Blurred Weaponry (Saints of the Void, Book 1)

by Michael Valdez

  ~~~~~

  It took the rest of the until nightfall for Dastou to guide Jaspertine within spitting distance of the fleet of warships. Those monstrosities were faster than expected, and closing the distance proved time-consuming when he also had to prepare an infiltration plan, or the closest he came to a plan.

  By the time night fell, Jaspertine had caught up to the nearest destroyer, named SDC-01-04 according to lettering on the hull – and renamed Fat Duck because Dastou refused to call it that convoluted designation. The empty black sky was the only witness to Dastou’s team sneaking closer and closer to the Blackbrick warship, the cruiser’s siopane-hybrid engine entirely inaudible compared to the pumping, churning, behemoth engines of the destroyer. Dastou masterfully guided his small vessel to the port stern of the big ship, and Crawford was ready with a chubby, tubular grappling hook launcher.

  A few meters away from the destroyer and most of their entire forward view was blocked by steel that had yet to be marred by time or exposure. Dastou glided the boat with care closer and closer, turning it parallel, the wake from the larger vessel giving him trouble and causing him to instinctively tighten his grip on the cruiser’s wheel to keep from steering off course. From inside the navigator’s area, only half his forward view was now the steel hull of the destroyer, the last in the line heading for Davranis North. The other half of what he could see was empty, calm ocean. The stark difference between technology and nature that he was witnessing was filed away in his mind for a future subject in a philosophy course.

  Dastou got Jaspertine’s starboard side lined up with the warship, a measly half meter separating the two. The cruiser had some of the same auto-pilot technology the Caravan sported, though with a much smaller onboard computer. Dastou and Crawford quickly cobbled together a program that used proximity sensors to tell Jaspertine to stay a very specific distance away from an object for three minutes, and then take off southwest a few kilometers. They also bastardized one of the two remote start devices into a call button that would have the cruiser come back for them when the time came.

  Crawford still held the grappling hook launcher at the ready, his feet steady against a wake that was greatly diminished from being so close to the destroyer. At a nod from the Saint through the steering area’s window, he hefted it up, aimed, and fired. The hook shot out with a subdued pfft and flew upward, a black rope trailing loosely behind. It went over Fat Duck’s railing a little over twenty meters up, and Trenna started to pull on the rope. It caught after a couple of slow tugs, so she pulled harder to check it, then harder again. It was secure. Crawford thumbed a button on the launcher and the barrel opened up, releasing the remaining coiled rope. He put the launcher away in its supply crate, which was drilled into Jaspertine’s deck near the upper cabin, and locked it while Trenna secured the rope to a cleat using a knot that Dastou taught her. She then grabbed three pairs of climbing gloves with leather palms and handed some out when Crawford and Dastou met her at the rope.

  The men looked at what they had, realized each had two of the same glove, either left or right, and exchanged one of each. When Dastou raised an eyebrow at Trenna she gave him a slightly embarrassed smile and shrug. The trio quickly put on their gloves, and Crawford looked up just in time to see Dastou glaring at him. The redhead still had his white, thigh-length lab coat on, which wasn’t exactly ideal for infiltration.

  “If we get seen, we get shot,” said Crawford while fiddling with the thumb of a glove until it was on perfectly. “It’s not as if they won’t know who we are from our eyes. She’s no better,” he added, indicating Trenna.

  She was wearing a tan-colored, insulated jacket to guard against the north-leaning oceanic cold they were in, so she’d be easy to spot, though at the minimum better than Crawford. They clearly hadn’t planned for shadowy slinking when they left on their boat ride. Dastou adjusted his own gloves, tightened the fabric-and-hook straps on the backs of his hands, and took to the rope first.

  “So we’re sure about not going in armed?” asked Crawford again, speaking over the destroyer’s engines. “Against a literal army?”

  Dastou spoke while he put one foot on the handrail of Jaspertine, letting the other foot move in the air until it tapped Fat Duck’s hull, and tilted his body back before starting his climb.

  “People are going to die today,” Dastou said honestly. “There’s going to be enough blood, and I want to keep what’s on our own hands at a minimum. We will do only what we have to.”

