Secrets of the Fire Sea j-4

by Stephen Hunt

  Hannah listened carefully to the instructions the old u-boat man imparted to her. The commodore assured her that in the case of the Cassarabian-designed submarine they were imprisoned on, their uncomfortable brig would be located between the boat's orlop deck and the bilges, and that the diving chamber should lie just down the corridor from them. The two of them waited for the next meal of thin gruel to be slotted through the feeding vent in the bottom of the door. Not because, as Hannah first suspected, the commodore wanted to escape on a full belly – but as an indicator that the boat's mess would also be fully occupied, with as many of the Pericurian sailors off the decks as they could hope for.

  Minutes after the footsteps of the sailor charged with feeding them had died away, the commodore sprang the lock and the door retracted into the ceiling. There were no marines inside the small brig office outside, nor a master of arms – all the fighters were otherwise occupied on Jago. The commodore managed to break open the locker where their belongings had been stowed, retrieving his sabre while cursing the thieving paws of the ursine that had stolen the expensive pistol he kept concealed inside his great coat.

  As the commodore had promised, it was only a short way down the corridor to the diving chamber, both Hannah and the u-boat man's strength needed to spin the iron wheel on the door in the deck to reveal a simmering pool of water in the middle of the floor. There were diving costumes racked on the wall – triple-insulated canvas. The massive brass helmets shaped like shark heads had hard crystal lenses where the sharks' eyes would have been. Commodore Black lifted the complex arrangement of lead weighted belts, buoyancy compensators and auto-inflation hoses over Hannah after she had donned her ridiculously large suit – cut for an ursine, not for someone of her slight build. Then he bid Hannah sit on the edge of the frothing water as he lifted the tank and regulator onto her back; her spine almost crumpling from the weight of it.

  Donning an arrangement similar in almost every way apart from the better fit on his almost ursine-sized frame, the commodore lifted a spear gun out of the rack and pilfered a couple of underwater flares, then, with a final check on the air hose's connection to the back of Hannah's helmet, they both dropped through the tight enclosure of the airlock pool. Circle's teeth, it was hot inside, even with the protective layers of the suit going rigid around Hannah's legs, arms and chest. Then they were dropping down into the burning waters of Jago proper, the dark hull of the Pericurian u-boat squatting ominously above them, the green fronds of an underwater forest rippling below. Forward of their position lay the basalt rocks of the island's submerged harbour, the alien-looking buildings fronting the tunnels that led away from the underwater harbour lit by the flares of enemy divers and u-boat lanterns. Dozens of vessels were suspended in the sea in front of the underwater cliffs, their lights making the beads of sweat rolling down Hannah's eyepieces glint like stars.

  Hannah's breathing inside the helmet sounded unnaturally loud, echoed by the rasping of the regulator, as though she was sharing the suit with someone else. Distracted by the noise, she almost lost sight of the commodore, unused to the sensation of moving and locating someone in the three dimensions of this hot, viscous world. How unlike the experience of swimming in the city's public baths, or jumping off bridges into canals on festival days this was – it must be how a bird felt when flying. Hannah spotted the commodore below her. He was waving at her to move down, to follow the fronds of the strange underwater forest towards the harbour tunnels. As they got closer to the island's submerged base, the commodore slowly angled around and pointed to the dozens of Pericurian divers in front of them, tiny shapes marked by the flash of their underwater cutting gear, cables running back to the u-boats at their rear. Hannah followed the old u-boat man into the undulating seaweed that would cover their approach, colourful fish as large as shields dodging effortlessly out of their way. They emerged from the underwater forest at the foot of one of the metal carvings to the side of the ornamental entrance to the harbour created by the ancient Jagonese. It was a bronze devilfish, ninety feet tall, sitting on a row of scallops, each shell bearing the arms of an ancient senatorial seat. The devilfish's metal tentacles were rolled up around it and Hannah saw that the suckers of its arms were actually pipe-ends capped by grilles. The discoloration in the water told her exactly what this was – a sewage outlet for the city, Hermetica's machines still dumbly following the pattern of their creation even during the surprise assault of the holy war forced upon Jago.

