The Trophy Chase Saga

by George Bryan Polivka

  The living pulled the dead away so one more cannonball might be loaded, one more round fired. Those who stopped to help the wounded were shooed away angrily by the wounded themselves. “I’m done, leave me!” and “Fire the cannon!”

  And they fought on. They were mistaken and misguided, partially trained and poorly disciplined, but they fought on with grit and tenacity.

  But the Drammune were mercilessly accurate, ruthlessly efficient. Gant Marie’s hull was quickly torn open in three places, the two lower of which drank in water at such a rate that the third highest wound, four feet higher up the hull, would be doing the same within minutes. She was doomed. Forcible lost her foremast and her mainmast almost simultaneously, and sheets of canvas billowed down over the decks and were then held fast by a web of rigging and lines, rendering her unable to fire her guns, unable to free herself. Roped and tied and blindfolded, she was hammered again and again and again. She too would go down. Wellspring had no rudder and had suffered under a particularly bitter broadside to her cannon placements, leaving the crew decimated and unable to return fire. She was crippled at sea, but she would survive the pass. Windward, however, would not survive; she was burning.

  Only Blunderbuss made it through unscathed. This was because at the crucial moment, as the Drammune came into range, she quit firing her cannon. The crew had run out of ammunition. Deckhands looked around at one another, baffled, and then began to discuss the problem. Their captain wandered down to the main deck, considered the issue, and suggested he may have left several crates of ammunition unopened in the hold. Men volunteered to search. The crates were located. The lack of a cargo crane was noted. A mate suggested that a bucket brigade be formed. The captain assigned crewmen to spots along the companionways. The lack of a crowbar was noted. A crowbar was found. The crates were opened. Eventually, individual cannonballs were passed, one by one, up to the deck. By this time, of course, the pass was long over and done.

  The pass complete, the Vast now assessed the situation. Finally, captains raised their eyes to find their flagship. They saw the Marchessa waving more white linen into the wind than the royal hospital on wash day. They saw their commander’s message, signaled frantically again and again by an arm-weary flagman: “Cease fire. They flag truce.”

  But even this became distorted in the retelling. Davies’ unequivocal statement became, after but one or two re-transmissions, “They have surrendered!”

  Cheers rose.

  Then chants, then songs of martial glories praising the prowess of Nearing Vast. The king’s Navy celebrated what they now fully believed to be a great and historic victory. The Drammune commander lowered his telescope, his amazement turned to incredulity. Zaya had seen threescore battles fought and won, fought and lost, but he had yet to encounter anything quite like this. He looked at his first mate. “Vastcha anetho soomay?” Have the Vast gone mad?

  The sailor answered dutifully. “Seyk, hezz.” Aye, sir.

  Vast casualties were heavy. But thanks in part to Vast ineptitude, in part to Drammune restraint and accuracy, and wholly to the sheer, unmerited mercy of God, most wounds were not mortal. Almost all of these humble fishermen, these common sailors, these men of peace in peacetime, would live to tell the tale. But they would live to wish this tale were never told. Their hearts were as true as any hero’s, but their errors were simply too egregious.

  Commander Zaya looked around at the steely eyes of his men, who now awaited his orders. He saw sullen looks, simmering anger. They had been attacked by a people without honor, and now the salamanders sang and reveled as though victorious. They mocked the Drammune. The Drammune wanted blood.

  Within minutes the Drammune ships had moved into positions of power over those six who had dared to attack under parley. As the Drammune closed in, the seas went silent. The noise of celebration died away. Vast captains, doing the honorable thing, quieted their crews and prepared to accept the unconditional surrender of their foes.

  The Karda Zolt slid in alongside the Marchessa, now hove to nearby. This Vast crew was anxious and intimidated, rags of truce now hanging limp in hands. They alone seemed to know the grievous nature of their error, and the penalty Commander Zaya was preparing to impose. They could not help but eye the Drammune cannon now positioned and ready, aimed so as to sink the Marchessa in a single volley amidship, at the waterline. The Marchessa’s captain quickly had a ship’s boat lowered. Zaya watched Moore Davies without emotion as he bobbed about on the way over for parley, four men rowing him in the tiny shallop. His head was up, his chin high, but his mouth was drawn down and his jaw clamped tight. He would come aboard of his own free will but would stay aboard in chains, and he knew it.

