That could be Captain Moron, without an eye. Wouldn’t you like to see him bleeding at your feet? All we have to do is escape. Come on, Jillybean, you’ve gotten out of tougher spots than this.
Jillybean squeezed her eyes shut, trying to shut out Eve. “Yes, they are property. Your property. If you had made me your armorer, wouldn’t you expect me to repair any weapon that had been broken? And if I was a mechanic, wouldn’t you want me to fix the cars with broken axles? That is all I’m doing. It’s just maintenance, nothing more.”
“That’s just it, I don’t want these slaves repaired. Look at them. They’re old models. They’re past their prime. They’ll never run like they used to. And besides, I have to make room for the newer, nicer models. When I take Bainbridge, I won’t need all of these, so don’t waste your time. They’re only going to be junked in the end. Some, I might keep around.” He gave Leah a wide, white smile, that made the little girl both hopeful and frightened at the same time.
“Others,” he shrugged, and casually pulled one of his shining pistols. “Who needs a slave that can’t even eat? I should put her out of her misery right now. Wouldn’t that be the humane thing to do?” He extended an arm that seemed unnaturally long and pointed the Colt at Kerry. She bowed her head, her entire body trembling as she waited for the bullet.
The church emptied of ghosts in one blink of Jillybean’s blue eyes. “We had a deal,” she said, stepping down from the dais and coming to stand in front of the gun. “I have three days…”
“Thirty-one hours by my watch.”
“Yes, of course. Thirty-one hours, but I can’t do it without my helpers. In fact, I need more of them. I’m certain that you’ll need at least two hundred rockets and with so few people, uh, I mean slaves at my disposal, I don’t know if it’ll get done. Is there any way I can get more?”
The Captain lowered the gun. “You think I have slaves just sitting around doing nothing? I am planning two invasions. Trust me, every slave is hard at it. But if you don’t think you can get the job done in time a few of my men with whips can do wonders to speed up production.”
Jillybean shook her head. “I can’t work like that. The screams get into my mind and then they don’t stop. I-I’ll make sure we get done. I promise.”
He snorted, “I don’t want promises, I want results. If the rockets aren’t done tomorrow, I’ll relight the fire and give every one of them a nice steaming-hot bath. And you’ll watch.”
Turning on his heel, he left, walking through the center of the church with dozens of slaves cowering on either side of him. It was as if he was without a care in the world. He certainly wasn’t afraid even though the slaves could have rushed him and killed him in seconds.
See? Eve was suddenly behind her, whispering in her ear. Use the slaves. You can start a revolt. You can lead them to freedom. You can save Bainbridge. Think about it, Jilly. And what about that dippy Jenn Lockhart? You could save her, too. You could be a true hero for once.
“You want me to start a revolt with this?” It was a laughable idea. Including the Captain, there had only been five Corsairs in the church. A hundred slaves had practically wet themselves in their presence. “No. They’re too beaten down. Too afraid.”
But what about when the Captain leaves for his invasion? You could do it then. Huh? We could seize Hoquiam for ourselves.
“And when he comes back, triumphant and leading an army twice the size of our own? What then? Do you think they’ll actually fight?” For the most part the slaves were frail, downtrodden women, barely able to muster the energy to face the rising sun. The men, if possible, were worse. Every one of them bore outrageous scars as evidence of the mutilations they had suffered. They were a broken people, so it made sense that Jillybean was their queen, she was broken as well.
Eve was silent, knowing the truth. The slaves wouldn’t fight against any sort of odds, especially being led by someone else in a collar. As fancy as the gold was, it was still a collar and as long as she wore it, she was not a real queen. She was nothing more than a joke in a hideous crown.
This upset Eve more than Jillybean, mainly because Eve couldn’t lose herself in her work as Jillybean could. The melding of physics, chemistry, electronics, engineering and construction was enough to engulf a person and normally, Jillybean would have flown into her work with the eagerness of a child. Adding the pressure of a ludicrously abbreviated timeframe to the dreadful penalty of failure made the three days allotted to her something of a nightmare.