  Commodore Black tested one of the grilles with his diving suit's gloves, but despite using all his strength he wasn't able to dislodge the thing. Hannah nervously checked for Pericurian divers off to their right. She and the commodore hadn't been spotted yet. No, the Pericurians weren't interested in sewage outlets barely large enough to admit a single diver – they needed to open the way for their entire war fleet to enter the capital en masse.

  Hannah attempted to help the commodore, who was using his spear gun as a lever to try to force open one of the grilles, but the barnacle-encrusted bars had been as good as welded shut by the rust and wear of age. Her suit's interior was beginning to burn her now, the layers of insulation starting to be overwhelmed by the searing heat of the boils. Hannah felt a twinge of panic. How long before they were spotted and hauled back to the fleet's brig? Her toes inside her fins felt as if they had been jabbed into a fire grate. If they swam to the surface, could the pair of them scale the towering black cliffs of Jago – in full view of the enemy fleet, with the surface crowded by Pericurian soldiers waiting to engage the enemy? This escape was looking more and more like madness, the commodore's warnings deadly prophetic. Hannah was still struggling with the drain cover when a stream of brown dust and coral debris rained down on her helmet. She looked up. The siphon on the side of the devilfish's head had opened up above them, figures in the bright orange rubbers of modified scald suits arrowing out of the opening. It was a maintenance tunnel hatch and it was disgorging Jago's defenders – tug service divers, the merchant marine and harbour repair crews, come to ensure the underwater gateway stayed sealed to the invader's fleet!

  The commodore pulled her back just as the lance of a spear gun bubbled past, entering the sewage grille they had been trying to force open. That shot had come from above. Of course! She and the commodore were wearing Pericurian suits. A choice of outfit that looked as though it was going to get them both killed. A couple of divers from the ragtag army raised in Jago's defence were zeroing in on Hannah and the commodore, breaking off from the main force swimming towards the sappers attempting to clear the harbour entrance. Wicked barbed lances were exchanged between the Pericurian invaders and Jagonese, seemingly slow in the water, but powering fast enough to skewer a handful of the defenders – explosions of red mist under the sea where the spears found their mark.

  Another barbed bolt cut through the water, this time only an inch from Hannah's chest. Then the two divers from the city were upon them, the commodore releasing his spear gun's single round into the two attackers. The diver the commodore shot was carried back by the spear's impact, clutching the metal barb that had impaled his gut. Hannah desperately tapped her helmet, trying to indicate that her eyes were those of the race of man, not ursine. But the surviving attacker was beyond noticing, closing in on the commodore with a dagger drawn from his leg sheath. Jared Black had his own Pericurian diver's blade drawn and the two figures twisted and turned in the water as they grappled and fought for purchase.

  Hannah kicked over to the two figures thrashing in slow motion. She pulled on the handle of her knife, freeing it from her leg sheath in time to slash at the back of the Jagonese diver's seashell-shaped helmet, cutting a wedge out of the air hose connecting his helmet to its tank. As the lion's share of the defender's air supply began to ladder upwards, the commodore pushed their attacker away and allowed the figure to swim desperately up towards the surface. Hannah was watching the weight belt their attacker had just detached sink towards her when she felt something as powerful as a
whale slam into her shoulder, sending her corkscrewing back through the water.

  Hannah just caught a glimpse of the rotating propeller on the back of a Pericurian torpedo ploughing forward to slam into the cliff, before the first shockwaves of the explosion reached her and blew her into a bottomless chasm of darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  'He ain't firing,' shouted the convict, his voice lost behind the barricade, lost against the hymn-like howling of the Pericurian soldiers, their fierce war songs given counterpoint by the crash of turret rifles against the brass tanks of compressed gas that powered their weapons.

  'I cannot!' said Jethro, squatting sadly against his unfired rifle as though it was a crutch. 'I cannot take a life in this way. Every death is my own.'

  'It will be your bloody own, alright,' said the convict, sighting down his rifle. 'The wet-snouts are coming forward a second time.'

  'Bayonets!' yelled someone behind them. 'Get your cutlery fixed.'

  'It is not his way,' said Boxiron, watching the tide of fur, fang and claw storming down the street at them. The attackers were firing wildly, pitons smashing through the barricade and hurling the kneeling ranks of those freed from the prison off their feet with each impact.

