Generation Z (Book 6): The Queen Unchained

by Meredith, Peter

  “But.” The one word was Emanuel’s sole argument in favor of giving into fear and hiding timidly.

  “It’ll be okay. We are too far away to be seen or heard, and they are in the middle of the channel with no reason for them to make a course adjustment.”

  His calm tone did nothing to calm anyone. The crew remained in a state of barely contained freak until the Corsairs were far astern. After that they were all smiles and manic blabbering about their “Brush with death,” as Teresa called this minor episode. To Troy, their reaction was far more frightening than seeing a few lights on the water. How would they react in a real emergency?

  “Not well,” he muttered, wrapping his coat tighter around him.

  It was close enough to the shift change that Teresa volunteered to come on early. “I don’t think I could sleep after that,” she admitted as the others went back to their bunks, grinning and relaxed. “It’s my nerves. They make me, I don’t know, jumpy. Kinda like I drunk a lot of coffee. You know what I mean?” He said that he did, and she went on, “Then my stomach starts hurting. There’s no sleep after that.”

  “I suppose not,” he said. For a few minutes, he watched as she stared back at the fading lights with a pair of binoculars perched on her knife of a nose. Her right leg jimmied up and down as though it was having its own ongoing convulsion. “Would you like me to stay with you for a little while?”

  “If you must be nervous, Teresa at least be nervous about what lies ahead. I’ll take the con for a while if you wish to go up front.” She was eager for the company, and grateful as well, thanking him over and over. Troy nestled her at the bow, wrapped her snuggly in two blankets, and told her everything would be okay.

  His confidence was all a facade. The ships represented the vanguard of the main fleet, which could be just over the horizon, strung out in a long unruly line. Or they could be hours away, perhaps just then crossing the invisible boundary between the Pacific and the strait. Because the Corsairs had a well-deserved reputation for being poor sailors, unable or maybe unwilling to keep to their station, Troy was hesitant about rushing forward. Although the strait gradually widened, there was too great a possibility that some drunken captain wasn’t weaving about, this far north.

  In different circumstances, a prudent sailor would have run his boat up practically on shore to keep out of reach of the Corsairs. Troy didn’t feel he had the time to waste searching the shoreline for a hidden cove that the mapmakers had overlooked. Time had begun to weigh on him. Ever since they had made it to Bainbridge, he had been restless to leave again, almost as if he were being drawn away, pulled by some unseen force. He had no reason to believe that it wasn’t a godly force. After all, he prayed for guidance daily.

  He hoped to see the main fleet sooner, while it was still dark and he could see their lights, rather than later when the sun was up and they were both trying to manage the tricky waters of the mouth at the same time.

  “I see lights!” Teresa hissed breathlessly.

  Troy had to duck beneath the sail to see them. Because of the distance and the motion of the boats, they looked like fireflies blinking on and off. He hurried forward and took the binoculars from her, scanning everything in front of him. “There’s only forty-six?” He counted again and came up with one fewer this time. “There’ll be more,” he said. “Let me know right away when you see them.” He went to the wheel and edged the boat closer to the shore.

  There they rode all the while watching the lights of the fleet glide closer and closer. Then, like the van, it passed into their wake and they looked forward, waiting to see the rest of the Corsair ships. Troy’s best guess was that they had somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and seventy ships. With the thirty that had been in the Sound already, added to the fifty-six they had just passed, he figured they still had half the fleet in front of them.

  With the sky tuning from black to indigo behind them, it was a frightening prospect, especially to Teresa. “Maybe we should hide,” she suggested every few minutes as the sun crept over the mountains far to the east.

  Troy might have considered it if there was anywhere to hide. The map showed nothing until they reached Port Renfrew and by then, they’d be a half mile from the ocean. No, they had to keep barreling on and pray they weren’t seen. His prayers came true, but not in the way he hoped.

  They traversed the rest of the strait in the bright morning sun and saw nothing except a few gulls and a pod of killer whales. While the crew breathed a sigh of relief, their young captain grew more concerned. He turned south into the Pacific and now that the wind was right on the Harbinger’s stern, they fairly flew down the coast with everything she could bear and the mast groaning with each gust.

