Compass Rose

by Anna Burke

  Table of Contents

  Titlepage

  Dedication

  Foreword

  East

  Captain’s Log

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  South

  Captain’s Log

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  West

  Captain’s Log

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  North

  Captain’s Log

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Center

  Captain’s Log

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  About Bywater

  for Tiffany

  Foreword

  On November 7th, 2015, I lost my wife, and the world lost a talented writer and learned scholar. Sandra Moran cared deeply, not just about her own fiction, but about lesbian-centric fiction in general.

  The Golden Crown Literary Society, an organization about which Sandra also cared deeply, approached me about establishing a scholarship to their writing academy in her memory. As Sandra was an instructor at the Academy and believed strongly in mentorship, I agreed this would be one of the most impactful ways to honor Sandra’s memory. Thus came into being the Golden Crown Literary Society Writing Academy’s Sandra Moran Scholarship.

  Sandra would be so honored to know that she was the impetus for creating an opportunity for up-and-coming writers to be mentored and to succeed in their own right.

  It is a privilege to introduce to you the work of Anna Burke, the inaugural recipient of the Sandra Moran Scholarship. Anna’s talent is profound, and Sandra would be so proud of this, Anna’s first published novel.

  Enjoy reading this book, and the many to follow from this gifted writer.

  Cheryl Pletcher

  Asheville, NC

  July 2018

  East

  Captain’s Log

  Admiral Josephine Comita

  North Star, Polarian Fleet

  June 15, 2513

  37.1, -58.2°

  As Admiral of Polaris Station and acting captain of her flagship, the North Star, it is with growing frustration that I record yet another log without decisive naval action. We are now seeing increased raids on outlying stations and supply lines, and despite repeated reports to the Council, no action has been taken to address the growing pirate threat. If things continue in this vein, we are at risk of losing the coastal mines, and without the mines our entire way of life will collapse into anarchy.

  I have found myself revisiting Andrea Shang’s canonical text, A History of the North Atlantic Archipelago. Her study of societal collapse is especially relevant in light of the pirate Ching Shih’s growing influence in the Atlantic.

  Like the collapse of Western civilization, we are at risk of failing to act until it is much too late, despite the clear warnings provided by myself and others. Now, it is not the threat of rising seas and warming temperatures that will destroy us, as we have learned to live in this altered world, but a bitter struggle for the last of the resources left that will drive us over the edge.

  Unlike the collapse of the West, however, there is still time to avoid disaster, provided the Council remembers its duties to all Archipelago stations instead of sinking deeper and deeper into corruption and complacency.

  I will end this log with a passage from our history:

  The North Atlantic Archipelago is still perhaps the greatest feat of human engineering in our impressive history as a species. Today, the Archipelago stands as a testament to the courage, resilience, and adaptability of the human race— and as a reminder of our failures. Shang, 2503.

  We will not repeat these failures on my watch.

  Chapter One

  I was born facing due north. By the time I was three, I could pick the North Star out of the heavens with the unerring certainty with which other children picked their mothers’ faces out of a crowd, and the constellations burned against my eyelids even in the darkness beneath the waves. My mother used to tell me I could be anything I wanted, except lost.

  She was a literal sort of woman. My name was proof of that.

  I checked our direction out of habit, tuning out the sounds around me. We were sailing east. The ship was subbed beneath the surface, keeping out of the way of the fractious wind, and down in the training room the crew burned off steam while the whitecaps mounted somewhere far above us and the night shift navigator charted a course over the deeps.

  “North, south, east, west.”

  I named the cardinal directions softly to myself as I worked the punching bag, a little frustration boiling over into my combination each time I came back to north.

  I had perilous straits of my own to navigate, and not even a compass for a brain was going to get me out of this one. Ship life was tight. It made it hard to breathe, sometimes, and even harder to avoid people like Maddox.

  “Hey, jelly.”

  I paused mid-punch, wiping the sweat from my brow with an equally sweaty forearm. The ship’s training yard was always packed after the shift change, and it took me a moment to isolate the taunt from amid the sweaty throng of people boxing, grunting, cursing, and lifting in the long, echoing room.

  I didn’t have to look far. Maddox’s large bulk towered over me, a bead of sweat dripping from his crooked nose to the floor. His nose had been broken several times, unfortunately not by me, and it ruined his otherwise handsome face. I took an involuntary step back into the punching bag.

  “What, Maddox?” I said, trying to make up for my lost ground with a bolder tone.

  “We don’t let drifters use the gym here,” he said with a smirk.

  I clenched my jaw and bit back a sharp reply. Maddox’s chiseled chest glistened in the light of the bioluminescence, the genetically modified algae that flowed through the light tubes of the ship casting blue shadows over his brown skin. I entertained myself with a fantasy of plunging several sharp objects into his over-developed pectorals, but kept my mouth shut. If I didn’t rise to his bait, he usually left me alone after a few rounds of verbal abuse.

  “Your yellow-eyed father must have been a real noodle,” he said, his lip curling in disgust. “Raised the fever flag for your mum all right, though, didn’t he?”

