by James Axler
J.B. rose and set his fedora on his head. He almost took Mildred’s hand but looked at the grease and grime covering his. Mildred smiled and took his hand anyway. “There’s some soap in the med. Why don’t I wash those for you before you start touching me?”
J.B. liked the idea of Mildred washing his hands very much, and touching her more, but his mind was still fixed on the problem at hand, and that was keeping Ricky’s rear contact point water tight. He nodded to himself.
“I’ll talk to Doc tomorrow. Talk to him about this creed and code.”
* * *
DOC TOOK HIS morning walk around the ship. He felt mostly recovered from his fit and being seized to the shrouds. Crewmen hailed him from the rigging. Those busy at their labors nodded and smiled. Those with a free hand patted him solicitously like he was a beloved child. Doc smiled, tipped his swordstick or exchanged a few pleasant words with his shipmates as he passed.
He took the gangway down to blaster deck and walked forward. He stopped by the galley. Boiler and Skillet stood at the octopus barrel and the cookfire, respectively, engaged in hot debate. Boiler was a big, florid man with a huge gut that bespoke he liked sampling his own wares early and often. He wore a bandage around his head from the wound and concussion he’d suffered in the ship’s previous battle. Skillet was a lanky black man whose wildly beaded hair would give Mildred a run for her money. His left arm was in a sling. The cooks were very grumpy about being ousted from the med.
“Well, how would you cook it?” Skillet snarled.
Doc peered into the barrel from a prudent distance. The octopod’s great, gray head pressed against the section of iron grate nailed to the top of the barrel. Doc noted the barrel had been bolted to the deck. He also noted the creature’s rectangular, horizontal pupils flicking back and forth between the two cooks.
Boiler stared into the barrel and pointed his butcher knife at the cephalopod. His postapocalyptic English accent was even thicker than Atlast’s. “Well, I’ve cooked flying squids right proper, then! Haven’t I?”
“Flying squids is small! This one’s huge!” Skillet waved his cleaver in protest. “You cut that thing into calamari rings and fry it? All you’ll have is two hundred pounds of rad-blasted rubber! It’ll be mutiny after what Forgiven’s been servin’!”
“Peels it, pounds it, and simmers it soft. That’s what the Greek always said about fish with arms! I say we peel that gray skin off and simmer it succulent!”
Doc watched with great interest as the octopod’s pupils slammed open like a cat’s eyes in the dark at the announcement. Skillet scratched his assiduously cultivated beard at the thought. “Might work. Might use some slush from the morning salt pork to give it some flavor.”
Boiler spread his arms to the deck above happily. “And now he’s cooking, then!”
The octopus shuddered.
“And pepper,” Skillet decreed. “Lots of pepper.”
“Excuse me,” Doc said.
The octopod flicked a glance at Doc and then went back to devoting one eye each to the cooks. The octopus’s arms contracted around the bars confining it. To Doc’s eyes it seemed much like a man going white-knuckled at his sentencing. Doc loosened the hilt of his swordstick and leaned perilously close to the barrel. “Forgive me.”
“Nothing to forgive, Doc.” Skillet waved his cleaver in warning. “But I wouldn’t get too close. Rad-blasted squid tried to walk off last night with its arms through the grate. Nearly took the barrel with it.”
Boiler nodded. “Which is why we nailed it down, then, isn’t it?”
Doc peered at the alien eyes regarding Boiler and Skillet simultaneously. “Forgive me, good Skillet, but when I first said forgive me, I was speaking to your captive.” The cooks gave each other looks. Doc’s peculiar behavior was already a high source of humor and discussion aboard. The fact that Doc wanted to talk to dinner would earn both men wide-eyed attention at mess. The octopod eyes snapped to center to regard Doc in binocular vision.
Doc bowed slightly. “I say again, forgive me, for I am an icthyologist by training rather than a teuthologist, but am I correct in my assumption that you understand human speech?”
The creature in the barrel pressed the top of its huge head against the grate. It ejected water from its siphon and sucked in air, and then the tube vibrated and let forth a sibilant hiss. “Yes.”