  He glanced back at Trenna, who nodded to indicate that by now she understood how far they may have to go to survive. Unfortunately, the risk was necessary; it was extremely unlikely these warships were going where they were going without at least the threat of deadly action.

  Dastou climbed, keeping three points of contact as he went. His boots and the rest of his team’s footwear featured a spray-on coating on the soles that was not noticeable under normal circumstances, but would provide extraordinary grip on wet surfaces. It was a necessity for the boat ride and Husband already had a ton of the stuff for his own use. For this task, it made the Saint’s footwork against the damp metal hull of the destroyer as sure as he could ever hope for, and he climbed with confidence while ignoring the misting of Baritr saltwater he was getting.

  He looked back a couple of times while making the short vertical trek. Trenna and Crawford climbed steadily behind him as the cruiser waited below, the auto-pilot adjusting to make sure the boat was a certain distance from the steel hull. He also took note of how Crawford’s lab coat fluttered in the light ocean wind, helping him look superbly heroic for such a whiney ass.

  Dastou reached the aft deck, which featured a belly-high glass partition – the grappling hook had caught on the rounded steel handrail atop the glass border where the metal met glass, two of its three claws keeping it secure. He climbed over the glass making sure not to touch the hook at all, precarious as its position was, and landed softly in a crouch. He swiftly took in the aft deck, where small but powerful glass-encased diode lights were placed at even intervals in the metal floor. The illumination made it easy to see several square hatches built into the deck, three along the port side and three on starboard; missile tubes, the Saint surmised from his brief remembrance of the warship design in the Null Bank.

  Besides Dastou, there was only one person here. That sailor was directly across the aft deck and stood atop the hatch in the middle of the starboard side, his moss-green-with-white-trim uniform appealing in how sharp and new-looking its colors were. The Saint and his two-person crew had made the sneaky trek to the destroyer having not seen any patrols on the aft deck and now he knew why. The sailor was leaning forward, an elbow on the railing, looking out at the sea when he should have been walking around the aft deck at a regular pace or at regular intervals. Dastou guessed that the few days at sea for this new navy meant weariness was starting to set in, making room for boredom and laziness.

  The world had never seen a multi-pronged army-slash-navy like Blackbrick had, and without external threats the minimum discipline required of low-rank sailors and soldiers had no way of settling in. In the Tribeslands, the threats of slavers, less-than-moral hunters, and wealth-seeking warrior-kings kept neighboring clans sharp. This guy in front of Dastou, who actually yawned just now, wasn’t exactly at the top of his game. Dastou stealthily walked right up behind the sailor and tapped him on the shoulder. Mister Undisciplined stood straight up, turned around with the speed of someone who got caught doing something wrong, and his eyes went wide at seeing the Saint.

  “Sorry, pal,” Dastou said, then knocked the guy out with a single punch.

  The sentry crumpled loosely to the deck. After he shook his head at how easy that was, Dastou saw that both Trenna and Crawford had made their way up. Crawford fiddled with a palm-sized remote that featured a backlit view screen while Trenna grabbed the grappling hook and tossed it overboard. Then, the two of them faced and waved to Dastou, who returned the gesture to indicate the coast w
as clear. The Saint walked away from the knocked-out sentry and over to the bulkhead that marked the back end of the sheer center-third of Fat Duck, where a hatch that was barely taller than he was stood waiting.

  Dastou took his gloves off, stuffed them in a pocket, and used Open Iris for a few seconds while Crawford and Trenna jogged in his direction. First he observed the east-north-east direction, where Fat Duck was headed. He could make out a line on the horizon that stretched as far south as he could see, but cut off closer to the northern end: DavNo. They were getting close, and at the speed of this navy, they’d get there in about five-and-a-half hours, not accounting for fuel efficiency, a sly late-night arrival for the warships.

  Dastou studied the glass partition around the aft deck, too, which was belly high and supported by steel poles with matching height at regular t half his height. He didn’t remember much from his brief glance of this type of vessel in the trip to the Null Bank where he ran into the blueprints a few years ago, but he knew for sure that reinforced neirdite quartz – the strongest fully transparent material on the planet if you don’t count diamond – was not part of the original design. The Saint sighed inwardly at the thought of Vaiss not only being able to access the Null Bank, the only way possible for him to help Blackbrick build these secret war machines, but being able to add and modify to what he saw in the mental repository of knowledge. He knew Vaiss wasn’t a Saint, or at the very least felt certain of it due to how the Sainthood always worked – two per generation and so on – but evidence continued to pile up that he may actually be far more than that.

