
And there's the shouting.
Purse kicked the door to his office open, and went stomping off astern, looking and listening.
Through the second hatch, there was his number-one suspect.
"Lieutenant Lulamoon! What have I told you about-"
"Strings! Has anypony been in my storage locker-"
They blinked at each other, stymied.
Then Purse looked down, feeling that shift in the- no, that absence of the reassuring rhythm of the engines purring, vibrating through the decking.
Bugger it sideways, that's the engines!
He looked up at the blue mare, and snarled. "Nopony's been in and messing with your weaponry again, Lieutenant. You feel that?"
"Uh, sort of? I don't really know how this thing-"
"Yeah, nopony else does, either. But so long as Black Gang and the rest of the engineering ratings do, I didn't have to. That is, until it starts making this noise."
"Trixie doesn't hear anything?"
"That's the problem. We're supposed to be one-third steam ahead. Does that sound like one-third steam ahead?"
"Trixie's going to go out on a limb and guess no."
"You're damn right. It sounds like they've emergency-blown the engines."
"Is that a bad-?"
"Very bad, yes.“ The griffon geniuses of the Tenpenny Collective had wedged three full modern engines into the space that the old Daddy Longlegs had held two decrepit last-generation organ-grinders. The sleek new machinery were, with the state-of-the-art enchanted envelope overhead, what made the Princess's Bit a warship, and not an overbuilt lug with reduced stowage capacity. “I'm sorry, lieutenant, I need to go find Corporal Dam."
"Good luck, Quartermaster Strings?" he heard her say, timidly, as he ran off in the direction of his chief mechanic's shop.
Trixie caught up to the quartermaster just as the yelling began. She had followed him deep into the backquarters of the ship, the dark and crowded subdecks where the vast machineries lurked that in theory thrust the Princess's Bit through the skies on mighty wings of ironwood, canvas, and thunderforged steel.
It was eerily quiet, the normal thrumming - which Trixie, not being the sort of pony to pay attention to these things, hadn't noticed until they were gone - were, well, gone. She had always imagined these quarters to be stained as coal-black as the ponies that lurked within, since they almost always were just that - coal-stained ponies, filthy and dirty. The ponies of the artillery corps dealt with materials just as filthy and contaminating as the common gear-jades and wrench-monkeys of the engineering herd, but you never saw Trixie and her commissioned peers dirty like an engineering-pony.
Unless something truly horrible had happened, or the artillery-mares had happened to somepony.
At any measure, Trixie had expected the engine bays to be grease-slicked nightmares, but the Bit was too new, too recently-renovated to have collected the expected layers of filth just yet.
Except where the disaster had occurred. There, outside of the afflicted engine bay, the overwhelming sensation was the stink of burning, of carbon, and things burnt before their time. The back-corridors leading the engine compartments were crowded with underdeck ponies standing or laying down in various states of nervy exhaustion, concern, and confusion. The emergency had brought out the damage-control detachments, ponies from throughout the ship, and multiple unrelated sections. There were corporals and rankers and ponies too humble to be called 'rankers', and there was an omnipresent waft of smoke and stink and the burnt smell of lubricants set ablaze and quickly put out. Trixie spotted three of her own gunners laying with their opposite numbers here and there in the tangle of first-responders.
Trixie had been briefed about the battery sections responsibilities for contributing to the damage control drills, and the accident with the caisson had been a bit of a practice-run for this exact sort of thing. But otherwise, she'd not been involved in the planning, that had been all ship's master Tailwind. There she was, over there, with a gaggle of corporals and ship's mates.
It looked like the damage control parties had come through with flying colors. If Trixie had the slightest bit to do with it, she'd have been proud.
She and Purse Strings followed the sound of the yelling into the darkness of the middle engine bay, between two other, much cleaner compartments. All three bays were missing more than half their magelights, ill-lit by what Trixie guessed was emergency jack-lantern lighting, harsh and flaming.
Within the half-lit, scorched, blackened, grease-splattered middle compartment, was a cabal of dark shades, a coven of engineer-witches. The engineers were gathered, glaring at each other across a tumble of scorched, unidentifiable machinery and the sort of mess that Trixie's imagination had always assigned to 'the engineering herd'.
