The Legend of the Red Specter (The Adventures of the Red Specter Book 1)
Page 29
Joy went to her typewriter and composed a quick report, addressed to the KIB. She even knew the correct format to present the information. She’d typed up hundreds of reports, just like this. But she’d never expected to have to do it again, and with herself as the subject. It was surreal, detailing the threats: the corruption of the City Guard, collusion with the Triad and the notorious war criminal Shiori Rosewing, arms dealing, human trafficking, assaults, threats, etc.
Joy double-checked her report briefly after she’d spooled it off the roller. Not bad, Analyst Fan. This would be sure to rocket up to the highest priority as soon as the agency got it. For a second, Joy felt a sense of reprieve. Surely the KIB could handle everything. Of course, they wouldn’t be in time to prevent the Joanne Spaulding from leaving, but it was a big ship. It could be tracked down by the Navy. All the girls could be rescued by a team of well-equipped professionals. That was a way better option.
But Joy’s sense of relief didn’t last. Yes, the Kallistrate government could act, but would they? Certainly they’d investigate her claims about the smuggled weapons and Shiori. That would get top priority. But rescuing Lin Lin and the other girls….
Hunting down the Joanne Spaulding would take resources. The Kallistrate navy had few real warships—they were still transitioning out of the armored spikefruit cargo ships. And their true ironclads were stretched thin trying to patrol the entire Nokomis continent. Would they really divert one, just for the sake of rescuing a few girls, who weren’t even Kallistrate citizens? How much priority would that get? Could she count on them to do the right thing here?
Joy remembered her trials with Quintus, the inaction of her boss, and the complete indifference, bordering on hostility, of the Guardman she’d reported it to. Well, that guy could’ve been Sleywie, but would it have been any different if he hadn’t been? Could she count on the KIB to be any better?
Maybe they would be. Maybe they’d surprise her. But could she count on it? Could she stake Lin Lin’s life on it? Joy knew the answer to that. No, this was still on her.
Fold up the letter, address it, stamp it. Once she put it in the mail, it should reach the KIB office the day after tomorrow, given the holiday, and then the Triad and the corrupt Dodona City Guard would be finished.
Or would they be? Despite typing a report in an official format, she wasn’t KIB anymore. This was a bunch of wild claims coming in from an outside source, and it wasn’t impossible that it might get buried due to bureaucratic incompetence. It might get dismissed as crackpot nonsense. They probably got dozens of letters each week from paranoid loons. She could easily be mistaken for one of them. And what then?
Well, if the authorities didn’t act at first, exposure in the press could force them to. That was what a free press was for, after all. But all the legitimate newspapers had her blackballed. She couldn’t count on them to pay attention to her either. She had to get her information to someone with credibility, someone who would listen—Professor Gelfland! That was it.
She sat back down in her battered writing chair and started to mentally compose her letter. She could say that her fiction research had taken her to the docks, and then list all of the relevant details about….
No. This was all wrong. She was tired of lying. And somehow, her shame about everything that had gone wrong with her career seemed trivial now. She would come clean, get it all off her chest while she still could. That felt right, but she found it impossible to begin typing. The blank page stared her down like a bouncer at a nightclub that was way too cool for her. She had so much to say—too much. She lacked the ability to explain herself without unleashing pages and pages in a torrent, and she didn’t have time for that. She couldn’t do it.
Wait, what’s this “couldn’t” nonsense now? She was a writer. She was a reporter. And dammit, she was good at her job, no matter what anyone else said. So, journalist, report the story!
She started typing, writing about herself as though she were a news subject—just the facts, as objective and impartial as she was capable of being. While working at the Journal, she’d faced constant sexual harassment from a male colleague, which she’d reported, and her complaints had been ignored. The harassment escalated to assault, and she’d been forced to defend herself. Editor-in-Chief Hartmann fired them both for fighting. Subsequent gossip by unknown persons lead to Joy getting a reputation for being unstable and/or violent, but apparently the same stigma did not follow her attacker. She’d accepted freelance work from the Gazette because it was it was the only newspaper that would hire her.
Joy gazed down at what she’d wrote in amazement. Simple, clear statements in neat black ink on clean white paper. That had been easy. She should have done that from the beginning. She felt an incredible lightness all through her body. The rest of the letter came out with even less effort, the relevant details about the Sleywie-Guard, the Triad, and the girls pouring out into a few brief paragraphs. She ended with a notice that she’d informed the KIB, that he should go public with this if they failed to act, and an apology for lying to him earlier. She signed the letter, stuffed it into a stamped envelope, and tossed it next to the KIB letter on her dresser.
Was that it? Was there anyone else she needed to inform—if she didn’t make it back? She didn’t have much in the way of contacts left anymore. Excepting Tishka, Joy could vanish off the face of the planet and nobody besides her family would notice.
