by James Axler
Ryan gazed out at the seemingly endless ocean before him. “We’re headed south.”
“Indeed, there is already grumbling that our course shall take us past the northern coast of South America without stopping.”
Ryan had heard those grumbles as well. Once again he considered all of the little he knew about South America. “What’s there?”
“I do not know. We have been briefly into the Amazon basin upon a jump or two and found but little in those mutated rain forests to allure us. South? You move into the Gran Chaco of Paraguay, Bolivia and Northern Argentina, continue on and you find the vast pampas, further still the seemingly endless steppe of Patagonia. Few from here seem to go there, and apparently vice versa.”
“So it’s all plains?”
“Girded to the west by the mighty spine of the Andes nearly its entire length, but mostly, yes.”
“What happened down there during the nukecaust?”
“No living member of this crew has been farther south than Brazil, though the Glory has gone farther in times past. As you might imagine their major cities and military bases were bombarded, but in dear Mildred’s time South America did not pose either the strategic threat or value to warrant the wholesale destruction we saw in the Northern Hemisphere. The crew refers to it as a ‘big empty.’ It is rumored South America was deliberately scourged with biological weapons targeted both at the human population and their major agricultural crops. It seemed one or both sides in the final war that birthed the Deathlands decided it would be best to kill most of the population and starve the rest into a subsistence lifestyle.”
“Why?”
“I can think of two reasons. One, with the superpowers of the Northern Hemisphere reducing each other to radioactive ash and anarchy, they did not wish the nations of the southern continent to rise up and become the new world powers. Two, and it disgusts me to even contemplate, there must have been those in the North who expected to win the war, or, more likely, expected to claw their way back up out of the rubble and recover first. The great southern plains of South America, mostly denuded of man and having lain fallow for a hundred years, would be an ark of natural resources to be plundered.”
Ryan shook his head.
“This is mostly conjecture on my part based on rumor and scant evidence. The ship’s logs indicate to me indirectly that the decimated populations of southern South America abandoned the hot zones of their cities and returned to the subsistence farming, herding and hunting lifestyles of their colonial forebears. It also appears they are not particularly friendly. Though, should we jump ship, Ricky speaks Spanish. I, with my Latin, have made myself understood on more than one occasion with the Romance language speakers of your present day. It is possible we could make our way.”
Ryan considered Doc’s scenario of South America. What struck him most was that it meant that any redoubts in the southern plains of South America were very likely few and far between. If they jumped ship there, it might well be the last jump they ever made, and South America would be where he and his companions spent the rest of their lives, short or otherwise.
“There is another thing to consider,” Doc opined.
“What’s that?”
“Until very recently the Pacific was the Glory’s home.”
As the son of a baron, Ryan had the closest thing to a classical education the Deathlands could generally provide. Through his travels he knew that the Northwest Passage opened up in the Great White North for the short, unpredictable summer months, and the Panama Canal was blasted ruin. Neither offered the Glory a way out. Ryan did the math. “We’re going to round the southern Horn.”
“I believe that is what our captain intends, and I need not remind you, for the moment we are in the summer. When we cross the equator, we descend into winter. In my day, in the era of wooden ships and before the breaking of the world, winter passage around the Cape of Storms was considered extremely dangerous. I cannot imagine the risks have done anything other than multiply.”
“How long?”
“Three months perhaps, assuming disaster does not strike.”
“Long trip.”
“And arduous in the extreme.”
“Long trip to make unsigned or proved otherwise.”
“I believe if we are offered the chance to sign on as crewmen and refuse, we will have proved ourselves otherwise and find ourselves considered unreliable at best and a danger to the ship and her crew at worst. At best we will be stranded at the next available spit of land. But we were taken on because of a desperate need of crew, so hostages may be taken from among, or, how shall I put this delicately, the harshest methods available, indeed, imaginable, that will not directly prevent us from doing our assigned duties will be inflicted upon us. Once Oracle and the Glory come into ports of call where he can find eager recruits, our final, proved-otherwise fate may be quite grim.”
