Dead of Veridon (5 page)

The engine roared to life, incomprehensibly loud in the wake of our nervous silence. Wilson slammed the engine shut and bolted things down. He looked at me and started talking. His voice was lost in the noise. I shook my head and stepped forward. He leaned in to me.

"I got it going," he yelled.

"Okay," I yelled back. "Now what?"

He looked at me with a complete lack of understanding, then shrugged.

"We ship out of here?" he asked.

"The captain's dead, and we can't get topside. Can we control the ship from down here?"

He looked around the room, at the grim faces, the closed door, finally settling on the black gore on my hands and blade. Realization settled across his face.

"Oh. Hell."

I nodded. "Can we do it?"

"No," he said, shaking his head. "I've got engine power, but no rudder. We need the con for that."

"So you can go, but you can't turn."

"Yeah."

I looked around the room. The crew stood at mute attention, adrift without their captain. They looked like scared children.

"Anyone know which direction we were facing when we became mired in this... unpleasantness?"

"East south east," someone answered. "But we could have drifted."

"We've certainly drifted," another growled.

I grimaced. Drift could have us pointing down toward the waterfall, or maybe upriver. There was no way of knowing.

"Any volunteers to go out there and secure the con?" I asked. Silence, or as much silence as you could get in an engine room. I nodded. One guy stepped forward, his eyes on the deck.

"Sir, if you were... that is, if you go out there, the least we could do. The least I could do, I mean, is have your back. Sir."

"Brave of you. But hell if I'm going out there." I turned to Wilson and smiled. "Open it up all the way. Let it run for five minutes, then let's cut power and see where we are."

Wilson messed with some pistons, then wound up a flywheel and threw a gear. We lurched forward. There was a hammering chop from the prop. Bodies in our wake. It was a couple minutes until the sound stopped, and the engine stayed strong. I was just turning to Wilson to tell him to cut the power when a low, urgent drone filled the room. I looked around in confusion.

"What's..."

"Proximity horn!" someone yelled. Wilson swore and threw the engine off. We were still moving though, our speed bleeding off into the water. Another horn sounded, and another, each one more desperate, more panicked. I imagined the poor shipman, laying on the horn as we barreled at him.

"Brace!" I yelled.

We crashed into something, accompanied by a chorus of snapping wood and distant screams. The ship pitched crazily and I was thrown to the deck.

A long creaking groan settled over the ship, then we were still. I stood.

"Another ship? Or the docks?" I asked no one in particular. The crew, coming carefully to their feet, just stared around the room. These people were a special kind of worthless. The ship rumbled and shifted again, pitching at a bad angle to one side. There was more shouting outside, and the distinct, muffled roar of a shotgun blast. I found the blade that I had dropped when we hit, then went to the door.

"We can't stay here. Either we're sinking or the Badge is rushing the decks with some very sharp questions." I nodded to Wilson, then glanced at the rest of the crew. "Best get out of here while you can."

Wilson took my meaning and grabbed up a hammer. We were fighting our way out, whether it meant chopping down revenants or Badgemen. I threw open the portal.

A lazy slop of water sloshed over the frame and splashed against the engine. It hissed into steam as it cascaded over the machinery. The room quickly started to fill up. I ran up the stairs, which were little more than steps in a waterfall. The anansi was on my heels, the crew close behind.

We were sinking. The ship was pitched up at an angle, most of its starboard side underwater. We had hit a supply raft, and were only still afloat because we were lodged on its deck. The great flat expanse of the craft was taking on water as well, and the carefully stacked crates of its cargo were sprayed into a chaotic jumble. I ran up the uneven deck and hurled myself onto the raft. There was about a foot of water swirling lazily over the tarry wooden deck. The crew of the raft was struggling to dislodge our ship, to save their own. Crates were shifting slowly towards the sinking corner, further unbalancing the raft and adding water to the deck.

Our friends had come with us.

They wandered across the deck, killing and dying. The crew of the raft was having trouble coping with the two-fold disaster. Most had gone to deal with the problem they understood, and were clustered around our stricken craft, trying to dislodge it from their deck. Only a few were dealing with the more horrific problem, the score of living dead who were slowly killing their way across the raft.

I threw myself into the fight. A handful of the creatures were fighting their way past some toppled crates that had become an improvised barricade. I came at them from behind, cracking open skulls and severing long-dead limbs with my blade. The rest of the crew, with Wilson at their head, smashed into the revenants with frantic energy. They howled like madmen, desperate to get this nightmare behind them.

Together we broke the last of the revenants. Around us in the water were bodies, but apparently none of them were still animated. I was gathering my thoughts and looking for the captain of this raft when there was a horrific crashing sound and our doomed ship tore free from the raft. More crates bounced loose as we bobbed up, the water on our deck spilling over the edge as we righted. I ran to the side to watch the ship go down, and to see if anything came back up.

The ship slid quickly into the water, leaving nothing but flotsam and pearl-white corpses in its wake. Nothing moved. I was surrounded by the former crew, staring silently as the crew tower disappeared. The last thing we saw was the blank eyes of the captain's blown-out cabin, windows ringed in shattered glass and singed by his shotgun.

One of the raft's junior officers rushed up to us, his face flushed red with fury.

"What was the meaning of that! Ramming us, traveling at such speed in this fog! Have you lost your damn minds!" He was shuddering in his ill-fitting black suit, the cheap epaulets on his shoulders wrinkled from too much wear and not enough cleaning. "I demand - demand! - to speak to your captain."

