by Stephen Hunt
‘Synthetic morality is hardly mumbo jumbo,’ protested Daunt. ‘My skills in these matters have never failed me before.’
‘Maybe you’ve eaten a bad prawn,’ said Dick, toying with his greying moustache. He was enjoying needling the ex-churchman.
Sadly clung to his cane, waving away a sailor circling the room with a tray of drinks. ‘I don’t blame you, Mister Daunt. All that pitching and rolling in the launch to get across here. It’s enough to muck up anyone’s plumbing.’
Daunt peered across the room. ‘But it’s only the vice-admiral. Everyone else I’ve observed at the function is reading normally by my faculties. I wonder? I think it’s time that the master of the Purity Queen was introduced to our host for the evening.’
Dick groaned. They were meant to be keeping a low profile on the warship. Just enough for their absence not to be noticed and the Purity Queen ’s position in the convoy fall under suspicion. Having the ex-parson bearding the commanding officer in his own lair just because the amateur’s church senses were running spiky was hardly part of the plan. It wouldn’t take much for Daunt’s ignorance of the smooth running of a u-boat to be called into question, the kind of conversation that would be expected to pass between two nautical masters. Dick was desperately casting for a way for a first officer to divert his skipper without arousing additional suspicions when the ship’s siren sounded and did the job for him.
A voice followed the alarm, reverberating around the room from wall-mounted speakers. ‘General Quarters! All hands, all hands man your battle stations!’
Saved by the bell, except I don’t think this indicates any improvement in my sodding fortunes.
Two officers came running into the mess deck, out of dress uniform, a seriousness of purpose as they whispered to the vice-admiral. He nodded grimly and then departed with one of the pair trotting after him, leaving the task of explaining the situation to the remaining lieutenant. Even the vessel’s stabilisers couldn’t disguise the fact that the warship was picking up speed, the mess slanting upward as the ship rose higher on her aquaplanes. Outside her portholes the spray of stars in the sky flitted past as the flagship pressed on faster, the sounds of water churning under her monstrous propulsion wheels swelling to a crescendo. The assemblage fell into a hush for an explanation. As the strident wail of the alarm dropped away, the silence that replaced it hung heavy enough in the air for the Purity Queen ’s screws to carve slices out of it.
‘Quiet, please. We’ve picked up the sonar signature of Advocacy war craft ahead of the convoy. When we attempted to alter course to bypass them, other elements of the gill-neck fleet rose to the surface to our bow and stern, blocking our safe passage.’
Sounds of panic started to rise among the merchant crewmen.
‘They mean to extract their toll,’ noted Boxiron. It sounded as if the brute was relishing the chance for battle.
‘Send us back to our ship,’ someone shouted. The cry was picked up and began to echo out among the milling merchants and trader officers.
‘We are manoeuvring too fast to drop our launches,’ called the lieutenant. ‘You’ll need to stay confined to the wardroom until we’ve outrun the gill-necks.’
Angry shouts came from the guests, demands to slow down and sail them back to the vessels where their responsibilities lay. Used to unquestioning command on their own ships, hard men who could command coarse sailors, this wasn’t, Dick considered, the kind of crowd you wanted to turn ugly on you.
Dick watched the sailors who had been acting as stewards and hosts vanishing purposefully into the bowels of the ship, called to their battle stations. Not sprinting, but hardly slouching either. Well trained. Cogs in a machine that’s been greased by practice. ‘We need to get back to the boat bay.’
‘I concur,’ said Daunt, his gaze flitting between the angry faces of the convoy’s shipmasters. ‘It’s only a matter of time before someone on the bridge thinks to assign a company of marines to ensure the safety of their guests — not to mention our compliance.’
Sadly groaned and extradited himself from the comfort of a chair where he had sunk. ‘I’m not one to shy away from a little aggro, Mister Tull, but does it have to kick off at sea?’
‘I won’t let you die,’ said Dick, pushing his informant towards the door they had used to enter the mess hall. ‘I still need you to testify for me, don’t I?’
