by Anna Burke
“No you’re not. Miranda wanted to see you if you woke up before your shift.” She started walking, forcing me to follow her.
“How did you know I was awake?” I asked, a suspicion creeping over me.
“Are you really that dumb?” Orca rolled her eyes at me.
“You put a watch on the door.” That explained the sailor.
“You’re lucky I didn’t just lock you in. It’s this way.” She led me to an unfamiliar part of the ship and down a long hallway. At the end was a door.
“Well?” I asked.
Orca looked around us, then moved closer to me, her eyes murderous.
“Watch yourself with the captain, fleeter.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Orca’s braids moved around her face, the shells whispering things I was glad I couldn’t hear. She raised a hand toward my cheek, and I braced myself for whatever new harm she intended.
Miranda opened the door.
“She’s awake,” Orca said, a little unnecessarily in my opinion.
“Good.” Her eyes flickered over Orca, once, and then she smiled, clapping the first mate affectionately on the back.
I reminded myself that I had no right to be jealous, and kept the memory of Miranda’s cruel justice at the forefront of my mind.
• • •
The door shut behind me with a click, a sound I echoed when I realized my jaw was hanging open. The room faced out over the stern, with reinforced plastic giving an unrestricted view of sea, sky, and a few low lines of rocks. Grass and stone covered the floor, and a narrow pathway led to a circular courtyard with a low table and two chairs.
Around the courtyard bloomed a collection of flowers, more than I had seen even in the botanical gardens on Polaris. I recognized the faint floral scent that clung to Miranda immediately. It was coming from a flowering bush directly beside the door. More of them bordered the walls, framing the room in a riot of red blossoms.
“Hibiscus,” Miranda said, noticing my interest.
A green and yellow shape swooped past my face. I jumped again, feeling foolish when the bird landed on Miranda’s shoulder. It was almost as tall as her head, and had a curved, black beak that looked far too sharp for comfort. I had only ever seen a bird in photographs, and once from a distance. They didn’t fly over the open ocean we called home.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Blue skies,” croaked the bird.
Miranda’s lips quirked at my expression.
“It’s a parrot.”
“It can talk.”
“Yes, although the conversation is a little limited. His mate is nesting over there. Don’t go near her, unless you want to lose an eye.”
I scanned the bushes where she’d pointed, but saw nothing beyond the impossible display of color. Then I noticed the trees.
Lemons, limes, oranges, and other fruits grew in pots, shading the sitting area with fragrant shadows.
“What is this place?” I asked, my voice a little shaky.
“A reminder. Here, let me show you something.”
The bird turned its head around to watch me. I kept a healthy distance between us, noting a distinctly unfriendly gleam in his beady little eyes. At the end of a short pathway was a small pond, fed by a trickle from the evaporator on the roof.
Beside the pond rested a creature the size of a large cat. It had a dark shell with reddish spots, a bizarrely long neck, and stubby legs.
“This is Starbuck,” she said, kneeling by the animal. It turned its head toward her slowly as she broke off a nearby blossom and fed it to the animal. “A friend of mine found him on an island south of here. She gave him to me, when we parted ways.”
“What is he?”
“A tortoise.”
I had never seen a terrestrial animal in my life, aside from cats and rats, and the sight simultaneously took my breath away and filled me with a deep-seated anxiety that bordered on longing. Miranda stroked Starbuck’s shell affectionately.
“May I?” I asked, unsure of the protocol for touching a captain’s tortoise.
At her nod, I knelt and reached out a hand, letting it hover over his shell, suddenly hesitant. The tortoise turned his head to look at me, blinking reptilian eyes.
Miranda placed her hand over mind and gently pressed it down.
The shell was warm, and the tortoise shifted beneath the sudden weight, startling me into a laugh that shattered a tightness I had not known was inside me, and I glanced up at Miranda with a stupid smile on my face.
She squeezed my hand and let it go, leaving me to trace the bumps on the tortoise’s shell.
I had spent my entire life at sea, as had generations of my family. I had no words for the affinity I felt for this strange creature, forced to share an exodus I had never truly thought about until now. My heart clenched in unexpected sorrow for my forebears, bundled onto ships and sent to live on half-constructed stations in the middle of the Atlantic, away from the one thing they had taken for granted since time immemorial— solid ground.
“Why did you show me this place?”
“I come here to think. It’s a good place for it, kind of like the gardens on your stations. Starbuck is something, isn’t he? Maybe one day we’ll visit his island, see if we can’t find him a lady friend,” she said, speaking half to me and half to the tortoise. “First, though, there is something I need to discuss with you.”
She moved to one of the low chairs, gesturing for me to join her.
I sat, trying to take in everything at once. I disagreed with the captain. This was nothing like the gardens on Polaris.
There, trees lined the wider hallways, and the grove at the heart of the station took ten minutes to walk across. The gardens were carefully cultivated, each species labeled and maintained with a precision that bordered on obsession. You could spend hours wandering the largest of the garden grounds, lost behind hedges and flowers and occasionally encountering small swaths of grassy lawn. Each garden had a theme, modeled after a distant climate zone.
