Salvage

by Meljean Brook

  A sharp knock sounded at the cabin door. Before they could respond, it opened and the pale-haired woman in trousers came through carrying a bundle of Georgiana’s clothing. A mercenary, too, most likely, though it wasn’t the daggers or gun tucked into her belt that made Georgiana think so. It was the flatness of her gaze and the firm set of her mouth. Georgiana had seen that look in the mirror. This was a practical woman who would do what was necessary when it needed to be done, but who never forgot her own interests. Georgiana and Thom wouldn’t find any help here.

  “Mrs. Winch?” Georgiana recalled that Lord Pinchpenny had said the woman’s name. “Can you tell us where we’re headed?”

  “Out to sea.” She dropped the bundle on the bed. “I won’t tell you more.”

  That was enough for now. “Thank you.”

  Out to sea. Escape might be more difficult, but it could have been worse. She looked to Thom when Mrs. Winch closed the cabin door behind her. “Well, it is better than flying to the continent and trying to salvage among zombies. You’re a good diver.”

  Thom nodded, but she knew what he was thinking: the sea held dangers just as terrifying as zombies were. But he truly was a good diver. He knew to be careful beneath the waters.

  She was more concerned about the dangers on this airship.

  “Which of your friends does he believe will come for us?” But even as Georgiana asked, she realized the answer. Lord Pinchpenny had known about Thom washing up on the beach, so he’d obviously talked up someone in Skagen. He’d have heard the same rumors in town that she had. “Mad Machen? Lady Corsair?”

  Thom shook his head. “They’re not friends of that sort. Even if they were near enough to hear that we’d been taken, I don’t imagine they’d rush to a rescue.”

  “But they are acquaintances?”

  “Yes.”

  “Such company you keep, Thom.” So surprising. But as much as she would like for him to continue surprising her, they couldn’t afford to miss any opportunity to gain an advantage. Ignorance of any sort could only harm them now. “So tell me of this treasure, and why he believes that the most notorious of pirates and mercenaries would come for you.”

  * * *

  Thom moved to the porthole, keeping an eye on the sun’s position and trying to estimate their heading. North by northwest, for now. Nothing lay ahead of them but the sea and the gray clouds piled up on the horizon.

  He glanced back at Georgie, who was waiting for him to speak—and hanging up her dresses in the wardrobe. Even with all of this pressing on her, she did what needed to be done.

  Thom was the same. But everything he’d ever done seemed like a fool’s path now. Leaving England, to start. He hadn’t even known what he’d wanted then—he’d only known what he didn’t want.

  He didn’t want to live under the Horde’s boot. He didn’t want to work for nothing. He didn’t want to be an animal, or anything less than his own man.

  Then he’d met Georgiana, and he’d known. He wanted to be in her bed. He wanted to be her husband. He wanted to be a man for her, the only man she’d ever need.

  And if Thom hadn’t wanted her, if he hadn’t made her his, Georgiana wouldn’t be here now.

  But she was. Now the only thing that needed to be done was seeing her make it safely away.

  Thom wouldn’t be doing it alone, though. He’d rather have her anywhere else, but he was grateful for that. Georgiana was clever and practical—and she was right. They needed to figure out exactly what advantages they had and why this bastard had come after him, so it’d be easier to spot lies that might get them killed.

  So he started at the beginning of it all. “Two years ago, Mad Machen came to Oriana looking to borrow a diving suit. His blacksmith was going down in a submersible she’d built, retrieving a lockbox of Lady Corsair’s that had ended up in the bottom of the harbor at Port Fallow. He wanted someone under the water to help out if she got into trouble.”

  “That was Ivy Blacksmith?”

  An odd note in her voice made Thom glance back. She’d stopped beside the bed, holding a pink dress and looking at him.

  “You sound fond of her,” she added softly.

  “I am.” But he shook his head. “Whatever you’ve heard, it wasn’t more than that.”

  “What was it?”

  A weight settled in his chest. How much of this should he reveal? They were separating. None of it mattered now.