Boiler screamed. Skillet flailed backward and nearly sat in the cook fire. Nearby crewmen shouted in alarm. The two cooks brandished butcher knives and cleavers. Doc could not contain himself. “By my stars and garters!”
Ryan appeared at Doc’s side with his knife in hand. He kept a wary eye on his erstwhile, eight-armed opponent. “Doc, take a step or two back.”
Doc was utterly focused on the octopus. “How, pray tell?”
The octopod’s speech sounded like a snake gargling, but it was oddly very clear. “We learned.”
“From whom?”
“From humans.”
Doc pondered this fascinating development as crewmen gathered around brandishing marlinspikes, knives and tools. Other crewmen ran bawling for the officers and the captain. “Why would humans teach you speech?” Doc asked.
“They modified us. They wished to use us as weapons.”
“What happened?”
“The war happened,” the octopus replied.
“What happened to the humans who taught you?”
“We ate them.”
The crowd erupted.
“Sky fire!”
“Kill the fucking thing!”
“Captain!”
The octopus shuddered under the verbal barrage but kept its alien gaze locked on Doc. “That was many generations ago.” The alien voice seemed almost plaintive. “I have not eaten a human in months.”
“Fry the squid in crumbs!”
“I haven’t had calamari in months!”
“Captain on deck!” Commander Miles bawled. The crew parted like water as the captain strode through them. Oracle took in the scene of Doc and the two cooks. “What goes on here?”
“Oh, Captain!” Boiler was genuinely upset. “I ain’t cooking nuffing that talks! Am I, then? Much less eating it!”
Skillet pointed his cleaver at the barrel. “Squid can talk, Cap’n.”
Oracle’s face went blank.
Ryan nodded. “Doc’s interrogating it.”
The crew on the blaster deck held its breath. Oracle nodded curtly. “Carry on.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
Doc continued. “So you and your species continue to teach yourselves human language generation to generation?”
“Yes,” the octopod stated.
“Why?”
“It is useful.”
“For what?”
“Survival.”
As a man who had studied ichthyology, the prospect of a sea creature he could converse with humans intelligently was almost more than Doc’s soul could bear. “If I implore the captain to spare you, would you promise not to do harm to any member of this ship?”
The crew erupted in anger.
“Quiet in the captain’s presence!” Miles bawled.
“Yes,” the octopus replied.
Oracle addressed his prisoner. “You and your brethren attacked us.”
“We were hungry.”
“My crew is hungry,” Oracle countered. The octopod recoiled.
Oracle continued. “How are you to be trusted?”
The creature spent long moments staring. “To my knowledge no cephalopod has ever told a lie.”
Doc straightened. “I believe him.”
For all his mass, Boiler’s voice rose to a childlike shriek. “It will crunch our skulls like snails, won’t it? Eating our poor brains and then be slinking over the rail in the night, then!”
The octopod kept its golden, rectangular gaze on Oracle. “I am without my brethren. I am far from home. I am a coastal animal. I could not swim from the open ocean to the littoral waters without being e
aten. I could not swim all the way back to the Caribbean without exhausting myself and dying before the breeding season. I will not desert this ship until it returns to the Caribbean, and only then if given permission.” The eyes of the crew on deck snapped back and forth between their captain and the octopod in the barrel. “I give you my word I will not eat any member of the crew under any circumstances.”
“Other than serving as a source of intellectual intrigue for Doc—” Oracle’s sharklike eyes met the inhuman gaze of the cephalopod “—how would you serve this ship and your fellow crew members?”
The genetically engineered cephalopod spoke by rote. “Coastal infiltration and observation. Underwater demolition. Clandestine shipboard and port facility kidnapping and assassination.” The octopod’s eyes flicked about the crowd. “Any task requiring an anthropoid crewman to go into the water, or beneath the hull, I can perform with greater alacrity or be of great assistance. You have a significant mass of seaweed clinging to the bottom of your hull. I can begin removing it immediately and subsist on the barnacles infesting the bottom for at least a week.”
The crew stared in shock and awe at their potential nonhumanoid shipmate.
“Mr. Forgiven!” Oracle rasped.
The purser waddled forward. “Yes, Captain!”