My favorite had been what we called the North Garden. At the center of the grove stood one lone pine. Smaller pines bordered the edges, but there at the heart, next to a large, lichen covered boulder, was only the pine and a few scrubby bushes. It was austere to the extreme and, more importantly to me, rarely occupied.
If there was order here, it was haphazard, and as far as I could tell the only plants of practical value were the fruit trees. Miranda reached up and plucked an orange from the nearest one and tossed it to me. I caught it, cupping it in my hands.
“You’re better than advertised,” she said, plucking an orange for herself and sprawling in the chair. The bird flew off to perch on a branch.
“Blue skies,” it croaked again.
“Thank you,” I said, the thrill of the tortoise wearing off.
Sunlight broke through the shade of the trees, casting a bar of light across her eyes. I toyed with the orange peel in my hand as Comita’s warning about flattery came back to me.
“Where we’re going, I am going to need more than a borrowed fleet navigator. I need a navigator I can trust, and who does not question my decisions.” She stared at me until I met her eyes. “I need your loyalty.”
“You have it.” I held up my scarred hand.
Miranda gave a short laugh and looked out over the water.
“Loyalty taken at knife point is treachery in waiting, they say. How is your stomach?”
My hand went to the tender weal without thinking.
“Healing, captain.”
“You don’t agree with my treatment of Anemone Dive.”
I shuddered, trying to suppress the memory of the flogging and subsequent trial and execution.
“You are the captain,” I said.
“Exactly. But that was not enough for you, was it? I don’t typically explain myself to crew, but since you’re new here, I’ll cut you a little slack. This is not the Archipelago. I am not a fleet captain. I do what I
have to do to keep my ship afloat and my crew behind me. I have sailed in the Gulf, and I have sailed with the pirates we are up against. There will be no time for me to justify my actions to my navigator. For better or for worse, you and I are on the same side, and if you can’t take orders from me, I will have you off this ship faster than you can say ‘Davy Jones.’”
The cardinal points blew out of my head. Long practice kept my mouth shut while protests boiled into steam inside my skull. She was right, of course. I would never have dared challenge Admiral Comita, even if I had disagreed with her. I had let personal feelings, in more ways than one, come between me and my sense of duty. Comita would be ashamed.
“Captain,” I said, my voice as raw as my pride. “It won’t be a problem.”
“Good.”
I focused on peeling my orange to hide my shame, and to avoid looking at her face. Remember this moment, Compass Rose, I told myself. Do not make the mistake again of forgetting that she is your captain.
I remembered the tension between us in the few moments before Annie’s public flogging and bit my lip. Maybe Miranda hadn’t felt it after all, and so what if she had? She was the captain. She made the rules. There was only one way this could end for me, and it held a thousand variations of pain. Only, unlike my previous experiences with unrequited love, this one could actually get me killed. A distracted navigator was a liability to everyone she sailed with.
It was better this way, even if it hurt.
“We’ll be in the straits tomorrow,” Miranda said, moving to the next order of business.
I gathered myself together. North, south, east, west.
“I want to launch the trawler then, just in case Man o’ War gets caught in the crossing. And if she gets held up by pirates, it might be best if I were off the ship.”
There were several problems with that strategy. In this, at least, it was my place to question her, and I did.
“The trawler won’t hold many of us, not if it has to stay subbed in the Gulf. If Man o’ War doesn’t make it, then it’s game over. We’re better off staying together and trying again.”
“Spoken like someone who has never trawled,” she said, shooting me a small smile to soften her words. “You need to get in touch with that drifter heritage of yours. The trawler won’t need to support many of us. I want you on it at all times, and I will be there too, whenever possible.”
The prospect of sharing the confines of a trawler with Miranda did not bode well for my self-control.
“Won’t the pirates wonder where you are, when Man o’ War begs parley?” I asked.
“They can treat with Orca.” She glanced out the window.
“You said you sailed with them before. They know you. With all due respect, Captain—”
“If they refuse to treat with Man o’ War, she’ll have to leave the Gulf. If that happens, you will need me on that trawler with you, or you are as good as dead.”
I didn’t much like the prospect of death.
“We need to move now, then,” I said, wishing I’d remained asleep. “There’s a storm coming up behind us. We can still catch a swarm if we’re lucky.”
There were a few hours until sunset, plenty of time to prep a trawler and track down the nearest swarm. Getting there undetected would be something else. I didn’t like the idea of leaving Man o’ War to fend for herself, not with a storm on the horizon. The currents would rip at her, throwing her off my carefully plotted course, unless she wanted to sub one hundred meters or more.
Navigating a trawler in a storm, on the other hand, was a prospect I didn’t even want to consider.
“One more thing.”
Miranda, who had stood at my words, paused to listen. I knew the question was out of line, especially coming so close on the heels of her reprimand, but I had to know.
“Why are you helping the Archipelago? I would have thought a mercenary would be on the other side.”
Miranda ate the last segment of her orange slowly, watching me. Several emotions flickered across her face, among them irritation, but in the end she answered.
“If we lose the mines, we lose everything. I may not like the Archipelago, but I like the idea of the ocean’s lifeblood in the hands of Ching Shih even less. I’d rather steal from you than her.”
