“Turning,” Captain Hollander said, moving the controls to the right. “Let’s take a look at… whoa.” He’d turned the plane to fly over the battle.
The flotilla, at least six ships strong, flanked the entire starboard side of the Saint Catherine. Two of the biggest ships were firing glowing projectiles at the carrier. They exploded upon impact—yet the ship was unharmed. Whenever the explosive detonated, a silvery screen appeared, like a forcefield over the vessel.
However, as I watched, one of the bombs flew toward the ship and hit it directly, blowing a huge hole in the hull. Tiny sailors at mounted guns aimed their weapons toward the ship and started blasting the enemy, but that ship also had a forcefield. Two tiny people in white dresses dashed around, stopping at other tiny people lying on the deck.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. We were cowards for leaving in the middle of a battle. Dot and Peggy needed help.
Rachel. The breathy voice from Gorman’s conference room stirred in the center of my mind.
“What?” I said aloud.
I need you.
Torres and Bickley had stiffened, their eyes unfocusing. “Can anyone else hear that?” Torres said. “I think it’s her. I think it’s the Saint Catherine.”
Commander Hollander had maneuvered us around the battle, and already the sounds of war were growing dim.
Come back.
I stood partially. “Commander. Turn around.”
“No!” Bickley shouted. “We don’t take orders from the ship!”
I gave a stricken look to Torres, whose eyes were darting back and forth as she argued with herself. “No, I think we should keep going,” she said. “This isn’t our battle, and it isn’t our ship.”
“Turn around!” I shouted at Commander Hollander. “We shouldn’t have left!”
“Why not?” he protested.
“Because it’s selfish!”
We were being selfish, greedy, ungrateful people who’d been offered safety and security on the ship, and what had we done? We’d run as soon as we could. We were pathetic and deserved to be shot out of the sky.
Bickley jumped up and placed his hands on my shoulders. “Rach, this has nothing to do with selfishness, okay? We’re protecting ourselves. We don’t belong on that ship. Let’s all just—”
Another plane nearly hit us, the drone canceling out Bickley’s words. Commander Hollander banked sharply, tossing us off of our feet. The crate we’d opened tipped over, and several of the glowing spheres tumbled out. One flashed brilliant gold, like a flashlight turning on and off.
I picked it up, and it flashed again, and then again. It was hotter to the touch than before, and the humming was louder.
It flashed three times. Now it was uncomfortably hot.
I swore in Yiddish. “Open the door,” I said loudly. “Now.”
Nobody moved. “Why?” Bickley said.
“Now!” I shoved him aside, struggling to keep the sphere in my hands; I had to keep tossing it back and forth. My fingers were blistering, surely. I shoved the sphere in my pocket and grabbed the handle of the door. Now I could feel something seeping from the sphere into my body.
Their shouts of alarm were drowned out by the endless roar of the wind. We were at least two thousand feet in the air, and flying along at a brilliant speed, the battle already far behind. The ships looked like toy models in an endless gray-green bathtub.
I threw the sphere with all my might. The tiny glistening glass ball fell through the air, flashed once more, and then—
My vision went white as a wall of sound exploded outwards, like every foghorn on earth had gone off at once. The sonic blast knocked me backward and slammed the door shut.
Commander Hollander’s hands scrambled on the control panel as the plane was buffeted up and down on the wave. We began to zigzag in the sky, and the rest of the crates fell off the shelf and tipped over. The flashing of the sonic bombs lit up the tiny space like the Las Vegas strip.
I looked up from my supine position on the metal floor and simply stared at the dozens of bombs that had begun their detonation sequences. Well… this sucks.
“Now would be nice!” Commander Hollander screamed over his shoulder. The plane tilted again, and this time I could see that we’d turned around and were heading toward the battle.
I jumped to my feet, wrenched open the door, and then began kicking the flashing bombs out of the plane directly into the slipstream. Commander Hollander was bellowing obscenities while he tried to control the plane. Torres and Bickley were screaming at the top of their lungs, chucking the bombs through the open door. I finally began tossing whole crates out. I moved like a madwoman, desperate to rid the plane of the otherworldly ordnance.
