From the Deep of the Dark j-6

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘We’ve surfaced,’ said the commodore. ‘Time to signal the ships out there we’ve a mind to join their convoy.’

  ‘A mind for one last voyage, Jared?’

  ‘What’s that, lad?’

  ‘I heard what our friend from the State Protection Board said when he had you pinned against the wall at Tock House with a gun in your chest. Before he even said it, I had noticed that you were down a couple of pounds in weight. Your lungs are broken; I can hear it every time you cough.’

  ‘Is that why my mortal trousers no longer fit me?’

  ‘It’s a serious matter.’

  ‘No, Jethro Daunt, it is not. Dying comes to us all, sooner or later. You cannot cheat it. The life I’ve had foisted on me, I should’ve been dead a dozen times over. I should’ve died with the fleet-in-exile at Porto Principe; I should’ve died in the dark halls of Jago or the sand dunes of Cassarabia or the foreign fields of a dozen other rotten countries. You can’t choose not to die, only where you stand when you blessed do. It’s my time, and even the land has seen fit to turn me out of my rest, to see out my last days with a sabre in one hand and a pistol in the other.’

  ‘There are medicines that could be tried.’

  ‘And my ill-gotten gains have paid for them all, lad. You’d be better off turning back to those old gods who haunted you out of your parsonage. Put in a word with them for poor old Blacky.’

  ‘After what you and I did to them on Jago, even they have deserted me now.’

  ‘Ah then, matters of death I shall leave to the church and the graveyard diggers. Life I understand well enough, and this I know to be true. With my unlucky stars I was never fated to die peacefully curled up underneath a warm blanket with my wife and daughter sitting by my side. I’ll go like I lived and sell myself dear with it.’

  Daunt seemed concerned by Jared’s evident lack of care in this matter. The Circlist church would have it that after the commodore’s death, his soul would be tipped out and poured into the one sea of consciousness, mingled with all that was, is, and was yet to be, before being poured back out into all the myriad lives still to be born. But somehow, the commodore couldn’t imagine that fate suiting the audacious, coarse trajectory of his life. It was the most basic Circlist teaching that all that was living was joined, the same, indivisible. Jared Black’s life felt too dark to be diluted and combined with the rest of humanity. Yet, the end had to come eventually. Nobody could capture the river. Every time you knelt by the stream and cupped your hand in it, all you could ever come out with was water. Not the river. The river was flow and movement, just like the life they had been given.

  In the hammock, Charlotte Shades’ eyes flickered open and she moaned and moved a shaky hand out to cover her eyes from the light. Her other hand, the commodore noticed, went to the chest to check the jewel on her chain was still there. She did it barely consciously. A reflex; but an instinctive touch that spoke of its value to her.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Safe, Damson Shades,’ said Daunt.

  ‘There are monsters here, I have seen them. Their skin’s peeling off. The monsters.’

  ‘Not yet, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘But we will be sailing towards them. You can count on my poor unlucky stars to guarantee that.’

  There was a silence on the bridge as the commodore explained the nature of the message he’d received from one of the navy convoy’s surface vessels. Flashed across by the light of a gas lantern as the Purity Queen crashed through the waves topside, conserving her air and fuel supplies.

  ‘It is normal practice, good captain?’ asked Daunt. ‘For a convoy commander to invite the masters of the vessels under his charge to dine on board the flagship?’

  ‘I would have to say no, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘Usually, the fleet sea arm treats trader convoys with all the love and affection a drover shows towards his geese, the flat of his boot and the sharp of his stick to keep them together while driving them to market.’ The old u-boat commander tugged on his big silver beard thoughtfully. ‘But then, normal convoys don’t sail so large. This convoy’s been named Operation Pedestal, as I’ve been signalled it by our navy friends. Forty tramp freighters, six paddle liners and close to a dozen seadrinker boats like our own, not to mention the navy ironclads, support ships and coalers running by our sides. With such a fleet, the House of Guardians is making a statement to the Advocacy about who controls the blessed oceans. Yes, I would say the vice-admiral is sailing under parliamentary orders, keeping the shipmasters sweet and sucking up to his shopkeeper masters in the ruling party. You don’t climb so high up the greasy mast without learning whose arse to kiss.’

