Blood Red Tide

by James Axler

  Ryan ate. He had no complaints about the food, much less the portions. A pig had been roasted for the occasion in the main hearth. While the feasters waited, they gorged on plates of raw oysters, steamed mussels, snow crab in drawn butter, pickled anchovies, fried sardines, cow and goat cheese and laver bread and oatcakes. Ryan took an immediate liking to cold roast penguin. He tucked into his seaweed stew with particular will.

  Governor Laird watched Ryan shrewdly and leaned toward Oracle. “Your people have been without fruit or fresh greens for some time?”

  Oracle sipped the black beer. “We took on maté on the continent to compensate.”

  “That’ll get a man through, but it loses its potency fairly quickly. It has a tendency to get buggy. Shall I send a caldron of sea sass for your people aboard ship tonight? They’ll be the better for it.”

  “That would be a kindness, Governor.”

  Laird snapped his fingers at a servant. Nearly all of them seemed to be from the continent. “Tell Cookie to simmer our largest feast kettle with sass and row it out for the Glory, and tell him not to be stingy with his blubber.” The servant scampered for the kitchens.

  “Well now, Captain. I was but a tot when your ship last put in.”

  “Aye, she was the Starsailor then, under Captain Buckley. I believe he presented the governor of the Isles, your father, with a gift of friendship. May I continue the tradition?”

  Laird smiled. “Who am I to deny a guest?”

  Oracle nodded. “Miss Loral?”

  The First Mate took a black predark, nylon pistol rug from her satchel. Oracle passed it on. Laird unzipped it to reveal a beauty of a U.S. military-issue Beretta M9 handgun. If it hadn’t been matte black, the blaster would have sparkled. Ryan knew J.B. had gone to town on the weapon to turn it into an oil-on-glass slick tack driver. The case also contained a 50-round box of ammo and a spare mag.

  Laird smiled openly. “Oh, now, Captain, that is fine. Big Ian, let us show Captain Oracle our appreciation.”

  Big Ian rose from the great U-shape of tables in the hall and brought Oracle a bulging leather bag. He shook it and it clinked and rattled. He grinned to show his happy, gap-toothed smile. “They’re not so fancy as that, Captain, but with your permission?”

  “You humble me, Big Ian.”

  The man emptied the bag before Oracle.

  Six sets of well-worn handcuffs clattered to the table. Strawmaker hit a bad note and stopped playing. Big Ian’s grin went from happy to hideous. “Try one on for size, Captain. Then order your crew to do the same.” Ryan watched as the smoky galleries above filled with a dozen brown-jacketed sec man armed with the ghostly-looking whalebone stocked assault longblasters. The feasting Kelper dignitaries stared about in fear.

  Big Ian drew his saber and pointed it in Ryan’s face. “The Deathlander prick has a knife in his boot, then.”

  Governor Laird shrugged. “One would expect nothing less.”

  The blade gleamed in Ryan’s face. His one eye met Big Ian’s two, and they both knew they were most likely the two most dangerous men in the room. The sword tip hovered.

  “Shall I stab out his other eye?”

  Ryan’s fingers itched for the blasters he wasn’t carrying. He turned an arctic blue eye on Laird. “Governor, this is piracy.”

  Laird happily loaded his new Beretta and racked the action. “Oh, I’m not the pirate here, Mr. Ryan. Your captain is. Oracle is the one who attacked Jefe Spada’s men while they were trying to apprehend a wanted man, and ’tis it not Oracle who sent you forth to attack the trade caravan of Jefe Dirazar and steal all of his goods and slaves? Both times killing each of their gauchos to the last man.”

  He arched a knowing eyebrow. “Unless Oracle has pressed some into service? Do you deny this?”

  Ryan knew pigeons had flown and the Westerlies had pushed them faster than the Glory.

  Laird shrugged. “You see? You’re the raiders. You’re the cold-hearted looters. You, Mr. Ryan, are the pirates.”

  “No ship will ever land here again,” Loral snarled. “And our crew will defend the ship to the death. They will burn Glory to the water line before they let you have it.”

