Cuttlefish

by Dave Freer

  It swung wildly about and began to rise, presumably with the airship. “Right,” said the lieutenant. “Into the boats, gentlemen. We'll push off and watch—”

  “Stand in the name of the King,” yelled someone in the distance. And there was another yell, in Spanish, closer.

  “Esteban! Is calling for help!” said the local guide, getting to his feet.

  “Stay put,” said the lieutenant, pushing him down. “You show them the way back if we don't make it. Tamworth and Gordon, with me. The rest of you, give us some covering fire. Aim for the tops of the trees; otherwise you'll probably hit us.”

  The three left at a run, and the rest of the crew fired their rifles. It was enough to draw a lot of fire into the night from some distance off. The other side weren't firing into the treetops though.

  Minutes later the lieutenant and the other two submariners came back with three of the five men, carrying one, and half carrying another. They scrambled in to helping hands, and the punts pushed off. Just as they got there, several bright flares exploded into the sky, making the scene quite light, and the shadows stark. They could hear a motorboat suddenly, and the airship's searchlight began playing over the reeds again, from far higher up.

  The Cuttlefish's crew and the two unhurt locals poled the boat down the channel with such a will that Tim nearly fell overboard from holding on to the pole too long. The channel curved, and the local men wasted no time in getting them into a shallower, narrower inlet, where the reeds almost met overhead. High above more flares burned and the searchlight quested. Bullets ripped blindly through the reeds.

  “Right. Barnabas. You're about the smallest. Pull your pole in the boat, and give me a hand.” The lieutenant's voice sounded a little strained.

  Tim did as he was told, expecting to have to help with the injured. What he hadn't realised was the lieutenant was one of them. In the flare-light crisscrossed with reed shadows, Tim could see that Lieutenant Willis's arm was dark with blood, and his hand was dripping it.

  Tim had to cut away the cloth, trying to control his own breathing, and fright, and the feeling that he might just fall over. But it had to be done, so he did it, with the lieutenant telling him what to do. In the meanwhile they fled deeper into the swamps—avoiding going back towards deeper channels, where several patrol boats were now to be heard, but keeping to the shallower water, and the narrow channels. Getting out and pushing occasionally. Listening to the airship's machine-gunners strafing anything that they thought might be a boat.

  It did seem that the hunters had made the assumption that their quarry would go for the main channels towards the sea. That was a good thing, as the Cuttlefish's crew were not in the area that was getting searched and strafed hard.

  It was a bad thing in that they'd have to cross that area, later, to get back to the sub.

  “Wonder why they're so hot down that way, instead of searching here?” said Thorne, listening to the distant gunfire.

  The local shrugged. “I think they shoot at prawn fishermen, and the fishermen, they shoot back. They have the guns for the crocodile.”

  “I suppose around here if you shoot at someone, they shoot back, and the airship is a big target,” said Lieutenant Willis.

  It took them nearly eighteen hours to get back—incidentally with quite a lot of coal, looted off a half-sunken river-gunboat that had been abandoned on a mud bank.

  Clara took the first chance she got to ask Tim all about it, not an hour after they'd all returned to the submarine.

  “I wish I'd been there,” she said, eyes bright with the excitement of the story.

  Tim thought of the lieutenant's arm and the blood, and the fear. Shuddered. “You could have had my place.”

  “Well, it appears we've got them cornered,” said Duke Malcolm, looking at the map. “How long until they are captured or killed, gentlemen? This has gone on long enough.”

  The two naval officers looked at each other. Finally the older man spoke. “Well, Your Grace, the Zapata swamps are a very large area, actually. More than a million acres. And the area is a hotbed of resistance. We'd…we'd do better if they were in open water. We have several vessels fitted with the trackers that pick the high-frequency radio pulse of the submarine engines in the area. They were just lucky escaping in the Bahama shoals. Sooner or later they'll bolt for America again. Probably as soon as the weather turns bad. By travelling underwater—”

  Duke Malcolm slapped his hand down on the desk. “I know we have more accuracy than that, gentlemen. You should have rounded it down to ten square miles by the information we have. Saturate it. And patrol the Florida channel with those tracking vessels!”

