by Anna Burke
I obeyed, fuming. I could think of nothing to say in response. She had pulled rank on me, and it rankled. I also didn’t like the implication of her words. If Miranda’s crew felt that way, why was Miranda working with Comita?
Mercenaries needed division, I reminded myself. As much as this crew apparently hated the Archipelago, they would be hard-pressed to find work without us. The Archipelago produced the products that kept ships floating, and the pirates, drifters, and other unsavory sorts depended on those things just as surely as we did. Plus, they needed a market for their less reputable hemp byproducts.
That didn’t explain why Comita had sought out Miranda, of all people, especially if she hated the fleet as much as her crew seemed to think she did. I wished Comita had given me more information.
More than that, I wished I could punch Orca in the face. Habit and a coordinate roundup kept my temper in check, but a pounding pressure rose behind my eyes and narrowed my vision for a moment down to her twisted smirk. She met my glare with her own, which sent a different sort of thrill through my body than the sort Miranda summoned. My hatred for Maddox was nothing compared to what I was currently feeling for Orca.
Miranda wasn’t at breakfast, again. My eyes kept wandering to her empty chair, and I spent another meal in silence with only Orca’s back for company, her shoulders managing to convey her disdain. She continued to ignore me on the walk to the chart room, although I noticed that she kept a watchful eye on the crew members we passed. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t need her protection, and that I’d managed to make a place for myself on the North Star without help, but the looks some of the mercenaries sent my way stilled the words in my throat. By the end of the walk I was seriously regretting the hours I’d wasted with Harper. Instead of concentrating on avoiding her punches, I should have asked Harper to show me how to throw my own.
“Don’t leave until I come to get you unless Miranda herself shows up,” Orca said as the guards opened the doors to the chart room. The bright light blinded me again, but this time I was ready for it. I waited until the doors shut behind me to let out a silent scream of frustration. When that didn’t help, I pounded my thigh a few times with my fist.
The room was deserted. I knew there had to be others who used the charts, but the only person nearby was Crow’s Eye in the crow’s nest. I glanced up the ladder, wondering if he had observed my tantrum. The crow’s nest seemed very far away.
I pulled out the stack of charts Comita had sent with me and laid them on one of the tables. Finding the corresponding charts from Miranda’s records didn’t take as long as I’d anticipated. The room was surprisingly organized, with an assortment of charts and maps that clearly came from many different places. Some were in different languages, and a few were so old I didn’t dare remove them from their shelves.
Solitude and work restored my temper. I counted out the cardinal points to dispel the last of my anger. It was a trick I had taught myself when I was in the Fleet Prep. Navigators couldn’t afford distractions.
I traced the line of the coasts on the chart with a finger. I had never been within sight of land, and had never wanted to be, but now here I was, planning the best route to pass along the coast undetected, dodging pirates, methane, dead zones, and hurricanes, not to mention fleet supply ships and the mining stations themselves.
The mines were a distant reality that none of us really thought about. They had to be closer to the coasts in order for our rigs to reach the mineral and ore deposits on the ocean floor. I had never met a miner, and could not imagine spending my life that far beneath the waves, living in the total darkness of the deeps.
We had mines all up and down the east coast of the North American continent, but the majority were clustered in the Gulf of Mexico, a location conspicuously easy to control, thanks to the shape of the continent and the outlying islands. All the pirates had to do was restrict access to and from the Gulf and, barring that, keep our patrol ships too busy fighting off raiders to defend supply lines.
The tricky part for me was getting us into the Gulf undetected by either pirates or Archipelago forces, both of whom would be on the lookout for any suspicious ships, and who might be tempted to shoot first and ask questions later— or never.
My hand was cramped from marking coordinates by mid-afternoon. I stood up and stretched, looking around the empty room. I needed to see water.
The ocean spilled out around me as I climbed to the crow’s nest. I paused halfway up. Clouds were building into a light squall in the west, and rain fell over the water in sheets. We would pass it on our current course, but I found myself wishing for a storm to settle the electricity sending sparks through my frustration. Ahead of the rain danced several water spouts. The funnel clouds spun down like slender threads, gathering sea water like fibers onto a spindle.
Crow’s Eye was watching them when I hauled myself into the crow’s nest.
“Funnel weather,” he said. “Is that what brings you up here?”
“I just wanted to see the water.”
“Why do you think I never leave?” He gestured at a bottle in the corner. It contained a yellow liquid. “Don’t even come down to piss. I might miss something.”
I recoiled from the jar.
“It’s nice up here,” I said, changing the subject before he shared anything else about his bodily functions.
“That it is. I leave the charts to people like you.” His eyes remained fixed on the water spouts.
“How long has Miranda been captain?” I asked. “You must have been here before her.”
“I’ve been sailing under Miranda for three years. She was first mate under my former captain when we first met, but it was clear she was headed for a ship of her own.”
I thought of Orca and wondered if Crow’s Eye saw the same potential there. I didn’t ask, just in case. The thought of Orca captaining anything other than a sinking sub made my blood boil.
“Who did you sail with before that?”
“You’ve got a lot of questions today. I don’t like questions.”
