First part of the story may be found here
https://gunsoficarus.com/community/forum/index.php/topic,918.0.html“This is our home,” the old man said as he stirred the fire in the mouth of the cave.
“Yes, but that’s what I don’t understand, why would you choose this place as a home?” Daniel repeated. He and the Runaway’s crew had been traversing the edges of the Wastes for the past week, and this was the fourth community they had visited. He had yet to figure out how anyone could want to live in this desolate nothing-land.
“Where is your home, son?” The old man, leader of the village, was wrapped in a canvas cloak against the oncoming cold of nightfall.
Daniel laughed. “I don’t have one! Once you’ve tasted the sky, seen the stars from the topside of a cloud, no four walls could be enough.”
The old man smiled at the boy across from him. “So you will never make a new home for yourself? You will always fly?”
“Yes, just like Captain Narrid. You don’t get men like him living in a hole in the ground.”
“What kind of man is he that he cannot live in a cave like mine?” the old man poked the fire, glancing up at Daniel.
“A hero! He saved your people’s lives, through great risk to himself; and to myself!” Daniel fingered the splinter of wood that hung on a leather thong around his neck, remembering the wounds he had taken.
“And we cannot have heroes here in my humble cave?” the man gestured at the firelit rock around him, the woven mats, the chaff-filled cushions upon which they sat.
“I’ve never seen one under a mountain. Heroes come from the sky.”
Narrid strode in from the evening sunlight, attentive villagers in tow. He didn’t smile, and he answered their questions in his typical gruff manner, but Daniel saw the light in his eyes as they asked about his dangerous deeds. He didn’t mind telling them, though he stopped when he saw Daniel across from the old man.
“Daniel!” he snapped.
“Yes, sir?”
“Leave the Father alone.”
“But we were just-”
“Relieve Seryn on the watch, I need to talk with Father Yursa.”
“Aye sir.” The sun was setting, and the watch would be cold soon, but a sunset over the Wastes was said to be worth watching. The captain took Daniel’s seat as his apprentice walked out, and the two men’s voices followed Daniel out into the open air on the side of the mountain.
Seryn was perched on a sharp outcropping of rock. A couple of younger villagers had congregated at the bottom of the stone jut, interrogating the anomalous visitor. Seryn had one goggle lens pressed up against the captain’s spyglass, scanning the horizon and trying her best to ignore her admirers.
“Do you see anything?” one of the boys called up.
“What’re those goggles good for, ma’am?” the little girl wore a thick canvas dress and sandals. This village had almost nothing that they hadn’t made by hand. In one way, it was impressive; they lived in the waterless armpit of a burned out world, and somehow managed to not die. In every other way, Daniel just wondered at their decision-making.
When the Runaway had docked at the primitive rope and lumber station over top of this mountainside village, these children had been dying. Daniel had seen them leaning up against the walls of the cave, half-asleep in the bright midmorning, their skin bruised and gums bleeding out their slack mouths. The adults had been little better, but at least they had known what was killing them.
Scurvy had returned with the burning of the world. Doc said it wasn’t actually a disease, but a deficiency of a certain vitamin that was hard to come by in the dead places, where greenhouses and botanical witchcraft (or science, as she preferred to call it) were unavailable. She said the children needed Ascorbic acid, which apparently meant unscurvying acid. Doc had giggled as she told him that, and almost dropped her vial.
That’s why the captain had decided to steal fruit. Those little strawberry plants could live off of almost no water, and could survive the harsh winds and unforgiving sun of the Wastes. One bush could put forth enough tiny berries in a year to keep this entire village from losing their teeth and dying. The children were significantly more alive than they had been when Daniel had hopped off the gangplank carrying the strawberries.
Seryn appeared to regret saving them.
“Is your hair real, or is it science too?” The girl’s own hair was thin and straight, almost anemic compared to Seryn’s heavy mass of curls. Seryn’s eyes lit up as she saw Daniel, though her jaw remained clinched with the effort of not snapping profanities at children.
She hopped down off her rock, and smacked the spyglass into Daniel’s chest His engineer stalked off towards the cave, muttering. “They’re all yours, you bastard.”
As Seryn disappeared, all the children’s eyes turned to him. He looked back for a moment and straightened the buttons on his shirt, then rolled up his sleeves and began to climb up the rock.
“Mister?” a small voice called up.
“Yes?”