The ponies crowded within were exactly as filthy as engineers were expected to be, coated more in grease, coal-dust, and filth than properly groomed pony coats. If they ever had cutie marks, the grease, coal, and filth had caked them so thoroughly over that they might as well be donkeys. It looked like a gathering of demons, or umbrum, or some other underworldly shade of spook.
But still, no matter what they looked like, there were ponies under the filth, some head-hung and humbled, and some, equally filthy, with what looked like authority hung loosely about their withers, and the rest looking like they weren't quite sure what was happening.
There were more unicorns in that huddle than Trixie thought they had on the whole ship. Where had they been hiding?
"-didn't destroy the bearings, sergeant," a blacked unicorn mare was squeaking. "And the thaumic coupler is completely intact. Untouched, really. See? Here, and here, the blowout linkages worked like a charm."
"That's because they are charms, you daft bint," grouched one of the other horned lumps of grease and coal-dust in the shape of a pony.
"That's good, trooper, but I am not seeing a functioning-" growled the biggest horse-shaped shade, which by the way they were arranged around his dominance, Trixie assumed must be the sergeant - Black Gang? Also horned, although with a protuberance so short and stubby it might well have been a wart under all that grit and grease.
"Still, the hoppers are shattered, sir."
"I still work for a living, Huddle. How badly shattered?"
"Still, we've put out the fires back towards the bunkers, sergeant."
"Still? Still? Why are you grinning at me? My hoppers are busted, my engines are dead, and you're smiling at me! Why is that a good thing?"
"It means the ship's not on fire, sergeant!"
The big blackened sergeant snarled, and turned to the others.
"What's the status of the engines?"
"Number two's a bleedin' mess," one of the blackened ponies said, grimly, glancing back into the gloom that hid the dimly visible hulk of what must be the rest of the engine. The parts that weren't piled up around them in a half-wrecked state. "Will need better lighting to see what's salvageable. We were able to scram it, mostly. At least one piston's blown out. We'll see 'ow many more are up an' operational or recoverable once I get me lights."
"Number one was off-line," one of the other two said, eyeing her unfortunate fellow. "We were going to do the first thousand-mile overhaul at first light."
"Three was idling," the last one said. "Panic switch worked, doesn't look like we caught any back-blast from the scram. All linkages intact."
"Well, that is good news," said the sergeant. "Good job, Tie Rod. You'll have a job in the morning. So I'm hearin' I've got two workin' engines, is that right?"
"Yes sir." "Yessir."
"No, sir," disagreed the dirtiest and most subdued of the engineers.
"What does that mean, Silk Smooth?"
"I'm the hopper chief, sir."
"For now, yes?" gritted the big stallion, his blue eyes staring out of his blackened face.
"Well, number two, it blew out all our feeds, sir, when it scrammed."
"Why does he get to call Black Gang 'sir'?" asked one grimy pony, sotto voce.
"Because he bucked up royal, that's why, shut up, you jackass," replied another in the half-light.
"And those feeds won't…"
"Feed the engines, nosir. We need to rebuild the whole mechanism. It'll take a couple days."
"Number two needs some parts, Gang," said the pony who'd been yelled at before. Who was he? Trixie frowned at the second-most-blackest and most grease-befouled pony in the huddle. Was that one 'Huddle'?
"What kind of parts? We just launched! We should be able to rebuild every single part of this system!"
"Linkage gems, some mechanical gearing, thermal buffers. The gearing we have on hoof, but the rest we don't actually have in the supplies, sergeant," said maybe-Huddle the engineer in the diamond-dog house. He rattled off a couple more words Trixie didn't recognize or even understand enough to parse.
"Why don't we have any of that, Strings?" the sergeant bellowed.
"Buck you, Gang," the stringy, clean earth pony snarled. "We were going to load those lots before somepony decided they wanted to fill hold number five with broken-down supply carriers and spare scouting rigs and other nonessentials. We thought our newly-renovated engines would last at least one long cruise before burning out bearings and piston-heads. We might be able to repurpose some gems from the uniform supplies for your linkage sparklies. The gaskets and the watsits and the doohickies I got in storage. The hopper feeds? That I definitely need to tap external supplies."
