Those Pirate Bastards
We spent a week on what was supposed to be leave, but turned into anything but.
The ship itself was fine — the real struggle was whipping the boys into anything resembling actual sailors.
Me? I was fine. What worried me was what all these foreign kids would go home thinking about Daehan.
"Forward, march!"
"Left, flank!"
"Your foot's out of line, you rascal!"
"I apologize!"
"Drop and give me fifty!"
Of course, it wasn't all drill. We also spent plenty of quality time getting to know each other.
"Oh, and if any of you ever end up in Japan, make sure you look after the Himiko School. It's run by a girl who's like a daughter to me."
"Your daughter?!"
"No, no! Lady Haneul!"
"The audacity! Who dares lay a hand on Lady Haneul?!"
You absolute lunatics! That is NOT what I meant!
Imagine if they ever visited another country. The whole nation would be ruined in a week.
"No! That's not it! I gathered up orphans and built a school for them!"
"Ah!"
"Hng... she truly is a saint!"
"An angel! An actual angel!"
Weren't you seething with murderous rage just ten seconds ago?
And the one sobbing actual tears probably needs a doctor, not an angel... Still, how could I stay mad at them? They really were good, obedient kids.
By the end of it the ship was spotless and the clothes no longer stank to high heaven.
"All right, we set sail tomorrow, so everyone get some rest early. No evening inspection tonight."
"Oorah!"
"No way!"
"We're free tonight!"
Was the inspection really that bad? Well, come to think of it, the captain and first officer had been running the boys ragged, drilling them within an inch of their lives.
Tonight they could drink and unwind a little. They'd earned it.
The canal locks, meanwhile, were giving us absolute hell. We'd left them alone for a while, and the currents went completely berserk — so we ended up in a frenzy of hauling in entire hillsides to redirect the waterway and dam it back up.
For now we'd opened just enough on one side to keep the locks functional. The rest was still under construction.
"Wow, I guess the other crews really were dying to see the ship, huh?"
"You could just moor it here and charge admission."
Ara Southern Port was the Western Continent's western hub for ocean traffic, so navy boys stopped through constantly — and every single one of them caused a scene just to gawk at the ship.
"The Lady's here too!"
"Whoa!"
"I've never seen her before!"
Half of them seemed to be coming to see the fleet's poster girl as much as the vessel itself.
After squeezing every last drop out of our week and waving off the final visitors, we finally set out to sea.
Preparation took an absurdly long time, too.
"The warm-up takes forever, doesn't it?"
"Yeah. I peeked into the engine room — the boiler's the size of a house."
Since we had no idea how long we'd be out, we loaded up on coal, and since we might stumble into some trade, we stocked plenty of goods — tea leaves, porcelain, that sort of thing.
It was honestly a scam how much cargo the Horned Whale could carry, but the Whale Shark carried more than five times that. And that's with coal stuffed in the hold on top of it.
No wonder the ship sat so low in the water.
"Fresh water made right on board, food stores for days... this ship is amazing."
"Someday we'll be cruising around on ships like this for fun."
"Yes! That'd be wonderful!"
Once we had ships to spare, we'd run separate passenger liners and freighters linking the Eastern Continent and the Original Continent, I supposed.
HHOOOOONK
"Eek!"
"Gah!"
That was the departure whistle, presumably — and it was deafening.
"Good grief..."
"So it wasn't just a duck quacking after all?"
I'd thought the train whistles were loud, but the ship had them beat. How was it this loud even mounted all the way up there at the top?
"So... *cough cough*."
"That's what I get for going slow, huh?"
We'd left the harbor and were creeping toward the canal, and the smoke was billowing everywhere. Most of it flew up into the sky, only a little of it drifted down — but still, yikes. Congratulations, we're now the global front-runner in air pollution...
Once we passed through the locks and sailed down the canal, though, the smoke thinned out noticeably.
"Apparently going slow makes more smoke?"
"Forget that — from on board, the canal looks enormous!"
"Completely different from seeing it from the bank, right?"
The ship moved faster and more smoothly than I'd expected, honestly. Not bad at all.
