At that very moment, two hundred miles northeast of Petrel and her friends, Sharkey was shouting orders. “Up aerial!” There was no time for a message turtle. “Send a comm to the Rampart!”
Cuttle leaped for the aerial crank, and Gilly tapped away at the comm key. ATTENTION RAMPART! HUNGRY GHOSTS OVERHEAD! ATTENTION RAMPART! HUNGRY GHOSTS OVERHEAD!
“Tell ’em they’ve been spotted,” cried Sharkey. “Tell ’em to get under way before the Ghosts eat ’em!”
YR POSITION DISCOVERED, tapped Gilly. GET UNDER WAY!
Sharkey cursed the clearness of the sea hereabouts, which had allowed the Ghosts to spot the big submersible from their strange bubbles. And then he cursed the big submersible because there was no answer to Gilly’s message, which meant the Rampart was below aerial depth. And comms didn’t pass through water.
“Try again,” he snapped, and as Gilly tapped out the futile message, he pressed his eye to the periscope.
All Sunker children knew the tale of the Hungry Ghosts by heart. They’d heard it from Granfer Trout, who was the oldest of all the old salts on the Rampart and had no duties at all except to eat, sleep and tell stories.
Three hundred years before, a horde of Ghosts had escaped from the darkness of Hell and invaded the Up Above. These ghosts had bellies as big as mountains! They were always hungry, and their favorite food was machines. They ate automobiles, trains and buses; steamships, rockets and flying machines. And when that didn’t satisfy them, they gobbled down the people who invented the machines, and the people who used them.
Anyone who tried to stop the Hungry Ghosts was killed and eaten. Nowhere in the Up Above was safe. And so Professor Surgeon Lin Lin and her husband, First Admiral Cray, built a fleet of giant submersibles and took to the Undersea, along with family, friends and a hundred waterproof boxes of surgeon papers.
Things were fearfully hard for that first generation. They weren’t used to being crammed into such small spaces, sharing bunks and bumping into their neighbors whenever they turned around. But they gritted their teeth and stayed. And it was only at night, with the fleet running on the surface, renewing air and batteries, that they gave in to their homesickness and stood on the outer decks, straining their eyes to see the land from which they were exiled.
Sharkey couldn’t imagine feeling homesick for terra. The Undersea was the only world he’d ever known. Like all the Sunkers, he ate mussels, oysters, seaweed and fish, cooked and raw. His clothes were made from sea silk, and any metal he needed was mined from the ocean floor and smelted in one of the onboard workshops.
Life was still dangerous, of course, and smelly, and either too hot or too cold, depending on the season. The water from the distillers always tasted of oil, the air was usually a little stale, and over the centuries, most of the submersibles had been destroyed by storms or rust or accidents, until only the huge Rampart and the tiny Claw were left.
But no one complained. It was what they were used to, and, besides, it was a hundred times safer than the Up Above. In all those years, the Sunkers had seen the Hungry Ghosts’ skimmers from afar any number of times. But the Ghosts had never seen the Sunkers.
Until now.
The skimmers were furling their sails, revealing immense structures on their decks. Sharkey had a bad feeling about those structures—which worsened when he saw rocks being loaded onto them, and figures hauling at a winch, turning it tighter and tighter.
“Looks like some sort of catapult,” he muttered.
“Still no answer,” said Gilly. “What now, sir?”
Sharkey’s mind was awhirl. Would the rocks damage the Rampart? Maybe not! They’d lose some of their force when they hit the water, so maybe they’d bounce off the hull, leaving nothing but a few dents.
But then the first catapult fired its load—and a moment later the children heard a muffled whoomp, like an undersea avalanche. The Claw shuddered. A gout of water spurted upward.
Sharkey groaned. “They’ve got explosives!”
The second catapult fired. And the third. Then the first again! Whoomp. Whoomp. Whoomp. Explosives tumbled into the water all around the Rampart.
“Sir?” said Poddy. “We’re going to help ’em, aren’t we?”
Sharkey hesitated. He was horrified by what was happening, but he was also pretty sure that the Rampart was doomed—and he wasn’t about to risk his own precious skin for a lost cause. “Nay,” he said.
The three middies stared at him. He knew what they were thinking. But it’s Ma and Fa they’re attacking, and Granfer Trout and Ripple and Adm’ral Deeps and Surgeon Blue—
“It’s not going to help anyone if we get eaten as well,” he said. “If the Rampart goes down, we’ll be the last of the Sunkers. We’ll be the only ones who know where the boxes are, and what’s in ’em. We’ve got a duty to stay alive.”
