by James Axler
Ryan fell over the quarterdeck rail and dropped the seven feet to the main deck. Throughout the shrieks and screams and shouts of battle an undercurrent of moans went up as the Glory crew saw Ryan’s fall. He distantly knew that once he was dead it was very likely the crew would surrender the ship. Commander Miles and Manrape would be executed as too dangerous to live. Glory’s female crew would be reduced to rape slaves. The able seamen slaughtered. The remaining crew would submit and go back to the bad old days of being a Sabbath crew.
Ryan pushed himself to hands and knees. The battle on the deck boiled, but none came to save him. It seemed battles between captains were sacred. Ryan wished someone had told him. His saber clanged contemptuously to the deck beside him. Sabbath wanted an example made.
“Pick it up.” Ryan looked at his right arm. It was soaked in his blood from shoulder to fingertips. He glared back at Sabbath and filled his left hand with his dirk. Sabbath spoke quietly for just the two of them. “I will give you one thing—or rad-blasted scum, I have always heard you Deathlanders were tough. They say you have to be, given the pesthole you live in. But you? You are also brave, and no man since the breaking has ever risen to captain so fast. I salute your seamanship and your courage. But now I must humiliate you for the benefit of all crews concerned. You will be marked in no books. You and your friends shall die and be forgotten, and now I must humiliate you. Rise.”
Ryan’s limbs betrayed him and fell back to hands and knees.
Ironman sailors roared. Sabbath’s voice rose. He was used to shouting orders in a gale. “Oracle! The doomie! He swore I would die the day I took back the Glory!” The battle slackened. The numbers were almost even now, but the Glory crew backed off to watch Ryan’s demise. “He foretold I would die by his right hand!”
Four Ironman sailors came up the hatch and hurled Oracle’s body to the deck. They had stripped and mutilated him. The Ironman and Lady Evil crews cheered. The Glory crew stared in stunned horror. Sweet Marie let go of her ruined face and let out a terrible cry. Many fell to their knees. Sabbath looked up. His daughter, Blue, held the prow. He looked to Kang and tilted his head at Ryan. “Let him be beaten.”
Kang laid into Ryan. The knotted ropes slammed into him. All fighting had ceased. Sailors were rare things in the world, and Sabbath wanted most of them. The Glory crew flinched and cried out with each blow. Ryan could do nothing to save himself. His one solace was that he wasn’t screaming.
After a dozen blows, Sabbath held up a hand. Kang ceased and wiped his whip so it would bite better. Sabbath held out his hand. “Now, rise, One-Eye.” Ryan tried to push himself up. He got two crawling steps forward and fell. “Rise now and know the mercy of my blade, or lie to be beaten to death like a dog on the deck.”
Ryan’s left hand found his dirk. He could hear his crew weeping at the sight of him. Ryan felt an uncomfortable jab in his chest. He put his right hand beneath him. His palm sank into the stiff orange fur of a mutated ape’s mummified backhand. Ryan’s fingers laced between the horrible digits like it was a five-bladed push-dagger. He pushed himself to his hands and knees and saw Sabbath’s shadow cast onto the deck before him. Once more he felt Oracle’s last letter burning against his breast. He heard Oracle’s words of hope and doom in his head. Sabbath raised his short sword for the decapitation. Ryan saw Jak down, with his white hair clotted with blood. Ricky lay on the deck clutching his right hand with a pair of cutlasses pointed at him. J.B. and Mildred were nowhere to be seen.
Doc shouted from somewhere on the other ship. The ring of his steel told he was the last Glory man fighting. “Ryan!”
Ryan saw the shadow of the blade behind him swing.
He thought of Krysty and decided on his last act on Earth.
Ryan lurched up and shoved out his dirk. Sabbath’s blow deflected and shaved flesh off his shoulder. Ryan got one foot beneath him and stabbed the mutant paw up. Three of the outsized, silver-clawed digits punched into Emmanuel Sabbath’s throat. Sabbath’s jaw dropped open in shock as he gagged on the mutant phalanges stopping his glottis. Ryan ripped the paw free. Sabbath fell blinking, gaping and drowning in his own blood. Ryan reeled. Blue screamed for her father from the prow.
Ironman sailors screamed in terror as Mr. Squid came arm-scuttling at full height down the gangway from the quarterdeck on four arms with a boarding ax, a Korean sword and two pikes in the rest. Manrape, covered with blood, came down the other gangway followed by Rood and Strawmaker. His held his scattergun reversed. The bayonet was gone and he tapped the buttstock into his palm. “I’ll kill anything that moves!”
Doc’s head appeared over the rail. Like Ryan his right arm was covered with gore from shoulder to sword point. Unlike Ryan it all appeared to belong to others. He peered quizzically at the tableau before him. “Did we win?”
“Kill them all!” Kang bellowed.
A thudding sound erupted, as if a giant was running up the main hatch. Krysty erupted onto the main deck as if on invisible wings. She was covered in blood from Kang’s beating. Her titian tresses snaked around her head. It could have been a trick of the light, but she seemed to glow from within. She held a pair of spare capstan bars in each hand. She hit a cluster of Canadians like a berserk windmill reaping limbs and bodies like wheat. Sabbath’s crew screamed, and Krysty suddenly whirled on Kang.
Ryan shoved the monkey paw skyward and managed one last ragged shout. “Oracle!”
The crew of the Hand of Glory fell on their attackers screaming like banshees. “ORACLLLLLLLLLLE!”
Ryan fell on his face.