“Sign Mr. Squid into the book and remove the grating. Unbolt the barrel and take it up top someplace out of the way and bolt it down again. Let that be his bunk, and see that it is filled with fresh seawater every other watch.”
Dumbfounded mutters rippled through the crew. Forgiven’s fat jowls worked in shock as he opened the book and his pen hovered over an empty line. “And rate him...?”
Oracle turned his flat black stare upon Doc. “How should Mr. Squid be rated?”
Doc spoke without hesitation. “Specialist, subaqueous.”
Forgiven’s pen drooped. “Sub, aquee...?”
“Ship’s dictionary,” Oracle advised.
The captain’s voice dropped. “Doc, you are responsible.”
“Aye, Captain!” Doc enthused.
Forgiven jumped as a seven-foot suckered arm snaked out of the barrel, took the pen from his hand and signed Mr. Squid on the line. The purser shook as he took the proffered pen back and the arm retreated back into the barrel. “Very good, Captain. Mr. Squid, sub-aqueest, specialist...signed.”
Chapter Seven
The Caribbean
Captain Emmanuel “Black” Sabbath stood on the incredibly high stern of his ocean-going junk Ironman and watched the island ville burn. Despite the Caribbean summer heat he wore a black frock coat, black knee breeches and hose, along with a wide-brimmed black cockle hat with a silver buckle. At his hip he carried a hooked cane knife. He drummed long fingers on the worn rosewood hilt in meditation. “Oracle’s not here.”
Blue snarled and tapped the little island on her chart. She didn’t like being wrong. “He’d have to have come here! This is the only ville with a ropewalk within range. Much less manioc fields, a sawmill and a pig farm. He has to resupply.”
Sabbath glanced at his daughter. Blue was pretty, black haired, and would have been beautiful like her mother except that visible blue capillaries formed a delicate, spiderweb tracery beneath every visible inch of her skin. She wore black as was the custom of many ship’s captains in this age, but her blouse and breeches were deliberately cut to hug her slender curves. Her logic was flawless. The burning ville would have been the last chance to take on cordage, lumber and salted meat and fish while allowing a window of escape. The smoke rising into the sky and the recently cleaned blade at Sabbath’s hip had determined the Glory had not come into port. “And yet he is not here, nor has he been.”
“And we know why.” Sabbath’s son, Dorian, lolled against the taff rail. His giant, brass and ivory-handled butterfly knife made lazy, flashing figure eights in the morning sunlight. Open, the weapon was thirty inches long and was a short two-handed sword. Closed, the double handles served as his baton of office. He was tall and rangy like his father and had his mother’s good looks in masculine form without the mutations. Dorian tossed his black, unbound hair contemptuously. “Oracle’s gone all doomie again.”
If Blue were a cat, she would have arched her back and hissed. She was a pure sailor, one of the best, and believed in little besides winds, tides, a well-oiled blaster and sharp steel. Despite being a mutant herself she had no use for prophecy or mutie visions.
Sabbath knew better.
He turned to his astrologer. “Oracle’s not here.”
Ae Sook was beautiful, Korean, and when Sabbath had taken the junk years ago she had come with it. Her manicured, gaudy-red nails tapped the intricate brass astrolabe in her lap. Skydark had broken the world and compasses were often unreliable given the rampant electromagnetic anomalies, much less the irritating habit of the poles themselves to wander. Nevertheless, despite the poor, broken and battered Earth’s condition, the stars still looked down on her from their fixed positions and they could be used as tools for navigation. Ae Sook was not a doomie, but she observed the movements of the stars and planets as her mother and her mother before her and divined horoscopes. She spoke with a thick accent.
“Captain Dorian is correct. Oracle is moved by his visions. It makes him difficult to predict. Captain Blue is also correct—in the end, the needs of Oracle’s ship must dictate his actions. If he avoided this last chance here, then we must look for the desperate and the unlikely.”
Sabbath gazed on his available fleet. He had two ships besides the Ironman beneath his feet.
His son’s red painted ship the War Pig was aptly named. She had two screws that had been converted to coal and that gave her the power to maneuver any way she liked and push against bad weather. But she ate that coal like a pig, and in the intervening century her steel masts and spars had been replaced by wood and she had never sailed efficiently since. Still, she carried a devastating weight of shot with her cannons, she had a very large crew of very dangerous men and muties and few could match her in a stand-up fight. Sabbath had been recently tempted to move his ensign to her and make her the flagship of his fleet, but the ship was best suited to his son’s middling sailing ability.
