by Scott McKay
That captain was Albert Wood of the sternwheeler Promise, which made the regular cargo shipping route from Elk’s Head in the far north, around the Hard Cape into the Gulf of Prosperity ports of Beacon Point, Port Colby, Gold Harbor, Stableford, Principia and Welvary, south around the coast to Admiral’s Bay and Port Excelsior, and into Watkins Gulf for Newmarket and Port William. Captain Wood was a humorless, stern taskmaster of a man, and in taking Patrick on he told him in his clipped northeastern accent, “You won’t like me, boy. In fact, you may attempt to murder me in my sleep. You will fail, and I’ll regret having drowned you.”
Wood, however, was wrong. Humorless and stern was exactly what the fatherless child craved in a mentor after the touchy-feely ministrations of the Sunrise Temple. What he saw in Wood was the masculinity and raw toughness of the Principia docks – and rather than ignoring him or shooing him out of the way, here it was demanding he participate in its ways.
Cabin-boy duties gave way to those of boatswain within a year, though Promise’s crew found great amusement in an eleven-year-old with such a job. But by the time the fast-learning Patrick was thirteen he had progressed to Sailing Master, and by fourteen he was doubling as the ship’s engineer having mastered every bolt and screw of its twin engines.
And as Promise pulled into Port Excelsior on Patrick’s fifteenth birthday, on the third day of the fifth month thirteen years ago, Patrick expected Captain Wood to name him First Mate. The sailor currently holding that position, John Hawkline, was leaving the crew for a Trenory girl to whom he was engaged and a 100-acre farm in the new Dunnan’s Claim territory, a place he was planning to call Thistleton Farm. As the boat inched to its mooring at the Port Excelsior wharf, Wood called the crew to the foredeck for a bit of a ceremony.
“Gents,” he said, “let me interrupt your travails for an important announcement…a pair, actually, because we have two of our number to be leavin’ us. First Mate Hawkline, an able seaman for true, is takin’ on a new livelihood. He’ll be tradin’ the sea sprites and sharks for pigs and chickens down in Dunnan’s Claim, and we have somethin’ to send him on his way.” Wood then produced a paper box and passed it to Hawkline, who opened it to find a small hand-shovel and a straw hat emblazoned with LANDLUBBER in bright red stitching.
“I’ll keep these treasures at my bedside,” the recipient deadpanned.
“Hawkline isn’t our only loss,” Wood then announced. “We’re also biddin’ farewell to young Baker…”
Shocked, Patrick glared at the captain, who then smiled at him and continued. “Young Baker here has been admitted on my recommendation and that of the Sea-Captains’ Guild to the Naval Academy at Wellhurst just up the coast there – which is why he’s leavin’ us now.”
A roar of congratulatory applause rose from the crew. Patrick was dumbfounded. All he could think to do was embrace the captain, as nobody had ever looked out for him like this man had done.
Patrick didn’t finish first in his class at Wellhurst. He finished second, but he graduated a year early, completing a four-year course in three, and earned a plum assignment straight out of the academy as an ensign on Vanquisher, a Navy brigantine plying its trade in the Great Sea east of the Ardenian coast. For four years Patrick, who had grown from a skinny, sandy-haired wharf rat to a square-jawed, muscular and handsome sailing veteran, and had even shed most of his South Principia brogue, served on Vanquisher’s crew, where he fulfilled all his childhood dreams. He saw the Lerian port cities of Resinan and Arouz, he saw the diamond beaches at Taravel and pocketed five dozen precious stones on shore leave, giving him a not-insignificant nest egg for his retirement even after dropping a dozen of them in the post to the Reverend Mother at the Sunrise Temple with a note of gratitude. There was a reason Vanquisher was such a coveted berth.
The young seaman even had an encounter with one of the fearsome Mottled Men of Cavol, during a stopover in the Thosian port of Bergod; the man was nearly eight feet tall and well in excess of 30 stone, considerably more than twice Patrick’s weight, with skin so full of birthmarks he was neither black nor white. The Mottled Men were the most fearsome warriors on earth, and this one was in a quite surly mood, so when Patrick happened to bump into the giant and spill a bit of wine on his boot in a quayside saloon in Bergod’s sketchy bowery, he made an obsequious apology and a hasty exit with his shipmates.
