by Anna Burke
“Now,” Kraken said, his voice subsiding back to its normal rumble. “Let’s go over this again.”
I took a deep breath, trying not to let Orca’s words sink in, and laid out the Council’s verdict and Comita’s orders.
“It is a classic bait-and-trap maneuver. Aries will attack from the mouth of the Gulf while Andromeda strikes from the Caribbean Sea. That should distract Ching Shih long enough for Polaris and Orion to come in through the channel. Polaris will close the Red Flag Fleet in from behind while Orion takes back the mines, and the remainder of the Archipelago fleets will patrol the exits to keep any ships from escaping. That should also prevent any of Ching’s patrols from coming to her aid. Without the mines, Ching will have nothing to hold hostage.”
“And she will be penned in the middle of the Gulf while you sink her ships, one by one,” Orca said.
“Yes.” The word hurt.
I remembered those last few hours in the Council chambers, listening with mounting horror as they coldly ordered the execution of any pirate sailing under Ching. There would be no parley or surrender. The Gulf would run as red as Ching’s flag.
Somewhere in the midst of the closing trap, Man o’ War floated unaware.
Coward.
My own fists clenched, and I longed to hit the wall.
“Comita gave me her word that Miranda would not be harmed,” I said. The words sounded hollow after Kraken’s storm.
“Comita gave you her word, huh?” Orca kept her tone level, glancing sideways at Kraken, but I could see the anger quickening again.
“She’ll send a message to Miranda once we get closer. Man o’ War is the only ship that has clearance past our lines.”
“Rose.” Orca walked towards me slowly, nodding at Kraken to keep him placated, and put her ruined hands on my shoulders. “I know she’s your admiral. I know you trust her. But think about it for a moment. How convenient would it be if that message got lost in translation or, better yet, was never sent? How very fucking convenient would it be for Miranda Stillwater to die in the Gulf, sparing your Admiral the difficulty of explaining to the Council how she tricked them into pardoning a known mutineer? And even if your admiral does her best to warn Miranda, there are still a million ways things could go wrong. Do you trust Comita enough to put Miranda’s life in her hands?”
“I—” My voice strangled in my throat.
How very fucking convenient would it be for Miranda Stillwater to die in the Gulf.
Orca squeezed my shoulder gently. It was that, more than anything else, that unraveled me.
“I have to go.”
I fled the room, running down the hallway with my eyes blind with unshed tears. I ran, heedless of the perplexed faces I passed, until I came at last to the North garden.
It was empty. It was always empty, only the pine and the boulder standing sentinel at the center. There was a spot behind the boulder hidden from view and soft with pine needles. I scraped my shoulder against the rock as I stumbled to my knees, sending a flurry of lichen to the ground.
The pain felt good.
I curled into a ball with my back against the rough stone. The garden, despite its austerity, reminded me of Miranda.
“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. I need your loyalty.”
Loyalty, obedience, love. Miranda asked for it, Comita expected it, and I delivered it, because that was what I did. I pointed my commanders in the right direction.
I watched the needles blur in front of me.
I had been so ready to distrust Miranda— so eager, in a way, to be disappointed that I had not even thought to question Comita.
Comita was my admiral, but she was more than that. She was Harper’s mother. She was the iron filling, the lodestone of Polaris, the point I set my compass by. She would not betray me.
She is your admiral, first.
Admirals had more than their navigators to think about. They had entire fleets to govern and a station to protect. Miranda was just one captain, and if Comita thought that Miranda jeopardized Polaris, or jeopardized Comita’s legitimacy as admiral, could I really trust that she would keep her word?
I knew the answer. I knew it by the pit in my stomach, and by the heaviness of my limbs. I knew it by the cold, clear clarity of the constellations somewhere far above the ship.
“You’re a navigator, Rose. You see several possible courses and you take the one that makes the most sense. Politics are different.”
Only they were not that different. If I could distance myself enough, I could see the brilliance of the plan. Eliminating Miranda tied up loose ends. It might not have been Comita’s plan in the beginning, any more than Annie had planned on drowning me beneath the ship when she first invited me to sit with her, but, like Annie, Comita was an opportunist. She saw several possible courses, and she chose the one that made the most sense at the time.
Even if she wasn’t planning on deliberately abandoning Miranda to chance, Orca was right. There was still the possibility that things could go wrong. Sonar pings were notoriously unreliable over long distances.
I’m just a navigator, I thought to myself, but the thought was not comforting.
There was only one person who could help me now.
Chapter Nineteen
I found Harper in the baths. Her face was flushed from the heat, and a few curls escaped the towel piled on her head. She gave me a cat’s smile, stretching her arms over her head and threatening to burst free from the second towel wrapped tightly around her chest.
I didn’t have time for her games.
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pitching my voice low.
Her smile vanished.
“Let me get dressed.”
Back in our station quarters, I laid out my concerns, watching her face tighten.
“My mother wouldn’t do that,” she said, tapping her fingers on the table.
I poured her a drink.