“Can you bring the pretty lady back? I think I like her better.”
Daniel missed the sunset as he entertained the village children. They weren’t particularly interested in stories of his youth, but they lit up when he pulled out the copper compass his father had given him when he was accepted as Narrid’s apprentice. They turned it in their hands and giggled as the needle swiveled against the motion to point north. He tried to explain how it worked (as much of it as he knew), but they didn’t understand its purpose.
“But why do you need to know which way is north? The Waste is east, so that’s north!” A freckled boy gestured in the direction of the scorched plains, then up the mountain range for north.
“How would you know when you weren’t here though? What if you were on the other side of the Wastes?” Daniel asked.
The boy laughed, “The other side of the Wastes? Even your airboat can’t fly to places that don’t exist!” The other children all laughed with him, and Daniel frowned.
“I have been to the other side of the Wastes,” he lied. He hadn’t technically been there, but he knew it existed. The maps all showed the Fjord Baronies that way.
“No you haven’t, there isn’t such a place! Aunt Laurxeis always said outsiders were full of lies.” The freckled boy laughed again, and the others of his pack followed suit. Except the little girl in her canvas dress.
“What’s out there, sir?” Her eyes were wide, her face open. The look of belief, of wonder. The thought that somewhere were sights worth seeing and stories worth living.
“Everything. Everything you can imagine is out there somewhere. Ruined cities that reach the clouds, great machines that belch black smoke and give light to a million people, glass houses with trees as tall as a man growing inside!” The children, even those that had been laughing, gaped at him. Daniel grinned and continued, “Ships as big as your village! Poison water that really is the edge of the world, stretching forever out over the horizon. Lizards that can swallow a man, water so cold that it turns to stone!”
“Can you see them through your magic metal?” The freckled boy pointed at the captain’s spyglass.
“Hmm, I don’t know,” Daniel gave them a sly smile, and extended the spyglass, pressing it to his eye. He gasped. “There’s a dragon now! The man riding it is waving at us!”
The children spun and looked the way he was pointing, seeing nothing. Daniel turned slowly, sweeping his view across the horizon. “There’s the Storm Islands, where lightning strikes every minute. They don’t need clocks there, they just count the lightning. And there’s. . . uh oh.”
Daniel jumped down, collapsing the spyglass and pushing the children out of his way. The captain needed to know immediately. They had to get back in the air.
“What did you see? Is it a dragon?”
“Yeshans!” Daniel called out, half to the children, half to his comrades. “Yeshans on the horizon, coming this way!”
Captain Narrid met Daniel at the mouth of the cave.
“Where and how many?” Narrid snapped as Daniel ran up to him and saluted.
“Two, up from the south, maybe ten minutes when I first spotted.”
“Give me the glass,” Narrid said and motioned for Daniel to hand it over, which the apprentice did very carefully. The captain snapped it up to his eye and scanned the horizon.
“One heavy armed frigate, and two escorts, Pyramidion class,” the captain muttered to himself.
Three? Daniel had only seen two. He wondered if that counted against him in his apprenticeship. Then he wondered how much that really mattered at that particular moment.
“Get in the middle, smoke, spin, fire, smoke... Or flank outside, keep one between...” the captain continued his mutterings. Then he slammed the spyglass closed and turned to Daniel, a grin splitting his unshaven face.
“You’ll be telling your grandchildren about this one, son. Now where’s my crew?!” the captain barked and turned back towards the cave, right as Zhen came jogging out with his beard fluttering in the wind.
Seryn and Doc followed quickly after. The sisters had been treating those children that needed more than a few strawberries to make them well. Doc had blood on her gloves.
Even in their disheveled state, the crew looked ready. Memories of their last, and his first, battle came unbidden to mind. The overwhelming noise and the searing pain of his injury. He touched the splinter that hung from his neck as the captain addressed his crew, and Daniel tried to force a bit of confidence into his expression. If he’d been able to see himself, he would have categorized the look as ‘upset stomach,’ not ‘confidence,’ but it was the best he could do.
“Three enemy ships approaching, seven minutes out. Doc, I’m going to need you gunning. Seryn, I need you to put out as much smoke as you can, as quickly as possible. Zhen, I want some shrapnel rounds. Why hit one ship when you can hit three?” The captain gave them a smirk and turned.
