Seabound (Seabound Chronicles Book 1)

by Jordan Rivet

  Seabound

  Seabound Chronicles: Book One

  Jordan Rivet

  Seabound: Seabound Chronicles, Book One

  Copyright © 2014 by Jordan Rivet

  First Edition: November 2014, Updated: February 2015

  All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Contact Jordan Rivet at rivetjordan@gmail.com

  www.jordanrivet.com

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Cover Design by James at GoOnWrite.com

  Book Layout and Design ©2013 - BookDesignTemplates.com

  For my siblings: Chelsea, Alex, Lindsay, Kimberly, Jake, Jamie, Olivia, and Kylie

  Man marks the earth with ruin; his control

  Stops with the shore.

  ―LORD BYRON

  Chapter 1—The Riding Storm

  A horn blasted in the depths of the ship. Esther sat up as the sound thundered through her cabin and lightning illuminated the porthole. She swung her legs over the edge of the bunk, feeling the cold spread through the worn toes of her socks. Then the ship lurched, tipping her to her feet. Esther felt a twinge of irritation. Did it have to be tonight?

  She waited, ready to move at a moment’s notice, and scrubbed a hand through her straight black hair. She’d cut it bluntly, hacking it short to keep it out of the way of her work, but it had grown down almost to her shoulders again, shaggy and uneven. She’d have to do something about that.

  A second horn shivered through the dark. A storm was coming.

  She listened for a third call. The wind picked up, driving water against the porthole, but there were no more horns. Just two. It’s a rider. Still, that lurch had her worried. Esther jammed her feet into her boots, grabbed a tattered raincoat, and pushed open the flimsy metal door. She wasn’t on storm duty, but there was work to do. The floor rolled. The waves would be coming hard and fast now. The Catalina wasn’t a small ship, but Esther could already feel the wild motion of the sea. She trailed her hand along the bulkhead as she jogged down the passageway.

  Esther’s boots scraped bare carpet that had once been plush, back when the Catalina had been a proper cruise ship. She could hardly remember the feeling of soft fibers between her toes. Now her mind was on more practical concerns. She left her home corridor and made her way to the darkened plaza. A crystal chandelier still swayed from the ceiling, but the bulbs had been repurposed for more essential needs. The hall was a garish reminder of the way the world used to be.

  Esther was accustomed to moving through the ship without light. The world had been dark for sixteen years. It wasn’t pitch black, of course. The sun rose and set the same as it had during her early childhood on land. But the curtain of ash that had filled the atmosphere and changed their lives forever kept the world in perpetual shades of gray. It was a gloomy, overcast darkness, the kind that led some people to despair and others to fight for new ways to survive.

  Esther stomped down the grand staircase, joining her neighbors who’d left their cabins to make sure the Catalina rode out the storm. Now that she was up, she felt the familiar thrill that always accompanied violent weather. Finally something was happening to break up the monotony of life at sea—and she was ready.

  “Hi, Esther dear. Thought you were on duty last week.” Her friend Bernadette was carrying a canister of batteries down the stairs. Bernadette was one of the few adults on the Catalina who was shorter than Esther. She had long white hair, and her chunky turquoise sweater, a gift shop remnant, nearly swallowed her tiny hands. It bore a faded screen print of the Catalina and the slogan “Your Island at Sea.”

  “I was. Just checking on Cally. It’s her first time watching the pumps during a rider,” Esther said, walking beside Bernadette for a few paces.

  “She’ll be okay,” Bernadette said. “She’s been following you around since she could walk. She knows what to do.”

  Esther shrugged. “We’ll see. Do you need help with those?”

  “Oh, I’ll be fine. These bones still have a little strength left.”

  Bernadette smiled, and Esther noticed she had lost another tooth. Someone on board would need to replace the old dentist soon.

  At the bottom of the grand staircase, Esther swung through a service doorway and made her way into the depths of the ship. Maybe Cally could try dentistry. She was keen to assist Esther with engine maintenance, but she was too bubbly and flighty for the careful, dirty work of a mechanic. And she didn’t love it like Esther did.

  The ship gave a particularly violent shudder. The wind must be picking up, but Esther could no longer hear it as she climbed down a spiral stairwell and into the bowels of the Catalina. Still, she wasn’t too concerned. It was a rider, not a runner, after all. They would have been warned by radio if the storm was going to be bad enough to use their precious fuel reserves to escape. The Catalina would roll through this one as it had through every rider since Esther and the others had made their homes aboard the ship. Their weather prediction technology was improving, and they hadn’t gotten close enough to a real runner to need their fuel reserves in years.

  Esther pushed open the hatch to the engine room and stomped along the metal catwalk, her footsteps clanging in the yawning space. The cavernous room took up the two lowest levels of the ship, beneath the waterline, and when the engines were off it was surprisingly quiet. The machines cast hulking shadows across her path. She passed the first block of silent marine diesel cylinders and climbed down to the bottom level. Her boots splashed on the final step.

  “What the hell is going on?” Esther said.

