by James Axler
“Hip! Hip!”
“Huzzah!”
Gypsyfair came forward with a deep blue garment draped over her arms. “This is for you, shipmate. I sewed it myself.”
Doc unfolded a blue coat much like that of Commander Miles, Miss Loral and Purser Forgiven. His eyes stung and his throat tightened. “Oh my stars and garters...”
“You serve in the captain’s cabin, you shall keep the captain’s log and serve as well as purser’s assistant,” Miles intoned. “You must look the part. Your pantaloons, hat and shoes will follow shortly.”
Atlast and Koa peeled off Doc’s coat and helped him don the ship’s jacket. It was common knowledge that no one sewed better than Gypsyfair. The coat fit perfectly. Doc felt overcome with emotion. “Oh dear, oh dear...”
“Doc,” Oracle said softly but firmly, “I believe I gave you an order.”
Doc straightened. “Aye, Captain! The tech room and Mr. Rood’s report. At once!” Doc strode swiftly to the main gangway with a genuine swagger. Krysty shot Ryan a bemused look. Ryan accepted a stoop of past-its-prime banana beer from Wipe and nodded at her.
For good or ill, he and his companions were aboard the Glory until she saw the Cific.
* * *
DOC STRODE JAUNTILY to the tech cabin. Crewmen grinned, whistled, gave him the thumbs up and called him shipmate as he passed. None seemed surprised. Apparently the fix had been well in. Doc stuck his head into the tech room. Mr. Rood sat at his worktable hunched over logs and making notes. Three radio transceivers of different makes and ages dominated the room. Doc found the soft glow of their dials pleasing. Rood had both a fuel and a hand crank generator, although Doc noted smaller cables snaking up the mizzenmast next to the antenna, and he knew there were some solar panels and small, cobbled together wind-turbines up in the tops. Doc rapped politely on the thin wooden doorframe set into the canvass divider that formed the room. “Mr. Rood, are you free?”
The ship’s techman glanced up from his worktable. Unlike many of the crew, he kept his hair cut short. The sleeves of his jersey were rolled up and tied. His eyes were red rimmed from long hours in not particularly good light, but he grinned. “Hello, Doc. Nice coat!”
Doc flushed with pleasure.
“What can I do you for?”
“Captain’s business. He asks if you have intercepted any more transmissions and wishes your report.”
“Half a dozen just today, and just like all the days before, they make no sense.”
“Are they in a foreign language?” Doc asked. “I am familiar with several.”
“No language at all, unless I’m missing something.”
Doc stepped inside and peered at Rood’s extensive log entries. They consisted of many long series of dots and dashes with corresponding letters written beneath them. “Well,” Doc observed, “whomever our chatty friends may be, they appear to be using Morse code. I gather most sailors of this time use it?”
“Most don’t. Most ships don’t have radios, and most ships’ complements right up to captain are illiterate.” Rood made a derisive noise. “Some of the more sophisticated types use semaphore. This stuff makes no sense. Must be some broken piece of tech on auto.”
“Hmm.” Doc frowned. He and his companions had encountered numerous pieces of technology that had survived skydark and kept on operating, some in endless loop, some having jumped their original programming, some chilling deadly and others heartbreaking in their mechanical devotion to duty. “I see three possibilities, my good Mr. Rood. One, you are correct and there is a piece of tech somewhere beyond our horizon, emitting gobbledygook. Two, there is a monkey, or an illiterate child chained to a desk similar to yours, with nothing better to do than randomly pound upon a transmission bar day and night.”
Rood laughed.
“Or three,” Doc continued. “Let us assume willful, perhaps hostile, intent behind these transmissions, and, for the nonce, let us assume this is a simple Caesar cipher.”
“A what?”
“Julius Caesar,” Doc explained. “A mega-baron of long ago.”
“Powerful?”
“One of the most powerful the world has ever known. When he sent a message that was private or of military significance he would encrypt it with a substitution cipher.”
“A what?”
