He brought it down to just a few centimeters from his son’s face. At first Bar was terrified of it, terrified to take the heavy object. It was too big, too important, but his father wasn’t going to let him back out. No, Cuthbert simply held it there, out to his son, keeping the boy with his unwavering gaze, refusing to relent, not until the boy took the wheel. Finally, Bar gave in and drew up the courage to take it from his father’s grip. The wheel was heavy, extraordinarily heavy, but he managed to keep it up…somehow, and that felt good.
Consciousness began to intrude. The workshop, with its warm-hued wooden beams, lath walls, and dusty shelves slipped into a blur of color. His father’s sturdy form, strong arms, broad chest, square jaw, faded to a ghostly vapor and then dissipated in a wind of gunpowder smoke. Cuthbert’s voice was all that remained, raspy and faint, but it followed with him into the light. “Aye, and a bigger man than I was in life, I’ll wager.”
Rat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat.
Bar snapped awake as though someone had doused him in cold water. The clatterbolt still firing through his mind, but that wasn’t the case at all. It was a hammer he was hearing. Someone nearby was hammering. His heart reached out, swimming through the River of Creation, desperate to see his father once more, but the workshop was long gone, and instead Bar found himself below deck, in one of the Chimera’s cargo holds. There was soft light filtering down from the hatch high overhead, and the chamber smelled strongly of spruce and pitch. Dust motes lulled lazily through the air above his face, flashing and disappearing in the strangled rays. With wakefulness came the full spectrum of strained senses; heaviness, as though his body was made of lead; skin slick with perspiration; nostrils filled with the caustic aroma of sulfur; ears ringing; the iron taste of blood on his tongue, and that rat-tat-tat again. Bar rolled his head to the side, found stacked crates and loose boards, piled sacks of grain and flanks of jerky meat hanging from chain and hooks.
“Good,” Al’s voice came from nearby, strong and steadying. “He’s coming to.”
Rat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat.
Bar rolled his head in the opposite direction and found it was the Supply Control Officer, Sven Nilsson, making all that racket. The brawny petty officer was pounding boards in place over the double doors leading to the ship’s main passageway, barricading it against…well what, Bar didn’t know? The dazed ensign couldn’t be sure, but as time ticked away, marked by the impact of that hammer, the mutiny began to manifest in his mind—the violence on deck—the mayhem and the carnage— throngs of battling men—Moore most likely dead—and most of all, Stowe with his fearsome clatterbolt, spraying death across the main deck. And then, very dimly, Bar began to pick up on the vestiges of that continuing conflict rumbling through the ship’s timbers like a distant storm. Somewhere people were still fighting, yelling, screaming… doors slamming shut, and glass breaking… was that an explosion?
The men arrayed throughout the spacious hold made a scant crowd, but most were instantly recognizable. Men like Weapons Officer Second Class Abner Tolle, Skyman Brandon Tanner, Alabrahm Muldaire, his electronic technician Egan Sato, and Gunnery Skyman Piter O’Dylan. There were others as well scattered through the room, but Bar was too groggy to try and identify them all by name. He had a pounding headache trying to split open his skull and it made it nearly impossible to concentrate. Whoever had clubbed him had turned his mind into a loose jumble of swimming chaos, with hardly the mental focus to remember his own name let alone everyone in the dusky twilight of the compartment.
“How long have I been out?” Bar asked wincing as he tenderly explored the side of his head with gentle fingertips. The bump he discovered was a testimony to the strength of the blow he’d received. At nearly the size of an orange, it pulsated with a life of its own. Even the simple act of touching it caused a fresh bout of stinging pain, and his eyes teared-up instantly as a result.
“Not long—an hour perhaps—give or take,” replied Al while handing him a damp rag. Bar used it to dab the wound, finding it stained in blood when he pulled it away.
Just great, concussed and open to infection. Who knows the filth that rubbed into it lying on this cargo-hold floor? “What’s the ship’s status?” grumbled the woozy officer as he attempted to heave himself up. He managed to make it to his elbows before he was forced to stop. The deck lurched below him, or so he thought. The result roiled his stomach and he faltered on the verge of vomiting.
