Chapter Three Hundred and Thirty-Nine - Finders Keepers

“So, how bad is it?” I asked as Awen pulled herself out of the engine bay. She had a bit of grease on the tip of her nose and some sweat on her brow, but she looked happy all the same.

“It’s fantastic,” Awen said. “It’s also so, so simple. Well, no, it’s complicated, so many little parts interacting, but it’s like whoever designed it wanted every part to be easily replaceable. I think I could make half the parts here out of glass and they’d still work. Nothing’s under a lot of strain when everything’s operating properly. There’s nothing new here, exactly, it’s all just executed so cleanly.”

“That’s nice,” Amaryllis said. Usually when she said that it was sarcastic, but this time it didn’t sound that way. “But will the ship work?”

“Oh,” Awen said. She pulled out a hankie to wipe her nose, but before she could I knelt down, licked my thumb, and rubbed the grease off with a bit of Cleaning magic. She made a face before replying. “If we can get the balloon refilled, then yes. Even without, I think this one can fly, though it’ll be under a lot of strain and we might not get far on the fuel we have.”

“Flight-capable without a bouyancy device?” Amaryllis asked. “That’s impressive. We’ve been trying to crack that one for a while, but we always run into issues, at least when it comes to anything larger than a raft. You need a lot of fuel to manage it, which means more weight, which means bigger engines, which means more fuel.”

Awen nodded. “They’ve figured it out here. Which I guess isn’t too surprising, the Snowlanders are supposed to be some of the best mechanics around, and it shows. I don’t even think this was a mass-produced ship. It’s got a few little personal touches that I wouldn’t expect from something being built in a factory.”

Artisanal ship crafters? That was neat. The more I heard about these Snowlanders, the more I wanted to visit them. Although, the flag still concerned me. “Nothing piratical in there, right?” I asked.

Awen shook her head. “I don’t think a motor can be piratical.”

Calamity had found a seat atop the covered part of the hull. Now that I was thinking about it, the ship was kind of shaped like a very sharp shoe with a hole on the end. “So, are we going to leave this here? Seems a shame to leave a working airship behind.”

“Airboat, technically,” Amaryllis pointed out. “And... yes, actually, you’re correct. Under most international treaties, capturing a pirate’s vessel means that the vessel is now, in part, your property. You have a legal duty to communicate with its previous owners in most countries, whereby they have the right to purchase it from you at half its market value. Which should be covered by any halfway competent insurance. So, having technically captured this vessel, we can lay a legal claim on it.”

“Really?” I asked. “We didn’t even beat the pirates ourselves though, so would that be fair?”

“Broccoli, the nice thing about pirates is that they don’t show up in court to argue with you,” Amaryllis said.

I pouted, a bit of warmth clinging to my cheeks. “Okay, fine,” I said. “It still feels wrong to just up and take this ship.”

“Take a quarter of it,” Calamity said.

We glanced up to him and the catboy grinned a very Cheshire grin. “We are, of course, splitting the find four ways, right? It’s only fair.”

I nodded. “Yup, that’s true.”

He blinked. “You’re not going to argue it?”

“No, it’s fair, why would I?” I asked. “Besides, without your help we wouldn’t be here. Did you want me to teach you a bit about handling a ship? I’m not an expert yet, but I think I can qualify as an experienced novice.”

“Oh, I’d like that, sure,” Calamity said. “But if we’re going to take this thing up, how’re your sylph friends going to reach us?”

“We could reach them in midair,” Amaryllis said. “It might even simplify things greatly.”

Calamity nodded along. He was clearly excited, but then his shoulders fell. “We can’t. The ponies.” He gestured off to the side where the three ponies we’d ridden along were grazing at some of the taller grass.

“Oh, right,” I said. “What do we do with the ponies? Could we bring them aboard?”

Amaryllis wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know about that. Most ships that carry livestock are designed around the idea that they’ll have to carry livestock, with stables and cages that have straps designed to hold them in place without too much motion.”

“This ship should be able to lift them,” Awen said. “They’re heavy, but not past the total load we could carry.”

I looked over at the ponies, who were just happily munching along. “They seem pretty tame.”

“I’ve got a skill that'll keep them from panicking,” Calamity said. “We can tie ‘em up here, and maybe cover their eyes, just in case. They won’t mind the noise, I don’t think.”

I was pretty sure that Calamity just really wanted to ride on the airship. “What would we need to do?” I asked Awen.

She gestured to the balloon. “It’s deflated, but not entirely. So we need to look for holes, and if there are any, we need to plug them. Then we need to inflate the balloon. There’s a pair of tanks under the hull, I’m guessing they’re filled with whatever the Snowlanders use for their buoyancy.”

“It’s a mixture of helium and a few magical gases,” Amaryllis said. “They keep the formula somewhat hidden, but not as hidden as their methods for sourcing helium.”

It made sense. Helium was pretty much the best gas for airships, with hydrogen being a bit way too explosive and other gases having their own problems. If the Snowlanders had easy access to helium, that would give them a leg up. Then again, looking at the little ship, it was clear that helium wasn’t their only advantage. I had no idea what the magical stuff was, but it didn’t seem as rare, somehow?

