Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  “Of course they is – look, there. Two crew.”

  “Ahul and Pree are your licensed crew, not these two.”

  “Come on, it says two crew – two crew! I’ve got two crew.”

  “Khasimav…”

  “You know what it’s like. Ahul’s gone done a bunk to be with his family, may skies rain upon him, and Pree’s still holed up with his leg. I gotta go out with someone – or do you want to explain to my missus why you let me drown alone?”

  The mention of Khasimav’s missus clearly had a stronger effect on the boy than any imprecation or threat of thunder. He glanced at his colleague, who was perhaps less aware of the wrath of Khasimav’s wife, then with a sigh passed the tattered authorisation back. “Get them registered,” he barked, trying to infuse his voice with an authority that had already been lost. “Next time I can’t look the other way.”

  Yoko’s shoulders rolled down like the last curl of a breaking wave against a rocky shore. I realised I’d been leaning my weight into my left leg, ready to spring across the distance between myself and the soldiers. “You were always such a nice boy, when you weren’t a little shit,” Khasimav cackled gleefully, which was the closest I imagine he ever came to saying thank you.

  Chapter 54

  I was a terrible sailor. I had grown up far from the sea and couldn’t work out what was worse: huddling inside in the black depths of the ship as it rocked from one imminent disaster to the next, straps straining to hold the buckets and nets tight against the swaying, sure-to-kill-us-all hull of the boat, or clinging to the side on deck, both arms wrapped around the railing as the horizon dipped below my feet, then rolled up to tower above my head like the sky itself would fall. Only Khasimav’s utter disregard for our obvious imminent doom convinced me that we weren’t, in fact, about to be drowned in a hurricane. Seeing my foam-drained, burning face as I leaned over the side unable to puke, he guffawed, “Nice day for it, priest!”

  “I’m a spy, not a priest,” I growled, but he couldn’t hear me over the slapping of the sea.

  A little boat on a big ocean need not meet a storm for the experience to be thoroughly vile. I drank the ginger tea that Farii brought me from the gloomy cabin below and wished that the salt would freeze on my face to take away some of the blazing nausea prickling over my skin. When I finally did throw up, Khasimav gave a great cry of victory, as if some glorious rite had been accomplished akin to the first prayers at a newly raised shrine, and I felt a little better.

  We sailed south into the night. The sun did not set as a visible orb; the horizon was an endless curve of bruised grey-brown, smeared with muddy blue. The cloud was so complete that it diffused everything into one formless monoculture, hard to tell where sea met sky. For a while, it was the grey of the pale flagstones of the Temple of the River; then it was the grey of the dry pebble shore; then, it was a thick, boundless slate; and finally, a starless, shapeless, worldless void.

  Lost in a forest, Lah would say, you are not alone. All around you is life, living.

  This doesn’t play well with my ego, I’d reply, and Lah would laugh.

  That, they’d say, is precisely the point.

  In the middle of the sea, the only sounds are the water and the wind – endless, gobbling, slurping hunger of sucking and spitting, slapping and slithering against the side of the boat. Khasimav has turned off all illumination but a little red light in the pilot’s cabin. Farii sleeps below, Yoko keeping watch at the prow as if she might still be able to do something against some invisible threat, as if the gun buried in her clothes has any power against the ocean. With no light, no distinction between sky and sea, we are floating to some deathly land, cut off from the rest of the world, and it is terrifying, and, in a way, it is perfect peace.

  For a moment, I am not afraid, and Georg is not inside my head. I had forgotten how good it felt to be free.

  Beneath us, there is life. Schools of silver fish feasting on white-fleshed critters that forage amongst the clawed scuttling things of the shallow sea floor that hide from the bug-eyed creatures of the darker depths. The giant squid, flushed crimson, care nothing for the deeds of men; neither do the kakuy that lurk, tentacles spooled around some volcanic vent, at the very bottoms of the great oceans of the world. They only cared when the world was burning, and their wrath was as disinterested, amoral, potent and inescapable as the tsunami upon the gentle shore.

  Instinctively, I offer them a blurted prayer. Not for blessing or safe passage – these words have no meaning to the great spirits of the deep – but for my own peace of mind, and in wonder at what it is to sail across the surface of a forest.