  ‘Best you trim your beard then, Blacky, before the flagship’s launch comes to pick you up,’ said Dick Tull. ‘You don’t want to be embarrassing us all when you’re nibbling on the vice-admiral’s plump partridge breasts.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be getting as far as the captain’s table if I accepted his invite,’ said the commodore. ‘Vice-admiral Cockburn used to be plain speaking Captain Cockburn, and the last time we met it was the at the end of a round of depth charges after he’d spent near fourteen months chasing me across the world’s oceans, trying to stretch my neck for a privateer. Fortunately for us, our little contretemps was in my previous boat, the Sprite of the Lake, or we might have found our place in the convoy occupied by a spread of mines!’ The commodore swept his large fingers to take in the bridge crew, the sailors hunched over their boards and navigation panels. ‘While the half of my crew that didn’t once sail for the cause are known to a mite too many ports and courts as smugglers, privateers, mutineers and deserters.’

  Daunt raised an eyebrow. ‘Will the absence of the Purity Queen ’s officers from the vice-admiral’s table not create a few suspicions?’

  Commodore Black tossed his skipper’s cap at Daunt. ‘Well, that I don’t believe it will, Captain Daunt!’

  Daunt placed both hands on the boat’s rail, the deck heaving with the roll of the waves. Apart from the jouncing of their launch in the dark waters, the sight of the convoy on the sea might have been Middlesteel viewed at night, so tight were conning towers, masts and superstructures packed in, hundreds of portholes and wheelhouses aglitter under the stars. Of course, if it had been the capital they were travelling towards, Barnabas Sadly wouldn’t be moaning and retching over the side. The oiled seaman’s coats they had borrowed seemed scant protection against the crashing waves. They had developed a false perspective of the sea travelling on the u-boat. It was only when you were tipping up the crest of waters as tall as a hill and sliding down the other side that you caught a glimpse of all its dangers and immensity. Not even the darkness can hide how vast it is.

  Daunt might only have been masquerading as a skipper, but he had no trouble in identifying the convoy’s flagship, The Zealous, an ironclad with a radical new design the newssheets had termed a ‘wheelship’. A platform weighted down with mighty guns and a citadel-like superstructure, she was pierced with six slots that held a series of twinned hundred-foot high spherical wheels on either side. Turning and churning the sea, her six wheels provided both buoyancy and propulsion. Rotated by powerful steam engines pouring smoke into the sky, balance in the water was provided by a series of hydrofoils on either side. Launches that had made their rounds among the convoy waited in the shadow of lifting cranes, escaping the thunderous waves as they were winched up into the docking cradles of a boat bay under the flagship’s platform. Larger shadows hovered over the bow of the flagship, pocket airships returning from patrol to seek out the safety of the vessel’s hangars. Unconventional and ugly, The Zealous was said to be the lion of the waves, unmatchable by the men-o’war of any other nation’s fleets. She reared out of the waters as she powered forward, her guns given a stronghold’s commanding view over the ocean, contemptuous of the waves below. Unsinkable.

  Boxiron moved to stand by Daunt’s side. ‘I fear I make almost as unconvincing a seaman as Barnabas Sadly.’

  ‘W
ith this many vessels in the convoy commander’s care, I trust the vice-admiral will have too many guests to hone in on our nautical deficiencies,’ said Daunt. ‘Besides, the commodore’s crew appear to my eye as varied an assortment of chancers and rogues as our own company.’ He glanced back at Barnabas vomiting over the side. ‘And as the good captain assured me before we departed, some of the greatest naval commanders in history have suffered from a “mortal spot of seasickness”.’ Although, I will admit, not with quite so much gusto as Barnabas. Daunt adjusted a peaked cap slipped over the steamman’s head, a faded badge in its centre with the arms of an anchor and seahorse on the cap’s crown. And at least we look the part.

  ‘When a steamman starts to wear clothes,’ said Boxiron, touching his cap, ‘it is usually taken as a sign of mental illness.’

