The big man hesitated. Half his face was hidden behind the most ridiculously out-of-regulation beard Andrew had ever seen. His eyes were clearly visible, and they were compassionate.
“May I speak to you for a moment, sir,” Sokolov rumbled like a Russian freight train.
Andrew steeled himself, pulled the door open, and stepped aside. The Russian entered Andrew’s small cabin, effectively filling it.
Mr. Sokolov fidgeted and shifted his weight, making a deck plank creak.
Andrew kept his voice even. “What can I do for you?”
“When I was a boy, I had a dog,” Boris Sokolov began. He stopped. Andrew waited, having no idea where to go with that remark. Andrew had known Boris when he spoke little English, and even to this day, his English syntax became bumpy when he was upset.
“She was a good dog, sir. Anya was her name. I loved her. She kept me safe in the mountains around Listvyanka.”
Andrew stood there, hoping for a quick end to this story.
“One day, Anya became caught in a thicket, and she was bitten by a dhole.”
Andrew didn’t want to ask, but it seemed impolite to listen all the way to the end without making a single remark. “What’s a dhole?”
“It is a wild dog,” Sokolov answered. “Their red fur is beautiful. They rarely come so far north, and even more rarely travel alone, so I knew to be afraid. Anya did not know to be afraid because the dhole was a dog, like her. Anya was bitten, and the dhole was rabid. It was the same way for the young gunner’s mate. He trusted those he should not have, because he did not know better.”
The big Russian sighed. It was akin to watching all the air rush from under a circus tent at once. “I cared for Anya for days, until she did not know friend from enemy. When she began to slaver and try to bite us, my father made me kill her. He did not do it himself. He handed me the gun. He said I had learned a lesson about losing the ones I love, but now I must finish the lesson by doing what was best for her, no matter what it cost me.”
Mr. Sokolov paused, then said, “You have done the same thing, Commander Sharpe. For all of us.”
“Thank you, Mr. Sokolov,” Andrew said. “I appreciate your kindness.”
Sokolov left. Andrew closed the door and then did what he’d been fighting not to do for two days. He snatched his blanket off his bed, wadded it up, buried his face in it to keep anyone from hearing, and fell apart.
Not one minute later, he threw the blanket aside, went to his mirror and savagely wiped his face, trying to hide his weakness. Captain Maxwell was stronger than the steel that held this ship together. He had told Andrew what to do and to think and to be. Maxwell had laid it out in the mess hall, and by God, Andrew would do it. He would be it. He would become it.
Twelve hours. Twelve hours until they would intercept the convoy. Twelve hours until it all happened. Everything they had done, every life they had lost, every man they had killed—all of it hinged on the moment they pulled the trigger, twelve hours from now. Andrew would be ready.
W
Garret had a nightmare. It was about the Hollow Man. The nightmare was as soundless as The Perils of Pauline. The dream was filled with events and people, moving and even talking in the sonic blankness. It made them seem dead even as they smiled. Despite the people, the dream felt as deserted as the road on which Garret had first met the Hollow Man, with the darkness pressing in close, the ashen trees pressing closer.
In Garret’s dream, the Hollow Man was in the corners of his and Molly’s little house. It hung in the shadows, draped in darkness, watching her. She was fixing a meal. Then the dream skipped ahead. She sat at the table, holding the baby, talking to Sarn. The meal was in front of him, half eaten. He was trying to console her. Garret couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she was in tears of frustration. The Hollow Man had changed corners, closer to them.
Then Molly was in the buttery, leaning against the shelves like a limp sack of flour. The Hollow Man was above her, hanging against the ceiling, wearing the shadows. Molly pushed off of the shelf and went to the corner to retrieve whatever it was she had come for. As she stepped beneath him, one of the ragged corners of his cloak brushed her forehead. Garret’s hair stood on end when she absently brushed it away.
He had touched her. The Hollow Man had touched his wife.