  My jaw clenched tighter, threatening to crack a few molars.

  Pure-bred Archipelago citizens viewed drifters as little more than vectors for disease, their small, boxy vessels bobbing around the Archipelago ships and stations like toxic flotsam, and little better than parasites. In fairness, disease was an issue on drifter tubs, but I had a suspicion Maddox was not referring to the flag drifters raised to warn each other about contamination.

  “At least he had something to raise, you—”

  “If anyone deserves yellow fever, it’s you, Maddox,” said Harper Comita, coming to my rescue before I could finish the insult. Her arms were folded menacingly over her generous chest, and I didn’t bother trying to hide my smile as she stepped between me and Maddox. Harper was shorter than me, but nobody on the North Star messed with my best friend. We called her “Right Cross” for her signature knockout punch.

  “Careful who you hang with, Harper,” Maddox said, his leer slipping. “Only place she’s going is Davy Jones’s. I’d like to see you navigate your way out of that, Compass fuckin
g Rose.”

  His fists flexed impotently as he glared at me.

  There were two reasons no one messed with Harper. One was her killer punch, and the other was her mother. Admiral Comita didn’t play favorites, but she also wasn’t about to let her crew members tangle with her only daughter.

  “Go screw a barnacle,” I said to his retreating back. He stiffened, but fear of retribution kept his feet moving in the other direction.

  “Screw a barnacle? Really, Rose?” Harper shook her head and grinned, showing off her dimples.

  “I thought it was pretty clever,” I said.

  “You would.” She knocked my shoulder with hers, then wrinkled her nose. “You’re sweaty.”

  “You’re about to be,” I pointed out, nodding toward the mats.

  Harper was dressed in her Fleet-issued training clothes, her tank top and shorts clinging to her curves in a way that mine decidedly did not. Where I was tall and narrow, Harper was a bundle of muscle and feminine overtones that would have been hard not to drool over if she weren’t my only friend.

  “I don’t know what his deal is with you,” she said, narrowing her eyes in the direction Maddox had departed. “It’s not like he was on the navigational track before you got here. The only thing keeping him out of the bilges is his daddy.”

  “He’s just jealous that my nose is straighter than his,” I said.

  Harper laughed, her dark curls bouncing cheerfully around her head.

  “Spar with me?” she asked. “I promise I’ll go easy on you.”

  “I don’t know. I had a pretty tough bout with this bag right here.” I made to sidle past her and sprint for the showers, but she grabbed my wrist and hauled me over to an empty mat.

  “You owe me. Maddox would totally have kicked your ass.”

  “Friends don’t owe friends.” I lectured her as she did a few warm-ups. “But if we’re keeping score, then maybe we should talk about all of the things I haven’t reported you for.”

  “Like what?”

  She threw a few punches at the air. I winced as the blue light from the bioluminescent ceiling tubes blurred under the speed of her practice blows, and reached for my own gloves with exaggerated slowness.

  “Like how last week you helped Jonah set up a new still, Miss Chief of Engineering.”

  “Whatever. I’m not Chief yet. I can do what I want.”

  She assumed a fighting stance, forcing me to follow suit.

  “I’ll remind you of that when you are Chief and you can’t figure out why your staff is always drunk. There was a reason they shut Jonah down. His shit is too strong.”

  “For you, maybe,” she said with a smirk, then lunged.

  It was a short bout. They usually were with Harper. I managed to block her and she refrained from breaking my face, which by my standards was the measure of a strong friendship. Harper liked to hit things.

  We sparred until we were both dripping sweat and I refused to continue.

  “I need to shower,” I said, wiping down the mat while Harper stretched.

  “Noodle,” she said.

  I rolled my eyes at her. I hadn’t heard the insult until I joined the Polarian Fleet. I also hadn’t eaten a noodle before leaving my home station, Cassiopeia, either, which might have explained a few things.

  The ocean was the soup, a sagely twelve-year-old Harper had explained to me when I first arrived, and if you couldn’t handle the heat, you noodled.

  The showers were not as crowded as the gym, which was a relief, and the water was pleasantly warm. It had been a sunny day and the solar heat lingered in the whole three minutes of water I was allotted.

  “You’re an engineer,” I grumbled to Harper as I toweled off and reached for my clean uniform. “Why can’t we have longer showers? There is literally water all around us.”

  “The rate of passive desalination is fixed, you mollusk. If everyone took the kind of showers you like, we’d die of thirst. And you’d hog all of the hot water. If you want to soak, go to the pools when we get back to Polaris.”

  I pictured the soaking pools on Polaris Station, with their trailing willow trees and stands of bamboo— heat from the surface sunlight keeping the water temperature toeing the fine line between refreshing and comfortable.

  It was pointless. We didn’t have station leave for another month.

  “Does your mom have an override or something for her shower?” I asked.

  “That is an obscene abuse of power,” Harper said, pointing a finger at me in mock outrage. “Besides. Does it look like she ever relaxes?”

