CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Voluntarily stepping aboard a Bullet ship felt like stepping in front of a loaded gun.
Tassos greeted them with a snarl and a smirk. As soon as Caledonia’s foot touched the deck, he swooped in like a massive hawk, hooking one brawny arm around her neck and tucking her against the solid wall of his chest.
“Welcome aboard the Deep Cut, Captain,” he growled, the sound of his voice equal parts vibration and amusement.
Caledonia’s pulse pounded three staccato beats high in her throat, panic momentarily overwhelming her thoughts. His arm was a vise around her neck, her chest wedged against his stomach. She could feel the metal plates shifting inside his doublet.
She quashed her flashing panic, and instead of struggling against the entire bulk of Tassos as he certainly wanted her to do, she unsheathed the knife at her waist, sliding the tip into the narrow gap between the bottom edge of his doublet and the top of his pants.
Tassos stiffened as the blade bit lightly into his abdomen.
“Unless you greet everyone this way, I recommend you keep your hands to yourself.”
Caledonia added enough pressure that she felt the skin break beneath the point of her knife. Tassos, however, only grinned harder, bending his face uncomfortably close to hers.
“Give it a little push, dear,” he said, goading her. “And all my Bullets will be yours.”
“Your Bullets and your problems,” Caledonia answered. “It’s too soon to kill you now, but I will if you don’t withdraw your arm.”
Tassos laughed, a great bellowing sound that echoed across the deck in the mouths of his Bullets. But he released her and stepped away without any indication that her knife had cut as deeply as she knew it must.
“I can see why my brothers like you.” The words were offered in the vein of a compliment, but they sounded more like an insult.
“I can see why they don’t like you,” she countered, and this time, his bullish smile turned sour on his face.
“Cepheus, let’s move!” Tassos barked.
Caledonia turned to confirm the rest of her team was aboard the Deep Cut. Pisces stood nearest. She bore an expression of cold malice, one hand resting on the grip of her gun. On top of that hand was Oran’s, fingers glinting with silver splints as he prevented her from shooting the Fiveson. Just behind them, Sledge and Nettle stood side by side, their expressions equally stormy.
“Make ready,” Cepheus called.
Across the water, Tin echoed the order and the griphooks of both ships rose and snapped loudly into place, leaving the Deep Cut and Luminous Wake free to sail.
“Join me on the bridge, Captain,” Tassos commanded as the ship surged forward.
“Let’s go,” Caledonia said in a low voice, giving each of her team a pointed look.
When Tassos strode across his deck the entire ship responded as though he himself was a ship in the ocean pushing waves in all directions. His crew made way or marked him warily, orbiting around him like insects circling a carcass. They eyed Caledonia and her command crew with a mix of keen disinterest and hunger. Caledonia noted the ones who seemed unable to look away from Oran. For now, they were under the protection of Tassos, but what would happen when he looked away?
The ship was similar in design to the Luminous Wake, except instead of climbing up to the bridge, they skirted around it to where the deck swept low toward the racing water. Tassos took the lead as the ship darted ahead of the fleet.
The Net was suddenly very close and now Caledonia could see exactly how it had earned its name. The ships weren’t just evenly spaced but woven together like a flexible, yet treacherous scarf. What she’d taken for long ropes of razored wire and hooks was, in truth, a vast array of webbing. The webs draped between the stationary ships like canopies, but Caledonia felt certain that any rogue vessel attempting to slip through the Net would trigger the trap. Those webs would drop, ensnaring an entire ship to prevent its escape. And if previous experience was any indicator, they were likely electrified, too.
“Cala,” Pisces said, her eyes locked not on the Net itself but the water. “Fins.”
Caledonia followed her sister’s gaze to the sight of six fins. They slashed through the water in lazy rocking motions, deep gray sails above shadowed bodies. These weren’t the blunt dorsals of dolphins but the black-tipped flags of sharks. As she searched the bright blue water, she found more of the creatures swimming far beneath the surface and clustering close to the hulls of other ships down the line. There were dozens of them.