  Then Yoko was by my side, shaking me, and I must have dozed, and she was whispering: “A light.”

  I followed her finger, and didn’t see it at first, then it flashed, tiny and white, and we both turned to look at the red glow of the pilot’s cabin, and Khasimav’s face was drawn and tight.

  “A ship?” Yoko asked, as we slid into the relative warmth of the little square of buttons and wheel that was Khasimav’s domain.

  “Yeah.”

  “Another fishing boat?”

  “Maybe. Probably not.”

  We watched it a while longer. I imagined it getting bigger, nearer, knew I was imagining it, that paranoia was seeped into every part of my being. Then it was definitely bigger, nearer, not paranoia at all, a true thing, and Khasimav barked: “You, hold the wheel steady,” and I did, while he and Yoko scurried to raise the triangular sail, the boat lurching to the side as it caught the wind as if stung by a wasp. This done, Khasimav scuttled back into the cabin, took the wheel from me and turned so we caught the wind, deck creaking and fabric snapping taut. “Check the fuel,” he murmured to Yoko, who nodded once and vanished below decks. I waited, back pressed to the wall of the cabin, smelling the sudden stench of processed algae as Yoko pulled back canisters and peered into pipes, before she returned and said, “We’re full now.” Khasimav grunted an acknowledgement.

  From below, Farii emerged, blinking and weary, her face an alien thing in the eye-aching glow. “Problem?”

  “Maybe not.”

  Yoko prodded one finger towards the light on the horizon, perhaps a little nearer than before, perhaps no. Farii licked her lips, inclined her head and watched, the fear deep in her too.

  “Wind’s in our favour,” murmured Khasimav, an attempt at brightness that his voice couldn’t quite carry off. “And she’s not exactly a racer.”

  For nearly half an hour, we four stood pressed tight in the cabin, sea-sickness forgotten as engine and sail ploughed us through the dark. Then Khasimav, the only one with the right to say it, said what we all knew: “She’s coming for us.”

  “Patrol ship?” asked Yoko, sharp, hard.

  “Maybe.”

  “How long do you think until they reach us?”

  “Maybe an hour.”

  “How close to shore can we be in an hour?”

  “Not far. But we’re still a long way north.”

  “Can we call for help?”

  “Sure – if you want every ship on the sea to know who you are.”

  “Ever been stopped by a patrol boat before?” I asked.

  “Only once, random check.”

  “Did they search the ship?”

  “Yes.”

  Farii said: “Send out the call.”

  Khasimav sighed, tutted, reached for his radio with a muttered “My missus is going to kill me.”

  “Wait.” I caught his hand. “Don’t mention Farii.”

  “Why not?” snapped Yoko. “You know they’re looking for her.”

  “Yes, but they probably don’t know she’s on this boat. If you say her name out loud, every Brotherhood vessel in a hundred miles will come crashing down on us.”

  “And every Council ship too, no? We’re in contested waters, and they have the stronger fleet.”

  “Even so – we want Council ships in force, not Brotherhood.”

  “That’s a fin
e trick if you can do it,” muttered Farii, a flicker of her hand to the radio. “I’d love to see you try.”

  I took the microphone from a sceptical Khasimav and intoned, at his command, the distress call, a call for help across all frequencies, Council fleet help us, help us, sounding far too calm for anyone to take us seriously, I felt. Then I added: “Yue Taaq. This is a message for Yue Taaq. It’s Ven. It’s me. Help me.”

  Chapter 55

  A chase at sea is a slow affair.

  I hunched over the radio as Yoko and Farii watched the light growing nearer, highlighting form. A patrol vessel for certain, a huge kite sail unfurled above its prow, its engines growling, the scars of bio-resin glistening in jagged lines across the hull. We ran before the wind, but the bigger ship was faster, the pinpoint shards of a dozen smaller lights visible along its hull and deck as it drew nearer. It hollered at us over the radio, then by loudspeakers, sound blasted to semi-incomprehensible gibberish by the sea, and we ignored it. It flashed lamps at us in a dizzying pattern of ons and offs, which Khasimav roughly translated as a command to halt and the sailors’ equivalent of cussing.

