Children of Zero

by Andrew Calhoun

  The lanterns were still lit, and there was no damage to the ship down here other than a few knocked over barrels. The Black Star had concentrated its assault on the upper decks, probably looking to render the Epoch unable to fight back as quickly as possible. Once resistance was eliminated, the Lavics would likely aim lower to punch holes in the bottom portions of the hull.

  Kettle, Haley and Soup raced toward the brig.

  “For fuck’s sakes!” Dallas yelled out when he saw them. “What took you so long?” His expression reflected the anger in his voice. There was a dark series of scabs above his right eye where Saeliko had slammed his head into the table in the harker’s cabin six days ago.

  Kettle pulled up in front of the bars. “What?”

  “If you hadn’t noticed, dipshit, someone’s trying to sink us.”

  “Yeah, we need to get off this ship.”

  “Thanks, Sherlock. C’mon, get me out of here. Where’s the key? Oh, please tell me that you didn’t forget to bring the key.”

  Kettle suddenly had an abashed look on his face. “Ah.”

  “You shithead!”

  “Okay, okay. We’ll find it.” He looked around desperately and didn’t see anything resembling a key. In hindsight, he should’ve scavenged a flintlock from the main deck before coming down. Maybe he could have shot the lock off.

  “You are the most useless sack of . . .”

  Dallas’ sentence was split in two by a cannonball ripping through the hull of the ship no more than five or six feet from where he stood. In that split second of violent destruction and mayhem, Kettle’s brain attempted to ramp up its processing speed to make sense of it all, but he still came up short. The cacophony of noise was deafening, but the ancient primate core of Kettle’s brain was more concerned by the flying debris. He noted – as if outside of his own body – that his arms were coming up rapidly to protect his face, particularly his eyes, while he simultaneously pivoted on his right leg to turn away from source of the damage. That was stupid; there was no way he could turn fast enough. And anyway, it seemed like debris was coming from everywhere all at once.

  His pivoting turned into plain old-fashioned falling. He hit the ground unceremoniously and his brain quickly switched to damage control mode. There was a hellish ringing in his ears, and a few splinters no bigger than toothpicks were sticking out of his right forearm. Blood dripped off his face somewhere, but he could feel that it was nothing more than a scratch.

  “Everyone okay?” That was Soup calling out. More like yelling out. He must have been half-deaf as well. Kettle spotted the kid lying on the ground holding his wounded shoulder. Above him the smoking cannonball sat lodged in the center of a fractured beam of wood that had formally been braced with metal plates. The journey through the side of the hull and the iron bars of the brig, and then into the beam, had been enough to bring the projectile to a stop. Soup’s face looked astonished.

  “Gwaenchana,” Haley yelled back in Korean and gave a thumbs up. Her brain had evidently switched back to her mother tongue.

  “Me too,” Kettle added. He then looked over at Dallas, who was lying on the ground in what remained of the brig. At first, Kettle was worried that the big Marine had been knocked unconscious, or worse, but his fears were allayed when he saw Dallas begin pulling himself back up to his feet. There was a nasty gash running down his left arm from shoulder to elbow, and there were two red spots blooming on the pants covering his upper left thigh.

  On the bright side, they weren’t going to need a key.

  Dallas didn’t quite make it into a standing position before the entire ship heaved and bucked savagely. Kettle felt a lurching sensation in his stomach and realized that the aft section of the Epoch was dropping rapidly.

  “Leg okay?” Kettle shouted at Dallas. “Can you swim for it?”

  “Yep.” Dallas was already looking at the gaping hole in the hull, fully aware of what was going to happen next. Another salvo was slamming into the Epoch, but the enemy needn’t have bothered. The Epoch’s fate had already been sealed.

  “Soup!” Dallas called out. “You’re with me.” He waved his arm for Soup to join him by the breached hull, which was starting to let water stream into the brig. Soup was already on his way. He stepped over the brackets for the ruined wall of bars that previous kept prisoners locked up. Kettle understood Dallas’ logic. Soup’s shoulder was not much better than useless, meaning that this would be a hard swim for the 18-year-old despite his military training. Dallas was going to make sure the younger Marine got to shore without drowning.

