Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts

by Alan Campbell

  A hail of rifle shots burst through the port window, showering Granger with shards of glass. He grinned maniacally and then pumped the main-line primer and opened the rest of the air shunts. The bridge juddered heavily in response.

  The ship began to pick up speed.

  Granger watched the bow of the Haurstaf man-o’-war slide by as he took the Excelsior out into the harbour. Ahead, he could now see the gates of the Glot Madera heave into view. A fishing boat and two canal ferries made sudden course changes to move out of his way.

  From the control deck came a steady clacking sound, as the ship’s comspool began disgorging a message it had printed onto a thin strip of paper. Evidently there were crewmen aboard somewhere. They would probably be down in the engine room, which meant they might not yet be aware that the emperor was not aboard. Granger tore the tape loose and read it.

  ER – NO/REC – ORDERS/TO – OPEN MAINFEED – AI

  Awaiting instructions. The ER glyph meant the message had indeed come from the engine room. Granger clicked open the pressure cap, turned the destination-wheel round to its ER setting, and then dialled and punched in a reply using five of the seventy-three commands available on the command wheel.

  BR – CONFIRM – REQ/OPEN MAINFEED – EJH/DANGER – REQ/ALL HASTE

  He depressed the release valve and heard a series of phuts as his reply disappeared into the ship’s warren of steam messaging pipes. A comspool in the engine room would begin typing it out almost at once. The Excelsior meanwhile was now building up speed as she passed through the gates of the Glot Madera. The great Ethugran Administration Buildings loomed to port and starboard. Granger locked down the wheel and hurried over the port window.

  Unable to match the yacht’s pace, the emperor’s launch had turned around and was heading back to the dockside. Hu himself was now standing on the smaller boat’s deck, shouting and waving his hands up at his crewmen and soldiers on dry land. As Granger watched, the emperor’s men began to commandeer vessels all along the quayside. They were coming after him.

  The comspool on the control deck began its rhythmic clacking again. The briny smell of octopus ink came from its innards as tiny metal elements rattled away behind the printing wheel. It sounded out of sorts. Granger checked the device’s oil reservoir, and then adjusted the steam inlet valve and feeder gearing. The tape began to spool out more smoothly.

  ER – CONFIRM – REQ/VERIFY – FLAG/YELLOW – AI

  He cursed. Someone in the ER crew wanted a verification code, and Granger didn’t know the correct response. There were nine flag glyphs around the command wheel he could choose from. But which one? If he lucked upon the correct response, the engine room crew would open the main fuel feed line. If not, they’d shut down the engines immediately, thereby foiling his escape. Granger peered ahead along the Glot Madera. The deep-water channel ran straight for a thousand yards or so, before curving gently to the south-west. The Excelsior would reach the corner in two or three minutes. An eight-to-one chance of choosing the correct coded reply? It wasn’t good enough. He couldn’t allow the crew to stop him here. He dialled in a different response.

  BR – NO CONFIRM/TAPE FOUL – REQ/REPEAT LAST MESSAGE

  With the wheel still locked in place and the Excelsior firmly fixed on her current heading, Granger picked up the last of his powder cartridges and left the bridge. He had minutes to reach the engine room and then get back to the wheel. And less time yet to murder the crew.

  The deadship struck them on the starboard side with enough force to send Maskelyne staggering sideways. He lost his grip on the wheel. A terrible metal groaning reverberated through the Mistress’s bulkheads as the ironclad’s reinforced prow crushed a deep trench in the dredging ship’s hull. The Mistress lurched sickeningly, her deck cranes tilting closer to the roiling red-brown waters as the crew hung on for their lives. The bathysphere clanked against its mountings, then broke free and smashed against the port bulwark.

  Ianthe cried out in alarm.

  The grinding and moaning of stressed metals continued for a tortuously long time, before finally subsiding. Maskelyne gazed down at the wreckage in disbelief and horror. The bow of the Unmer ship remained embedded in one side of his own vessel. That heavy iron prow had crumpled the Mistress’s hull like paper. Had it holed them? He couldn’t see how it could possibly not have holed them.