  And he might soon be dead. Nothing mattered at all now except for Georgie.

  “She was the closest I’d come to staying with you.”

  Her dark eyebrows pinched together. “What?”

  “Ivy was like me. Born under the Horde. Given a sweeper’s arms instead of a hauler’s apparatus, but the same. And she left England when she could, but now she has arms of mechanical flesh.”

  A frown creased her forehead. “I still don’t understand.”

  “I wanted arms like that. I couldn’t afford them.” Salvaging was hardly a lucrative business, and the one man who could create flesh made out of metal fibers and nanoagents charged a small fortune for each limb. “But seeing those arms on Ivy made getting them seem more possible. And that made the possibility of coming back to you seem a little closer.”

  “Why would you need those to come back to me?”

  Anger and hurt dug into his heart, sharp and hard. “You asked me to hold you in my arms every night, Georgie. I had iron bars.”

  And he’d never thought much of it until leaving England. Prosthetics were as common as noses there. But not around the North Sea—and he’d known that she hadn’t envisioned a man holding her in an iron cage.

  Yet he’d promised. He hadn’t cared if it meant getting newer, better arms. That suited him. Making her happy suited him even more. He just hadn’t known it would take so long.

  But Georgiana damn well shouldn’t pretend that she hadn’t asked him to do it.

  Now she stared at him, her face absolutely still. After a long second, she whispered, “I did say that.”

  “You did.”

  “And that’s why you kept leaving?”

  He gave a sharp nod. “I promised to make you happy.”

  A wild little laugh burst from her and she sank onto the edge of the bed, clutching the pink dress to her chest. “You were hoping to earn enough for mechanical flesh.”

  “Yes.” Because Thom hadn’t known that anyone could make prosthetics like he possessed now. Though not mechanical flesh, they were just as amazing in their own way.

  “So you made their acquaintance in Port Fallow. And then?”

  Thom hesitated. Her voice was strained. Her face had paled, but her eyes were bright, as if she held back tears.

  “Georgie?”

  She shook her head. “Staying or leaving isn’t so important now, Thom. How do you think the rumors began? Is there anything we can use as leverage against this man?”

  Staying or leaving wasn’t important. For so long, it had been all that mattered. It didn’t now.

  Thom pulled a chair from under the table and sat. “Ivy likes building things. I had experience diving. So about four months ago, Mad Machen sailed into Port Fallow’s harbor for a few weeks’ stay, and while she was there we made a trade. I’d tell her what I knew of diving in deeper waters, and she’d give me the first submersible she’d made. So we spent time together while she built a new one. But anything else?” He shook his head. “She’s a fine woman. But I haven’t had eyes for anyone but you, Georgie. And she doesn’t have eyes for anyone but Mad Machen.”

  “For the pirate? But I thought he abducted her. Forced her to work on his ship.” Her green eyes hardened. “Forced her into his bed.”

  “That’s what people say, but I asked her once if she wanted help getting away. She said no. And I never saw anything that made me think he’d hurt her.”

  Instead, he knew exactly what the man felt when he looked at her. Thom was feeling the same now, looking at Georgiana. There was the woman he’d kill for,
die for—and do both without a single regret.

  “Truly?”

  He nodded. “Considering what she’s capable of building, Georgie, she could have gotten away a long time ago. If she’d wanted to.”

  Her expression thoughtful, Georgiana rose from the bed and hung up the pink dress. “He has a terrifying reputation.”

  “And he’s earned it. He is a madman.”

  “A dangerous man.” She joined him at the table, skirts swaying with each step, sweeping her flowery scent around them. “But you weren’t worried?”

  Thom shrugged. “After watching a megalodon swim by when I was a hundred feet below the surface, mad pirates don’t seem much of a threat.”

  Unless they pointed a gun at Georgie. Even a giant armored shark couldn’t terrify him as much as seeing her in danger.

  Smiling, she took the nearest chair. The sun shining through the porthole caught the reds in her hair like sparks of fire and deepened the shadow beneath her soft bottom lip. Her gaze fell to his arms. “So they truly were a gift?”

