They left the casino district around one in the morning to walk to Faust's warehouse, two of them, on foot, with the ship meeting them there.
Her yard is dark and narrow, lit by shard lamps that throw everything green. She was waiting with six constructs standing at the edges of the light. Not warforged. Similar enough at a distance to be mistaken for them, and wrong up close, with nothing behind the eyes.
“You're early and you're short-handed.”
Tauon told her the boat was coming and that they had wanted to be here regardless, holding up their end. She asked about the other two. He said they were with the ship, and then, gesturing at her guards, said they were very nice, that the crew had one themselves, that they made good workers.
“I noticed you had a warforged. These aren't quite the same.”
At two minutes to three the Boats N Hoes came in toward the refueling gantry slip and two fully armed Cordoban military sloops moved to intercept her.
What followed was Chet threading a caravel into a slip under guns, with the party on the dock doing what they could to help from the ground. The ship made it in. The sloops made their point and did not press it. Scout and Yazan boarded and they made their way to meet Erin Faust.
Sixteen well packaged and well protected glass crates of slightly glowing, slightly moving cargo went into the hold, sealed, and stayed sealed. Faust handed over the paperwork with them.
The requisition is a formal decree out of the Hermit Kingdom, issued through the Magistrate of the Northern Steppes, and sealed with the symbol of the Supreme Chairman, it valued the shipment at a hundred and twenty thousand gold. Faust contracted the run at seventy-five, with her quarter coming out of it. Delivery to the southeastern border crossing between Quebec and Dixie.
They lifted at half past four into clear Caribbean sky.
The first day was uneventful, and the crew used it.
Scout worked up a set of his patented atlas maps and handed one to Chet, who took it seriously. Yazan and Scout put two hundred and fifty gold into a scroll of Blur. Scout and Chet laid out the approach: skim the Atlantic coast first, and make their approach to Quebec from the north. Seemed simple enough.
Arkady also opened his Compass of Need. The needle went around in erratic circles, the way it does, and then locked. It did not wander after that. It held steady on Captain Chet Russo.
“Hey Chet. How's it hanging.”
“Clear skies. Not another ship in sight. Fresh wind, full belly, couldn't ask for anything more.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
He said he'd been meaning to see about the mess they'd made of his deck. Then he told them to keep their eyes peeled, because those sloops come out of nowhere, fast and mean.
Arkady didn't mention the compass.
Miyake was nowhere to be found.
Second day, three thousand feet, flat blue-green water underneath.
Scout and Tauon saw the dark patches in the ocean first, the shapes that mean flotsam floating on the water is throwing shade on the shallows below. Then a Cordoban sloop came up out of the cloud cover and put a ranging shot over their heads.
Arkady threw a Jolly Roger up over the mast in silent image, on the theory that pirates are a known quantity and whatever the caravel actually was might be worse. It did not work.
The sloop fired again and this time connected with a harpoon. Scout put the large cannon on them and missed clean. Tauon returned with the harpoon ballista into them and held.
Then another Cordoban medium cannon rang out as a second sloop came around. Its shot punched through the lower deck, through the laboratory bulkhead, and left a cannonball embedded in the wall.
Chet did not wait to be hit again. He turned the Boats N Hoes into the enemy sloop and rammed her in spite of the two ships being entangled in harpoon lines.
Both ships took it hard, heavy structural damage into their own hull, worse into the Cordoban, and both of them started losing altitude at once. Every person on deck went down. Arkady went over the rail entirely, thirty feet out into open air with nothing under him.
Yazan lit the flametongue and stepped through a dimension door directly onto the second sloop's deck, decapitated him, and sent his lifeless body overboard.
Arkady, falling rapidly, tried to throw a rope back up at a ship that was climbing away from him. It just licked the railing and failed to find purchase.
Tauon went head-first off the deck after him. His boots did the rest. He caught Arkady in open air and slowed his descent to the water below.
Yazan found the Cordoban chaplain in the ship's head, jammed in there, holding a Symbol of Jasiri and cowering in fear. He killed him right there and took the seemingly ineffective symbol from his corpse. In addition to the symbol, Yazan retrieved his now unloaded pepperbox, an ammunition pouch, and a handful of gold and platinum service medals off the disgraced military chaplain.
When it was over the caravel had serious damage all throughout her, an unusable laboratory, and two crippled Cordoban sloops lashed to her hull with hydrogas still in their tanks. A quick pass through the sloops revealed that this particular Cordoban detachment was severely under-provisioned, likely having not had a meal for days. Scout got to work on the repairs to the Boats N Hoes while the crew discussed what to do with their ill-gotten gains and settled on making for Savannah to find out their worth while salvaging what they can from them.
Miyake had not come up once.