  During this stretch, no one was happy and the fear built up with every mile. Troy kept the land in view despite the pleading of his crew. They were sure they were racing to their doom and that, at any second, they would see more black sails. Troy was afraid they wouldn’t. He disliked the very notion of a premonition; it smacked of witchcraft, something his religion expressly forbade. In spite of that, he had a dreadful feeling he knew where the other half of the Captain’s fleet was.

  There was only one way to find out. “Emanuel, ease us to port a tick, please.”

  Emanuel had a bristle brush head of hair and even when he shook his head violently it didn’t move a millimeter. “No way, God damn it! We all know where we’re at. That’s the entrance to Grays Harbor, up yonder.”

  “I know. We’re going in just to take a peek.” When he steadfastly refused, Troy was left with few options. “It wasn’t a request, Emanuel. It was an order. Follow it or go below, and I’ll let you off the ship at my earliest convenience. And if you take the Lord’s name in vain one more time, I’ll pitch you overboard right now. Are we clear?”

  Emanuel’s answer was spoken in such a low tone that Troy didn’t catch it. All the same he turned the boat. When Troy spotted the North Jetty, heavy waves breaking all along its length, he said, “Give it a wide berth, Emanuel. I doubt they do much dredging in Hoquiam.” The Corsairs were far too lazy to dredge a thing, though they did move belled buoys around the shoals that grew in size year by year. Emanuel swung the Harbinger in a wide arc before cutting straight east. He had a grip on the wheel as if he were steering up the river Styx. With the water filled with bloated corpses and giant zombies, it wasn’t a bad analogy.

  As bad as the sight was, the smell was worse. Teresa went green before puking over the side, which led to Sara puking as well. Troy grimaced and whispered a prayer for the dead. Although they were unrecognizable now that they were half-decomposed and picked apart by gulls, Troy knew who these men were. They were all that was left of the Coos Bay Clan and the Magnum Killers. Their bodies had been dumped in the bay and left to rot, and were now being pulled out to sea by the current.

  To avoid most of them, Troy cut south and kept going into what Teresa called “The mouth of Hell.” The harbor was five miles long and with every minute they sailed deeper into it the greater the terror on board grew.

  Finally, they could see the waterfront of Hoquiam itself. Troy scanned it with the binoculars. “No ships,” he said.

  Emanuel, who came stumping to the stern, nearly went headfirst into the water because of the sharp pitch of the deck. “It’s a trap!” he cried, in a high voice. He peered back along their wake, expecting to see a hundred sails charging after them.

  “It’s not a trap,” Troy said. He almost wished it were. Teresa, crouching on the stairs, begged him to turn around. “Not yet. I have to make sure they’re gone. Three days ago, the west river was dammed, but that was where they traditionally moored their boats. A little further, I swear.”

  “Further?” Teresa moaned. “Oh, gaw…” She stopped herself one letter short of blasphemy. He gave her a look and then went back to staring through his binoculars. There was a sudden burst of activity in the city. The people were ant-like with the distance, still he could see them running about. And n
ow a bell was sounding. Its urgent tolling came drifting across the water.

  Even though everyone begged Troy to turn around, he stayed the course, fighting his own fear. His heart was pounding so hard that he could feel it in his stitches. Then he saw the edge of the wide muddy expanse. “Coming about! Curtis get ready to repo the boom.”

  “Repo?”

  “Reposition. Sara, drop the spinnaker as soon as she begins to luff.”

  They certainly weren’t a crack crew, and Troy was really more of a soldier than a marine. They sketched a slow, somewhat jerky turn that none of them were particularly pleased about. At one point they almost stalled completely. Then they were around and the spinnaker was up and filled like a giant pregnant windsock. They picked up speed as they were running with the current and very soon, they were back in the Pacific.

