Diego and the Rangers of the Vastlantic

by Armand Baltazar

  Now!

  He lunged and stretched as far as he could. His fingers brushed the hull, so close, but the boat lurched away from him, and he was falling. Paige reached for him, helpless. And then he was under the waves.

  The world became a gray, frigid blur—salt stinging his eyes. Diego flailed for something to hold on to, but there was only water and foam tossing him around. He couldn’t tell which way was up or down. His chest hurt, his breath wanting to escape. Cold everywhere.

  But then the harness straps cinched tight, and Diego felt himself being tugged. An icy moment later he burst out of the water. He dangled in the air and slammed against the side of the ship again. Through salt-stung eyes, he saw Petey and Paige straining to haul him up. Lucy had joined them.

  “Faster!” Lucy shouted.

  The rust-streaked side of the barge swayed toward them again, sure to crush him between the two hulls.

  The harness pulled him higher. Diego rose a few more feet and pulled his legs up into a crouch as the two boats smacked together, their sides scraping.

  There was the railing. He reached for it. . . .

  Hands locked around his wrists, dragging him up. He got his elbows over the railing and gasped for breath as they dragged him onto the deck.

  “There he is, our prize catch of the day!” Petey said, clapping him on the back. But the worry on Petey’s face showed how close it had been.

  Diego coughed up seawater. “Thanks.”

  “What on earth were you doing over there?” Lucy asked as they guided him into the common room.

  “I wanted some quiet, to work on stuff,” Diego said.

  “When you weren’t in the bunk room last night,” Petey said, “we assumed you were down in the engine room again. Man, D, that was close.”

  “Too close,” Paige echoed. “Again.”

  Diego glanced at Paige, anger flaring, but he remembered what Ajax had said. “Thanks for saving me.”

  They helped Diego to a spot by the boiler. He huddled close to it, feeling the heat seeping through his damp clothes.

  “Mr. Ribera,” the captain said, arriving from the deck. “What were you doing on the barge?”

  “Repairing some equipment,” Diego said, shivering. “I meant to come back last night, but I fell asleep while I worked.”

  The captain leered down at him, taking big, grumbling breaths.

  His fist shot out to his side and punched the side of the boiler. The echo rang in their ears. “You have disobeyed me too often,” he snarled, rubbing his fist with the other hand. There was blood on his knuckles. “I should throw you overboard NOW and be done with it!” He turned toward Diego.

  “Captain, no!” Petey shouted.

  Diego fell back on his elbows, the captain looming over him.

  Ajax’s metal arm shot between them, smoke puffing from its piston, holding the captain back. “That’s enough, Captain,” Ajax said. “You’re right, but remember, we still need a crew.”

  The captain stood up and straightened his coat, his eyes never leaving Diego.

  “How much longer will this storm last?” Petey asked.

  “It’s a flash squall,” Gaston said, entering behind the captain. “Very strong, but usually less than a day.” He walked over and ruffled Diego’s hair. “You are lucky you weren’t swept away, petit frère.”

  Diego shook free of his hand but was too tired to comment.

  “Lucy,” the captain said, “I need you back on the bridge. Gaston, to the engine room with Ajax. Petey, Paige, get Ribera sorted out, then take him to the lower compartments.”

  He pointed at Diego. “You monitor the hull for flooding, and you stay there until the storm is through. I don’t want to see you again until the sky is blue.”

  Diego huddled as close to the fire as he could get. The shivering was finally subsiding, and he could feel his fingers and toes again.

  “Man, D . . . ,” Petey said, taking Diego’s soaked blanket away and giving him a dry one.

  “How could I have known there was going to be a storm?” Diego said.

  “Yeah, but still,” Petey said. “Not even a day goes by when you’re not in danger.”

  Paige returned from the kitchen and handed Diego a mug of hot tea. She didn’t say anything, but Diego could feel her exchanging a look with Petey.

  “I know what you’re all thinking,” Diego said, “but you don’t know the whole story.”

  “And what story is that?” Petey asked.