“Sorry.” I stared out at the distant rain. “Have you ever been to the Gulf?”
Crow’s Eye cleared his throat and swiveled in his chair to face me.
“Wouldn’t be worth my salt if I hadn’t, now would I?”
“Those charts down there have a lot of variability in the dead zones. I was wondering if you could tell me what it was like to sail there,” I said, hoping he would forget that he didn’t like questions.
“This time of year, the whole Gulf is a dead zone. If you’re on the surface, you better hope you keep the vents shut, or hydrogen sulfide will wipe out the crew. The good water is down deep, where you want to be anyway. Too much algae, jellyfish, and hurricanes up top. It’s a hellhole, and there’s things in the water there that you haven’t even had nightmares about, girl.”
“Like what?”
“Squid, right below the shelf, and octopus as big as small boats. Makes Kraken look friendly, doesn’t it?”
“I guess so.”
“But that’s where the mines are, girl, so that’s where we’re going. And you’re gonna get us there.” He tapped on the stumps of his legs with thick fingers.
“That’s the idea,” I said, feeling, if possible, even less confident than I had a few moments ago about the prospect.
“Well, I tell you what. You can do it. There’s more to you than meets the eye. Your only problem is that you don’t know how to think like a pirate yet.”
“How do I think like a pirate?”
“For starters, you’re gonna have to drink a lot more rum. Gives you big ideas, especially if rum’s all you got. The captain don’t hold with smoking the pirate weed.” His smile revealed a few missing teeth. “Then, you gotta get lean. Live from one meal to the next. It gets you thinking about doing things you can’t imagine, hunger does. Thirst too. No port to turn to, just ships to raid for food and parts. Once you can make that your reality, the rest comes easy.”
“Sounds like you have some experience.”
“I’ve sailed under a lot of captains and a lot of flags. Only made one rule for myself, and that was that I’m done sailing in the Gulf.” He grimaced. “Fat lot of good that did me, eh? The poles, on the other hand, are something I would still like to see.”
“What do you think is there?” I asked.
“Ocean isn’t dead at the poles, they say. Yet. I’d like to see that before I die. Schools of fish. Maybe even a whale, or a shark.”
“Why not go?”
“Need a captain willing to take me. So far, the spoils are here.” One of the spouts receded into the cloud, only to be replaced by another. “Now I have a question for you. Where did you come by those eyes of yours?”
“I was born with them,” I said.
“You didn’t get those eyes from the fleet.”
“My father was a drifter.”
“Is that what your mother told you?” He stroked his beard. “I suppose he could have been. Blood thins.”
“What are you talking about?” I didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking.
“Just that I’ve heard of eyes like yours before.”
“Maybe you ran into a plague ship,” I said, regretting my climb.
“It wasn’t yellow fever.”
“Then maybe you should speak clearly, Crow’s Eye.” Anger slipped into my voice and I steadied myself on due north.
“Or maybe you should learn to read the deeper currents. Now get out of here. You’re distracting me.”
I glared at the back of his head as I descended. The only thing unusual about my eyes was their color. Fleet blood was relatively homogenous. Our eyes were mostly brown, after so many generations of interbreeding, with the occasional blues, grays, and greens popping up in unexpected places, and hair color tended toward brown or black as well.
Most of the genetic variations happened on the outlying stations, like Cassiopeia, where outsiders occasionally mingled their blood with the Archipelago’s. My eyes hadn’t set me apart on Cassiopeia. It had been my sense of direction and my mother’s pride that did that.
Whatever Crow’s Eye thought I was, he was wrong. My father was just like any other man before he vanished. Average height, weather-beaten skin, and my curly dark hair. His eyes were brown, like my mother’s, and he trawled for plastic in exchange for seeds, supplies, and medicine. He was a drifter, nothing more, and my mother cultivated seaweed in the eel beds.
I pulled out a chart at random from the shelf, for the moment too angry to plot coordinates. It detailed a small patch of sea near the Gulf and showed absolutely nothing of interest. I shoved it back on the shelf in disgust.
“You’ve made a surprising amount of headway on these charts.”
I jumped a foot in the air and whirled around. Miranda was sitting at the table I’d vacated, watching me. There was nobody else in the room.
“Um,” I said, searching for words that failed to appear.
“Did I startle you?”
“No,” I lied.
She raised an eyebrow at me.
“A little, Captain.”
“You shouldn’t let your guard down like that. Now. Come show me what you have so far.”
I sat opposite her, my heart still racing.
“Our options are limited. There are only a few ways in, and you can bet both sides have them tightly patrolled. The way I see it, we have two options. We sneak in, or we don’t.”
“Explain,” she said.
“A lot of my plan is dependent on variables outside of our control, and I also need more information.” I took a deep breath and met her eyes. “I need to know more about your trading relationships with the pirates, and I need to know what kind of small craft you have in the hold.”
“I suppose that is fair,” she said. “Assuming I tell you, what do you have in mind?”