“Hold on. You want to fight?” Seryn asked. She put her hands on her hips, the universal stance of a woman correcting a wayward man.
“We have to, Seryn. If we run, they could kill these villagers.” He turned towards her sister for support, “Doc, we can’t risk leaving them to the Yeshans.”
Doc shook her head, calm but certain, “Dying will not help them any more than running would, Captain.”
Narrid turned to Zhen and Daniel, face dark with frustration. “We can beat them. You have to trust me.”
The big gunner stepped forward and placed his hand on the captain’s shoulder. “I trust you; to be brave, to be noble, to be hungry,” Zhen said with a laugh. “I do not always trust you to be wise, captain. In this, I side with the sisters. We cannot win against three.”
Narrid turned to the now congregated villagers, all their eyes on the crew as danger approached. Looking to them for protection, as they had with the sickness. Perhaps expecting another miracle from the Runaway.
The Yeshan soldiers wore starched blue uniforms, the Crane stitched on one soldier and the Tiger on the other. Military then, not the trade guard. They all carried rifles, pistols in their belts, and an elegantly curved blade in a crane-etched scabbard on their hips. But none of them drew weapons on the crew of the Runaway. Narrid stood with his hands clasped behind his back, in his best captain’s pose.
Daniel’s heart pounded as the soldiers encircled them. Most nations were not kindly towards pirates. Stringing them from a mountain peak and leaving them to the wind’s mercy was a typical punishment. He couldn’t remember the specific Yeshan laws, though he chastised himself for not paying attention while reading the manuals. He hadn’t quite believed that Narrid could be caught. And giving strawberries to sick children. . . surely that would buy them a bit of leniency.
He met the eyes of the two Yeshan officers, and decided that the benevolent nature of their crime would not be as assuaging as he hoped. They walked side-by-side up to Narrid; one wore a Deer on his breast, for the trade authority, and was a tall, skinny man with a spotless uniform and a sneer. The other wore a Tiger, like the soldiers, and a look of determination.
The Tiger walked up to Captain Narrid and stared down at his opponent. The two men were different in almost every aspect: Narrid was dark, his hair unruly and his beard unkempt; the Yeshan looked like a recruitment poster come to life, with closecropped hair, no beard, fair skin, and tall. But the men stood straight.
“Captain Narrid of the unallied ship Runaway?”
“Yes.”
“By the order of the Yeshan Senate, you are under arrest for piracy, smuggling, and the murder of Crewman Maenzi of the YIA Scales.”
The Deer grabbed the last word, disgust dripping from his voice, “And you’ll die for it, pirate.”
***
Captain Narrid had his own private cell in one of the Pyramidion’s underbelly. A luxury, as far as prisons went. He sat on the ratty cot and waited, planning his defense. If they gave him a chance to defend himself. Much easier to simply execute pirates and dump their corpses off the side.
Not a particularly glorious ending. But then, such was a pirate’s lot. A long drop and sudden stop, as his father would have said. Then he would have laughed. When the Arashi warships dropped ‘pirates’ over the side, everyone gathered outside to watch them fall. It was a spectacle for the town, a bit of entertainment to break up the grays and browns of their burned world. He saw grins on his neighbors’ faces as men screamed and flailed and fell to break against the ground. Justice, they said, that those who flew against their rules would be abandoned by the skies and reclaimed by the earth. Some called it God’s judgment for perverting His gift of flight.
All so predictable. Men who believed in God said that God judged the pirates, and punished them for their misdeeds. Men who put their faith in nations said the state brought justice. Pirates he’d known would blame anything that crossed their mind for their misfortunes, a god or a man or a fickle wind.
The world seemed to play out the way it would no matter what a man believed. Men of God died of scurvy, men of nations died of enemy nations, pirates died to their own folly.
Now he would die. He knew why, at least. That gave him a bit of an edge over the men he had seen crying as they fell through the clouds. If he could spend the last moment of his life flying, that would be good enough.
Though the Yeshans might not do it that way. He’d heard of public beheadings, or a private bullet behind a prison wall. Whichever. He would face it, chin up. If they were going to tell their children of the Strawberry Thief, he had to leave a good impression.
He sat quietly, waiting. They still hadn’t taken off. Very strange.
Then a pair of boots stopped in front of his cell. Narrid looked up and saw the trade officer, uniform still immaculate, glaring down at him. The man’s mouth was twisted as if he’d eaten a wasp.
