The Battleship Ponytemkin

by James Washburn

Prologue - Ponytemkin Blues

Prologue

Ponytemkin Blues

The North, wherever it may be the north of, is never a good place to be. The North is somewhere people are from, not somewhere people go, at least not out of choice. It can generally be relied upon to be Grim Up North. Nowhere is this more true than in Northern Equestria, the Ancestral Homeland (one of many, since ponies have had a long and nomadic history), lying far to the north beyond the Crystal mountains (known locally as the Chunderheads). It was here that all ponies lived in suspicion and mistrust until they fled south in search of warmer climes, and to escape a winter that wouldn’t end. It’s a land with a long and bloody history, and the land remembers. But of course, you’d know all about that.

You wouldn’t know about Nowheregorod, but frankly you can’t hardly be blamed for that. It lay sprawled on the coast at the mouth of the river Vulga, seventy miles or so west of Stalliongrad and a few miles south of absolute zero. In the long and distant past, it had been one of the greatest earth pony ports until it froze solid. It had been resettled after the thaw a hundred years ago when the windigoes retreated to the pole. Some academics would argue that this wasn’t really a thaw since the north was still cold as a bureaucrat’s heart, but these were arguments made by silly ponies. It most certainly was a thaw, because the town was no longer buried under thirty feet of glacial ice.

The town itself was a mix of squat, concrete prefab affairs the resettlers brought with them and old stone houses which weren't that much better before they were buried. They all clustered around town hall like a huge flock of nervous stone lambs around an old ewe, and for the most part could only be praised for being hard wearing, and only occasionally collapsing of their own accord. Only the vast tractor axle factory offered any change of scenery, spewing smoke into the sky and dumping interestingly coloured outflow into the icy sludge of the Vulga. Well, it would have been if the workers hadn’t been on strike. A small detail, but an important one.

The only other landmark in the town was the docks. In summer, they’d be abuzz with ships coming and going, shipping tractor axles and young foals who wanted out of this nowhere town all across the world. Now though, in the depths of winter, with the Vulga hidden beneath snow and ice, there was only one ship in dock. The battleship Ponytemkin.

It was a mighty ship to behold, certainly. A good five hundred feet long, twice the height of any building in Nowheregorod (except the tractor axle factory, which was the second-largest in Equestria), sixty metres wide at its widest, a hull a good metre thick at its thickest and armed with enough crossbows and catapults to prevent anypony who crossed it from crossing anything else ever again.

In its glory days, it had sailed across all the North Sea, hunting leviathans, crushing entire pirate fleets into splinters, duelling rogue dragons and generally maintaining the peace by destroying those who failed to respect it. Now though, it sat in Nowheregorod docks, a relic of times less settled, waiting patiently even as the snow and ice hedged it in.

Well, the ship itself waited patiently. The crew? Less so.

* * *

Like a bad joke, two earth ponies and a pegasus were sat in a bar. Stoker, Keel and Anchorage had gathered around a table in a darkened corner of the North Star, one of Nowheregorod’s premier coffee and donut establishments. Stoker hadn’t been to any other establishments, but if the North Star was considered one of the best, he really didn’t want to. The donuts were beyond stale, the tea was known to dissolve spoons and you couldn’t stir the coffee so much as plough it. But they were there regardless, even if it was only because Keel’s tastebuds had long since been burnt away by years of cheap coffee and naval food, and because Anchorage was keen to do the same for his. Stoker, whose tastes remained resolutely civilian, was complaining.

“Remind why we’re here, again,” he said. “This coffee tastes like the river looks.”

Stoker was a slight, grey-coated earth pony with a baby blue mane, which he'd had shorn short but not shaved in a desperate attempt to improve it. He had gangled at an early age, and hadn’t quite grown out of it. He also hadn’t grown out of the sullenness and awkwardness that went with it. He was dressed in his boiler suit which served as a uniform in the engine room of the Ponytemkin. It was a boiler suit with history, and had been passed down, passed up and passed around so much it was effectively shapeless, hanging off Stoker like a half-shed second skin. Right now, with the knees worn white and the black soot stains, it was passing through the off-grey spectrum on its way to the colour stain.