  Such was Commander Zaya’s design, and to that end all events flowed. But for Zaya, for Davies, as for all souls that bob and skitter across the surface of earthly seas, currents shift. Winds bring change with astounding speed. Ships appear on horizons. Monsters arise from the deep. This day was destined to be remembered for far more than the deeds or misdeeds of a score of obscure ships that had found and scraped the bottom of the Vast nautical barrel.

  The beast’s skin sizzled, flaring yellow. Within it was kindled a matching fire. The long fin angled downward, the sparkling skin reflecting light as it skimmed quickly across the surface of the waters…this could be only one creature, only one! The Firefish rose from the depths where it had circled far beneath the stormy battle, and now it swam with all its might, with all its heart and mind and soul, toward the object of its devotion, its desire.

  Deep Fin.

  Deep Fin had come. It had come for the Firefish.

  Deep Fin remembered!

  “Hahn!” cried the Drammune lookout. “Enmenteras!” Enemy ship! He then called out the compass point, and commander Zaya wheeled about, scanning the seas to the northwest of the Karda Zolt. Through the scope he could see that the approaching Vast vessel was heeled to port at an impossible angle. It could be but one ship, the one last seen when the Nochto Vare went down. Then, she was fleeing. Now, she attacked.

  “Chekah Kai,” the commander said softly. Trophy Chase.

  The Firefish broke the surface moving at its fastest speed, an all-out sprint upward toward the light. It flew from the water. This was an enormous leap, not over the bows, but straight into the air a hundred yards from its great Deep Fin, well over a hundred feet into pure, dazzling, invisible daylight. It shot almost straight up until its tail left the water and it was airborne, a flying fish, a porpoise. Eyes alight, its hide gleaming and glittering in the sun, it rotated in the air, its entire long, lithe body spiraling gracefully, once, then again, and then a third time. And when it smashed down into the water on its dorsals, it soaked the Trophy Chase with a wild wall of joyful seawater.

  And the men aboard roared their approval. Their ally had returned!

  But just as quickly, the roar died away. All eyes turned to John Hand. All hearts and minds registered the same question at the same moment.

  The admiral did not join in the outburst. He barely glanced at the Firefish. He watched his men. He watched their reactions, listening as their cheers turned hollow, then went silent. He saw all eyes turn toward him, one by one, as he knew they would. He knew what they were thinking. They looked to him for the answer to one question, and none needed to speak it aloud.

  With Packer Throme not aboard, who will now command the beast?

  The Admiral of the Fleet had a choice to make. Finally, here was a decision that did not feel foregone, nor pre-scripted. He had three options. He could set his face like a flint and sail on, ignoring the Firefish as though it were nothing but the natural oddity it most certainly was, no more noteworthy than the surfacing of a whale. Or, he could treat the thing like the dangerous predator it also most certainly was, and order up the sides of beef he’d salted away in the hold, get men to the longboats, load the lures, and kill it once and for all.

  Or…he could behave as though the beast was the trained animal his men believed it
to be, the circus act it quite certainly was not. He could take up Packer Throme’s mantle, his place at the prow. To John Hand, the professor of nautics, the rider of the waves of history, this came down to a simple matter of strategy. Which path gave him the best chance of success? Which path could win him back his ship?

  He knew what he needed to do. But he hesitated. The series of failures that had marred this voyage taunted from the back of his mind, conjuring up images before his eyes, like bones jangled on a witch doctor’s amulet way down south in the Warm Climes. His failure to command his own fleet, his poor decision to leave them all alone, his would-be attack that ended with armed Drammune officers aboard his own ship watching his every move…all these spoke out against him. He needed to sweep all that away somehow. He could either throw those bones into the fire, show the men that such drivel was powerless, or…he could put them around his own neck and use them to his own ends.