  “Yes. Ivy said it was in trade, too.” Though they were worth far more than any help he’d given.

  “She sounds very generous. And amiable.”

  “She’s both.”

  “The rumor is that she’s a little mad, too.”

  “Considering that she gave me these arms for nothing, I’d say there was some truth to that,” he said, and her laugh in response lifted through him. “Though I never put much stock in rumors.”

  “I don’t, either.” Her smile faded. Steadily, her gaze held his. “But it’s sometimes difficult to ignore them, when a rumor is the only news of your husband that you receive.”

  Throat suddenly thick, Thom nodded. He’d done wrong by her in that. The easy excuse had always been that he couldn’t read and write, anyway. But he could have had a message sent. Thom just hadn’t been able to make himself tell her that he still had nothing. And the longer he’d gone without a message, the harder it had become to send.

  But that soft admonishment was all she said of it. “And these coins? How did you find them?”

  “While I was in Port Fallow, working with Ivy on that submersible, I ran into Lady Corsair again. We met on Mad Machen’s ship and she invited me up to her skyrunner for a dinner.”

  Georgiana stared at him. “You had dinner with Lady Corsair.”

  With a grin, Thom nodded. The disbelief in her voice wasn’t that of someone wondering whether he lied. His wife was wondering whether he’d gone mad, too. Maybe for good reason. A mercenary, Lady Corsair’s reputation was even more ruthless than Mad Machen’s.

  “And while we were eating, Archimedes Fox told me—”

  “Archimedes Fox!” Now she laughed. “He’s not a real man. He’s a character in those adventure stories.”

  “All of them based on his salvaging runs.” Though it wasn’t the type of salvaging that Thom did. Instead of recovering recent wreckage, Fox risked the zombies in the abandoned cities of Europe, searching for treasures. That risk had paid off for him, too. “Much of it’s true. Especially the bit about his colorful clothes—I nearly go blind every time I look at him.”

  She laughed again. “Truly?”

  “Yes,” he said. “His sister writes the stories. She lives in Fladstrand.”

  Not far from Skagen. Georgiana’s eyes widened slightly. “I heard that Lady Corsair flew into that town a few times—and that Fox’s sister was kidnapped last year. But I thought it was all part of another story.”

  “They didn’t tell me anything about that. Fox was more interested in talking about a wreck that might be worth diving. It was more than two hundred years old, and he said it was just waiting for any man who could dive deep enough for it—and that in a wreck so old, I wouldn’t have to worry about anyone claiming ownership of anything I found.”

  He’d also said that others had died searching for it. But Thom hadn’t thought there was anything to lose by trying.

  He’d been wrong. Though he’d found the treasure, there’d been everything to lose.

  “How deep was it?”

  “Fox didn’t know for certain. Just deep enough that no one had found it yet, though his research had given him a good idea of its location. But it was just over three hundred feet.”

  “Three hundred feet!” Georgiana shot out of her chair, her hands flying to her head as if to keep her brains from exploding. “Thom! What the hell were you thinking?”

  She was right to be angry. That dive had hit him harder than any other, making him dizzy under the water, and feeling as if every joint in his body would snap apart after he’d come up, despite a slow ascent. In her place, he’d have been shouting, too.

  But foolish or not, his answer was the same. “I was thinking that I had new arms, but that I didn’t have anything else to bring back to you. It seemed worth the try.”

  Her lips compressed and she turned away from the table, arms crossing beneath her breasts. Those soft mounds rose and fell sharply a few times before she nodded. “Where was it?”

  “Off the eastern coast of Ireland.”

  She glanced back at him, baffled. “Ireland?”

  “It was the wreck of the Resolution.” That was met with a blank expression. “It was the ship that the Irishmen fired on when the Horde first invaded.”