  “That is the case exactly, Miss Loral. I’m not taking the Glory. I’m just taking your captain for his crimes. You will keep all timber, cordage and supplies you bargained for in good faith. You will attempt the horn and I wish you well of it, but you will sail on, or be sunk, without your captain. That is my final word.”

  “War!” Koa declared. “War with my ohana! War with every island!”

  Laird nodded. “Stories of the kanakas reach even here, Prince Koa, but we have two oceans and a continent between us. Still, you’ll have the Westerlies at your back. Paddle your war canoes around the Horn if you can. I’ll meet you fleet for fleet, man for man, land or sea any time.”

  Koa stared bloody murder at Laird.

  “Miss Loral,” Oracle finally spoke. “Mr. Miles is now acting captain. You are commander. Mr. Ryan is First Mate. Take what we have bargained for and go. Sail the Horn, and take Glory to warm, safe harbors.” Oracle snapped the manacle around his monkey’s paw and with difficulty got it around his other wrist. “I order you to put them on.”

  Big Ian flipped a set of cuffs to each of the shore party with his saber. Doc surged to his feet. It was a miracle he wasn’t shot. “Oh Captain, my Captain!”

  Ryan knew Doc was a heartbeat away from drawing his concealed sword, and there was nothing they could do in this hall except die.

  “Doc!” Ryan snarled. “Put them on.”

  Doc wept as he put on the manacles. Ryan and the rest followed suit. The governor nodded. “Big Ian, take them back to their boat. See them rowed to their ship. If they take any action, slaughter them. Know if the Glory fires on you, they shall be blasted to splinters in vengeance.”

  “Thankee, Gov.” Big Ian looked at Miss Loral. “But this one follows orders.” He looked at Doc. “This one’s feeb.” He shook his head at Koa. “If this one is a prince, then I’m the queen of England, and the guitar player won’t do shite.”

  Big Ian ripped his right hand around and punched Ryan in the eye with the brass basket of his sword. Ryan’s head snapped back as he deliberately took the shot. His world narrowed to a dark tunnel surrounded by purple pinpricks. He instantly felt his face inflating like a balloon and his eye closing. Big Ian laughed. “And this one won’t do shite if he can’t see.” Ryan heard the sword sheathed. “Now move, you lot!”

  Ryan rose and the room spun. Koa put a hand on his shoulder.

  Governor Laird happily aimed his new Beretta at the pig turning in the fire. “I don’t know if this will be of any comfort to you, but I am not going to give your captain to Spada or Dirazar. No ñandú will snap off his cock.”

  Ryan fought nausea and wondered if he had a concussion. “No?”

  “No, I am going to give Oracle to Captain Dorian. He’s on his way.” Governor Laird’s smile was sickening. “I suggest you sail for your lives.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Captain’s Cabin

  “We go back!” Miss Loral’s fist crashed on top of the chart table. She spilled tears of fury. “We go back now! We get the captain and burn their ville to the ground!”

  “E kokua!” Koa thundered. “To the rescue!”

  Mr. Forgiven wept openly. “They took our good captain, and we took their lovely parting gifts and weighed anchor!”

  Ryan took the cold guanaco steak off his eye and tried to glance around the assembly. They were mostly a tearing smear in his remaining eye that he could barely open. Techman Rood bristled with rage. Ryan was again surprised to note Koa’s presence at a captain’s cabin conference, and again he suspected there was more to the Hawaiian than he knew.

  J.B. looked at Ryan. The companion
s were not ones to leave anyone behind, and the Armorer was spoiling for a fight. Mildred hung on his arm. Commander Miles’s half-healed wounds clearly pained him. Losing his captain pained him more. His jaw set with terrible certainty.

  “Their shore guns will blow the Glory out of the water. If we send a cutting out party, they’ll never get past the ville, much less into Laird’s fortress.” Miles bowed his head in anger and shame. “We just have to swallow this. The Glory has swallowed worse in the past. If we take vengeance, it comes after the Horn and after the Sabbaths.”

  Ryan admired Miss Loral’s sentiment. Like Commander Miles, he didn’t relish sailing into the teeth of Stanley’s coastal blasters or trying to take on a ville of several thousand souls.

  “Coward,” Miss Loral grated.