The sonic blasts obliterated all sounds, deafening me to even the rushing of my heart in my ears. There was no onomatopoeia in existence that could capture the sheer force of the sound. Nothing could possibly still exist, at all, anywhere, beyond the scope of the explosions.
Yet, a moment later, we were flying over tiny bits of wood and metal where, formerly, a fully-armed flotilla had been. Nothing else was there: not bodies, not furniture, not desperate survivors waving for aid. It had all been disintegrated.
By us. By me.
Weirdly, the Saint Catherine was fine except for the holes in the hull that had been blasted open by the flotilla. Dot and Peggy, tiny figures in white that were clear against the gray steel, darted around from person to person.
Commander Hollander tilted the controls, his chest heaving. “Oh my God. Oh my God. I’m landing,” he said with gasping breaths. “Hold on.”
The three of us in the back clung to each other. Torres hid her face in my shoulder, and Bickley wrapped his muscular arms around the two of us. The flight deck filled the windshield, growing nearer every second. Finally, we touched down, bounced, and then ground to a halt next to a few other planes.
Nobody said anything for a few seconds.
Bickley slowly released us from his tight embrace. “Okay,” he whispered. “Let’s get out.”
Commander Hollander turned around in his chair. “Um… I don’t know how to say this, but… the Master at Arms is on his way here right now, and all his men are holding hand cuffs.”
6
The Master at Arms slammed my cell door shut. The metallic bang echoed around the brig, hammering home just how utterly pathetic I was. I slouched against the tiled wall, my hands in my pockets.
He crossed his arms. “I don’t want to hear a peep out of you. Just sit there and worry about what you’ll do when we dump your sorry ass in Port des Morts.”
I gave him a sidelong stare, then mimed zipping my lips and throwing away the key.
He tutted and marched away, up the stairs, and then through the heavy steel door to the brig. The final slam of the brig door made me wince, and then sigh as I slid down the bulkhead. I banged my head against the wall repeatedly. You’re an idiot. You’re an idiot. You’re an idiot.
The pain from banging my head distracted from the pain in my hands, which had burned ever since I’d picked up the glass spheres. I looked at them, studying the palms and backs for the millionth time, but could see no difference. The cuts and lacerations looked the same as before, and the pain felt much deeper than skin wounds.
A whistle sounded, high and long. Over the speakers, a tinny voice said: “Man overboard! Not a drill!”
Some things never changed.
“It could be worse,” Torres said from across the small hallway and down two cells. “They could’ve put us in isolation.”
“Oh, shut up!” I shouted back. “I didn’t want to get on the plane in the first place!”
I slammed my head into the wall again. Maybe I’d knock myself out, floating away into oblivion and being freed from my new reality.
The brig. Of all places to end up after I’d died, I’d ended up in the brig of a ghost ship on the buttcrack of the universe. If my parents knew that I’d gotten tossed into friggin’ jail in the
afterlife, they would’ve stopped sitting shiva for me.
“Let’s not fight,” Commander Hollander said, his voice floating from the far end of the hallway. “This is the time to work together.”
I glared in the direction of his cell. “Arthur, I still haven’t decided just what I’m going to do to you for killing us, so put a cork in it.”
Bickley, who was directly across from me, walked up to the bars. He gave me a look of exasperation. “He’s right, you know.”
I flipped him off. My patience with everything and everyone had just run out.
He sighed. “Let’s look at this another way. We now have time to figure out what we’ll do in Port des Morts, though of course, any plan will be tentative until we know where that place is and what the situation is there.”
The pain in my palms flared. The burning was spreading up into my wrists. “Does it matter?” I shot back. “No matter what it is, it’s—”
“Port des Morts is where the dead go to die.”
I slowly raised my head and got to my feet. Who was in here with us?
