Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts (38 page)

There had to be a way.

He set his heading, and locked down the wheel before scanning the horizon with the navigator’s telescope. Satisfied that he wasn’t about to collide with anything, he set off for the gun deck.

The stairs down aggravated his joints, but the pain wasn’t enough to worry him. He’d found that, by simply working his muscles from time to time, he could loosen up his limbs. A few moments of agony was better than seizing up altogether. Eventually the stiffness would diminish. The burning sensations had almost gone from his toughened flesh, although he hadn’t yet become accustomed to the feel of his rough grey skin under his own fingers. It felt as if he’d been boiled in a suit of leathers. He wondered briefly if he was arrow-proof, before dismissing the thought. The important thing was that his wits remained intact, for he had a problem to solve.

Amber reflections played across the bone arches in the gun deck. The emperor’s cannons gleamed as if they had been forged yesterday. Granger found the smell of warm metal relaxing. He’d spent many years on many such decks, if not on one as fine as this.
Twenty-four cannons: Imperial Ferredales retrofitted with flintlock mechanisms.
He could load them all by hand, although it might take him a couple of hours to do so, and he could use the lanyards to fire them one after another, but if he was down here in the gun deck, then he couldn’t be at the helm. And fire-power was nothing without tactics.

Granger paced the deck. Given the time available to him, it seemed unlikely that he could devise and build a mechanical method for pulling the lanyards from the bridge. What if he simply removed them altogether, replacing the ropes with fuse cord running directly into the flintlocks? He’d seen spools of cord down in the powder deck. That was certainly much simpler. Fuse cord could burn at up to ten feet a second, depending on its composition. It would be simple enough to run a length of it from the bridge, down through the pipe ducts, and use a cigar to light it.

Just like in Kol Gu, ’’38.

He smiled at the memory of that campaign.
Three hundred enemy goldtooths coming up the hill towards our camp, a hundred fuse cords and three chemical matches
. Hu had sent them to eliminate a Kol Gu Archipelago warlord, just the latest in a line of pirates who had fought each other over that shrinking island group. Granger could no longer remember his name. Creedy had used two of the matches to light his cigar, before Banks pointed out that the enemy was still at least an hour away. That had been almost four years before Weaverbrook, before Imperial Infiltration Unit 7 became known as the Gravediggers.
Banks, Springer, Lombeck, Swan, Tummel, Longacre.
So many faces that existed only in his memories.

Fuse cord.

The spools in the powder deck turned out to be a disappointment. Most of the cord was the cheap, low-grade stuff used in mining, with a burn rate of perhaps half a foot per second. The distance from the bridge down through the pipe ducts to the gun deck had to be at least a hundred and twenty feet. One twenty feet at half a foot per second gave him four minutes between the time he ignited the fuse and the cannon’s detonation, which was hardly ideal for a pitched battle. What’s more, he’d have to figure out a way of insulating one cord from another within the pipe ducts, while allowing them each enough oxygen to burn.

Only three hundred feet of the fuse cord was of higher fast-burn grade, which would allow him to rig two cannons to fire with a twelve-second delay between ignition and detonation.

It wasn’t good enough.

Granger carried the spools of quick cord back up to the gun room. There had to be better solution. He began the heavy work of loading and tamping each of the cannons. He had hours ahead to figure it out.

Briana Marks drew her hair out of the collar of her white woollen tunic, and let it fall over her shoulders. She was standing at the back of the
Irillian Herald
’s wheelhouse, quietly watching the crew at work. Her captain, Erasmus Howlish, was leaning over the map table, speaking quietly to the navigator about their course. A former Losotan privateer, Howlish still bore the raised white lines across the back of his hands where a Guild torturer had once applied his lash. He wore his black hair in a long plait in defiance of protocol, but Briana allowed him this small conceit. One had to be flexible when employing one’s former enemies.