The first two days had gone by without a wink of sleep. By the middle of the third, she collapsed onto her throne and was unconscious until she was kicked awake by the Black Captain. He stood over her shaking his head, while off to the side, Colleen White grinned maliciously and Leah Stewart tried to hide in her shadow.
“I hope for your sake that you’re ready for a demonstration,” he said. “Let’s have the girl.” His latest guard a gap-toothed fiend named Derrick Wodtli grabbed Leah and dragged her forward. The Captain bent at the waist so he could look into her face. “Should we start boiling the water now, dear?”
Leah was too paralyzed with fright to do or say anything. Jillybean scratched the sleep out of her eyes and stood up. “Not yet. I’ve run the calculations a hundred times. I just need a proper launch site and something to hit that is comparable to the wall.”
She was nowhere near as confident as she sounded. If there was even one decimal out of place in any of her equations, the rocket could explode on ignition, launch itself on a suborbital trajectory, or go right into the ground. If the black powder wasn’t mixed right, the rocket could fall out of the sky. If the fin angles weren’t perfect, it could spin off at a right angle. If the impact detonation wiring was loose or crossed, the rocket might just bang into the wall uselessly. And so forth.
Still, she put on a brave face. A rocket was chosen at random, set on a hospital gurney and trundled out into the grey day. The launching platform was long and ungainly, though still light enough to be carried by five slaves. In fact, the only delay in getting to the launch site was due to Jillybean’s weights. Naked except for her terrible green-yellow bruises and her golden collar, she trudged slowly along, dragging her weights until her legs were quivering.
Eventually, two slaves were brought up. Each was forced to carry one of the 45-pound barbells. Because Jillybean had to carry one as well, they didn’t go all that much faster. A half a mile never felt so far.
Finally, they came to an open field near where the east fork of the Hoquiam River usually emptied into Grays Harbor. The Corsairs had not yet opened the dam they had created and the river was nothing but a great expanse of mud. Across the mud was an old rusting warehouse that was just under thirty feet in height.
“There you go,” the Captain said. “Do your thing. While you do, talk to my guy Kent, here about what you’re doing. He’s going to be my chief gunner.” Kent was a shifty, rat-faced man with angry eyes. “Oh, before you get started. That thing we talked about?” He shooed away the others so that it was the two of them.
“The rockets can detonate two ways,” she told him. “The first via impact but only after it’s armed, so don’t drop them after that, and secondly with the larger of the two devices that your guy Kent is holding. You can set them all off at once or you can choose them one at a time by typing in their code 001 to 200.”
He took the remote from Kent and inspected it, inside and out. “Hmmm. Seems legit enough. Of course, you know this is the closest I’ll come to these, so if you’ve planned something funny, I’ll make sure you and your family pay. Do you dig me, my little queen? I’ll make everything you’ve experienced up until now look like a vacation. Not that I’m offering clemency or anything, but if you have a trick up your sleeve, now’s the time to come clean.”
“I’ve made them just like you asked. The rockets are just rockets.”
“Every one of them?” She nodded and his smile turned beautiful again. “Alright then. Let’s see if they fly st
raight.”
Kent was an uneasy gunner and something of a fool. Luckily for him, she had made the rockets foolproof. “They sit on the launcher with the red strip facing up. As you can see, it’ll fire on a nearly horizontal trajectory for up to four hundred meters. So, make sure you set her off on a flat surface. I would suggest using a level and shims. Slightly high is better than slightly low. Then just aim. I think the rocket will rise slightly. We’ll see though, right?”
“Yeah.”
She had him go through the process alone with her nearby making little suggestions. When it was all ready, everyone stood back. Jillybean held her breath as Kent counted down from ten. He even cried out, “Blast off!” The eight-foot long rocket did indeed blast off. With a scream and a cloud of black smoke, it shot off the launcher, lifting, lifting, lifting and then evening out.
