Albatross IV

The following is a transcript of the debrief of Cdr. Alexia Malphus, Captain of the power-sail Expanse, assigned to Navy Battlegroup B. Cdr. Malphus was tasked with investigating the disappearance of the Albatross IV a week after its failure to arrive at port in Fourth Season, 698. Magistrate Tarinn of House Orius presided over the proceedings.
M. Tarinn:

Good morning, Commander. Before we begin, I would like to emphasize that this inquest is for informational purposes only. No allegations of misconduct are to be levied against you or your crow, nor any repercussions are to be decreed. The purpose of this debrief is so that the Principality of Etoile may avoid repetitions of related mistakes in the future. Is this understood, Alexia?

Cdr. Malphus:

Aye, I understand.

Tarinn:

Very well. Let's skip over the mundane details - you were at port at Patino when orders arrived assigning you to search this grid coordinate for the Albatross or whatever was left of it. You left port, and you found the Albatross. Start there.

Malphus:

We encountered the Albatross IV drifting roughly sixty miles north north-west from Patino, following the northern trade current. Our chronometer recorded roughly sixth tick in the morning, immediately before sunrise. Immediately noticeable was the lack of any distress signal. No flags, no visible motion on the ship, no reaction to our appearing on the horizon, so the initial assumption was that this was not a pirate attack. The ship had no visible damage at a distance either, so we ruled out naval mishap or a Nautilus.
However, upon closer approach, our lookout saw what appeared to be a human head tied to the figurehead of the ship, cleanly cut.

Tarinn:

What were your thoughts at that point?

Malphus:

A bit disturbing, of course, but I am a veteran of the Blackshore insurrection. One of the greener deckhands took a look through the spyglass and vomited off port.
In any case, we pulled alongside and hailed to no response. The trade current flows fairly quickly in that part of the Feryll Sea, I estimate roughly eleven or twelve miles to the tick. More disturbing things as we came alongside - some of the glass portholes were covered in red from the inside, like in a bad horror production at the Amphitheatre. I led the boarding team myself, with six other crew in the detachment, all experienced in combat.
The deck of the Albatross was ordinary and at a glance nothing was apparently wrong, other than the lack of crew. We separated into two teams to search the ship; I went to the captain's cabin in the aft while Hartman and his team went below decks. The captain's cabin was...unfortunate.

Tarinn:

Explain.

Malphus:

Official inquest, right? Let's make sure nobody faint of heart reads this. Captain Urvel of the Albatross IV had a daughter. We didn't find the captain in the cabin, but we found his daughter there, separated into many pieces. Dismembered arms nailed to opposite walls of the cabin, head with nails hammered through the eyes on the desk, torso on the ground, mutilated, obviously violated. Is more detail required?

Tarinn:

No, we have the investigator's report as to the condition of the bodies discovered. That's enough, please continue.

Malphus:

Grives is a staunch warrior and the best axe fighter I know, and as soon as he saw the sight he had to step out and vomit on deck. He has a daughter of his own so I can only imagine what went through his head at that point. Nobody wanted to stay in the captain's cabin for longer than necessary, but I did retrieve his log before we left to search the forecastle. You have the log; I learned nothing of value from it. The Albatross was simply another commerce transport coming back to the Capital with empty holds, under contract from some dockside exporter or another.
More carnage in the forecastle quarters, but in this case we saw that the men there had gone down fighting. My guess at the time was that, unlike most of the others on the ship, the men at the fore were aware they were under attack and had attempted to fight whatever it was. They had erected a few barricades and all of the corpses had blades in hand, and the bodies were the freshest of all the corpses on the ship. Those men had died less than a day before we arrived.

Tarinn:

Your thoughts at this point?

Malphus:

Just that this wasn't pirates. Too many bodies still had gold jewelry on them; we recovered a few wallets and satchels and I don't believe a single Florin was taken from anyone on board. This made me think this was a hit of some sort. Perhaps the Albatross was smuggling something, and someone somewhere didn't want them to make it.

Tarinn:

This is speculation, yes?