Ryan stood on the bowsprit of the Hand of Glory with the wind in his hair and the vast southern Lantic before him. “Tell Oracle you’ll sign the book. Tell him I’m applying for training on the quarterdeck.”
“I shall make it so at the first opportunity, dear friend.” Doc smiled slyly for the first time in a long time. “Or should I say, shipmate?”
Mr. Squid’s flesh suddenly flashed to the electric green of Doc’s trunks. Ryan again knew he was assigning human emotions to the nonhumanoid, but he could swear the cephalopod was pleased. Mr. Squid’s left eye muscles suddenly contracted and covered the golden orb. Ryan almost thought Mr. Squid was winking at him, but then an oval of skin turned black over the enclosed eye. Two thin black lines suddenly shot like tracery from either corner of the oval to encircle the cephalopod’s head-body.
Ryan was genuinely startled. Mr. Squid had just simulated an eye patch.
“You know,” Doc proposed, “I believe this is going to be a very interesting voyage.”
Chapter Eleven
Ryan applied for officer’s training on the quarterdeck. He found himself on his hands and knees on the main deck. He knelt shoulder to shoulder and sandwiched between Gallondrunk and Onetongue to port and Sweet Marie and Hardstone to starboard. Each held a worn and rounded brick of sandstone and furiously scrubbed the deck white with a mixture of sand and seawater. Manrape stood behind them. When he judged the section of deck clean, he shouted, “Shift!” and the stoning team moved backward to the next section of boards.
In tribute to her continuing mostly uselessness, Krysty was assigned the bucket to sluice the section. Normally, scrubbing the decks was a task assigned to new sailors, to old ones as punishment, or to crewmen who had proved themselves useful for little else. This was not a normal Sunday morning scrubbing.
This was a race.
Life aboard ship was with rare exceptions unending toil. Captain Oracle, like the captains before him, had turned much of the work into competitions, and he’d assigned tiny bits of privilege—leisure, trophies, totems or extra rations or jack—to teams or watches that excelled. All members of the crew were required to be proficient with a pike when called on, but Ryan had earned the brass ring and joined the Phalanx. These competitions went from the lowliest of menial waisters’ tasks up to the shifting of sails, the speed of the cannon crews or personal marksmanship. Back in the day, when they had been new to the Glory, Gallondrunk, Onetongue, Hardstone and Sweet Marie had been the fastest deck scrubbing team in the Glory’s recorded history. They had worked with another new sailor named LonelyLane, but he had died in a chem storm long ago and the rest of the team had since risen to higher tasks aboard ship.
Now the champions had been called to battle once more. Ryan had been assigned to fill the missing slot—and not without a great deal of grumbling by his teammates.
Sweet Marie snarled and threw an elbow into Ryan’s ribs. “Rad-blast it, Ryan! Keep up!”
Ryan struggle
d. In his life he had engaged in some of the hardest, dirtiest and most dangerous labors the Deathlands had managed to birth. Nonetheless, scrubbing floors had never been part of his purview. An emotion in Ryan that he recognized as pride rebelled against the task. At the same time he knew that was exactly why Oracle had ordered him to it. If Ryan hoped to someday be an officer aboard the Glory, he needed to know every aspect of the ship, as well as every aspect of every single crewman’s duties, and know it from personal experience.
“Sluice!” Hardstone grunted.
Krysty sent a bucket of seawater sheeting across the section.
Manrape nodded at the gleaming white deck. “Shift!”
Ryan and his teammates crab walked backward to a new section of filthy deck.
Bosun’s mate DontGo called out from starboard. “Shift!”
Ryan risked a glance across the deck.
Mr. Squid was a section ahead.
To the delight of the crew, Mr. Squid had announced that the Glory’s bottom was free of seaweed and barnacles. Atlast had dived off the bowsprit with a quarter pike and emerged two minutes later at the stern. He’d happily gasped he had never seen the Glory cleaner. Mr. Squid had nipped every strand of seaweed down to the hull and drilled into every clinging mollusk with his beak and eaten them for rations. All admitted the ship was sailing faster and steering better. When Mr. Squid had searched about for a new task and announced he could scrub the decks faster and more efficiently than the waisters, this had sent shock waves of indignation through the crew.