It struck the warehouse two and a half seconds after it left the launcher. There was the minutest of pauses, then the forty-pounds of explosives went off with a brilliant fireball. When the smoke cleared, they could see a gaping hole in the wall, twelve feet wide.
There was a cheer from the Corsairs, followed by sighs of relief from the slaves. Even the Captain seemed pleased.
Jillybean was not. The ignition charge had misfired, not completely of course. “It was too slow. It was the charcoal. Too many fillers. Kent, I’d suggest you mill your own black powder. It’s a simple procedure. Now, the launch angle. Why the lift?” She dragged the weights over to the launcher and rechecked the level.
“That was a bit of alright,” the Captain said, running his hand along the launcher. “Impressive even.”
She made a face. “It was only okay. The flight trajectory was off. It lifted higher than I had hoped or expected. There may be a thermal layer rising from the old riverbed. Decomposition of newly exposed plant and fecal matter might account for it. Maybe.” It could be twenty different things.
The Captain, who had no interest in the decomposition of any sort of matter, snorted. “Is this an act for me? Pretending to be worried about all this science stuff? We both know that you don’t really want to blow up your own people. You’re not fooling anyone. I know what you’re up to. You’re trying to make an excuse to come along. Why?” He yanked one of her chains, sending her to knees. “What sort of trick do you have up your sleeve? Some crazy plan to escape?”
“No, I’m not trying to escape,” she choked out. “It’s just…” She was embarrassed to tell him that losing herself in the rockets had been the only thing keeping her sane; as sane as she was, that is.
Eve found this hilarious and her crowing laughter made Jillybean cringe. You call this sane? What are you going to do when they come back with Deanna in chains? Eve asked. What are you going to do when they force you to watch Jenn Lockhart get gang raped? When they decorate your church with a hundred more bodies? When they start liquidating the old slaves, dipping them in the boiling water? What are you going to do when…
“Shut up, Eve!”
She was glaring at her rival when the Captain began to laugh. “Play your little games, Jillybean. It won’t matter one bit. You’re going to rot in your cell until I come back.” He grinned at the distant fire. Without looking away from it, he spoke first to Kent, “Tell me you got this?”
“Yeah, no problem.” It sure had seemed easy enough.
“Good.” He now gave Jillybean’s guard his undivided attention, staring the man right in the face. “Listen up, Derrick. I want her watched night and day. Nothing goes into her cell except for her bare ass. Food and water, only. That’s it. And I want her isolated, and I want more weight added to her collar. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” he answered, smirking through his beard. “What about the others? Do you want it done all at once or one at a time, or what?”
“What others?” Jillybean demanded. “Are you talking about the other slaves? The ones that helped me?”
The Captain backhanded her across the face. She went reeling back, stopped short with a hard jerk by the collar that tore into her throat. He laughed as she choked. “You know the old saying: Dead men tell no tales. It works for slaves, too. We wouldn’t want anyone to know how we make our rockets, right?” He laughed again, filled with the perfection of the moment. Everything was going his way. His only worry was that things were going too perfectly.
Now’s not the time for being over-confident, he told himself. There was still the “What if” factor to take into account. He stared off at the fire for a good long while, mulling over a hundred ways he could still lose, and yes, there was still a chance of that.
Operation Otter Pop had scared him more than he cared to admit. The people of Bainbridge were meek behind their walls but what would they be like when forced to take the field? Would they find their courage? Would they find an able general among them?
And how would his new allies, the Mountain Bandits behave in a fight? Would they skulk? Would they run at the first sign of trouble? The Captain had known all along that they wouldn’t stick with him through a long winter laying siege to the island, and after all the reverses of late, he had to wonder if his own men would as well. And if they did, would he still be their leader come spring? Thankfully, Jillybean had given him the keys to victory. The rockets would be a shock to the people timidly hiding behind walls.
