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When DeCarde entered the troop HQ section compartment, he found Virtanen waiting for him.
“My people are settled in and are raring to resume action station drills. Something about fighting a sea-going, steam-powered Q ship is just nuts to my Marines. And the Thebans? They can’t get enough of anything, period. Ready, sir?”
“Take me on the grand tour.”
They started with the starboard midship battery, whose camouflage plate was in the closed position, hiding its contents. It boasted a twelve-millimeter, six-barrel calliope — DeCarde remembered reading the weapons were, for an unknown reason, called Gatling guns long ago — and a rapid-fire one-hundred and five-millimeter cannon. Between them, they could sink anything that floated on Hatshepsut and even breach stone walls should any defended town on Aksum prove hostile.
Virtanen slapped the calliope.
“When this baby goes off, it’s as if the Almighty is standing by your ears, tearing the Infinite Void apart. Four thousand rounds a minute if we want to empty the ship’s ammo lockers. We have ball and high explosive, both with one in five tracers. Granted, it’s not plasma, but will make mincemeat of the Saqqarans or anyone else stupid enough to try us on. Electrically powered, though, so if we lose the generators, that rate of fire becomes zero rounds a minute. Both guns are controlled from over there.” He pointed at a thick window behind them. “One crew per. Ammo is gravity fed from above via those tubes and spent casings are funneled below for recycling. Waste not, want not.”
Virtanen showed DeCarde the inside of the control room, then said, “The port-side battery is a mirror image of this one.”
“In that case, no need to visit it. How about up in the bow?”
“Follow me, sir.”
They headed forward and climbed up the starboard stairs to emerge in another enclosed compartment, this one with a single calliope sitting silently at its heart.
“We’re in the forecastle right now, sir, which exists solely for that fire-breathing machine. It can shoot forward, across a sixty-degree arc, and on each beam. Mind you, it’ll stop if the gunners switch from front to side, so it doesn’t shoot off the corner pillars. The control room is on your left, same setup as the starboard battery, minus a canon controller. Ammo is gravity fed from above, spend casings collected from below. Aft looks the same except it occupies the rear of the superstructure’s second level.”
“What’s next?”
“The firing positions for embarked troopers.” Virtanen headed for a door at the rear of the gun compartment and spun its locking wheel. When the door swung open, bright sunlight hit the deck, relieving the gloom.
As they walked out, the sergeant pointed at stairs leading to the forecastle’s second level.
“Three shielded firing positions on each side, capable of taking our largest portable weapons and the calliope’s ammo locker in the middle. Care to go up?”
“Not at the moment.”
“The rest of the shielded firing positions are in the aft superstructure. Two sections can cover three hundred and sixty degrees.” They stepped off along a deck that was pitching as Vigilance cut across waves coming through the passage between Thebes’ main island and its eastern neighbor. DeCarde could see three columns of smoke in a tight column behind them — the merchantmen who’d traded masts for steam engines. They’d make the crossing to Mazaber in record time, now that the Central Passage could be risked because of their iron-hulled escort.
But none of it was possible without Lyonesse scrapping the principles established by President Jonas Morane and fueling Theban progress up the technological ladder at a high rate. Case in point, the four steamers now headed for Aksum couldn’t even make it across the ocean without the dry fuel pellets to fire up their boilers.
And those came from a prefabricated plant whose modules were built on Lyonesse and assembled on Hatshepsut by the technicians who brought it across the stars aboard a naval transport. There wasn’t enough wood, coal, or petroleum in the Theban Archipelago for an entire steam-powered fleet, let alone combustible natural gasses.
“What are your fire control protocols?” DeCarde asked as they neared the outside starboard ladder leading up to the bridge wing.
“My troop sergeant and I are on the bridge with the captain during operations, while two troopers monitor battlefield sensors from the bridge wings. The sensor situation isn’t ideal, but we didn’t have time to mount a set permanently and wire it to the generators. That’ll be for the next cruise. I control the large guns while Gus Hightower oversees the small arms. We do everything via the troop radio network. Considering the sort of opposition we might face, it’ll work just fine. If someone comes up with an iron-hulled, armed pirate ship, we might need to rethink the command-and-control setup.”
DeCarde noticed Virtanen’s tone and choice of words made it clear he wasn’t seeking his former CO’s approval or even counsel, another sign of his growth as a professional and his evident self-confidence.
“Have you practiced with the ship running at sea?”
Virtanen nodded. “During the final shakeout cruise. Captain Fenrir runs a tight ship. There’s usually only him, the officer of the watch, a petty officer at the helm, and a signaler, meaning there’s plenty of room for Gus and me. I’d be even happier in a fire director’s nest up top, but that could give the game away. Maybe one of Vigilance’s descendants might have a proper remote fire control system run from a combat information center below deck.”
“I doubt there will be many more Q ships, let alone dedicated ocean-going warships.”