Al caught him. “Near as I can figure,” explained Al as he and Tanner helped the shaky ensign to a crate where he could sit and gather his wits, “all the fighting resumed once Stowe was forced to retreat with an empty clatterbolt. Disappeared into the ship’s bowels… Now it seems four factions have broken out in the chaos. Pockets of Kinglanders and Glenfinners are still brawling throughout the ship. Mostly, seems the Kinglanders got the lower decks and the holds, and the Finnies hold everything above… I’m guessing the bridge as well.”
From the back pocket of his cooking-stained overalls, the squat old steward produced a tarnished flask, unscrewed it and handed it off to the ensign. Bar nodded in appreciation and hauled back on the liquid, expecting it to be liquor, but damn near spat it out when he realized it was just tepid water. Still, his throat was parched and the moisture did much to ease his throbbing skull. When he tried to hand it back, Al held up a hand, insisting that the officer finish it all.
“Where does that leave us?” Bar asked, wiping his mouth across the sleeve of his bloodied undershirt. Passing back the flask, he discovered his hand was trembling. Al gently cupped it and pried the container from his uncooperative fingers. For that, Bar was grateful. He had no way to tell how bad the blow to his head had affected him, but he could only hope the effects would diminish with time—and the sooner the better.
“It leaves us here in the port cargo hold, lad, and in the process of barricading ourselves against them all—till we figure out this whole mess anyway. Mostly, what we’ve got gathered here is the old-guard, Chimera men, like ourselves, whose allegiances are with each other and the ship, and not with King’s Isle or Glenfindale specifically. As near I can tell, ain’t none of us keen on the idea of using civilians as bait, but neither are we much for open mutiny against the ship’s master; and from what I understand, seems you’re of like mind as well. As such, I prompted a few of the lads to bring you here, where it’s safe…relatively speaking anyway. As soon as Sven’s done hammering, we should all be as snug as a bedbug in here alright.”
“Indeed,” Bar glanced around, “where’s Gryph?”
“Gryph…?” In puzzlement, Al scratched at the gangly hairs of his beard. “Ah, the wee flyer…. I don’t right know the answer to that.”
“He’s thrown his lot in with the Finny mutineers,” offered the wolfish flyer.
Seeing this nefarious northman rule-breaker in their midst surprised Bar. “And you didn’t, O’Dylan?” he wondered aloud.
“I may be a northerner, but I’m no Glenfinner…though in all honesty, I thought about jumping in for the sake of a good dustup with some smug crownies, but after Max and his crew took it too far by killing Thomas—and as good a lad as they come—that pretty much took the lift from my wings. Realized quick after that that nothing good would come from such unbridled rage…and when I got clocked good by Tavish, well, that pretty much sealed the deal for me.”
“Still, are you sure about Gryph, O’Dylan,” pressed Technical Skyman Sato. His hair had turned shaggy in the melee and now he looked more like a child than ever. “I mean him siding with the Glenfinner mutineers doesn’t exactly make much sense. The man was a Kinglander fighter-pilot during the Kingdoms War. Here-tell he was shot down over Glenfindale and held as a prisoner of war for nearly a year.” The electronic technician looked to the other weary souls crowded expectantly around Bar, looking for confirmation. “Can’t imagine him siding with those people after that.”
“What you mean by, ‘those people’,” grumbled Tanner, stepping into the light filtering down fr
om the hatch overhead.
“Aye, my apologies…I meant no disrespect.”
Nearby, O’Dylan folded his sinewy arms across his inverted chest, and frowned. “Gryph’s got his reasons, and sure as shit I saw him shaking hands with Chief Watell as we retreated into this prison—the man’s the de facto leader of the Glenfinners…guess this whole ship now too. We changed course shortly after that.”
Bar’s mind was still clouded in a fog of hammering pain, but he noted the cook’s earlier comment. “Al, you said there were four factions?”
Alabrahm gave the browbeaten ensign a trite smile; a haggard thing in the dusty twilight of the hold. “The captain—in a manner of speaking—is the forth.”
“The-captains-the-forth…” Bar blurted out in a single incredulous word, hardly able to contain his disbelief. “I thought he was dead.”