“Keep your crews on their ships,” Tassos said.
“Is that what they’re here for,” Caledonia answered, ignoring the threat. “To keep your crews in line?”
This won another laugh “I don’t need sharks to keep my clip in line.”
“But you do need something.”
At this, Tassos abandoned his jovial tone, his voice dipping low when he answered, “We all need something, Bale Blossom.”
The closer they drew to the Net, the more Caledonia marveled at the intricacies of its design. Here at the end, there was a ship unlike the others. It was long and flat, its base marked by what appeared to be two narrow tunnels leading straight through to the other side of the Net. The deck seemed to rise and fall chaotically, without a thought for function, and the whole of it crawled right up to the shore of the Bone Mouth’s nearest island. Beyond this point, the the islands themselves became the barricade.
Caledonia tried to peer between the ships to catch even a glimpse of the Silt Rig, but with only seconds to scour the sea, she had no luck. The ship approached swiftly until all she could see was the Net itself. Every piece of it fed so seamlessly into another, she realized she had no idea where they were going to dock. Just as soon as she’d had the thought, the ship cut its speed, then rotated and began to slide backward toward a narrow space in the matrix. Docking orders were shouted up and down the main deck and the Deep Cut inched backward.
The air here was stale with salt and sulpher. Sharks cut close in the waters below, as much at home here as the ships themselves. Massive griphooks came down on either side, snapping the Deep Cut in place, one more link in the chain.
“Follow me,” Tassos said, rounding on Caledonia and directing his steps back toward the main deck. “We have a lot to discuss.”
Leaving the Deep Cut, they immediately found themselves on the deck of the strange, flat ship that extended outward from its anchored point on the Bone Mouth. But as they walked, Caledonia realized this wasn’t a single ship at all, but several. She was crossing from the deck of one ship to another, each connected to the next by a combination of griphooks and broad sheets of metal welded in place. Unlike the Assault Ships that composed the rest of the Net, this was more of a building stitched together entirely of ships. The whole thing must have covered a square mile of shallow waters.
Tassos led them inside the megaship, its mazelike corridors rivaling the chaotic weaving paths of Cloudbreak. Stairwells led to hallways and more stairwells, taking them up and down and up again as they moved deeper inside the mysterious structure. Caledonia did her best to ignore the small alarm singing in the back of her mind as she admitted she would not be able to retrace their steps to the surface. Tassos could be taking them anywhere. Straight to the hold or worse.
Finally, he led them down a narrow corridor and into an isolated room at the end. Cepheus was already inside, along with two men. One was old and grizzled, bearing a shock of pure white hair pulled into a bun at the back of his head and tanned skin so long tortured by the sun that it had turned leathery, wrinkles digging into his face and arms like deep crevices. The other was younger with shoulders and fists that matched those of Sledge.
“This is Tug,” Tassos said, gesturing to the bludgeon-fisted man standing beside a long table cutting the room in half. “And that’s Heron. You’ve met Cepheus already.” He paused and said, “This is Caledonia Styx.”
“The infamous Bale Blossom. Well, isn’t that a hell of a thing.” The white-haired man had taken a seat across the room, back pushed against the wall, and showed no interest in standing to greet their semi-hostages.
“This is Pisces,” Caledonia began, eager to get these strange pleasantries over with. “Sledge, Oran, and Nettle.”
“Oran.” Tug’s voice was an ominous rumble. “Fiveson.”
The word was more than a title. Caledonia had heard it used in many different ways in the time she’d known Oran. It had been a curse and a threat. Spoken by Tug, it was both.
“Is it too much to assume you already have a plan?” Tassos asked, bracing his hands against the table.
“I’ll have one soon,” Caledonia countered, moving to stand across from him. “But first I need everything you have on the Holster: the harbor, the city, everything.”
