by Anna Burke
He raised his eyebrows, then winced.
“I’m seeing three of you, but you’re easy on the eyes, so it’s okay.” His speech was slightly slurred. “Why do they keep aiming for my head?”
“I don’t know. Finn, do you think you can walk?”
“I don’t know about walking, but I can crawl. Where’s my knife?”
“You need to get out of here, not—”
Orca screamed.
I turned away from Finn and was halfway across the deck, my small knife in my hand, before I realized I had no idea what I was planning on doing. The squid had dislodged Orca, who had fallen into the water. Kraken dove in after her, leaving me face to face with the nightmare.
Time froze. The squid’s eyes rolled towards me, huge and wide and not quite as empty of recognizable emotion as I would have liked. I had a faint impression of fear, compounded by the rank, fishy stench of the creature, and confusion.
Then it opened its beak, and any stirrings of creature sympathy fled.
Kraken shoved me aside just as one of the squid’s remaining tentacles swept toward me. He was soaking wet and covered in wounds from the suckers, but grinning like a madman.
“Now,” he shouted, and Orca made another leap for the creature’s back. Water poured over her from the leak above, flinging off her braids in droplets as she drove her blade into the squid’s back. The squid tried to pull itself up with the tentacles trapped in the door. Orca clung to the blade, and her weight, combined with the sharp edge, was enough to open a four-foot-long slice in the animal. White flesh puckered beneath the red of the mantle, and the squid released another jet of ink as it shuddered beneath the sundering.
“Get clear,” Kraken shouted at Orca.
She slid off the squid and tried to leap for the rim of the holding tank, but the distance was too great. The squid writhed and flailed, submerging her in the inky water.
I dove.
I might be Archipelago fleet scum, but I had grown up on Cassiopeia station, swimming in the eel beds. I could hold my breath for five minutes at a time, and I always knew which way the surface lay.
The shock of the cold water hit me like a tentacle. There were none of those underwater, thankfully, but the bulk of the squid’s massive body was much more dangerous. If it struck me, I could, at best, hope to lose consciousness and drown, and be crushed to death at worst.
I could not see Orca in the black water. I struck towards the bottom, feeling the vibrations in the churning froth. The squid felt like it was everywhere, its agony palpable in its savage death throes.
Orca, where are you?
Beneath the water, the absurdity of the situation cost me a precious bubble of air. Ching was out there somewhere, preparing to take down the Archipelago. Comita, my Admiral, was up to her elbows in pirate blood, the fate of the Man o’ War in her fists. Meanwhile, Miranda, my captain— my infuriating, arrogant, and intoxicating captain— was trapped between the two of them, and here we were, battling a giant squid in the bowels of our own ship.
This goddamn ocean has a sick sense of humor.
There, to the left. I felt a shift in the water. It was smaller than the struggling cephalopod, and just as desperate. I kicked out towards it, my cupped hands slicing cleanly through the murk, and felt skin brush the tips of my fingers.
I circled around her.
We were deep in the tank, and I could tell from the frantic ripples that she was almost out of air.
I dove deeper, searching for the bottom. There was nothing more dangerous than a drowning person, I reminded myself as I released a stream of bubbles in order to sink onto the soles of my feet, and then I pushed off with all of my strength.
I collided into Orca on the way to the surface, wrapping an arm around her waist. She reached for me, but I kept my other arm free. My legs and lungs burned. Orca struggled, slowing our ascent, and I wished, for a moment, that she’d had the good grace to pass out like Finn.
Instead, she fought me as she fought every waking moment of her life.
I gulped my first breath of air quickly, anticipating her reaction. She was stronger than me, and she broke free of my grip the minute I relaxed enough to breathe. Her hands grabbed at my shoulders, pushing me back under as she coughed and spluttered.
I forced myself to relax, letting her breathe, until my lungs began to burn again. This was the tricky part. Some people calmed down with air, but most panicked until they were fully out of the water.
Orca seemed determined to remain in the latter category. When I breached again, she wrapped her arms around my neck, making it impossible to keep us both afloat.
“Kraken,” I managed to shout.
Ripples and a splash preceded him, and then the giant propelled us towards the edge of the overflowing tank. There was almost a foot of water on the ground, and I coughed on my hands and knees.
Orca vomited black water beside me, the tattoo on her bicep glaring at me with its red eyes, as if daring me to point out the discrepancy between her name and her affinity for water.
“We need to get that shut,” Kraken said, his voice grim.
I looked up at the doors. They were jammed with more than tentacles. Part of the trawl was snagged as well, the metal twisted and jagged. There was no way we were going to fix it.
“Wait.” I wiped water from my eyes, staring at the bit of net dripping through.
“We don’t have time to wait, unless we want to seal this compartment off.”
“If you engage the trawl, and we open those doors, can you net this thing in our wake?” I asked.
“Why would we want to do that?”
“Can you?”
“Maybe.”
“What better way to throw off sonar than to tie a giant squid to our stern?”
Kraken thought about this for a moment, rubbing one of the sucker wounds on his arm.
“You’re crazy, you know that?” he said.