I looked down at the blade in my hand. The black blood of the revenants was slick along its length, pooling and dripping onto the deck of the raft. As it fell it coagulated before my eyes, crystallizing into tiny gears that clattered noisily at my feet. I stared at the snowflake-delicate gears swirling peacefully in the pools of water left behind, mixing with the blood of the crew who had died in the fight, along with my own, leaking from numerous cuts and bruises.

"Captain's dead," I said to the frantic little man. I looked up at the swirling eddy that marked the last resting place of the ship, her captain, and much of her crew. Wilson stood next to me, his knuckles white on the grimy shaft of the hammer he had picked up.

"For now," he whispered, turning away.

Chapter Three

Draw Iron, Draw Steel

T
HERE WAS A
very brief but very sharp argument, when the captain of the raft decided that we should circle around and look for survivors. Wilson and I showed him the remains of the cog-dead on his deck, made it clear that there weren't survivors, and made some quiet threats about what would happen if he tried to turn the raft back. He took it poorly, but he also didn't touch the wheel. That's all I cared about.

The Ebd-side harbor ghosted into view through the thick morning fog. Our raft was trailing wreckage, a flotilla of broken wood and smashed crates and broken bodies bobbing in our wake. Wilson and I huddled on the front of the raft, as far away from the accident as we could manage. They brought us blankets and coffee. The raft wasn't fast, and I wanted nothing more than to be fast and off the water. The coffee mug in my hand shook, from the cold or the adrenalin. Not the fear.

"What are we going to do?" Wilson asked me, away from the rest of the crew. It was clear what they were going to do. Drink, and forget, and maybe find a new line of work away from the river. Sounded good to me.

"We're going to talk. Talk to Crane, talk to the elder Burn." I drank some coffee. "Maybe talk to Valentine."

"Valentine will be difficult, Jacob. He hasn't forgiven you. That man keeps his grudges like clockwork."

I snorted. He was clockwork, after all. "Maybe. But Crane went to a lot of trouble to keep this job out of Valentine's sight. Took a chance working with me, didn't he? I'm famously unreliable."

"You're famously in trouble, Jacob. Not the same thing." Wilson readjusted the blanket across his multitude of shoulders and stared at the slowly approaching docks. "Not the same thing at all."

"Still. Be interested to hear what Valentine knows of the guy." I stood up and stretched my legs. The many wounds I'd taken in our fight were starting to get stiff. "Be more interested to hear what the guy has to say for himself."

"Yeah. Me too." Wilson grinned, and I shivered a little more. Wilson was kind of creepy when he smiled. All those teeth, small and sharp and so incredibly... uncivilized. "But I think..."

There was a pause of some seconds, then he stood.

"Jacob?" he asked.

"Yeah?" I was staring down into the water, trying to not see floating faces and pearl-white fists grubbing to the surface. I blinked and it was just water again. Turned to Wilson, then looked where he was pointing.

The docks were swarming with Badge. Most of the harbor was shut down, the workers and shipmen shoved away from the water and cordoned off. The whole fleet bobbed quietly on the water, tied down and shuttered.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"After what we saw?" Wilson asked. "Gods know."

Signal flags came out as we got close. Quarantine. The raft shuddered to a halt, and a rapid semaphore flashed from boat to shore. I didn't know the language well enough to follow it, but I saw the quarantine fly a couple times. Wilson shook my shoulder.

"Over there," he said. There were a couple ships that looked poorly treated, anchored off the dock. One of them was burned down to the shell. There were bodies across the deck. Skin white as pearls.

"Looks like we're going to be famous," I muttered.

"Famously in trouble," Wilson agreed.

An impact siren spun up behind us, out in the fog. A smallboat, narrow and fast, came tearing toward the docks. It ripped past us, its engine groaning. The deck was a horror show of gorey crewmen and white-skinned dead, struggling. The crew held the tiny cabin, and that at bloody cost. The captain had his fist down on the throttle, all ahead full, and no amount of flagging was going slow him down.

The crowds of Badge on the dock began yelling and ordering and counterordering. There was a warning shot, then another, then a firing line was drawn up. A crackling report and the water and wood of the ship danced with lead. The throttle was still down.

The smallboat bounced off an anchored barge, scraping metal plates with a wrenching sound that screamed across the water. That slowed the vessel, but still it crashed into the docks and skipped up into the air, collapsing onto a barricade of crates that the Badge set up.

The officers were quick. The firing line reformed, bolstered by other units. They advanced, weapons hot, firing as they marched. The ship danced, the bodies got redder, sparks glittered whenever lead struck metal. Not a minute it took, not more than a handful of heartbeats. Then they stopped firing, and not a living thing remained on that ruined ship.

"I'm not sticking around for that," I said. Wilson agreed. Panic had a firm handle on those men. Panic and fear, and a deep belief that such things could be handled with firearms. I shucked my blanket and crept to the side of the barge, out of sight of the docks. When we were good and close, Wilson and I slipped into the water and started to swim.

Tough thing to do, to slip into that cold, black water after what we had just been through. All the way in I kept imagining dead fingers slipping around my legs, kept seeing bloated faces just beneath me in the water. I fought the urge to go straight in. We swam to one of the burned-out wrecks that were tied down just beyond the docks. The water around them was thick with ash and wreckage. Stopped long to rest our lungs, refusing to look down into the water, our arms draped over the charred remains of a barrel.