I wasn’t that well-versed in history and stuff, but it was pretty clear that this vehicle was a few decades ahead of any other airship I’d seen so far. “Have the Snowlanders always been so far ahead?” I asked.

“Technology-wise?” Awen asked. She nodded. “I think so. I remember uncle talking about them when I was young.”

“But that was a few years ago,” I pointed out. “Have others caught up?”

“It takes time to catch up,” Amaryllis said. “Time which they’ve used to progress even more. But the technological edge won’t hold forever. The Snowlands have plenty of resources, but they’re cold and rather hostile at the best of times. In a few decades we’ll catch up to them, I’m sure.”

“Yeah,” I said. Then I gestured to the ponies. “So, are we going to get them aboard?”

As it turned out, it wasn’t that simple, but my friends weren’t against the idea. Awen had Calamity and I clambering over the balloon, looking for rips or tears while she prepped other things aboard the ship and Amaryllis sent a message to the sylph with our new location and the new information we’d found.

That the pirate idea was entirely verified (the not-quite-jolly-roger was a dead giveaway) was troubling. More troubling was that the pirates had access to some really high-tech Snowlander ships.

“Found one!” Calamity said. He was poking a finger through a fist-sized hole in the tarp.

As it turned out, there was a second hole on the opposite end.

“It looked like the balloon got pierced through,” Awen said as she brought out a patching kit from one of the compartments. “Maybe a magical attack, or a ballistae bolt. It doesn’t look like it’s a big enough hole to ruin the ship, but it would have made it lose altitude.”

“So they landed out here and abandoned it,” I guessed. “But why?”

“Does it matter? It’s good for us, and too bad for them!” Calamity cheered.

Patching the two holes took a good half-hour, even with Awen helping. The stuff the ship had for hole-patches was mostly tarp strips with glue on one side covered in a thin piece of paper. By using fire-magic on the paper (and burning it off) the glue became warm and very, very sticky, it could then be slapped over the hole and pressed in while it dried. The instructions called for cold wind or ice mana to be pushed against the surface, which Amaryllis helped with since she had the easiest time converting her mana to other aspects.

Once I cleared the glue off of our equipment--it really was terribly sticky--we set to reinflating the balloon.

“We don’t have enough gases to fill the balloon entirely,” Awen said. “We’re going to have to mix in normal air.”

In the end, we inflated the balloon with what gases the ship had, then Awen and I undid the rather heavy tanks and tossed them off the side. They were designed to be easy to remove, so it wasn’t a big deal, and the weight difference would help.

After that, Awen set up a pump to fill the rest of the balloon’s space with normal air while Calamity and I coaxed the ponies aboard up a lowered gangplank and then convinced them to lay down onto some blankets while we fed them the rest of the grain we’d brought.

I could see why Amaryllis didn’t like the idea of bringing them aboard. They took up a lot of space, and if they panicked, then things would get really complicated really fast.

“I think our first stop will have to be somewhere to bring the ponies,” I said.

“We can return to the hunter’s,” Calamity said. “There’s a fairly large camp. It might have some supplies we need to keep this boat going too. I think a few of the machines we have at the camp use the same kind of fuel.”

With that semblance of a plan in place, we spent the rest of the morning preparing to fly. There was probably a lot less to do to get this ship airborne than, say, the Beaver needed to prepare, but the ship was unfamiliar to us, and we didn’t have nearly as big a crew to help set things up.

Awen got the engine started, then, with a box secured to the floor to give her some height, came to stand behind the wheel. “Alright. All hands on deck. Gravity engine to half and throttle at idle. Broccoli, sails to neutral. Amaryllis, Calamity, check the rudder sails and start winching the anchor up.”

I snapped a salute to Awen, which lit up her cheeks brilliantly. “Aye, aye, Captain Awen!”

“Awa! I’d much rather be the first mate, actually.”

“Can I be the captain?” Calamity asked.

“You don’t have the hat for it,” I replied. Cowboy hats were cool, but not what you were looking for when about to pilot an airship. Not nearly enough feathers.

“This is a boat,” Amaryllis argued. “Which means we have no need for a skipper. Now, will we sit here and argue or are we going to get this tub into the air?”

Calamity spun the winch which brought up the ship’s anchors, and Amaryllis and I busied ourselves adjusting the sails, which was surprisingly easy. They were smaller than those on the Beaver Cleaver so we didn’t need nearly as much effort to get them deployed and angled correctly.

Awen kicked up the juice on the gravity engine, and then for just a moment, we hovered on the spot. I grinned at the familiar but still strange feeling of momentary weightlessness before we started to climb up very gently.

“Engine seems buoyant at... sixty-four percent,” Awen said.

“Is that good?”

“It’s not exactly fuel-efficient,” Awen said, “but it’s enough to let us move, if slowly.”

We rose up a few dozen metres, then Awen slowed the ascent down so that we were hovering on the spot.

“Okay,” I said as I glanced over the edge. “Now we only have one more thing to do. What do we name this ship?”

***