“Pirate. It’s time. You will follow me,” he spat, then opened the cell door and stalked off down the hallway.
He followed the hateful officer onto the deck. The night was cold, though several flarelights held back the darkness. They were still hovering over the mountainside village, and Yeshan soldiers were unloading crates and handing off the contents to the villagers. Very strange.
“As much as I’d like to see you splattered across the desert, pirate, my colleague here has other orders.” The trade officer gestured to the man with the Tiger on his breast, who was watching the proceedings below. “And in this, he outranks me,” he said, the words seeming to fight their way out of his mouth.
With that, he spun and walked back to the stern of the Pyramidion, yelling at a crewman unfortunate enough to be convenient. Narrid walked up to the military officer, and stood beside him, watching the activity below. He waited for the other man to speak, cautious of upsetting whatever miracle was happening.
After several minutes of watching, the officer spoke, “I’m trying to understand you, Captain Narrid.”
“I’ve never thought of myself as a complicated man,” he replied.
“The village Father claims you gave them strawberry plants in exchange for a bit of lumber, bread, and water. Maybe a hundredth of their value, after risking your life to get them. After killing a man to get them.”
“I never meant to kill the man. The Scales fired on us without any declaration of intent or arrest. We responded in kind,” Narrid spoke quietly. He hadn’t intended to kill the man, but he didn’t mean to let his ship go down either. Maybe years ago the death would have brought Narrid the regret a man’s life deserved, but no longer.
“Trade Warden Carreff does not see that as an excuse. He would love to see you dead. As you might have heard.”
“I believe he mentioned it. Why isn’t he getting his way?” Narrid was tired of wondering.
“I have a mandate, directly from the Senate, to recruit all suitable freelancers into the service of the Crane. We have visited each village after you, and each time, I learned that you have traded invaluable plants for mundane goods,” the officer said, turning towards Narrid, “and each of these villages was dying before you did.”
“Where’s my crew?” Narrid asked. He was tired of talking, and of having his hands bound.
“They are safe in the brig of the Heron, our sister ship,” the man said as he nodded across to the other Pyramidion. “They will be set free upon your agreement to my proposition.”
“I’m not to be given much choice, am I?”
“Unfortunately, no. We need every ship that we can get, to bring this world under the Blue Veil.”
“I don’t know if I want to help you conquer the world, captain. . .” Narrid started.
“Hiarre. Commander, actually,” the officer responded.
“Commander Hiarre, then.”
“I doubt anything I say will convince you, but there’s a reason I brought you out here. Just look, captain,” Hiarre gestured at the mountainside, the villagers taking crates inside and the soldiers unloading yet more off the ships.
“Part of our mission was to hunt you down. But the greater part was to bring these villages under the Blue Veil. And that means they get equipment, to help them farm. They get food, they get medical supplies. The Yeshan Empire will care for these people,” Hiarre watched and stood up tall. He believed what he was saying, and the evidence below supported him.
“How do you know I won’t flee as soon as I get my ship back under me?”
“I don’t. We’ve had many privateers flee, or switch colors once they were out of sight. So I show you this, and I trust that you truly wanted these people to live.”
Narrid watched, and thought. “Alright. Let’s talk terms. I’ll tell you right now though, I’m not painting Runaway that horrible blue.”
Commander Hiarre smiled briefly and clapped a hand on Narrid’s shoulder.
***
After an indeterminate wait in the mostly-quiet of the brig, the Yeshans released them at the foot of the makeshift dock without a word. The crew saw Narrid at the helm, quietly watching the night sky ahead of the Runaway. He appeared lost in thought, but no worse for wear.
“Sir?” Daniel called up, as Seryn went to check the ship, and Doc and Zhen began to go through a few crates that the Yeshans had left on the Runaway’s deck.
Narrid didn’t respond at first, turning the wheel gently as he thought. After another moment, he turned to look down at his confused crew. “Glad to have everyone back on board. Get her ready, because we’ve got a long way to go.”
Narrid kicked the engine on, and Runaway began to rise into the night sky, ready to sail into that black sea of stars. The cold night wind swept across his face as they quickly left the red flarelights of the Yeshan squadron behind, as well as the fires of the little nowhere village. For a moment, Daniel stood and enjoyed the freedom he had so briefly lost.
“Oh,” the captain called down at his crew, “we’re Yeshan now.”