It was the time of his life, and during Patrick’s tenure on Vanquisher he advanced his career rapidly. From ensign he progressed to lieutenant junior grade, and from lieutenant junior grade to full-blown lieutenant, and from there to lieutenant commander, even getting some combat experience in a few encounters with Perinese pirates along the Lerian trade routes the Ardenian Navy was in charge of patrolling. He left Vanquisher as a lieutenant commander and second mate on the ship, which saw what Patrick thought was a little more-than-healthy amount of turnover through the inordinately frequent retirements of its officers.
Patrick’s next assignment was that of Executive Officer of the Ardenian naval ship Tuttle, an ironclad gunboat built by the Rackleigh Shipping Works of Port Excelsior. Tuttle was assigned to patrol Watkins Gulf and sweep it clear of Udar marauders. There, he saw real combat. While Dunnan’s War had mostly made the land safe from Udar war parties, at sea the Udars saw Ardenian shipping as a major source of plunder. With no peace treaty ever signed to end Dunnan’s War, not that the Udars had ever honored one, the sea was a constant battlefield.
Lacking steamships and operating sail- and oar-powered boats without naval cannons, the Udar relied on guile to ambush civilian vessels. They commonly attacked at night, laying in shipping lanes where small Udar sloops could sail into the path of a sternwheeler or merchantman, and their warriors could use grappling hooks attached to rope ladders to board and savage the Ardenian vessels. Once the attack was over, oar- or sail-powered Udar galleys would move in and whatever cargo or passengers the victim vessel was carrying would be loaded onto their main ships. Whenever a commercial vessel strayed from the convoys the Tuttle would often escort, or when one would take its chances at outrunning or slipping past the Udar raiders alone without naval protection, the enemy would all too often lay in wait to do his worst.
Interestingly, the Udar never made prizes of the Ardenian ships themselves. Those they set on fire after slitting the throats of the crew and stripping them of whatever equipment, supplies or riggings they could carry away. Female passengers were commonly taken aboard the pirate ships as plunder, which was why Watkins Bay commercial shipping, unlike the trade along the northern and eastern Ardenian coast, had become more or less an exclusively male endeavor.
On several occasions Tuttle managed to intercept those seaborne raiding parties, and the result was one-sided. There is no use attempting to board an ironclad gunship; its decks are empty and its crew is protected inside the plates of metal armor. All boarding such a boat accomplishes is to provide point-blank opportunities for the marines aboard the gunship to pick attackers off through the rifle-slots. On one occasion during an attempt to board Tuttle a suicidal Udar did manage to empty a bellows-full of crude oil through one of those rifle slots before being shot down, and another Udar managed to throw a torch through another in an effort to light that crude ablaze, which would have surely been the end for Patrick and his crew. But the torch fell two feet from the puddle of oil made by the bellows and was quickly discarded, and the attack repelled. For days the crew complained of the smell, of course, and the ship got a thorough scrubbing when it pulled into port at Newmarket, but that was the worst of it.
Otherwise, the experience involved a whole lot of shooting at people incapable of effectively shooting back. Tuttle was equipped with 10 six-inch cannons firing incendiary shells: casings full of black powder peppered with phosphorous and equipped with pressure fuses lighting the mixture when it hit something, which made for nearly immediate seagoing bonfires of wooden Udar ships. Between the incendiaries and the three spring-loaded chain guns swinging from turrets on Tuttle’s f
oredeck, no Udar ship could match its firepower or weapons range.
But Tuttle’s top speed of eight knots wasn’t always fast enough to take Udar ships out of the battle space. Because its steam engine, a temperamental contraption requiring the full attention of the crew to keep it from breaking down, trailed a heavy pall of smoke astern, it could hardly sneak up on anyone. The Udar sloops it commonly chased had a top speed of twelve knots. When the Tuttle entered the area of a potential pirate attack, it was always a question of landing a lucky shot from a bombardment before the enemy could sail away.
