by Anna Burke
“With my recent track record, I’m not sure I should sit in a chair where someone else got stabbed,” I said.
“Suit yourself, but you’re not sitting on my lap.” Miranda waved her hand around the cramped room. There were no other chairs.
I sat a little more heavily than I’d planned, trying to get that particular image out of my mind. I could still feel the place on my waist where her hand had rested.
Pirates, hurricanes, and jellyfish, I reminded myself. Oh, and most likely death and the destruction of all you love.
Miranda seized the wheel and waited expectantly. The mouth of the docking hatch opened, revealing the sun-streaked shallows. The shoal blocked most of the ocean, and I couldn’t get a reading.
“Take us out,” I said, feeling panic like a band across my chest.
We were headed into the straits and, beyond that, the largest dead zone in Archipelago territory. Toxic waters and violent weather lay ahead, and swarms of jellyfish that clogged filters and blocked visibility, concealing us from enemy ships— and enemy ships from us.
Fleet Preparatory had not prepared me for this.
The distant storm had picked up strength since I’d last checked, and the evening water was cloudy in anticipation as I checked the sonar against my inner compass and the coordinates I knew by heart.
“Once we’re under cover, I want you to look for a decent current. We need to get the trawl out,” Miranda said.
“We’re actually trawling?”
“Damn straight. We can’t be floating around in a drifter tub without something to trade. The wrong people might get the right idea.”
“My father was a drifter,” I said. “But I’ve never trawled for anything in my life.”
“Ask Kraken how it’s done. He knows a thing or two.” She paused, looking me up and down. “Any chance he’s your daddy?”
The idea was horrifying.
“He’s a good-looking man, once you get past the tattoos and the scars. I can see a little family resemblance.”
I stared at her to make sure she was joking. She put on an earnest expression. “No, really. Ink a kraken on you and you could pass for twins.”
“Over my dead body.”
“Careful, he might like that.”
I shook my head slowly, unsure of how to respond to her playful banter. This was not the same woman who had given me an ultimatum a few hours ago.
“How fast does this thing move?” I asked, steering back into familiar waters.
“That depends on Jeanine. It’s a split engine system. These rigs burn methane like you wouldn’t believe, and the solar cells do the rest, not that they are in great shape. Luckily for us, we have an override. We gutted an old fleet-issue W5000 and installed her engines along with the rest, just in case we need to move quickly.”
“Where did you get a fleet W5000?” The W5000 was an older model of the ships the Archipelago used in combat maneuvers. Small, fast, and hard to detect on sonar. Harper had gone to great length one afternoon to explain the inner workings of the engine to me. I hadn’t listened to the details, but her tone of voice suggested that the appropriate response was awe.
“A previous contract.”
“With who?”
“You’re not very good at unquestioning obedience, are you?” She swiveled toward me slowly, tapping long fingers on the wheel.
“I’m sorry, Captain.”
We lapsed into silence and I felt the tug of the currents. We were headed for a large surface swarm, which would do for now until I could locate something deeper. It would be difficult; the swarm would block our sonar, which would leave us entirely reliant on my instincts. It was a gamble no fleet captain would have made.
“There’s a swarm ahead. Not deep enough for us to follow for long, but it will give us cover.” I peered out through the darkening water, feeling for the current shift that heralded miles and miles of jellyfish ahead.
Miranda had a peculiar expression on her face as she stared out into the black sea. The light played across her profile, casting shadows beneath her brows. Her knuckles were white where they clenched the wheel, and I could see the muscles in her shoulders tense.
“Captain?”
“Do me a favor, will you? Find something to put in this.” She tossed me a flask, not bothering to meet my eyes. “Course is clear enough.”
I turned the slender flask over in my hands, noting the man o’ war engraved on the front. My palm itched in sympathy. There were too many jellyfish around for comfort.
I ducked out into the hallway and into the storage room, where bags of rice and tins of salted fish towered over me on the shelves. Seamus was here, patrolling the corners with a vigilance that made me uneasy. Rodents on a drifter ship were vectors for disease.
“Get them all, Seamus,” I encouraged as I rummaged through the small room. The grain had the Archipelago stamp on it, and on closer inspection I saw the smaller stamp— Ursa Minor, with one point emphasized. Polaris. I ran a hand over it and tried to fight off the sudden constriction in my chest.
“Need something?” Kraken’s deep voice startled me.
I held up the flask defensively, and he chuckled.
“You might make a decent mate after all. We keep the rum down here.”
He removed his bulk from the doorway, allowing it to breathe again, and led me back to the common room. There was a plastic barrel lashed to one end of the galley kitchen, and he held the flask out beneath the spigot.
“You can help yourself, as long as you stay sober.” He winked. “And just remember that you have the captain to answer to if this runs dry.”
He patted the barrel affectionately, and turned back to the kitchen.
I watched for a moment as he pulled pans down from the hanging rack.
“You’re the cook?” I asked, feeling a little incredulous.
“Calamari, rice, and beans. It will be on the stove. Bring some to Miranda when you can, and make sure she eats it.”
“Oh,” I said.
My view of Kraken had taken a shift I was not prepared for. He grinned at my confusion.