The canal was so wide that with just the one ship gliding through, there wasn't the slightest risk of trouble.
And the canal turned out to be longer than I'd thought — we'd entered late in the morning, and by the time we reached the far end, the sun was already setting.
"Hmm? So is this fast or slow?"
"Beats me? I can't get a feel for it either. Still, we keep a steady pace regardless of the wind, so we're probably faster than a sailing ship."
Probably.
After resupplying at Wikiwa, we decided to make a full circuit of the surrounding islands.
"European pirates running absolutely rampant out here, is that it?"
Causing mayhem in somebody else's house, these punks?
"Yes, my Lady."
"We've got plenty of prisoners, right?"
This lifetime would feature no pirates-of-the-Caribbean movies, thank you very much.
"Yes."
"Then load 'em all up and let's sort this out properly."
"Oh! I'll fetch them at once."
Hauling a few hundred extra bodies was barely an errand.
So we built a holding pen on deck. Out of the goodness of my heart, we even gave it a bit of shade.
"What IS this ship? I've never seen one this big."
"No idea. Is this even wood?"
"What else would you build a ship out of?"
"Fair point."
"Then why doesn't it have any sails?"
"Huh?"
Thanks to these pirate bastards, plenty of our Horned Whales had come back battered and broken. And that, my friends, costs money. So what does that mean? Time to go collect our debts, obviously.
"Hello there, you wretched sons of sea-dogs?"
Time for a little census first. I didn't need to look to know they'd be Western Europeans.
"Whoa..."
"Where is she from?"
"Daehan, obviously! Idiot!"
"She's beautiful..."
"Could she be... a siren?!"
Ah. I really have lived too long. Who knew I'd rack up this many foreign languages.
"Right! One question. We're taking you all home now — each of you, state your port of departure."
"Gah!"
"We're going HOME?!"
"Whoa!"
Hmm? Once they saw where they were going, they might not be so thrilled.
"Lisbon!"
"Seville for me!"
"Please send me home!"
"London here!"
Countries I knew all too well, naturally.
"Good! Eat the food we give you and behave yourselves."
"Thank you!"
"Hng... an angel after all!"
Hmm. Now, how much should I charge for the damages?
Minimum bar: strip their royal treasuries down to the bare walls. Anything less and I wasn't listening.
Census complete, we set sail for a round of merciless negotiations.
And as we passed one island, we came upon the aftermath of horrific plunder and destruction. The number of bodies... it was beyond words.
"That was the pirates' doing too, I take it?"
"Yes..."
"Captain. We can't catch them all, but circle the area and sink every last one of them before we move on."
"Understood!"
And so for nearly a month, we scoured the coastline like someone picking fleas off a dog.
"Three pirate ships ahead!"
These pirate bastards always seemed to travel in packs of one to three.
They'd apparently been modified for speed, because they were genuinely quick — for sailing ships, anyway.
"Engine room! More speed!"
The steamship cruised at a leisurely pace in ordinary times, but in combat she could push considerably harder.
RRRRUMBLE
At first I thought some monster had latched onto the hull. All that rumbling was genuinely unnerving.
But once we started overtaking other sailing ships, I learned something: our cruising speed was roughly on par with theirs.
Maximum speed, though? Not even a contest. I never once saw one of these bastards escape. The moment they were spotted, we'd run them down in ten to thirty minutes, every time.
"Gun crews, ready!"
And there would be no conversation. No negotiation. We simply fired first. The gunnery officer used to say something about how he hated his precious ship getting scratched — needless or not.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
And get this — the ship only had nine gun positions per side, but each position fired two shells in a volley. The shells were cartridge-loaded, so the rate of fire was no joke.
"It's over! The monster's come!"
"Quick! To the nearest island!"
The pursuing Whale Shark was already famous in these waters.
A monster with no sails, racing across the sea at impossible speed.
According to those who'd watched from distant islands, it spared no one.
"Good, the wind's with us! Make haste!"
"Please, please!"
Sails swollen with wind — never had they looked so dependable as they did today.
THOOM!
"What was that?"
"They're firing already?"
Wasn't it far too early for them to open fire? For men who'd spent their whole naval careers using cannons at point-blank range, this was pure lunacy.