It only took Virtanen a few heartbeats to catch on.
“Because Hatshepsut won’t be disunited long enough to need them, right?”
“Yep. And once this place has a single government, the only war and Q ships in this system will be up there.” DeCarde pointed at the sky. “Ours, and ours alone.”
***
“There are the islands of perdition known as the Saqqaras, Ambassador.” Fenrir pointed at dark humps slowly creeping over the western horizon, their tops kissed by the rising sun when DeCarde entered the bridge after breakfast a few days later. “We’ll be passing Cimarron’s wreck at the passage’s entrance by midafternoon, which means anchoring nearby for the night. I must confess, I’m still not quite used to the speed we can travel nowadays.”
DeCarde gave him a questioning glance. “Why anchor? Is the navigation that dangerous?”
Fenrir squinted at the distant island and shook his head.
“No. It’ll be a clear night, and that’s the only thing we need, especially since we don’t depend on wind or an underpowered Stirling engine. The Saqqarans — they’re the risk. We might not see them coming until it’s too late.”
“Sergeant Virtanen and his Marines will pick them up the moment they launch boats, no matter how dark it is.”
Fenrir turned toward DeCarde and gave him a skeptical look.
“They have a Void Sister’s instincts?”
“They have night vision visors attached to their helmets and sensors that can pick up human life signs from a distance.”
The mariner shook his head. “This new-fangled stuff is hard to remember. Whatever next?”
“May I offer a suggestion, Captain?”
Fenrir made a go-ahead gesture with his hand. “Please.”
“Let the merchantmen anchor before entering the passage, near this Cimarron you mentioned, and we keep going so we can attract the Saqqarans. They attack, we wipe them out, and the cargo ships then follow us through.”
“What if the Saqqarans don’t attack us?”
“Then, when we reach the other end, we turn and come back for a second run. If they don’t try that time either, the cargoes go through, and we assume they’re smart enough to avoid Vigilance, or this nasty narcotic I’ve heard mentioned has done the job for us.”
Fenrir scratched his beard, then nodded.
“Fair enough, Ambassador. We’ll do it that way. Less time wasted hanging about.”
“Now, does this wreck marking the entrance to the passage have a story, or did it come about through bad navigation?”
“Oh, aye, there’s a story alright, and it’s nothing to do with pirates. It happened over twenty years ago when I was a junior master’s mate in Morningstar, schooner. We were outbound to Mazaber and using the Central Passage. It was still safe then. Cimarron had been overdue in Thebes on her return from Mazaber when we left, and therefore her owner asked us to keep a lookout. We saw no evidence of her in the Passage or along the Aksum shore, nor was she in port in Mazaber. If she’d crossed our wake, we would have seen her. The navigable channel along Aksum isn’t that wide. Three weeks later, when we came back through the Passage, we found her wreck where she is now, beached, masts collapsed, spars and ropes in complete disarray.”
“Driven ashore by a storm, perhaps?”
“No. There were none during the entire six-week period. As far as anyone can tell, she disappeared after leaving Mazaber and reappeared at the Passage’s eastern end after we’d gone through westbound. I took a landing party and found her holds full, personal possessions stowed, hammocks rolled up, her log and ship’s books in the captain’s desk, the purser’s money still where it should be. The last entry in the log stated she’d spent the night at anchor on the western end of the Passage, waiting for daylight — before we reached the Saqqaras on our way to Mazaber. Back then, even without pirates, many captains preferred doing the Passage during daylight hours.
“We offloaded everything and brought it home for the owner, but no one ever heard from the crew again, and no one knows what happened. Most of us consider Cimarron cursed and won’t approach her. Too many unanswered questions. If the Saqqarans drove her aground, why didn’t they plunder her? If they attacked, where are the remains of the crew? And why, when we crossed the Passage westward, did we not see her wreck, nor come across her sitting at anchor on the far side?”
“A fascinating mystery, Captain.”
“Oh, this world hides more mysteries than you would guess. I’ve always said we’ve been out of sync with the rest of the universe since the Great Scouring.”
“Some would say of humanity itself is out of sync after ninety percent of it died thanks to the last empress’ madness.”
Fenrir let out a soft grunt. “No doubt. All those souls wandering the Infinite Void, looking for mischief or vengeance. At least that’s what the Brethren might say. I haven’t asked.”
“I can do it when we’re back. Abbess Rianne and I get along with each other, even though I’m not much of a believer.”
“She gets along with everyone. Nice that the Order let her stay in charge after that damned Hegemony abducted the rest of the Lyonesse Brethren save for her and Horam. Both were aboard my ship at the time.”
“I know. I’ve heard the story in great detail.”
“No doubt. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must confer with the other captains about our proposed plan. They may wish to anchor further out, away from Cimarron. It doesn’t get too deep for our anchor chains until about two kilometers offshore from the easternmost island.”