Malphus:

Of course. Without any actual evidence to the effect, there's no conclusion either way. And there's a problem with that, of course - perhaps in dramas and books there exist supernatural fighters that can slaughter entire ships of crew, but in the real world? The navy practices boarding actions every year as part of fleet exercises, and one thing we're always taught is that they're miserable and bloody battles. Numerical advantage is minimized in tight corridors, crossbows and the like are not particularly useful, it's all hand to hand with blade and mace and axe. My boarders could assault a private merchant crew and kill everyone on the ship but not without significant loss of life on our part.
What Hartman saw belowdecks was not that. Corpses strewn everywhere, bodies dismembered casually. At the mess galley whoever or whatever did this had taken the time to line up decapitated heads in a row on the table, all showing some variation of fear and surprise. A chain of hands was found with fingers entwined in one of the cabins. Your team did account for all bodies on the ship, right?

Tarinn:

Yes, all the bodies we collated were on the ship's manifest.

Malphus:

Meaning the attackers left no bodies.
We searched the rest of the ship and other than gore and bodies we found nothing significant. The ship's hold was empty as per the captain's log. The flywheel room was untouched and the ship still had power, and at this point I believed my men were close to breaking, so we clutched the ship's wheel to deliver half power and put it under tow, and towed the ship as quickly as we could back to the Capital. We left nobody on the ship for the duration of the tow.

Tarinn:

And that's where the ship was lost.

Malphus:

Correction, for the record? That's where the Principality lost the ship. We did our part, we towed it to harbor, we delivered our reports, I gave my men three weeks of shore leave to try to get over what we saw, and it was someone on your side who was responsible for the ship vanishing.

Tarinn:

This is outside the scope of-

Malphus:

A mistake was made, Tarinn. Two days in, and a power-sail of the Principality that hosted one of the worst slaughters human eyes has ever seen, up and vanished from one of the busiest ports in the nation, and nobody knows what happened to it. I would be stripped of all rank and power if I permitted the Expanse to be lost in such a way. Why hasn't the Principality investigated this more deeply?

Tarinn:

We are, Alexia. That's what this is about-

Malphus:

No it's not. This is pushing paperwork so there's something on file for future bureaucrats to hum and haw over. We have sightings of the ship, you know? Terrified sailors who heard rumors catching sight of a ship in the fogbanks with portholes weeping blood. Navy's had to put down rumors and enforce order, and you have doggerel being published by Capital journals egging on the nonsense so they can sell more copies.
There is someone or something out there that's capable of boarding a ship and emptying it of its crew in a vile way, and we don't know how or why. This is a danger to the Principality, and it's unbelievable to me that nobody in the central bureaucracy seems to care.

Historical Basis

The Albatross IV was a trading power-sail that went missing in 698. A Principality Navy patrol power-sail found it adrift and towed it to shore, with eyewitness reports recounting scenes of gruesome intensity; the entirety of the ships crew had been slain by an unknown entity. Two days after the Albatross was docked in the Etoile Capital City, it vanished overnight.
The myths in the years since are little more than wild speculation - that the Albatross was now captained by the ghosts of its crew, searching for whatever did this to them. Or that some magical ritual went awry and something had been conjured (unlikely, as the historical incident predates the discovery of magic). Or that there was a revenant of the ocean prowling the seas, taking its supernatural vengeance upon the Principality of Etoile for some imagined slight. Sightings of the ship are uncommon but crop up in occasional reports, and are typically chalked up to wild-eyed sailors on their first cruise. Occasional private sailors will venture forth to see if they can find the Albatross IV, but none have succeeded as of yet.
The Principality has a significant bounty on information that could uncover the truth of what happened to the Albatross IV and/or its current whereabouts, and said bounty has been unclaimed in the years since the incident.

Spread

Tales of what happened on the Albatross IV spread rapidly as soon as it was towed to the Capital by the Expanse. Traumatized crew of the Expanse recounted some of the horrific scenes while in drink. The Principality issued no official word for weeks on end to either the mass killing or the disappearance of the ship, lending fuel to the escalating rumors.
When the Principality finally did release an official report, it was widely debunked as a whitewash by many of the crew, leading to the spread of conspiracy theories and speculations upon the supernatural.

Cultural Reception

The incident involving the ship captured the zeitgeist of the nation at the time, with the mystery of what happened to the ship and the muddled response of the Principality serving to undermine its reputation for hard-nosed competence. Although the history is beginning to fade from the public imagination, it remains an incident that virtually all Etoileans are aware of, and each person has their own theories on what exactly happened, based on whatever collection of hearsay they've managed to accumulate.

In Art

A production surrounding the Albatross IV was staged at a disreputable playhouse in the Etoile Capital City in 699 and was shut down by the Principality for its excessive use of animal parts to simulate gore and violence. Audience reception was deeply negative.

Date of First Recording

698

Date of Setting

698