* * *
“COME ON, CAPTAIN.” Mildred’s voice came through a dense dark fog. “Ryan? Ryan? Come on, I know you’re in there. You were here this morning.” Ryan opened his eye. He was lying on his stomach. Mildred was trying to put some soup in his mouth with a spoon.
“Krysty,” Ryan croaked.
“Right here.”
Ryan turned his head. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
Krysty looked drawn and disheveled but not injured. “How are you doing?”
“I lost my boots, I lost my blaster, nearly lost you.”
Ryan looked to Mildred. “How long?”
“You’ve been in and out for the past forty-eight hours.” Her eyes were grave with concern. “I’ve seen you take some damage. This was bad.”
Ryan’s body was a pulsing mass of pain. “How bad?”
“I’ve never seen you take a beating like that. We won’t talk about the duel beforehand or the scurvy you haven’t quite recovered from yet.”
“And?”
“To stop Ryan Cawdor, you’ve got put a stake through his heart and bury him six feet down. Then, you still better run like hell. I was on deck when you stood up. It was biblical.”
Ryan suspected he would live. “Who’s in command?”
“Commander Miles and Miss Loral are taking turns, though Manrape is doing most of the heavy lifting.”
“What happened below?”
“Well, they loved our cannon work and wanted J.B. bad. They swarmed him when he was out of ammo and beat him down, oh, and speak of the devil...”
J.B. walked in with a limp and a lumped face. “You look like shit.”
“Feel like it,” Ryan acknowledged.
J.B. stared at Krysty intently. She blinked. “What?”
“I heard your blaster went overboard.”
Krysty sighed. She couldn’t begin to count the things she and her revolver had been through together. “Yeah.”
J.B. squared his shoulders and reached under his ship’s jersey. “Here, take mine.”
The med went silent as J.B. held out his new Glock.
“Oh, my God.” Mildred’s jaw dropped. “J.B. Dix, sharing his toys!”
Even Ryan was surprised. He shook his head and quoted Doc. “We
live in an age of wonders.”
“Always figured you needed something bigger anyway.”
Krysty cradled the blaster. “Never used semiautos much.”
“Yeah, well, when you get tired of semiauto, you can flip the lever on the side and go full.”
“Thank you, J.B. You’ll have to teach me how to shoot it.”
J.B sighed and let go of his regret of giving up the blaster. “Course I will.”
Ryan changed the subject for J.B.’s benefit. “Everyone else?”
Mildred nodded. “We’re okay. I released Ricky and Jak. They’re resting in their hammocks.”
“Doc?”
“I swear to God he becomes a murder machine when you take him aboard a boat. The water agrees with him.”
Ryan smiled.
“He wrote the tale of the battle in Mr. Forgiven’s book. Last night he read it to the crew. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. He’s a hero. You?” Mildred made a noise. “They worship you like a god.”
Ryan looked at J.B. “What happened to Blue?”
“Captured alive. Koa told her if she agrees to train Polynesian crews, there will be no repercussions. He said if she agrees to give him a child, he’ll give her the first sailing ship they capture or build to her specifications.”
“And?”
“She agreed to all of it. Koa is turning into an ocean of fertility.”
Ryan laughed and it hurt. “What are the dispositions of the ships?”
“Salvageable according to Manrape. There’s been a lot of comingling of crews in the last few days. We have to, to keep all the ships afloat and seaworthy. Most of the surviving Sabbath crew seems to like the Glory model of sailing.”
Ryan nodded. “My coat.”
Mildred snorted. “Gypsyfair declared it unsalvageable.”
“There was a note in it.”
Mildred pulled it out of her pocket. The note was crusted with Ryan’s blood. “How about I throw it over the side.”
“Where’s Oracle?”
“We buried him at sea. You were asleep. Doc said words. There was a lot of weeping.”
“Where’re Oracle’s hands?”
The cabin med spoke quietly. “We sewed the monkey’s paw into his shroud along with a cannonball and sent it down with him. Everyone agreed it had done its job, and no one wanted its curse aboard.”
“What about the other one?”
Mildred shuddered. “No one wanted to touch it, and when we slid Oracle off the board, it rose up from the deck on its fingertips, walked to a scupper like a spider and, to quote the crew, it followed the captain down to the Old Place. I say good riddance. That shit is still freaking me out.”
Ryan obeyed his captain’s last command. “Open the note.”
“No, oh hell, no. I don’t want any of this Oracle doomie-shit coming down on me.”
“Oracle said open it only if we won.”
J.B. took the note and unsealed it. He cracked a smile.
Mildred, against her will, leaned in to look. “What is it?”
J.B. handed Ryan the note. “Latitude and longitude.” Ryan looked at the bloodstained coordinates. They were South Cific. Krysty made a shrewd guess. “It’s a redoubt.”
Ryan thought of his conversation with Oracle. “Every reason to believe so.”
“And?”
“Tell Commander Miles I suggest he take command of the Glory. Tell him he should give command of the Ironman to Koa and give him all the Tahitians. Some of the Ironman crew may still be salty. I suggest he give the Lady Evil to Miss Loral. Have them sail to Molokai and Tahiti, respectively.”
“And us?”
Ryan considered Oracle’s prophecy and the three choices of dying unknown in an unknown sea, being cursed for breaking the world anew or possibly saving it. He considered every doomie thing that had happened since the journey began.
He held out the note to J.B. “Take this to Commander Miles and tell him to set a course.” Ryan took a good long look at Krysty and smiled. “Let’s go home.”
* * * * *
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ISBN-13: 9781460338988
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Charles Rogers for his contribution to this work.
Blood Red Tide
Copyright © 2014 by Worldwide Library
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