Sabbath sighed as he looked on his daughter’s ship, Lady Evil. The Lady was a schooner, her flush deck, deep vee hull and two steeply raked masts were a delight; she was painted sky blue and it was just possible she was the fastest sailing ship left in the broken world. The Lady was the terror of the Caribbean and the Gulf coasts of the Deathlands, but she was small in the scheme of things. There was only one ship Sabbath knew of that could freely sail the great oceans with the weight of shot and yards of sail to ask by your leave from no pirate or baron, and that was the Hand of Glory. She had once been his. She had been his flagship. Sabbath’s fist clenched around the hilt of his butcher blade.
Oracle had taken her from him.
Under Sabbath’s captaincy she had been the Hand of Doom, and he had ruled her with an iron hand.
Oracle had returned her to glory and to the volunteer ship she had been for more than a century. Sabbath stared up into his junk’s rigging. The sails of his three masts were fully battened, and the bamboo slats spreading through the black, lateen rigged sails looked like the fins of a great fish. Sabbath had exaggerated the effect by painting the battens sheaths white like bones. She was a beautiful ship, and big, but she could not match the Glory’s sailing ability. Ironman carried a respectable weight of shot, but her dramatically upswept hull and compartmentalized chambers were not ideal for blaster decks. As far as Sabbath knew, the Glory was the only perfect ship still afloat, and skydark might fall again before the hand of man could ever make another like her. “He’s heading south.”
Dorian snapped his massive balisong shut and rose. “The Brazils! A hungry and thirsty journey in his condition but plenty of villes! He’s fast enough to make sail for it, get resupplied and...” Dorian trailed off. “Then what? He can’t make Africa or Europe from there. What i
s left but to come back into our teeth?”
“He’s heading south,” Sabbath repeated.
Blue was shocked as she saw it. “He’s going to round the horn.”
“In the southern winter?” Dorian was appalled. “Rad-madness! Triple-stupe bastard!”
Blue admired the gall of it. “If there is one ship that could do it...”
“There are two I know of,” Sabbath said.
“Aye, Father,” Blue agreed. “I can—”
“The War Pig can chase him around the horn.” Sabbath corrected.
Blue bit her lip. Dorian stopped short of strutting like a rooster across the stern. “Aye, Father! I can!”
“And chase him you will, but you’ll not catch him, nor try to.”
Dorian tapped his double hilts in his palm. “No?”
“No, you’ll push him. Give him no rest or respite. Stay under sail down the south. He will outpace you, but when you hit the Horn? While he is tearing sails and snapping spars in the storms, you drop sail and go to your coal. Again, don’t try to catch him. Push him. Push him to breaking with his skeleton crew watch on watch, breaking with the scurvy, hunger and despair, and then push him to me.”
Dorian smiled like a child pulling the wings off a fly. “You and sister Blue will take the Northwest Passage.”
“It’s summer, sweet winds up the Deathlands east and no better sailing across the Great White North. With luck we beat the chem storms and have even better winds down the Deathlands west into the Cific. Oracle has never sailed outside the South Cific before. He’ll be sailing by dead reckoning and rumor. Once he rounds the Horn he’ll have to hug the western coasts, and we’ll have him.”
Blue flipped through her chart book. Many of the maps were more than a hundred years old. The apocalypse had reshaped entire coastlines, dropped entire island chains beneath the sea and generated new ones. The Caribbean Sea was better charted than most, but beyond it, most modern charts were little more than forlorn suggestions. The fact was, like the first age of ships, vast stretches of ocean were once more uncharted. Where a modern chart read ‘Here there be monsters’ it had been written in deadly earnest. Blue collected and collated every chart she could buy, steal, copy or take in plunder. Her library took up a good portion of the captain’s cabin on the Lady. A sheet of vellum stretched from floor to ceiling on her starboard wall, and on that she laboriously pieced together her masterwork, her chart of the world. Blue sighed.