“You, my little pony, don’t know how good you’ve got it,” said Keel. His voice tried to be reassuring, but his expression said ‘too old for this manure’. “At your age, I would’ve killed to stay all winter in port, rather than freezing my flank off at Coltava like I did.”

Keel had lived his life in the navy, colt and stallion, and it showed. His manner was that of a well-natured thunderstorm, and he was built like a brick outhouse. He too wore the engine-room pony’s pride, his ratty old boiler suit.

“But it’s so damn dull! Nothing but snow and coffee,” he gave his mug a good look, “or whatever this stuff is.”

“Keel’s right, Stoker,” said Anchorage. “This is as good as it gets.”

Stoker huffed and turned back to his coffee. He might’ve drunk it too, but this was Nowheregorod coffee. He stared into it despondently instead. Silence reigned with a iron fist. The place was like a dose of tranquilisers. Mind you, thought Stoker, it was filled with sailors. Most of the lower deck crew seemed to be in tonight, and that was still a good fifty or so ponies, even with the recent reductions. They were all in the same boat as each other, and the Ponytemkin was not a pleasant boat to be in. Stoker sighed and slumped on the table, bored out of his head.

“Join the navy, they said,” he murmured. “It’s a stallion’s life, they said...”

“Don’t fret,” said Keel, smiling indulgently, “you wouldn’t be the first to join on false pretences. They told me it’d be pretty mares and sherbet fountains all the way to Timbucktoo and back, and look where that got me.”

Keel gave Stoker a cheery slap on the back. He wheezed and slumped on the table.

“Look, I just thought there’d be more, y’know?” he said, glum as could be. “I mean, like today. What did we do? We marched from one end of the ship to another and back again. Then we had drill, then we had that godawful speech the captain insists on.”

“That’s the Servicepony’s Pledge, you know,” said Anchorage, one eyebrow raised in what he must have thought was a wry look. “Reminds you why you joined.”

“Yeah? Well, I know why I joined,” said Stoker, suddenly animated. “I joined to fight the enemies of Equestria, to defend the sovereignty of the nation! Not to march from one end of the ship to the other and stare at coffee! I joined the navy to get away from pointlessness.”

“Well, you can’t blame Captain Ironsides for that,” said Keel, very pointedly not making eye contact. “After all, he is- was a military pony. I mean, they’re all about marching up and down for no apparent reason. It’s all ceremony, don’tchaknow.”

Stoker harrumphed.

“Look, I’m as keen as the next pony to get into the thick of a good fight and give Johnny reindeer or Johnny griffon what for,” said Keel, well aware that the next pony was Anchorage, who considered the lost art of war an art worth losing, “but it’s peacetime now, whether you like it or not. And, you can hardly begrudge things for being peaceful now, can you?”

“Anyway, maybe the new captain’ll be better, eh?” said Anchorage, picking up the slack. “Might bring a bit more of that old-fashioned naval tradition back.”

Keel grinned. “You mean thuggery, skulduggery and bu-?“

“The other naval traditions, Keel. There are foals present, you know.”

Stoker groaned and slumped back on to the table, muttering under his breath. He seemed to attract derision wherever he went, from Grimesby to the secondary school in Murmanesk. He assumed it was something wrong with the world at large.

They sat a while longer in silence. Anchorage wished he had a little hoof-ful of rain cloud, just so he could put it over Stoker’s head at a time like this. Keel’s natural exuberance, meanwhile, demanded release.

“You gits are all so miserable,” he said brightly.

He threw a hoof around in a gesture encompassing the whole room.

“It’s like a morgue in here!” he boomed, dust drifting down from the rafters.

A few others, silently nursing their drinks, looked around at Keel. He gave them his biggest, dumbest smile. Anchorage shushed him hurriedly.

“Well it’s true!” All eyes were on him. “Come on! This might be the only shore leave you get for MONTHS! Live it up a little!”

A pegasus at the bar, dressed in the bib overalls of the tractor axle factory, piped up.

“Excuse me, but some of us have work tomorrow,” she said, tossing her blonde mane, “so shut up!”

There was a general rumble conversation. It didn’t sound happy.

“Not all of us,” said a unicorn at a table, also dressed in the factory's uniform. “Some of us are showing some solidarity.”

There was a murmur of agreement. The word 'splitter' may have been heard.