  A layer of water covered the floor of the engine room. Sixteen-year-old Cally stood ankle-deep in the water, apparently having a minor panic attack.

  “Esther!” she shrieked. “I’m so glad you’re here! We’re sinking!”

  Cally’s red hair, which she’d tried to cut to look like Esther’s, frizzed out in all directions. She was operating a pump manually, of all things. The radio by the door sputtered, its message indistinct. The lights flickered violently.

  “Stop doing that, Cally. Do you really think it’s going to help?” Esther said calmly.

  Cally kept a tight grip on the pump as if it were a life raft. “I didn’t know what to do! The pumps stopped. I think there’s a short!”

  “It’s all right,” Esther said. “Come over here and hold the light for me.” She splashed through the water covering the floor to the open control box on the far wall. A spark of electricity crackled from a loose wire. “Was this open when the water started coming in?” Esther asked. She yanked rubber gloves from her back pocket and bent the wires away from the water. You could never be too careful.

  “I think maybe I left it open last time I checked on the circuits,” Cally said. She stood by Esther’s shoulder, rubbing a blister that had formed on her finger.

  Operating the pump by hand indeed. Esther took a small flashlight from her belt and handed it to her young assistant.

  “You need to make sure this thing is shut and sealed.”

  “I’ve left it open before and nothi
ng’s happened,” Cally wailed.

  “Just be more careful next time. Hand me the smaller tool kit.” Esther planted her feet far apart and went to work on the circuits, quickly slicing and realigning wires, preparing to bypass the damaged area. “Tell me about the water,” she said.

  “Oh right.” Cally looked down at the flood soaking into her jeans. “Heard on the radio that we hit some debris. I think it was part of an old shipping container or something. Put a gash in the hull.”

  “Who’s on the repairs?”

  “I don’t know. I was just supposed to control the water intake, and it’s a disaster! Are we going to sink?”

  “No, I’ll fix it,” Esther said, privately relieved she had decided to come down here even though she wasn’t on duty. Cally wasn’t ready for this. “A shipping container, huh? Hope they pulled it up. I’m desperate for some decent steel.”

  Structural repairs weren’t part of Esther’s domain, but the men from the repair crew sometimes gave her leftover scraps, which she used to work on improvements to the ship’s systems. They knew she wouldn’t waste the metal, even if they didn’t always think her ideas would work. But Esther believed she could do more than just fix the machines. One day she would prove it.

  She flipped the circuit on the control box. Nothing happened. The ship rocked, dousing them with salty water. Esther shielded the control box with her body to keep it dry. She flipped the switch again. On the third try, half of the pumps sputtered to life. Something was blocking the rest. Esther moved along the line to the first silent pump, the water sloshing around her. It had risen almost to her kneecaps. Her foot bumped a loose bolt on the floor. She plunged a hand into the cold water and grabbed it as it slid past her again.

  “What’s this?”

  Everything in the Catalina had to be tied down, contained, controlled.

  Cally shone the beam of the flashlight onto the bolt. “Oh, I found that the other day and forgot to tell you about it,” she said, biting the edge of her lip. “I set it over there somewhere.” She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the big steel toolbox.

  “Rust and salt!” Esther swore. “I could have fixed this days ago.”

  “I’m sorry! I didn’t know it was a big deal.”

  Esther shook her head, then took a deep breath and dropped into the water beneath one of the pumps. She felt her way through the dark. In the silence, the water pressing into her ears, she could focus on the connections, sensing what was out of place. Sure enough, one of the tubes had come loose, disrupting the pressure of half the system and triggering the safety cutoff. The rocking of the ship pushed her back and forth in the cold water. She gripped the pipes and felt her way along the grooves and joints of the machinery. She came up to grab a breath and a wrench and then slid back beneath the pump. Holding the loose bolt in her teeth, she forced the tube back into its socket and tightened it into place.

  She wished Cally had chosen another occupation. Engineering was not for the absentminded. You needed to be detail oriented, careful, and technical. They couldn’t afford mistakes.

  Esther surfaced. “Flip the third switch from the right in the control box, Cally. Third from the right.”

  She pulled herself up from beneath the pumps, spit the salt from her mouth, and stepped back. The machinery shuddered. Slowly the impellers began to turn. Along the line, the remaining pumps sputtered into motion, drawing water from the belly of the Catalina and spewing it back into the sea.

  “The water’s still coming in!” Cally said. She was right. Despite the pumps, the water rose, marking its progress on the bulkhead. The leak still hadn’t been repaired.

  Reggie should be there by now. “I’d better go make sure someone’s on it,” Esther said. “Keep an eye on the water level down here.”

  “But—”

  “You’ll be fine, Cally.”

  “But Judith says you’re not supposed to—”

  “Don’t worry about Judith. She should be in her quarters now anyway.” Esther didn’t want to miss out on a chance to pick up some extra materials. She was technically still on probation, but now she had a perfectly good excuse to check in with the repair guys. She couldn’t let the ship sink.