“Well, if we only had to hide from the Archipelago on our way in, that would make things a lot easier. I have an idea of their patrol patterns, and I am pretty sure I can avoid them. I plotted them here with a margin of error.” I pointed to one of the charts. “But I don’t know much about pirate patrols. I was thinking that once we’re in, you could pick up a contract with the pirates, and we could send out a small craft to get a feel for what is going on. I can keep a smaller boat off of the sonar, I think, but we need to get Man o’ War into the Gulf and the best way to do that is to have a valid reason for being there.”
Miranda leaned forward on her elbows, examining my notes.
I couldn’t keep my eyes on the chart. The scars on her skin were unusual. They weren’t raised, like ordinary scars, but looked like someone had brushed them on as an afterthought. Some were small, others were long, but all were narrow in diameter and curved almost lazily over her body.
“That could work,” she said, nodding. “What kind of small craft would you need?”
“Nobody looks twice at drifter trawlers. They’re not fast, but if we’re careful, we won’t need to worry about moving quickly.”
“You want a drifter trawler?”
“Yes,” I said. So far it was the only plan I had thought of that held water.
“Done. You’ll have it. As for trade, that might be more difficult.” She lapsed into a thoughtful silence. “I’d need something going in, and I don’t have anything to spare in my hold. Mercenaries trade in three things, Rose: supplies, fighting power, and information.”
I swallowed, realizing with a sinking feeling where this was going.
“I don’t have supplies, and I have no desire to shed unnecessary blood. That leaves information, and the only information that will interest these particular captains is Archipelago intelligence. Intelligence,” she said, tapping the fleet patrol patterns I had mapped out, “that you happen to have.”
“We can’t give them that,” I said, reaching out to snatch the chart away from her. She caught my wrist in her hand and gently placed it back down on the table.
“If you can come up with another plan, we won’t need to.”
“What if we fed them false coordinates?” I said.
“Then we would be dead. They would find us, and even if we managed to escape, my reputation would be ruined and there would be no going back. If we do this, we do it right, and hope the gain outweighs the risk.”
I stared at the charts, searching for another option. My eyes lighted on a familiar patch of sea.
“Do you know anything about these coordinates here?” I asked, pointing to the place on the map where I’d approximated the location of the unknown ship I’d investigated for Walker.
Miranda frowned slightly, then glanced up at me.
“Why do you want to know?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it, unsure of how to answer. Comita had told me to obey Miranda. She hadn’t said anything about confidentiality.
“There was an anomaly recorded from this quadrant. It could be important.”
“Anomalies usually are,” Miranda said, giving me a look I couldn’t interpret. I told her about the sonar readings North Star had picked up, and what it implied about the pirate force’s capacity to sub. Miranda’s eyebrows raised throughout my story, until they were almost lost in her hairline.
“Comita didn’t tell you who was leading the pirates, did she?” she asked.
“No.” Comita had not told me very much at all, I reflected, and I hadn’t thought to ask.
“I can see why the Archipelago wants to keep that particular piece of information to themselves,” Miranda said, shaking her head. “Panic isn’t a good strategy.”
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Ching Shih.”
My hands balled into involuntary fists, muscles, and tendons contracting in fear as everything I had ever heard about Ching Shih ripped through my brain like a hurricane.
For starters, nobody knew her real name, or her origins. She had taken the name of a long dead Chinese pirate queen, and she matched the legendary qu
een in strength, ruthlessness, and cunning. Ching came out of the South Atlantic in a red tide, binding unassociated pirates to her infamous Red Flag Fleet and organizing the pirate drug cartels for the first time in decades. If she had set her sights on the Archipelago mines, we were in much deeper waters than I realized.
“No,” I said, “Comita did not tell me that.”
“Your North Star probably picked up one of Ching’s scouts, which means we have less time than I thought. If Ching is scoping out the stations, then she’s planning to do a lot more than just cut off the Archipelago from the mines.” Miranda didn’t look nearly as concerned about this as I felt she should. “Either way, I have a new task for you. There are some rumors on my ship that you’re an Archipelago spy, and I need to give my crew something else to stew over. I can’t have them second-guessing my navigator’s choices.”
Chapter Seven
“This is fucking ridiculous,” Orca said as she shoved through the door to the Man o’ War’s training room. I couldn’t have agreed more. The room was smaller than the one I was used to, the mats looked like they hadn’t been washed in years, and the lighting was just as bad. “First she wants me to babysit your ass, and now I’m supposed to train with you?”
“First mate comes with all sorts of responsibilities,” I snapped back. “Maybe you should call for a vote.”
Orca whirled and grabbed my shirt at the collar.
“I won’t need to call a vote if I break your fucking neck.”
“And here I thought you were supposed to keep me alive.” This close, I noticed that Orca had unusually long eyelashes. I imagined plucking them out, one by one.
“‘Alive’ is open to interpretation.”
Miranda’s plan to simultaneously distract the crew from the rumor mill and make them respect me had several flaws, in my opinion. The first was definitely Orca, who had taken to sharpening her belt knife before we fell asleep each night. I had no doubt about the implied threat, and the sound was highly irritating. In retaliation, I made a habit of coughing loudly just as her breathing deepened into sleep. The result was that she was even more irritable than usual, but I felt better.