“If only,” scoffed O’Dylan.
“I thought you weren’t with the mutineers?” probed Egan Sato.
“I’m not…but a dead captain would’ve helped put this whole mess to right.”
“But him as the fourth faction, Al? How’s that? Ain’t he leading the Kinglander contingent?” Bar needed a good day to sort through all this insanity. He was having a hard enough time making sense of the conflict, and the pressure in his head wasn’t helping matters either.
“Nay,” clarified the cook, “seems Moore locked himself away in the forecastle after the bustle of losing his bridge.”
Tanner stepped forward to explain, though he looked tired and ready to collapse as the hard-set lines of his mouth formed the words with minimal movements. “When we swarmed the deck—after escaping his hold—I saw the captain knocked to the ground. Last I saw, they’d beaten him near to death, but some of the crownies got tangled up in the tussle, and Moore dragged himself off. Every once in a while now his voice will shriek out from the communication tubes…he sounds…”
“Insane,” offered Tolle.
Bar raised a hand in interruption. “Wait…Tanner? What the hell are you doing here with us now? Last I knew you were running with the Finnies.”
“Like O’Dylan here, I ain’t no mutineer, Bazzon, you should know that after the years we’ve served together…but then again, I wasn’t about to sit lashed to that hull either—left to freeze to death or get shot. So I went along with Watell’s escape plan, but when the fighting turned indiscriminant…well, I’ve got southland friends, and I wasn’t about to rough up good men for no reason.”
And that brought up another interesting issue Bar needed clarification on. “So how did you lads even get free in the first place?”
“Incompetence mostly,” admitted Tanner with a humorless set to the dark leather of his cheeks. “They never confiscated the Chief’s screwdriver…the one he keeps tucked in his boot; so with it he was able to pull apart a fair number of the locks, and by the time you showed up he had enough to exact his escape. That’s why he prompted Stowe into striking. It gave his supporters the opportunity to get the jump on the master-at-arms.”
“So then how did Stowe escape from you all?” Bar questioned skeptically. “He was pretty well swarmed.”
Tanner rubbed a hand over his wooly black hair. “He’s a right tough old bastard, and he fought tooth and nail, right to the platform’s edge, and then like you, he pitched himself over. We thought him a goner—you too…guess we were wrong on both accounts. But, Bar, you gotta understand, we…I never intended to take it that far. We were just going to subdue Stowe—chain him up—but then he killed Fredson with that gun of his, and well…that just set the men off. Seemed we got caught up in the heat of fighting—I’m just as guilty—but when Stowe had us all in his sights, I saw reason…then you went down, and I knew I had to stop fighting and start protecting.”
“He dragged you here,” clarified Al.
“And for that, I’m grateful.” Bar nodded to the old dark-skinned Glenfinner, while still pressing the cool cloth to the pulsing lump on his skull. “So, back to the captain then; where does he fall into all this? If he ain’t leading the crownies then what?”
“Can’t really say exactly.” Alabrahm shrugged. “No one can coax him out of hiding, but near as any of us can figure, Stowe is acting on his behalf now; stalking around the ship with that clatterbolt of his—like some accursed mad-dog without a master’s hand to guide him.”
Bar screwed up his bruised face as he reasoned over what he’d been told. “Thought you said his clatterbolt was empty?”
“There’s not a man aboard willing to test that out, mate,” offered Tolle as he stood next to Sven, handing the supplyman boards as they were requested. “Could be he’s got ammo stashed around… or the captain could be supplying it to him on the sly; but no matter what the ‘might be’ could be, no one wants to be wrong when it comes to the ‘what is’, you keen?”
Bar nodded with sympathetic understanding. “So then what’s Stowe’s ultimate goal?” But he realized he might as well have asked why the pantheon gods do what they do. It wasn’t surprising when no one had a ready answer.
“That man takes orders to a fault,” ventured Tolle, and he dropped the remaining boards and patted off the lapels of his black military jacket. Behind him, Sven shook his head in disappointment as he continued with the task of barricading the door alone.
