by Stephen Hunt
Staggering like drunken sailors, the four of them navigated by Boxiron’s supposedly infallible sense of direction, clambering down steep ladders with ridiculously thin treads, as if the naval architects had deliberately been trying to create injuries from falling. At times, Dick thought he recognized some of the corridors from their escorted journey up from the boat bay. Mostly, he was navigating a narrow-passaged purgatory of unfamiliar shifting iron walls, slippery floors and intermittently hissing gaslights. They blundered through the strong smell of sea water, machine oil and the acrid tinge of smoke and gun cordite. If there was any consolation, it was that Sadly appeared to be sharing Dick’s tribulations in magnified misery, the green-tinged informant’s mouth intermittently opening to make gurgling noises as if he was going to vomit. His cane tapped out when their illumination failed, knocking at the sides of the corridor, grunting as he hauled his weight along on his clubfoot. Jethro Daunt, by contrast, seemed serenely untroubled by the confusion and carnage they were passing. Unbothered by the sound of running boots, shouts, the distant firecracker rattle of weapons fire, sweaty faces of redcoated marines looming up like devils in the half-light as they came pushing past towards the fray. There was, though, a quizzical look on the ex-parson’s face. As if he didn’t quite understand why they should be here, on The Zealous, at this time. As if their involvement was a puzzle with a definitive answer that could be teased out. What they found instead was a corridor full of gill-necks below. On the opposite side of a two-storey chamber, long-barrelled rifles were raised against a handful of marines, fire spurting from slots in the weapons’ muzzles as they exchanged fire with the crew. Snout-shaped silver war masks hid the soldiers’ faces, while their elongated skulls bobbed with a cone of frilled-ridges capped by a fin-like slash of bone. Roughly of human height, the heavily muscled scales of the attackers’ wet skin shone in the half-light – not much of it on show beneath carapace-like chestplates. Armour that might have been ripped off crabs, shell plates covering metallic mesh that shimmered with oil rainbows in the flickering lamplight. Used to being able to cut rapidly through the deep waters of the ocean, the underwater warriors moved with sinuous speed in the unnaturally thin environment of the air. The gill-necks betrayed their origins as a branch of mankind’s evolutionary tree … vestigial surface lungs that could allow them to exist briefly out of the water fluttering weakly below their chests, a reverse rebreather mask connected into their masks to allow them to suck at the precious sea water they craved. The Advocacy soldiers’ weapons gave off snake-hisses as they fired, the outnumbered human sailors facing them answering back with the oak splintering crackle of their sea pattern rifles. With the initial volley depleted, each side charged at each other, bayonet stabbing against bayonet, although the gill-necks’ blades were more like crystal-edged spears running underneath the long length of their weapons’ barrels.
So, this is what we’re bleeding fighting? We’re no match for their strength.
‘They’re blocking the way to the boat bay,’ roared Boxiron. ‘I fight in five!’
Behind Boxiron, Daunt gripped the rusting gear lever of the hulking steamman and dragged it slowly through its network of grooves until it came to a rest in the slot where someone had scrawled ‘murderous’ on the plate. Tilting a piercing spear of steam towards the ceiling, Boxiron vaulted the rail and hurled himself down towards the floor of the circular chamber and the two sides locked in a mêlée. A cry echoed up from his voicebox as he plummeted, a metallic steamman landslide. ‘Top gear!’
He fights in five.
Coming hard and fast, the gill-necks threw themselves onto Boxiron, the crystal blades of their weapons bouncing off his hull plates, scraping and scratching his already dented surface. Two iron fists lashed back, cracking carapace armour, bones and flesh, sending broken bodies flying into bulkheads. No more sidestepping his true nature, attempting to temper his clumsy malfunctioning body. No more trying to dampen down his servos so that he didn’t inadvertently crack floors, dent walls, snap the toe bones of those standing too close to him. This is what Boxiron was for. Damage. Indiscriminate. Clanking. Raw. Damage. His legs lashed, his arms flailed, his head butted. Steam was spent and blood was shed.