  Diego lowered his voice and told them about his run-in with the captain the night before.

  “Wow, Balsamic had a family, huh?” Petey said. “But why didn’t you come tell us last night?”

  “I just . . . I needed to be alone is all.”

  “So, what were you working on out there?”

  “Just this.” Diego pulled the tablet from his bag.

  “Why would you waste your time with that?” Paige wondered.

  “Paige,” Petey warned.

  “Back off, Kowalski,” Paige said. “Everybody knows those stupid things don’t work. Or are you saying that mumbo jumbo of yours fixed it?”

  Diego considered telling them about the weirdness when he’d found the tablet, the vision of the octopus-shaped piece, the transporting, but he didn’t want to risk another fight with Paige.

  “It’s been on my mind,” Diego said. He held out the tablet for them to see. Paige took it and flipped it around.

  “Wow, that’s actually in pretty great shape,” Petey said.

  “It might even work for a minute, before a magnetic-field spike fries it. The battery’s dead, so I’m going to put it out in the sun later and see if it charges up.”

  Paige ran her finger over the glass and tapped the power button.

  Suddenly, the screen flashed to life, and words appeared:

  Hello, Diego, my name is _______

  “Whoa, what did you do?” Diego asked, jumping to his feet.

  “Nothing! You said it didn’t have any power.”

  “How does it know your name?” Petey asked.

  “I don’t know,” Diego said.

  The screen went dark again.

  “Um,” Diego said. “That shouldn’t have happened. It . . . it doesn’t even have all the parts it needs.” He pressed the power button again. Nothing.

  “Did you do that . . . thing you talked about to fix it?” Petey asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Has anything weird ever happened before when you did?”

  Diego wondered again if he could explain it to them, but he wanted to learn more on his own first. “No,” he said, and then tried to change the subject. “Maybe it has some kind of voice recognition feature or something.”

  “But you said it doesn’t have any power,” Paige said.

  Diego shook his head. “I know.” He slipped the tablet into his backpack. “We should probably get to our jobs.” He jumped up and down a few times to try to get the blood flowing. “Hey, thanks again for saving me.”

  “Sure thing, D,” Petey said.

  “Yeah,” Paige said. “I never leave a friend behind.”

  “So . . . that means we’re friends?”

  Paige allowed a half smile. “Sorta.”

  The storm lasted through the day and night, finally subsiding before dawn. Diego woke to find the ocean as smooth as glass. The clouds had thinned to damp puffs, like chains of cotton balls, the sun sneaking through in pale rays.

  “We should reach Volcambria by late in the day,” the captain informed them at breakfast.

  “Where exactly is Volcambria?” Diego asked Petey, who was consulting a half-folded navigation chart while he ate his oatmeal.

  Petey spun the map around and pointed. “It’s part of an island chain called the Islands of the Great Eastern Wall that used to be the east coast of the United States. The islands that lie along the major shipping routes have been charted and mapped, but Volcambria is up here, in the uncharted region.”

  After brea
kfast, the captain assigned Diego to sit on the prow of the ship and depth sound, like the old mariners did in the days before sonar and radar. Diego lowered a weighted rope every few minutes, read the depth by how many feet of the marked rope were wet, and reported the reading back to Gaston, who was piloting. Petey was inside charting their course. Lucy sat high above in the crow’s nest. She’d been trained to watch for changes in the ocean’s color as an indicator of depth and also for breaking waves, which might signal reefs or rocks. The storm had blown them off course, so they were traversing a shallow stretch of sunken islands that the captain had always taken care to avoid in the past.

  “It’s over ten fathoms,” Diego called.

  “Aye,” Gaston said. “I think we’re through it. What do you say, Lucy?”

  “Clear and deep,” she reported.

  “You’re welcome to return to the engine room, petit frère,” Gaston said. “I’m sure you miss the grease and diesel, and it no doubt misses you.”

  “Sounds better than listening to you,” Diego grumbled, but not loud enough that Gaston could hear. He coiled the rope and gathered up the tablet, which had been charging in the sun beside him.