  He could hear from their footsteps that Trenna and Crawford got to him, so Dastou down-shifted and turned to face them.

  “Where to next, sir?” the redheaded agent asked.

  Dastou indicated the hatch next to him with a head tilt.

  “Obviously,” Crawford said. “I meant once inside. Are you still certain that we should only explore?”

  The private first-class had made his views perfectly clear, and multiple times, that it would be best to sabotage these ships somehow. Dastou agreed, but only if they could sabotage their ordnance and leave the ships themselves alone. These sea-faring behemoths were prime examples of information the Social Cypher kept hidden from the public’s forced education; the radio equipment by itself could prove incredibly useful, let alone any other innovations crammed into these things. Of course, the biggest problem with doing any real damage was Dastou’s fear that his ability to enter his mental library had been permanently hobbled, meaning he’d never be able to fix parts of these destroyers that he disabled. That last part he would keep to himself, though.

  “’Certain’ is probably not the word for it,” admitted the Saint. “The DSF is only an army in concept or organization – I don’t want to take part in pre-emptive strike nonsense, which might prove that we’re dangerous and need to be feared. Let’s just see what we see.”

  “How,” Crawford started, taking a breath to tone down his language. “Uninspiringly bland.”

  Dastou raised an eyebrow, unsure what Crawford could have said that was more insulting to a Saint.

  “You expected more?” Dastou asked rhetorically. “You should know by now I’m full of shit half the time. Get inside.”

  Crawford shook his head once before he pushed up a chest-high lever with a slight grunt of effort and pulled it back using the rubberized hand grip, the big metal hatch squeaking open. As Dastou led the way in, a delightfully ominous peal of lightning was spotted off to the east, flashing through thick clouds that were hard to gauge the distance of in the darkness. The Saint smiled.

  Surprisingly, Trenna led the way quickly and efficiently into the destroyer’s corridor as Crawford pulled the heavy hatch open. The lights above eye level inside the ship seemed to have been stepped down to half strength so sailors’ eyes could quickly adjust to the night outside if they had to be on deck. Crawford and Dastou followed her in followed her. Once all three of them were inside, Trenna did not stop to look back as she continued to lead without permission. She scooted against the wall, moved down the passageway foot over foot, making as little noise as a stalking cat, and waited at the end where it forked. Trenna’s back was flat against the bulkhead, her head indicating that she was listening.

  Crawford went in the same direction as Trenna, and Dastou picked up the rear. The look on the lab-coated redhead’s face when he glanced back at his commander was one of aggravation. The Saint didn’t give a damn – she went ahead of him and behaved as she should, better than Crawford might have done. When they met up a couple of seconds later, she didn’t explain herself.

  “Someone’s coming,” Trenna whispered. “It sounds like footsteps on stairs somewhere ahead. There are steps down here right next to me, too, lots of noise coming from there. That’s where we should go; the noise will cover us.”

  She looked sideways, back to the others, and the confusion of her reaction when seeing Crawford’s pissed off face was pretty wonderful. Better yet, she ignored him and asked Dastou: “Is something wrong?”

  “Well,” said Dastou, “you kind of took over just now.”

  “Oh...” she said, as if she just remembered where she was and who she was talking to. “Uh... Sorry, it was just instinct. I’ve snuck around a lot.”

  “I bet. Lead on, then, since Crawford couldn’t handle it anyway.”

  “How would you know?” asked the indignant redhead.

  Dastou pointed at himself. “Headmaster.” He pointed more closely at his own chest. “Saint. In charge. Trenna, we’ll follow you.”

  “Er, yes, sir.”

  Trenna peered into the corridor again and sidled nervously forward a step, then stealthily turned the corner to the right and instantly headed down the flight of steps she mentioned a moment before. The others followed. On the tips of her toes, Trenna walked down the metal steps without pausing until reaching the metal-grated floor below. On the landing, Trenna only stopped for a pair of seconds to get her bearings, then moved to the left, still tip-toeing as she slipped around a big piece of humming machinery.