“You all might think Stowe is with the captain, except Moore ain't letting anyone in the arms locker but himself,” stated one of the nearby aeronauts cynically. He was a thin, humorless man, with a bristly crop of sandy hair. “And as for the Kinglanders, that little crackpot Cecil has sworn to gut the master-at-arms if he catches him, but that ain’t got nothing to do with isle faction warfare, that’s a good old-fashioned personal grudge.”
“Child knows no respect,” stated Tanner as he folded his sinewy arms over the corded muscles of his narrow chest. “My only regret is I never got to beat some into him.”
“Still, the Kinglanders support the captain, don’t they?” Bar was beginning to feel the strength return to his legs, and he tested their balance by standing. He was a little shaky and wanted nothing more but to sit down again, but he needed to stand. He needed to take the wheel.
“Hell-if-I-know,” replied Al. Always the mother hen, the cook hovered by Bar’s side, looking to be ready in case the ensign should collapse. “It’s a real mess out there, lad, people don’t know who they’re for or against anymore. And while I say they’re four factions, there’s just no way to be certain on that. Best be cautious, ‘tis why we planked the door. Men have been harassing us since we fled here, issuing threats… trying to coax us out… lost Ben that way. Heller, that drugged-up grease-monkey’s been looking to settle a score with him for months, on account of the whipping he took for contraband Moon salt, and they were both Fallens… you keen? Some are fighting for their isles, some for honor, and some just to settle a score.”
“Tolle,” barked Bar, switching to the robust petty officer, “Before everything went to hell, McVayne was taken to the infirmary…do you think he’s still alive?”
“By last account…he’s a right tough bastard he is, though for how much longer is an unknown. You see, Rogert—that skill-less hack—was tending to him last I knew; and since the Doc got himself gunned down, that leaves McVayne’s prognoses grim at best. To make matters worse, he’s in Kinglander territory, under orders from Captain Moore that he’s to remain under arrest pending execution; so we’re only left assuming his fate’s in their hands.”
“So what of the other officers?” inquired Bar, feeling a sudden hopelessness wash over the situation. There were at least half a dozen other men who outranked him, but the reply was a depressing list of dead officers, some killed outright in the melee, and at least two by Stowe’s indiscriminate gunfire.
“That puts you in the very real position of being the commanding officer, Ensign,” finished Al.
“What about the men we got here, where do they stand?”
“Honestly,” stated Al, wiping the bead
ed sweat off his liver-spotted head. “Most here are tired and scared. They’ll fight if the need be, but no man truly wants to be involved…and I can’t say I blame them with this mess.”
“And what about you, Alabrahm Muldaire,” Bar said, cocking his eyebrow.
Al paused, smirked. “I’ll do want needs to be done. Besides, near I figure, no cook has ever been tried and executed for mutiny in the long and illustrious span of the Royal Air Navy. I believe it’s generally considered bad practice…cooking skills being what they are throughout the service and all. Good cooks are hard to come by.”
“Is that a fact?” asked Bar drolly.
“It is as far as I’m concerned. Besides, I wholly plan on claiming feeble-mindedness no matter what the outcome may be.”
“Lovely…”
“Looks like you’ve been placed in charge,” remarked Tanner.
“Quite right, Captain,” agreed Tolle with a snicker and a lazy salute. “Better you then me, mate…wouldn’t be caught dead trying to sort this mess out myself.”
“Swell…” Bar’s brow furrowed into deep troughs of concentration. “Then our first priority should be putting this ship back in order, and that means establishing some sort of truce, and for that I think we need McVayne. He’s from Sepia, he’s loyal to Ascella, and an honorable man—and respected by most everyone on this ship. At the very least, it’ll give us a united front, and enough ranking officers to justify our position.”
“And what is our position?” inquired Al.
“We’ll figure that out later,” grumbled Bar in response, adding a dismissive wave as though the notion were a mere technicality. But Al planted his hands on his broad hips and scowled; a thing that turned his face into a deflated sack of leathery flesh.
“That’s a dangerous game to play, Bar,” chastised the cook, “the men will need a cause to follow you, else they’ll join up with someone who has one.”
Aethosphere Chronicles: Winds of Duty Page 7