Then it was the dead of night, in the baby’s room. Molly was laying the precious bundle down. She stepped out the door, pulling it half closed. The light went out in the hall. She had blown out the lamp.
The Hollow Man’s presence filled the room around Garret’s baby as quickly as the darkness filled in the space left by the absence of the lamp.
The baby’s crib stood in the middle of the room, a delicate item made of thin wooden spindles and baby blanket. The Hollow Man was there, standing at the end of the crib. It watched the baby for a long time. It reached up and lowered its hood.
Garret awoke. From each of the previous nightmares, he had awakened screaming. This time he awakened shaking, his jaw, neck, and every other muscle in his body locked up. He was covered in cold beads of sweat. He twitched, jerked, flipped his hammock over and fell. Luckily, instead of impaling himself on the crag-like snag that used to support Nancy, he hit the deck beside it. The bullets and buckshot imbedded in his legs, chest, and abdomen were making his nerves sing discordantly with hot discomfort.
The pain was relieving. It gave him the ability to lie to himself and say that this was real, and the dream was only illusion. A couple of the other guys stirred around him when he hit.
Velvet and Fishy sat up, blinking in the low light.
Garret suddenly hated the electric glow. It was wrong, unearthly, so unlike the fire that had been good and right before all the world came unglued. The dream was fading from him, as usual. In just a few seconds, he’d lost it completely. It was cruel, in Garret’s opinion, to be left time and again with the negative feelings of a nightmare, but not be allowed to recall the thing which had caused them.
“Garret?” Velvet asked. “You okay?”
“Go back to sleep,” Garret rasped wolfishly. “I need some air.”
With that, Garret was gone. Despite the excuse he’d made, he didn’t go through the nearest door out onto the deck. He went the opposite direction, down the length of the citadel. He knew where he was headed with the first step, but he didn’t admit it to himself until he got there.
W
“It will not work,” Mr. Wilkes said simply, again.
“That is unacceptable,” Captain Maxwell replied, gripping the rail. He, Mr. Wilkes, and Captain Shearer stood at the starboard side of Kearsarge’s stern deck, the thirteen inch guns stretching out behind them. There was little chance of them being overheard. Kearsarge was ploughing into a slight headwind. Not that it mattered anyway. Within a matter of hours, everyone would know, or if Mr. Wilkes was correct, everyone would be dead.
“Captain Maxwell,” Shearer said. “We both know there are times wisdom trumps duty. Perhaps this is one of those.”
Maxwell spoke to Mr. Wilkes again. “Can you absolutely guarantee me that the weapon will not function?”
Mr. Wilkes took off his spectacles, bowed his head, and pinched the bridge of his nose with a hand. “No,” he admitted. “It might fly true.”
“Then let me make myself perfectly clear, gentlemen,” Maxwell said. “As long as there is the slightest chance of success, I will fire the Astra. Too many lives are depending on this.”
“David,” Shearer said gently. “What about the lives of your crew?”
The conversation was becoming tense, off balance. Everyone wanted to leave.
“Look me in the eye, Robert,” Maxwell said. “Look me in the eye, and tell me that in my position, you wouldn’t do exactly what I’m going to do.”
Shearer sighed and looked out across the ocean. “I would not ask you to be less than you are, Captain Maxwell.”
Maxwell addressed Wilkes. “Y
ou and the ship’s blacksmith have a matter of hours to make it as ready as possible. Get started.”
“I sent him to bed,” Mr. Wilkes said. “And I will not wake him again.”
“You will or I will,” Maxwell said.
“He was making it worse, Max,” Mr. Wilkes replied, rubbing his watery eyes. “He’s exhausted, and he can’t fix it. We’ve been trying for days. There’s a chance it might work now. If he keeps pounding on it, he will eliminate that chance.”
“Explain to me,” Maxwell said flatly, “precisely why my blacksmith cannot repair the problem. I thought this was simply a dent in the casing.”