Wheeee— SPLOOSH
"Ah."
"Figures."
Watching shells splash down in hopelessly wrong spots, the crew relaxed.
THOOM!
"Again?"
Then came the sound of another volley.
Wheeee— SPLOOSH
"Uh... that one got closer, didn't it?"
When the shell landed just a short distance from the hull, the sailors thought, surely not.
And then, moments later.
THOOM-THOOM!
"No way...?"
This time the cannon fire came in rapid succession.
"It can't be."
Wheee—
A sound the panicked sailors knew all too well began closing in, closer and closer.
SPLOOSH! SPLOOSH!
More than ten shells raining into the water.
CRACK! KRA-BOOM!
"What the—! Why are they exploding HERE?!"
Some shells sank straight into the sea, but plenty more went off where they landed.
CRUNCH
"Huh?"
"You gotta be kiddi—"
A shell dropped practically at a sailor's feet, punching clean through a stretch of deck before detonating — and the poor man didn't even get his words out.
KA-BOOM!
The shell exploded, hurling shrapnel in every direction.
"AAAAAGH!"
"Hrk..."
Dozens of sailors had been on deck adjusting the rigging while watching the situation unfold — and in an instant, more than ten of them were swept away by the blast.
"It hurts..."
"Hrk... help me..."
The pirates stood frozen, unable to process what had just happened.
"What the HELL is going on?!"
THOOM-THOOM!
And into their ears came yet another thunder of cannons.
"Hng... this is what we get. Should've just fished and lived quiet."
There was nowhere to jump — this was open ocean, endless in every direction. And these were warm waters, crawling with sharks.
Wheeee—
"I want to live..."
Between the sobs of the crew, the shells began falling with terrible precision.
KRA-BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Plenty of them were duds — but even a dud was more than enough to smash a hull to pieces.
The deck ran slick with the sailors' blood,
RRRUMBLE
and before long the ship began to sink. Already circling above the wreckage were schools of sharks, drawn from every direction by the scent of blood.
"Left bracket — short!"
"Fire everything as-is!"
We had no mast, but we'd built an observation post up beside the tall funnel. The observers there tracked where the shells landed, then relayed corrections so the gun crews could adjust their bearing roughly by instinct and fire again.
"Pretty primitive, but it works, doesn't it?"
Well, the whole battle happened inside a single kilometer. A kilometer? No — closer to a few hundred meters, probably?
And the turrets — that was the real beauty of it. We could sail in at an angle and keep firing the whole way.
The enemy ships carried nearly all their guns along their sides, so they couldn't even manage a proper reply. They just took hit after hit. It was almost pitiful.
They'd fire a few shots from their stern as they fled — but how on earth were they going to hit anything with that?
Whee— CRACK!
"What?! My baby! You SCRATCHED her?!"
All their desperate shooting accomplished was making our sailors even angrier.
"Look at them working themselves to the bone over there... from a distance, it's honestly a comedy."
Watching a ship blow apart bit by bit with debris flying everywhere — it was a little funny, I'll admit.
"Those men are all going to die, aren't they?"
"Yeah. They won't even be able to jump overboard."
Sharks had already gathered nearby — from who knows where — and there were far more than one or two.
At this rate, we couldn't have rescued the men in the water even if we wanted to.
"Honestly, they'd be better off raising a white flag and surrendering."
"They're pirates, though. I imagine they'd fear a life of slavery more than death."
Fair point. In Daehan, even convicts and slaves lived like human beings — but in foreign lands? Who knew.
Good luck getting a proper meal, let alone clean water on time. And pirate prisoners were supposedly punished with particular cruelty...
"If they came into someone else's waters, they should have learned to live quietly..."
Why else would they touch our ships and plunder our islands? Think about it, and it's all their own doing. Those bastards committed atrocities beyond counting.
Murder was routine. Assault and worse was simply Tuesday.
The village on the island we'd stopped at along the way had been utterly beyond horror.
They'd cut off the villagers' ankles — every last one of them — so no one could flee...
We'd have to clean this up as thoroughly as we could before moving on.