Maxine felt the frustration spiking in her throat. “Yes, I get all that. But what if the weather gets even worse? What if the wind changes and we’re caught anyway?”
“Then we should prepare for battle, at least,” Poppet said with determination. “No point in keeping the guns and the grenades in the hold. We need to get them up on deck and make sure everyone knows how to use them. It’s going to be all hands to the pumps if the Grimoire gets alongside us.”
Maxine smiled, feeling glad of the support, but turned to her husband. “I know why you’re being cautious, Josh. I get it. You don’t want to lose us again. I get it. You want to keep us safe. I do, too. I don’t want to put Tally or you in the firing line. But what else can we do? We need to take the fight to them, Josh. We can’t run forever. Sometimes, the best way to defend ourselves is to turn and fight.” She met her father’s eyes next. “You taught me that, Dad. You taught me that lesson first.”
Donald and Josh exchanged glances, and Poppet began to applaud. Then, when she realized she was the only one applauding, she looked sheepish and stopped.
“And planning for battle will give Karel some focus, and a way to smooth out her anger over Ten-Foot. I think she’s as disgusted at us for allowing him to be shielded from her revenge as she is at him for killing Jingo.” As Maxine finished, she knew from Josh and her dad’s expressions that she’d won them over.
Fighting Gabe’s ship might be a little crazy, but she needed to feel she was doing something other than running away, and if they won the battle, she knew it would give her a strong sense that Gabe could ultimately be defeated, and if that happened, Storm would come back to the fold.
That mattered almost as much as anything.
Plus, she had a lot of history with Gabe to erase. And this was a strong start.
Because it was Maxine’s idea, she volunteered to speak to Karel up on the deck while Josh and the others worked with some of the probationers who could be spared to bring the weapons up from the hold.
The weapons and ammunition were placed under tarps in the lifeboats to keep them out of the worsening weather. Everyone had already been issued foul weather gear and life jackets, too. The wind was still rising, and although it was now past midday, the sea had become a roiling boil of wine-dark water with white, cresting waves, and the sky was bruised with threat. It was hard to tell what was spray coming over the side of the ship and what was rain from the clouds.
They took turns resting while others worked on the decks, but no one seemed to get much rest when they were below decks—not with the movement of the Sea-Hawk on the heaving swells.
The deck was slick and darkened with water. Maxine found she had to hang on to ropes and stays in order to keep upright as the ship heeled and yawed.
Karel had stopped walking up and down the deck. She was standing now, looking out to sea ahead of the Sea-Hawk. The woman was drenched to her bones, as she hadn’t taken the opportunity to get into waterproofs.
Maxine stood beside her now, the wind flapping her hair and stinging her eyes. She held out yellow waterproofs and a life jacket. “Why don’t you put these on? Or come down below decks. Get warm? Get dry? I could make you a coffee?”
The ordinariness of her words underscored the extraordinariness of the situation. That feeling undercut her words with the sudden sense that she was being trite and insincere, as well. Offering someone a coffee in all this—the danger, the threats, and the grief. Maxine suddenly felt very dumb.
“I’m sorry. That was just stupid. You’re hurting. The last thing you need is me coming up here playing the good Samaritan. I’ve come for a reason, and it’s not to offer to make you a damn cup of coffee. We need you.”
Karel’s face, wet with spray, turned and looked at Maxine. Her eyes were wells of hurt, her lips pale and her cheeks colorless.
At least it was a start, Maxine thought, to have her meeting her eyes. A way in. “I’m not here to tell you that you shouldn’t be angry about what happened to Jingo, and how we’ve protected Ten-Foot from you. I get your need for some… balance… some, I don’t know. A sense of revenge. I feel the same thing, too.”
“You do? I doubt that.”
“You can believe me or not. But we need you. I need you, and when it comes to it, all the kids and adults on this ship are going to need you. You’re the best fighter we’ve got.”
Karel’s eyes narrowed. “Go on.”