Captain Oracle had arranged a contest for Sunday morning. Bets had flown.
DontGo stood behind Squid happily shaking his head. Mr. Squid had five of his eight arms churning stones before him in dizzying, interlocking circles. When DontGo called “Shift,” the three arms Squid kept behind him contracted him back like bungee cords to the next section of deck. Wipe happily alternated sluicing the deck and sluicing Mr. Squid. Ryan scowled as Doc clapped fresh stoops of seawater against Squid’s siphon when called upon.
Oracle stood at the rail of the forecastle like a black, unblinking statue. Commander Miles stood next to him holding a gleaming silver hand chron. Miss Loral strode from rail to rail gauging the progress of the race. “I swear I’d let my mother eat off Squid’s deck!”
The majority of the spectating crew were backing the humans, and they would boo and shout insults. Mr. Squid’s small, hardcore group of adherents howled expectantly.
Ryan’s team redoubled its efforts. Onetongue glanced back at Squid. “Hee’th out of hi’th barrel! He can’t lath’t!” Ryan wasn’t so sure. “Sluice!” Hardstone snarled. Krysty heaved the bucket. Manrape nodded. “Shift!”
Ryan’s feet hit the gangway to the quarterdeck. “Stay where you are, Ryan!” Sweet Marie hissed. The rest of the team rotated and hit the stairs seamlessly by twos. Ryan was grateful for the respite. He looked over. Mr. Squid was mostly obscured, but he seemed to be in snake-ball mode and having problems with the steps.
“Sluice!” Hardstone called.
“Lover!” Krysty called out in consternation. Ryan tensed as he suspected what was to come. A second later a good portion of her bucket hit Ryan’s back. “I’m sorry! I’m—”
“Shift!” Manrape ordered.
“Get your ass up here, Ryan!” Sweet Marie yelled.
Ryan charged soddenly up the gleaming gangway and retook his position. It was not lost on Ryan that his first visit to the quarterdeck was on his hands and knees and hard at labor. The team scrubbed as if a chem storm was inches in front of them. “Shift!” Manrape ordered. The team passed the binnacle and the wheel.
“Shift!” DontGo called. Mr. Squid snapped up onto the quarterdeck like a giant rubber band. Ryan’s team had to spread out to cover the small but far more open space. Mr. Squid took the opportunity to throw a sixth scrubbing arm into the mix. Captain Oracle and Commander Miles retreated to the end of the ship, grabbed a sheet and pulled themselves up on the stern rail out of the way of the contestants. Ryan glanced up as Mr. Squid passed the binnacle. It was the structure right in front of the wheel that held the ship’s master compass, master chron and barometer. The binnacle contained twin lamps under glass so that the steersman and conman could read it by night and in all weathers. The binnacle had shelves below that held master charts. Ryan slowed for one second as he beheld the glass dome atop the binnacle. A human, skeleton hand floated in a swirling blue and red miasma of liquid.
Ryan froze as the skeleton hand turned in its suspensory fluid and pointed at him.
Manrape’s rope slammed between Ryan’s shoulder blades. “Eyes to the deck and the task at hand, Ryan!”
Ryan remembered his promise to Krysty, took the blow, put his mind to his fellow teammates and tripled his efforts. They moved steadily backward and passed the skylight of the captain’s cabin. Mr. Squid steadily caught up. Crewmen on deck and in the rigging shouted and cheered. Hardstone snarled. Krysty sluiced. “Shift and turn!” Manrape called. The team turned to find the last, short section abutting the stern rail. Ryan’s team scrubbed for their lives.
“Finished!” Manrape shouted. “Fit for Captain’s inspection!”
Ryan and his team collapsed.
Mr. Squid squelched up against the stern rail seconds later. His normal gray color was ashen. Wipe shoved a bucket of seawater under his siphon and it bubbled over suspiciously like a man gasping for breath.