  Daunt indicated the exploding waves. ‘Chased out of home by an unlikely alliance between royalists rebels and the secret police, with us heading into the heart of a war waiting to be declared, I thought that might be taken as a given.’

  ‘It should prove to be quite a distraction.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow you, old steamer?’

  ‘My body may be the ramshackle product of your people,’ said Boxiron, ‘but only below my neck. My vision plate is still fully functional. I am not yet blind or insensible to what is going on. We have had many offers of work this year, yet you only accept the most dangerous and challenging of cases.’

  Daunt shrugged. ‘They pay the most.’

  ‘We do not need the money. You are seeking to distract me from my predicament — the mind of a magnificent steamman knight inexpertly fused to this stumbling monstrosity of a body.’

  Daunt tapped the hulking creature’s chest plate, just above the squeaking transaction-engine drum rotating in his centre. ‘But it is our mind that makes us who we are, old friend. Our memories, not this. All flesh is dust.’

  ‘In my case,’ said Boxiron, ‘I believe all flesh is rust. There are those among your race who suffer from wasting diseases, and they sometimes count it as a kindness when family and friends cut short their thread on the great pattern.’

  Daunt sighed. He knew that steammen who had their design violated, corrupted outside of the pattern laid down by King Steam and his Hall of Architects in the Steamman Free State were expected to seek suicide. It was a hard code, but one a warrior of the commando militant was expected to adhere to. ‘You might be diminished, but you are by no means a cripple. You share some of the memories of the human-milled automatic whose body your head was grafted onto. You are a unique being in your own right. Hardly perfect, but which of us can say such a thing?’

  ‘I am neither one thing nor the other,’ said Boxiron. ‘I am stuck in an existence I did not ask for.’

  ‘Yes, I believe I know how you feel.’ Is that it? Daunt mused. Are you merely the steamman reflection of myself? Poor Jethro Daunt. Cast out of the church, seeking redemption where he can find it? No, there must be more to it than that. We’ve come so far together since I found you working as a hulking enforcer for the flash mob; too far for it to end like this.

  ‘Have I ever thanked you for saving me?’ asked Boxiron.

  ‘I believe we’ve saved each other,’ said Daunt. ‘Many times in fact, over the years.’ He looked at the steamman. Daunt knew his friend well enough to know what he was thinking. How easy it would be to fall over the side, allow the fury of the waves and the depths of the seas to claim his walking corpse of a body.

  One day, this won’t be enough.

  For Dick Tull, having a believable alias was second nature in his line of work. Second officer of a u-boat or an anarchist with a taste for sedition and assassinating parliamentarians, you observed the traits and tricks of the type, then you mirrored them right back. When you were dealing with amateurs like the ex-parson and his metal mate, you had to work with what you’d been given. A brief, tight cover story that was easy to hold onto and remember under duress. Jethro Daunt was now masquerading as a wealthy eccentric who had decided to sink the greater part of his fortune in a shipping concern, transporting high value caffeel beans and tea powder between the colony plantations and the Kingdom. A part that the churchman played to perfection with his strange habits: humming nonsense ballads and limericks to himself; the way he would drift off into a daydream and start pointing and wagging his finger as if he was conducting a debate against an invisible opponent, lecturing unseen students. Meanwhile, the steamman’s cover story was that he was the brute of a first mate whose clinking metal fist kept the unruly crewmen in order. Barnabas Sadly was the general officer who kept the stores, ran the books and oversaw the galley. There was one thing none of the party from the Purity Queen had to fake. All the u-boat crewmen in the gathering carried the same untidy, dishevelled air compared to the officers from the convoy’s surface freighters, paddle ships and liners. Living cheek by jowl in the cramped, sweaty confines of a submersible had that effect on a sailor, and even a cursory attempt to scrub up for an engagement couldn’t quite remove the impression.

  Four of us hard-pressed to tell stem from stern. It’s a good thing the convoy’s brass seem more interested in the spread of food than the conversation.

  ‘It don’t seem right, Mister Tull,’ Sadly whispered by Dick’s side. ‘All this food laid out and nobody with a care to charge by the plate.’

