Under Noa's gentle pressure, Lorraine felt like entering a calm harbor.
Half asleep, he jolted to hear the hatch slammed.
Knock knock knock!
Noa leapt away with a mischievous leap like a frightened white ear, and Lorraine, at first unsupported, flailed her hands and slammed them woefully against the thick, flower-woven carpet, not painfully, but frighteningly, too.
He bared his teeth and climbed to his feet, gave Noa an apologetic smile, and pulled open the hatch to see Pierce.
"What's wrong?"
"Brother, large foggy area at ten o'clock, about fifteen kilometers away, we may be able to flank through."
"The Fog Zone?"
A very strange word, and Lorraine couldn't help but frown at the sky.
The sky was fine, the big waves on the sea were caused by the trade winds, and had nothing to do with the stormy thunder, so how could we encounter a foggy area in these conditions ...
"Have Haina go around, this time of year ..."
"Captain!"
Before Lorraine could finish her command, Kron came running over with a sharp, terrified look on his face and an unforgiving white ear lying on his head that he couldn't even tug off.
"Captain, the bilge is starting to leak! We've been filling it with water for so long that the adhesive on the sealing plate is starting to come off, and there's basically no chance of salvaging it!"
"A bilge leak?" Lorraine's face paled, "One, or ..."
"Three!"
The Buttercup's watertight compartments were six per side, plus the bow and transom, for a total of fourteen.
There were four previous water injections that had pushed the boat's draft to its limit, and if there were three more ... no! It's four!
The ship will surely sink!
Lorraine took a deep breath, her easily emptied mind racing once more.
Sinking was the worst possible scenario, but with no damage to the hull itself and enough sailors on board to drain the ship, the likelihood of an outright sinking was negligible.
But the fact that the three compartments began to fill with water would surely slow down the Buttercup's speed further, and it wouldn't be long before the Reindeer caught up with them, and in the vast expanse of the sea, they wouldn't have a chance of getting away!
The Only Way to Live ...
Lorraine gritted her teeth, "I'll take the helm, Keren will man the sails, Pierce and Noa will command the sailors to drain the water, and get Haina up on the lookout at once ... And Yacharin, get him up!"
"Captain, are you going to ..."
"We ... into the fog zone!"
Into the fog zone!
Fifteen kilometers apart, at the Buttercup's current speed it would only take an hour, and even after accounting for the loss of speed due to the cutting winds and leaks, the whole process would take no more than an hour and a half.
Lorraine ascended to the helm, surrounded by the crowd, and took the handwheel from Haina.
The two men looked at each other, both pursing their lips and solemnly nodding to each other.
"Left rudder 60 degrees, transom half, cutting wind!" Lorraine shouted to the sailors on deck, "Buttercup, target, fog zone!"
...
One chased, the other fled, the Buttercup was losing speed, and the Reindeer, coming around the side from behind, was in hot pursuit of Lorraine's right rear.
That was the message communicated by Hina on the lookout.
From the Reindeer's response, it was clear that Velen had also discovered the presence of the Fog Zone and had seen through Lorraine's attempts.
Fortunately, or unfortunately ...
The fog zone isn't at twelve o'clock, it's at ten o'clock.
With a 60-degree angle of cut, the Reindeer, fully rigged with transom sails, could not cut the wind as deftly as the Buttercup. With the loss of the huge longitudinal sails at the stern, all she could do was to keep folding her lines, and in this way keep up her pursuit.
This undoubtedly increased the distance traveled by the Reindeer dramatically, barely maintaining the speed parity between the two sides in a situation where the enemy was fast and we were slow.
The deck of the Buttercup was a jumbled mess.
The wind was high, the waves were strong, and they were in an unstable, cutting wind environment, and the sailors stood in long rows on the deck, each with cables tied around their waists to hold their bodies in place.
They sent buckets of water up from the bilge, splashed them into the sea, and passed the buckets back again, and the cycle began to make a circle.
Grab the time, the speed, the load, and the wind!