  When it fired the first flare, I was astonished to see the ocean revealed in pale red beneath us, to find that we were still on the surface of this planet, not spinning through some endless void but bound by the laws of common nature. Khasimav clicked his teeth, sighed: “Warning shot next,” and barely were the words out of his mouth than an unseen explosion smacked into the night, and a hundred metres to our right the water slapped up in a gout of white, reflective crimson and black.

  “59mm gun,” mused Yoko in the voice of one who had sat exams on the topic and not particularly enjoyed the experience. “Probably a Kraken-class cutter.”

  “Is that good?” I asked, and she did not answer.

  Another shot broke the sea to our right, the retort quickly swallowed by the rolling water. Behind us, the host of little red lights rose up from the deck, swerving in the wind like battered seagulls before regaining a little stability as the ship launched its drones towards us.

  “It’s all right,” Yoko murmured, as they rose around us. “They’re mostly just for surveillance.”

  “Mostly?”

  “Bet you wish you were a proper priest now,” rattled Khasimav, all grin and no humour. The next warning shot hit so close to the prow that we bucked above the shockwave it sent out like riders on a wild horse, and Khasimav uttered a curse of ancient foulness between gritted teeth.

  “They’re launching inflatables,” murmured Yoko, head turned to the ship behind us.

  “Oh good – they’re not going to blow us up, just shoot us.”

  “I don’t know if they’d rather arrest me for a public trial or shoot me and lose my body,” mused Farii, with the stiffness of a critic discussing a show of dubious quality. “That decision may be above their pay grade, of course, which makes it more likely they’ll at least arrest me first.”

  “They don’t know you’re here,” I offered brightly, “so they’ll probably just shoot you by mistake.” Yoko glowered, but Farii gave a single burst of laughter, that died as soon as it had lived. I shrugged. “Sorry. Just saying the obvious.”

  “Why would you do that?” scowled Yoko.

  Outside the cabin, a drone was bumping against the turning side of the boat, its red lights flickering as it buzzed up and down like a curious bird. Farii flapped one hand at it instinctively, a leader used to the world obeying her every whim, then scowled when it managed to settle on the deck, a squat, hunkered thing, blinking at us with its salt-scoured camera. Behind us, the two boats lowered from the larger ship hit the water, rising high on a wave before dropping so fast one soldier nearly lost their seat in the churning acceleration of the moment. They cast off from their tie lines almost together, rushing towards us low in the water, a single headlamp on each prow, vanishing and reappearing with each swell of the sea. “Inflatable” seemed an odd description for the speeding vessels tearing down on us. A resin hull on a black carbon weave, the only part that appeared inflatable was a band of soft padding around its rim. Everything else was spotlight, soldier, gun and carbon.

  Yoko had her weapon drawn, but Farii put a hand on her arm, shook her head. “There’s still a chance,” she breathed. “I’ll talk to them, I’ll… there’s still a chance.”

  No one in the cabin believed it, and no one said a word.

  As the first inflatable drew level, Farii stepped out of the cabin, hands raised. I don’t know what she called out to them, but her words were lost across the water. She called again; again, the words were snatched away. A bump on our right announced that the other inflatable was against us, reaching up with hooks to snag onto the side. Khasimav throttled down the engine, shaking his head. “Well,” he sighed. “I was hoping to die better.”

  “How better?” I asked.

  “You know when you fall asleep after sex?”

  “Seems harsh on your sexual partner.”

  A head popped above the railing on the right, followed a second later by the barrel of a gun, lugged up awkwardly by someone barely holding onto the hooked ladder that swayed and bounced against the tug of the sea.

  “At least the fishes will be well fed!” chuckled Khasimav as the soldier rose a little higher over the side, struggling to hoick their gun into a more threatening pose.

  I heard the whistling of the shell a second before it struck – or perhaps I imagined it, my mind retrospectively seeking to make sense of chaos. The quality of its impact was different from the warning shots that had been blasted our way – less of the sea tearing apart, and more fire and air compressing and expanding in a crimson rush. The flash of light was bright enough for me to briefly pick out the inside of the cabin, and it took me a moment to realise that the shell had fallen not on us but behind, a few metres off the prow of the closing cutter.

