Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space)

by Catherine Lundoff

  The captain produced a spyglass from one of the innumerable pockets that adorned her battered blue pea coat, putting it to her remaining eye. It was dusk, and the wind was starting to pick up a bit from the southeast. The garbage-choked waters of the East Channel slapped the ship’s hull. The air smelled like mud and seagull shit. It was time.

  She turned to the first mate, who’d been silent since being rebuffed not five minutes ago. Was it really just five minutes ago? thought the captain. It feels like a year. “Beat to quarters and hoist the black flag, Aki,” she said. “It’s time to start slitting throats.”

  The First Mate smiled, which would have been kind of cute were her teeth not filed into points. “About time, Cap’n,” she said, and then she swept down the stairs from the quarterdeck. “Battle stations! Look hearty, you scurvy dogs!” she screamed to roars from the crew.

  Not to be outdone, the second mate had been pulling down the yellow, white and black tricolor of the Water-Taxi and Limousine Commission. The ship had burst to life and was now a swarm of activity, as the pirate crew ran out the guns and the Jolly Roger crawled its way to the top of the flagpole.

  From another pocket of the captain’s coat came an antique red and white megaphone, which she thumbed on and directed at her prey. “Ahoy, there, merchie!” she yelled at the ungainly, slate-grey ship—more a bathtub than a boat, thought the captain with a sneer—that was now only a couple hundred yards off her starboard bow. She lifted the megaphone to her lips again. “This is the Pizza Rat!” she said, and her crew pounded the gunwales with the butts of their guns and shrieked. “You’ve heard of us, and what we’ve done. Now heave to and prepare to be boarded, or we’ll have your guts for garters!”

  A few months ago, after a merchantman had refused to strike the colors, leading the Pizza Rat on a lengthy chase and then resisting the boarding party tooth-and-nail to boot, Aki had actually tried to turn the offending captain’s guts into garters. It hadn’t worked out very well, and indeed, it was days like that one which made the captain wonder if perhaps she hadn’t gotten herself into the wrong line of work. She banished that stray thought from her mind as she grabbed the fire pole that went from the quarterdeck to the bridge and shinnied down.

  Unlike the quarterdeck, the bridge was enclosed from the elements by a set of spectacularly grimy floor to ceiling windows. It was empty save for Fouad, the helmsman, a perpetually rumpled middle-aged man with curly greying hair and a walrus mustache. Fouad’s grandfather had driven taxis on land; his father had driven them on water. “Driving is in the blood,” is what Fouad himself said whenever he’d had one too many and was feeling ruminative. He turned and sketched a mock salute as the captain arrived on the bridge.

  “Ready for action, Fouad?”

  He snorted, sending the ends of his mustache skyward for a moment. “Action? What action?” He motioned at the merchie. “We’ve caught them with their pants down and ass hanging out.”

  There were a few other ships in hailing distance and each and every one of which had bugged out the instant the Jolly Roger made its appearance. That left only the Pizza Rat’s prize, floundering pathetically in the water dead ahead. The captain didn’t even need her spyglass now. She was close enough to see the tub’s name—the O’Melveny, whatever the hell that was—and its crew, scurrying around like ants whose colony had just been smashed by a vengeful giant.

  “They put about on the port tack when we raised the black flag,” said Fouad, “then changed their damn minds and went hard a-starboard. Now they’re caught up in stays, and not a motor to be seen.”

  It was just then that the O’Melveny struck the colors. The captain smirked. “And we didn’t even need to fire a warning shot,” she said. “Oh, well. Suppose it’s about time everything went right for once.”

  Fouad frowned. “Look over there, Cap’n,” he said, pointing starboard and astern. “One of the other ships is turning around.”

  This did indeed call for the spyglass, which made an encore appearance. The captain frowned into the lens. One ship had, indeed, turned around, and was headed back directly towards the Pizza Rat and the merchie. It was going fast, too, a sleek little blue number with some contraption mounted on the bow.

  The captain put down the spyglass, turned to Fouad, and said, “I don’t know what in hells they think they’re playing—”

  She would have said “at” next, but then there was a loud explosion. Bloombito squawked, flew directly into the ceiling, and landed in a heap of feathers on the tiller. A massive gout of water shot into the air uncomfortably close to the starboard beam.