Maxine pointed back along the Sea-Hawk, to where Josh and Donald were lifting AK-47s from one of the crates they’d helped bring up to the deck and placing each weapon under a rolled-back tarp in one of the lifeboats.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Maxine asked.
“What?”
“Storing guns in a lifeboat. But that’s what we’re doing.”
“Why?”
Maxine turned back to Karel. “Because I’m after revenge of sorts, too, or at least a chance to strike back at Gabriel. I think that ship is going to catch up with us soon, and we’re going to have to be ready. And I want you to help us make everyone ready. Please.”
Karel closed her eyes. The spray stood out on her face like sweat. Her teeth kept grinding behind her lips, and she didn’t speak. She just took the waterproofs from Maxine’s grasp and began to thread her arms into them.
Karel set to work almost immediately, taking two of the probationers aside from their positions on the rigging in order to teach them how to load and eject magazines on the AK-47s, as well as how to fire them and how to switch between automatic and single-round fire. For all their bravado and criminal activity before the Barnard’s event, the probationers were not skilled with weapons—either machine guns or handguns. Karel taught them how to aim, how to make the most of their use, and the difference between the curved magazines and the drum magazines which held up to a hundred rounds, of which there were a good mixture of both stored upon the ship.
The M203 grenade launchers mounted on a selection of M4 carbines were a little more difficult to show and to teach. “You won’t have the advantage of the electronic sights, so just keep the barrel high enough to launch the 40-millimeter grenade towards the ship when it’s close enough and I give the order. The idea is to get the grenade to arc up and down in a curve. So, if you have to make a few ranging shots, that’s okay. We have plenty of grenades for you to get your eye in.”
Karel showed them how to load the snubby high-explosive and prime the launching mechanism.
“Remember the M4 is a good rifle too, if you need to use it as such; you can use it to shoot across the bows of the ship to get the Harbormen to dive for cover, and then follow up with the grenades. Always best to keep the enemy guessing.”
Banger Church raised his hand. “They’re gonna be firing back at us, right? I don’t suppose we got any body armor on board, have we? Might make things a little easier.”
Josh pulled back the lid on a crate of Kevlar vests. “Knock yourself out, Banger. There’s enough stuff down in the hold to fight a war.”
“Yeah,” said Banger, sliding a jacket from the crate and sizing it up, “but is there enough to win one?”
Maxine and Josh left Karel getting the probationers ready, with Martha and Filly learning and helping where they could.
“You did well getting her out of that funk. Now she’s back on the plate, she’s hitting all the home runs,” Josh said with a hard-edged smile.
Maxine nodded. “Just don’t ask me about the coffee,” she said, and she was glad when Josh didn’t. He just shrugged and put the field glasses back up to his eyes, searching out the Grimoire.
“Getting closer. You might have your wish, you know.”
Maxine hugged herself against the wind. Relishing the thought of a battle was not something she was at all used to. For the last few harsh months, she’d done as much as she could to avoid them. But this felt different. She felt as if something had fundamentally changed within her.
As Maxine contemplated this new feeling, the weather continued to worsen an
d the mood among the crew seemed to drop further. Few words were forthcoming, other than more and more urgent orders from Dotty-B to the probationers about the sails and the rigging.
Karel finished up her teaching sessions on the weaponry and Josh remained nailed to the stern of the Sea-Hawk, binoculars to his eyes as he watched the Grimoire get ever closer as they took in sail to slow their progress.
Maxine’s dad readied the lifeboat they were planning to drop into the water when the moment of attack was reached. He and Poppet had devised a strategy that would see them going across to the pursuing ship, or at least near enough to make attacking it on two fronts viable. The idea was to get close enough to be underneath cannon fire and send grenades into the Grimoire to take them out as soon as they could. The darkened sky continued making for a gloomy afternoon and evening, and the heavy seas made Donald think they had a good chance of getting near the ship without being seen as night fell. They also had flares on board to send up so that, after any battle, they would be able to be found again by the Sea-Hawk. It was a maximum risk strategy, but one that might see them victorious.