The speaker, a young man judging from the sound of his voice, laughed quietly. “What on earth did you all do? You all are the fresh meat, right?”
I peered through the bars. “Who are you? Show yourself.”
A handsome man in his mid-twenties, with rich brown hair and eyes, appeared and lazily draped his arms through the cell bars. “Seaman Wayne, at your service.”
Bickley gripped his bars, an expression of pure hate suddenly marring his features. “You’re the guy who was throwing chem lights into the water the night we died!” He shook his bars, then punched one. “You are so lucky you’re in there, and not in my cell.”
Wayne just stared at Bickley, bored, and then turned back to me and pointed at Bickley with his thumb. “What’s his problem?”
“If you hadn’t thrown the chem light overboard, most of us wouldn’t be dead, that’s what!” Torres shouted. She retreated deeper into her cell and began to sob.
Wayne’s face fell. “Well, damn. Did I kill you all?”
I pointed toward Commander Hollander’s cell. “No, the flyboy killed us all, but we were all in that compartment because you threw a chem light in the water. It made the lookout team think someone had fallen into the water, and we were at muster for the man-overboard alert.” I took a shaky breath. “If you hadn’t done that, Torres and Bickley would almost certainly be alive.” I rested my forehead against the bars. “But I’d still be dead, I suppose.” My voice had dropped to a whisper.
Wayne swallowed. “I… I didn’t know that’s what those things were. I thought they were toys. I’m so sorry.”
“Toys?” Bickley gripped the bars again. “Why the hell would there be toys on a US Navy vessel, moron?”
Wayne threw up his hands. “I don’t know! There’s tons of other weird stuff on ships now, so why not toys? There’s nuclear reactors, computers, women who aren’t nurses, and planes that can go faster than sound! How was I supposed to know that little sticks that glow in the dark weren’t toys?”
“And was that you who drew the little cartoon on the classroom board?” I asked through gritted teeth.
Wayne looked down. “I kept having visions of it. I didn’t realize that it was going to…” He trailed off, true shame taking hold. “It seemed funny at the time.”
I’d never wanted to throttle someone so much. “Yeah, that’s just hilarious,” I spat. “Moving around chairs and leaving ominous warnings? Surely you have an actual job on this stupid ship. Or are you just a waste of space?”
Wayne’s head dropped and he sighed. “I’m in the engine room. It’s just me. The rest of us died.” He sighed again. “Everything just seemed so… so pointless after that day. I just wanted to laugh again, you know?”
I didn’t know what I’d expected him to say, but it wasn’t that. “What do you mean, they died?” I asked slowly. “We’re all ghosts.”
“We’re not ghosts,” he said, glum. “At least, not the way you think of them. We’re not the leftover bits of people.” His large brown eyes flickered up at me, and this time I just rested my forehead against the bars. “You probably think of humanity as bodies who have souls. It’s the other way around. You are a soul. You had a body. When you can’t stay in your body anymore, that’s when you go to your eternal rest. Except not us. We were sucked into this realm.”
“Is it Hell?” Torres asked. “Or Purgatory?”
“No. You’re in the world of the Oceanus.”
Bickley blew out a long breath. “Say that again?”
I racked my brains, recalling the unit on Greek Mythology I’d taken in World Literature class in high school. “Do you mean the okeanos, the great river that surrounds the world?”
Wayne looked at me, a small smile on his face for the first time. “Hey, you know it. Good job. Yeah, the Oceanus. That’s how the Romans said it, and that’s how we say it here on the Saint Catherine. But it’s not a river. It’s a vast ocean that covers most of this earth.”
“And the Saint Catherine sails the Oceanus?” Commander Hollander asked.
“Obviously, Arthur!” I shouted down the hall.
Torres appeared at her door, her eyes red-rimmed and watery. “What’s the point of it all, though? What’s the ship do, and why are we here?”
“Rollins said there’s a war on,” Bickley said. He looked sideways at Wayne. “And to answer your earlier question, we stole a plane filled with glass bombs that were singing, accidentally detonated all of them, and obliterated an entire fleet of enemy ships.”