Taking advantage of the confusion, Dick, Jethro and Sadly slipped down the spiral stair gantry to the chamber’s floor level, circling to the side of the fight, the few human sailors left alive demoted to the battle’s periphery. For its centre, its core, was now the throb of a boiler heart, Boxiron a wild hurricane of metal whipping through the disordered ranks of the enemy’s warriors.
Dick scooped up a rifle from one of the fallen soldiers, pulling off the corpse’s pack of shells. By his side, Sadly triggered his sleeve gun, the small single-shot pistol thudding into his open hand.
‘I told you not to bring that peashooter. We’re meant to be u-boat traders.’
‘Sailors shoot each other, don’t they, Mister Tull?’
‘Against those gill-necks, you’re more likely to annoy them.’
There was a corridor ahead of their chamber, the passage that led down to the boat bays – now filled with gill-neck warriors falling back under the fury of Boxiron’s onslaught. Bodies lay littered in the steamman’s wake, some broken and as still as death, others writhing in agony on the floor. Dick added to it, the butt of his rifle cracking down into the skull of one of the warriors trying to pull himself back onto his feet. There was a satisfying crack as the gill-neck slumped back down.
‘That was hardly sporting,’ protested Daunt.
Said the man who’s unleashed a metal demon onto the enemy. ‘What, you think there’s rules for this, amateur?’
‘He was trying to surrender.’
‘He was going to take a bite out of your leg!’
The force of the impact had dislodged the gill-neck’s silver mask, revealing humanoid features that were proudly defined by a burnished lightly scaled skin. Fierce and proud, even beaten unconscious. Its teeth were sharp and white, though, Dick had got that much right. They were famous for their bites weren’t they? At least, so the colourful stories of the penny-dreadfuls would have it – the Kingdom’s drowning mariners murdered by the savages of the sea before being dragged down to drown in their submerged palaces.
Dick felt the breeze ahead. They were close to the boat bay at the bottom of the vessel. He could almost taste his freedom. Dozens of runabouts and launches suspended on crane lines waiting to be lowered down to the choppy surface of the sea below. One of the little beauties had his name on it, waiting to take him back to the Purity Queen.
‘Coronation Market rules, Mister Tull?’ said Sadly.
Coronation Market. Middlesteel’s worst slum district. Guaranteed to leave its streets with a knife in your back and a bad disease between your legs. ‘They’re the only rules that count.’
As they pushed out into the open space of the boat bay, the party was assailed by gill-necks on either side of the boarding gantries, strong, muscled arms holding drum-headed weapons. The enemy soldiers opened up and weighted nets spun out from the strange guns, slapping into the steamman from both directions. Boxiron began to pull the netting off, tearing at it even before its lead-weighted ends had finished wrapping around him, but as he clawed at the material, Dick noticed the netting was still connected to the weapons by dangling cables. Cables that jolted as the charge they were carrying struck Boxiron, the steamman making a very organic sounding yelp as the mesh glimmered with the devastating force of the power electric. A deafening crash echoed around the boat bay as Boxiron tumbled onto the deck, his netting dancing with sparks.
Dick hardly had a moment to take in the sight of the felled steamman twitching on the floor before he was smashed in the back. Slammed to the floor just in time to see the bare webbed feet of a fresh boarding party of gill-neck fighters pistol-whipping Sadly and Daunt down to the deck with a flurry of blows. The rifle was kicked out of Dick’s hand and sent spinning over the edge of the boat bay into the waiting sea. Vanishing
, along with any hope of an escape back to the u-boat.
A swift kick in his side turned Dick over. He was greeted by the sight of a dozen gill-neck weapons pointing at him, blades under their barrels balanced inches away from his bruised face.
‘Trespassing surface dweller vermin,’ hissed the sibilant voice of the nearest warrior, the frill of gills in his neck vibrating as he talked. ‘Let us see how long you have left.’
‘Left before what?’ coughed Dick.
‘Before your death, surface dweller. Before that.’
‘She’s dead in the water,’ said the commodore, banging the side of the periscope in frustration. ‘Damn their evil starfish, they have The Zealous. Wrapped like a kitten in yarn.’
‘Jethro and Boxiron?’ asked Charlotte.