“Hey, just because I’m the one doing my job.”

“Yeah? Your job involves demeaning the dignity of every workin' pony and the in’nernational proletariat as a whole, you winged bastard!”

Keel knew a bad situation when he saw one, and as always, endeavoured to make it worse. He stood straight and tall, inviting whatever he got. His smirk alone would have justified war.

“I always knew you pegasuses were boring bastards, but this is something else!”

Even Anchorage looked shocked. The pegasus stood and glowered. If looks could kill, it’d be wall-to-wall corpses.

“What was that?” she said sweetly, advancing on Keel, green eyes flashing.

As one, Anchorage and Stoker shook their heads and waved their hooves at Keel in the universal signal of ‘shutupshutupshutup’. Keel ignored them and ran a hoof over his mane to slick it back, still grinning his war-crime smirk.

“Well, alright, maybe not all pegasuses,” he said, “but you, and your ilk. Pegasuses who insist on being banal and boring like there’s some kind of prize in it.”

There was a moment of silence. A new kind of silence. It was filled with the sound of ponies leaning over or around to get a better view, the drip, drip of the tap at the bar and the low, grinding sound of a pegasus driven too far. It was a silence with an edge.

Keel had said a Word. A Word not used in polite company, in fact, not a word to be used in any company. It wasn’t even Their Word, because not even They could countenance using it. Keel, in other words, was in a world of cack.

The pegasus drained her coffee with a sound like a blocked drain and fixed Keel with a look that could have made toast out of bread.

“It’s pegasi, you cretin!”

The pegasus leapt and flew into Keel. The air rippled in her wake and he was shove back into the wall. The plaster cracked and shook. The pony manning the bar tonight was far too young and slight to have the force to say ‘oi, you!’ or ‘cut that out, you two!’ and so he dived down behind the bar with a yelp. With the evening suddenly looking lively, the rest of the patrons piled forward for a better view. Anchorage and Stoker tried to get back, away from the melee erupting in the corner, but were hedged in as everypony in the joint came to heckle the fight on.

Keel was pinned against the wall, deflecting blows as best he could from his grinning face. The pegasus was wild with anger, lashing out wildly and blindly at Keel with her hooves. Anchorage edged closer, looking to stop her, but was held at bay by flailing limbs. Keel lunged forward, trying to take her out, but took a hard hoof right to the temple. It knocked him cold but his unconscious body, still propelled by his momentum, continued onwards into the pegasus. They fell backwards into the crush of ponies watching, catching a good few with half-aimed blows.

Those nearest tried to back away from her, but were hedged in by those who wanted a good view. The net result was a great shove which, through a few poorly-aimed swings, misplaced hooves and no small amount of malice, mutated into a bar fight. There was a lot of pent-up anger in that room, between the striking factory workers, the non-strikers, the crew of the Ponytemkin and the couple of argumentative sods who had been waiting for something like this all evening.

It wasn’t a bar fight of staged leaps from table to table, or carefully timed chair-swings but rather a scrum of flailing limbs and half-screamed expletives, spreading out across the whole bar, like a bath full of loaded mousetraps. The mass of ponies churned onwards, hooves flying, glasses smashing, tables breaking.

Keel lay where he had fallen, forgotten as the fight rolled onwards. Anchorage shouted for Stoker over the din of battle.

“Let’s get him out of here, eh?” he shouted.

It was nigh impossible to be heard over the ruckus (or fracas, depending on where you were looking), but Anchorage seemed to get the gist. The two of them grabbed Keel, each taking a hoof in their teeth and hauled him towards the door. Just ahead of them, unnoticed in the carnage, the barpony slunk out from behind the bar. He burst out of the door and into the street, shouting plaintively for help.

Snow blew in from outside, which was followed briefly by a patrol of marines, swathed in winter greatcoats and snow goggles, bedecked with weapons. They waded into the fight, shouting for calm, but found themselves quite overwhelmed. The way was, for the moment, clear. Taking advantage of the confusion, Stoker and Anchorage dragged the supine Keel out of the door and out into the cold night.

Comments

[totallynotabrony]

Looks interesting, but if you have cover art, why isn't it on the story?

[Walt2012]

" . . . at the mouth of the river Vulga . . . "

Is that where you get Vulgar Boatmen?