The helmsman stood rigidly at the wheel, his eyes fixed on the horizon beyond the
Herald
’s foredeck. She was an old Valcinder man-o’-war, refitted in Awl to provide the sort of luxury accommodation expected by the Guild, but Briana cared little for the silks and silver and teak down in the staterooms. She preferred the simple functionality of the wheelhouse. Its position high on the quarterdeck gave her an uninterrupted view of the surrounding sea. This hemisphere of Unmer duskglass contained nothing but the ship’s wheel console, a navigation station and a curved steel bench, over which Briana had placed her whaleskin cloak. The Unmer glass served to filter out much of the late-afternoon sun, along with most of the fury of the wind and sea. Through the glass dome she could see the rise and plunge of copper-coloured waves as gales whipped across the Mare Lux, driving amber breakers. Spume battered the
Herald
’s bow, but here in the dome it remained warm and peaceful.

Two telepaths, one on each of the
Herald
’s sister men-o’-war, had been relaying information to her throughout their search for Maskelyne. Briana knew her distant compatriots only as Pascal and Windflower, both young Losotan yellow-grade psychics who had been attached to the Guild navy since completion of their training. She had probably seen them numerous times at the school in Awl, but for now they remained disembodied voices to her. She had no desire to learn more about them than their names and rank. En route to the Whispering Valley, they had happened upon a strange ironclad vessel a few minutes south of the Border Waters. It was an Unmer deadship of archaic design using a makeshift spinnaker to tack south – and it was being captained by the very man they had been looking for.

Briana’s own ship was still three leagues to the south-east, and it frustrated her that she couldn’t see the pair of red-hulled Haurstaf craft converging on the ironclad.

An Unmer deadship.

They informed her that it looked like an icebreaker – perhaps one of the very ships sent south from Pertica to join the Unmer fleet at the battle at Awl. If so, nobody had seen its type at sea for almost three hundred years. Briana reached out with her mind, feeling for the presence of Unmer consciousness.

She heard her companions psytalking in hushed tones, but she didn’t bother to listen in. She felt for the ship, searching for any psychic presence aboard. And then she noticed something odd. An echo? Not quite. It was
almost
a reverberation, like the resonant silence an Unmer tuning fork makes when its tone is below human hearing.

Are either of you sensing this?

Sensing what?
Windflower said.

There are no Unmer aboard
, Pascal added.
I’ve already checked.

Briana sent her thoughts back across the sea.
Follow the ironclad, but hold off until I arrive.

Yes, sister
, Windflower said.

She’s not going anywhere against these winds
, Pascal remarked impatiently.
How long will you be?

Briana shot back her reply,
As long as it takes to get there.

Driven forward by the same strong southerlies that were impeding the deadship’s progress, the
Irillian Herald
sped across the Mare Lux. Her mainsail and spinnaker billowed; the rigging creaked. Fine metallic spray blew across her top deck. At noon the ship’s navigator struggled to take sight on the pitching boards. The afternoon remained bright, but blustery. A pod of nomios broke the surface of the waters to port and followed the Haurstaf ship for over an hour, flashing through the waves like chrome shuttles. Briana stood on the foredeck, scanning the northern horizon. She remained in contact with her Guild sisters, but there was little more to report. Maskelyne had retreated below decks and seemed content to remain out of sight. The deadship continued her creeping zigzag progress south, while her crew made no attempt to contact their pursuers. Finally, as the sun sank towards the edge of the world and the western sea turned a coppery-red, the
Herald
’s lookout gave a shout.

At first, Briana could see nothing, and then in the distance she spotted the yellow-white glow of sailcloth bobbing in the slanting sunlight. The two Haurstaf ships were coming about, following the darker iron vessel as she tacked to the south-east. There was a sudden commotion around Briana as the
Herald
’s crew turned the ship to intercept.

They came upon the deadship at dusk. Briana stood on the bridge, coordinating between Howlish and the captains of the other two Haurstaf vessels. As the
Herald
ran from the south, the rearmost Guild vessel,
Trumpet,
passed Maskelyne’s stern, on a broad reach that caused her to lift and crash through the wave tops, while her sister,
Radiant Song
beat hard to cover the western flank. At Briana’s orders,
Trumpet
fired a warning shot down the ironclad’s port side, but the deadship merely continued on her present course and speed.

