Tale of the Thunderbolt (6 page)

The rest of the shelf held mostly unread Kurian propaganda and service bulletins.

There was a quiet knock at the door.

“Naturally,” Valentine said to himself and two hundred pounds of alcoholic stupor a leg's length away. He rose and opened the door.

A twelve-year-old boy in a uniform two sizes too big for him stood in the corridor. The crew called him and his twin brother Peaone and Peatwo, being identical twins sent to sea in the care of their uncle, one of the petty officers. The captain, sick of not being able to tell them apart, flipped a coin and had all the hair shaved from Peaone's young head. Under a messy shock of sun-white hair, Peatwo looked up at Valentine with piercing blue eyes.

“Sir, the captain's passing the word for you, Mr. Rowan. He wants to see you in his cabin.”

“Tell the captain I'm coming.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Peatwo said, turning and moving six feet up the passageway toward the captain's door. The captain was not the sort of man to just knock on the wall or come himself.

Valentine retied his boots, wishing he had had just five minutes out of them. He walked the short distance to the captain's cabin. He smoothed out his uniform unconsciously and knocked.

“Come,” a sharp voice answered.

Captain Saunders fancied himself a species of tough old seahawk, but to Valentine, he seemed more like a rather aged rooster. The heavy wattles hanging under his chin were hardly hawklike, and the full head of gray hair that was the captain's pride and joy was brushed up into a bantam's pompadour. Perhaps something hawkish flickered in the stare of his hard hazel eyes, between which a beak of a nose matching that of the mightiest of eagles, if not a toucan, arched out in its Roman majesty.

“You passed the word for me, sir?” Valentine asked. The captain was in one of his work-all-night fits, and Valentine tried his best to look alert.

“Ahh, Captain Rowan. Are the marines ready to go to sea?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Good. You'll be glad to know we'll be leaving in the morning — the fuel pump is repaired. I had to light a fire under the Chief, but if properly motivated, the man can work wonders.”

Valentine blanked his expression. He looked around at the small day cabin. The captain sat behind a massive desk that must have been brought in sections, then reassembled. It dwarfed the other chairs in the room. A few pictures, all of Captain Saunders in various stages of his career or of ships he had officered, decorated the walls. “Glad to hear it, sir. The waiting has been hard.”

“It's finally over. Keen to get to sea, I hope? Ready for the smell of burning sail?”

“At your order, sir. One thing though, sir. I still haven't had any luck finding a reliable team of rangers. Something must be going on inland. I've tried through channels and I've tried out of channels, but all I can find are kids or old men,” he said, more than half-telling the truth for once. “The Grog labor team is a combat squad on paper. I'd like to just keep them, sir.”

“What about quartering them? We're crowded enough — the men won't share with Grogs.”

“We can rig some kind of shelter in the well deck, sir. Tents would do.”

Captain Saunders thought for a moment. “Very well, they can eat the leftovers. Stretch the stores. I understand Grogs aren't too particular. Put that foreman of theirs in charge of squaring them away. I'd like to depart at dawn, and you'll be welcome on the bridge at six a.m. We'll take her out right after breakfast.”

Close to two hours of sleep! Valentine sagged in relief. “Thank you, sir.”

“One thing, though, Captain Rowan. I'd like you and the exec to do a final weapons inventory. You'll do your marines and the small arms locker, and he'll cover the heavy weapons. Wouldn't want to reach Jamaica and find your men's rifles had been left dockside by accident. ‘For the want of a nail,' am I right?”

“Yes, sir.” Valentine said, the prospect of sleep evaporating like a desert mirage. “Speaking of small arms, I had to give over my revolver for barter for some parts the Chief needed. I'll need a new pistol from the ship's arms.”

“Rowan, you have to learn to throw your weight a little more. Greasing palms with your sidearms . . . Still, if it helped get us to sea, I'm grateful. Anyway, get that inventory done. That was item one, business. Item two is pleasure: I'd like your company at dinner tonight. A tradition of mine, to celebrate the beginning of what we all hope will be a successful cruise. Mr. Post is invited, too, of course. Number One uniforms, please. That will encourage your lieutenant to clean himself up.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Valentine said.

“That's all for now. See to your men, Rowan.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Valentine shut the cabin door softly behind him and began his day's work.

 

He hardly noticed the ship pulling away from the dock and moving downriver, so busy was he with final preparations. The executive officer, Lieutenant Worthington, started on the heavy weapons inventory then begged off as the engines were turned over to attend to duties on the bridge. Valentine, who had little to do with the actual handling of the ship, was glad to be rid of him and offered to finish Worthington's part of the barely begun job. The exec, though two years older than he, had not seen much action and assumed Valentine to be a man of vast experience, to be a captain of marines in his mid-twenties. He had the annoying habit of wanting particulars of the various real — and faked — incidents in Valentine's “Captain Rowan” dossier. Valentine did not wish to discuss the faked events out of fear of slipping up on some detail, and the memories of the real incidents seen from the sidelines in the service of Kur troubled him too much to want to talk about them for the entertainment of a callow fellow officer.

Inventory and inspection done, he just had time to change into his best uniform before dinner.