  Either choice would be the right choice, so long as it worked.

  The men waited. John Hand set his jaw. Decision made, he walked silently, without word or expression, to the stair of the quarterdeck. He descended to the main deck, crossed it, and climbed to the foredeck. All eyes still on him, he climbed to the forecastle. But when he grasped the stays that ran up from the bowsprit, and then stepped up onto that wooden beam, the men cut their eyes to one another, sharing a wonder, a fear, and a deep misgiving.

  The admiral looked at the bowsprit beneath his boots. It was thick as a man’s torso where he stood at the base, and tapered to the width of his forearm fifteen feet from him, at its farthest point. There he looked out over the seas, calmly, serenely, in the very spot where Packer Throme had stood. And then he waited for the Firefish.

  “That now,” Mutter Cabe said in a hoarse whisper to Delaney, who stood beside him on the standing rigging along the mainmast yard, “that just ain’t right.”

  The sea coursed by, flowing directly underneath them. With the ship heeled as far to port as it was, the water was closer to Delaney and Cabe than was the angled deck, now down and to their right. In the blue water directly below them, just under the surface these sailors could see the Firefish swimming, its lean body snaking alongside the ship at their precise speed, just below the waves. It was a great yellow streak of flame and power. It moved forward now, toward the bow, toward John Hand.

  Delaney worked some moisture into his mouth. “Mutter, don’t get all shocked now. But for once, I think I agree with ye.”

  The Drammune commander had seen the Firefish leap, from a thousand yards away. He had seen the beast shoot out of the water, twist, and splash back down into the sea. He waited now, expecting to see a lunge, hoping to watch the Firefish take down the Trophy Chase as it had done the Nochto Vare.

  But the beast did not lunge, did not destroy…instead, it rose alongside the ship’s prow.

  John Hand felt a creeping dread. The specter of all his recent poor decisions rose once again, dark in his mind. This was not the right choice. Everything in him now screamed it. But it was his choice. He had made it knowingly. He made it because he believed the beast was but a beast, acting according to the laws of its nature, according to ebbs and flows that could be measured like tides, according to instinct and animal reflex, all predictable. Lund Lander had measured these things, reduced the hunt to a series of calculations.

  It occurred to the admiral, in a small bubble of clarity that rose up within his dark doubts, that Lund Lander had ultimately been unable to calculate these monsters. He had died in the maw of one of them, and on this very ship. But John Hand pushed that stray thought back down from where it had come. Accidents happen.

  When the Firefish rose, John Hand turned to look at it. He had seen these things before. From a distance, yes, but not a great distance. He knew what they looked like. He knew what to expect. He would not be surprised by anything he saw here.

  But he was surprised.

  As the Firefish closed in on the bow, still racing below the surface, flying alongside the Deep Fin, it remembered. So clearly, so cleanly, so vividly, as if it had happened just now…the beaming light, the wonder, the rows and rows of eyes, the joy of the Deep Fin! Yes, the source of it, the mind of it, right there at the front, at the creature’s head. And it rose, ready to bask in that same glow, to look the Deep Fin in the eye once again, to know its power once again. To obey its command.

  The Firefish, too, was surprised.

  The Drammune commander twisted the outer sleeve of his telescope, focusing it. The head of the beast was now up out of the water, at a level even with the prow of the Trophy Chase. And someone stood there, up on the bowsprit. What was this about? Could it be that the stories were true?

  And then the Firefish opened its mouth. Its jaws just seemed to unhinge, dropping down like an inverted portcullis, until that figure, whoever it was, could have stepped in.

  What had shocked Talon in her encounter with one of these beasts more than a year ago was the intelligence of the thing. Packer had seen the same intelligence, had been able to read its thoughts in the creature’s eyes. And now those huge, wet eyes pierced John Hand, focused on him so crisply, so deeply, that they seemed to penetrate his very thoughts. He had been proud and aloof, coolly surveying this animal, disdaining fear, knowing he and his men could slay this monster if need be. Those had been his thoughts. But what John Hand saw in the beast, what surprised him to the core of his soul, was the beast’s deep, deep disappointment.

