Turning my attention to the task at hand, I took hold of the rudder and steered the shallow-bottomed craft alongside the quay. Undulating waves slapped at the thousands of stone stanchions that held the city above water.
The squid whooshed the boat forward while I looked up, searching until I spotted the dangling glowgrub. I’d left it there an hour earlier, tied it to Kell’s water sluice with a silk thread, and tossed it over the platform’s edge as a marker.
Navigating up to the glowgrub, I tapped one of the squid’s tentacles twice—the signal to stop—and reached high to cut the worm loose and dropped it into the sea.
Needing a better light source, I fumbled for the paper globe I’d placed on board this morning. Giving it a good shake, I woke the fireflies inside, and the globe lit with a shimmering phosphorescent glow. Navigating into the dark shadow cast by the city, I scanned the platform’s underside, having little problem locating Kell’s trash chute.
Through a series of stop-and-go single and double taps, I coaxed the squid next to a heavily barnacled column and wrapped it with kelpstalk rope.
I pulled another rope from my supplies, this one with a large fishhook carved of mammoth bone on the end. I made quick work of wrapping the hook in silk.
I took my first shot at throwing it up into the chute. Missing, I pulled the rope and hook out of the water and tried again and again until I finally succeeded in landing the hook over the chute’s lip.
Next, I strung a leather-strapped machete over my shoulder, so the blade would hang on my back. Taking up a filleting knife, I tucked it into my belt. I untied the boat, pulled up the rudder, and gave the squid a single tap. “Go on home now.”
As the skiff lunged forward, I took hold of the rope and started up, hand over hand, pulling myself into the rotten-fish stench of the short chute, barnacles slicing my knuckles, pincers nipping at my wrists. Keeping focus, I threw up a hand and caught hold of the chute’s lip. Pulling hard, I lifted my torso into the opening, my shirt shredding as I scraped over the shells. With a final scramble, I pulled up my legs and stood.
I was inside. Standing in a small supply closet, the chute I’d climbed through rested at my feet.
My heart pounded like it was trying to club its way out of my chest. Desperate lungs huffed thirstily at the air. Blood dripped from my hands. Blood seeped from the scrapes on my chest, a single droplet rolling slowly from rib to rib to rib.
I gripped my weapons, machete in my right hand, filleting knife in my left, both blades carved of mammoth bone—no technology meant little metal for weapons. I squeezed the handles tight inside my fists.
Feeling strangely brave and determined, I moved forward, my hands and feet tingling. I passed quietly by the entryway, the guards’ feet visible below the curtain that posed as a door. I crept through the dark room, avoiding chair silhouettes, feeling the ripple of sea-bamboo mats through the thin soles of my shoes.
Afraid to blink, my eyes began to water. Scared of being heard, I sucked air through my nose.
I climbed the staircase slow and deliberate, stone to stone to stone. At the top, I found myself in a small room. A sleeping form lay on a sponge mat on the floor. A flicker of candlelight danced across his face.
I approached, my fists squeezing painfully down on the weapons’ handles. With the machete raised over my head, I skulked up to him undetected. I stopped close. Watched his bare chest move up and down to the rhythm of a gentle snore. I put my eyes on his neck. Targeted my swing.
One clean chop was all it would take.
One. Clean. Chop.
I brought the blade down with full force . . . but my aim was wide, and the blade struck his chin with a bone-on-bone crack, warm blood splattering up my hand and wrist.
He sat up, machete embedded in his lower jaw, his eyes stunned and confused.
I missed. I fucking missed! Fingers of panic squeezed down on my throat. Claws dug into my heart.
Pol’s command brought me back to the situation at hand. The knife. I drove it into his shoulder.
He grunted as I pulled the two blades free. He knew what was happening to him now, eyes completely wild. Savage. Yet also alert—the look of a trained warrior. His destroyed jaw kept him from making a sound and calling for the guards, but not from attacking. He lunged for me. I met his reach with the machete, and severed fingers fell to the floor.
I drove with the knife. Chopped with the machete. Again with the knife. Again with the machete. He tried to fight, but I wouldn’t let him. I kept hacking and stabbing until there was stillness.
I backed away from the body, letting the weapons fall from my fingers. He lay half-off his mat, a bloody mess of cleaved and pierced flesh.
