BECMI Chapter 377 – It’s All in the Delphan
I continued my Magevoice speech to the fleet spread across the sky. “I am going to be Casting a Cloud Vessel on the ship on which I currently stand, enabling it to move through the sky with relative ease, but not great speed. Have your ropes ready, and we will set up a barge train for the moment by roping us all together.”
Done prepping the sailors and getting them into motion with something to work towards, I had to go diving into my Ring for that particular spell, which turned a sea vessel into basically a slow skyship for an hour per Caster Level, a useful way to get around and out of rough seas, if nothing else.
But the fact remained that I had it, no way I could NOT have it in a culture as obsessed with aeromancy and skyships as Delpha had, and it would turn this haggard bunch of sea vessels trying to sail the winds into something that was going to be respectfully more dangerous and maneuverable than anything would be able to predict.
It was also a VII, and could be made Permanent...
Dread tingled and indicated there was Immortal attention upon us, the same three Immortals as before. I wondered how Delphax was taking the obliteration of His Avatar, the shock obliterating the memory of the cause of it as I looked around.
Sama wasn’t with us, which would have been much the best scenario if we had to get into a naval engagement in the skyworld… no, no that couldn’t possibly be the reason lost ships had been returned to us, nopers. Someone wanted to see some excitement.
With grim expectations for what was ahead of us, I got to work.
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Soon enough, the Scampering Wave was surging into motion, the aeromantic power actually enhanced by the local manafield. The default gravity plane of anything barely large enough to generate a field was always oriented toward the distant sun at the center of the skyworld (which actually had the name of Meandral, the Infinite Rings), although ‘downside’ of a plane was perfectly valid.
Sky continents and larger islands with planetary levels of mass generated ‘normal’ gravity regardless of orientation, thus allowing them to rotate without any issues. It was weird, but easy to roll with it, but meant, for instance, that sailing between locations on the winds, ‘down’ on a ship was always directly towards the sun or directly away from the sun, depending on your proclivities.
As you approached a ‘world’, your gravity plane would become dominated by the larger mass, so you had to be careful of your maneuvering. It also explained the size of some of the Delphan skyships, as coming in and overwhelming the gravity field of smaller opposing ships was a viable tactic if you were careless.
The magic allowed ‘up’ and ‘down’ maneuverability, but it was a slow and steady thing, not powered by the wind, and it also didn’t allow any kind of pitch or yaw.
A sea rudder also didn’t have nearly enough area and wind resistance to work effectively, so the carpenters and crew had to start rigging up the extra masts and booms with sails to give the ships decent steering tails and wings.
With Wood Shape helping fuse the masts to the hull, spars to the masts, and mount them all, soon the spare sails were in use and we effectively had big wings and a fan tail as we swooped through the void.
There were actually a full hundred ships in the fleet, although most of them were smaller supply drommonds and galleys, thirty longships, and a dozen frigates like the Wave. Galleons were the product of southern shipyards, not northern ones, and Eismark preferred to build skyships, not sea vessels.
We’d have to change that. Clipper ships and modernized sailing vessels shouldn’t piss off the Immortals at all, merely being more advanced versions of primitive ships. Proper ironclads would have to wait for a decent amount of propulsive power to truly be effective, however… but gnomish coal and steam tech was already out there in a few places, so spreading it shouldn’t be that big an issue.
I stayed Markspace silent, because we were under observation almost all the time and I didn’t want to risk the /Tellepathic communication being spotted by the Immortals, of course. I spent a good long time studying the fleet as we moved around, ropes thrown out and ships tied together in a long snaking line to either side of the Wave, forming a nice flying wing that could swing together into a line without too much effort, if they stepped in the new sails to allow it.
It took most of the day to gather the ships together and rope them up, with crews of carpenters and sail-cutters moving from ship to ship to get the new mounts, masts, and sails into place, working steadily and with increasing speed as they puzzled out what was needed and how to make them more quickly.
Oddly enough, rowing could be effective here… if the wood was native and so infused with aeromantic energies. Oars from worlds dominated by oceans? Not so much.
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It truly was an awkward position to be in, with the Wave’s gravity plane effectively forming the basis for the whole fleet.
On the whole, however, once the wingsails were in place, the captains and crews were enthusiastic to try out some maneuvering. The longships in particular were pretty light and maneuverable compared to some of the other ships, and when Captain Olgiersson did some sweeping turns, dives, and even managed to work out how to corkscrew with some work, all the other ships were wild to start their own projects, enthusiasm for possibilities replacing awe and wonder.
Then, of course, the first storm hit. It swept up the water that had come through with us, now floating in great freezing shards in the void, and blew the ice before it like a cold wall of death.