  Like the hallways above, the lights were stepped down to half, and the ceiling seemed lower because of fat and skinny pipes and cable wranglers taking up some of the head room. Trenna moved swiftly, sidling down the first corridor. With only a third of a meter’s worth of space to either side of Dastou, there would only be room for one person normally, two if they were passing each other sideways. The ship was built to house as much machine as possible and as few people as necessary.

  Trenna kept going, stopping at the next corner to listen for enemies. There was a lot of noise, mostly from the engines and other machinery, but some from the sailors that chatted at random locations, their words snaking around corners.

  “...Told you not to bet against him. He’s a damn shark.”

  “Again with this gauge?”

  “Just tap it, it’ll work fine.”

  “Ow! Fucking beam!”

  “It’s what you get for being tall.”

  “I swear my girl’s been crazier than a bucket full of...”

  “...Grateful that new paint smell is finally gone.”

  There was laughing, grunting, huffing and puffing, yawning, and friendly mocking from the twenty or so people down here. It was like the Academy whenever Dastou went to the mess hall during lunch periods. He didn’t have to eat there, he wanted to – he loved that big room full of gray-eyes and camaraderie, though what he experienced at the moment was a fraction as hectic, the crew of this destroyer whittled down to a minimum complement.

  Satisfied that no one was too close after, Trenna leaned toward Dastou and spoke.

  “The Cypher builds maps and guides at upper-right corners,” she said, stating the obvious, “and this place is all squared and lined. Do you want me to go in that direction?”

  Dastou only nodded; either one of them would be able to get there, and she was already doing it, so why not?

  She acknowledged the no
d and kept going. One turn, and another, the tight spaces perfectly aligned at ninety-degree angles, and it made Dastou wonder where she was going with so much focus. Unfortunately, those straight, simple paths turned into a maze because they were constantly halting to avoid being spotted. On the travel lanes closest to port and starboard were small rooms, the sleeping quarters. Each had two sets of bunk beds, a pair of narrow tables bolted to bulkheads with matching bolted-down stools, and four footlockers. The lights weren’t on in any of the rooms, though the few that had sleeping crew members in the had the doors ajar rather than fully closed.

  Several minutes passed while the trio walked, doubled back, changed paths, and made more “progress.” The whole time they moved, Dastou also took note of the myriad tubing and cabling. The smaller pipes were copper in color, valves here and there were red or green to easily stand out, and the backing of stations with gauges for different pressures and temperatures were black hard plastic with white indicator needles. Most pipes marked every meter with a few letters and numbers indicating what was contained within. Thinner pipes that carried electronic cabling, and cables that were kept in place by metal hooks, ran all over, reaching corners, the ceiling, the floor, sometimes connecting to lights. This was the engine and maintenance area, and it looked exactly like the Caravan’s underbelly.

  It was Saint Lonoj Ornadais that designed the Caravan, come to think of it. Dastou’s mentor, when showing off the drawn-up plans for the first time, claimed that it was a unique, complex amalgamation of big-engine cargo barges and subway trains. Dastou now realized that it was all a lie. The main inspiration had to be the type of vessel they were in now. By the ever-distant void, half the pipes in the mobile headquarters featured wording that was a perfect match for what he saw here. The Caravan was to serve as a moving nerve center, using the fatter underground rails which webbed and wound all over and were mysteriously never taken advantage of by the Cypher compared to the standard subway lines. For the DSF, travel to anywhere in the modernized world was made trivial, an afterthought. Walking in Fat Duck’s innards clued Dastou in to the truth: his mobile headquarters was a warship. It didn’t have external weapons systems like this destroyer, but so much of its workings seemed similar that he couldn’t sidestep the comparison.

  Dastou had the first large-scale war machine of its kind ever built at his disposal the whole time he ran the Academy, and across the ocean a fleet of them were being built by Blackbrick. The world was becoming a very different place right before his eyes.

  Trenna stopped at the end of a passage that led into a huge room and waited for a minute. Then two. It was enough time to witness a handful of sailors walk in and out of this big room, check some gauges and meters, and walk out together and into a side door. They’d been gone for a minute or so before Crawford’s patience was drained.

  “What are we waiting for?” asked Crawford in a whisper.