Her family. That was what bothered her the most about this. Suppose she messed this up and disappeared forever. What would that do to her parents? Would they mount a search for her? Post a reward in all the papers and wait at home, night after night, hoping for some kind of news, some scrap of information that would tell them for sure to give up hope and begin grieving? She could see it happening. She could see them doing that. But was there anything she could do about it?
The problem was that the letter would take several days to get to Gortyn, and by that point it would all be over. Either she’d have made it back to the Temple, or she’d have gotten caught, and… well, best not to think about that. But the point was that she didn’t want her parents to open a letter from her saying, “Hi, I might be dead by the time you read this,” several days after she’d made it to safety. She couldn’t do that to them. Sure, she could send a second letter after she got back, and they’d both likely arrive at the same time, but it still seemed like a cruel joke. What if they read the letters out of order? How could she phrase this? To say goodbye forever, but only maybe, but no, not really—just kidding, guys. False alarm, I’m actually okay.
This was impossible. She should get moving. Just get out there and get it over with. Hopefully she’d come back fine, and none of this would ever have been necessary. But a single, contrary thought kept Joy glued to her chair: what if it was necessary? What if she screwed up and never came back? What if this was her last chance to say goodbye? Was she fine with saying nothing? No, she wasn’t fine with that, but she was stuck with the problem of what to write. Should she tell them about getting assaulted? About getting fired? About stumbling around freelancing for a lousy tabloid and blundering into the middle of a gang war? She’d be here all night. Joy pulled her knees up to her chin and curled in a ball, as her ragged office chair creaked backward on its spring, her stomach churning.
Enough. Whether she should or shouldn’t write a letter was irrelevant. The truth of the matter was that she’d run out of time. She had to reach the docks and rescue Lin Lin before morning. That meant she had to leave now. And as for her parents…well, she’d just have to make extra sure that she didn’t get caught, and then the whole issue would be moot. Yes, that was it.
Joy felt her anxiety abate as she stood up, reflexively patting her butt to make sure no stray bits of packing tape had stuck to her, went through one final inventory check of all her gear, and headed out on her daring rescue mission.
Part VII
Rescue Mission
Chapter 40
Night Swimming
Joy fought a sudden urge to duck her head and run. If someone recognized her from the stampede, they might call the Guard to detain her. She forced herself to relax and calmly walk by, like this conversation had nothing to do with her. Actually, the more she overheard, the less of a concern it was. The description of the "Mad Cow Girls" had warped in all the retelling. They were all to be on the lookout for two crazed street urchins in dirty, tattered clothes and wild, stringy hair, screaming and laughing like maniacs. Possibly high on Spike, and what was the world coming to now? Where were the parents? It was the collapse of society, that's what. Now, back when they were kids.…
Fine. That was fine. She didn't need to be famous for cattle rustling. She just had to execute her mission. Joy left the boardwalk and headed down the wooden plank steps to the thin strip of sand that was Dodona's only beach.
Even in the late evening, there were a handful of people playing or swimming in the mild surf. It was summer, after all, and going out at night was a good way to beat the crowds. So there was nothing unusual about her being here—just out for a swim, like you do.
She ducked into one of the changing tents by the seaside, stripped out of her clothes—the same ones she'd worn for dinner—and into all the spy gear she’d stuffed in her purse. Since she'd bought them, she'd just used the snorkeling gear one time, and the watertight satchel only briefly, just to test that it worked. She'd had some idea that she might use the satchel for reporting a story going down in a flood, or a typhoon, or something, and needed to protect her notes. Of course nothing of the kind had ever happened, and all her gear did was take up storage space in the bottom of her trunk—until now.
She packed her clothes and shoes into her oversized purse and tucked it away over by one of the thick wooden posts of the boardwalk. Her satchel was stuffed to capacity as it was—she was having second thoughts about bringing the heavy flashlight, but it seemed too potentially useful to leave behind.
She took a deep breath, and waddled her way down to the surf, awkwardly high-stepping because of her swim fins. Putting them on in the water would have been better, but she still had bandages on her feet for her blisters and didn't want to get sand in them. She waddled past the other beachgoers, trying to avoid eye contact. Nothing to see here, just out for a little casual night-swimming—with an army-issue swimsuit, diving-mask, a snorkel, swim-fins, and a satchel belted around her waist. She looked ridiculous.
Well, no matter. If people noticed, nobody was impolite enough to say anything, or stop her as she grimly marched into the sea, dived beneath the waves, and started her long journey over to the docks.
The first thing she noticed was the sting in her feet as the salt water soaked through her bandages. And the water was a good deal colder than she'd expected. This was supposed to be summer—what gives? Or maybe the water was just generally this cold, but it was easy to ignore when the sun was out? Anyway, she just had to deal with it. And there were more pressing problems. After swimming around for more than a minute or two, she realized that what she was doing was even more dangerous than she'd accounted for. Forget being spotted, just trying to keep her bearings underwater in the middle of the night was proving to be a challenge. There was light coming from overhead, from the moon and from the dock lights, and the wide oval of her diving-mask helped bring clarity to the underwater world, but it was still really, really dark. It would be so easy to lose her bearings. Her flashlight was supposed to be waterproof, but it was stowed in her satchel, and she wouldn't have used it anyway, lest she risk giving away her position.