Doc remained patient and pointed at the strings of meaningless letters. “Those are words. For example, here is the alphabet.” Doc wrote out the alphabet A to Z on a sheet of paper. “Let us assume I am so foolish that my own, personal substitution cipher is simply the alphabet backward.” Doc wrote the alphabet Z to A directly beneath.
“Now...” Doc swiftly wrote eight words of Z to A backward nonsense. “Match each letter in the alphabet above, each letter corresponding to the letter of my cipher below it.”
Rood looked at Doc like he might be losing it but swiftly matched letters and scratched out a sentence below Doc’s. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog?”
“It is a panagram.”
“A what?”
“A phrase that contains all letters of a given alphabet. In this case it is the most commonly used panagram in predark English.”
“What does it mean?
“It means you have deciphered my code, Mr. Rood.”
“Rads, thunder and fallout!” Rood was amazed. “That’s incredible!”
“Clever but not incredible. The concept is thousands of years old. It seems in your bold new Caribbean someone has rediscovered it.”
Rood’s face fell as he scanned his own notes. “But the tech men, out there, they ain’t using the alphabet backward.”
“Indeed not. I fear they have devised an alphabet of their own. Julius Caesar, for example, was known by historians for using a left shift of three.”
“Well, if they have their own cipher, how do we decipher it?”
“We must break it, my friend.”
“Break it? How?” Rood asked.
“Frequency analysis.”
Rood tapped his radio dial. “I already got his frequency.”
“I speak of the frequency of letters, shipmate. Though perhaps our first, best course would be pattern words.”
“Pattern words...”
“Let us surmise that these voices out in the ethers are speaking about us. Thusly, I might be tempted to subscribe the word ‘Glory’ to the more frequent, identical, four-letter words. Since we are aboard ship, and being pursued, we might also look for ‘latitude’ and ‘longitude’ or their Latin abbreviations. Now, should he also have a word substitution code atop his cipher, or be engaging in multiple alphabet shifts, then you and I, good Rood, will be burning the midnight oil.”
Rood’s eyes seemed in severe danger of glazing over.
Doc held up a calming finger. “However, let us, you and I, just as a starting point, assume that our opponent has dreadfully underestimated us and assumes that we, along with nearly everyone else in the Caribbean Sea, has never heard of a Caesar cipher.” Doc spread out a sheaf of Mr. Rood’s notes.
The old man’s eyes danced across the pages and his long finger followed and tapped. “See! Here, here and here! I detect the corresponding patterns of latitude and longitude. The U, D and E all correspond, and the two words between them have given us all the vowels except the sometimes Y. I believe much of these communications are coordinates!”
“I see it.” Techman Rood’s world visibly expanded. “I see it!”
“Indeed!” Doc picked up a pen. “With your permission?”
Rood leaned in like a hound on the scent. “Break him!”
Doc swiftly began scratching beneath Rood’s lines of copied code. “Yes, this can only be Glory! And here, this, this and...” Doc’s pen hand wilted.
“What?” Rood asked. “What happened
?”
“My worst fear. Everything made sense until it made no sense.”
“You ain’t making no sense.”
“I am afraid we have fallen into a trap. It was too easy, and now we are confounded by translations in the code that make no sense, which means we are on the wrong tack entirely or have been duped.”
“You’re still making no sense,” Rood reiterated.
“Perhaps not. Then I pray you, good techman, do the words ‘war’ and ‘pig’ in any conjunction mean anything to you?”
Rood straightened.
Doc sighed. “I fear we must start anew and—”
“Captain!” Rood shot to his feet and nearly slammed his head into the beam above. He burst out of the cabin and ran shouting across the blaster deck. “Captain!”
Chapter Twelve
The entire crew had seen or heard about Mr. Rood bolting out of the tech room and charging for the captain’s cabin waving a sheaf of papers. Doc swiftly followed. Commander Miles and Miss Loral had been called, then Gunny, Manrape, Movies and Atlast. All had been within for quite some time. The crew sat around in groups, muttering. Ryan sat in a rope coil-cum-lounge chair by the mizzen with Krysty sipping banana beer that was getting downright skunky. She wrinkled her nose as she drank. “What do you think’s going on in there?”