‘My word won’t count for much, says I.’
‘It’ll count for a lot less if I let Walsingham’s assassins toss your corpse in an alley back home.’ And it’s not as if I’ve got that many friends left alive, is it?
Boxiron closed the door behind them. The four of them were standing in the open on a deck gantry, the ship’s aft lanterns running behind them. Dick stared out between the flagship’s churning wheels. Nothing. How could you hope to spot anything out there? Just dark crashing waves, the night sky’s canopy only set apart from the sea by stars. No sign of the gill-necks. No sign of a war brewing.
‘They haven’t tried to stop a convoy before, have they?’ Sadly asked.
‘Harried only,’ said Boxiron. ‘I believe this counts as an escalation in tensions.’
It’s never made easy. Not for me. But it was more than that. Something about tonight felt wrong, and it wasn’t only the ex-parson’s odd reaction to the vice-admiral. The gill-neck force just happened to have chosen the precise time to corral the convoy when the masters of the convoy were off their bridges and on the flagship. Even at the best of times, moving a convoy was more akin to a drover driving his flock to market. With the captains gathered here, it wasn’t so much a convoy, as a seaborne shooting gallery. And as used as Dick was to bad luck, this felt too much like it was straying from coincidence into the realm he specialized in. Treason.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘The escort ships are pulling out of line and forming up as an independent flotilla,’ announced the sailor on the Purity Queen ’s sonar station, two greasy hands clasped to his earphones with his eyes shut, as if he could picture in his mind the ironclads taking position.
‘A grand disposition for cutting through the gill-necks’ ranks,’ said the commodore. ‘But it leaves our line of civilian tubs as ripe for picking as plums on a warm summer’s day. They’re not going to be happy out there.’
Charlotte knew how the merchant vessels’ crews felt. Waking up groggy and disoriented and with bizarre memories of a pursuit by monsters was bad enough. But waking up to find herself pressed into the crew of this strange submersible craft; its roguish company with their insular manners and sailor’s slang — an alien tongue of binnacle lists, drift counts and parbuckling — a miniature kingdom of cramped corridors and cabins and unfamiliar equipment. And everywhere Charlotte wandered the same odour of burnt oil and uniforms sweated by near-tropical heat while running submerged. She might still have King Jude’s sceptre, but the price she was paying for its possession was growing higher by the day. Sometimes, it was hard to tell where reality started and her delirium-haunted dreams had halted.
Charlotte piped up. ‘What about our people on the flagship?’
Our people. Well, the steamman had saved her life, so she supposed she owed him, not to mention the eccentric ex-churchman who seemed determined to warn her of supernatural threats to her life. Feeling gratitude to people wasn’t something Charlotte was used to, or a situation she felt at ease with. Especially because she wouldn’t complain if the commodore decided to turn his u-boat around and head right back for the solid land of home. I’d take my chances in the rookeries and disappear into the underworld. There was only so far the reach of a bunch of evil royalists and crooked secret police could extend, wasn’t there?
‘The Zealous is turning to meet the enemy vessels,’ said the commodore. ‘They’re moving at a rate of knots now, too fast to lower their launches safely. Jethro and that sly old bugger Dick Tull will be confined on board, though not willingly, I’ll wager, if Boxiron slips his gears.’ He scratched his beard thoughtfully.
‘Fire up our fish-scales outside — let’s see if the money I paid that brainy wretch in the naval yards is any more useful than a scraping of barnacles growing on my new hull. Prepare to bring us around, helm.’
‘Stealth plating receiving charge,’ reported the crewman. There was the slightest of vibrations from outside the hull, as if a tiny mosquito had come awake and was doing circuits of their cramped control room. ‘Acoustic profile is approaching optimum.’
The commodore checked a bank of machinery that looked more recently installed than most of the rusting, heavily greased equipment on board. ‘As slippery as an eel and hopefully as hard to seize too, to the phones of every boat in the water. Down-plane two degrees, helm, slip us out of the convoy and turn us around. Run us into the wake of The Zealous.’