“Don’t worry,” he said, hauling a small squid out of a bucket of brine. “We’re not related.”
It took me a moment to realize he was referring to the squid, after Miranda’s teasing, and my laughter surprised me.
“You sure it’s not a distant cousin?”
“Trust me. If I ever catch a little kraken, I’ll release it.”
“Release the kraken,” Finn intoned dramatically as he popped into the room. “Smells good in here. Jeanine’s about ready to blow this cork. When you installed the new pump on the bilge, did you notice it catching on anything?”
“Nothing wrong with the gears.”
“Something is jamming it.”
“Well,” Kraken said, bringing the knife down on the squid decisively. “Looks like one of you has to go in.”
“You’re small,” Finn said, looking at me. “Feel like spelunking?”
I waved the flask around and backed out of the room, mumbling something about the captain’s orders.
The captain in question had her head in her hands when I returned bearing the rum. I paused in the doorway. Miranda’s broad shoulders were hunched, the muscles bunched and knotted beneath her thin shirt. Her hands had a death grip on her hair, and I watched her take several steadying breaths before I cleared my throat.
“Miranda,” I said as softly as I could.
She sat up slowly and held out a hand. I placed the flask in it, mesmerized by the curve of her throat as she took a long pull of the alcohol.
“That’s a little better,” she said, licking her lower lip.
“It sounds like they’ll have the ship ready to sub soon, assuming we can find a deep water swarm.”
“Good.”
I sat down, watching her out of the corner of my eye. The rum didn’t do much to relax her. Blue eyes scanned the water ahead.
“Can you tell what kind they
are?” she asked.
“The swarm?”
“Yes.”
“Not really. I can tell if it is a big swarm or a smaller one, but that’s about it.”
The ocean was swarming with jellies, more varieties than I could count.
“Have you ever been stung?” Her voice was so low I had to lean in to hear.
“Once or twice, when I was a kid.”
Miranda passed me the flask and I drank obediently. She leaned back slowly in her chair. I could feel the swarm getting closer as the minutes ticked by.
“Dammit,” Miranda muttered, taking another drink as the first jellyfish appeared, dark shapes floating at the surface and brushing against the partially submerged window of the low-riding vessel. “Of course they’re man o’ war.”
Above us, the blue bladders of the jellyfish floated on the surface of the water, lit by the last light of the setting sun, while their long tentacles trailed down to tangle and part in front of us. Man o’ war follow the current. I hoped this current continued on its course, and I prayed the coordinates I’d left with Orca got the rest of the crew into the Gulf.
As much as I disliked her, I didn’t want anything happening to the first mate. Orca was mine to destroy.
The rum burned in my belly. Drinking while navigating was a punishable offense on the North Star, but this captain didn’t seem to care.
I had never seen her this agitated. Her blue eyes were feral, and the nervous energy radiating from her body could have powered a small engine as the jellyfish grew thicker around us. Long tentacles brushed against the ship, and I shuddered slightly at the residual charge. Miranda’s hand hovered over the lever that triggered the subbing mechanism, shaking like an addict’s.
“We’ll be here for a while,” I said. “We need to get out into deeper water before we sub to another swarm. I can relieve you if you want to get some food, Captain.”
Miranda let out a short breath, and the tension abated as she visibly pulled herself together.
“Why don’t you grab some, and bring me a plate on your way back. Can’t leave you to fend for yourself in these waters yet.”
I double-checked our course, well aware that Miranda had just dismissed me twice in the span of a few minutes, and followed the smell of frying squid to the common area.
• • •
“I don’t understand,” I said to Kraken as I heaped food onto my plate. “She named her ship Man o’ War. Why would she do that if she hates them?”
“Did she say she hates them?” Kraken said, not rising to my bait.
“Not exactly, but she looks like she’d rather chew off her own hand than sail through this swarm.”
Kraken’s mouth twitched in a smile at my words, and I took a mouthful of food, hoping to offset the effects of the rum. The rest of Miranda’s crew might drink like fish, but I was not yet immune to its effects.
“Every sailor has something she— or he— hates. It’s the nature of the business. We’re not meant to be out here, and some part of us remembers that. Isn’t there something that unsettles you, Compass Rose?”
“Yeah,” I said, my tongue too quick to respond. “Your captain.”
Kraken dangled a tentacle in his tongs. “You’re smarter than you look, then.”
“We got problems.” Finn popped his head into the common room, catching my eye. “Fleet ship, coming in hot.”
My squid turned to rubber in my mouth and I bolted back to the helm.
“Ship,” I said by way of explanation to Miranda. Finn was right on my heels.
“We’ve been pinged,” he said, “but I don’t think they’ve noticed us yet.”
“They’ve noticed something.” I stared out through the mass of man o’ war. This route didn’t make sense for patrol, and I couldn’t see anything on the sonar. Just reflected sound waves, bouncing back off the jellies.
“You got a course, Compass Rose?” Miranda’s voice cut through my calculations.
“Take us out of gear and keep us in the swarm. If they’ve seen us, there’s nothing we can do, and if they haven’t, then they’ll try to avoid the swarm for the sake of visibility.”