Unlike with Jillybean’s operation, when his rockets started knocking holes in their one defensive line, the people of the island would be trapped, unable to do anything but await the inevitable. Every night more rockets would strike and every night the Corsair ships would light up the harbor, darting here and there, ready to attack at twenty different locations. Every day they would wake to see the smoke of a thousand campfires. Their minds would turn an already huge number of men into an unstoppable, overwhelming force that could crush them whenever they wished.
He was sure they’d jump at the first chance to surrender.
It would be even easier to destroy the people of the Bay. According to his intelligence network, they had less than a hundred spineless men, and only a single ship left to defend them. He discounted the seventeen hundred women out of hand. First, they were women, and second, they were either ex-slaves, or ex-whores. He had known his share of both and the idea that they would fight was laughable.
What was more laughable was their sixteen-year-old “Queen.” Jenn Lockhart was no Jillybean. Not even close. For reasons that utterly escaped him, she had dismissed two offers by the Guardians to join forces and now they were both isolated and weak.
All of this was great news and was also why he was so worried about the “What if” factor.
What if the Islanders refused to give up even with their walls in ruins? What if the Mountain Bandits tried to turn the tables on him? What if the rockets merely scratched the wall? What if a storm swept aside his fleet as they headed south to San Francisco? An act of God was just about the only way he would lose against them.
He knew he would dwell on all the “What if” possibilities during the voyage north. Because his radios were line of sight only, his string of radio operators that stretched from Hoquiam to Bainbridge would be useless. For two or three days, he would be tactically blind and for all he knew he could be sailing into an immense trap. Of course, the idea was outlandish and yet it couldn’t be simply dismissed. Jillybean was the perfect example of someone who had made the mistake of not taking into account the “What if” factor.
More crazy scenarios entered his mind. They were fueled by that little touch of nerves he always got when around the Queen. It wasn’t just that he never knew exactly who he was talking to, it was also the fact that she really wasn’t afraid of him. He had broken her mind wide open and fractured it into a million pieces, but she wasn’t personally afraid. She only feared what he would do to others.
That made him uneasy. It wasn’t normal, not even for an insane person. They tended to feel greater fear than anyone. He would know since he had driven more people insane than he could count.
/> Suddenly he clapped his hands. “Alright! Hold off on killing the slaves for the moment. You never know, we might need them, just make sure you divide them. Keep the people who worked on the engine separate from those that helped make the bomb, get it? Good. Let’s get the rockets loaded up. I want to be underway by the evening tide. Come on!”
Everyone rushed about, leaving Jillybean to haul her barbells with only Leah to help her. The seven-year-old tried to drag a hunk of lead that weighed as much as she did, but was kicked in the stomach by the hulking guard. “Git! Your ‘Queen’ don’t need you no more.”
Holding back her tears, she skittered to Colleen White and the two hurried away.
Make him pay, Jillybean, Eve said, materializing next to Derrick. She stared up at him, consumed with hatred. Make him cry. Let’s see how he likes it. And don’t tell me you can’t, because I know you can. You just have to escape and we all know that if anyone can do it, it’d be you.
Jillybean sighed. “That’s the problem. I don’t know if anyone can.”
Chapter 20
Bainbridge Island, Washington
Deanna Grey thumbed the switch and as she had expected, nothing happened. The detonator, which didn’t look anything like the ones Jillybean had stored away beneath the wall, was a fake. She made a show of flicking the switch over and over.
She then casually tossed it back to Andrea Clary. “It’s the spy again. And now she’s starting to become laughable. All she has are these games and as long as we fret and worry over her, the more power she’ll have over us. We have to stop jumping every time she gives us a little scare.”
“How do you know she’s a she?” Andrea asked.
“Because she came to me the other night in my own home. She held a gun to my head and tried to get me to turn against my own people. I wouldn’t, so she threatened to have Emily killed. I told her to go stuff it.” Whispers of astonishment from the crowd went back and forth. “I know my Emily. She would never allow me to trade the lives of thousands for her own. That is true courage. It’s the type of courage we all need to show, not just in the coming days, but in the coming hours. We need to get battle ready now!”
Generation Z (Book 6): The Queen Unchained Page 23