Still moving backward, I bumped into a wall and let myself lean against it. My knees buckled, and I collapsed, my back sliding along the stone until my tailbone struck the floor with a jolt.
I leaned over to vomit, and the twisted muscles in my gut heaved bile onto the stone.
Wiping my mouth with a quaking hand, I saw Kell move. With a jerk of his left leg he managed to roll himself off the mat. Horrified, I watched him inch slowly forward, heading for the staircase.
For the Sire, I thought grimly. I stood and walked over to the machete. Looking down at the handle, I refused to pick it up. Picking it up, I refused to take another step. Taking another step, I told Pol I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t.
Chopping downward, I said I couldn’t over and over and over.
CHAPTER 3
“Why must teh Empirre recapture ths world? Because Maritinian kelp isrich in, of all things, vitamins.”
–JAKOB BRYCE
I stopped reading the mission report right there. This had to be a joke. “Vitamins?”
Right. I kept forgetting. This was fourteen months before arriving on Maritinia. Fourteen months before I slaughtered Colonel Kell.
It had been only a few days since they’d implanted Pol’s consciousness into my head. Just the first of many surgeries I’d have to suffer over the coming months while in transit to Maritinia. Soon they’d carve my pear stomach into a washboard. Then they’d hone the sloping curves in my face. Slim my eyebrows and reshape my stumpy fingers. They’d work me up and down with scalpel and surgical saw until I looked like Kell.
I lay back on my bunk, the only furniture inside the small cargo hold, and tried to concentrate. I conjured the rabbit hole in my mind, the small opening through which conversation was possible. The trick was to drop an imaginary spider silk into the hole and send the words vibrating along the invisible thread.
He responded after an annoyed sigh—which was impressive considering Pol didn’t have lungs.
I stared at the screen, letting him read through my eyes, scrolling down when asked.
Maritinia. I knew I couldn’t have expected to land the choicest assignment, but I’d sacrificed the next three years of my life for this mission. I’d been hoping for something a little more consequential than the Empire’s dental health.
Mundane facts scrolled by. Population: 700,000 (approximate). Biota: piscine with chlorophyll-based ocean vegetation. Economy: agrarian.
The statistics painted a simple picture. Maritinians were kelp farmers. No wonder I’d never heard of the place. The only thing remotely interesting about it was how those simple kelp farmers had managed to overthrow the Empire’s appointed governor.
I nodded, realizing that this mission had a symbolic importance that far outweighed vitamins and toothpaste.
The sun rose from the emerald ocean. Bright morning rays made the sea sparkle as if it had been sprinkled with gold dust.
The quintet of silver domes were small by Empire standards, but they were pretty in their way, the bulbous, onion-shaped structures each tapered into a point at the top. Quaint.
The island was a man-made atoll, a slate gray circle set in an ocean of undulating green. The ring was broken in places, collapsed stone visible through shallow water that channeled into the inner lagoon. The lagoon itself looked like an inlaid emerald lassoed by granite. Patches of purple, blue, and orange coral showed through the seawater like squirts of paint pressed under aquamarine glass.
The camera zoomed in on one section of the atoll, where a crowd of people stood surrounded by Maritinian soldiers holding firerods that must’ve been seized during the coup. Inside the circle of guards, about a hundred prisoners stood lined up in military-style rows. Some in uniforms, others wearing civilian dress, all of the men and women standing with hands bound behind their backs.
The camera continued to zoom until it focused on Admiral Dii Mnai, the coup’s leader and self-appointed admiral of a rebel navy. Standing on a dais, his ample frame loomed behind a podium. An emerald-colored cloth hung over the spot where the five-pillared logo of the Empire would normally show.
He looked into the camera, his harsh eyes intimidating the lens. Let it be known that the peoples of Maritinia have been free-ed from the grip of the Empire.
I upped the volume, his provincial accent hard for me to grasp.
Admiral Mnai jabbed a finger at the heavens. The Empire’s hold on our flow has been shatter-ed! Maritinia is free! Today is a day to remember. A day to rejoice.
Look at them, he said. On cue, the camera panned over the prisoners. For millennia, they have steer-ed our currents, and they have stolen our resources, and they have murder-ed our children. They have jail-ed and torture-ed our Interpreters, but no more.
The camera returned to Mnai, who pounded the podium with his fist. No more! They are parasites, these so-call-ed representatives of the Empire. And today, they will pay for their sins, and the sins of their predecessors. Tomorrow, we will build a new Maritinia, but today . . . Today, we will feed the angry souls they have wrong-ed!