My words sounded a lot more confident than I felt. Man o’ war might fool sonar from a distance, but they were surface jellies, which did not offer us much protection from close quarters. It was a small comfort, at least, that the sun had set, shielding us from watching eyes.
“And shutter the windows,” I added.
Miranda flipped off the lights in the helm, casting us into an almost total darkness, broken only by the dim lights of the dash and the murky light of the stars filtering through the water.
We drifted in silence for several minutes, waiting for the fleet ship to pass in the night or hail us. I closed my eyes, feeling for any hint of events to come in the currents.
“Rose,” Miranda said, touching my arm. I opened my eyes. There was a break in the jellyfish ahead, and the sonar readings coming in were definite. There was not one ship out there, but two. I recognized the telltale shape of the fleet ship in the reading. The other ship was smaller, unfamiliar, and headed straight toward it.
“Shit.” Finn ducked out of the helm and ran toward the common area, bellowing for Jeanine and Kraken. Miranda’s eyes widened, and she brought the trawler back into gear.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “They’ll see us.”
“No they won’t,” she said. “And we need to get the hell out of here.”
“Why—.” My question strangled itself in my throat.
A bright light lit the water, a red flash that turned the Portuguese man o’ war into blue-red blood vessels, pulsing above us.
“Get down!”
Miranda dragged me out of my chair and onto the ground, throwing herself on top of me. A wave hit the trawler, for all that it was impossible for a wave to hit us underwater, tossing the trawler into a jumbled mass of lights and floor and walls. Miranda had one arm wrapped around my head, and I heard the sharp crack of her elbow striking a solid surface. The impact reverberated through my skull, and I had a brief and terrible moment of clarity where I realized what might have happened had her arm not been there, and then the world turned back into chaos.
North, west, east, south. The directions made no sense.
There was something heavy on top of me, a dead weight that made it hard to breathe.
My ears popped, and my eyes felt tight.
We were in a downward spiral, the trawler hurtling toward the deeps much faster than was survivable.
“Miranda?”
There was no response from the warm body on top of me. The trawler still spun, although not as quickly, and our bodies had come to rest pressed up against the foot space of the dash. My tumbled compass picked up on the most pressing direction in my world— down. If we kept up this pace without pressurizing, we would all be very dead very soon.
Miranda groaned faintly, and I wriggled out from under her, resisting the urge to check her vital signs. I had been trained for situations like this, and I appreciated the drills now as muscle memory and conditioning took over. The ship was the priority, and I had to get her righted, because if I didn’t, Miranda would die, along with me and everybody else onboard.
Hauling myself up the dash was disorienting to the point of nausea. I groped around for the wheel and nearly wrenched my arm out of the socket in the process. It spun freely, and I braced my lower half beneath the dash and grabbed on to it as firmly as I could before groping around for the sub clutch.
The ship bucked under me, shuddering as the pressure around us grew greater and greater. I wrenched the wheel up and back toward the surface, thanking the cardinal directions for their presence in my bloodstream, because what I could see of the instrument panel was totally shot, and every direction looks the same at night below the waves.
When a vessel is deeply subbed, it has to rise slowly, or else the pressure change will be lethal. I resisted the urge to throttle back to the surface and instead
brought us up to a place where my ears no longer felt like rupturing, and let the trawler stabilize with a series of loud hisses and a distant, metallic screech. The sudden stillness knocked me off balance, and I slid down the wheel like a deflated life raft, feeling around in the dark for Miranda.
I encountered her hand, first, warm and limp, and felt my way up her arm until I found her face.
“Miranda?”
Her pulse beat steadily under my searching fingers, but she didn’t respond.
“Miranda.”
I patted her face, gently, not daring to move her in case something was broken. I needed light.
The switch for the bio-lights was back up by the wheel, and I fumbled around in the dark, turning on the ship’s bow lights as well. I left them on, too worried about Miranda to bother hunting for the off switch.
Miranda lay crumpled on the floor, her chest rising and falling evenly. A large lump above her left eye was already bruising, but all her limbs lay at the right angles. I remembered the sound of her elbow hitting something hard, and gently worked her sleeve up her arm. There was bruising there, too, and a little bit of blood, but the joint moved fluidly and nothing pulled, snapped, or ground.
I didn’t have a pocket light to check her pupils, but I prayed the worst she would suffer was a mild concussion. The clarity of my thoughts surprised me, and with that realization the clarity shattered, and I curled up around Miranda, stroking her hair and fighting the ball of panic knocking around in my chest.
“Captain,” I said, my face close enough to feel her breath. “Captain, wake up.” I wrapped my hand around hers, hoping for some sign of life. Without Miranda, it was game over, for me and for any hope of gaining access to the pirates. Without Miranda . . . The ball of panic expanded, stealing my breath and choking me with an unexpected sob.
“You’re hurt.”
The blackness around the corners of my vision contracted, bringing me down to a narrow corridor that ended in a pair of blue eyes.
“Captain?”
With a wince, she reached up and touched my cheek. Her fingers felt wet, and when I looked at them they were black in the half-light with my blood.