I shrugged.
“Get Orca out of here. When I open those doors, I’m going to have three seconds to get to the hatch. You be ready, and tell Jeanine to seal off the hallway just in case.”
“Is it dead?” I nodded toward the twitching squid.
“You let me worry about that. Go.”
I helped Orca to her feet. She spat out the last mouthful of brine, glared at me, and slogged through the rising water toward Finn. He had made it to the hatch, but judging by the look on his face, the effort had cost him.
Jeanine opened the door for us with a rush of water. I helped her slam it shut again, my face pressed against the window.
“Do you all have a death wish?” Harper said.
I ignored her.
Kraken pulled the last lever and bolted toward us. Behind and above him, the doors began to open, unleashing the full fury of the ocean.
“Get out of here and seal the hallway,” I ordered.
The others scrambled to obey, too cowed by the sound of rushing water to argue.
“One, two, three,” I counted to myself, my hand shaking on the latch.
North, south, east, west.
The force of the flood knocked me back as Kraken exploded through the hatch. I scrambled to my feet and threw myself at the door for the second time in as many minutes, my feet slipping on the slick floor.
Kraken let out a sound that might have been a curse or a roar, and the door clicked shut. He wound the lock and sank to the floor beside me.
“Well, wolf pup, there’s a first for everything,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder.
“You mean you’ve never done battle with a kraken?” I asked, the rush of adrenaline making me giddy.
“That wasn’t a kraken, kid. That was just a piece of oversized sushi.”
I let out a long sigh. The water pounded against the door at my back, a savage massage that imitated the rush of blood in my ears. I hoped Jeanine and Harper were keeping us stable.
“No one on my old ship would believe me if I told them what just happened,” I
said.
“Anybody on your old ship worth telling that story to?”
I thought of Comita, and the years I’d spent desperate to earn her approval.
“No, I guess not.”
“Then I guess you better learn to tell it like a Merc.”
“How do I do that?”
“Easy,” he said, leaning his head back against the door. “Add a few more tentacles each time.”
“Kraken?” Thinking about the dying squid reminded me of something Comita had said during the council. “Can I ask you something?”
“Is there anything I can do to stop you asking?”
“Is Miranda going to kill Ching?”
He gave me a sideways glance.
“What gave you that idea?”
“Comita said Miranda was going to neutralize Ching Shih.”
He closed his eyes and let his face relax into exhaustion.
“There is nothing neutral about death, kid.”
Chapter Twenty
Orca stared out at the water, her face illuminated by the occasional flash of distant torpedo fire.
“I suppose this is as good a time as any to thank you,” she said, not meeting my eyes.
Looking at her was easier than watching the destruction of the world I knew, and so I noticed her lip twitch upward ever so slightly.
“First mate.”
“What, jelly?”
“Accept it.”
“I accept nothing,” she said, shooting me a mock glare.
“You’re glad I stuck around.”
“I—” Orca cut herself off. “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, I’m glad you stuck around. Don’t let it go to your head.”
My smile faded as reality imposed itself in another flash of light.
“That must be the Aries Fleet,” I said. Only a few fleets still manufactured warheads with that kind of power. Aries was one of them.
Polaris was another.
“Ching’s holding her own, though.”
I watched the sonar. It was a mess of ships and flotsam. Ching’s raiders darted around the larger fleet vessels, peppering them with smaller missiles and ripping into hulls when they got the chance.
“How the hell are we supposed to find Man o’ War in the middle of this?” I asked.
We only had a few hours before Comita and the rest of Polaris snapped the jaws of the trap shut. A few hours to track down one ship in the entire Gulf of Mexico, without getting blown up, captured, or boarded in the process.
The last option seemed unlikely, given our mangled passenger. The squid trailed us, a dark shadow that attracted hordes of smaller squid. The feeding frenzy clouded the sonar, making us look more like a swarm than a trawler.
“Isn’t that your department, navigator?”
I rubbed the hilt of my knife, feeling the cardinal directions beneath my thumb. If I was being honest with myself, I was afraid.
I was afraid of getting any closer to the battle ahead.
I was afraid of running into Ching Shih.
And most of all, I was afraid of Miranda. If she rejected me now, I was worse off than the lowest drifter, with no ship or harbor to my name.
“This thing handles like a pregnant cat,” Orca said under her breath as she messed with the controls. “If someone shoots us, we’re squid shit.”
“I don’t know how to find her,” I admitted, pretending not to hear her.
“Aren’t you supposed to have some sort of magical ability?”
“It’s not magic, and no. I don’t get lost. That doesn’t mean I can find anyone else.”
“You found me in that tank.”
“That was different. You were close. I just had to sort through the wavelengths until I found one that matched a human, not a squid. There are thousands of ships out there.”
“So find Man o’ War. You’ve sailed on her, and you know the captain.”
“Do I?” Now it was my turn to mutter.
Orca made a show of ignoring me.
“We’ll be hitting the first flotsam, soon,” she said. “You’re not going to get sick again, are you?”
“I’ve seen wreckage before.”