  Before Dallas could help Soup out of the ship, the hole in the hull dropped below the waterline and the seawater cascaded through in a massive torrent. With so much water pouring in, there was no way they were getting out. Haley and Kettle looked at each other and then back the way they had originally entered. Maybe they could make it back up to the main deck before they drowned.

  “It’s okay!” Dallas screamed at them. Kettle thought he looked comical, like a man casually standing next to a dam that had burst. “We just have to wait for the water pressure to drop. Just get ready to hold your breath!” Again, Dallas’ logic was sound. Once the compartment they were in filled up with water, the water wouldn’t be pushing in from the outside of the ship and they could just swim out and up.

  Kettle wondered how deep the water was in this part of the bay. Would the Epoch hit the seabed before they swam out? How far would they have to swim up?

  He followed Haley and joined the other two next to the opening in the hull. The ship was filling up remarkably fast. The sounds of battle above them ceased, though he could hear cries and shouts from somewhere above. As the water came up around his knees, and then above his hips, Kettle silently waited and hoped that as many of the other crew as possible had safely abandoned ship and were swimming to shore. He also wondered if the Black Star would sail in closer to pick off the survivors one by one. How cruel was their Lavic harker?

  The water surged up to their chest. Everything was dark now. Kettle couldn’t see a damn thing. He held on to Haley’s hand on one side and Dallas’ elbow on the other. He could feel pieces of wood and other debris bobbing around his head, and he also observed that everything had gone surprisingly quiet.

  “Now?” he asked.

  “Just about,” Dallas said. “Take a deep breath before you go. Then feel your way out of the ship. When you’re out, try to kick off the hull and swim a few meters straight out before you go up. You don’t want to get caught up in all the rigging and shit coming down. Got it?”

  Everyone said yes.

  “One more thing,” Dallas said. “It’s easy to get turned upside down. Remember to keep your eyes open. Light means up. Dark means down.”

  Good advice, Kettle thought.

  And then they went.

  Kettle was lucid and composed. He gently pushed Haley out of the hull breach first, though it was clear from her movements that she was equally in control of the situation.

  As soon as he exited the mortally wounded Epoch, his eyes became useful again. Above him, light was filtering down through the water and a maze of wreckage that was slowly spreading out all around them. Kettle remembered Dallas’ advice. He moved carefully alongside the hull away from the hole he just swam out of until his feet could find solid purchase, and then used the hull as a launching point to thrust himself forward and away. His legs kicked and he pushed forward with his hands as well, all the while being careful not to expend too much energy going in the horizontal direction. He still had to go up.

  The latter task took a lot longer than he had expected. He wondered if it was possible to get the bends from doing this. He wasn’t sure how that worked. Nitrogen saturation or something like that. If they got out of this alive, he’d ask Dallas about it.

  All of these thoughts were instantly purged from Kettle’s mind when he saw the faint shadows of someone struggling in the water off to his right. It was a woman trapped in a tangled mess of ropes and pul
leys, and she was being pulled in the opposite direction that Kettle was going, down instead of up. The light was still too dim and untrustworthy to make out the victim with any certainty, but it looked like Amba. The stark horror the woman must have felt being dragged down to her death. Kettle shuddered but kept kicking toward the surface, knowing full well that there was nothing he could do; the sailor was doomed. If it was indeed Amba, the Kalleshi pirate had finally run out of luck. Kettle turned instead to the living, glancing around with relief to see his three companions nearby, all of them ascending.

  The last meter or two to the surface was permeated with a ragged pain in his lungs and a narrowing field of vision. When he burst above the waves, his first breath was a greedy gasp for air, which was closely followed by a six or seven more rapid gulps of air mingled with spray. Gradually the pain subsided. There was a general ache in his chest, but he was otherwise fine. More importantly, his three companions were bobbing in the waves nearby.