Purse Strings hadn't actually said 'watsits' and 'doohickies', but it hadn't sounded like Equuish, and Trixie wasn't sure exactly what she'd heard.
The sergeant's blue eyes rolled in his blacked face. "So you don't have what I need. Who'd likely have it? Where do we get the replacement parts, Flywheel?"
"I don't know, maybe a proper yard."
"Hey, Strings, where's the nearest proper yard?"
The quartermaster twitched, and looked up. "Nearest yards are in Barkalona, and then next somewhere in the New Territories."
"So Barkalona?"
"Yeah, probably. Unless somepony else cleaned them out, Fort Bing oughta have a fully supplied yard. What the hell happened, Gang?"
"Celestia, I don't know. We're talking fixes right now, aren't we, ponies?"
"I think it was bad fuel, quartermaster," said the hornless hopper pony, Silk Smooth.
"You don't know that!" yelled the number one engine pony, Flywheel.
"What else could it be?" asked the grimy pony beside her. Huddle?
"I don't know… maybe bad parts."
"You think the griffons bucked us?"
"No, but…"
"How would we even know?"
"Needs a rockhopper to look over the damn fuel…"
"Do we even have a rockhopper on board?"
"Don't look at me, I'm from Detrot," said the hornless Silk Smooth. “We need a real rockhopper, I can work these gears and machining, but buck me if I know what good coal looks like.“
"It's your damn business to know whether the coal is good, you plothole!" yelled the horned Flywheel. “Why do you even have a job, Smooth?“
“Ask Gang and the ship's master, you stripped screw! I’ve got a mechanical mark, not a stonemason’s! I can't go into a chrysalis and come out a glittery gold-shod rockhopper with butterfly wings! I'm not the Major!“
“Shut up, the both of you!“ bellowed Black Gang, his blue hornglow holding up a blackened spanner threateningly.
OK, things getting a bit heated in here…
"Look, Barkalona had a rockhopper, last time I was in port!" yelled Purse Strings, moving forward to restrain the pissed-off unicorn stallion. "We can figure it out there!"
"Not if we want to run the other engines with this crap!" snarled one of the other grimy engine ponies. "Even if we did, the feeds are buggered. We'd have to feed it by hoof. Or bucket brigade."
"No! Buck it, no! No putting more of that dodgy crap into my engine!" yelled one of the other grimy engine ponies. Tie Rod?
"Well, buck," swore the sergeant, tossing the ruined spanner into a corner. "If you ponies don't want to use our fuel bunkers, and the hopper ponies say the feeds are buggered… how are we getting to Barkalona? Purse, how far are we from Perroencia?"
"A quarter-day's cruise with engines," said the quartermaster. "Celestia only knows how long using… well, buck, how are we gonna move this great goldplated hulk without engines?"
"Shank's mare, my stallion," said a voice from behind Trixie.
Trixie spun around, looking to see who'd snuck up behind her.
"Shank's mare," said Lieutenant Martin Gale, standing smugly in the hatchway with a gaggle of damage-control ponies peering over her shoulders at the confrontation inside the engine bay. "We've got the wingpower, and the rigging. We can get this hulk into port. It will simply take a bit of lather and bottom. My birds can get you into port. Can you get this rubbish rebuilt when we do?"
The deck stunk of coal badly burned. Giles and his files stood about, checking each others' rigging, their stays and their traces. The lieutenant passed by them as she checked each squad along the deck. Giles looked much more closely after that terror Martin Gale had passed them by, tugging on each harness, carefully following each set of traces, making sure that all of them were properly, cleanly coiled.
Then, it was time for the lieutenant to come abreast of Giles and his cats. She checked each harness, each stay, each knot, and each coil of traces. Giles and his ensign looked anxiously over her shoulder, nodding as she did, wincing as she frowned.
Finally, the inspection was over. The lieutenant and the ensign led each squad out through the gaps between the envelope and the deck, keeping their traces from tangling among the stays holding up the deck, keeping the griffons from entangling themselves with each other. Each squad was passed carefully through the gaps, until it was time for Giles and his squad.
