A ship.
Kite could just make out an iron tower and a funnel. It breathed dark smoke. When he let his eyes come back to things in the foreground, he realised that sailors had clustered close, not knowing what to do. He glanced up at the quarterdeck, where Captain Heecham didn’t look interested in giving any orders.
‘All right,’ he said, trying not to show firstly how relieved he was that this wasn’t the start of the apocalypse, and secondly how embarrassed he was to have lived for years imagining he wasn’t that religious, only to find childhood Catholicism bursting back to life right at the most unhelpful moment. ‘Back to work. Embarrassing to capsize because we all want to stare.’
There were some muted laughs. He pushed a few shoulders, very gently, because the sailors were slight men, pressed or from long lines of underfed families. He was freshly shocked every few days by how fragile they all were. On the sea, the smoking ship glided on, effortless, on no wind.
The ship overtook them slowly about two hundred yards to port, just in view. There was nobody on the deck, and no sign that anyone on it had noticed the Defiance. No reply to their signal flag.
In the deep quiet of the fog, it was possible to hear the flicker-click of moving water over a deeper mechanical snarl. The ship had waterwheels. They were what kept it going, he thought, but the whole thing was so unlikely he had lost confidence in any ability to guess what it might be doing. It had masts, rigging, and sails, but they were furled. When the rocks came sharper and more frequently, the Defiance lagged, unable to keep up.
Five knots on no wind, in fog. The sailors were whispering about devices from Hell. Someone thought it must be some advance made by the French. Or both.
‘Sir?’ the first one said, looking for an umpire.
He shook his head, feeling odd, because an hour ago he would have said that he had a nodding acquaintance with most marine-related things in the world, but the ship was an automated beast unrelated to anything he knew.
Somewhere out in the fog, a cannon fired. It sounded flat: no flintlock. French.
All along the rail, men straightened up fast. Beyond the mechanical ship, still invisible except for the patch of fog its smoke was turning black, there was a French warship, and it had just fired a warning shot. Kite whisper-hissed for the gunners to get below in case they had to engage. Up and down the deck, he heard the other lieutenants doing the same.
A bright light flickered at them from the mechanical ship, about level with the mast. Flash flash flash, off, flash flash flash. They had to be signals. Kite had never seen a light code before and he couldn’t even start to guess what it said. It was the same three, in sets, again and again. As he watched, a woman in green rushed to the stern with a man, and waved at them before she pushed the man overboard. The man hit the water at a painful angle, but he did surface, gasping.
Just people: normal frightened people. Not archangels or devils. A worried stir went along the rail. The water was freezing. No one could last in it for more than a few minutes.
‘Get that man out of the buggering water!’ Captain Heecham shouted from the quarterdeck. He was hunched forward on the taffrail, staring like everyone else. He looked like a slouching bison.
Sailors ran for lifelines.
‘Where’s he gone?’
‘I can see him,’ Kite said quickly. He followed the man in the water and held his arm out straight to guide the sailors. The man could swim, at least.
A round of gunshots went off this time, a whole broadside, from somewhere beyond the mechanical ship. Kite still couldn’t see anything, but he could hear the French ship now – someone was yelling orders. More black smoke poured into the fog.
The man in the sea vanished underwater for a few seconds, but he came up again. Still, the mechanical ship showed no flag. The blinking light signal went on and on.
‘Sir, do we engage?’ the second mate’s voice called from near the hatchway.
‘She’s got no colours, she could be anyone’s!’ Heecham bellowed back.
When the man in the water reached the end of the rope, he only rested against it, too tired to pull himself up. Someone yelled at him to tie a bowline knot, but he clearly wasn’t a sailor; he only looked blank. Shrapnel tore into the water next to him. The sailors shouted to hurry the fuck up before he was blown apart.
‘Quiet!’ Kite said to them. ‘Quiet, all of you. Sir,’ he called down to the man in the water, ‘listen. I’m going to tell you how to tie a knot that won’t break your ribs when we pull you in, all right? It’s not difficult.’ Everyone gasped as a cannon ball smashed up a plume of water all of ten feet off the bow. On the quarterdeck, Heecham was still telling the helmsman to hold still, and not far off Kite and the sailors, a midshipman was hauling hard on the signal flag ropes, uncoiling a message up the mast:
URGENT identify yourself
Still nothing from the mechanical ship, no flag to show its nation. More shrapnel.
‘Ready?’ Kite said, in what he hoped was a calm voice. It was Officer Trick Number One. If you could sound calm enough, you could claim that everything was absolutely fine, even if the man next to you had just exploded, and people would believe you.
The man in the water nodded. He was shivering so badly he could barely move his hands, but he was doing a hell of a job at