‘We’re taking pings,’ sounded the phones man. ‘No back-echo. We’re displacing all incoming noise!’
‘One number short on the convoy’s list, then.’ said the commodore, his voice satisfied. ‘We’ve got two hours or so before we have to rest the stealth plates, or the mortal things will burn themselves out. After The Zealous, now. If I know Jethro and the rest of our friends, they’ll be pushing off the warship before long. We’ll pick them up and let Vice-admiral Cockburn and the gill-necks dance the sea waltz together while we set a course for the heart of the Advocacy.’
‘Fish in the water!’ warned the sailor on the phones station. ‘Multiple launches running hot. Depth charge spreads descending too.’
His words were borne out by a distant reverberation, the Purity Queen’s hull quivering at the faraway detonations.
‘Who fired first?’ the commodore demanded.
‘Simultaneous exchange of fire, skipper,’ said the sailor. ‘Damned if both fleets didn’t open up on each other at the same time!’
‘Bloody fools. This is meant to be a convoy, not a wicked sea duel. Cockburn’s orders should have been to avoid trouble, not provoke it.’
Another volley of depth charge explosions shook the u-boat.
‘Are they shooting at us?’ asked Charlotte.
‘They can’t even see the Purity Queen now, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘No, those are our fleet’s depth charges, and meant for the blessed Advocacy’s boats. The gill-necks don’t have surface vessels as such — though their fleet’s thick with submersibles. Take us up to periscope depth, pilot, I need to take a peek at what those blockheads are doing up there.’
A minute later and the old u-boat man had pulled a steel tube down out of the ceiling, using two grips on its side to twist the periscope around.
‘Skipper,’ warned the sailor on the sonar desk. ‘I’m picking up the sound of gyroscope rings being rotated.’
‘I see them, phones,’ said the commodore. ‘Starfish surfacing in the water, at least three of the terrible things.’
Charlotte had to resist grabbing the scope from the vessel’s skipper. ‘Starfish?’
‘Nothing good for our convoy, lass. The gill-necks have come armed for the hunt. Look at the terrible things getting ready to go into operation. That’s it for Jethro and our friends. They belong to the gill-necks now!’
‘What is that thing?’ shouted Dick. On their starboard, a metallic dome rising out of the waves started rotating, sea water pouring off five massive metal arms spinning around its head. There seemed to be nodules running across the arms, hundreds of them, giving the appendages the appearance of octopus tentacles.
Boxiron ran to the railing on the ship’s gantry, his vision plate emitting clicking sounds as his head jutted out over the edge. Whatever tricks Boxiron’s skull was playing with the sight of the bizarre carousel-like machine out there, the steamman recoiled back as if he had been physically struck. ‘A boarding device! The capsules in the arms are packed full of soldiers.’
Multiple detonations sounded, dozens of capsules exploding out from each arm. As sharp as a steel needle at their business end, the capsules rammed through the hull-platform of The Zealous, the vessel shaking as they pounded into her. On a normal ship the capsules would have struck just above the waterline, but on the wheel-ship they sank into the flat hull of the platform riding high above the waves, metal splinters shattering where each of the boarding devices hit. It was only then that Dick noticed a ring holding a large steel cable built into the flat rear of each capsule, the lines still connected to the dome-like thing surfaced off their side. With a hideous squealing sound, the dome began to rotate, rewinding the multiple steel lines it had cast out back into a groove around its base. As the cables wound, the wheel-ship started to list badly, the hydrofoils on the opposite side of The Zealous rising out of the water. It’s towing us towards it!