  Curtis started to say something about Canada, however, Troy was already turning south where the ocean had grown cross. The winds soon began to gust and the water was a slushy grey chop that made the boat shudder as she shouldered the waves aside. The spinnaker didn’t help to ease the ride and probably should have been lowered, seeing as it pushed the head down into the water with every gust. The crew became too seasick to even complain.

  And still Troy raced on. Half of the Corsair fleet had gone south and, by his reckoning, they had a twelve-hour head start. He was desperate to catch up, though what his one ship was going to do against eighty or ninety boats, he didn’t know. He had faith in God and left his fate in His hands.

  All through the voyage south, he tempted fate constantly, driving the Harbinger at break-neck speeds even as the wind began to gust upwards of thirty knots and the ocean turned angry, heaving the boat up and down like a child’s toy. Sometime in the mid-afternoon watch, they lost a jib, as a line parted under the strain. In seconds, the sail was slashing itself to pieces against the forestay.

  Troy knew he had to shorten the sails or risk losing another one and perhaps the entire ship if she broached, but it ate at his heart to do so. It meant losing a great deal of his speed. For the sake of his crew, he reduced sail and plodded through the muck of a cold, wet and windy storm. It was the kind of storm that would have sent day-sailors scurrying back to the safety of shore, but was shrugged off by mariners who had to provide for their families.

  With common sense prevailing, the Harbinger took the storm in stride. The same could not be said for the sad crew, who alternated between the abject misery of seasickness, and the terror of ten-foot swells with steep faces, coming at eight-second intervals. In Troy’s mind, the weather was just this side of “sporty.”

  It calmed enough in the late afternoon for him to take a deserved rest and by morning of the following day, the crew were too exhausted to vomit or complain. They existed in something of a muted dead zone and didn’t seem to care that Troy was driving them toward the very enemy that they had hoped to be running from. They figured it out the next morning when the storm blew out and in the ethereal glow of fading mists lit by the metallic glare of a bright morning, they saw a crowd of black ships pulled in close to shore.

  They were unloading men and munitions, and already there was something of a mob spread out over the beach.

  “Where are we?” Teresa asked. She had lost four pounds in the last few days and now her cheekbones stood out sharp and clear.

  “That’s Drakes Bay. We’re eighteen miles from San Francisco.”

  She deflated, her green-tinged face falling. “What are we going to do? Do we go south to Mexico?”

  Emanuel, who had the wild look in his eyes again, hissed, “There’s sails out yonder. Jesus! Look at them all.” Troy’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing to the man about his blasphemy, he was too interested in the sails. Hoping that they were the white sails of the Guardian fleet, he hurried forward and squinted against the fierce glare coming off the water. The sails were black and there were only four of them…no five. One was just a speck in the distance. They were heading to the city.

  “Are they just scouting or bottling them up?” he said, speaking to himself.

  Teresa overheard him. She grabbed his arm. “No. Tell me you’re not thinking about going down there. Troy, don’t you see that we have to get out of here? Right now before they see us.”

  “Fleeing is not an option,” he told her before changing the angle on the mainsail. Heading back to the wheel, he turned the Harbinger further out to sea, keeping just on the fringe of the sight of the sails. He ran parallel with them for two hours until he spotted the Golden Gate Bridge; it was only an orange smudge on the horizon at that distance.

  So far, he had counted fifty-seven boats and as he drew near the bay, he ticked off thirty-three more. They were in an imprecise amoeba-shaped clump about a mile from the bridge. As Troy edged his ship in closer, he trained his binoculars on the immense structure that was less of a bridge and more of an immense obstruction. It hung with a spider’s web of chains and ropes, especially along the lower part of the towers that held the bridge up out of the bay.

  Between the massive supports were buoys and more chains. Strangest of all were what looked like dozens of anchors hanging beneath the bridge. They looked like an insane person had gone about decorating the bridges. Both ends of the bridge were more or less wide open. A few dozen cars had been pushed into position to form three simple walls on either side of the bridge. Troy knew they wouldn’t hold for long, especially on the northern edge where the hills rose high and dominated everything. Anyone on the bridge would be subject to withering fire from the heights.