The wink she gave me was positively roguish, and any resemblance between her sense of propriety and Comita’s vanished.
“Come on, Compass Rose,” she said. “Let’s make some wake.”
Chapter Ten
“Now would be a good time to confess any inadequacies you think I should be aware of,” Miranda said to me as we stood on the dry dock in the landing bay with Kraken.
The boat waiting in the dock was the ugliest trawler I had ever seen. Algae dripped from the retractable trawl, and the narrow hull was more patch than bow. The windows needed a good scrubbing, and looking at the engine compartment made me glad I wasn’t a mechanic. I would be lucky if it even had sonar. It looked hardly big enough to house a family, let alone the extended family that usually occupied drifter vessels.
“Who is the skipper?” I asked, shifting my weight from foot to foot as the water flooded the dock beneath the boat. I hadn’t thought to ask, and I didn’t want to think about Annie.
“That would be me, for now,” Miranda said. She looked at the boat like a cat stalking a rat, daring it to challenge her. “Can’t exactly bring Annie aboard, now, can we?”
No, I thought, I suppose we can’t, since she is moldering at the bottom of the ocean.
“The mechanic?”
“Jeanine.”
The shark tattoo on her shaved scalp grinning even in the dim light of the hold, Jeanine leapt aboard the deck of the ship and slipped into the hatch. I watched Kraken run a hand fondly over the trawl beam and swallowed, not entirely sure I wanted to ask what his role was. Finn sauntered down the dock, whistling something out of tune and shattering my concentration.
“Evening, Captain,” he said, breaking off his tune to eye the ship. “She’s a real beauty. What are we calling her?”
“Sea Cat,” Kraken said, patting the ship the same way he might have patted a woman’s backside.
Miranda shook her head at him.
“We’re not calling her anything yet,” she said, turning back to me. “Finn will be our sonar and systems specialist.”
“Does this ship have a system?”
“Of sorts,” Miranda said.
Finn winked at me as he followed Jeanine into the bowels of the trawler. I jumped a little, surprised at the friendly overture after the isolation of the past few days. “But there are plenty of other ships in the soup to keep him occupied.” She took hold of my elbow and steered me towards the edge of the dock. The deck of the boat was slightly green and encrusted with patches of optimistic barnacles.
“Watch your step,” Miranda said. “It’s slippery when it’s wet.”
“Just like our goddamn captain,” Kraken called up from the hatch.
Miranda’s laugh haunted my burning cheeks as I clambered up the slope of the deck and down the ladder into the ship’s belly.
I really, really wished they would stop saying things like that.
The inside of the rig smelled strongly of fish. Portholes let in the dim light of the docking bay, illuminating cramped and dingy living quarters. Something brushed against my ankle and I jumped backward, bumping into Miranda as she descended the ladder.
“Easy there,” she said, placing a steadying hand on my waist.
The thing brushed against me again, and I recognized Seamus’s bushy tail as it flicked out of the shadows on his way to investigate any rodent stowaways.
The boat lurched as the water filled the dry dock, and Miranda stepped around me on her way to the helm. Her fingers trailed absently across the small of my back. I willed myself to ignore it, her reprimand still ringing in my ears, while my body informed me unequivocally that it had every intention of betraying me.
She paused at the do
orway and looked back.
“This tub isn’t going to navigate herself.”
The hallway leading to the bridge was tiny. I couldn’t imagine Kraken fitting through it, let alone what would happen if two people tried to pass each other at the same time. At one point, windows opened into the greenhouse as we wound up toward the bow, and I had my first look at a drifter hydrofarm. My stomach rumbled preemptively, not impressed with the messy rows of plants in dilapidated trays and the vat of stinking nutrient soup that I imagined I could almost smell through the heavy plastic. It wouldn’t do us much good anyway if we subbed as deeply as I planned.
A second door led down into the ship’s intestines by way of a dank hole and ladder that made me glad of Seamus’s presence. The storage hold farther on, at least, looked dry, and I was comforted to see bags of provisions that bore the stamp of the Archipelago on them.
“Where did this ship come from?” I asked Miranda as I ducked below the low door frame and climbed the short stairs to the helm, just in time to see the door to the ship’s bay open into the evening.
Miranda dropped into the chair behind the wheel and swung around to face me.
“Think of it as a recent recruit.”
I glanced around the small room. The front wall was made of thick, clear plastic, blurred here and there from the heat of a repair torch. The bio-light was no worse than what I’d gotten used to on the Man o’ War, and I noticed a few personal touches left by the drifter family who had lived here. A tiny doll was shoved in a corner behind Miranda’s chair, no more than a bundle of rags with beads for eyes. My seat had a badly frayed cover over the lumpy frame, stitched all over with tiny waves. I ran my hand over the raised, blue shapes with a finger.
The back of the seat had a dark stain on it. I touched it tentatively. It looked and felt like dried blood.
“This wasn’t a plague ship, was it?”
“No.” Miranda raised an eyebrow at me. “Unless you count family as a sickness. There were ten adults on this ship and six children. Maybe someone got tired of it.” She nodded at the bloodstain and I jerked my hand away.