  He had more on his mind than these bumblers. There was disturbing news out of the Australian territories, as well as trouble in Africa, and yet another rebellion in India. There were looming coal shortages, trouble with the Chinese in Tibet.

  The Empire was short of food, short of coal, and being nibbled at by lesser peoples. Duke Malcolm knew that it was up to him to keep it alive.

  He sighed. “Look. Saturation bomb the area from the airships. They're waiting for a patch of bad weather to try and sneak across to the United States. As I recall, this is the season for storms and hurricanes there. We cannot afford to pussyfoot about, gentlemen. And now I have work to do. Report back to me when you have something to report. I expect that to be within three days.

  Duke Malcolm shook his head. They probably thought that he did not know that they'd had one gunboat run aground, and looted before it could be salvaged. Or of the sporadic resistance the marines had encountered from the locals who knew the swamp far better than the marines did.

  He did not approve of the fact that they had not seen fit to tell him of these matters, though. He'd have to punish a few people.

  The sky was the colour of slate, not its usual blue. It looked more like London than the Caribbean, but without the umber tinge the coal smoke gave to the light there. It seemed to be growing darker even as they watched, although it was only midmorning. There were still a few fires burning to the east, where the Royal Navy and the British Airship Force had been bombing and shelling the swamp to pieces. The rising winds had at least got rid of the airships. “The barometer's falling fast,” said Nicholl, coming up to relieve Tim.

  “Better catch it then,” said Tim flippantly.

  “You're a cheeky brat,” said Submariner Nicholl, smiling, grabbing him by the collar and arm, shaking him out over water. “I ought feed you to crocodiles, only I don't want to poison them. Means we'll be moving, sonny. So you probably pulled the last full watch up here with the mosquitoes.”

  Tim liked Nicholl. He wouldn't have dared clever comments with some of the others, but submariners like him and Thorne, and some of the engine-room crowd…they made life on the submarine good. Of course there were a few lowlifes too. He met two of them as he went down the hatchway. Banks and one of the other ratings were polishing. And they weren't about to let Tim through. He stepped forward; they stepped back into his way. “What's the matter, Darkie?” said Banks, mockingly.

  “Just let me pass.”

  “When you say please…nicely enough.”

  “Please,” said Tim, stepping forward.

  “That's not nicely enough,” said Banks with a smirk, pushing him back. “There was no ‘master.’”

  Tim shoved the hand aside, pushed forward. Next thing they were grappling and fighting. And Tim was smaller and lighter than Banks. He'd just landed hard on decking, with Banks on top of him, when the other rating grabbed them. “Mate's coming!” he hissed.

  Banks was already on his feet when the mate came down the passage. Tim staggered up and continued on his way, feeling his lip. But the mate had plainly seen or heard something. “What is going on here, ja?”

  “I tripped over someone's feet, sir,” said Tim.

  “Just helped him up,” said Banks.

  Mate Werner obviously was not convinced. But he seemed to have other things on his mind r
ather than following it up. “I'm watching you two. You will not make trouble or I will put for you both into the lockup, ja. Now get on with your work.”

  Tim was glad to.

  Clara found herself tagging along to listen in on her mother and Captain Malkis.

  “One thing we do know, the Royal Navy have a belief that submarines aren't affected by surface storms—of course waves are not just a thing on the surface. Maybe if we could go deep enough we could escape the effects, but honestly we can't. The steel of our hulls can't take the pressure, but they don't know that. Instead they believe we can travel peacefully under stormy seas, while they get tossed about on the surface. They believe, or can be made to believe, that we're running. But to be honest with you, Dr. Calland, it's not so much a case of running, as where we run to. It would appear that our American contacts have been penetrated by Duke Malcolm's spies.…”

  “If we have any choice, I don't want to go there anyway,” said her mother, haltingly. “I…I think they lied to me. I need to talk to them first…if I can.”