“Strategy.”
J.B. and Mildred came up from belowdecks and joined them. Miss Loral approached from the gangway. The first mate’s normally lupine, grinning face was sober. “Mr. Ryan, Mr. J.B., you are requested in the captain’s cabin, if you please.”
Ryan and J.B. gave each other a look and followed Miss Loral down the gangway. Crewmen by the cannons and those slung in their hammocks all watched them like hawks. The two men crossed the invisible line on the stern blasterdeck, went to the door and entered the captain’s cabin. Compared to every other space in the ship it was spacious. Ryan could stand to his full height without hitting his head. The stern was full of windowpanes, and Ryan had just scrubbed the deck around the skylight. At the moment most of the glass was open.
The cabin was bright and zinging with natural light and fresh air. A pair of cannons pointing backward took up a fair share of the space. Between them was a couch, and charts and artifacts covered the walls. The captain and his remaining officers and specialists stood around a heavy table.
Oracle looked up. “Mr. Ryan, Mr. J.B.” He nodded at the ship’s book open on a separate lectern with a pen lying in the spine. “Be so kind as to sign the book, or if not, clap onto something heavy and hurl yourselves overboard. Failure to choose one or the other will be regrettable all the way around.”
J.B. looked to Ryan.
The one-eyed man shrugged. “Admit it. You can’t wait to get your hands on those cannons.”
The Armorer signed. Ryan followed suit.
Oracle gave a brief nod. “Mr. Ryan, Mr. J.B., thank you for signing and in doing so forgiving the circumstances surrounding it. Forgive also the lack of ceremony. Time is short. Come, join us.” Ryan and J.B. joined the circle and glanced down at pages of code and innumerable charts and maps.
“Permission to speak freely.”
“This one time, Mr. Ryan. Until you make officer and earn the right to address the captain on anything other than ship’s business.”
“We signed. We’ll serve. Me and all of mine. But we’re not slaves. From what I see, neither is anyone else on this ship. Assuming we survive to see the Cific, we have the right to leave. If you intend to slave us, I’ll throw a match in the powder room at the first opportunity.”
The assembled crew was horrified. Oracle smiled. It was disarming. His white teeth blazed out of his face, and at close range you could see the crow’s feet carving out from the corners of his eyes. “Had you given me a few seconds more, I had intended to extend to you nearly the exact same contract. I can get all the crew I want in the Cific. You and yours have proved yourselves. Have the rest of your companions sign. You shall be protected by the creed and code and have full shares in all trade, and should we reach a place in the Cific where you wish to debark, you shall be allowed to leave, sorely missed, yet every canteen, mag and knapsack full.”
Ryan held out his hand. “Deal.”
Oracle held out the leathery, cracked palm of his twice than human size monkey’s paw. He slammed it into Ryan’s palm and Ryan grimaced at the force of it. The one-eyed man’s skin itched as the orange fur and dead leathered flesh scraped his palm, and his spine prickled. He squeezed the hideous prosthesis to seal the deal, then let it go. Oracle sighed dramatically. “This is why I never drop anchor in the Deathlands.”
Commander Miles snorted. “And why none of us from there ever want to go back, Captain.”
The tension around the table broke.
“Mr. Ryan,” Oracle rasped.
“Captain.”
“Dorian Sabbath and the War Pig descend on us.”
“I’ve never heard of Sabbath. The War Pig’s a ship?”
“Yes, a powerful one.”
“Can we take her?”
“That, Mr. Ryan, is the question before us. The War Pig can’t sail like us, but she has engines. She can’t shoot with anything like our crew’s speed and accuracy, but she has bigger blasters and more of them. Should it come to a boarding action we will be badly outnumbered, and all of these things would be true even if the Glory were fighting fit and at full strength.”
“Fight or run?” Ryan asked.
“We have Doc to thank for breaking the Sabbath code. We know our enemy’s plans and their dispositions. Emmanuel and his daughter, Blue, take the Ironman and the Lady Evil through the Northwest Passage, while Dorian hounds us down the South American coast.”