  “What you got there, Ribera?” Lucy called down to him.

  “Just this,” he said, holding up the tablet. The sun flashed in his eyes and he blinked hard looking up at her. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked like Lucy was wearing a pirate’s hat.

  “Paige told me about that. Can I see?”

  “Sure.” Diego returned the rope to its compartment, slung his backpack over both shoulders, and then made his way to the top of the bridge and climbed the rigging up to the crow’s nest.

  Lucy opened the floor hatch for him. “Whoa,” he said as he stood, taking in the view.

  “This is epic,” Diego said.

  “It hasn’t gotten old, even as my behind’s gone numb sitting up here.”

  Diego smiled and handed her the tablet. He studied the black leather tricorn hat that shielded her face from the sun.

  “I like your new hat. You look like a real pirate.”

  “Gaston gave it to me, said it belonged to an actual buccaneer who sailed with the captain.”

  “Ah, I see. Well, it suits you nicely.”

  Lucy smiled. “Of course, it does get hot after a while,” she said, taking it off. She turned the tablet over in her hands. “I’ve never seen a computer up close before. I’m forbidden from interacting with any technology from Elder or Mid Time. It doesn’t seem so dangerous to me. Paige told me this did something strange—”

  The screen flashed to life again.

  Hello. Is this Petey or Daphne or Paige or Captain or Lucy or Ajax or the French Toad?

  “It’s like it knows everyone on the ship,” Lucy said. “Does French Toad mean Gaston?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You programmed it to say that, didn’t you?”

  “It was the least I could do, since he always calls me petit frère.”

  “That just means ‘small brother,’” Lucy said. “It’s not nearly as bad as French Toad.”

  “Maybe I’ll change it,” Diego said. “I programmed it to respond to the crew, but it doesn’t know who’s holding it.”

  “It seems to know that it’s not you, though.”

  “It might be using this.” Diego pointed to the small camera lens above its screen. “Or it might be able to sense variations in touch.” He picked up her hand gently by her fingers and held his palm next to hers. “See? Pretty different. Color, size, lines.” Diego hadn’t realized how filthy his hands were, but also there was something electric about having their hands touching, just side by side.

  But Lucy was already pulling hers away and flipping her hands over. “If my mother could see this,” she said, examining her chipped fingernails. “A pirate’s hands are not ladylike.”

  “You look tough,” Diego said. “Seaworthy.”

  Lucy eyed him. “That makes me sound like a hag.”

  “That’s not . . . I didn’t—”

  She play-punched his shoulder. “Relax, Ribera. I’m not always giving you a go.”

  A silence passed between them.

  “So tell me,” Lucy said, “why is this thing working? Based on everything I’ve ever heard my dad or Georgie say, it shouldn’t be.”

  Diego shrugged. “I put a revolving pulse disruptor fuse in it. I was thinking that would allow it to run for short intervals, like my dad’s old Sony Walkman, and then shut down if there’s a magnetic-field spike.”

  Lucy raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m afraid I don’t speak—what did Paige call it . . . geek. Especially not the Mid-Time brand.”

  “Ah.”

  “You got that was humor, right?”

  “I did,” Diego said, smiling.

  “Good. You know,” Lucy said, “back in London I go to an all-girls Traditionalist school. So, talking to Mid-Time geeks is never an option. Talking with boys of any kind is more or less frowned upon, let alone a Mid-Time boy. That would be scandalous.”

  “Like me?”

  “Especially you.”

  “What’s a Traditionalist?”

  “You might call it an elite class of British Steam Timers. We’re not like your True Believers. We don’t stringently reject and wish to separate from the other time classes, but we do value a strict adherence to our time culture.”

  “It sounds hard, living like that, keeping all the other times out.”

  Lucy shrugged. “Actually, it’s terribly easy, as long as you aren’t prone to curiosity, or a conscience. I suffer from both, though I’d never let Mum and Dad know that. They think it’s not only a privilege, but a destiny. Or something. Father goes on and on.”