It sounded good, which didn’t surprise him. His mind was always calculating, even in an emergency. Always thinking about what things sounded like, and how to survive, and how to fool people so that he came out the other end looking like a hero.
The three middies nodded. Poddy’s eyes were brimming, but Sharkey knew she wouldn’t cry. Sunkers hardly ever cried. They just followed orders and made the best of things.
He put his good eye to the periscope again. “The Rampart must be trying to get away,” he said, keeping his voice flat and sensible. “But the Ghosts are pointing to her—the skimmers have caught up—”
He stopped as a roil of water, like the breath of a dying whale, broke the surface. The skimmers rocked from side to side. The Ghosts rushed to re-aim their catapults.
“The Rampart’s surfacing!”
And now at last the comm began to work. First came Admiral Deeps’s call sign. Then the quick, desperate message.
RAMPART HOLED AND TAKING ON WATER. ABANDONING SHIP. POSITION FIFTY-ONE DEGREES TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES NORTH, FOUR DEGREES TWENTY-TWO MINUTES WEST. SAVE YOURSELVES. GO! THAT’S AN ORDER!
None of the middies moved.
Sharkey snapped at them. “You heard the adm’ral! All ahead two-thirds! Ten degrees down angle!”
At that, Cuttle, Poddy and Gilly rushed to their posts. “All ahead two-thirds. Aye, sir!”
“Ten degrees down angle. Aye, sir!”
As the Claw’s bow sank, Sharkey took one last look through the periscope. He thought he saw one of the giant bubbles break from its moorings and blow towards the Claw … and then the sea washed over the glass, and the Up Above, with all its hatred and destruction, was gone.
“Make your depth sixty feet.” Sharkey stood over the helm, snapping out orders and watching the depth gauge. No one spoke except to acknowledge his instructions, but the air in the little submersible was thick with grief.
There’ll be no survivors, thought Sharkey. The Ghosts’ll get ’em, every one. Which makes us the last of the Sunkers.
“Steady on sixty feet, sir!” said Gilly.
Sharkey nodded. “Adjust trim. Heading east-sou’-east.”
He sounded completely calm. But if he was good at hiding his feelings from his crew, he couldn’t hide them from himself. His parents had died two years ago, killed in the accident that sank the Retribution, but his aunties and uncles and cousins were still on the Rampart, and he couldn’t imagine a world without them.
He thought of what it must have cost Admiral Deeps to abandon the giant submersible and let it sink to the bottom. He thought of the Hungry Ghosts, who had eaten so much and were still not satisfied—
To port, something tumbled down through the water.
Sharkey’s first thought was that they were under attack, but then he saw the billowing cloth and the thrashing legs. Someone had escaped from the Ghosts!
“Hard port rudder!” he shouted.
The Claw turned quickly, though not quickly enough for Sharkey. Those frantic legs touched the seabed and tried to push off, but the cloth had snagged on something and wouldn’t come free.
Sharkey threw himself into the retrieval seat and grabbed the lever. “All stop!”
He pulled the lever back quickly, and the mechanical claw shot out towards the frantic figure, knocking the box out of the side air lock and probably losing it forever. But there was no time for regret. No time for caution either, or for worrying about bruised flesh or broken bones.
“Stay still!” he hissed, but the figure struggled harder.
Bubbles swirled around the little claw, and so did sand. It was almost impossible for Sharkey to see what he was doing. The talons closed around something. He hoped it was the figure; he wouldn’t get a second chance at this.
Behind him, Poddy opened and shut valves, compensating for the weight of the little claw and whatever it held. Sharkey pushed the lever forward, and the figure was hauled back into the Claw’s side air lock.
“Seal outer hatch!” he snapped. “Blow water! Unseal inner hatch!”
He scrambled for the side air lock, which was aft of the chart table. He flung the inner hatch open and dragged the limp, sodden figure into the control room.
It was a girl, her eyes closed, her hair in pale strings around her face. She coughed, and a stream of salt water gurgled out of her mouth.
Sharkey backed away from her in horror, his ruined eye aching behind its patch. In that moment of confusion, he’d thought he was saving one of his cousins. But the girl who coughed and puked on the deck was a complete stranger.
He had rescued a Hungry Ghost and brought her onto the Claw.
* * *
When the telegraph device started chattering out a new message, Petrel almost jumped out of her skin with relief. “It’s Dolph!”
But it wasn’t.
“That’s not ship code,” rumbled Krill. He’d been pacing up and down, his face thunderous, ever since the message from the Oyster came through. Now he stopped and glared at the device. “Nor is it Cook code.”