I didn’t want to think about the fleet ship I’d seen destroyed with Miranda, or the raiders Orca and I had blown with a methane deposit.
“Not like this, you haven’t.”
“Have you?”
“I sail under Miranda Stillwater.”
I took that for a yes and closed my eyes, trying to align my compass to a moving point. I might as well have tried to touch the North Star itself.
“Incoming,” Orca said. “Open your eyes, jelly.”
I blinked as the torpedo streaked past, missing us by only a few meters.
“Must have been aiming for someone else,” I said.
“Do you have coordinates for me, or not?”
“I—” I didn’t. “Isn’t there a call we can use?”
“Like she’d hear it in that mess?”
“Do you have any better ideas?”
“Yes. And all of them involve me standing over your lifeless body if you don’t get us to the goddamn ship.”
“Just try it.”
Orca let out a huff and fiddled with the sonar until she found the prerecorded track she wanted.
“It’s a pod call. Orcas used to use them. She’ll know it’s me.”
“Shit,” I said, jumping.
A raider ghosted past us, jagged fins primed for battle with a gleaming edge. It paid us no heed, but our proximity to the battlefield set my teeth chattering.
“You sound like a rat,” Orca said, keeping the trawler in low gear.
“Sorry.” I clenched my jaw.
“It is probably a bad time to ask, but is the only weapon you have that knife?”
“Yes.”
“I swear that woman makes me earn every cent. She didn’t give you anything else?”
I remembered the way Miranda had presented the knife to me. The rush of emotion that followed was at odds with the fear gripping my body.
Just imagine how she would have presented a sword, I thought.
“She wasn’t exactly in the best mood when we left,” I said.
Both of us were quiet for a moment.
“Well, if anything happens, stay behind me.”
“Sure thing, first mate. Just try not to drown me again.”
“Whatever. Hey, listen to this.”
She turned up the receiver. Inane whistles and clicks flooded the helm, sounds of a long dead sea still echoing beneath the waves.
“Remember these coordinates.” She closed her eyes to listen more intently, then named a location only a few miles south of us.
My heart ricocheted off my chest.
We were close.
So close.
The squid milled around us, passing in front of the trawler as they tore chunks from their vanquished brethren.
Get to the ship, I told myself. And then get the ship out of the Gulf. Everything else is secondary.
There was only one problem. The coordinates Orca named were right in the thick of the fighting.
“How do we get in there without taking crossfire?” Orca asked.
I reached for the ship’s intercom.
“Harper,” I said into the mouthpiece, “is she ready to fly?”
There was a crackling pause.
“As ready as she’ll ever be,” came the reply.
“Give me the wheel,” I said, fixing the coordinates in my mind’s eye.
“You’re the navigator. I’m the skipper.”
“Do you want to be a dead skipper?” I asked.
“Fine, but I’m having you flogged for insubordinate behavior.”
She sounded like Miranda.
“Go for it,” I said, taking the wheel and a deep breath. “And hold on.”
I brought the W500 to life and tuned out everything but the ocean.
The raiders were fast, and the missiles wer
e faster. I felt for them, knowing we only had seconds to adjust course, and circled around until I felt an opening ahead.
“Are you a whale or something?” Orca asked, breaking my concentration.
“No.”
“Then how are you seeing this shit?”
“I don’t know. I just am.”
“Echolocating freak,” she muttered, but there was respect in the insult.
“Okay, here we go,” I said, and turned us head on into the fray.
Orca sent out another whale call, alerting Miranda’s crew to our approach, and then I lost track of what she was doing as every ounce of my being focused on maneuvering our bulky trawler through the tangle of watery death.
Directly ahead of us a raider tore a jagged rent through a smaller fleet submersible, and I jerked us clear before the raider could swing around for another pass.
Several hundred meters past the raider, in the intermittent light of the battle, I saw bodies striking out for the surface from a sinking vessel.
“Holy shit,” Orca said, and I followed her gaze for a perilous second.
The surface was on fire.
“It’s the bloom.” Her words were hushed with awe. “The fucking algae bloom is on fire.”
“The swimmers—”
“There is nothing we can do for them, Rose, and unless you want to join them, get us to Miranda.”
I obeyed, clutching the controls with white knuckles.
The sleek, heavy bodies of the Archipelago ships cut through the black water, illuminated by the flashes of the explosions and the eerie glow from the flames above. I tried not to wonder how we looked to them. We were losing our entourage of squid as we pressed deeper into the fray, and I did not think there was much left of our passenger after the ravages of the journey.
How am I going to find Man o’ War in the middle of this, even with coordinates?
“Shit,” Orca shouted as something hit us.
I did not have time to think about the implications of the impact. Ships clustered above us, black shapes against the unhealthy red surface, and the water was thick with debris. It was impossible to tell which side had the upper hand. Ching’s raiders darted about like eels, quick and slippery compared to the imposing might of the Archipelago, and in the darkness, all I knew for sure was that people were dying whichever way I looked.
“We’re fine,” Jeanine said over the intercom. “Took out one of the smaller port-side bulkheads, but we stabilized her.”