Once they were off the deck and in front of the stricken ship, Giles was able to draw a clean breath. Somehow, the air in front of the drifting Princess's Bit was cleaner, easier, more sweet than the stillness left over that smoky deck.
Whatever had happened below decks to the engines and the fuel, Giles knew it wasn't anygriff's fault who was still on the ship, but still, every griff felt the guilt. Some-griff had done something, somewhere, that had let down the regiment. Somehow.
It was their turn to make it right.
The last squad emerged from the depths of the deck, below the idle envelope. For whatever reason, only the griffon troop had been asked to do this. And somehow, the griffons had responded to that demand.
Nogriff knew what exactly had happened, but everygriff felt that they had to keep up the side, prove the home team was equal to the crisis.
Whatever the crisis might be.
Lieutenant Martin Gale gave out an unearthly screech, like a roc on the hunt. It ended into a most unpony scream which might have been, if you didn't think too hard about it, 'set forth!' in a pinched squeal.
All the griffon squads beat their wings, and leaned against their stays and traces. Giles himself felt that iron pressure against his shoulders and withers, and pushed the harder against the immobility of his harness. He screamed his determination against the heavy, immoveable weight of his harness, and all his squad-griffons screamed back at him.
Their wings beat, once, twice, three times. And the slightest breeze blew against his beak.
He beat his wings again and again, singing a wordless cadence, one-two-three, and then, once again, one-two-three.
And again and again, until the breeze was unmistakable, and the Lieutenant was floating by as the massed griffons strained and screamed and pushed, and bit by bit, mere griffon muscle moved that enormous, idled mass of ship and envelope and broken engines, slowly, slowly towards some distant port which nopony had told anygriff about.
And some foreign land passed, acre by acre, yard by yard beneath the wings of swearing griffish guards, and the bobbing, floating hulk that was drawn behind their sweating wings.
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Don't you just hate it when your mode of transportation breaks down miles away from anywhere?
Hopefully they can get it all back up and running once they find a port, but at the very least they've got a gameplan to get there and the hope it'll work.
Kinda wish Trixie knew a bit more of the engineering lingo...I was enjoying a bit more insight than usual on how the engines work...
... Well at least the ship didn't fall. Honestly this isn't terribly surprising. Literally everything about this mission was cobbled together from a bunch of mismatched parts anyway
The ship was fucking brand new! And the engine got blown by bad fuel?! This journey is off to a WONDERFUL start. Troops wounded at the presentation by over eager Rookies, the Captain get a concussion while sparring, a goddess of th deep threaten them if they don't get a figurehead soon, the local crazy mage almost unvoluntarily suicide herself by execution platoon with cannons and both the engineering and artillery got explosions in the span of 24 hrs.
God I love reading about this mess of a Company.
First thing first, good fuel, new spare parts and not ditching
them this time. Then finding the specialist they are lacking and steal them from the fort. But will thing goes as smoothly as that?
So they can't simply use anything for fuel huh? Why do I feel like there will be something later on about alternatives fuel that isn't wing power?
We all know where they actually sleep. Togetheeeeeeeer
Gotta respect a warship pulled by a flock of griffons.
I find it amusing that this is both ship-compatible and also compatible with "I want some office space on this tiny Celestia-damned ship". Oh, Gilda.
Nice turn of phrase.
The mechanics' chatter was nice. The social dynamics of the situation rang true to life.
You know, "get out and push" isn't an option for RL warships, but I just bet some officer, somewhere, would have tried ordering it if it were. Since it is an option here, Martin Gale is helping.
10376321
Bad fuel? Or possibly sabotage
10376389
Today I Learned, speaking Doylistically. Huh. It's amazing the list of things that pass over your head or unseen below the waters as you skim across the surface to get from point to point. Boiler explosions were filthy, nasty ways to die. I can see why the authorities had a 'shoot on sight' policy for saboteurs caught with coal torpedoes. Returning to Watsonian matters...
We'll see what the rockhopper finds. There are all sorts of things that might lurk in a coal fuel bunker.