Everything needs to be grabbed with one's own two hands, and every tiny bit of advantage is used to offset one's own side's increasingly well-defined disadvantages!
Saw the fog zone!
At the sight of the foggy area, a startled cry rose from the deck at first: "Destroyer!"
The Reindeer's massive frame leapt out of the horizon, smashing the waves with a roar and coming straight at the Buttercup's side from two kilometers away!
"Yacharin! Blast her sails!"
With a yell, Lorraine jerked the rudder to full, Acharine gained elevation, and the long-stored six-pounders fired at the same time as the Reindeer's bow guns!
Boom boom boom!
A huge splash of water rose up into the sky and bloomed one by one on both sides of both ships, the salty seawater splashed on Lorraine's face, Lorraine wiped his face and pulled the bow in reverse back to its course again.
"Distance to fog zone 1.7, distance to caribou 1.3, Lorraine, she'll cut us off!" Hina shouted from the lookout.
"She can't cut it off!" Lorraine's face was full of scorn, "Full sails, fold to! Acharin, to the stern gun!"
Kron himself ran to raise the sails, and Acharin rolled and dug into the transom. The transom sail went up once more, and Lorraine sliced the wind to pull the bow back into the wind from new, and the whole ship lurched to be fore and aft of the caribou again.
The distance between the two sides was already less than a kilometer, and in the vastness of the sea, such a distance was almost indistinguishable from tailgating!
The reindeer's bow guns roared again, and one grazed the hull of the ship, plowing up a cloud of debris.
The Buttercup pressed up against the waves, bow high, and then, crashed!
"Yacharin!"
"Sophie. Labrador, bless me!"
Boom!
There was only a single gunshot from the high cocked transom, and Yacharin, having fired his chain shot, abandoned his guns and slumped down to the porthole to watch with bated breath.
The rounded iron shot made a high arc, opened in the air, and a chain, with two hemispheres, flew like a stretched dumb-bell over the Reindeer's head, and hung on the dense jib halyards of the bow.
It whirled around and around the halyard, and the red-hot chain burned through two cables in just a few moments.
Avalanche! Avalanche!
Yacharin knew it was his own hallucination, but that was the kind of popping he heard.
The Reindeer's bowsprit slammed down, and the huge top-end cross-sail instantly unloaded, crashing loosely into a half-sail.
"Vive la!"
At Acharin's cheer, the Reindeer slowed down as if it had slammed on the brakes, and before it could adjust its hull, the crippled Buttercup rejoined the tangent line, bobbed, and plunged headlong into the fog that seemed to be monstrously coiled over the sea, and was lost in the twinkling of an eye.
Velen stared blankly at the vanishing shadow of the ship.
"I ... failed?"
The navigator remonstrated beside him with trepidation, "Governor, this position is at the exact three pivot points of an equilateral triangle with the island of Ireland and Iceland, according to the old navigator's lore ..."
"I've heard that legend." Velen coldly interrupted the navigator, "The Viscount gave the Sailor's Mirror as a gift to every governor in the Chamber, and though it's an ancient chart of little value, I've had the honor of reading it."
"Since you know ..."
"Are you afraid?" Verlaine stared at the navigator, his eyes full of fierceness, "A strange area of fog and reef land is nothing more than a strange area of fog and reef land, where savage English pirates dared to go in, and we ... honorable gentlemen of France are to be gripped in our cages by the fears of the ancients?"
The navigator swallowed hard, "Titus but the orders ..."
"Return to the ship."
"Eh?"
"Orders were given to return to the ship." Velen dusted off the front of his bloodstained trenchcoat, "To my knowledge alone, no less than five adventurers have attempted to explore the foggy island of Herbasi in the last hundred years, yet the small boats couldn't get in and the big ships couldn't get out. Foolish English pirates storming into the fog zone in a Brigantine this time is no different from death."
He sneered, "Our time is honored and valuable, and the Cantabrian prey is worth far more than this group of dead men."