  “Mother of—” began Khasimav. He didn’t have time to say anything more before the next shot landed, now to the right of the enemy ship, which lurched as if shoved by a playground bully, lights flickering, several going out. The one soldier who’d nearly made it onto the deck slid as Khasimav slammed his hand against the throttle, jumping us back into motion, the hooked-on ladder slipping along nearly the whole length of the railing as we chugged away from the stalled boats by our side. Farii, having perhaps thought twice about negotiation, launched herself back into the cabin as we accelerated, blurting: “Who is firing, who is firing, who is…”

  Either side, the inflatables revved up, easily matching pace, and finally from the left came gunfire, rattling down the side of the ship. Khasimav let go of the wheel, grabbed Farii by the top of her head and dragged her down to the low cabin floor in a bundle. I lurched to one side, grabbed the door on the opposite side of the cabin as glass crackled and smashed, and tumbled out onto the deck. Yoko was a few feet in front of me, crawling on her belly, eyes fixed on the ladder still attached to our right-hand railing.

  For a moment, I thought the marine who’d been clinging on so desperately had let go, dropped back into the water. Then a hand crawled its way over the side of the ship, scrambling for purchase, and Yoko had her gun drawn. She waited, until the top of the head was visible, and emptied out three shots. One of them missed, and I don’t know if the second hit or if the shock of sudden motion and violence was enough, but with a gasp and a splash, the marine let go, tumbling backwards into the ice-black water below.

  Another burst of gunfire to our left, ripping along the side of the boat, smashing out the thin red light of the cabin and raining glass and splinters across the deck. The drone that had managed to land crawled a little to one side, curious as a cat, the camera turning to examine the scene, before Yoko kicked out hard and caught something that cracked and crunched. The drone wheezed and tried to take off, but one of its four blades wouldn’t spin, and it tipped itself onto the side and spun, an upturned beetle bouncing on the deck.

  Another smack in the night, another whistle and thump of c
annon. I peered up, tried to see its source, thought I saw the flash of something far-off and huge, spitting pinkish-sodium fire. A cloud of little red lights was drawing near from the same direction – more drones – a sudden burst of motion above us as the cutter’s drones detected the incoming swarm. This time I heard the crack as the distant ship fired, the shell striking something on the patrol vessel behind. I half-expected an explosion, the rupture of a tank or some profound sign of desperation. Instead, I heard the creak of carbon bending out of form, the crack of resins popping and the sharp, hard snicker-snacker of the biopolymer frame ripping like ribs shattering along the spine.

  Then the little cloud of cutter drones rose higher, and I saw something yellow flash in the belly of a half-dozen of the buzzing machines.

  The bombs they dropped were tiny – little more than marbled grenades – but they were enough. Some fell on the deck, some fell in the water around, picking apart the dark in yellow-white, tearing through the hull of Khasimav’s boat like bolts through tissue. The world rocked, lurched to the left, tipped down hard. I tucked my knees under my chest and wrapped my hands over my head as the world around crunched and spat sizzling salt, heard cries below and the creak of resin tearing apart.

  Then the new batch of approaching drones was on us, and suddenly the air above was full of little machines smashing head first into each other like drunken wasps, of blades caught on blades and swirling, whining, messy flight. I smelt burning algae oil and resin-coated timber, tasted acrid smoke and heard a high-pitched scream in my left ear that drowned out even the sea. I moved one hand, and it seemed to travel incredibly slow. Tried to move it faster and knew that, though I had the physical capacity, the connections between mind and fingers weren’t having any of it, that my mind couldn’t conceive of motion.

  Another smack of light, another crump of something striking the cutter behind, and this time I knew it had hit something flammable because there was a rising mirrored glow across the ocean, picking out the shape of the drones falling like spring blossoms from the sky. Yoko’s head emerged in the reflected darkness of a world turned to fire, and she was dragging Farii behind her by the armpits, hissing something at me which I couldn’t hear over the singing in my ears and the tearing of the sea. I wrapped one arm around Farii’s chest and heaved, and was surprised to feel how wet and cold Farii was, catching in the light of a rising flame behind us a smear of blood across Yoko’s face as she mouthed more inaudible commands.