  Trenna matched his volume. “I think the map might be in the next room, and there’s exit stairs at the end that we can take to leave and keep exploring.”

  That area wasn’t fully visible, and all Dastou could tell from here, near the lower-right corner, was that it was pretty wide. Near Trenna, a plain plaque at chest level declared that the room ahead was the “Element Control Center.” The Cypher-standard language indicated that the space ahead was for monitoring pressure, temperature, levels, purity, and viscosity of the multitude of specialized lubricants, coolants, and fuels used by this warship. It would be an open space, and despite Trenna having accepted that they might have to fight their way out of Fat Duck, she was clearly trying to avoid any confrontation.

  “How many are in there, can you see?” Dastou asked, unafraid of being overheard thanks to the humming, thrumming, gurgling, and swishing of all the different machines and piped liquids up ahead.

  “One sec…,” answered Trenna, who had the only good view. “There’s three sailors inside for now. There’s two doors on each side wall, but lights aren’t on past their view windows that I can see.”

  “We can go ahead and distract the sailors that are visible,” Dastou suggested. “They have jobs to do and won’t leave their stations unless relieved, so we’ll have to make them move.”

  “Oh. Um...,” started Trenna. “Yeah, if they could be pulled away somehow, that would work. I could take a quick look at the map when they’re gone.”

  “Are you sure?” Dastou asked after he noticed some trepidation on her part.

  “Not really,” Trenna answered with easily too much honesty.

  When Crawford glared back to Dastou expecting him to take charge, the Saint only stared at the redhead with slit-eyed annoyance before addressing Trenna. “Well, the good news is I’m me and this guy’s a trained combatant. We’ll probably be okay to knock a couple people out. Trenna, we will go distract them if you feel up to taking a look at the map and heading up on your own first.”

  Trenna’s eyes got a little wide at the same time Crawford’s body language said he felt like he had to babysit or things would go wrong. She took her time to respond.

  “I can do that,” Trenna stated firmly after a few seconds. “I can do that.”

  “Okay. Let’s go, Crawford.”

  Dastou walked off without hesitation, back to the corner they turned to get here, and heard the redheaded agent follow after a few seconds. The Saint tried to remember why he brought Crawford along to Blackbrick to begin with and made a short mental list of those with the same talents that would be less insubordinate or easier to deal with.

  When the men made it to the middle of three narrow walkways that would lead to the bigger room, Dastou stayed back far enough so he wouldn’t be seen before he wanted to be. The room had two levels, one a meter below the first in the center of the space. That lowered section was square and had two big, intricate, cylinder-shaped pieces of machinery hooked up to an array of pipes and cables that disappeared below the floor, a short set of steps at each corner leading down. A pool of light-blue coolant could be seen through gaps in cables and the grated floor, bubbling mildly. The grated flooring made it easy to track the wiring to three bulkheads, a sailor at each reading gauges or taking notes.

  Dastou dug into a pocket and removed a Stitch. He pulled off the adhesive strip on the back of the wax paper and stuck the hypnotic tool to the front of his shoulder, easily visible to anyone that saw him. The Saint glanced to Crawford.

  “Some of these soldiers may be affected by Citizen Vaiss’ Stitch work and resist mine,” said Dastou. “They’ll be your job.”

  Dastou moved straight ahead toward the square dip in the floor with the machines, not bothering to step lightly, his boots clanking against the grating. All three sailors looked in his direction, and he faced them so that they all had a good view of the Stitch. Each of them saw him, twitched several muscles in their faces, and then got back to whatever it is they were doing. Something was wrong. Knowing that either Trenna or Crawford would likely rush forward at this apparent success, he put his hand high in the air in an easily understood “stop” gesture.

  The Stitch he was using read “stay quiet and stay still,” a new concoction he came up with in Hyugesten before leaving on his sea voyage. It did not say “take a gander and then go back to your duties, gentlemen.” The sailors did see the suggestion, and their only reaction was to full-on not give a damn. These three men were unbalanced. That meant that hypnotism was working within them differently than it should, causing unpredictable behavior. Several seconds went by with his hand up as Dastou watched the men work quietly and diligently and thought hard about what was going on.