  This beast, somehow, found John Hand wanting. The admiral blanched, his bravado gone in an instant. Then the beast’s discontent melted into anger. And just as quickly that anger grew into rage. The transition in that enormous face, within those eyes, the emotion that exuded from that scaly, misshapen thing, its jutting jaw, its bristling, skewed teeth, could not possibly be misread. Had there been an audible click accompanying the shift to anger, like the cocking of a firing mechanism, it would not have seemed out of place.

  The beast’s jaw dropped as its eyes widened. Hand felt the wave of heat emanating from the fiery yellow scales.

  He knew now the beast would attack him.

  The beast had come within the presence, there at the head of the creature. But this was not the presence of the Deep Fin. Not remotely. Here was a shocking darkness, where before was light. Here was suspicion, where before was empathy. Disdain, where there was honor. Where once light glowed and pulsed outward, now darkness pulled. Here was intelligence, yes, but without an embrace, without warmth, without the fire that burned and glowed and charged through all, that invited, that inspired.

  Was this truly Deep Fin? Yes. But the presence, the mind of it was not same. Here was the look of a predator. The eyes of a killer. The Deep Fin was a storm creature, and the storm creatures were hunters. But in these eyes now, the Firefish was the prey. The animal instinct John Hand had expected took over, but not in the manner he expected. This instinct allowed a simple choice, an either-or, to flee or to fight. The beast clicked through this process in an instant. And locked into fight.

  That’s when the beast’s jaw dropped.

  It would kill. It would kill now.

  The admiral’s jaw dropped also. His eyes went wide just as the beast’s narrowed. His instincts also kicked in, and the same two choices fired through his mind. He chose flee.

  But his legs would not move. The beast’s jaw was wide, its eyes fiery yellow, its lunge imminent. He had to move. He let go of the forestay with his left hand, the one closest the beast, in a jerky effort to turn and leap off the bowsprit back onto the forecastle deck. But as he did, he lost his balance and started to fall backward toward the water, away from the beast. Instinctively, he swept his left hand and arm up and behind him, where his hand struck the other stay. He grabbed desperately for it, found it in his grip, then let go with his right hand. Now he faced astern. He found his feet again, and bent his knees to leap to the deck.

  But the Firefish struck at that moment. The admiral put out his right hand to fend t
he thing off, and as he did, he cried out in sheer terror.

  The rage within the Firefish demanded it attack. And so it attacked. But when it saw the movement, saw the awkwardness of this bit of flesh, this ungainly motion from the very place where the intelligence emanated, out of which the dark aura flowed, another thought darted like a sparrow through its brain. Even as it lunged, as its teeth snapped down, other images flashed through its mind, and its memory. As it had swept the seas clean of morsels after killing the crunchy storm creature, some of those morsels behaved precisely as this dark, fleshy presence did. Those morsels had flailed their little fins and whimpered and cried, just as this bit did. And deep within the beast, an awareness took hold…

  This was a morsel.

  The morsels were creatures. The storm creature was a creature of creatures.

  And in that brief flash of insight, the Firefish adjusted its attack. It snapped not at the Deep Fin, but at the morsel, at the awkward fleshy thing, to pluck it away, to swallow it as it had swallowed many others.

  To rid the Deep Fin of this dark presence.

  The crew watched in horror as the jaws of the lunging Firefish closed on their admiral. But the beast’s adjustment was not precise. It did not take the whole of John Hand. It took his arm at the elbow, severing it instantly with an explosion of electricity that flashed like smokeless gunpowder. They heard no crack of powder, however, only a crackling, like the sizzling of a pinecone in a fire, or the crinkling of brittle paper in a flame.

  And then the beast was gone.

  John Hand stood on the bowsprit still, his knees still bent, his left hand squeezing the taut line for all it was worth, his right arm gone. He watched the beast disappear. He stared after it, unseeing. Then he held what was left of his right arm up before his eyes, and stared at the stump that remained.