Wilkes waved a dismissive hand and replaced his spectacles. “It’s not the dent. It’s the alloy. We concocted it specifically to propagate the spread of the white caesium. Your blacksmith doesn’t know how to work with it. It’s not his fault. No one has ever forged it before. We had to cast the casings.”
“So be it,” Maxwell said. “We will fire it as it is. Reassemble the casing.”
“Not now,” Mr. Wilkes said. He wasn’t being insubordinate. He was just being a tired old man who didn’t care about anything anymore. “I need some sleep before I reassemble the shell. It won’t take more than half an hour to do it, once I’m rested.”
With that, he simply turned and left, without waiting for Maxwell’s leave. Maxwell let him go. He and Captain Shearer stood side by side for a long time. Maxwell swore quietly.
Another trackless period of time slipped past them. Water washed against Kearsarge’s hull.
“Tell me, Robert,” Maxwell said quietly. “Have I become that thing we both swore to destroy?”
Kearsarge continued her eternal chuffing beneath them. Thick black smoke rolled from her funnels and roiled past above them, turning the night sky into a tumultuous but silent sea.
“Yes,” Shearer replied. “You have.”
After another long silence, Shearer rejoined, “I will retire, Captain Maxwell. You should do the same.”
“I take it the admiral’s quarters are satisfactory,” Maxwell said.
“They are,” Shearer replied, resting a hand on the rail.
Endless tracts of water passed them, rippling in Kearsarge’s deck lights, then fading away into oblivion behind them.
After a while, Shearer said, “We were young when we took that vow, much like your XO. We did not know what the world would demand of us.”
Maxwell was emotionless, cool as the heart of the sea. “When I fire the Astra, the world will lose the life it takes for granted, one way or another.”
Silence.
“Then it was not ours to keep, David,” Shearer said, and walked away across the deck.
W
Garret stood outside the door, staring at it. It was thick steel, banded and riveted like every door on the Kearsarge. It looked impregnable. For Garret it might as well have been. He knew he no more belonged inside than his hound dog, Babe, belonged in the Malvern mansion.
He was standing in the middle of the citadel in plain sight. Across from him was the work area for the five inch forty gun number four. The guys who manned it were sleeping in their hammocks all around the gun, just as Garret’s friends were sleeping right now around Nancy, at the forward end of the citadel. If an officer had seen Garret loitering around the doorway, they would certainly have asked him what he was doing there, and he would have had no good excuse.
Even though he could not remember the nightmare that had awakened him, it had rekindled this need, even if only inadvertently.
The dream had left him frazzled, discouraged, and for some reason, sick with worry for his wife and child. He had no idea how long would be the path to return to them, but he knew what he had to do to begin: he had to try to become the person he was meant to be. So he pushed through the door.
He’d never been in this room before, but the comfort of familiar surroundings blanketed him as he stepped across the seal. Small things inside his mind and heart began to realign as he walked around the room, savoring the smell of coal smoke and iron, letting his fingers trail over the well-worn tools. Hammers and tongs of all shapes and sizes hung in leather pockets and through holes in bench tops. Punches, gouges, and wedges were strewn about in various tall-sided bins. In the center of it all, backlit by the last embers in the dying forge, stood the anvil.
Garret was in Kearsarge’s smithy. Every battleship had one. Battleships were floating cities of iron and steel, so somebody aboard had to be able to repair the metal bits when they broke. Garret had been told that in modern ships, the smithy was becoming more of a machine shop. But Kearsarge’s keel had been laid in 1898. She was one of the last of the old battleships, so despite the beautiful new trip hammer and the electric grinder filling the corners, her smithy was simple and plain. It was, in truth, not that much different from Garret’s own shop. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it.
Though there was a blacksmith somewhere aboard, and he and his strikers sweated every day in this smithy, Garret began to suspect that he himself understood Kearsarge’s smithy in a way no one else did. Garret could feel apathy in the air. He could see it in the haphazard discard of the tools at the end of the day, the careless impact marks upon them: the man who worked in this shop was a blacksmith by trade, and that only. Garret was a blacksmith by birthright. Beneath his feet, Kearsarge creaked quietly in agreement.