  Teresa tugged at his sleeve, her narrow face screwed up in fear. She was begging Troy to get them out of there. “Those Corsairs are signaling us,” she said, pointing at the closest boat. It was running flags up its backstay.

  “It says ‘Report ASAP,’ according to this book.” Sara held up a black and white composition book to show the Corsair’s private signals.

  Troy took it and glanced through the pages. He grunted once and then ordered the spinnaker up and the wheel turned so that they were pointed due south. The crew raced to get out of there and were happy when the water began to gurgle along the side. While they were at it, Troy ran up the signal for ‘Reconnaissance. Will Report.’

  “That’ll give us some time.” He didn’t tell his crew that it would give him time for his own reconnaissance.

  The Harbinger sped south and as it did, Troy scanned all around the horizon, certain he would see a distant white sail. The Guardians were sure to have their own ships keeping an eye on the Corsairs. Five miles went by and there was nothing. “Maybe they’re further out.” It made sense. If a chase ensued, the Guardian ship would want to lead the Corsairs away from Highton. He was in the process of turning when Curtis Owens gave a shout.

  There, in the cove of Half Moon Bay, were what looked like the tips of a dozen or so spears jutting up over a little hillock of sand and weed. They were in fact, masts, silver masts, which meant they were Guardian ships. Immediately, Troy heeled the ship over and raced for the cove, excitement filling him. Here was a chance to hurt the Corsairs!

  If they hurried, the Guardians could attack while the Corsair ships near the Golden Gate were disorganized and basically defenseless. He could picture the battle perfectly: They would come flying in from the west under full sail, pinning the black ships in place, making them easy targets. They would have to move, but the only way they could pick up the speed to maneuver would be to swing in close to the bridge, where they would surely be attacked by the People of the Bay.

  It would be a battle of annihilation and with a third of their fleet destroyed right off the bat, the others would…

  Troy’s excitement dried up as he saw that there were only fifteen Guardian ships in the cove. Where were the rest? “Maybe they’re on their way. Lord, please let them hurry! Emanuel, run up a white flag. Sara take in the spinnaker and the jib.”

  While the crew hobbled about, following his orders, he went below to put on his armor and t
o take up his spear. On deck again, they were closer now, close enough for the Guardians to see they weren’t Corsairs. He waved his spear and dozens were waved back. A minute later, ropes were tossed to them, and they were pulled in close to the forty-eight foot Morning Dove.

  Troy leapt across where he was greeted with stark relief by Captain Boon Mills. She was a perpetually grinning woman, though now there was pain in the smile. “Thank the Lord. I never thought I’d ever see you again.” She looked with some disappointment at Troy’s small, underwhelming crew. “Please tell me there are more of you coming.”

  “I wish I could.” He gave Boon the briefest of accounts, concerning the situation on Bainbridge. If anything, what was going on in the Bay was even worse. The two free peoples were practically at war with each other, with both sides digging in their heels.

  “The Queen cut off access to the bay,” Boon said, shaking her head. “Half of us are trapped here. We were going to cross over to the Bay on foot, but now that the Corsairs are here…” Another shake of her head. Troy understood. As a people who were dependent on the sea, they couldn’t simply leave their ships to be taken by the enemy. Boon went on, “We don’t know what to do. The Bishop has made it clear that he won’t fight for this queen. He says that she is only a puppet of the last one, and I agree. That Jillybean can claim insanity all she wants, but in the end, she was worse than the Corsairs. It’s practically as if she’s in league with them.”

  “In that you are wrong,” Troy remarked. “She is far more noble than I would have guessed.” He stuck out a hand. Captain Boon gave it a perplexed look and then took it. “Watch over my ship, will you? I need to talk to the Bishop.”

  Boon held him back. “You’re wasting your time. His Excellency has pulled his ships in, and the others won’t acknowledge us. I was on the bay side last night, desperate to get over to the Bishop to warn him that the Corsairs were coming, only they wouldn’t even look my way.”