“Even if she doesn’t, it’s still a huge risk.”
“She wouldn’t do that,” Harper repeated. Her hair, hastily dried, spilled over one shoulder and she gave it a savage tug.
“I know, Harp,” I said, but I had the feeling my words were not reaching her.
“She wouldn’t. Would she?”
Harper turned wide, brown eyes on me. The bruises from her stint as a prisoner were almost gone, but a ghost of greenish yellow still stained her left cheek. It made her look older.
“She’s the admiral. She will do whatever she needs to do to keep Polaris safe,” I said, treading carefully.
“She sent you into the Gulf alone with a mercenary traitor.” Harper’s eyes welled, and it occurred to me that this was the first downtime either of us had had since our ill-fated adventure.
“If she could do that to my best friend, what else would she do?”
“We’re at war, Harp. And I could have said no.”
Harper’s knuckles tightened on her hair, squeezing the last of the water out of it. I nudged her drink closer to her.
“Maybe you should have,” she said.
I traced the scar on my palm.
“Rose,” Harper began, then stopped herself and knocked back her drink. “There’s something you should know.”
I didn’t need to be a psychic to know I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear.
“What?”
“My mother and Leticia, the Aries admiral, have been friends for a long time. Aries was one of the few stations that actually listened to my mother’s warnings about Ching Shih.”
She took another drink.
“The thing is, Leticia and Octavius Grant, the admiral of Andromeda, have always worked closely together, too.”
“So?” The pit in my stomach yawned wider.
“Octavius has a cousin on the High Council.”
I waited, bile rising.
“Do you remember who proposed the “no
parley” policy?”
The “no parley” policy was what the Council was calling their decision to take no prisoners. I swallowed and took a guess.
“Octavius’s cousin?”
Harper nodded.
I poured Harper another drink, downed it myself, then refilled the glass for her.
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Her voice cracked, and she rubbed her palms across her eyes to dash away the tears. “I don’t know, but if my mother wanted to get rid of Miranda, she wouldn’t do it herself. She would have someone else do it, someone who nobody could trace back to her. Someone like that councilman.”
I was glad of the drink. The streak of heat it burned down my throat stopped the scream.
“We could be wrong,” I said. Voicing the hope diminished it further.
“We could.”
We stared at each other.
“She’s my mother,” Harper said through her tears.
I took her hand and held it tightly.
“I am so sorry, Harp.”
She took a deep breath before putting into words the question in both of our heads.
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know. If we try to leave, she might sink us. She’d have to, if we disobeyed direct orders.”
Harper frowned.
“She wouldn’t if I was onboard.”
My chest ached.
“No. Absolutely not. We could all die, and she could accuse me of trying to kidnap you on top of that.”
“Do you see an alternative? You’ll never get out of our range any other way. If I’m onboard, she’ll come up with an excuse. She won’t want you taken captive, because you and your crew could ruin everything for her if you tell anyone who you’re sailing under. She could try and sweep it under the rug, but it is risky. She’ll fall back on her original promise and pardon Miranda.”
“Harper, I can’t let you do that.”
“Why?”
“Because this is my problem, not yours. I have to warn Miranda, but you don’t owe her anything.”
“My mother wants to wipe ten thousand souls from the face of the earth.” Her voice was thick with scorn. “I know that they are pirates. I know that they would probably have killed me if I hadn’t stowed away on your trawler, but that doesn’t make it right. That’s not war, Rose, that’s genocide.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I am not going to sit here waiting for my mother to kill the woman who saved all our asses. We’ll have to wait until we’re through the channel, though. If we leave before that, we risk sabotaging the attack. They need you to help navigate.”
“I get Miranda. You stay here.”
“And do what? Watch as my mother blows you out of the water?”
“We’ll think of something.”
“This is the most logical course, Rose,” Harper said. “Besides. You would do it for me.”
“It’s not the same. You’re the admiral’s daughter. You’re—”
“I did not ask to be the admiral’s daughter, but I am an engineer. And if you want that tub of yours to outdistance my mother’s advance guard, you’re going to need me.”
“But—”
Harper slammed her fist on the table, spilling her glass.
“Goddamn it, Compass Rose. Let. Me. Help. You.”
“Yes, captain,” I said without thinking, the authority in her voice overriding all else.
“That’s more like it. Now come on. We’ve got work to do.”
She stood, leaving the drink to drip down the side of the table, and strode out of the room with enough confidence to put Poseidon to shame.
• • •
The channel crept into view of North Star’s portholes. Dead trees stuck out of the shoreline, pointing accusing fingers at our ships.
I stood beside Admiral Comita on the bridge, awed despite myself.
I had not had the luxury of sightseeing the last time I had sailed these waters. I had been too focused on getting us out alive.
I stared now.
Patches of green showed through the dead wood, and something brown, furry, and cat-sized darted up a distant trunk.
Ahead of us, swarms of insects rose off the water, and Comita shuddered.