10376400
This being Equestria, it would not surprise me if there was a phoenix shell fragment mixed into the coal or a salamander fry that stowed away in the boiler...
10376420
Oh yeah, this is Equestria, we can't forget the Fantasy-side reasons the engine could have blown up.
10376400
Rockhopper... is it a term you invented for this story? Because Google search is only giving me something for mountain bicycle... which I am sure is not relevant. I bet it's an Earth Pony thing...
10376561
It's a reference to something that Oliver came up with, with regard to one of the chapter books, about Pinkie Pie and her family doing this music festival. The idea that the rock farmers bury organic materials under dirt and stone, and hold sock hops or music festivals over top, with lots of dancing - a 'rock hop'. This is what they call 'rock music'. And once they're done, the organic stuff under the dirt and rocks has become 'rock oil', petroleum which can be used for lubricants and fuel and so forth.
But in general, 'rockhopper' is another term for those earth ponies with an affinity for the fruit of the earth, rather than farmers of plant and seed and tree. In extreme cases, a literal geomancer. This isn't Estee's Triptychverse, with the earth ponies' ultimate powers being a great tribalist secret, or anything like that. Ponies are mostly in harmony with each other at the macro level in this 'verse.
10376588
Nice! That's a nice idea of what a rock farmer could do.
... wait... does that mean there is going to be a concert in the near future to make supplies for the ship!
Yes! Peace, love and Rock and roll goes with war stories.
10376596
Not... any time soon. There are things afoot in Barkalona. You'll see. I need to work on chapters 37 et al, but I've got some of it roughed out here.
(I've been having fun with the endlessly fractal polities of the Inland Sea and the Illes des Prance. You can fit an awful lot in these spaces, you know?)
Re-reading this chapter and a few things are popping up for me.
The lighting in the engines bay is definitely a problem to fix right away. It's a bad recipe for accidents It's what it is.
Stocking harnest over spare parts saved their butts here but it's generally a very by idea to not stock what should be considered essential like these. Definitely something Twilight and her staff need to talk about so it doesn't happen again. Also the lack of space for storage is really a big problem huh? Of course it's a ship, space is premium after all...
Is Twilight still out of it since she didn't show up with the explosion? Or did Gylda sleep through it?
With all the technical and mechanical terms thrown around did you do a lot of research or did you simply have fun inventing words and parts for the engines?
It looks like the ship will be in docks for some days for repairs, resupply and probably some needed upgrades now that they had the time to properly test it. I guess it's high time for Twilight to gather all the officers and people responsible to a meeting to cover what need to be done and review the first strech of the journey and what went wrong.
10376609
Ohoh! That sounds interesting. Prance, foreign countries, politics, magic, creatures, good food and wine (because !Prance!). Sound like a perfect recipe for troubles.
Can't wait to see what the group will land themselves in.
10376624
Well, we're mostly going to be in the not-Catalan sections of the not-Mediterranean for the time being. I've gone through a couple different iterations of what this region looks like. And I reserve the right to adjust as needed for plot points.
"We're supposed to be full steam ahead. Does that sound like one-third steam ahead?"
Were those supposed to not match?
In any case, though, I enjoyed the chapter. :)
10376709
Gah! No, I fixed part of that, but missed the earlier part. Thanks, fixed.
Let's just hope that this was just an ordinary accident (or possibly sabotage if the one responsible can be found and... disabled) and not Auntie A getting impatient for her figurehead.
10376714
Ah, thanks. :)
10376561
To my ears, 'rockhopper' sounds like a colloquial term for a pony who can tell one rock from another. It sounds like coal-fired machinery is reasonably common, so a skilled rockhopper would know some simple techniques to tell whether a load of coal is suitable as fuel for the ship. Might be a specific term, like for a mineralogist, or might be a catch-all roughly equivalent to 'gearhead'. I think it's a made-up word for the setting.
10376420
Yeah, the total of factors affecting a bit of coal don't necessarily confine themselves to chemistry as we would understand it...
I do enjoy the language used about the engines. It sounds about right for 19th century engine technology that's got a bunch of crystal magic bits in its guts because that's just the way things are.
