This, this! was the gift of the Elder King, thought Melville, as he rejoiced in the far flung galaxies that hung so close above him. Flatland compressed distances, so that travel between worlds was practical. It also compacted distances so that the galaxies hanging above him looked as near as the Moon from Old Earth. Like most sailors he never got tired of looking at them. On the world below him he’d almost given up hope of ever seeing them again and now, for a brief moment, he rejoiced in it.
After a sailor’s brief, orienting glance at the sea and the sky he turned his head and looked at the Kestrel, dreading what he’d see. The rope ladder hung from the Ship’s bowsprit, and from here he could see no damage. All he could see was the bow of the Ship, and only the portion of the bow that was “above” the plain of Flatland, that vast, two-dimensional plain in which the three-dimensional form of the Ship floated. There might well be great damage to her flanks, stern, or below the plain of Flatland, where he couldn’t see.
The Kestrel was of the Falcon class, constructed over 100 years prior with her sister Ships, Falcon, Sparrow Hawk, Pigeon Hawk, Peregrine, Meriadoc, and Gyrfalcon. She was what the Westerness Navy was pleased to call a frigate, with three masts extending above and below Flatland.
She was constructed of white Nimbrell timbers, which were coated with the Elbereth Moss, making her a beautiful, pure white. Except where she was painted with red trim on the “red” side, and green trim on her “green” side. She was like a great swan resting in pure blue water.
The old concepts of port and starboard, left and right didn’t work when there were essentially two ships, slapped together keel to keel. So convention established that all of one side was the “green-side,” while the other side was the “red-side.”
Flying from her mainmast, both above and below, she flew the Westerness flag, a four-armed, pinwheel galaxy on a royal blue background.
She carried forty 12-pounder cannon, twenty above and twenty below the plain of Flatland. She was intended as much for cargo, transport and exploration as for war, with a large hold, a large complement, and six cutters. Swish-tail, Sharp-ears, and Wise-nose were on the deck “above” Flatland. Bumpkin, White-socks, and the captain’s barge, Fatty Lumpkin, were lashed to the reverse deck, arbitrarily and universally referred to as “below” the vast plain formed by Flatland.
She was down to four cutters now. Swish-tail had been intentionally beached on the world below, her Keel used to form the Pier.
Bumpkin was lost, along with their second mate and a small crew, in an earlier exploration of a nearby world. She’d been beached on a shore and her Keel didn’t raise back up into two-space. After several weeks of waiting they had no choice but to bid their comrades a sad farewell. If they hadn’t raised a Pier yet, they never would. They marked this spot on their charts as a “reef,” warning others away from what treacherously and deceptively looked to be a habitable world.
Melville leaned to look as far as he could down the red-side of the Ship, which was her starboard or right side from above the plain of Flatland. He saw their carpenter, Mister Tibbits in Wise-nose, lashed alongside the Kestrel, where a repair crew was working on a portion of her flank.
“Ahoy Chips!” he shouted.
The carpenter looked up from his work. “Mr. Melville! I’m so very glad to see you, sir!”
The carpenter held a warrant officer’s position. He seemed to be the senior officer present, so Melville called out to him, “Permission to come aboard!”
“Aye, sir! Come and join us here, if you will, sir!”
Melville was already scrambling the rest of the way up the ladder to where he could flip up onto the deck. Hans, Broadax, the middies, and finally Lady Elphinstone followed to begin their assigned tasks.
From here he could see that the upper deck had been savaged by the most severe blast of grapeshot imaginable. The white Nimbrell timber of the mainmast was chewed almost all the way through. Great chunks of railing and decking had been blown out of existence. Much of the rigging was recently repaired, with pieces of shrouds and ratline still hanging in shambles.
The Ship’s crew all wore work clothing made of old, off-white sailcloth. Sailors hung in the rigging like a flock of dirty white birds, chattering and toiling efficiently. Throughout the Ship, seamen were working under the carpenter’s guidance. Several were in the cutter working beside him.