‘No boats have launched,’ says the commodore. ‘Ah, the poor unlucky fools. The best we can hope for is that our friends are still on the ship and not among the poor wretches treading water underneath The Zealous.’
‘We can’t get them off?’
‘Not with a starfish wrapped around The Zealous, lass. Those iron beasts are troop carriers – nautical siege engines. That vessel will be swarming with boarding parties. If there’s one crumb of comfort for our friends, it’s that the gill-necks must be looking to take prisoners and prizes. Hostages to bargain with, and a prize vessel to embarrass Parliament into negotiating.’
He surrendered the periscope for Charlotte to gaze out for a moment onto the carnage. It was as if an octopus had clambered over the dark silhouette of The Zealous, two vessels locked in a death struggle which the Jackelians had already lost. With The Zealous’s propulsion wheels stilled, fires were left burning across her decks, lights in her portholes flickering. Sailors who had fallen off or abandoned the flagship were visible as small as bugs under her beam, struggling in the water.
‘Phones,’ said the commodore. ‘Any sign that the gill-necks are aware that we’re here?’
‘No pings being received, skipper,’ answered the sailor. ‘They’re too busy chasing the rest of the convoy off.’
‘They’ve still got eyes, though,’ said the commodore half to himself. ‘We are taking a mortal risk, sitting here. We just need a single gill-neck swimming close enough to lay their peepers on the Purity Queen.’
Charlotte sighed. What had she been thinking? That they would just sail up to The Zealous while Jethro Daunt and the steamman tossed themselves off the deck and landed in front of the u-boat? This was the reality of war in the periscope’s sweep … confusion and murder and darkness and men drowning in the water or burning in the oily debris set afire, two vessels locked together while marines tried to hunt down the opposition. A world shrunk no larger than a corridor down a gun sight and the comrade minding their rear from ambush.
‘What do we do now?’
‘We wait and we watch, lass. For a boat to launch with our friends, or for the cables of the starfish to disengage from the hull of The Zealous, or for our clever stealth skin to wear out. Either way, we get to leave.’
‘What will the cables disengaging mean?’
‘That the wicked gill-necks have taken the ship. That all resistance on board has been beaten down.’
Charlotte could tell from the strained lines on the faces of the crew how dangerous staying here was. An oppressive silence spread amongst the men and women waiting on the bridge, fingers nervously wiping the same oily spot on an air scrubber, the red knuckles of hands clutching onto the sides of seat stations. All of them with ears cocked to the distant sounds filtering through the hull of the u-boat. Never was a silence so loud. They clung to the hush expectantly, waiting for a sudden sound, anything that would indicate their discovery. But what would that be? A torpedo detonating against their hull, a sudden inrush of water followed by the screams of dying men struggling to seal off bulkheads?
At last, the commodore folded the handles on the periscope and sent it retracting down into the floor with a clatter as it locked into place. ‘The starfish is disengaging and making for a dive. How long have we got left on our stealth cells?’
‘Ten minutes, skipper.’
‘Time enough to clear these wicked waters. Down-bubble two degrees. Slip us past the Advocacy flotilla. We’ll hug the boils of the Fire Sea until we’re close to the seanore hunting grounds.’
Charlotte wiped the sweat dripping into her eyes away. She realized her clothes were soaking with it. ‘Are we going on?’
‘Only forward, lass. There’s nothing behind for us, not until we get the answer of what my sister is up to with the gill-necks and those rascals who paid you to steal King Jude’s sceptre. Between the cover of the magma flows and the Purity Queen on silent running, we’ll show the gill-necks they are not the only masters of the ocean. There are a few lessons in seamanship they’ve sill got to learn from old Blacky.’
Charlotte nodded grimly. Why do I get the feeling that it’s not an answer that any of us are going to like? Half the people who had tried to help her plucked by fate and captured by the gill-necks, or worse, as dead on the flagship as poor old Damson Robinson in her pie shop. I’m not a lucky person to be around.
Charlotte woke with a jolt, eyes opening to the sight of her cabin’s porthole; the same circle of armoured glass where she had just been dreaming of monstrous faces pressed up against the window. The oily, scaled skin of their distended heads banging and whacking to gain entry, break through the u-boat’s hull and feast on her blood.