It was barely an eddy by the standards of the skyworld, but it was a freaking wall of chilling wind, driving ice chunks, and freezing rain to the crews. I called the warning to the whole fleet, turned into it, braced the Wave as all the sails were taken in, and basically the ships were pushed backwards through the sky helplessly in a large V, just enough sail on to keep the wings of the formation wide so the ships didn’t run into one another.
By the time it pushed past us, we were shoved back a hundred miles towards nearest sky island, completely helpless before the wind. The ships were coated in ice, and all the captains agreed they needed a lot more practice before they could ride a storm like that effectively. Without being roped together, the fleet would have been scattered all over the sky and likely we would have lost about half of the ships and the crews from the deadly ice storm.
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I could still pop up a private Sanctum space for myself to eat and sleep in, and it was actually larger than the Wave, which earned no amount of envy from the other ships and crews. It also made a decent place for the captains of the various ships and their Casters and advisors to meet, given the lack of other surfaces available.
The fact ninety percent of the captains and two-thirds of the Casters were male humans didn’t daunt me in the slightest. They wanted to get home, and I was their way to get home. It was basically as simple as that.
Conjuring up a decent Heroes Feast for everyone to partake of got me very quickly on everyone’s good side. Ship’s fare generally wasn’t all that impressive, and certainly didn’t compare to high-end Clerical magic.
Introductions were made all around. The first order of business was to reform squadrons and chains of command, commodores being appointed for the captains, and admirals being appointed for the three fleets to be made out of the squadrons.
Squadrons averaged five ships, the three fleets were thirty, thirty, and forty in number. Solgas the Osprey, a captain of grim and fell reputation who might have dabbled in rather a lot of privateering on the side, got the nod for Fleet Admiral. Voted in as his second was Engol Foxwait, appointed Left Admiral, and Cap’n Markinusku was made the Rear Admiral, both men also having over twenty years experience at sea, and not letting this new sky intimidate them.
In other words, they were adapting quickly. Since all three of them actually worked for Sama, that didn’t surprise me in the slightest. Going from 2D to 3D combat was something a lot of men couldn’t do, even among the Delphans.
Sure made fleet maneuvering easier, however.
Funnily enough, they were dealing with someone that had over a hundred years of experience with airships, as my Sims here liked to use them for mobile bases of operation. They just shifted them from one location to another for long periods of time when needed, or just randomly sailed around and explored as the mood and Fate took them wherever they wouldn’t bother anything… or could bother all sorts of things and it wouldn’t matter, as the case might be.
In other words, I could give them some quick lessons on this kind of travel and fighting, and if the ships weren’t made for it, at least we were adapting with impressive speed by pooling men and materials.
I let the men work out whose ships got wingsails first, as they needed to be competent and brave captains and crew who could learn some very new ropes rather quickly, then pass any tricks on to others. I did let them know there were probably native sailors here from navies used to sailing the sky, and, well, our whole fleet looked absolutely ridiculous to them, like something cobbled together by children from scraps.
That stung their pride, and the stories and illusions about the kinds of naval actions I’d seen let them know they were severely out-matched on many levels.
They did have one advantage, as everyone knew Delphan airships always preferred ranged combat, and so were not competent at boarding actions or in personal combat, considering it savage and barbaric. If we had to fight, that was going to be one of the key ways we could take matters to an enemy.
And not incidentally, get better ships!
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“Gentlemen, we’ve gone over a great many things, helping us get started in the right direction. I am fully aware of the supply situation, and we’ll be setting course for the nearest sky island looking for food. We haven’t seen anything edible out here yet, but there will be a lot of birds as we get into asteroid clusters and the like, and some of the skyfish are excellent, just keep an eye out for scavvers and their bigger cousins.”
I’d shown them all Holos of what those looked like, and one of the keen-eyed Northmen officers indicated he might have seen a pack of them. They had to be on the lookout for them around one another’s ships, as scavvers liked to hide around the lower hulls out of sight of the sailors and jump through the gravity plane to surprise crewmen in lunging passes.
Everyone staying armed at all times was going to be important, as were nets raised around the ships so a skyshark or stormwing couldn’t just swoop in and pick off a sailor for a snack.
“I’ve grimmer news for you all than the fact we’re in another world in a different dimension trying to find the way home.” Which Find the Path could do nicely, and indicated was on the far side of the three surviving portions of Delpha. “That news is that we are under Immortal observation, and it was definitely an Immortal hand that brought us to this point.”
I raised my hand for silence, instantly quieting the rowdy bunch. I was fully capable of talking over them so loudly their ears would ring, after all!