  “It’s NYPN!” shouted Fouad, pointing at the advancing blue ship.

  “Disengage, and do it now,” said the captain, fighting to keep a note of hysteria from creeping into her voice. “Set a course for LaGuardia Bay, and fire up the motor. Full speed ahead, Fouad.”

  She didn’t even wait for him to confirm her orders before hauling herself hand over hand back up the fire pole to the quarterdeck. We’ve got to put in a set of stairs, the captain thought for the hundredth time, wondering as she did if it would be the last. The only greeting she received on the quarterdeck was a shell that shrieked overhead, clipping lines of rigging and barely missing the mizzenmast. The Pizza Rat was starting to pull away from the O’Melveny, whose captain was surely kissing the deck and thanking whatever set of gods she worshiped. The sun was a rapidly disappearing disc of orange in the west.

  Aki ran onto the quarterdeck, gun in hand and eyes wild. “Why are we running?” she asked, gesturing with her rifle at the approaching police cutter. “We’re bigger than they are. We should stand and fight!”

  A kettle of tension deep within the captain boiled over at that moment, and she took three quick strides across the deck, grabbing Aki’s gun with one hand, tossing it overboard, while holding onto her first mate’s throat very tightly with the other. Aki opened her mouth to speak, but the captain squeezed. A hoarse squawk was all that emerged.

  “Shut the fuck up,” said the captain conversationally. “We’re pirates, you idiot, not soldiers. We slug it out with them, and we wind up with a boat full of holes and half the crew dead. And that’s if we’re lucky. Now where’s the profit in that, I ask you?”

  Her grip loosened and Aki once more attempted to speak, only for the captain’s grip to tighten again just as suddenly, resulting in a slightly more truncated squawk. Bloombito cooed in response from his perch on the captain’s shoulder. “Again, shut the fuck up,” said the captain. “I wasn’t actually asking you.”

  The Pizza Rat had turned away and accelerated south, giving them a chance to open fire on their pursuer. The ripping sound of machine-gun fire filled the air. Then there was a short sharp smashing sound, and the ship shuddered. The police cutter had scored a hit, punching a hole in the Pizza Rat’s hull just above the waterline amidships on the port side. A few scattered screams added their voices to the cawing of gulls overhead.

  “Now go do your fucking job,” the captain snarled, “and be a good little girl, or I’ll cut off your fucking tongue and feed it to the fish.” She pushed Aki away towards the damaged area of the ship. The first mate stumbled, opened her mouth as if to say something, then thought better of it and ran.

  “That was a bit dramatic, no?” Roberto had somehow managed to appear on the quarterdeck unnoticed. He was surprisingly good at sneaking around for a man who was the size of a small bear.

  “What’s the damage?” asked the captain, waving towards the smoking hole amidships. Another shell sailed overhead, detonating harmlessly about fifty yards astern.

  “We’ll live, for the moment.” The Pizza Rat’s guns continued to tear away, though from the looks of it they weren’t doing much.

  “That’s comforting,” said the captain. “You always did have a way of putting me at ease, Roberto. It’s probably why you got the second mate gig.”

  “We’ll live,” repeated Roberto, “for about six more minutes, after which we’ll run out o
f fuel, at which point they will proceed to run circles around us until we are dead.”

  “That’s not so comforting.”

  “They’ll also definitely have called for backup by now.” There was a crash and an unearthly screech as a shell smacked into the foremast, turning it into an assortment of bent metal shards. Four of the crew were pulped across the deck.

  “You know, maybe you should just shut up.” The only thing they had going for them, the captain thought, was that night was rapidly approaching. Oh, and that they were leading the police into a trap. Couldn’t forget that.

  The Pizza Rat’s gunners finally scored a hit of their own. There was a muffled blast. Smoke started pouring from the pursuer’s stern.

  “That’ll slow them down a bit,” the captain said. “Now if we can just—”

  “You know what I said about how they’ll have called for backup by now?”

  “Didn’t I just tell you to shut up?”

  “At your nine o’clock, amidships,” said Roberto, flinging an arm in the offending direction. “Another of the little buggers.”