But now she had to recognize what that meant. She had to be careful, because it would be very easy to get disoriented, and if that happened, there was no one around to help her, and she would probably drown. And then no-one would be able to help poor Lin Lin, or any of the other girls.
She needed to stay as far away as she could from the docks, to maintain stealth, while keeping the long, black shapes of the boat hulls always in her peripheral vision on her left. At first she tried to make her dives as long and deep as she could, the better to avoid detection. Her black hair and blue-grey suit were nice and stealthy, but a proper frogman would have a black full-body drysuit. Every time she neared the surface to clear her snorkel, she felt a stab of fear, sure that the moonlight flashing off her pasty thighs would give her away. But, the longer she went on, the more the effort of holding her breath wore on her, and she had to surface more and more frequently. Exhaustion would be her greatest enemy.
And another thing she'd only just realized—the difficulty in identifying the correct ship from underwater. In theory it sounded easy—the Joanne Spaulding had a distinctive red hull, an ornate design on its paddle wheel, and was berthed near the huge crane golem. But colors weren't so easy to make out right now, and she couldn't see the paddle wheel design or the crane golem without surfacing. Add to that the fact that there were actually several of those crane golems along the docks. She'd taken a long look down the docks from the boardwalk, right before heading down to the beach. She'd counted at least four of them, all lit up, rising to the sky. Which one was the right one? She wished she'd thought to count them earlier that day, but she'd been busy clinging to the back of an enraged cow.
She had to figure it out anyway, somehow. Several times she surfaced, letting the tip of her snorkel emerge first, then rose up just enough to bring the top half of her mask above the water line. She did this as slowly as possible, so as not to create any noisy splashes. Twice she saw the towering forms of crane golems and had to check the surrounding ships to see if they matched her memory. And of course that was impossible. She was looking at everything from a completely different angle. A crane, piles of cargo containers—that was the entire freaking dock.
No, it wasn't impossible. She couldn't let herself think that. She'd come this far. She wasn't going to give up now. Focus on the ship. She would have to identify the ship itself. She could remember what the Joanne Spaulding looked like. Colors were much harder to make out in the darkness, but that ornate design on the paddle wheel—that had to be unique. She just had to keep going until she found it.
It felt like it took forever, surfacing and diving and double-checking, passing ship after ship. Every time she surfaced, she worried that she'd be spotted. Every time she dived and swam, she worried she'd swim past the correct ship. Had she gone too far? No, she hadn’t hit the Shackle yet. That was right—Pier 25 had the first crane golem before reaching the Ala-Muki. Worst case scenario, she’d turn back if she hit the mouth of the river. The realization should’ve come as a relief, but the mere thought of having to backtrack at all filled her with dismay.
She'd already done more swimming than she'd done in the past year, on top of a long day of hiking back and forth across the city, topped off with a few brief interludes of terror-induced sprints. The swim fins helped her speed, but they also added resistance, and her thighs were starting to burn uncomfortably, along with her lungs. Those sensations began to dominate her awareness, and she became even more concerned when she realized that she was losing sensation in her hands and feet.
She wasn't wearing a proper drysuit, and that had other disadvantages besides lack of stealth. The Dodona harbor wasn't freezing, but it sure wasn't a warm bath, either. People could get hypothermia from non-freezing water, if they were exposed to it long enough. How long had she be
en bumbling around in the dark? It felt like forever. She'd been told about this once, in one of those classes she'd taken? What were you supposed to do in this situation? She was having a hard time remembering, for some reason. Oh—that was right! The first thing you were supposed to do was get out of the water. She needed to find the ship, pronto!
Finally, she surfaced in view of a golem-crane, a large maze of stacked cargo-containers, and one of the ships nearby—a paddle wheel, with a cutout design on the side. She swam in, closer and closer, surfacing once midway there, as quickly as she dared. The possibility of being spotted terrified her. All she needed was for one Triad man to be looking in her direction at the wrong time, and the whole mission would be blown. That scenario got more likely every time she surfaced close to the docks.
A thought popped into her head: what if that ornate cutout pattern wasn’t unique to the Joanne Spaulding? What if it was actually a common feature for paddle-steamships? Well, she didn’t want to pop up next to the ship, close enough to read the ship’s name in the darkness. That was guaranteed to get her spotted, and truthfully, she didn't think she had the energy for it. She was at her limit. If this was the wrong ship, then she was just flat screwed. She'd have to go for it and hope for the best.
She popped up in a pocket of air beneath the wheel, between two of the slatted paddle-spokes. She clung to the wood slats, and spat out her snorkel mouthpiece, taking long, deep gulps of air. Or at least, she tried to, but each breath came in with a shaky vibration. Her teeth were chattering. She needed to get her entire body out of the water, right now!