  He flung open the wheelhouse door and called down. ‘Mellor! Have someone fetch my family. Round up everyone but the repair teams. I want them top deck, now. And I want a time-frame here.’

  ‘Aye, Captain.’ The first officer relayed Maskelyne’s orders to several crewmen, who took off at a run.

  ‘Are we going to sink?’ Ianthe asked.

  ‘Very likely,’ Maskelyne replied. ‘Come with me.’ Without looking back to see if she was following, he climbed down the wheelhouse ladder and hurried along the deck to the point of impact.

  Most of the crew from the lower decks had already appeared, and their gem lanterns moved about in the gloom around Maskelyne as they began to assemble into ranks. Someone was taking a head count, calling out names. The deadship’s figurehead leaned over the starboard bulwark amidst a mess of twisted metal, and it seemed to Maskelyne that that maiden’s grimace evinced a hint of cruel satisfaction. He could smell burned iron, rust and ash, and the bitter salts of the ocean, but something else . . .

  Fuel oil. The dredger’s whale-oil tanks had been ruptured.

  Maskelyne leaned over the side and peered down at his stricken hull. The ship’s skin had been crumpled almost to the waterline and ruptured in at least four places. Clear fluid was seeping from the fore rents, leaving the surrounding brine with a nacreous sheen.

  Mellor arrived at his side. ‘We’re pumping out all the ballast tanks,’ he said. ‘Those that haven’t been damaged, anyway. Two midships pumps were shorn from their outlets, and we can’t get to the fore ones. Abernathy will try to keep us afloat a while longer, but he’s not confident. Secondary repair crew can’t get access to the engine room. Flooding sounds like it’s above the hatches.’

  ‘What about the men already in there?’ Maskelyne asked.

  ‘Not a sound from them, Captain.’

  ‘Cut down through the crew quarters.’

  ‘That’ll shorten the time we have, sir.’

  ‘Do it.’

  ‘Aye, sir.’ He turned to go.

  Maskelyne stopped him. ‘Where are my wife and son, Mr Mellor?’

  His question was answered by a different voice. ‘Ethan!’ Lucille was with Ianthe, and now ran over, carrying Jontney in one arm and Maskelyne’s blunderbuss in the other. She had already fitted a frozen void-fly cartridge to the stock. She gazed up in wonder and horror at the dark hulk of the Unmer ship, before evidently remembering the gun.

  ‘I thought you could use this,’ she said, handing the weapon to him.

  He took the gun and examined the mechanism. ‘Where did you learn how to load it?’

  ‘It’s not that difficult, Ethan.’

  He arched his eyebrows. ‘I suppose you’re right.’ Then he reached over and fussed with Jontney’s hair. The boy looked up at him and smiled – the sort of open, trouble-free smile that Maskelyne hadn’t seen in the child for a long time. ‘Keep him safe,’ he said to his wife. ‘Mellor will look after you both. Do whatever he says.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to board that ship,’ Maskelyne replied. ‘It looks like it’s our only way out of here.’

  Granger tried the engine-room hatch, but found it to be locked from the in
side. He placed the powder cartridges on the floor against the hatch and took out his knife, flint and fuse. But he stopped. The metal hatch opened towards him, its rim resting against the metal bulkhead. He wasn’t sure the explosives he’d brought were enough for the job. He stood there for a moment longer, while his mind ran through the naval ballistic tables for this thickness and grade of steel as it compared it to the sort of brisance he could expect from high-grade cannon-powder. It couldn’t be done without shaping the charge, and he had no time for that.

  He hammered his fist upon the hatch.

  After a moment, a voice came from the other side. ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Who am I speaking to?’ Granger demanded.

  ‘Able Seaman Fletcher, sir.’

  ‘Don’t open this hatch to anyone, Able Seaman,’ Granger said. ‘That’s an order. Not to me, not to anyone. And do not under any circumstances take orders from the bridge. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir. What’s going on?’

