Moon Sea Marauders Pt6
Steampunk serial
Previous chapters: Part 5 Part 1
It felt like every whim of the Fates were turned against us at this point in the journey, and the news of the failing gravitic aether drives spread like wildfire through the Poseidon despite the early hour of the morning. Captain Devworth made his way down into the belly of the ship in no time, heading for the engineering section, while the remaining officers scattered to the helm and forecastle respectively. I had been on the verge of retiring myself for the night, although this new calamity managed to change my mind. On the forecastle, surrounded by the nighted cold and the dim lanterns of the forward watch, I listened and observed as the mariners scurried around to deal with the airship’s unstoppable descent, and it was not long before the news was carried up from below: the issue at hand was not mechanical, but something else. The Faraday coils were behaving exactly as expected, and were not the source of the lost altitude after all.
A brief halt of the windmill engines brought us coasting to a stop, still many yards above the terrain, and the descent of the Poseidon halted in turn. When we moved forward again, we lost more altitude; when we halted our forward locomotion, so too did our descent halt. There was a furious deliberation amongst the officers, followed by a simple experiment: Captain Devworth ordered the windmill engines to be reversed, blades now spinning the opposite way, and gave the command for half speed. As we started to gently drift backwards, away from the distant polar north, the glowing coils below our keel once again began to lift us, and the Poseidon began to regain her lost altitude with every few yards we drifted south.
The conclusion was inevitable: something in the soil below, perhaps brought on by our proximity to the lunar pole, was negating the effects of the gravitic aether emanating from the keel of our ship. When the windmills were turned around and we resumed our movement towards the north again, the same inexorable descent once again struck us as we continued our pursuit, and the next conclusion was equal parts resignation and frustration.
If we were to continue our pursuit, then at some point the Poseidon would no longer be able to fly.
Of course, this conclusion also swiftly brought us to our next realization: if the soil in this region was negating our own Faraday coils, then would it not affect the French privateer in the same manner? After all, both ships operated on the same principles, and if there was some geological effect playing upon this region to dampen the efficiency of the Faraday coils, then any effect suffered by the Poseidon would surely be suffered by the Daphne as well. The French ship was lighter and smaller than us, granted, and could perhaps travel some distance further than us before its inevitable grounding - but ground it would, and that alone gave us hope to continue the pursuit.
For the remaining hours of the journey, we thus began to prepare for the next phase, which would involve trekking over the desolate, ice-shrouded moonscape below us. With the horrors of Absolution Point still fresh in their minds, the mariners and marines of the Poseidon remained undaunted by the task ahead, and were relentless in their preparations. Extra winter clothing was brought up from the stores, muskets and weapons were prepared, and backpacks were loaded with sacks of food and great flasks of water. If we had not spotted the Daphe by the time we were forced to halt our pursuit, the plan was to split the crew into several smaller parties and then fan out from there, scouring the icy darkness for any sight or sign of the French ship’s passage. With a little luck - and a great deal of perseverance - we would be able to pick up their trail at some point, and then begin the task of rescuing Lady Jessica from her captors.
The morning bell had just pealed when there was an answering cry from the topmast - our prey had been spotted! We were barely a handful of yards above the surface at this point, and the icy fields below us were barren and devoid of life as far as the eye could see. Faint hills and sullen valleys crisscrossed the land here, seen only dimly by the lights we cast around the Poseidon, and even the vicious lightning which clung to our keel was muted and subdued at this point. The lookouts indicated a mast to the north-west, several points off our port bow, and we had barely turned our bow in that direction before the last bits of altitude were lost and the Poseidon touched soil for the first time. Our speed had slowed to a crawl at this point, and as that first shiver scraped through the hull, Captain Devworth ordered a full halt and for the Faraday coils to be shuttered. To go further was to risk crossing the point of no return, beyond which our stately ship would no longer be able to hold herself aloft, regardless of our science.