Occasionally, though, Tuttle would happen upon the Udar galleys waiting to soak up plunder from the attacks, and in those cases it was pure target practice. The Udar would have as many as 100 oarsmen working to propel their galleys, and at times they might manage to match the Tuttle’s speed – for a while. Those galleys couldn’t maneuver like the steam-powered Tuttle could, and their catapults launching pots of burning crude oil couldn’t sink the Ardenian gunboat
Nevertheless, Patrick’s duty aboard Tuttle was challenging. When Udar raiders did manage to hit civilian shipping, their body count was always at a maximum, and on the occasions when the Tuttle arrived too late to stop an attack, the carnage aboard a burning vessel was often highly difficult to stomach. Moreover, the ship’s crew seemed nearly unanimous, though the officers were under orders to squelch discussions about it, in thinking politics back home hindered their mission. While the Navy had more than enough firepower to sink the Udar ships when they found them, clearly what they didn’t have was enough gunboats patrolling Watkins Gulf to truly control the sea lanes. The older sailors aboard the ship told stories of Dunnan’s War, when the Ardenian Navy could amass vast fleets of warships to take the battle to the enemy at will. It was discouraging that while Ardenia was far richer than it had been 25 years before, it demanded the Navy operate with a far smaller navy against what looked like the same determined, if outgunned, enemy.
Also, there were the rules of engagement with respect to Udar pirates; essentially there were none. The official position of the Ardenian Navy was to offer no quarter to the Udar, and so the common practice was to sink every boat and shoot every pirate. Patrick was just fine with that charge at first, but the more he saw of the wanton destruction of the Watkins Gulf campaigns, the less enthusiastic he was about the wholesale slaughter he and his crew were enmeshed in. It just didn’t seem as though there was ever any end to the pointless carnage on the seas, and Patrick wondered more and more if taking prisoners and exchanging them for peace wouldn’t be an idea worth pursuing.
At the time, the Excelsior Locomotive Line was finishing its rail corridor between Port Excelsior and Port William, which would all but obliterate the need for commercial shipping along the north coast of Watkins Gulf. Virtually everyone agreed that was a good thing. The safest and easiest way to stop the piracy at sea, if there weren’t going to be enough Navy ships to do the job, was to pull the potential plunder out of the shipping lanes.
Despite the frustrations about endless bloodshed and mysteriously scarce resources, Patrick’s three years aboard Tuttle were profitable career-wise. Twice he earned the Naval Medal for Gallantry during his duty in Watkins Gulf, and when the ship’s captain, Commander Victor Marwich, fell ill and died at sea, Patrick assumed command and led two successful combat actions against Udar pirates in a week before the ship put into port at Newmarket. The Admiralty promoted him to Commander and gave him acting command of the ship for his final three months of duty on Tuttle.
And from that point, having just turned 25, Patrick Baker commanded ships.
His current command, in fact, was one of the Navy’s elite vessels. The newly-built Adelaide was a steam frigate supplied by the Markham Maritime Company of Admiral’s Bay, 224 feet in length, with dual 625-horsepower steam engines powering screw propellers which could give the ship an astonishing top speed of 22 knots, and it boasted three 100-pounder pivot guns mounted fore, port and starboard, and four chain guns emplaced port and starboard. Adelaide had a crew of 120, including 34 marines. It was one of the most advanced naval weapons platforms in the world, and for its mission, to sweep the Udar out of the seas, it was largely overqualified.
Which was fine by Patrick. As was his home port of Dunnansport, a brand-new city at the mouth of the Tweade. Dunnansport had the air of a small town of 5,000 punching above its weight, with new people moving in all the time and construction going on ubiquitously. It was exactly the kind of place a street kid from the slums of Principia making his mark on the world would see as home.
He’d been the captain of Adelaide for three years, by far the youngest mainship captain in the entire Ardenian Navy. And during that time the fight against the pirates became significantly cleaner than it was on Tuttle. The new ship easily outran the Udar marauders, and its rules of engagement were slightly different. As Adelaide had brig facilities capable of holding prisoners, some could be taken, and were.
Patrick was fascinated by what intelligence could be had of the Udar his crew was able to pluck out of the water after sinking their boats. For a society the Ardenians had been warring against, off and on, for 1700 years, less was known about these people than Patrick thought should have been.