They're lucky. Any proper group of misfit soldiers need adversity for the right bonding experience. The unlucky ones get it while under enemy fire.
10377225
So having to backbreakingly tow their own busted ride over miles and miles is adversity? Yeah, I can see this.
Humm. What else they could suffer before getting there that's not combat... well the next port they get to was teased there was trouble brewing there so there is that... but it might involve fighting...
Oh! How about a big storm? That something that could potentially solidify their bond over. Nothing better than nature trying to kill you for making you band together to kick it back.
Err... there is getting sick... but I guess they kind of covered that with the bad chowder.
While the first thought was a coal torpedo (As linked below.) It may be simple, but subtle deliberate improper fixes, like sand in a carbuerator.
I think rather we with matters of pings little nightmare dealings and then this, the dreams masked the actual culprit with a little bit of sleeper agent.
Plenty of folks would love to see various folks fail for various reasons and not be bothered about collateral.
The only question remains if its meant to send them someplace particular, or be an 'all lost at sea' ?
Small nit — it’s sotto voce, with no “i”.
Fascinating chapter as always, though! Curious to see what’s going on.
Great success!
I know the Gryphons are the only ones doing the towing for morale reasons, but I wonder how many Gryphons worth of wingpower Lady George represents?
They only need one Rainbow Dash!
But she exploded and died or something.
I wonder if their is a traitor on board?
Are engines rated by ponypower in this universe, and/or ships rated by wing power? Wondering if they can now be rated by griffon power :)
Ohhhhhh, now you stepped into my wheelhouse for "Things that seem like they fit at a surface glance but really are not what you think."
Even for as overall anachronistic and all over the place as Equestrian tech can get, they are nowhere near the point where SCRAMing would be the term for emergency shutdown of an engine. Especially since it isn't what you call that sort of emergency shutdown for just any sort of shipboard engine, it's a term unique to the emergency shutdown of nuclear reactors. And while there is some question as to the etymology of the term, the most common source is it being an acronym for "Safety Control Rod Axe Man", and yes there was one point where SCRAMing the reactor meant taking an axe to a rope that was holding up the control rod..... a very, very short point but one that kind of stuck as it was the very first fully operational nuclear reactor, set up in University of Chicago by Fermi mostly as the proof of 'see this works!' and yeah, the safety system was having a guy with an axe standing by the rope ready to cut it the moment anything went wrong.
So yeah, you don't 'scram' a coal fired engine.
Now, the big search to find out if this was just bad luck, fate, or some more malicious!
And guessing they don't have harness or lines big or strong enough for Lady George to help out.
10855376
Eh, reading the Wikipedia page, it seems that it's probably a bacronym, with the first "axe man" not hearing the story until many years after the fact, and a mention of a design of an early reactor (think it said early 50s?) with more sophisticated shut-down method, and a student or assistant asking "what do we do after we press the button?" And being told "scram, get out of there," leading to the button being labeled "Scram".
Either way, it's highly likely to be anachronistic, unless, due to magical coal being a thing or something else, there is already a tradition of using "scram" when referring to an emergency shut-down, e.g. "Once you hit the pressure release valve, scram and get the hell out of there!"
11090158
Yeah, like I said the exact way the word came around isn't certain, but what is certain is it is unique to nuclear reactors.
11090158
11091084
I know I am late to this conversation, but I figured I'd add my two cents.
You're both right, you don't scram a steam engine (especially the style of steam engine I think they're basing this engine off of). The emergency shutdown button, or switch or lever in the case of a steam powered boiler of that era, would actually just put the engines into neutral and evacuate all the steam pressure in the system out the smoke stacks (and also out the whistle, to alert the bridge and crew that something has gone *really* wrong). Then they'd do other things, like, you know, cut off the feed water into the boilers, evacuate the water and fuel already in the boilers depending on the severity of the problem, then wait for the whole system to cool down.
You do all that, because unlike in a nuclear reactor, if a boiler goes critical, it doesn't get really hot and then make the air glow blue for the rest of human history, it explodes and you lose the entire compartment of engineers. Usually instantly. And those who don't become carbon outlines on the wall, really wish they had.