The Last Ship Out

Matinsoq, October 29th, 1908
Captain Pilypas Dukrantas looked out over the frozen bay of Matinsoq harbor.  Kanqaamiut's twin funnels belched dark smoke as the icebreaker turned into the main channel.  
The ice - only twenty centimeters, not yet enough to slow her - snapped and popped under her rounded bows.  The sea had frozen over a month back.  Temperatures dropped as winter approached.  Soon it would be thirty centimeters thick, and then forty, and then - well, enough to bring even Kanqaamiut to a halt.  Captain Dukrantas didn't want to overwinter.  He had a maintenance list four pages long, and a *preventative* maintenance schedule that had been utterly wrecked by this season of madness.
*Still*, Dukrantas told himself, looking out over the twilight horizon, back towards Matinsoq's capital city.  *We've done more good in this season than we expected.**
The three Liotainian icebreakers had opened the way north for the aid ships to Matinsoq.  Hardly a solo effort, of course - Joseon's plucky little Boijeo had left only the day prior, having unloaded some of the last supplies that would reach Matinsoq until the next spring.  But Kanqaamiut and her two sisters had the weight to crash through the thicker ice, and manage where the smaller vessels got stuck.
Dukrantas moved to the starboard bridge wing, lost in his thoughts.  In the last seven months, poor Kanqaamiut's steam engines had been running without interruption.  She'd spent no more than sixteen hours at anchor in a single stretch.  Twelve hundred passengers; thirty-six thousand tons of food and medicine; forty-nine thousand nautical miles traveled.  Even now, she carried the last group of Liotainians leaving Matinsoq, a group of doctors who'd run a nutritional program.
It perhaps was happenstance or irony that Kanqaamiut, the first ship to arrive in Matinsoq in April, would also be one of the last to depart.  Dukrantas didn't mind; it was closure, of a sort.
"Sir," one of the lookouts reported.  "Two points starboard bow, sir - on the coast.  I... think it's a crowd on the end of the peninsula, sir."
"Ah?"  Dukrantas lifted his binoculars to his eyes.  The Arctic evening was settling in; he could barely see the dark strip of land that served as the protective breakwater to Matinsoq harbour.  "I think I see it.  I'll trust your younger eyes..."
It was a crowd - locals by the hundreds, maybe a thousand or more... no, definitely more.  A huge chunk of the town's remaining population of sixteen thousand.  Pinpricks of light sparkled from the torches they carried; and then, at a signal invisible from this distance, the torches were thrown and a dozen bonfires roared to life.
"Rendering honors," Dukrantas said to himself.  He returned to the bridge.  "Steam whistle, Paulius," he commanded.  "Give them a show."
"Aye, sir," one of the seamen answered, stepping over to hang on the knotted and slightly frayed cord for Kanqaamiut's whistle.  The banshee cry echoed across the ice; in the freezing arctic air it would be heard for a dozen kilometers.
In the light from the bonfires, Dukrantas saw the Matin civilians lifting their hands in farewell.  They saluted with fire the Last Ship Out.  Kanqaamiut shrieked in reply.
Light and fire, Dukrantas mused to himself.  Sound and steam.
"Helmsman, steer bearing two-zero-zero," Dukrantas ordered.  "Engineman, three-quarters ahead.  We're homeward bound."
Category:Fiction