Oracle’s silver-clawed middle finger moved over the chart. Ryan was fascinated to see a map that looked recent and skillfully drawn. He was disappointed that so little of the east or west coasts of the Deathlands were marked. Some stretches were little more than dotted line suggestions. Oracle read Ryan’s mind. “I was only partly joking earlier, Mr. Ryan. Few sailors I know make port in the Deathlands, except by accident or desperation. Your Deathlands and their villes have a certain reputation.”
Ryan reserved comment. He looked at the Northwest Passage and then scanned down South America, the Horn and the Cific beyond. “Seems like a lot of empty space for just three ships to hunt one.”
“So one might think, Mr. Ryan. But look at the Glory. We are not a simple fishing boat, an oared longship, galley or oceangoing canoe. We are a full-rigged ship. We have a smithy and a carpenter, yet there are some things, like rope in quantity and sail-making cloth of quality, that we cannot manufacture. The port villes where we can get them are relatively few and well known, and sooner or later we must visit them. Should we survive the Horn, we will be in desperate need. We will have Dorian behind us, his family laying in wait ahead, all knowing the few courses we can take for resupply.”
Ryan had to admit he hadn’t thought of that. “Double back?”
“We could, but Sabbath has turned the Caribbean villes that could resupply us against us. Few of the Caribbean shore villes could withstand the Sabbath fleet if it arrived in anger and began bombarding them.”
Ryan looked at the chart of the Cific with its tiny, scattered dots. “Is the Cific any better?”
Oracle smiled conspiratorially. “I have friends there.”
Ryan’s tactical mind considered the huge ocean, the limited choices they had for resupplying and the enemy’s overwhelming firepower and numbers. “Is this Dorian Sabbath impulsive?”
Oracle grinned from ear to ear. “Indeed, Mr. Ryan. Dorian is hotheaded, bloodthirsty, egotistical and very impulsive. His father instructs him to drive us before him. But Dorian dreams of catching us at anchor and capturing us, and make no mistake, we will have to make l
andfall several times before we attempt the Horn. Dorian knows that. He would dearly love to engage us at sea, knock away enough of our spars that we can no longer maneuver and board us. He dreams of presenting us to his father in tow rather than being the hound that drives us into his father’s and sister’s arms.”
J.B. scratched his chin. “Find a bay, Captain. Drop anchor. Dismount the cannons from both sides of the ship. Conceal them on shore. When Dorian comes in for the prize, we hit him with everything we got. All at once.”
“Not bad, Mr. J.B., and I have considered it, but should Dorian survive our great broadside, he can maneuver to put the anchored Glory between himself and our blasters. It will take a great deal of the crew to man all the weapons on shore. He could easily take the Glory from those that remain. We could not fire on him without killing our own shipmates. He could then clap onto the Glory and simply steam out of range under engine power, leaving us shipless and stranded on a forlorn shore.”
Ryan stared hard at the charts. “I don’t know enough about fighting this ship, much less sailing it to come up with a trap for Dorian.” He arched an eyebrow at Oracle. “But I think you have an idea, Captain.”
“Gunny informs me that the blaster we found you with has an optic.”
“Aye, Captain, but it’s small, 2.5 power, made for very fast and very accurate shooting in the short to middle distance. I’ve made some long-range shots with it, but it’s a marksman’s blaster, not a sniper, if you know the difference. Begging the captain’s pardon.”
“I do know the difference, Mr. Ryan, and my problem is no crewman aboard the Glory knows how to use an optic. My question is, do you know how to use a long-range scope?”
Ryan suppressed a grin as he remembered some of his blasters past. “I do.”
“Gunny,” Oracle ordered.
Gunny came forward bearing a four and a half-foot long, flat, hard plastic case. Ryan could almost hear J.B. getting excited. Gunny set the case on top of the charts and flipped the latches to open it. J.B. stared at the long, black longblaster within. His jaw went slack. “Dark...night...”