  She left Cally standing beside the control box, mouth opening and closing in protest like a red-haired otter’s. Esther just wouldn’t let Judith see her out of her cabin. She’d never know.

  Chapter 2—Salvage

  She took a shortcut up the old elevator shaft. The elevators had been replaced with ladders in one of the early bouts of energy-saving enthusiasm when the group that had taken refuge on the Catalina realized they would be calling it home for the long haul. Esther reached the top rung of the ladder and hoisted her compact body out of the shaft. She used to wish she were taller than her five feet and one inch, but instead of growing tall in her teenage years, she grew strong. Now, at twenty-two, her body had matured into a small, powerful shape, well suited for crawling through the engine room and fixing the machines and contraptions that made life on the Catalina possible after all this time.

  A metallic clanging echoed through the ship, a different timbre than the howls of the wind. That was a good sign. Esther followed the noise to the starboard lifeboat deck, taking a detour through the huge storage facility that had once been a cocktail lounge. The wind whistled a high-pitched note as it tore around the ship. Sea spray coated the deck in a slick film. Esther found one of the repairmen leaning over the side of the ship. Reggie was a muscular seaman who’d been on the crew of the Catalina before the big eruption.

  “What’s the damage, Reg?” she shouted above the wind.

  “’Sup, Esther. Storm drove a piece of sea crap into the lower third. Wong and Pieter are down there now, patching up the hole.” He nodded toward a set of lines pulled tight over the side of the ship. They dropped into blackness below.

  “The water is still coming in through the engine room.”

  “Yeah, we had some trouble with the patch, but I think it’s sorted out now.”

  Esther breathed a little easier. The ship was barely holding together these days. “Did you save any scrap metal for me?” she asked.

  “Won’t have much left after this one. I think we hit a half-submerged hull,” Reggie said.

  “Ouch. Cally said something about a shipping container. We got a cargo haul nearby?”

  Sometimes they came across sealed shipping containers floating together like whale pods. These could be goldmines, depending on what was inside, and the containers themselves were extremely useful.

  “Don’t think so,” Reggie shouted. Sea spray clung to his short, thick hair like frost. “Just scraps. Have to get it from Judith if you want the full story, though.”

  Esther rolled her eyes. “I’ll pass.”

  “Don’t blame you. I haven’t been in the mood to talk to her in about four years, the bitch.”

  “At least she doesn’t hate you.”

  “Hard to tell, innit? Look, I doubt she’s forgotten about last time,” Reggie shouted, “but you might be able to pick up bits and pieces without Judith noticing if you want to brave the wind.”

  “I’ll give it a go,” Esther said.

  She had a knack for fixing things and—she believed—for improving them, but it was an ability that got her into trouble as much as it got her out of it these days. Their leader, Judith, hadn’t been particularly happy when one of Esther’s improvements backfired. Judith didn’t seem to understand the concept of trial and error.

  Esther left Reggie watching out for his men in the waves below and made her way along the outer promenade. The hull dropped away beneath her feet. It was a patchwork job. They’d collected debris from the wreckage of the world for years, reinforcing the Catalina to protect themselves from the driving winds and colossal waves of an atmosphere gone haywire. The six-hundred-foot pleasure cruiser hadn’t been built for the battering it had sustained over the past sixteen years. They’d lost massive sheets of steel and fiberglass in the
first storms. Twice they’d lost members of the crew when debris ripped across the decks like a giant’s razor blade. Back then they hadn’t yet learned which storms they could ride and which ones they’d have to flee. Even so, they were safer at sea than on land.

  Esther cut through a damp corridor toward the aft deck. At the blunt stern of the Catalina, a steel shield bent around a deck that had once been open to the sea breezes. It had been an atrium for sunbathing and swimming. Now, they needed to protect this space, to keep out the sea. A door that originally belonged on a boxcar sealed the entrance. Esther tied herself to one of the strong tethers they’d found in a capsized cargo vessel and pulled open the heavy door. Immediately, the wind whipped inside, driving water against Esther’s skin so violently that it was like being pelted with pebbles. She pulled her storm goggles up from around her neck and stepped into the gale.

  The sky was a violent purple, with driving swirls of gray and black. Every flash of lightning revealed the striations of the ash-filled atmosphere. Seawater rampaged across the deck. The rain came in sickly fits, never enough to provide as much freshwater as they needed. They were lucky to have a decent desalination system.

  Above Esther’s head, the big wind turbines spun too fast for her to see the blades. The churning of the waves would be running riot on the turbines attached to the stabilizers below the sea. They’d get some serious power reserves out of this tempest. It was a good thing too. The half-starved solar panels on top of the ship barely produced enough for everyone’s basic needs on a normal day. They could shoot a batch of water through the desal system and replenish their water tanks. They were getting low. It took a lot of energy—and a lot of clean water—to run a floating village of over a thousand survivors. This storm would likely replenish their supply of seaweed too, a vital source of nutrients that was becoming harder to collect with each passing year.