15 EVASIVE ACTION

Engine Room

The Emperor of the Seas

May 17

1900 hours

Three of the engineers were carrying crowbars, which they wielded like clubs. The fourth had a gun. He seemed to be in charge, although English was not his first language. “Put hands in air!” he demanded.

We ran instead. This was not my idea. Catherine bolted first, and the rest of us had no choice but to follow her.

The engineer with the gun promptly opened fire. There was plenty of machinery around to protect us, but since almost everything was made out of metal—including the walls—the bullets ricocheted about wildly.

“Careful!” Catherine screamed at them. “You’ll damage the artifacts!”

“And us!” I added. “Don’t damage us!”

The engineer kept firing as we ran. More bullets pinged off the metal surfaces. Pipes ruptured, venting steam, which created more cover for us, but also turned the engine room into a sauna—and made it hard for us to see. Suddenly, we found ourselves trying to run through a fog, surrounded by dangerous machinery and even more dangerous enemies. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the floor was moving.

The storm outside appeared to have gotten worse just in time to complicate our escape. It would have been challenging enough to flee through an obstacle course of steam and gadgetry, but now we had to struggle to keep our balance as well.

Fortunately, the engineers were in the same situation we were. From somewhere in the fog, I heard the distinct sound of someone running headlong into a turbine, followed by cursing in a language I didn’t know.

Catherine and Erica simultaneously recognized that the steam was an advantage and decided to make more of it. Each snatched up a wrench and deftly knocked the valves off other pipes, which resulted in more steam venting into the room, further concealing our escape.

“What was it you realized earlier?” Erica asked me casually, as though we were merely on an errand at the drugstore, rather than running for our lives. She had a habit of doing this. It was a little bit unnerving, as it always gave me the feeling that maybe Erica didn’t think I was going to survive long enough to tell her the information later.

“Murray knew all about this reactor!” I explained, clambering over some pipes. “About the housing and how it was bolted down and everything!”

“So?” Mike vaulted over the same set of pipes with much more grace than I had.

“Why would Murray know about this unless it was important to him?” I asked. “Murray’s not the kind of guy who just happens to read up on shipboard nuclear reactors. Or who reads up on anything, really. Plus, the fact that this ship even has a reactor is supposed to be a secret. His plot must have something to do with it.”

“Nice thinking, Benjamin!” Catherine said, in a way that made me feel fantastic. “Oh, and duck.”

I did, and she deftly lobbed her wrench over me. It whacked one of the angry engineers on the head as he emerged from the fog and promptly rendered him unconscious.

“Thanks,” I said.

The other engineers all seemed to have lost their way in the fog. We heard them shouting to each other—or possibly at us—as they bumbled around in it.

We arrived at the reactor, ascended the iron rungs on the housing, and scrambled back through the emergency hatch into the space under the stage.

While we had been down in the engine room, the evening’s theatrical performance had begun. Now, instead of chaos under the stage, there was military precision. It was quiet, save for the overture music playing in the theater above us. Apparently, given the rocking seas, it had been decided that the actors would not be suspended from wires; instead, the entire cast was assembled beneath the stage, waiting silently to be lifted up on one of the many risers for the big opening number. There were dozens of people dressed as a menagerie of sea creatures: merfolk, tropical fish, sharks, octopuses, crustaceans, and what might have been either jellyfish or very large plankton (I wasn’t quite sure). They all goggled silently as Catherine, Mike, Erica, and I suddenly emerged into this space.

Below us, the engineer with the gun emerged from the fog and took a shot at us. It sparked off the hatch, provoking startled gasps from the actors.

Mike and I slammed the hatch shut before another shot could be fired, but there was no way to lock it, given that it was an emergency escape.

We hurried for the wings of the stage but found them blocked by the ship’s security guards. Hulking men bearing Tasers were waiting for us on both sides, boxing us in.

“Oh bother,” Catherine said with a sigh. “The engineers must have called for backup.” She plucked a knife from her utility belt to defend herself.

Erica did the same.

I reached for my mace, only to discover that I had lost it, probably after being thrown overboard. In fact, my entire utility belt was empty, save for a soggy packet of gum.

However, there was a bin full of weapons close by: the swords and broadaxes for the musical’s many battle scenes. I quickly grabbed a broadax—which turned out to be made of Styrofoam. In retrospect, this made sense; the actors didn’t want to fight with real weapons for fear that someone might accidentally have a body part lopped off. But at the moment, it was disappointing. The best I could do was wield it menacingly and hope that it fooled the guards.

By my side, Mike took a sword and did the same thing.

For a few seconds, it worked. The guards all hesitated in their approach, wary of the weaponry each of us held.

“Drop those,” one of the guards demanded.

“Shhh!” a mermaid hissed. “There’s a performance underway!”