  'He ain't firing,' repeated the convict, as if this was the only thing that mattered, his bravado fleeing now the defenders had made contact with the terrifying ranks of their massive enemy. The convict might have been a steamman himself, stuck in a loop with fear.

  'You seem more in control,' Jethro said to his steamman friend, sounding surprised. 'Before we voyaged here you would have slipped into a fury by now.'

  Boxiron stood up, his right arm turning the massive hammer slowly in preparation. 'This is my way. This is what I am for, but I will require your help.'

  'He ain't firing,' protested the convict by their side, fumbling for another charge to slip into his smoking breech.

  'Don't worry,' said Boxiron, laying his left hand upon the convict's shoulder. 'I am to claim his share.' He looked down at Jethro. 'It is time.'

  'He ain't firing,' the convict coughed at the huge ursine who had smashed through the barricade and pushed a bayonet through his ribs. Howling with victory, the giant invader shot the man once, the impact of the piton throwing the corpse off her blooded blade and clearing her turret rifle.

  Jethro heard the clack of the Pericurian's turret rifle drum as its barrel swept around towards the steamman and the ursine fed a fresh piton into her breech. 'Forgive me,' Jethro whispered as he seized the lever on the back of Boxiron's spine and shoved it up to five. Top gear. Boxiron jolted straight as if he had been struck by lightning, rotating the hammer in an uppercut that lifted the ursine off her feet and sent her sailing into the bow window of a deserted shop. Too panicked to reload their rifles now that they were thrusting and cutting at the enemy through the crumbling barricade, a handful of the Jagonese convicts turned and ran, yelling in fear, the first to flee collapsing as one of the police militiamen shot him in the back with a pistol.

  'Coward!' yelled Boxiron, striking forward to sink the flat of his hammer into the policeman's gut. 'This is how you lead!' He stepped over the groaning officer's body and vaulted the collapsing barrier, his massive weight clanking into the middle of the Pericurian assault, clearing a circle of broken bones with his warhammer. Shocked ursine stumbled back as this huge iron brute landed in their midst and lashed out at them. 'Take only those that I leave!'

  Jethro looked at his hand in horror as the Jagonese defenders vaulted the blockade and threw themselves down at the stalled, hesitating assault. The hand that had just turned the clock back on everything he had accomplished since rescuing his friend from the influence of the criminal flash mobs in the slums of the Jackelian capital. Jethro pushed through the barricade, just behind the melee, the only evidence of his steamman friend the brief flash of a hammerhead among the screams and shouts. The convicts pressed forward taking Boxiron at his word and impaling the wounded soldiers trying to crawl away along the ground.

  'Please,' Jethro begged them. 'Take them prisoner. Enough, they are wounded.'

  'Savages. Filthy, treacherous wet-snouts. Savage. Savage. Savage.'

  The convicts pushed the ex-parson away as he tried to restrain them. Jethro Daunt stumbled to his knees. 'This is wrong. Wrong.'

  A fist as strong as steel gripped the back of Jethro's neck, pulling him off his knees. It was one of the Pericurians. A fierce scarred grey-furred face stared into his own. The beast was lying on the ground with a sabre driven through her back – mortally wounded, no doubt, but still with enough strength left to crush him. Blood was streaming out of the corner of her mouth. 'This – is – war!'

  She dragged Jethro astride her, her arms pulling him down towards the bloody blade jutting out of her own dark leather armour.

  'For me – and – you!'

  Jethro grunted in agony as he tried to resist his stomach's inevitable inching descent onto the sabre's tip. He was being pulled down to join her in death. Hannah woke up to a darkness filled with spots of light. Was she blind, lying on the seabed with a dwindling reservoir of air, perhaps? No, she could hear the water, but it sounded like the gentle splash of a paddle on the surface. As she stirred, a hand reached out and covered her mouth. A hand covered with rough, bare skin, not ursine fur.

  'Keep your voice down,' whispered the silhouette in the darkness. 'There are Pericurian soldiers on these streets.'

  Hannah realized she was staring up at the LED panels of a vault roof, malfunctioning by the look of them, dark except for a few flares of light dancing along what was left of the imitation sky. 'Where am I?'