“Make sure all hatches remain locked and guarded at all times, and the ventilation systems completely sealed,” she instructed a nearby officer. “Anyone who breaks protocol is to be quarantined and docked two weeks’ pay.”
When she saw my startled look, she gave me a grim smile.
“It’s not taught in the ranks, as there is little cause for it, but those insects out there are vectors for diseases that could wipe out an entire station. We do not have the necessary immunity, and there is only so much that our doctors can do. One outbreak could decimate us, and then Ching Shih would not have to raise a finger.”
The swarms outside took on a more sinister meaning. They were similar to swarms of jellyfish, in the way they clung together, but they moved much faster— more like schooling fish than a swarm.
Mist rose off the morning waters through the haze of insects. We kept the ships to the center of the channel, but it was tight, and the bridge was full of nervous sailors taking sonar readings and shouting out depths. A smaller ship ranged ahead of us, reporting back every few minutes. If the worst came to pass, they would place a few explosives to clear the way.
“You have brought great honor to this fleet, Compass Rose,” Comita said as she surveyed the buzzing bridge.
“Thank you, Admiral.”
I tore my eyes away from her before she could see the anguish written clearly in the amber.
I could be wrong, I reminded myself.
A few birds took wing along the banks. I was not alone in watching them soar away, and Comita cleared her throat pointedly.
A ruined structure jutted out from the bank a few meters ahead. Comita slowed the ship, giving it as wide a berth as the channel allowed.
“There is a stretch of these,” I cautioned as the rotting, gray stone stared at us through eyes of empty windows. Another one of the brown shapes scuttled on a ledge, and a sailor with a spyglass let out a shout.
“It’s a rat. Neptune’s balls, it’s a goddamn giant rat.”
“Language on the bridge,” Comita said, but she gave the porthole a curious glance.
I, for one, was perfectly content to keep as much distance as possible between myself and giant rodents. The rats in the bowels of Cassiopeia Station grew to an alarming size, and they were notoriously vicious. I had no desire to speculate about the nature of these terrestrial relatives.
More dead trees slipped by.
I felt useless, standing there, making only a few minor corrections. This was the easy part and, without the threat of a raider behind me, it was almost boring.
That left me time to worry about the plan Harper and Orca had come up with. Sweat ran down my sides, and I hoped Comita chalked up my nerves to the impending attack.
As I guided us through the channel, pausing now and then to wait for a detonation to clear some of the bigger debris aside, somewhere in the docking bay Harper inspected the Sea Cat on the pretense of following her mother’s orders. The trawler had been transferred out of Polaris’s hold to the North Star, which was a small miracle in itself, and Harper was supremely confident that no one would question her. She may not have asked to be the admiral’s daughter, but the arrogance that came with the title had its uses.
The ship was not entirely as we’d left it. Polaris had removed the bulk of the weapons on Sea Cat as a precaution, which had reduced both Orca and Kraken to simmering fury.
Not that weapons would do us much good where we were going. We would be outgunned at every quarter. Our best hope lay in the anonymity of the drifter vessel. As long as we were perceived as harmless flotsam, we stood half a chance, and only a few of Ching’s sailors had a visual identification on our vessel.
The rising su
n splintered off the smooth water, and I shielded my eyes with my hand. The current moved slowly here, but it moved, a sinuous passage through the winding channel.
“There’s a large thing ahead,” I said, unsure of what to call the long wreckage I remembered. Sand and water had reduced the front of it to rubble, but the curved tiers of the structure reflected sonar waves back in bizarre geometric shapes. Most of it was below water, which made it harder still to identify from the surface.
“Hard to port,” Comita said, not bothering with degrees.
I chewed on my lip.
“Are you all right, Rose?” Comita asked.
I nodded, not trusting my voice. I had plenty of legitimate reasons for concern without adding treason into the mix.
Among them was the disconcerting realization that I did not even know how Miranda would react when she saw me again. My heart constricted in my chest.
“It narrows up here,” I said, my brain following the course despite my heart’s defection.
North Star rounded a bend and her hull scraped sand. Alarms rang around the bridge, followed by shouts.
“Press forward,” I told Comita, who was in the process of ordering a complete halt.
She frowned.
“It opens up in another few meters, but if we stop here, we’ll need a tow.”
I had grown used to the informality of Miranda’s crew. Comita did not look like she appreciated the authority in my tone.
“With all due respect, Admiral,” I added.
“Full speed ahead,” Comita said, correcting the course. Her eyes warned me that this concession was not absolution.
It was evening by the time we reached the mouth of the channel. I felt it in the eddying current, and in the gradual influx of jellyfish. They blurred the sonar readings, tiny pricks of light on the screens as we left the shoals for deeper water.
“Go get yourself something to eat,” Comita told me.
I forced myself to walk out of the helm. My legs wanted to sprint, and I ate alone in the mess hall, methodically shoveling food into my mouth.
“Well, look who it is,” said a familiar voice.
I set my fork down deliberately and looked up. Maddox loomed above me, wasting oxygen with every breath.