Captain Oracle and Commander Miles hopped down lightly and strode to the quarterdeck rail. “Miss Loral?” Oracle questioned.
The first mate stood on the main grating and opened her arms. “Clean as a whistle, Captain! Port and starboard!”
Oracle nodded. “Commander?”
Miles strode the quarterdeck, giving a rare smile. “Captain, Glory’s deck hasn’t been this clean in years.”
The crew cheered.
Oracle took a slow walk down the starboard gangway and back up the port. The crew on deck and in the riggings held their breath. “Very good, Commander. Very good indeed. A fine race and congratulations to port and starboard crews.”
Commander Miles continued to enjoy the gleaming decks. “And I am sure they thank you, Captain.”
The crew cheered.
“Mr. Squid is the winner,” Oracle declared.
The cheering stopped. Sweet Marie detonated. “We beat the squid! Fair and square! Right beneath your feet, Captain!”
Oracle turned his gaze on able seaman Sweet Marie. The mono-block of sailing woman paled. Oracle extended his left hand toward Commander Miles, who reached into a pocket of his blue coat and pulled out a white glove.
“Oh, here we go!” Miss Loral called.
Cheers once again erupted from deck to rigging. Captain Oracle slowly walked down the starboard side of the ship. He held the white glove behind his back as his black eyes took in Mr. Squid’s work. He walked the full length of the ship and returned back up the port side. His gloved hand did not move. The captain stopped at the port gangway to the quarterdeck. He extended one gloved finger and stroked it beneath the step at shoulder level. Oracle raised his finger high. The fingertip of his glove was black with grime. “Mr. Squid scrubbed the undersides of the treads.”
Sweet Marie couldn’t contain herself. “Beggin’ the captain’s pardon!” Crewmen who had lost bets shouted out. Even Hardstone was incensed. “The undersides? We never scrub the undersides!”
Ryan rose. “Permission to speak!”
Oracle nodded. “Granted, Mr. Ryan.”
“My team gave one hundred percent.”
Mutters of assent greeted the statement. Oracle nodded again. “I acknowledge that, Mr. Ryan.”
Ryan lifted his chin to starboard. “Mr. Squid gave one hundred and ten. Today he was a better sailor than me. Starboard beat port. I concede defeat.”
“Here! Here!” Doc applauded. Mr. Squid’s supporters cheered.
Oracle ran his gaze over the rest of the port team. Sweet Marie blew a lank, sweaty lock of red hair out of her face and shook her head. “Not a sweet, willing face to sit on for a thousand leagues, and now I am schooled in my sailor’s duty by a squid? I swear it’s enough to make a girl go back to trawling on her father’s barge!”
Laughter broke out.
“Commander,” Oracle grated. “Is there any beer left?”
Miles made a face. “Just a half cask of that banana beer we picked up in the Dominicas, and it’s turning fast.”
“I doubt the portside crew will complain. A stoop each.”
“Aye, Captain!”
The captain regarded his subaqueous specialist. “You are victorious, Mr. Squid. I know not what spoils to give you.”
“I am tired,” Mr. Squid replied. “I would like to rest in my barrel.”
“Of course. Nothing else?”
“I would like Doc to sit with me. If the ship can spare him.”
A number of very rude, man-on-squid suggestions rang out. It was difficult to discern in his stygian dark face, but Oracle might have been amused. “Doc?”
“Captain, you reward me as much as Mr. Squid, if you find I can be spared.”
“You can be spared, Doc. But I will require two errands of you while Mr. Squid’s barrel is emptied and filled with fresh water.”
“I am at your service, Captain.”
“Go down to the tech room and bring me Mr. Rood’s report about the radio transmissions he has been receiving.”
“At once.”
“Before you do, sign the book.”
The ship got quiet.
Doc bowed low. “Humbly, and with honor, my captain.”
Forgiven took the massive book from under his arm and presented Doc with a pen. Doc signed on the indicated line. Manrape’s voice boomed, “Hip! Hip!”
“Huzzah!” the crew roared.
“Hip! Hip!”
“Huzzah!”