‘We’ll have to turn about, ma’am,’ Howlish said. ‘Or run the length of her guns at close range.’

Are those guns likely to be operational?

He made no reply.

‘Are those guns likely to be operational?’ she repeated, aloud this time. ‘That ship doesn’t look like much.’

‘I’d rather not find out, ma’am,’ Howlish replied.

‘What do you suggest?’

The captain thought for a moment. ‘She can’t outrun us. With that spinnaker, it’s amazing she’s making any progress at all. So she’ll need to barge a path between us. I imagine she’ll probably snap tack to put her stern against the
Song
and her broadside to the
Trumpet
’s bow. That would keep two of the three cannon batteries out of line.’ He scratched his nose. ‘That’s what I would do, ma’am.’

‘And how should we respond?’

‘The fact that Maskelyne is using that spinnaker suggests that his engines are dead. It might be advisable to have the
Song
haul off to starboard and chainshot the ironclad’s sail. That will take away what little manoeuvrability she has left.’ He nodded to himself. ‘It would give the captain a good reason to cooperate with us.’ He inclined his head towards the waves. ‘Using the corvus will be risky in these seas.’

Briana nodded. ‘All right.’ She sent the orders to the psychics aboard the other two vessels.

After a moment, the
Song
began to turn, bringing her cannons to bear on Maskelyne’s ironclad. A series of flashes ran along the side of the Haurstaf vessel, followed a heartbeat later by the crackling boom of artillery fire. The Haurstaf shot tore through the ironclad’s sail, reducing it to ribbons.

Smoke drifted over the waters.

‘She’s trying to turn now,’ Captain Howlish remarked. ‘We’ll see.’

The remains of the Unmer ship’s spinnaker began to luff and snap. Briana could see Maskelyne’s crew rushing about on deck, trying to pinch their rudely rigged sail, but it was hopeless. The ironclad had stalled mid-way through her turn.

‘She’s in irons,’ Howlish said. ‘Shall we haul close?’

‘What about her guns?’

‘She’s dead in the water,’ Howlish said. ‘Maskelyne’s only hope now is rescue.’

‘Very well, let’s board her.’

‘He might try to board us,’ the captain added. ‘You might want to let the
Song
or the
Trumpet
approach first.’

‘We have the largest force here, Captain,’ Briana replied. ‘Have them stand at arms.’

‘As you say, ma’am.’

Howlish did as Briana ordered; he sailed the
Herald
around the stern of the deadship and then hauled her in close to the wind. He ordered her crew to lower their own spinnaker and then to ready themselves to repel boarders. The Unmer vessel did not fire her strange cannons. Indeed, as the distance between the two ships closed it became apparent that those weapons were little more than pillars of slag. Maskelyne’s crew had no means with with to defend themselves against the Haurstaf men-o’-war. Howlish’s long experience as a privateer became apparent, for he managed to heave to within three yards of the stricken ship.

The deadship did not appear to have sustained any additional damage from the attack, but Maskelyne’s crew, under the shadow of that scorched metal tower, were nevertheless eager to secure the grapples thrown over by the Guild mariners. Briana joined Howlish amidships just as the Haurstaf vessel dropped her corvus, the iron spikes clanging against the derelict’s metal-plated deck. No shots were fired; indeed, not one of Maskelyne’s crew was even armed.

The metaphysicist himself appeared on deck. He took one look at the tattered sail, then turned to the Haurstaf vessel and vaulted up onto the boarding ramp. He strode over to the
Herald
without a care in the world, forcing the Guild mariners already on the ramp to retreat.

Briana had seen him once before, many years ago at Hu’s court. Although they’d never spoken, back then she’d been struck by the confidence and vigour in his stride. He’d been a scholar of wide renown among the Losotan privileged classes, a man of considerable means and an Unmer expert who had advised the emperor himself on several occasions. Yet this creature standing before her now was a shade of that former man. He was dirty, unshaven, stooped and painfully gaunt. His dark eyes glanced everywhere, as though his former arrogance had been replaced by a nervous and unsettled energy.