  “Hold the course!” shouted the captain to Roberto, and Fouad at the helm, and really to everyone. It was too late to do anything else at this point anyway, with only a few minutes of fuel left. Hopefully, a few minutes would be all they needed. Their original pursuer was lagging noticeably now. Dusk was changing to dark, and if they could shake this newest tail and get out of open water they’d be as good as invisible.

  The Pizza Rat juddered through the choppy waters of LaGuardia Bay. A salvo of rockets shrieked overhead, as the second police cutter tried to gauge the range and sight in. The Rat’s gunners returned fire, but their broadside didn’t trouble the enemy. Fouad had opened the throttle as far as the old engine could go. It whined and retched as the ship skipped over the waves. Their pursuer matched the Pizza Rat’s acceleration with an almost contemptuous ease. It was edging closer and closer, though gunnery on both sides was hampered by the encroaching darkness.

  A blast from their pursuer’s horn hailed the pirate ship, as the chase continued. “Now hear this,” blared a disembodied voice. “Attention unidentified criminal watercraft. You are hereby required to heave to at once, by express and lawful order of the New York Police Navy. Failure to comply may result in the use of lethal force against your vessel. Again, this . . .”

  The recording continued, but the captain had heard enough. She sputtered in indignation. “Failure to comply may result in the use of lethal force! What the fuck have they been shooting at us for the past twenty minutes, party favors?”

  Roberto sighed, shaking his head mournfully. “I swear,” he said, “their standards just keep on dropping. Give it a few years and they’ll be grunting at us.”

  “We’re coming up on it, Captain!” shouted Fouad, from below. “Just a minute now!”

  The smell of smoke and blood filled the air. It was all too familiar. “All right, Fouad,” the captain said. “Execute when ready. Let’s give these bastards a little gift from the Old City!”

  A few seconds later the ship twitched a point to port, so imperceptibly that one could be forgiven for not noticing it, and then slid back to resume its previous course. All of a sudden, there was a terrible mangled screech, the sound of metal clashing on metal from behind them. Their pursuer had collided with some object beneath the waterline and run aground. It listed over on the starboard side, hull belly-up in surrender. LaGuardia Airport may have been long gone, but its air traffic control tower was not. Lurking beneath the waves, just inches beneath the surface, it waited to ensnare careless travelers. It was easy enough to avoid, of course. You just needed to know exactly where it was.

  As the crew cheered and burst into song, the captain heard a cackle waft up from the helmsman below. “Fugheddaboutit!” shouted Fouad, triumphantly, as the Pizza Rat and its pirate crew slipped away into the murky nighttime streets of Jackson Heights.

  It wasn’t a big surprise when New York sank beneath the waves. The surprise was that everyone stayed. Life went on much as it always had. There were a few minor alterations to people’s daily lives, of course; boats replaced cars, food carts became food canoes, and no one lived on the ground floor anymore. But there was no mass exodus from the five boroughs, no long snaking line of refugees wending its way deep into flyover country. New Yorkers stayed. They built up, and kept on building. Great swathes of Brooklyn were brownstones underwater as far as the second floor, with ramshackle additions welded onto roofs. Labyrinthine passages were strung between the skyscrapers of Manhattan, a spider web of streets hundreds of feet above the water. Most New Yorkers lived their entire lives without ever setting foot on land. The city sank, and rose again.

  Everything about this new New York, an ungainly Venice on stilts, was outsized; both the virtues and flaws of the old New York were magnified in the newer version. Denizens of the Old City who battled rats, cockroaches and bedbugs would doubtless have been pleased that they shuffled off this mortal coil early enough to avoid the sharks, crocodiles, and poisonous jellyfish of the New City. Traffic choked the main water-streets and thoroughfares at all hours. Hapless crossing guards in rickety dinghies tweeted whistles and waved stop signs as every imaginable make and model of watercraft jostled for tiny scraps of space.