“It’s not any sort of code,” said Petrel, her shoulders slumping.
The telegraph fell silent. But a few minutes later, it tapped again.
“I believe it is a code,” said the captain. “And I have nearly enough information to calculate—” He listened. “Yes, there are numbers. Fifty-one degrees twenty-five minutes north, four degrees twenty-two minutes west.”
“That’s a chart readin’, shipmates,” said Mister Smoke. “Someone out there’s sendin’ their position to someone else.”
The members of the stranded company stared at one another. “But that is impossible,” said Fin. “They would need another telegraph device, would they not? And such things are unknown outside the Oyster.”
“Someone must know about ’em.” Krill ran his fingers through his beard. “Cap’n, where’s fifty-one thingummy? It’s not close enough to do us any good, I know that.”
“It is two hundred and seven miles, sixty-five yards and two feet northeast of here,” replied the captain. “Which puts it forty-three miles off the coast in the Nornuckle Sea. Near the Banks of Kell, which are famous for their fishing.”
“A fishing boat would not have a telegraph device,” said Fin firmly. “No one would have a telegraph device. The Devouts would have found it and destroyed it years ago. You do not understand how clever they are, how persistent. They even found the Oyster in the end!”
Krill started pacing again. “But they didn’t destroy us, so maybe they’re not as clever as you think, lad. Or maybe there’s a ship out there that’s even better at hiding than we were. But like I said, it won’t do us any good, not two hundred miles and more away.”
“Two hundred and seven miles is not far, not for Mister Smoke and Missus Slink,” said the captain. “They could run that distance in—”
“No!” said Petrel. And then they were all looking at her, and she couldn’t say what she was thinking—that Mister Smoke and Missus Slink had been a part of her life for as long as she could remember. That without the Oyster’s deck under her feet, she already felt as if she’d lost a big chunk of herself. And now here was the cap’n trying to slice off another chunk and send it north!
So all she said was, “I don’t think we should split up like that. Sorry, Cap’n, but it doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.”
“All the same, he is right,” said Fin. “We must get back to the Oyster before Albie goes south and leaves us behind. Which means we need a boat.”
“’Course we do,” said Petrel. “But there must be one closer than two hundred miles!”
“I thought there’d be boats all along this coast,” said Krill, “but I ain’t seen a single one.”
“The Devouts have probably confiscated them for their own use,” said Fin.
Krill peered at the captain from under his heavy brows. “How long would it take the rats to get to this other ship?”
“I cannot give you an exact time,” said the captain. “If they keep to the coast, they will have to pass very close to the Citadel, which will slow them down. And then they will somehow have to get from the shore to the ship. My best estimate is twenty-six hours, or perhaps a little more. That is, if the ship does not move from its current position. How long will Squid and Dolph hold out against Albie if they do not hear from us?”
“As long as they can,” said Krill gruffly. “That daughter of mine won’t believe me dead until she sees my bones laid out in a row, and even then she’d probably tell me to get up and stop lazing around.”
“Then Smoke and Slink should go now,” the captain said.
“No!” Petrel couldn’t believe that they were going to do it. She tried to think of sensible reasons to keep the two rats with them. “What if they can’t get from the shore to the ship? What if the weather’s bad? What if the crew’s hostile or mad or—or just plain nasty, like Albie?”
Mister Smoke winked up at her. “Don’t you worry about us, shipmate. We’ll find a way.”
“But what do we do in the meantime?” That was Fin. “We cannot stay here, not with the Devouts on their way.”
“We will go up the coast too,” said the captain, “but at a slower rate. We will look for villagers who want to learn about water pumps and mechanical plows. We will search for the Song. And when Mister Smoke and Missus Slink find the boat—”
“If they find it,” said Petrel quickly, “which I don’t see how they can.”
“—they can send us a telegraph to get our new position.”
Fin winced. “We will be traveling towards the Citadel. There will be spies and informers everywhere.”
“Then we will have to be wary,” said the captain. “Mister Smoke, Missus Slink, are you ready?”
It was going to happen, and there was nothing Petrel could do to stop it. She wanted to pick the two rats up and hold them so tightly that they couldn’t go anywhere, but she knew she mustn’t.
Her hand touched each gray head, as lightly as a snowflake. “You’ll come back, won’t you?” she whispered.
“Aye, shipmate,” said Mister Smoke. “We’ll come back.”
“Don’t worry about us, girl,” said Missus Slink.
And with that, the two of them turned tail and dashed off. Petrel watched them go, wondering if she would ever see them again.