On the ship’s gantry, Dick, Jethro, Boxiron and Sadly were thrown across the deck as though they were little more than ants on a capsizing toy boat. Dick’s hand lurched, catching hold of a depth charge platform and hanging on for dear life as their ship was dragged across the waves. Boxiron’s firm grip lashed out onto the depth charge loader, clutching hard onto Jethro Daunt with the other, while Sadly swung in turn on the ex-parson’s hand, attempting to jam his cane into something solid enough to support his weight. Sailors unluckier than the four of them were sent tumbling off the superstructure and decks, shaken into the sea below and swallowed without a trace by the peaking waves. Beyond The Zealous, all was confusion. The long line of the convoy had broken, ship’s lights scattering across the sea, thunder sounding from warships’ guns, explosions and fires flowering in the darkness. But this ship, they want intact. As The Zealous was drawn in against the boarding machine, the angle of her deck righted, Dick tossed back from the edge into a wall behind. Boxiron spun into a porthole, smashing the toughened glass into a shower of shards as his arm shot out to stabilize himself.
With The Zealous reeled in alongside the Advocacy’s machine, a flurry of magnetic cables lashed out from a ring of holes at the apex of the siege craft, flying over the top of The Zealous and securing the gill-neck’s catch. A tangle of lines impaled the soft skin of one of the vessel’s pocket airships, the ’stat three-quarters reversed out of the hangar at the stern of the flagship as the projectiles struck. Capture cables tightened and the impaled airship crashed towards the launch deck, her command bridge and engine cars smashing down into the wheel-ship. A series of explosions rocked the vessel, a propeller cartwheeling across the deck in a cloud of debris as the airship’s expansion-engine gas ignited. Smoke gushed out from an open swinging door behind Dick, cries of alarm and orders drifting across the superstructure as a crew of sailors struggled past, unravelling a fire hose between them while Dick and the others picked themselves up. Tellingly, the guns of The Zealous had fallen silent.
‘This is a pretty picture,’ moaned Sadly, brushing broken glass off his clothes. ‘Pride of the bleeding fleet sea arm and we’re stuck here, a fly in the gill-neck’s web.’
‘They want the ship as a prize,’ said Dick.
‘Her capture would make a powerful propaganda coup for the Advocacy,’ said Daunt. ‘That much is certain.’
Dick and Boxiron leant over the vessel’s railing. In front of them the vast wheels were churning uselessly; behind them a wheel had stopped turning altogether, tangled by the cable shots of the underwater nation’s strange vessel.
‘Too far to jump. Even with a buoyancy vest, the fall would break your softbody necks.’ Boxiron glanced over at Daunt. ‘Not mine though.’
‘Let us hope that our boat bays are still in friendly hands, then, old steamer.’
‘Survive the fall, maybe, but you’ll float as good as a sinking rock,’ said Dick.
‘That is a common misconception,’ said Daunt. ‘In fact, Boxiron will float like a sealed drum and fare rather better, I fear, than we will.’
‘Well, good for him, amateur. How about you float home on him? Me, I’ll choose Blacky’s old tub again.’
Small arms fire chattered within the vessel, boarding parties clashing with Jackelian marines. How many gill-neck sold
iers were shot across in each of those capsules? Sweet Circle, it’s never made easy. Not for me.
‘How are we going to get out of here?’ complained Sadly.
‘I possess perfect positional bearings,’ said Boxiron, the tone of superiority positively leaking from his voicebox. ‘I can place our location inside the ship, including our point of entry on this vessel, within two feet.’
‘Just take us back to the boat bay,’ growled Dick.
‘Follow me. I shall lead the way.’
Taking Boxiron at his word, the party plunged inside, allowing the steamman to take the lead. Whatever havoc the gill-neck boarding parties were creating inside the vessel, their handiwork had done significant damage so far. Gas lamps set into corridor walls flickered intermittently, throwing areas of the vessel into darkness — a gloom broken by the bobbing hand lamps of crewmen scurrying about on action stations. Worse still, the stabilizers that balanced the platform above the ugly propulsion wheels had been damaged. Previously stable enough in choppy waters that Dick had been able to rest a glass on a mess table, the drink’s contents as still as a mill pond on a summer’s afternoon, now the ship’s passages lurched and shifted with each swell of the waves below. Unlike a normal vessel, the wheel-ship didn’t possess the natural stability in the water that a keel’s weight would have given her.
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 red-coated 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.