  Inequality, that yawning chasm that separated the fortunate from everyone else, had grown by leaps and bounds, the two sides of the chasm moving farther away from each other. The rich lived in opulence on verdant islands dotted amid the waters of the city. The super-rich lived on dry land, a concept beyond the ken of ninety-nine percent of those who scratched and scraped and drifted through the streets. It should come as no surprise that some of those ninety-nine percent, the dispossessed and desperate, forsook the law and took to the waves with ill intent. Like the old stories of Robin Hood, the pirates of New York stole from the rich. They were rather less enthusiastic about giving to the poor, though.

  The Floating Conclave was supposed to take place, by ancient and hoary tradition, on the first Thursday of every month. There was no explanation for this. In point of fact, the Floating Conclave took place whenever the most powerful pirate captains of the Five Boroughs had enough free time to sit down and do some day planning. It was thus a rare and momentous occasion.

  Even so, there is one tonight, and we are invited. Let us go, then, to the old Statue of Liberty, the chosen site for this edition of the Conclave, convenient enough for all the great captains yet out-of-the-way enough to, hopefully, not catch the wandering eye of the New York Police Navy. The captains need not fear. The NYPN knows in vague and general terms about the Conclave. It may even know where it will meet. But the NYPN will do nothing due to the bitter certainty that it could arrest every pirate captain in New York and a day later there would be a brand new crop, possibly even more bloodthirsty than the current lot and definitely less predictable. Better the devil you know than the deep blue sea.

  Enter Roberto Garcia-Rosenberg, second mate of the good ship Pizza Rat, a toasted everything bagel in one hand and his hole cards in the other. He is losing at poker and has been for some time now, but the bagel is delicious and a sweet young thing from the Hedge Funder’s Bane has been making cow eyes at him all night, so this particular Conclave is by no means a total loss.

  “Are you going to fold, or what?” Copper Gourd asked. He was in a hurry because he was winning. Ride your luck while it lasts, he’d said not two minutes ago, waxed mustaches quivering with glee.

  “Call,” said Roberto, tossing a pile of chips into the center of the table. His father had had a set of mustaches like that, back when he and Mom still owned the family artisanal pickle factory in Williamsburg.

  “Fold,” said Madam Mercury. She turned to Roberto. “Heard you and the Rat got in a bit of a scrap the other evening.”

  “That we did,” acknowledged Roberto with a nod, as The Mop raised the pot. “But the captain saw us through it.”

  “You talk about her like she’s g
ot a magic wand stuffed up her ass,” said Copper Gourd. He called The Mop’s raise.

  “Who’s to say she doesn’t?” asked Roberto. He folded and stretched, taking in the view. Dozens of pirate ships were tied to the spikes of the old statue’s crown. There were a couple of lookouts perched on the torch, scanning the horizon for intruders. Salesmen and touts flitted to and fro on the periphery hawking their wares. The bold and desperate hoping to earn a place on a pirate crew circulated through the crowd, trying to catch a captain’s eye. They had quite a bit of competition.

  The captain was talking to a spy. One thing that the rich of every era have had in abundance is employees. Invariably, some become disgruntled. Like any other pirate commander worth her salt, the captain maintained a network of informants throughout the city. They fed her morsels of information and were repaid with morsels of cash. While the information was generally idle gossip and stray rumors, every once in a while one of those morsels of information had a bit more meat on it.

  “So, you’re saying it won’t have a guard escort?” The captain frowned dubiously and scratched her nose. This sounded a bit too good to be true, and after the debacle last time out, she was scrutinizing each and every gift horse with care.

  “No guards,” said the contact with a definitive shake of her head, sending blonde curls flying every which way. “They said it would attract too much attention.”

  “And the cargo is . . . fancy plates? What the fuck am I supposed to do with those?”

  The contact flounced and stamped her feet. “You’re not listening! It’s china, it’s silver, it’s art, it’s everything! All going to their beach house in Vermont before the summer season starts. It’s worth, God, I can’t even imagine how much! And you’re just going to sit there?”

  The captain didn’t actually doubt the contact. She’d worked for the House of Greenstone for a few years now. The contact always demurred when the subject of why she was so keen to sell out her employer came up, and the captain had never felt it wise to press the issue. The Pizza Rat had made more than one score thanks to information she’d provided, and the contact had made a fair bit of coin for her trouble. It had been a mutually profitable relationship. So why did the captain feel like she was being played?