Wayne paused, then nodded, clearly impressed. “And on your first day? Wow.”
“The war,” I said, glaring at Wayne. “Tell us about the war, since we won a battle for the ship.”
He sighed. “There’s a ton of realms, okay? Humans are from the human one, fairies are from the fairy one, et cetera. The Oceanus is the home of water creatures, mostly. Mermaids and stuff. But there’s some land, and this world has a lot of weak spots into the other realms. It’s become a hub for the chaff of all the other worlds. The entire fairy realm has been embroiled in a nasty war for decades. Refugees and deserters have been just pouring in, and they bring the war with them. This ship’s original mission was to sail the ocean blue and stop monsters from getting into the world of the living. Nowadays, though, we’re just as busy directing refugees to the bits of land, stopping the bands of pirates, stuff like that.”
Monsters. Magic. Fairies. Pirates.
I wasn’t in the Navy anymore—I was in a children’s storybook. Except nothing about this was the stuff of children’s stories. I’d come here though a violent death, and since then I’d seen an officer shoot Commander Hollander, and then I’d been attacked by a… wait, what was that guy?
“Wayne?”
“Yes?”
“What kind of creature has white skin and eyes, and hair the color of seaweed? One attacked me in the Taft.”
He made a face. “Fairy pirates. Fairies can change their appearance, and they imprint on the inhabitants of other realms when they leave their own. The fairy pirates imprinted on mermaids when they came here. Too bad they didn’t take the tails, though. It might make them easier to kill,” he muttered. He sighed. “Unfortunately, the fairies are tricky bastards. They can cloak themselves in the world of the living and appear and disappear at will. Half the stuff you know about fairies from the old stories are true.”
“They didn’t seem so hard to kill a bit ago,” I said, smiling despite myself. “Those were fairy pirates, weren’t they?”
“I don’t know. I was down here. Were there a bunch of ships lobbing bombs at us?”
“There were.”
“Yeah, that was pirates.” He smirked. “I suppose dropping an entire payload of magic on them would do the job.”
The painful heat in my wrists was snaking up my arms. I bit my lip and rubbed my forearms. “Magic, huh?”
“Yeah, it’s what this whole w
orld runs on. The world of the living runs on solar energy. This place runs on magic. It’s what the pirates are always looking for. They prey on ghost ships because ghosts are almost entirely magic. It’s a limited resource, you see.”
“Ghost ships? In the plural?” Bickley asked. “How many are there?”
“There’s a ghost ship for every active navy in the living world. The sailors are people who died through accident or injury. Never met someone who died in combat on one of these ships. Even the nurses died like that. Dot blew up when someone accidentally dropped a missile next to her, and Peggy caught typhoid or something. I fell off my cruiser and drowned.”
“Even Gorman and Muree?” Commander Hollander asked.
“I said shut up, Arthur!” The pain in my arms was making me short-tempered.
“Gorman and Muree died from the flu in the same night. They replaced the old skipper and executive officer, who were taken by the fog. You know how it goes.”
Torres tutted. “Wayne, you gotta remember that we were born into this world literally today.”
Wayne nodded. “Okay, well, the fog is—”
The pain was in my shoulders now. “Guys, be quiet. Please.” I sank to my knees, shaking. The heat was beginning to tighten in my chest. “Something’s wrong. Something’s really, really wrong.”
Bickley kneeled and held his hands out helplessly. “What is it?”
“It’s heat!” If I’d thought that pulling my clothes off would’ve cooled me down, I would’ve. Instead, I wrapped my arms around myself and choked back sobs. Hashem, take this pain from me.
Bickley gripped the bars. “Hey! Can anyone hear this? We’ve got a medical emergency!”
It was Wayne’s turn to punch the bars in frustration. “We’re dead, pal. That doesn’t work here. Believe me, I’ve tried. Not my first night in the brig.”
Yet, the door at the top of the stairs opened with a clang.
Sea of Lost Souls Page 6