Melville went to his left, toward the red-side, moving around the cutter lashed to the deck on the Ship’s bow. He hurried over to the waist and looked down at Chips in the cutter below. He grabbed a bit of railing and hopped carefully down to land beside the carpenter.
Elphinstone went straight to the dispensary to tend to the wounded. Hans, Broadax and the middies went about their tasks, but the two NCOs made a point of staying where they could hear the conversation in the cutter below. Little Aquinar stood immediately above in the Ship, awaiting Melville’s orders. Throughout this part of the Ship the sailors continued to work, but they shifted subtly so that they also could see and hear the conversation on the cutter.
“Dear Lord, Chips, what happened?” Melville asked. “What could have done this kind of damage?”
“Aye, sir. But this is nothin’ compared to what the bastards did with their damned huge round shot below. May the Elder King curse them to vacuum!”
“Tell me about it,” said Melville, putting a hand on the old warrant officer’s shoulder.
“Well sir, after we dropped you and your company off in the world below we left and went on a short explorin’ trip eastward of here. It was all slow easy sailin’. All Asimov days you might say. Lots of plot and character development but precious little action. The kind of adventure I’d write for myself if I was doin’ the writin’, if you take my meanin’.” The old carpenter leaned up against the cutter’s mast and continued with his story, while Melville sat on the railing.
“We was about ready to turn around to come back to link up with you, when we runned into a Guldur ship comin’ from the east. It was a mite smaller than ours, and she only had four guns to a side, two above and below. They was big guns, but we reckoned they could only be low velocity carronades. So we wasn’t too worried. They signaled to pull up for a talk, and what with Westerness tryin’ so hard to stay neutral and keepin’ out of the Elder Races’ squabbles and all, it never occurred to us that they’d sucker-punch us!” At this point Tibbits began gesturing in accompaniment to his tale.
“But old Captain Crosby was always a savvy one, he was. Our gun ports all had their hatch covers closed, nice and peaceful like, but behind the hatch covers we was loaded with double shot in every gun, manned and ready. But so did the enemy! Lootenant, those guns was no carronades! It shouldn’t be possible to build cannon that big. Everyone knows that the Keel charges can’t be designed to give that much energy. For hundreds of years it’s been so. But they fired at us, right through their closed hatch covers, and did us more damage with one volley than we could with a dozen. I tell you, sir, it ain’t natural to have guns that big and powerful.
“They let rip with grapeshot in the two upper guns, and ball in the lower. The captain, Lord bless him, the first mate, and the marine lootenant all met down on the red-side in the upper waist to come over to that Guldur bastard. The grapeshot ripped our red-side like nothin’ you ever seen before! The whole boardin’ party, an honor guard of six marines, and the bosun pipin’ them, all disappeared! We’ve only got bloody bits and pieces left to bury! Four guns were destroyed, and the crew killed or wounded on two others, leavin’ only four guns on the upper red-side. You see what it looks like here, but that’s after weeks of fixin’ and patchin’ while we was on the run, with that bastard right on our tail all the way.
“The real damage was done with the cannonballs that hit us below. They punched through the hull, shattered the mainmast housin’ for the lower and upper sides. Then they punched right on through and out the green-side! On the red-side they destroyed three guns, leavin’ only seven below.” Now the old carpenter began to pace the deck of the little cutter.
“But sir,” said the old sailor as tears began to flow down his cheeks. “Sir, the vacuum-cursed dogs cut our Keel! The Keel’s only holdin’ together with splinters. Lady Elbereth’s Gift, the Moss on the Keel, is all that seems to be holdin’ the charge. And sir, the Ship is dyin’! Only the Ship, old Kestrel herself is holdin’ us in two-space. If not for her, we would’a popped into vacuum days ago, and she can’t keep it up much longer. She’s dyin’ sir!” The old carpenter sat and began to sob.