The ensuing scramble to leave the ship played out with controlled chaos, and by the time we set off on foot only a skeleton crew of men remained on the Poseidon to guard her for our eventual return. Everyone else was ordered into the column which set off towards the distant point on the horizon where the French mast had been spotted, and soon we were trudging through ankle-deep, crackling snow crystals with only the cold and our lanterns for company. The wind was a cool, whispering serpent that coiled around our necks and bit at any exposed skin it could find, and I was secretly glad that my medical bag, once again clutched in my arms, precluded me from carrying one of the long muskets which the marines and even the sailors were equipped with at this point. Ice glittered and blushed along the barrels that floated in the darkness around me, and I heard many a muttered curse - especially from the sailors - when bare hands had the misfortune of grazing metal so cold that it could burn skin with the slightest touch.
It took us the better part of an hour to reach the Daphe, which, as we drew closer, appeared to have been beached in much the same fashion as our own Poseidon. What made it stranger, was that it had apparently also been deserted, for we found no man or even the lowest of sentry guarding it as we drew closer. Captain Devworth had split our column into two, with the aim of encircling the Daphe before advancing, and when we finally approached the ship from all sides and prepared ourselves for a peppering of musket fire from her rails, we were instead met with only silence. The privateer was a sleek thing, with long lines and a slender waist, and her windmill engines were pointed and smoothed in a way that made the Poseidon engineers point and mutter as they drew closer. Clearly this was something they had not seen before. Our cannonade over the edges of Absolution Point had done terrible damage to the ship as well, at which point the fatal weakness behind the ship’s sleekness came to light: as light as she was, the Daphe had sacrificed constitution for speed, and had paid a terrible price when our guns found her flanks. Holes had been torn in her stern and parts of her rear starboard flanks, and a forlorn curtain fluttered from the remnants of the windows which had once framed her stern and given a glimpse into her captain’s cabin. Her starboard windmill engine was also battered and warped, and it was clear that the remaining blades jutting from the rear of the engine had seized long before the Daphe herself had come to a rest here.
To say that the storming of the Daphe herself was anticlimactic, would be an understatement of note. Captain Devworth and the marines led the way, rushing up the boarding ramps while the rest of us waited with muskets at the ready - only to be rewarded, minutes later, by frustrated faces reemerging from the deck hatches of the downed privateer. Of the French crew, there was no sight, nor was the missing daedricium to be found anywhere either. Of Lady Jessica there was also no sight, although one of the men found a golden hair pin in the wreckage of the captain’s cabin which Sir Cottonby, having joined our excursion, swore belonged to the missing damsel. There was no sign of blood or injury in the cabin itself though, which raised our hopes that the lady had survived our initial volley at the privateer.
What we did find instead, once we started scouring the fields around the Daphe, were a set of tracks heading off to the north, and it did not take long for us to determine that this must have been the escape route along which the French blackguards had fled. There were deep wagon tracks mixed in with the boot prints as well, suggesting that some measure of cargo had been taken with them, and when a second sweep of the privateer’s hold once again did not turn up any sign of the stolen daedricium, we concluded that the French must have taken it with them.
Our path, then, was clear, and after leaving a token force behind to secure the Daphne, Captain Devworth led the rest of the column north as well, following in the footsteps of the French crew who had fled before us. We were anxious on this trail, expecting an ambush of musket fire from the dark at any moment, yet only the hissing wind greeted us as we followed the prints in the snow. The land became more coarse as we travelled, the smooth hillocks transforming into jagged hills of tumbled stone, and even though the trail we followed wove from side to side and took frequent detours to avoid the largest of the natural obstacles that rose in our path, it led unerringly northwards - ever northwards, into darkness, and into the long night that clad the moonscape around us..
So it was for many hours, and I had almost lost all hope of finding the French on that day, when the lead scouts returned to us. They were breathless and red-faced from their run, and the news they gave us was both sweet and strange.
They had found the end of the French tracks, at the mouth of a cave which led underground - a cave flanked by stone pillars, and carved in the likeness of beings no Man had ever seen before.
Next chapter: Part 7
Love the building tension!
Keen adventure awaits deep in the stony darkness!