Even though the woman was dressed as a half fish, she was still quite imposing. “Sorry!” the guard said, and then dropped his voice to a whisper to threaten us. “There’s no escape. You might as well surrender.”

“Why don’t you surrender?” Catherine suggested. “Put down your weapons, and we won’t cause you grievous bodily harm.” Despite the fact that Catherine looked as frightening as a rabbit, she sounded scary. The guards seemed to be seriously considering following her orders and might have even done it if one of the cast members hadn’t decided to get involved.

A burly octopus-man grabbed Erica from behind, apparently under the impression that, as a teenage girl, she would be easiest to subdue. It took him exactly one second to discover that he had made a terrible error in judgment, as Erica promptly flipped him over her shoulder and dropped him to the floor like a sack of concrete.

But this distracted Catherine, Mike, and me, and the guards leapt at the chance to attack. The one facing me fired his Taser, but I had honed my reflexes at spy school—especially the ones that involved escaping harm—and sprang out of the way. The Taser prongs struck an unfortunate hammerhead shark behind me, who cried out in pain as electricity surged through him, and then collapsed.

“Shhhh!” warned the mermaid again.

The overture concluded dramatically, and one of the risers lifted the first group of actors up to the stage to begin the show. The octopus Erica had poleaxed happened to be one of them.

Their appearance above us was met with thunderous applause. If anyone was bothered by the prone octopus, I couldn’t tell.

Around me, Catherine, Erica, and Mike were fending off their attackers. But I couldn’t really focus on them as the guard who had fired the Taser now came at me bare-handed. I swung my Styrofoam broadax in a desperate attempt to scare him off, but he didn’t falter, and my weapon broke harmlessly on his skull. I dodged him at the last second, and he barreled past, taking out three hapless lobsters.

Not far away from me, the engineers popped the hatch back open and started to climb out—although they paused in surprise upon seeing all the pandemonium around them. This gave me the opportunity to flip the hatch back closed. It clanged down on their heads, and they dropped back through the hatch into the engine room as though they had been bopped in a game of whack-a-mole.

While I was proud of this move, it left me open to an attack from another guard. I spun out of the way again and might have eluded him had the ship not lurched violently.

It had been rocking subtly all along, but this movement was something different altogether. We had most likely slammed into a very large wave; it felt as though we were all in a car that had just hit a speed bump at sixty miles an hour. I tumbled to the floor—as did half of the cast assembled under the stage.

And then the section of the floor I was lying on lifted into the air.

It was time for more actors to make an entrance. Only, most of the actors who were supposed to be on the riser had just tumbled off it—whereas I had fallen onto it. So I suddenly found myself at center stage before two thousand eager audience members, surrounded by toppled seahorses.

On the stage around me, things weren’t going well. The big opening dance number had gotten off to an extremely rocky start—which might have been the case even if my friends and I hadn’t barged into it. The actors who had originally planned to spend the scene suspended by wires didn’t appear to know the choreography—and those that were merfolk couldn’t really dance anyhow; since they had their legs bound together inside their fish tails, all they could really do was shimmy and take mincing steps. Their balance was precarious to begin with, and now the ship’s most recent jolt had toppled most of them.

Plus, there was still a large octopus-man lying unconscious to stage right. No one had seemed to know what to do except dance around him.

Now I emerged into the midst of the chaos—at the exact spot where, I later learned, the lead mermaid was supposed to arrive and belt out a power ballad about how she intended to rise above discrimination against her people. (It was titled “Something’s Fishy—and It’s Me.”) But the mermaid was currently sprawled out somewhere below, while I was now blinded with a spotlight at center stage.

The audience applauded wildly, expecting something incredible. Thousands of eyes focused on me at once. The music swelled dramatically.

It was absolutely terrifying. My first thought was that I would rather be back beneath the stage, where people were trying to kill me, instead of in front of an audience.

The music for the power ballad kicked in.

I ran.

For a brief moment, I considered dancing offstage, so it would look like part of the show, but I quickly realized this probably wouldn’t help—and I would only end up looking like an idiot. The audience gasped, apparently thinking I was an actor who had been struck by a massive attack of stage fright. Sadly, I didn’t even get offstage as fast as I had hoped, because the ship was still heaving about in the rough seas. I stumbled over two different merfolk on the way.

Behind me, the mermaid’s understudy tried to save the day, emerging from the chorus to sing, “In my life I have one wish: to no longer be half-fish.” But before she could get any further, an enormous wave made the ship pitch dramatically. An extremely large cast member dressed as an orca fell on top of her, squashing her flat.

At this point, the stage crew seemed to realize that the show was an unmitigated disaster and dropped the curtain. It thumped down just as I reached the wings.

Bjorn Turok was waiting there for me.

He cuffed me on the side of the head. And everything went black.