‘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 fleet-in-exile was broken 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