  “Yeah, I can imagine that. It’s a wonder your parents let you go to our museum school, where you’d certainly mix with other time cultures and races.”

  “Well, it’s only recently that my parents released me and my older brother Archie from homeschooling. Father said that a popular city official criticized him as an elitist and separatist. Having his children attend New Chicago’s public school would go a long way to bolstering the Emerson reputation. ‘And everyone knows Emersons are pillars of high society,’” she said in an exaggerated snobby voice.

  Lucy typed into the tablet.

  My name is Lucy Abigail Emerson.

  The tablet typed back:

  Are you a different Lucy? I know Lucy “Dino-slayer” Emerson.

  Lucy eyed him. “You’re clever.”

  “It’s your gravity board name,” Diego said. “I can change it if you want.”

  “You can leave it. Though I’d feel terrible if I’d actually killed that young dinosaur.”

  “I’m sure she will be fine.”

  Suddenly, the tablet blacked out.

  “What happened?” Lucy asked.

  “It still needs one more piece to make it stable,” Diego said. “The Sight showed me what it is, but what I saw seems impossible.”

  “What do you mean, the Sight showed you?”

  Diego flipped the tablet in his hands. “What I told you all in the engine room . . . there’s more to it than that.” Diego paused. He looked at Lucy and found her gazing right at him. He wasn’t sure if he should tell her, but when he looked into Lucy’s eyes, he knew he wanted to trust her. “It’s more than seeing an image in my head,” he continued. “It’s an ability, a power . . . my father called it the Maker’s Sight. It lets me see how to fix machines. I see it like a series of images, almost like flashes of camera snapshots. And then I know how it should go.”

  “My father would call that witchcraft,” Lucy said.

  “Would you?” Diego asked.

  Lucy shrugged. “I’d say any power that could help us to save our families is a blessing. Perhaps there’s more to you than the reckless fool that Paige thinks you are.” She smiled.

  “At least we know now that I can school you on a gravity board.”

  “In your dreams, Ribera.�
�

  They laughed together for a second, and then Diego couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Instead, he turned and gazed out at the water.

  “You know your mother is a hero of mine,” Lucy said.

  “You mentioned that.”

  “Many Traditionalist girls long for more than our society maps out for us. Your mother broke free of our stuffy rule book.”

  “She had to make my grandparents pretty angry to do it,” Diego said.

  “How remarkable it would be to have that chance,” Lucy said. “You know, London has Mid-Time and Elder sections, too. Sometimes Georgie and I would sneak off to the Mid-Time airfield to watch the planes. If Mother ever found out about that . . .”

  “They’re amazing, aren’t they?” Diego said. “Airplanes? The way they own the sky.”

  “Well, riding the gravity board was like the best of both worlds, skating and flying. It was a dream come true—until those allosauruses.”

  “You’d love flying in a plane.”

  Lucy laughed to herself, and then turned to look at Diego. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Um, sure.”

  “Back in school, that degenerate hooligan. He called you something, a name I’ve heard some Traditionalists whisper back home: clock mongrel. What does it mean?”

  “It’s something no decent person would ever say. But it’s the kind of thing you hear True Believers say all the time.” Diego folded his arms. “It means a filthy, half-breed dog of two different times. Before predator fighting was made illegal, they used to breed prehistoric dogs with modern ones to create a nasty new breed to bet on in the dinosaurs’ fighting pits. Clock mongrel was the name pit bosses gave those pitiful creatures.”

  “That’s despicable,” Lucy said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I know you don’t believe that.”

  Lucy shook her head. “Of course not, or I wouldn’t be friends with someone like Paige or a . . . Spanish boy?”

  “Me?” Diego said. “No, I’m Filipino, well, half anyway.”

  “But isn’t Ribera a Spanish name?” Lucy asked. “Wait, the Philippines were ruled by Spain for a while, weren’t they?”

  “Yeah. My dad speaks English, Tagalog—that’s the native language—and Spanish. But my mom’s Irish, so I’m mixed, like this world.”