Naturally, the dinner began with a toast over the cloth-covered folding table that had been set up for the meal. Worthington raised his glass of wine, an import brought all the way from Western Mexico. The captain and exec sat opposite each other, stiff in their crisp black uniforms, the captain's solid-gold buttons engraved with illuminati eye-and-anchor. Valentine and Post in their brass-buttoned navy blue filled the other places on the square table.

“The
Thunderbolt,
Queen of the Gulf,” Worthington intoned as they raised their glasses. Saunders sipped with a connoisseur's thoughtful appreciation; Post drained his glass in a single motion; Worthington barely tasted his. Valentine took a welcome mouthful, grateful just to be off his feet.

The wine hit him hard, and he fought to keep from falling asleep in his soup. A winter salad followed. The captain and the exec did most of the talking, discussing the pilot's navigation of the treacherous, shifting sandbars at the mouth of the Mississippi and the balance of the stores on the ship. Valentine was content to eat his main course, a fresh filet of Texas beef smothered in onions and mushrooms, in exhausted silence. Post, who had been encouraged by Valentine to mend his best uniform and press it to celebrate the freedom of being at sea and away from the humid air of New Orleans, finished the bottle and started on another of less illustrious vintage.

“Captain Rowan?” Captain Saunders's voice broke in through the mists of Valentine's fatigue.

“Sir?” Valentine asked, looking to his left at the captain.

“Lieutenant Worthington asked you a question. About the Grogs?”

“My apologies, Lieutenant,” Valentine said, bringing himself back to the dinner with an effort. “I'm not myself tonight. What was the question?”

“Seasickness, Captain Rowan?” Worthington asked, a smile that was half sneer creeping across his face. “We're still on the river.”

“Probably.”

“I just wanted your opinion on Uncle's Grogs,” the exec continued. “We were really hoping for some rangers for the inshore scouting work.” The men on the ship called Ahn-Kha “Uncle,” and Ahn-Kha was too well mannered among their enemies to correct them. In the Ozark Free Territory, he would have flattened someone who could not be bothered to learn to pronounce his name correctly.

“Uncle says that they are combat trained. I'll vouch for his word.”

“It's your responsibility, of course,” Captain Saunders said.

By now Valentine knew that the phrase was Saunders-speak meaning that if the Grogs failed in some way, the blame would be passed to Valentine.

“I'm sure we can keep them busy on the ship,” the exec said. “I've never had any experience with Grogs in combat. I've heard they leave something to be desired.”

“Properly armed and with a decent leader, I'll put them up against anyone,” Valentine said. “I've seen them in action, once they sink their teeth into a fight, the only way to stop them is to kill them.” He did not add to the speech that his experience mostly came from fighting against the Gray Ones, rather than with them.

“But as scouts, Rowan, as scouts?” the exec asked.

“Like dogs who can shoot guns. Fine marksmen. Good eyes and ears. Not a whole lot smarter than a dog, though. Decision making isn't their forte; they'll come back and hoot at you to let you know they've found something. Uncle can make more sense out of their tongue than I can.”

“Very well, Captain Rowan,” Saunders said. “That settles my mind, knowing you are confident in the matter. I'm sure they'll be an asset.”

The rest of the evening passed in the captain telling stories to his captive audience. Valentine leaned back in his chair, keeping his eyes open while his brain turned itself off. He shifted his gaze to Post, who had restricted his conversation to a few polite phrases during dinner. His lieutenant remained silent, failing to murmur appreciatively at Saunders's yarns. Post finished the second bottle of wine before turning to the brandy.

 

It was the third day out, and life on the plodding
Thunderbolt
had already turned into routine. The first light of dawn saw the Grogs hosing down and cleaning the decks. They devoured their morning fare with work-sharpened appetite. The cook, his mate, and the officers' steward then cleaned up the kitchen and prepared the meals for everyone else. The men tolerated the presence of the Grogs on the ship, especially since they took on so many of the petty labors, but drew the line at eating with them, or indeed sharing the same space. Grogs in tight quarters smell (even to noses not sharpened by the Lifeweavers) like a kennelful of mating ferrets, so they lived on deck in shelters rigged to the bulkheads of the forward well deck.

With their routine duties and weapons drill done, Ahn-Kha gave them leisure to fish. The rod-and-reel obsession began when a pair of flying fish broke the surface, leaving furrows in the calm ocean in their dash away from the ship. The Grogs hooted until Ahn-Kha reported that his team wanted to know if the “sea chickens” were good to eat and how they could catch them. Both Valentine and Ahn-Kha were strangers to deep-sea fishing, so he asked around the crew until one old bluewater man, less fastidious than the rest as to who he associated with, descended to the “Grog deck” to teach them how to use the ship's store of fishing poles and reels. Afterwards, the Grogs spent every spare moment fashioning lures, rods, and reels. Valentine prevailed on the captain to slow the ship to a crawl for an hour a day, when the garbage would be dumped overboard and the Grogs, wild with excitement foreign to human fishermen, pulled in all they could catch. It was just as well, for Grog appetites could tax the ship's stores on the three-month patrol.