  Dick found it hard to contradict his informant. The main mess of The Zealous had been arranged with linen-covered tables and a sizeable buffet set across its surface. Sailors in white dress uniforms and enough braid to befit an admiral served behind the tables, lifting silver domes to reveal slices of lamb and beef roasted to perfection, meats swimming in their own juices. There were plates with cheeses from every county in Jackals, others overflowing with oranges, grapes and exotic fruit that Dick couldn’t even put a name to. The crew on the ship wouldn’t get to eat like this normally, that was a given. Probably not the officers, either.

  All the money it costs for the state to mollycoddle a few rich merchants on this tub, and they’ll still make me scrabble like a swine in muck for a decent pension.

  Every few minutes the distant sound of whining stabilisers swelled above the rumble of chattering guests, the flagship’s platform adjusting its angle to match the pitch of the seas she was cutting across. Officers from The Zealous were circulating through the hundred or so guests, making polite conversation with hands steadied on dress cutlasses hanging from their belts. Braying arses. They moved with an easy confidence, as if they were born to command. And in a sense they were. Mill-owners’ sons, wealthy quality, carrying the clout to launch them into an officer’s career in the fleet sea arm. How many of them’ve had to start as a common sailor and work their way up the ranks? How many of them’ve had to pull an honest day’s duties on board this tub? This is what my ancestors fought on Parliament’s sodding side for? To swap one bunch of masters for another? That was Dick Tull all right. Always the tenant, never the landlord. But your ancestors weren’t sitting on a comfortable saddle behind the lines waving an expensive sabre in the air, needled an envious little voice inside him. His ancestors? Just muddy-fingered citizen soldiers, clutching a pike or balancing an old heavy rifle on a tripod as they faced their mirror image across a field. Peasants who happened to be in the pay of gentlemen factory owners rather than gentlemen farmers when the war started.

  There was a loud clinking on a glass as one of the officers called for silence. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, honoured guests of The Zealous. Pray silence for Vice-admiral Cockburn.’

  Stepping forward, the vice-admiral looked more like a pugilist than a navy officer. Short and stocky, he had shoulders wide enough for his crew to build seats above his lapels and place a sailor on either side to mount the vessel’s watch. Hard, ruthless eyes swept across the convoy’s visiting officers and Dick had no problem imagining his tenacious pursuit of old Blacky across half the world’s seas. The old sod resembled a pitbull, and once a pitbull sank its teeth into your
flesh, it never let go until it’d claimed a healthy-sized chunk of meat.

  ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of Operation Pedestal. I trust you are finding the wardroom’s hospitality as abundantly in your service tonight as our guns are in your vessels’ safe passage. The majority of you standing here today are merchants, and you do not need reminding that the prosperity of our nation has been built on free trade. That prosperity depends on the free passage of our vessels. But it seems there are some who need to be reminded that we will not suffer its impediment lightly. We lay no claim to what is under the waves. We cast no nets for fish here. We send down no divers to explore for minerals. However, where the Fire Sea has withdrawn, opening up a passage free of the need of firebreakers, we will allow no nation to extend its territorial limits and then demand a bandit’s toll priced in threats for transgressing open waters. We braved these currents when they were threatened by volcanoes and fire, and any enemy who seeks to close them to us now will find that we carry with us fire of our own. Fire enough for all foes foolish enough to play the privateer against our people!’

  Polite applause echoed around the mess hall and the vice-admiral circulated through the crowd, shaking hands with a firm grip and making reassuring noises to the commercial masters. Spoken like a reliable little politician on the make.

  Jethro Daunt’s beak-like nose appeared to be twitching in distaste. ‘There is something amiss here,’ he whispered.

  ‘You’re not wrong, amateur. It’s my tax brass being used to fatten up a mob of merchants who don’t need a crumb of it.’

  ‘No,’ said Daunt, sotto voce. ‘It’s the vice-admiral. He’s a blank to me — his body language, all of the tells that should be in his gestures and his voice, none of them are present. According to my finer intuition, it is as if he doesn’t exist.’

  ‘You might be having a bad day with that mumbo jumbo you’re taught in the church, but he looks solid enough to me.’ Solid enough to thump a shark unconscious with one hand and make a soup out if it with the other.