  I had to give her that. Comita was the hardest woman I knew. With her steel gray hair and steelier eyes, she kept Polaris’s fleet in military order. The North Star was the Polarian flagship, and we operated on Comita time.

  “Oh. She wants to see you, by the way,” Harper added. “I forgot to tell you.”

  I groaned and shoved my legs through my soft hemp trousers. My damp toes caught on the hem and I danced around for a few steps trying to keep my balance.

  “Why? My shift is over.” Dreams of my bunk faded into obscurity.

  “She didn’t say. She also didn’t say it was urgent. Have you eaten yet?”

  Harper winked at me as she shimmied into the close-fitting shirts favored by engineers and mechanics. Getting pulled into the ship’s mechanisms was a risk nobody wanted to take. I pulled on my much looser shirt, enjoying the freedom. Navigators didn’t have to worry about getting sucked into equipment, just the occasional hurricane.

  “No,” I said, not bothering to hide the despair in my voice.

  “Then come get some food with me and tell the Admiral that I couldn’t find you. Or that I forgot to tell you. Or whatever.” She eyed me warily. “You’re a beast when you’re hungry. If my mother thought about it, she’d thank me for sparing her the effort of dealing with you on an empty stomach.”

  “I should have told you to screw a barnacle,” I said. “You just don’t want to sit by yourself. I’ll eat as long as we make it quick. She’s not my mother. I can’t be late.”

  “You already are.”

  Harper smiled sweetly and led the way to the dining hall. The bio-lights were stronger, here, and the tables were full of North Star’s finest. Laughter and the low rumble of hungry sailors filled the long room.

  Dinner was fish and greens. I wolfed mine down while Harper chattered on about the latest gossip from engineering. It slipped in one ear and out of the other.

  I had never been called before Comita like this. If it had been an emergency, she wouldn’t have sent someone as unreliable as Harper to find me, and if it had something to do with my mother or Cassiopeia Station, then Harper wouldn’t look so cheerful.

  “Get out of here,” Harper said, interrupting my thoughts. “I’ll clear your tray, since you’re not listening to anything I say anyway. My mom is in her quarters.”

  “Her quarters?” My voice squeaked a little. The Admiral didn’t summon crew to her quarters.

  “Yeah.” Harper seemed unfazed by this breach in protocol, but then again, she had lived in the Admiral’s suite most of her life.

  “Is this about the pirates?” I asked in a hushed voice.

  “She didn’t say. Why don’t you go find out and tell me all about it later? I have some of Jonah’s brew in my bunk, if you can stomach it.” She made a shooing gesture and I fled the dining hall, my mind whirling.

  • • •

  I dodged Maddox on the way out. I would never live it down if he knew I’d been summoned to the Admiral’s personal quarters. It was bad enough that he had somehow figured out that my father was a drifter. A special summons would confirm his suspicions that I got special treatment, deepening his distrust and his unwavering belief that I didn’t belong, not just on the North Star or Polaris, but in the Archipelago itself.

  It wouldn’t have bothered me if it had only been Maddox. He was just the loudest among the Fleet Prep kids I’d grown up with.

  Sometimes, I w
ished my mother had never requested my transfer off of tiny, run-down Cassiopeia Station. Life on the edge of the Archipelago was far less glamorous, and Cassiopeia’s fleet was a joke compared to the Polarian Fleet, but no one blinked twice at my parentage at home.

  I ducked my head as I passed a group of sailors around my age. As a navigator, avoiding trouble was my job description.

  Things were different on the smaller stations. We didn’t have the resources of Polaris or Orion, two of the most influential stations in the Archipelago. We lacked the bioplastic algae farms that dominated production elsewhere, and our plastic reclamation plant relied on a handful of trawlers instead of a full fleet. As Maddox liked to remind me, we depended on trade with the drifters to keep our plant operational. There were a lot of drifter children on the smaller stations. I hadn’t realized there was a stigma to it until I left.

  Being a drifter had seemed exciting to me as a child. They got to go wherever they wanted, floating free of Archipelago rules, trading with the outlying stations and whoever else they pleased, but my mother had pursed her lips in silent disapproval whenever she caught me playing Drifter, Pirate, Fleet with my friends.

  In retrospect, losing my father to the ocean’s malice had probably sucked the romance right out of drifter culture for her, if it had ever been there in the first place.

  Malnutrition and disease are rarely sexy.

  I shook off thoughts of my mother. It had been a long time since I’d been back to Cassiopeia, and I was overdue for a visit. Of course, that would mean sacrificing station leave on Polaris to make the trip to Cassiopeia, a prospect that filled me with guilty reluctance.

  Then again, I reminded myself, if I had stayed on Cassiopeia, I would not be a navigator on Polaris’s flagship, serving under the greatest Admiral of our time. I could deal with anything, so long as I had that.

  I repeated the cardinal points as I walked, my anxiety temporarily soothed by the repetitive chant. North, northeast, east. Southeast, south, southwest. West, northwest, and north again.

  North was my point.