As Charlotte struggled to separate the reality from the dream, she realized that the Eye of Fate was leaking a blue light. A mist of illumination spread across the metal floor, shapes similar to those she’d been dreaming breaking up as if the first sunshine of morning was dispersing it. What was happening to her? This had never happened before. Ever since that thug, Cloake, had tried to kill her back in the Kingdom, nothing had been the same since. She touched the jewel nervously as she kicked off the blanket from her cot. You protected me back in the capital. Is this your price, now? Driving me half-insane with these impossible visions? Except that part of Charlotte knew that maybe they weren’t so impossible after all. Distracted, she realized that the tapping from her dream had returned. Someone was knocking on the door of her cabin. Charlotte got out of the cot and reflexively reached out to touch King Jude’s sceptre laid out on the top bunk. All the money she had saved up from her robberies, squirreled away in the Kingdom’s banks and counting houses. What use was it to her now? As good as exiled, on the run with her so-called patrons waiting to murder her if she ever showed her face again at home. No, she couldn’t think like that. She still had a small fortune here in the sceptre. She just had to find a way to parlay the stupid antique into its true wealth. Find the leverage, and the rest will follow. The money always helped.
It was Jared Black standing outside her cabin, the old u-boat man carrying a long metal object that had the look of a weapon about it.
She raised her hands, mockingly. ‘Stand and deliver?’
Black shook the long device. ‘An old friend. The same mortal weapon the nomads of the sea use underwater. A shock-spear. It fires a directed current accurate up to thirty feet below the waves.’
‘That doesn’t sound like much of a range?’
‘For anything further away, they use a rotor-spear, cast like a handheld torpedo with an internal motor to carry it towards its target. You see one of those heading for you, lass, you swim out of the way as fast as you can.’
‘Time to leave the Purity Queen?’ Charlotte felt a frisson of fear.
‘We’re in the seanore hunting grounds,’ confirmed the commodore. He led her through the u-boat’s corridors, down a ladder and into a chamber surrounded by diving suits, a central well of an airlock set in the middle of the suiting area.
‘Let’s see if the rough rascals remember me kindly.’
‘Honey, why would they remember you at all?’
‘I spent a little time with them in my youth. After the fleetin-exile was brok
en at Porto Principe, there weren’t many friendly ports for an ex-royalist officer with no money and the stench of defeat clinging to his uniform. Losing myself with the nomads of the sea was a blessed relief. It’s a simple way of life, following schools of fish and hunting for the day without a thought for tomorrow. You can forget yourself and relinquish your mortal cares.’
She recognized the almost wistful tone in the old man’s voice. Right now escaping her past seemed a good idea, to Charlotte. Two sailors arrived to help her and the commodore suit up. The diving suits were made of a soft brown canvas that felt as if someone had spent many long nights oiling them, their rebreather tanks and helmets bronzed metal cast with a variety of seashell and ocean creature mouldings. As the helmet was locked down onto her shoulders, she was sealed in; the last owner’s scent blended with a faint mustiness at the suit being kept too long racked. One of the sailors attached a thin cable between Charlotte and the commodore’s belt and his voice echoed in her helmet.
‘Keep the voice line attached, lass, unless there’s an emergency and we have to break away from each other.’
‘What qualifies as an emergency?’
‘If it happens, you’ll know it.’
After Charlotte had been given the thumbs up by the crewmen checking her suit, the commodore removed a cigar box-sized metal device from the racks and clipped it onto the front of her suit, pulling a rubber cable out from the device and connecting it to her helmet. She noticed that the commodore had a similar arrangement on his own diving suit. ‘The voice line allows us to speak direct-like to each other without anyone earwigging in on our conversation. This box, though, will allow you to hear what the seanore are saying in the water and project your voice back out. When you talk, hold your hand over your heart, so people know it’s your voice coming over the phones. You forget to do that, the seanore will think you’re lying or trying to hide something. It shows your hand is away from your knife and the trigger of a shock-spear.’