That wasn’t a particular indictment of Ardenian curiosity, of course. The Udar refused to trade with Ardenia in any manner and they similarly refused any diplomatic contact. To the Udar, Ardenians were simply enemies to be killed or chattel to be exploited. What appeared as wholly irrational, or even inhuman, behavior was explainable, Patrick learned thanks to the Admiralty’s bulletins and extensive independent research in whatever libraries he could frequent, and confirmed in the near-fruitless interrogations of the prisoners Adelaide hauled aboard, by religion.
The Udar were not worshippers of the Lord of All. They didn’t believe in the Faith Supernal or any of its main precepts: that mankind exists to inject reason and order from the chaos of nature, that kindness and cooperation are the Path to the afterlife, and that industry and creation bring one closer to the Lord.
Instead the Udar worshipped the god Ur’akeen, whose name translated roughly to Lord of Us. Udar faith held that Ur’akeen’s people were the only true humans, or at least the only ones who mattered, and the only blessed occupation for his devotees was war against the Others. As Ardenians were the only Others the Udar had any significant contact with, that meant for the 1700 years Ardenia and Uris Udar were neighbors, there had never been real peace, commerce, diplomacy or any other cooperative interaction.
Such circumstances, for a long time, had been greatly to the benefit of the Udar. They had been for most of history stronger militarily, as their entire society was perpetually mobilized for conflict and operated mostly as hunter-gatherers in the wild, mostly mountainous, country of the Great Continent’s southern half. The Ardenians had only managed to survive due to distance – most of the continent’s northern half went unpopulated for more than a millennium, and it was the eastern coastline, mountains and hills of the Whitlow Peninsula in the northeast and lower Morgan River Valley which was the extent of Ardenian lands. Dangerous wildlife and Udar raids kept that status quo for hundreds of years.
While the Udar were hemmed in by Ur’akeen’s admonition that no Udar should die a peaceful death away from his Afan’di, or home camp, which kept that society from expanding its landholdings, the Ardenians were a bit more enterprising, however. That was especially true in the past 100 years as the nation experienced a Golden Age.
Technology, something the Udar had never been much interested in, and a mercantile economy had flourished north of The Throat, the mountainous isthmus connecting the two halves of the continent. Ardenians had circumnavigated the world by sea (and just recently by air, in a new innovation pioneered by the famous entrepreneur and adventurer Sebastian Cross) and attempted to open trade with the nations on the other side of the Great Sea, though the presence of dread diseases prevalent in those nations made that impractically danger
ous until Ardenian medical science created vaccines to solve the problem.
There was a lot more. Ardenians had discovered gunpowder, steam engines and electricity. Ardenians had built the locomotive network, countrywide, which meant a six-month overland journey from Principia to the Far West port of Azuria on the Sunset Sea could now be made in a mere four days. The two-week sea voyage from Principia to Port Excelsior was now just a day’s trip by train. In the last two decades Ardenians now had the teletext, and could send messages coast to coast by wire in mere minutes. Those innovations put Ardenia a vast distance ahead of the other societies across the globe, among whom the Udar lay near the bottom in terms of wealth and advancement.
Mastering the skies was the Ardenian innovation which most inspired Patrick, as only a month before, the young commander had witnessed the docking of the airship Clyde at the public field in Dunnansport. This amazing vessel traveled on a row of four hot air balloons inside a dirigible frame with a cabin underneath capable of carrying three dozen passengers, and was powered for steering by a screw propeller similar to the one on Adelaide. It could travel at an amazing 48 miles per hour, as fast as the fastest locomotive. The implications, and potential applications, of this new marvel were mind-shattering.
Patrick wondered whether his next command might be a ship like Clyde. Or if he should ever consider leaving the Navy, something he had no plans to do, perhaps catching on as a pilot on an airship would be a means of achieving the kind of wealth his current salary wouldn’t quite produce.
On the other hand, while Patrick was a believer in the technology of the dirigible airship, he’d read news accounts recently that one of Clyde’s sister ships the Justice had crashed and burned upon takeoff in Principia, and the airship line which owned the dirigibles was in dire financial straits as a result.