  There were pieces of wreckage everywhere, some of which were on fire and sending black plumes of smoke upward into the sky. Kettle also noted with horror that he couldn’t see any other sailors.

  The Black Star had broken off the engagement and looked to be heading south along the coast.

  “Well, thank God for that,” Haley said as the Black Star slowly moved away.

  “We’re still not out of the fire yet,” Soup commented. His breathing was labored, but it wasn’t just his own condition he was referring to. “Remember the last time we got dumped in the ocean?”

  Kettle’s memory immediately called forth images of the plane crash and the sharks. The terrifyingly big sharks. And the screaming. And the blood in the water.

  “We should go,” he decided out loud.

  Dallas had already eased Soup through the water to a big plank of wood that helpfully was not on fire. Kettle noted again with a sense of admiration that Dallas was always proactive rather than reactive. The muscled Marine helped Soup up on top of the plank and began pushing him landward. It was probably a plan that would save Soup’s life. The kid didn’t look like he had much left in him, and it was going to take a decent amount of energy to make the beach. Kettle and Haley swam over to help. They positioned themselves on either side of Soup, grabbed onto the wood and switched to a sidestroke to help pull it through the water.

  “I should have figured out where the key to your cell was,” Kettle told Dallas. “I’m sorry.”

  “Bit late, brah.”

  “Hey, I messed up. I’m sorry.”

  “Nah, you don’t get off that easy.” Dallas kept pushing the plank forward through the water with powerful kicks, but he was looking straight at Kettle.

  “What do you want from me? I said I was sorry.”

  Dallas shook his head and let out a derisive snort. “You don’t get it, garbage man. It’s not about being sorry for your mistakes. It’s not about taking responsibility for them either.”

  Kettle looked over at Haley with a confused expression. He could tell by the look on her face that she also wasn’t sure where this was going.

  “I might be a dumb jarhead,” Dallas continued, “but it doesn’t take a genius to see what your problem is. And you’re not riding the short bus to school, so I figure you’ve got enough smarts up in that head of yours to know what your problem is, too. But you’re too chickenshit to admit it to yourself or deal with it or something. So, no, I don’t accept your half-ass apology. In fact, you can take your half-ass apology and shove it up your ass.”

  “Oh, well, geez, tell me what you really think.”

  “Not the time for jokes, dickhead.”

  “All right. Fine. All jokes aside, I don’t know why you’re all pissed off at me right now. Explain it to me, because given all the death and destruction that happened just now, let alone over the past few weeks, I figure a little comradery might just come in handy for the four of us.”

  “Are you really that clueless?”

  “Yes!”

  “You want me to spell it out for you?”

  “Yes. For the love of all that’s holy, just tell me already!”

  “Fine!” Dallas’ glare was intense. It was made even more intimidating by the flaming wreckage and smoke they were paddling through in an attempt to make a beeline for shore. “You’re content to make mistakes,” he said.

  Kettle stopped kicking. “What? I’m content to make mistakes? What the hell does that even mean?”

  “It means that you screw up, say sorry and just stumble on until you screw something else up. You just casually make one mistake after another, and yeah, sure, you probably feel a little guilt for a while, and you roll out the apologies. People say ‘Oh, that’s okay, Kettle,” and then off you go again.” He paused and then added, “Why aren’t you kicking? C’mon, it’s a long way to shore.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You don’t know me. That’s not how I live my life.” He started kicking again.

  “That’s exactly how you live your life. And back in the real world it probably didn’t have big ramifications. If I had to take a guess, I’d say you never got too close to anyone because deep inside, you always knew you’d blunder into whatever mistake was coming next, and whoever you were with would see your life for the disaster it was. So you probably drank a lot, kept to yourself and built this big mental barrier in your head that prevented you from having any real meaningful existence. Does that sound about right?