  The captain nodded. “Well, my suggestion is that instead of trying for Florida or Texas, where the Royal Navy probably expect us to go, we let them think we're running to Florida, but instead wait out the storm here and then go across to Rivas.”

  “Where is that?”

  Clara was glad her mother asked. She had no idea either.

  “It's on Lake Nicaragua. Since the blocking of the Panama Canal, the Americans have gone back to running an overland track railway over the Rivas Isthmus to get people to vessels on the Pacific, just like they did before the Panama Canal was built. I believe they're working on a canal-link through there to San Juan del Sur. It's much more defensible than the Panama Canal was, and the Royal Navy's Pacific fleet is quite stretched, anyway. You can make contact with the American Legation in Rivas. There is not much government in Nicaragua these days, since the bombing of Managua, but what there is, is in Rivas.”

  “And where will you go, Captain?” Clara asked, forgetting she was keeping quiet and listening to something she wasn't strictly invited to listen to.

  He smiled crookedly. “We were supposed to pick up cargo drogues off the Boston Shoals, due for Peru, around Cape Horn. And then, in exchange, take a cargo of Chile saltpetre in our drogues, and head for Westralia. The mines need it, and so do their hydroponics.”

  Her mother looked down. Closed her eyes briefly. Then said quietly, “Captain, that's why they're hunting me so hard. My mother and Fritz had got as far as a table-top way of producing ammonia. I think I can scale it up, and from ammonia…we can produce artificial nitrites…Chile saltpetre. At a tiny fraction of the cost of mining it and shipping it. The fertilisers can help to feed millions.”

  The captain looked puzzled. “Why don't you just give it to them, ma'am?”

  Mother sighed. “Because the nitrites mean explosives too. Not just for mining, but for munitions. The British Empire controls access to the Atacama fields in what is now mostly Chile. The Ganges Delta saltpetre quarries in the Indies are of course under Imperial control. The other ways of making nitrates are all expensive, and the other mines are far smaller. They want my knowledge not for fertiliser, but for war. And the British Empire would rather let the world starve than let anyone else have it.”

  “I see,” said Captain Malkis.

  Clara got the feeling, by the way he said it, that the captain did not regard war—against the British Empire, anyway—as the worst of all possible things. But he did not say anything about it. Just: “We will be able to send messages to the Americans from Rivas.”

  Tim found himself working down in the hold as a general dogsbody and run-around-and-go-fetch boy working on the chief engineer's latest contraption. They'd used the one long-range tick-tock to spring the trap in the Bahamas; now they needed another. It had to be a louder and bigger one. They still had an inshore tick-tock, but the captain wanted lots of range and noise on this one. It was to be too big to launch from the escape hatch. Instead they had to make it in sections and haul these up from the hold, onto the deck, and then onto a raft under camouflage netting ready for bolting together. The whole thing had to be towed down to where the swamp channels met the sea.

  The tick-tock itself was now inside a wood-and-canvas frame nearly as big as the Cuttlefish. Tim couldn't resist. He paraded up onto it. “I'm the captain of the Cuttlefish Two,” he said giving a fair imitation of Captain Malkis pacing the deck. “Up periscope. Down snuiver!” Someone threw a lump of mud at him, and he took a step sideways and fell through the canvas.

  The wetting and trouble he was in were worth it for the laugh, even if it was still getting colder, and the rain had started to come down. That afternoon the tick-tock was towed down, avoiding the struggling river-patrol boat, to the sea. The sea looked just like where one didn't want to be. The clouds were thick and heavy, and the ocean was gray and full of white horses racing shorewards.

  The chief engineer's modified tick-tock set off into the teeth of the storm. There was only one vessel out there—yesterday there had been ten. But the smaller vessels and the dreadnought had all gone, the smaller vessels perhaps heading for safe anchorage, the dreadnought out to deeper water. Now only a lone armoured cruiser battled the swell, the smoke from its triple stacks barely visible in the rain squalls. Tim was one of the crew getting shivering wet, helping Lieutenant Ambrose and the chief get the mock submarine out into the sea.