  Being unbalanced was in the same realm of oddity as being a natural like Trenna, except being unbalanced was rarer by a factor of ten. Yet three of them stood right here, in the same small room. Dastou walked around the square coolant hole and paced close to all three sailors, thinking. He decided to risk doing something dangerous to himself, and went to the sailor near the middle who was checking some hanging ch
arts more diligently than he was before the failed Stitch.

  The Saint bent down, calmed himself, and began to lift the hem of the Blackbrick uniform pants to get a good look at this man’s left ankle. Nothing there, and he heard Crawford rushing into the room.

  “Stop! The seizure!” The redhead called out a little too loudly.

  Dastou ignored him, checked the right ankle and found a Stitch. Crawford was right behind him now, and put a hand on a shoulder to stop the Saint.

  Dastou raised his hand high and waved Trenna, whom he could barely see past pipes, columns, and cabling, over to him. He waited until she was in view and close enough to speak to over the hum and thrum that ever centimeter of this room was emitting.

  “Check the map,” he told her while still fixated on the tattoo that didn’t affect him at all. “These people won’t react to you. We need to go to their communications room next.”

  “Okay,” she said, and jogged to the starboard-side bulkhead.

  She stopped at a meter-squared indentation where a cleanly designed map with all the sections of Fat Duck’s center third were marked in big letters, with smaller letters giving details and magnetic strips listing whoever was in charge of the area. Another indentation below it housed a diagram for the level they were in now, including where all parts of this machine were located, and magnetic tags with names for bunk assignments; two-thirds of the beds were unassigned. Dastou should have been the one to look at those maps now that the room was safe and he wasn’t needed to knock heads around, mainly because he could up-shift to memorize the study the thing faster and in better detail. Unfortunately, he already tried that and couldn’t. He was stuck; that body art on the sailor hadn’t affected him openly, but something in him had been altered.

  Dastou stood up, ignored the sailor, and saw that Crawford was actually worried.

  “Are you alright?” asked Crawford.

  “Yeah,” he lied, “but something incredibly strange is happening here.”

  Dastou walked to the door marked with a little logo of some stairs, opened it, and just stood there. He wanted to curse. A lot.

  “I got it,” she said, “I can lead us to any of the important places here. You should look too probably.”

  He almost didn’t hear her, and when he tried to go into Open Iris again, he failed. He gave up, re-registered what Trenna said, and responded.

  “No,” he said, and the word was harsh in his own ears. “We’re leaving, right now.”

  Trenna didn’t have time to nod or agree before someone was heard coming from one of the side doors, which could be stairs that went to some part of the middle-third of the ship that lined up with the deck. Footsteps clinked on metal stairs, echoed within that stairway and bounced against the door.

  Dastou was at the north door with Crawford and Trenna and opened it quickly, the simply latch fairly quiet, and peered into the narrow stairway beyond the opening. There was nothing there, he waved the others in, and they didn’t hesitate. Dastou rushed in after them, went up only two steps, then pulled the door closed, leaving it ajar to avoid any sound. There was another door further up, where Crawford and Trenna waited, but he only crept halfway up, hoping to spy on what was said to these unbalanced sailors.

  Luckily the woman that spoke up had a solid timbre to her voice, and a touch an anger that helped Dastou hear the sounds that leaked in through the crack he left at the stairwell door.

  “I thought I told you three to start sending me reports every ten minutes since the coolant pressure meters started acting up. Why haven’t...” The woman hesitated. “What are you doing? Pay attention when an officer is speaking.” Another pause.

  The woman’s steps could be heard going past the stairwell door, a different sound than the hum-thrum-swish of the room. She waited wherever she was, then took a few steps away; maybe going from one of the unbalanced sailors to another? Then she spoke three words in a language Dastou did not know, and it gave the Saint a piercing pain in the back of his eyes for a fraction of a second.

  The three sailors spoke up at once in a monotone cadence, like blue-eyes always did, and a chill ran up the Saint’s spine at the hollow echoing sound of their simultaneously articulated words.

  “Saint Cosamian Dastou has been seen,” all three sailors said.

  First came the woman’s running footsteps, then a very short pause, followed by the blaring of an alarm so loud Dastou was startled momentarily before turning and pointing to the upper door hard enough to make a joint pop and mouthing “Go!”

  ~~~~