  'The Augustine Vault,' said the shadow bending over her. Was that a police militiaman's cloak she could see behind the figure? 'The wet-snouts have taken most of the city now. We're following the Augustine canal east to get to the Seething Round and the Horn of Jago.'

  Hannah tried to move, but her shoulder felt as though someone had been using it for a pincushion and left the pins inside. Gradually, her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. She was horizontal on the deck of a gondola, warm canal water soaking her clothes. Her diving suit had gone. The crew were using oars rather than poles to move the gondola forward, keeping their profile low down on the water.

  'Commodore,' she whispered. 'Are you here?'

  'Just you,' said the silhouette, his cloak shifting behind him as he continued to paddle. 'One of the tugmen found you and brought you inside Hermetica. We were expecting a wet-snout to interrogate. Got quite a surprise when we found a missing church girl.'

  'My friend,' mumbled Hannah. 'He was in the water with me. We had escaped from the Pericurian fleet.'

  'We just found you,' repeated the shadowed figure. 'There's a lot of bodies off the coast now, our and theirs. Our divers got a few mines into their fleet and sent a couple of wet-snout boats down onto the coral. Hah.'

  Was the commodore dead? She remembered seeing the torpedo go past, and Commodore Black would have been closer to the underwater blast than her. Another stupid, useless death served up to the altar of religious-motivated conflict? She had to get to the final piece of the god-formula! If she could just do that, she could put everything right. Hannah was distracted by screams in the distance carrying to the canal, followed by a burst of turret-rifle fire.

  'Poor fools,' hissed the militiaman. 'People hiding in their houses even after we told them to withdraw back to the Horn.'

  'Why is it so dark in here?' Hannah asked quietly.

  'Wet-snouts have blown the power lines. Half the city is in darkness now, or running on battery light.'

  But it was a darkness that protected the boat from the sentries set by the Pericurian army. Slowly but silently their gondola followed the course of the canal through the blacked-out vault, lit only by the malfunctioning ceiling and the occasional fire from a burning street in the distance. Under empty bridges and past deserted boulevards and squares. Hannah had never seen the city so empty. Even in the near-des
erted quarters of Hermetica you could always hear the barking of a dog or smell the distant oven of some solitary resident still living in the home their family had occupied for generations. A lone holdout. There was always the chance of meeting a policeman on patrol, or the city workers out cropping bamboo to ensure it didn't overrun a near-empty vault. But this. This wasn't emptiness, this was desolation. A grim reminder of how Pericur would abandon the capital to the ursks and the ab-locks and the other monsters of the wilds once they had evicted the race of man. Hannah remembered the dusty, empty atmospheric station of the mining town at Worleyn where she, Nandi and the commodore had nearly died; icy winds blowing through cracked roof domes. Was this to be their fate now? She might have been better off staying a prisoner on the Pericurian fleet after all. At least she would have been left with her memories of Hermetica City, as it had been when she and Chalph played across its streets. When Alice Gray had been there to admonish her for missing lessons in the cathedral's school.

  Sliding through the darkness, not even daring to cough, Hannah squatted low as the gondola took her across what had once been the city she had known as home. Eventually they entered a tunnel carrying a bad reek, one of the sanitation passages that kept the canal waters moving and clear of refuse that fell in. When the channel became too narrow, the gondola men lifted their vessel out of the water and hauled it up onto one of the walkways, following the dark tunnel on foot to an opening in the next chamber across, before laying the craft down in the next canal and recommencing their voyage.

  If seeing the empty war-ravaged vaults had come as a shock, Hannah found the sight of the familiar streets of the Seething Round even more painful, filled with barricades and terrified volunteers pointing rifles towards the increasingly loud explosions and weapons' fire from the neighbouring vaults. Here at least there was light, and all pretence at stealth was abandoned. The chemical battery on the back of the gondola was given noisy life and the prow of their vessel tilted up as they sailed past wrecked canal boats and skips scuppered by their hundred to deny them to the invaders. There at last was the cathedral, but its magnificent stained-glass windows were dark and the bridge over the Grand Canal part-fortified and manned by what appeared to be anyone willing to carry a gun, pike or sabre.