For a brief instant, Garret felt what the Chief must feel each day, with each story he told, and with each night he slept in his hammock. It felt as if Kearsarge had kept a secret just for Garret, knowing the time would come when the world would need them both, together. Though he was three thousand miles away from everyone he loved, for a split second, Garret felt like he was home. It brought a lump to his throat.
He walked towards the forge, running his hand over the various items on the benches, savoring their touch. His hand fell on a large, curved plate. He picked it up. It was heavier than he expected, and it wasn’t iron. It was too dense and the wrong color. It was also warped along one edge. Someone had been working a dent, trying to pound it back into shape. They’d been doing a poor job of it, too.
Kearsarge’s blacksmith, whoever he was, had been forging like Garret’s Pa used to. Reshaping the metal by main force. True blacksmithing, however, wasn’t about forcing the metal to do anything. As Garret had long ago learned, forging was about listening to the metal, working it gently. Modern blacksmiths and industrialists had written thick books on the different methods of working different metals. Garret had always thought that was funny. People didn’t need instruction manuals, they just needed to listen, to pay attention to the elements beneath their hammer.
He smelled the plate, letting his wolf nose tell him what it could. It was an alloy of some sort, but nickel was the only element it contained with which he was familiar. It had a wrought iron-like feel to it, though there was no grain at all.
This was a metal with which he and his hammer had never danced. Though Garret would never tell anyone else, the simple interplay of man and metal was one of the most precious and beautiful things in his life. His Pa’s iron forgings were meant be used and abused, and when the strain of life eventually proved too much, to break and be mended again.
That’s why Pa and I always butted heads in the shop. That’s why he got so frustrated with me. Garret was the faster blacksmith, but only when he chose to be. The unnecessary time he’d spent on certain items had been a constant irritant to his practical father. I even tried to make garden trowels and hinges look nice.
Sometimes the world was dark and cruel, but Garret had survived because of beauty. It was in his hands and in his heart and in his mind. It made cold nights warmer. It made sins more forgivable. It made scars more bearable. Garret had been trying to make the world a better place to live, one fucking iron nail at a time.
He looked at his hands, dirty and rough from a childhood of working with iron, and now from scrubbing decks and mendi
ng ropes. His hands were certainly not beautiful, but they had created things that were. The first truly beautiful thing he’d made had probably been the iron rose he’d made for Molly. Looking back, it seemed like a lifetime ago, but it had been the beginning of everything. Mr. Malvern had taken the rose and displayed it to his wealthy business contacts all up and down the east coast, and they had come to Garret in droves.
They demanded iron creations of unparalleled beauty, even though they didn’t know what that meant. But Garret did. He had given himself over to the work, determined that each project would surpass the last. His imagination grew and bloomed as if it had been waiting all his life for the chance.
His last project, before the fateful night when he had run away from everyone and everything he loved, had never been finished. It was a dining room table, made of iron, stone, and glass. He had forged the legs of the table, which crossed beneath the middle of it, to look like sunken logs beneath a pond. He had forged iron fish, perfect in every detail, added real stone gravel, and then forged iron seaweed, standing up from the bottom, curved as if waving in a passing current. All of it was visible through the glass top, as though one was looking down through the surface of a stream.
Sarn would not have been able to finish it. It was undoubtedly still sitting there in the shop, incomplete, a testimony to Garret’s failure as a father and as a young man.
Garret looked at his hands, dirty and calloused, then at the simple piece of curved metal they held. He hadn’t picked up a hammer and tongs in months. He’d abandoned his purpose, and so beauty had begun to leave him. But there was some left, a little. Perhaps just enough.
If I use what I have, maybe it’ll let me begin again.
Ironically, when he was done, no one would say that the piece was beautiful, but that would only be because they would not know that, in order to repair it, Garret would have to do something far more difficult than the dining room table.
If I don’t make it home, this might be the last chance I get to do something only I can do.
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