The camera moved to the right and settled on Colonel Drake Kell. He wore the Empire’s uniform, colonel’s bars on his cap. Draped around his shoulders was an emerald cloth, the new Maritinian flag worn like a stole.
Kell stepped to the water’s edge, waves lapping against the pitted stone. A woman was escorted by a pair of guards to where he stood. Her eyes were puffy and red, her hair straggling and flapping in the wind. She had the look of a career civil servant whose frumpy clothes hung wearily on a body fattened by years of sedentary work.
She reminded me of me.
Colonel Kell grinned through the corner of his mouth and lifted the machete he held in his right hand. Mortified, I watched him give the woman a swift chop on the shoulder. She screamed and fell to her knees, blood already seeping through her blouse.
Get in the water, he said.
No, she wailed. No! She tried to stand and run, but tripped and fell on her side. Please, please!
Lifting his leg, he put his boot in the center of her back and rolled her off the edge. With barely a splash, she disappeared, reappearing a second later, desperately gasping for air. She sank out of view again, and I thought she’d sunk for good until she resurfaced. Over and over, she sank under and bobbed back into view, each time sucking what I thought would be her last gasp of air.
Something appeared from the corner of the screen. It looked like a tiny silver sail gliding through the water. A fin. Now I saw several. It seemed they were everywhere, all of them swiftly moving in. She came back up one last time before the water went wild with thrashing fish tails and sleek silver bodies that jumped and flipped amid violent splashes of sea spray.
Dry-mouthed, I looked away, my stomach turning over.
I turned back to the screen, hoping it would be over, but it had only just begun. The guards were shoving people in the water, beating them with firerods, kicking and dragging and tossing them in, dozens of them. One made a break, getting twenty yards before the purple lightning of a firerod caught his leg and dropped him to the ground, smoke curling up from his charred limb.
Some of the doomed swam for the coral, their numbers dwindling one by one as the fish—these silver needles of death—overtook them in a swarm of frothing water that took on a pinkish hue.
I couldn’t believe this was real. Those poor souls ripped apart and eaten alive. Eaten.
I saw.
Maritinia had to be liberated.
The Empire could’ve sent an army. But, instead, they were sending me.
Me.
Kill Kell. Take his place and subvert this new regime of monsters and madmen. Foment discontent and sabotage their defenses.
Pave the way for the Empire’s return.
That was my mission.
CHAPTER 4
“A machete isn’ta weaponn. Not by designg. But It can dkill. Such is our way. alwaysy turning tools intoweapons.”
–JAKOB BRYCE
The butcher lay at my feet.
Dead.
My hands were covered in blood. I could feel it on my face, my neck, speckled and smeared. Kell’s blood.
I nodded. Speechless. Ghostly candlelight flickered over the corpse. The machete in my hand cast a menacing shadow.
Yes. Much to do.
I wrestled the corpse onto the blood-drenched sleeping mat and dragged it across the floor, sliding it behind the hanging blanket that served as the closet door.
I rushed downstairs and tiptoed past the front door, where the guards’ feet were still visible below the curtain. Hurrying into the kitchen, I found a scrubbing brush and a bucket. Hustling to the sluice, I dipped the bucket directly into the stream, filling it with seawater. Back upstairs, I dumped the whole bucket onto the bloody scene and went to work scrubbing until my arms were spent before forcing water toward the back wall, where I could channel it into a small gutter that dumped into the sea.
I didn’t. Splashing the wall with half of a second bucket of water, I brushed left and right, up and down.
Unable to gauge the quality of my work by candlelight, I eventually had to call it good. Kell’s usual nap time was already over, and the guards outside were certainly expecting the colonel to go to the club for dinner.
But I couldn’t go out until another critical task was completed. Nabbing Kell’s glass of imported whiskey from the small stone block on the floor, I hurried back downstairs to the bathroom. I set the whiskey glass on the washbasin, then thumped the paper globe hanging from the ceiling. Fireflies brightened the small space with their fluttering glow. Despite a full week on planet, I still couldn’t help but recoil at the sight of the toilet, a stone-carved basin with two footholds and a hole through which you could hit the ocean below. How could people live like this? How could I live like this?
Tides of Maritinia Page 2