  Miles’s knuckles went white. “My first loyalty is to this ship and her crew. As acting captain, until confirmed or challenged, First Mate, should I find myself in similar circumstances, I will expect you to take command and sail on. Are you challenging?”

  Miss Loral looked like she just might.

  Ryan reached into his jacket and pulled out the sealed envelope. “Before we went ashore, the captain gave me this.”

  Something akin to both fear and relief passed across the commander’s face. “If those are the captain’s last orders, obey them.”

  Ryan tore open the oilpaper packet. It held two smaller envelopes. He had to pull his eye open to read it. One was addressed to RYAN. The other to ACTING CAPTAIN. Ryan handed the latter letter to Commander Miles, who stared at it. The two men opened their orders. Ryan found another, smaller yet again envelope. It was addressed READ BY THE LIGHT OF THE BINNACLE.

  “Commander,” Ryan asked. “I—”

  “You have my permission to go to the quarter deck.” Miles crumpled his note in his fist. “And I will abide by your decision.” He turned stiffly and stared out the stern windows. “Whatever that may mean...”

  Ryan felt his hackles rising. It was a well-established belief aboard the Glory that Captain Oracle had powers, and that they were both a blessing and curse to him. Ryan left the captain’s cabin and went to the gangway mostly by feel. In the darkness of the fo’c’sle, Strawmaker quietly strummed his guitar in sad, minor chord progressions that echoed the feeling aboard ship. Gallondrunk sobbed like a baby while Sweet Marie comforted him. Ryan emerged on deck. The wind blew bitterly cold and moaned through the rigging. The ship was at anchor, and Manrape stood watch at the wheel wrapped in a pair of dead gauchos’ capes. He raised an eyebrow at an able seamen entering onto the quarterdeck. Ryan held up Oracle’s last envelope. “Captain’s last orders.”

  Manrape didn’t seem surprised. Ryan went to the binnacle and pulled his swollen eye open.

  The skeleton hand hung half-closed and apparently dormant in whatever fluid filled the glass dome. A pair of covered lanterns lit the magnetic compass, the ship’s master hourglass, clock and the helmsman’s chart. Ryan cracked the wax seal on the envelope and wondered if there would be yet another packet nested inside. He pulled out a note written on a scrap of yellowed, predark paper that consisted of two sentences in simple block script.

  RYAN, THIS WAS FORESEEN. YOU WILL EITHER SAVE ME OR YOU WON’T. ORACLE

  Ryan looked up from the note. He snarled in revulsion, and his ship’s knife came free. The skeletal hand was pointing at him. He suppressed the urge to take the Longbow blaster from the binnacle case, empty the last remaining rounds into the glass globe and the hand it contained and kick whatever shattered remains were left into the Cape for the Kelpers to deal with. He smelled Krysty before he saw her. Ryan sheathed his knife.

  He was grateful for the backup. but he shook his head. “You aren’t even rated ordinary seaman. You can’t be on the quarterdeck without an officer’s permission.”

  “Nuke that,” Krysty replied. “I walked right past Manrape, and he didn’t say anything.”

  “Well, while you’re here,” Ryan said, lifting his chin at the binnacle. “What do you make of that?”

  Krysty stared at the hand in loathing. “I feel it every time it moves.”

  Ryan’s jaw set. Krysty wasn’t a doomie, but she felt things. Sometimes she was almost prescient, and when things got strange her feelings spiked.

  “So,” Ryan asked, “Oracle’s psionic? He’s moving it? Some other power is moving it?”

  “There are many other movers in this broken world. Some are terrible beyond words. My mother told me skydark birthed things and opened doors. She said some of the bad things are as old as time and loved what happened. Thrived on the fall. Got stronger. At least that’s what she believed. I— Gaia!”

  Krysty pulled her knife as the hand slowly turned and pointed at Stanleyville like an undead compass needle suspended in blood. “I hate that thing!” She glared at the binnacle. “I hate it! And I hate what it’s going to make you do.”

  “No.” Ryan took a long breath and let it out. “That hand won’t make me do anything. I have a choice to make.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m going to save the captain.”

  “You’ll die,” Miles announced.

  “Mebbe,” Ryan conceded. “Sometimes one man can do more than an entire ship’s company, and I’m not taking Stanleyville. I’m taking the captain out of it. This is a rescue.”