  “Have to aim just about at her. She might not hear the tick-tock otherwise,” said Nicholl.

  “Pity it doesn't hit her and sink her,” said Tim, looking at the distant grey bulk of the three-smokestack cruiser.

  “Then they'd chase us harder,” said Nicholl.

  Tim snorted. “You think? Harder than they are now?”

  Nicholl gave him a cheerful swat on the head. “Well, they'd hunt the other subs. In a straight-out war we'd just lose. So we fight a slow war. We don't push them too hard, and they don't—usually—push us too hard.”

  Tim wasn't at all sure about this. It seemed to be a plan of letting your enemies decide when they wanted to fight. But he was just a cabin boy, so he said nothing more. He enjoyed getting back to the submarine, though, and getting warm and dry again. It seemed odd that two days ago they'd been too hot to want to breathe. A day later they sailed, unobserved at last, out into the Gulf of Mexico.

  After days of heat, the huge storm had cooled the air over the gulf—for about half of their dash to Rivas. After that Tim found the air was so hot and humid it was sticking his clothes to him. It was hardly surprising no one lived in the tropical lowlands anymore if they could help it. There were places where you couldn't sweat enough to cool down, and the heat could kill you.

  Except for the final leg, once they'd sighted the shore batteries on the San Juan River, they'd been able to run with at least the snorkel up, avoiding any ships. The San Juan was a short, very wide and deep river. Going up it—especially the section of the turbulences, which would have been rapids if it had been any shallower—was slow. The electric motors simply weren't strong enough to push them along, and they had to have the Stirling engines running. The engine room was a sweatbox, and the engineers only did half-hour shifts in it. And then the number two compressor broke down.…They barely made it into the lake—nearly out of fuel, and with the Cuttlefish in need of both repair work and some new parts.

  “It's hard to believe this is not the sea,” said Tim, looking around as they paused after hauling the ropes on the sails that night. It was choppy, and there was not a sign of land in the moonlight.

  “Yeah, but closer to Rivas, you can see the volcanoes. And the water is the wrong colour,” said Tamworth, the sail-rating standing next to him. “Besides being fresh. But you get sharks here, though.”

  “But it's fresh water!” The crew—or at least those who could swim—had taken turns to have as near to a bath as they'd seen in months, earlier, when the wind had been still.

  Tamworth snorted. �
��Not after you filthy lot have been swimming in it.”

  “Huh. You were so clean. Are the volcanoes spouting smoke and lava and stuff?”

  “Why do yer think the water's so warm? Nah, they're just pointy mountains sticking out of the water.”

  Clara had been very jealous of them all getting to swim. But her mother and the captain had point-blank refused to allow her to join them—or even to swim on her own. “This is not Brighton, young lady,” said the captain. “And with any luck you'll be enjoying a bath at the American Legation soon.”

  Her mother was too busy on what must have been her fifth attempt at a letter to the American Consul to say more than no. It put Clara in a filthy mood, even if the shower tank had been refilled with fresh water and would produce a lather with soap. She went back to the celestial navigation text, and did not even go out on deck to see the volcano islands of Concepción and Maderas in the dawn before they sailed on for a river mouth near the city of Rivas. Here, at last, they went ashore.

  The local smuggler, Señor Omberto, who came to meet them, was also a wealthy farmer, and had a large villa next to the jetties down on the mouth of the river where he kept his netting barges…and a reason for him to have coal. The submarine would lie in the depths of the channel, just with a snorkel out, but Clara and her mother, four ratings, and Lieutenants Willis and Ambrose—in turns, while not on the submarine—could come up to the house. Part of the engine-room crew would be working on one of the compressors in the shed, but some would have to stay aboard and continue to work there.

  Climbing the stair, Clara knew that the submarine was hot and stank of all its familiar stinks. She also knew that she would miss it terribly. The captain promised she'd get to say good-bye. There was a lump in her throat about leaving.