  “Well now your casual fuck-up-edness does have consequences, Kettle. You make mistakes out here and people actually die. You don’t get to just say ‘sorry’ and move on as if nothing happened. The stakes are too high. Jesus, look at your track record. Go back to the plane ride from hell. Jay was the one friend you had on that flight, and you let him get killed. You probably never even thought to blame yourself, but think about it. What did you ever do to keep him alive up there? Nothing.”

  “That’s not fair.” Memories of those last moments aboard the airplane came rushing back. He remembered Jay helping him put on his oxygen mask because he hadn’t even been able to do that properly. Then he remembered Jay moving to the back of the plane to help people he didn’t even know. Kettle had been too afraid to move. But still, Kettle couldn’t see how his own fear led to Jay’s death.

  “It is fair,” Dallas asserted. “Just because you didn’t do anything doesn’t mean you didn’t make a mistake. You don’t get to let yourself off the hook for being too afraid. You see? That’s what I’m talking about. When shit gets real, you look for the nearest escape hatch instead of manning up and doing what’s right. And if anyone calls you on it, you just apologize as if that makes everything all right again.”

  “And what about Shen?” Kettle asked in a low tone that was just barely loud enough for his three companions to hear.

  “What did you say?”

  “Shen,” he repeated. “You said those three words to her and she ended up dead.”

  The look in Dallas’ eyes was controlled rage. Kettle thought there was a good chance that the Marine was going to throw a punch any second. He got ready to push off the plank backwards away from an incoming blow should it come. Gradually though, the tension in Dallas’ jaw eased, and he re-focused on pushing the plank carrying Soup through the water.

  “Let me explain the difference between you and me,” the Marine said coldly after about 20 seconds. “I’m going to live with that regret for the rest of my life. I fucked up and got Shen killed. That guilt is going to be stored away like a little black rock in my heart, and it’s going to be heavy for a very, very long time. I won’t try to bury that feeling; I won’t try to make it go away. What I will do is use her memory to push me to become a better person, a person that doesn’t make dangerous mistakes like that. But what I’m not going to do is make an empty apology and expect people to instantly forgive me. Are you feeling me now, brah?”

  There was a long silence after that. They began maneuvering the makesh
ift raft somewhat diagonally from their original course to intersect with the landing spot of a few survivors from the Epoch that had already made it ashore.

  All the while Kettle pondered over Dallas’ words. The anger and frustration slowly began to clear from his mind. Then he began, grudgingly at first, to consider whether or not there were any grains of truth in the accusations. Suddenly, the thought of his daughter popped into his mind. At first, he had no idea why. It was an abstract thought, one without substance or texture. After all, he had no idea what she looked like. He didn’t know what she looked like because he had abandoned her before she was even born.

  And then he understood that Dallas was right.

  4.3 SAELIKO

  “Are we almost at the top?” the Saffisheen asked. She was standing on a rock ledge with Ollan next to a tall but narrow waterfall. Below them a rope ladder was bolted to the rock face, and a second ladder started just above them. The ledge was something of a midway rest point. The two of them had gained a lead on the others during the trek from the coast; Brenna, Lofi and Jren were just now approaching the bottom of the first ladder.

  “Not sure. It was a long time ago.”

  “How long you think we’ve been walking?”

  “Fair bit, I guess.”

  “From the way you described it earlier, I thought we’d be in Maglipan by now.” Saeliko watched Ollan, waiting for an answer. None was forthcoming. The big Lavic just shrugged his shoulders apathetically.

  Brenna was about half way up the first ladder, her hefty frame moving swiftly. Like any good pirate, she was good with ropes and heights. Lofi was close behind.

  “Watch this,” Saeliko said. She then grabbed Ollan’s flintlock pistol from the leather holster on his belt. Her practiced hands leisurely loaded the weapon with powder and shot and primed the pan. She took her time, occasionally glancing up at Ollan to gauge his face and discern his thoughts. Ever stoic.

  Saeliko got down onto her knees so that she could look directly down at Brenna’s head.