What the Bones Could Not See
Session: 2020-01-14
Again there is no page in his hand. The account that survives says they came back and went straight into the fight, and how it began is lost. The last account left the party on the Sunrise Maiden, bound for the Acreon to collect ED210 and the gear they had left behind. When this one opens they are in a battle with a warship. I do not know whether they reached the Acreon, whether ED210 is aboard, or how the warship found them. If you go looking in the archive for that day, you will find a heading and a date and nothing else.
The warship was the Iron Rictus, of the Eoxian Corpse Fleet. The account calls her bone-covered. Eox sends its dead to crew its ships, and I have never been able to read about the Corpse Fleet without thinking of what that means in practice. A crew that does not breathe, eat or sleep does not tire either.
The crew of the Sunrise Maiden were tired. The account lists them as tired, wounded, sick and dying, in that order. Bren and Qwitch still carried the Akata sickness, and Deku was dead. This was not a crew in condition for a long fight.
At the start each of them worked a single station, the way people do when they are new to a ship. The account says they were trying to figure out / remember / learn what each station could do, all three at once, and I trust that more than I would trust a cleaner version. The records do not say which station was Taeon's.
And each of them kept a station, and kept it alone,
and then they were not alone, and the ship moved as one animal.
And the telling does not say which station was Kopalo's.
— Fragments of the Keepers, the Kopalo cycle, as it is usually told
The account calls the change magical, and admits that it warmed what its author calls a cold, shriveled heart. I would describe it more plainly. They began to move and think together and act as a crew. Nothing in the records explains how it happened. It seems to have happened the way it usually does, under pressure, after enough mistakes had been made in front of one another.
The Iron Rictus was more mobile than they were. For a while the account thought her mobility would ruin their day, and it says so.
Then her pilot made a mistake. A mistake in a turn shows you an animal's shape, and this one showed the crew that the warship had nothing covering her stern. The account gives the line to Bren Talic, though it calls him by another name: "He's got no ass guns!" I have quoted it exactly. Novitiates enjoy it far too much, and I would rather they meet it here than in the hallway.
From that point the plan was simple: stay in her rear arc.
The Field Canon has an entry that reads as if it were written about this fight. It wasn't. It was written long before Taeon was born, about animals.
ON PURSUIT — the blind quarter
Every predator has a side it cannot strike. Find it before it finds yours.
Speed is not safety. A faster animal may still be blind behind.
Watch how it turns. An animal shows its weakness when it turns badly.
Do not chase the head. Hold station at the tail.
A herd that moves as one is harder to break than one that moves as many.
Each member keeps a role. Roles are learned by doing, not by reading.
Expect the first exchanges to go poorly. They usually do.
Wounded animals fight longest. Do not mistake damage for defeat.
Count your own wounds as carefully as the enemy's.
— the Field Canon, on Pursuit
Novitiates are taught this entry for the fourth line, and they should be. I would point them to the last two. By the end of the session the Iron Rictus was badly hurt, and she was still firing.
After that the phases of the fight and the roles within it became second nature, according to the account. The two ships moved around each other trading laser and cannon fire, and the Iron Rictus took most of the damage. The account enjoys this part. It is the longest stretch it writes without a joke.
The last exchange of the night went through both ships' shields. Then the Iron Rictus fired another plasma torpedo. The account says another, so there had been one before, and that word is all the record holds of it.
The account ends with the torpedo in flight and three questions. Will the crew survive the impact? Will the Eoxian ship give way under the damage it has taken? Will the sick among them live long enough to find a medic? It does not answer any of them, and neither will I. The account was written by someone who did not yet know.
— What I notice, reading it again, is that the third question is the oldest of the three. The sickness came aboard with them from the Drift Rock and had been with them through every fight since. The dead crew of the Iron Rictus could not catch it.
The records do not show Taeon's hands on that day, or his station, or any word he said. They show a crew that had learned to act as one, with its shields down and a torpedo coming. I think he would have been still in the middle of it. The account says they had learned that much together, and I believe it.