  ‘Revolutionary militia have taken control of the Excelsior. They’re holding the first officer hostage on the bridge.’

  ‘Revolutionaries?’ Granger then heard a second voice behind the hatch, conversing with Fletcher, but he couldn’t make out what was said between them. Fletcher said, ‘We can shut the engines down from here, sir.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing,’ Granger replied. ‘Let them burn through the reserves. That’ll give us some time to get the emperor’s Samarol aboard. Do you have pistols with you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Swords?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘How the hell do you expect to protect the engines without arms?’ Granger yelled. ‘You can have my own pistol for the time being. Open up a minute.’

  He heard the locking lever clunk back, and the hatch opened.

  Granger – still clutching his knife in one fist – stepped through.

  Maskelyne climbed across a boarding plank onto the Unmer dead-ship, closely followed by two of his most stolid crewmen. Kitchener was an old soldier who had watched Maskelyne’s back during the Poppy Wars – a good man to have at your side whenever swords were drawn. Roberts was younger, but sharp and quick-witted and less superstitious than most. A good head on his shoulders. The rest of the crew held back to make whatever repairs they could, and to try to cut down to the men trapped in the Mistress’s flooded engine room. Many of them had baulked at the very idea of setting foot aboard the Unmer vessel. Maskelyne did not take this to be a good sign.

  Bloody vapours drifted through tangled cables. A layer of ash covered the warped iron deck, filling the air with an odour like that of an old, damp fire-pit. Booming sounds came from the metal under their boots as the three men approached the ship’s huge electrical tower.

  ‘You hear that?’ Roberts asked.

  ‘Hear what?’ Kitchener said.

  ‘That whine.’ He pointed up at the toroid atop the tower. ‘It’s coming from that thing.’

  ‘It’s still receiving power from somewhere,’ Maskelyne said.

  The men fell silent. Maskelyne placed his hand against the tower’s lattice of struts, and felt a slight vibration. His skin tingled as the invisible electrical fluid passed into him, and it seemed to him that the whining sound intensified. He could feel it in his teeth. He withdrew his hand quickly. Tiny pink aether flames danced across his fingertips for a moment and then disappeared. Still operational after three hundred years? Where is the power coming from?

  He walked over to examine one of the queer guns bolted to the deck. The cone of circular plates over its barrel prevented any type of shot from passing through the weapon. Perhaps it had also once utilized electrical fluids? It seemed unlikely that he could repair the device, for it looked utterly destroyed. Its metal surfaces had been heated to the point where they had actually flowed downwards, leaving tallow-like trails of iron. Maskelyne leaned closer and smelled burned copper. Nothing salvageable.

  The three men made their way across groaning deck towards the sterncastle.

  ‘Look at this,’ Kitchener said. He indicated an area of deck where a black scorch mark formed the shape of a sprawled human body. It looked as if the corpse had been removed, leaving a perfect shadow behind.

  ‘There’s more over here,’ Roberts said. ‘Four, five of them.’

  Maskelyne gazed down at the twisted shapes. ‘The remains of the crew,’ he said. ‘They were sorcerers, all of them.’ And not as much as a fragment of their bone left behind. Dragonfire had consumed them utterly. Maskelyne bent down to examine the shadow more closely—

  —and abruptly recoiled. For an instant he’d felt searing heat, and it had seemed that he himself was lying there amidst the smoke and flames, with the stink of burning flesh in his nostrils and the cries of the dying all around. Burned alive. They were burned alive almost three hundred years ago. The sensation left him shaking, and it took a moment to clear the echoes of that terrible screaming from his head. Had the ship itself absorbed the essence of the men who’d died here? All Unmer creations contained a spark of the infinite. Was it possible that the crew had somehow contrived to find refuge there?

  ‘Let’s not linger,’ he said.

  They found the door to the captain’s quarters in the sterncastle.