“I’m sorry. Karel… I… I’m sorry.”
Maxine spun around at the voice she recognized, technically, but which was speaking low and with maximum contrition. Karel, who was standing ten feet away at the rail and checking over an AK-47 that had developed an intermittent jam, was going over it with her practiced fingers.
The voice belonged to Ten-Foot.
His face was slick with spray, his eyes downcast, and he had a blanket wrapped protectively around his shoulders. Halley was behind him, his own face alive with expectation and with a smile curling at the corners of his lips—as if the scientist was watching a crucial experiment come to fruition in a petri dish, she couldn’t help thinking.
Karel had let the gun swing down by her side. She wasn’t going to be able to use it to shoot the boy who had killed her friend Jingo, but from the way Maxine saw her knuckles whitening on the barrel, she might just be planning to use it as a club.
“It’s the rage… I don’t… I just couldn’t help myself. It was… like I was lost in myself.” Ten-Foot’s earnestness was total, coming from every fiber of him. “You have every right to hate me. I get that, Karel. I really do. But Professor Halley says he can help me. I’ve been in the water for three hours and already I feel completely calm. Like the rage has gone away. I can’t explain it…”
Karel’s mouth was working, but there were no words coming out, as if her voice was hiding away—as incredulous as the rest of her.
“I’ve put us all in danger by screwing up the engine. I wasn’t thinking straight. If I were, I would have realized that Gabriel’s men are going to be willing to kill me just as happily as they’ll kill all of us on this ship. Jingo tried to stop me and I…”
Halley put a hand on the boy’s shoulder; he now looked more like an errant child come to explain to his teacher why he hadn’t completed his school assignment on time than the vicious murderer who had sabotaged the Sea-Hawk. Maxine couldn’t tell where the spray on his cheeks ended and the tears began.
Karel’s fingers slackened on the AK-47’s barrel, and Maxine watched her shoulders sag with released tension. Karel shook her head and ran a hand through her hair. She said nothing to Ten-Foot, but as his eyes flicked up and met hers for the first time, Karel just gave the smallest of nods—communicating to the boy that, whatever there was between them now, it was not hot and murderous, but something approaching forgiveness.
The moment hung in the air and the spray chilled them, the only sound being the flap of the rigging and the creak of the timbers.
That was until Josh, who was still at the stern of the ship looking out through his binoculars, turned to Maxine and the others, his face pained and his eyes wide. “The Grimoire,” he said. “They’re close enough for me to see who’s on deck. Gabriel is there… and so is Storm.”
13
“So, that’s how they did it,” Josh said to Donald and pointed to the bow of the Grimoire.
Donald followed Josh’s finger. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
There were three lines of luminescent paint starting to become visible across the back end of the ship, their ghostly green glow showing more and more as the gloom of the day deepened. Josh immediately knew that, if they looked, they would see the same thing on the back of the Sea-Hawk. There would never be enough glow created to throw light onto the surface waves, but there would certainly be enough of a signal to allow a following ship to keep tabs on it. That was how the Grimoire had followed them through the night without losing them in the total darkness of the sea beneath the overcast sky. Gabe was a cunning adversary. So that lookouts from land could make sure neither of his ships were being stolen, he’d had the bows and sterns painted with phosphorescent paint to keep them in sight. Ingenious and simple. Like all the best plans were.
But the same could not be said for their own plan, Josh noted with some anxiety. This plan was complex, high risk, and anything but simple.
Josh paddled hard, his shoulders bunching and his biceps burning. He kept his head down behind the sheet of metal they’d torn from the range in the galley on the Sea-Hawk to use for some protection. It wouldn’t stop bullets completely, but it would allow them to not be obvious targets and provide some cover. He was bulked out in body armor and had a tactical helmet jammed on his head with a viciously tight chin strap, but that didn’t stop him from feeling exposed and vulnerable in the water. The sea was rough but navigable, and that roughness was making the shots from the Grimoire dance around them, spitting into the water with only a tiny percentage of them clattering into the steel.