  “It’s not that I doubt you, Ryan, but I have to think of the safety of the ship.”

  Even Miss Loral was against it. “They had at least three motorboats that I saw. They’ll be patrolling and expecting trouble.”

  “That’s why you get me in as close a possible and I swim the rest of the way.”

  “Swim?” Miles was appalled. “In this water? In winter? At night?”

  “Skillet found plas-wrap in the bunker’s kitchen. I’ll grease up, wrap myself in it, then grease the outside. I spoke to Hardstone about our row in. He said the current isn’t bad and the tide will be on my side.”

  Ryan squinted at the first mate through his swollen eye. “Is he wrong?”

  Loral grimaced. “Good swimmer can swim mebbe a mile, two miles per hour, and that’s on a sunny day in the Caribbean. To avoid the harbor patrol, we’ll have to drop you off at least a mile from shore. You’ll be slowing down and going numb with every stroke. You think you can make that in an hour without freezing, much less dragging spare clothes and a blaster?”

  “I’ll just be taking my knife. When I get ashore, I’ll find clothes. If I need a blaster, I expect I can find one of those too.”

  Miles slowly shook his head. “You’ve got balls, Mr. Ryan. I grant you that. But you can barely see out of that eye.”

  “Miss Mildred will cut me.”

  Mildred exploded. “Jesus Christ, Ryan!”

  “The freezing cold water will take care of the rest.”

  Miles appraised Ryan yet again and turned to his techman. “Mr. Rood, what are the Kelpers saying?”

  “There’s shortwave radio traffic. The patrol boats are talking to each other and the fortress. They’re patrolling. They know the Glory’s a fighting ship, and they’re waiting for our response. Plus they got horsemen patrolling the coastline for outlier insertions. They also sent out more of Doc’s Caesar cipher. They radioed Dorian that they have the captain. Dorian is coming. He’s sailing on his engines and will take the captain and effect repairs in Stanleyville. Laird’s rolling out the red carpet.”

  “Commander?” Ryan locked his one-eyed gaze with Miles. “Now or not at all. I’m volunteering. Give me twenty-four hours.”

  Commander Miles closed his eyes and broke his word. “We sail on.”

  Miss Loral’s voice went dead. “Miles, when you’re fit? I challenge.”

  The entire tonnage of the Glory crashed down across Commander Miles’s shoulders. “Accepted, Miss Loral. Dirks at a dawn of your
choosing.”

  The acting captain suddenly rose to his full height. “Until then you will get your gaudy-skank ass to the quarterdeck! Take the con, and chart us a course around the horn. Dorian Sabbath is nearly on us under power. We drive into the Horn’s Westerlies in winter. Under sail. Tack upon tack. I cannot spare a moment, much less a day! Now unless one of you rad-blasted bastards can give me one reason to stay on, I—”

  “Commander!” Hardstone called out from his guard position outside the door. “A crewman seeks permission to address the acting captain!”

  Miles sagged in exhaustion and pain. “Well who, rad blast you?”

  “Subaqueous Specialist Squid!”

  The cabin went silent for a moment.

  Miles squared himself. “Send him in.”

  Mr. Squid entered doing his disturbing gait of walking erect on the tips of his seven arms. The arm the orcas had bitten off was already a foot long and growing longer by the day. “Commander Miles?”

  “Yes, Mr. Squid?”

  “I overheard this conversation.”

  Miles rubbed his temples. “And?”

  “And for a short period of time I am capable of swimming at speeds of up to twenty-five miles per hour.”

  Commander Miles blinked.

  “Pulling Ryan and not exhausting myself,” Mr. Squid continued, “I should be able to maintain a speed of ten miles per hour to shore. I have just dipped an arm into the ocean. Here in the protected waters of the Cape the ocean surface temperature is currently slightly above 1 degree Centigrade. If this greasing provides Mr. Ryan with any protection, I should be able to deliver him to shore within ten minutes and in reasonable physical condition. From there I will scale Lord Laird’s wall much like I would do the side of a ship and carry Mr. Ryan up with me.”

  Commander Miles and Miss Loral stared at each other.