  Her eyes slowly rounded in realization. She knew the story, then. Thom hadn’t until Archimedes Fox had told him. It was apparently common knowledge among the descendants of the Englishmen who’d fled Britain for the Americas—and a sore point between everyone living in Ireland and Manhattan City. But not in England. Those who’d lived under the Horde hadn’t known anything of the incident. And truth was, Thom didn’t care enough to hold a grudge now. He could see both the horror of what had been done, and he could see the sense of it, too.

  Two hundred years ago, a good number of Englishmen had been infected by the Horde’s sugar and tea. And when the radio signal had begun broadcasting, a good number of people suddenly had their emotions dampened. They’d become pliable, obedient.

  A good number of people, but not all of them. Those who could had tried to flee, but there’d been no airships then. The only escape lay across the water—and Ireland was the nearest destination that wasn’t teeming with zombies.

  The people on the first ships to Dublin had been allowed to disembark. But those ships had been full of panic and rumors of infection, and the city had recently lost a large number of its population to a plague, so the Irish had set up a blockade at the mouth of the bay and began ordering new arrivals to turn away. The English refused, and soon the sea had been teeming with boats waiting for entry, some of the passengers taking the risk of rowing to shore or attempting to sail farther along the coast—until the Lord Mayor of Dublin had ordered cannons to fire on the largest ship, Resolution, as a warning of what would happen to them all if they didn’t leave.

  The drastic action had the desired effect, but that hadn’t been the only ship sunk. Several dozen that left Dublin had also been lost in the North Sea and while trying to cross the Atlantic.

  “Fox told me that, aside from the fishing boats, most of those who’d managed to escape England only did because they could afford to go—and that all of the valuables they took with them had likely sunk, too.”

  “The Irish always denied it ever happened,” Georgiana said.

  “But people saw it, talked about it, wrote letters about it. Some painted the scene later. Fox had studied the letters and pictures, and told me where to find it.”

  “And you did.” Her admiring look sent heat rushing under his skin. “Were only the coins left?”

  “I don’t know.” Thom hadn’t stayed down long enough to look for anything else. “As soon as I saw the chest, I knew it would be enough. There were five thousand coins in it.”

  Georgiana’s mouth opened. No sound came out. She plopped back into her chair, looking astounded.

  Thom imagined he’d looked the same when he’d first
come across the chest. “Fox had given me the name of a salvage dealer in Brighton. So I took one of the coins in. He called it a Carolus Broad—one of the last English coins minted before the invasion. He said he’d had a collector eager to know if any came in. He gave me that collector’s offer, but also told me that the offer was lower than the value of the gold itself, and that, considering where I’d found them, I could take in more at auction or ask for a higher price. I wanted to bring the coins to you first, anyway, so I told the dealer to make his inquiry and send word to me in Skagen.”

  “So you were coming home with a chest of gold,” she said softly.

  “Enough to buy mechanical flesh if these arms wouldn’t do.”

  Her chest hitched. “Oh, Thom. They would have.”

  But he’d been too late, either way. He’d had these arms when she’d agreed to separate. “At least it was something worth bringing home. Something I could have given you when I left.”

  “The gold?”

  He nodded. “That’s a husband’s duty: earning enough to support his family.”

  “‘And a man doesn’t deserve to come home unless he’s done it.’ Yes, so I’ve heard my father say.” She rose to her feet and paced a few steps, rubbing her forehead with the tips of her fingers—a gesture Thom had seen many others make when they were frustrated or tired, though he’d never formed the habit himself. Skeletal iron fingers didn’t smooth away tension well.

  She faced him again, eyes narrowed. “Was this salvage dealer the only man who knew you’d found the coins?—but you met him before. So the dealer is not the same man as on this airship.”

  “The collector he contacted knew, too.”

  “You increased the price. Maybe it was more than the collector could pay—or he realized that hiring a band of mercenaries would cost far less.”

  That would fit. “So he came to take it rather than make another offer.”

  Georgiana nodded, blew out a sharp breath. He could imagine what she was thinking—the man had tried to kill him rather than make another offer, too. This task he wanted Thom to do probably wouldn’t end any differently.