  There was little evidence of fire damage inside. A short wood-panelled corridor opened into a small, sour-smelling wash room on the left. It contained a beaten copper sink and a wooden commode, a stack of rotten books on the floor. Roberts gagged and turned away at the stink, but Maskelyne pushed past him and picked up one of the books. It was a volume on surgical sorcery written in Unmer and packed with illustrations of opened human cadavers beside wire-wound rods and spheres. He translated the title as Venal Tissues of Man.

  To the right an open doorway led to a larger dressing room wherein the remains of the captain’s clothes still hung in musty wardrobes. The garments were covered in tiny spiders. Webs cocooned them completely, and yet not one strand of silk reached beyond the wardrobe itself. On the dressing table lay a copper egg and a small flute carved from a human finger. Maskelyne picked up the egg, but sensed nothing unusual about it.

  At the end of the corridor a third door gave them access to the captain’s cabin.

  Here Maskelyne stopped and stared in astonishment. Every corner of the cabin was filled with Unmer treasure. An entire rack of brightly lacquered swords, surgical swords, knives, daggers and stilettos hung upon the wall beside the bed, their steel blades agleam. A glass cabinet held chronographs, sextants, anemometers, compasses and astrolabes, all exquisitely wrought from a strange green alloy. There were shelves upon shelves of scientific instruments and small, boxed machines whose purpose could only be guessed at. An open chest at the foot of the bed contained a glittering hoard of gold coins. Maskelyne retrieved a coin with the intention of examining it, but it made him feel suddenly nauseous, and he dropped it back among the others. His skin prickled for a moment afterwards, and his hand began to tremble uncontrollably.

  ‘Captain?’ Roberts said.

  Maskelyne ignore him. His attention had already turned to a wide workbench under the stern windows, where a shining gem lantern stood amidst what appeared to be a number of optical and magnetic experiments.

  Kitchener whistled through his teeth. ‘Never seen the like,’ he said.

  ‘Fair bit of money here, Captain.’ Roberts added.

  Maskelyne turned his blunderbuss over and pressed two fingers against the glass void-fly phial. It still felt ice cold. He leaned the weapon against the table and then let his gaze travel across the room. Several of the expe
riments looked familiar. A sealed bell jar contained a tiny copper vane, like a miniature version of the anemometers in the cabinet. Each of the vane’s four thin, square fins had been painted black on one side and polished on the other. They were turning slowly, even in the sealed environment within the jar. Beside this mechanism a brilliant white gem lantern illuminated a diffraction box, wherein the rays of light passed through a pair of closely spaced vertical slits in the centre of the container and made patterns of interference across a rear screen. In addition to these finds he noted a large array of kaleidoscopes, reflecting telescopes, boxes of magnets, wires and prisms, and even a pair of Unmer spectacles. Runic inscriptions covered the silver frames, the decorations whirling around a tiny wheel fixed to one side of the rightmost lens. A triangle had been impressed into the wheel, within which was etched several digits, almost too small to see. Maskelyne picked up the spectacles and squinted at them. The number in the triangle was 1.618.

  The golden ratio.

  ‘Looks like our captain was an amateur opticist,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Spectacles like this were once worn by archivists, but I’ve not seen a pair quite so fine before.’

  ‘Nothing amateur about anything the Unmer do,’ Kitchener growled. ‘And nothing normal about it either. There’s a reason this ship came after us. Mark my words, sir. There’s an evil will behind this. Someone wanted us aboard this vessel.’

  Maskelyne examined the table. ‘The captain was studying the properties of light,’ he remarked. ‘The diffraction box illustrates that light exhibits the properties of waves, while this vane suggests that it is actually composed of particles. And yet if light travels in a straight line through a vacuum, can a single ray still be a wave?’ He found himself musing about each speck of starlight oscillating at a particular frequency. Had our brains developed to interpret those frequencies? How did light particles interact? There had be some association between them – perhaps analogous to the association that existed between the fragments of mankind? Looking at the experiments, Maskelyne suddenly felt that he was on the verge of finding something important, a key to the mystery behind all Unmer artefacts.