Covering fire from the Sea-Hawk was also making it difficult for the Harbormen on Gabriel’s ship to keep a bead on their little lifeboat. All was noise and smoke and spray. Marshal and Lemming, also in the boat behind Donald and Josh, dug their paddles into the water and the lifeboat made swift progress across the fifty yards of water between the two ships.
“There’s no point changing the plans,” Josh had said to the others as the Grimoire had borne down on them. “Me, Donald, and the others go as planned. Karel, you and the rest of the crew have enough firepower here to give us a fighting chance. They are not going to expect us to lead an attack on them, and that gives us an advantage.”
The evening was falling towards dark, and the swell and waves around the two ships made getting shots on the lifeboat a lottery. But, of course, the closer they got to the Grimoire, the easier that task would be. As if to prove the point, a bullet clanged into the shield, taking off a corner and sending up a spray of orange sparks in the quickening night.
Josh ducked deeper into the well of the lifeboat, but kept pushing the paddle into the water. They were getting close enough to the Grimoire to reduce the angle of fire from the decks, and in the last of the light from the sky, Josh could see that the fire from the Sea-Hawk was tearing through the rigging of the target ship. Ropes were frayed and snapping because of their gunfire—which was not being accurately sent their way, but hitting them entirely by accident—and holes were appearing in the sails, which were much easier targets. He had told the others to hold off on the grenade launchers until their lifeboat was on its way back—if they ever made it back, that was—in order to give them the opportunity to carry out this crazy mission.
The nose of the lifeboat thudded against the bow of the Grimoire. Harbormen were ducking out over the side with their guns, trying to fire down on them, but Donald was too determined to allow it with his returning fire from the AK-47. He raked a line of bullet holes up the back of the vessel and the heads bobbed back, one screaming as a round hit him in the neck. He slumped forward and fell dead into the water by the lifeboat, rolling onto his back and then disappearing into the waves.
An explosion in the rigging of the Grimoire tore spars and sails into a whirling mass of rope, splintered wood, and burning sail. Whoever had fired the grenade from the Sea-Hawk had, by luck rather th
an any kind of judgment, pitched a broken mast sideways.
Josh flicked an eye back to the other ship. He couldn’t tell who had fired the errant round, but it might have given them the chance they needed.
“Now!” Josh screamed, and with the boys paddling for all they were worth to keep the lifeboat against the Grimoire, he and Donald stood up as best they could on the heaving lifeboat and spun the grapples they’d fashioned from rope and boat hooks around their heads. The lines arced up and bit into the wood of the rail. A Harborman risked looking over the edge, and Lemming, dropping his paddle now that the lifeboat was umbilicaled to the ship and he was no longer needed to maintain their position, lifted a pistol and shot him in the face.
Aided by the binoculars, Josh’s intense study of the Grimoire over the last day or so had given him the strategic knowledge that it was being manned by just a skeleton crew of Harbormen—maybe ten at most, along with Gabriel and Storm. Two of that number were down already, and there was enough withering fire from Lemming and Marshal now to ensure that they would not be harried as he and Donald began to climb easily up the side of the ship, hauling themselves up on the grappled ropes. When they reached the gunwale and could see over and along the deck, they noted immediately that their own assault was not the main focus of the Harbormen.
The prow of the ship was on fire.
The grenade that had exploded in the rigging had sent burning sails and ropes scattering onto the deck and a fire had caught among a section of storage crates. Harbormen were running here and there, some with pails of water dredged from the side of the Grimoire not side-on to the Sea-Hawk.
Smoke was thick and the flames were high. The level of panic among the Harbormen was in no way commensurate with the size of the fire. And as Josh rolled onto the deck, this concerned him more than it should. Donald was already up on one knee and firing at the Harbormen as Josh’s eyes raked the deck looking for any sign of Storm.
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 87