Tassos sucked on his teeth as he considered his response, clearly weighing the benefits of withholding his intel against making actual progress. Finally, he gestured to Heron, who produced a map so expertly rendered, Caledonia could perfectly imagine the gasp that would have dropped from Lace’s lips. Her wide, blue eyes would have consumed the unmarred paper, the careful markings of latitude and longitude. Before Nettle, Lace had steered their crew through rough and clear waters alike, and she would have exclaimed over the degree of detail inscribed in every inch of this map. Even Caledonia recognized it for the prize it was, though she did her best to hide that from her current company.
“The Holster,” Heron said with a small flourish.
The map zoomed in tight on the western side of a peninsula where the shoreline scooped gently inward, creating a protected valley for the city of the Holster. In the center was the harbor, and the cartographer had taken great care to illustrate the series of breakers that limited ingress and egress. Beyond that, the western seas extended to the edge of the page. A small arrow in the upper left corner indicated how many miles to Cloudbreak, and a similar arrow in the bottom left did the same for the Bone Mouth.
Plucking a pouch from a nearby chest, Heron began dropping small metal ships into the harbor. “The harbor itself holds a full cohort of ships. Probably seventy-five at any given time. The rest”—he paused to place several metal blocks in a row— “are outside of these breakers.”
The breakers were evenly spaced, meaning only a few ships could pass into the harbor at once. Not unlike the metal islands in the waters of Cloudbreak. A barrier, but not a complete barricade. This was information they’d had, but seeing it mapped out like this brought new clarity.
“Can we bomb them?” Pisces asked.
“Sure.” Heron bobbed his head. “But they run deep. No guarantee you won’t gouge your hull trying to pass over one. Might be better to just leave them where you can see them.”
Caledonia nodded. “What else?”
“The gun towers.” As Heron spoke, he marked the towers with a jab of his finger. “All five are on high ground, outside of town, and impossible to target without putting your ships within range of their damned powerful guns.”
“One for every son,” Oran added, settling in at Caledonia’s shoulder. “Aric built them as we were named.”
“We protect him as we protect each other.” Tassos gave the response as though reading a script, and for a fleeting second Oran and Tassos shared a look thick with history.
“We won’t get anywhere near the Holster without taking them out first.” Tassos looked back to Caledonia, expectant in a way that bristled beneath her skin.
“How long does it take to sail to the Holster from here?” Caledonia asked.
“Only a day,” Cepheus answered. “Less at full throttle.”
“Good. Then we have some time to prepare,” Caledonia said, eyes tracing the distance from the breakers to the gun towers and all the way to the tip of the southern peninsula.
“How much time do we need for that?” Cepheus stood at Tassos’s elbow, arms crossed and hip cocked to one side.
Caledonia shrugged. “A few days. Maybe more.”
“Is that a problem?” Pisces asked.
“It’s not a problem.” Tassos nearly growled his response.
But Caledonia knew it was.
“How much Silt do you actually have?” she asked.
The look Tassos gave her might have gutted a lesser person. As it was, Caledonia let it wash over her to reveal what truly lay beneath it: fear.
“Enough,” he ground out. “Now, do you have a plan or not?”
“That depends on how many ships we have to work with. How many can you spare from the Net?”
“The Net isn’t something you just take apart, Bale Blossom.” Heron leaned back in his chair, dragging a finger along the lower portion of the map where the Net butted up against the southern tip of the peninsula. “Wasn’t designed that way.”
“But you just sailed the Deep Cut in and out,” Pisces protested.
“Wouldn’t be much of a Net if it was easy to dismantle,” Tug answered.
“Aric couldn’t have a single Fiveson in command of more ships than him,” Oran added.
“What does that mean?” Caledonia asked.
“The stationary ships have no engines,” Cepheus offered. “No engines and about five anchors each. We can pull the planks and trawling nets in for a storm, but the ships themselves don’t move.”
“So.” Caledonia drew a careful breath as she prepared her next question. “How many sailing ships do you have at your disposal?”
“You’ve seen it for yourself.” Tassos threw a hand in the air.
It took Caledonia a second to understand his meaning, and when she did, she felt her chin drop. “You’re telling me that the ships I saw today are your entire fleet?”
“Forty-three in all. I had a few more before Lir came at me, but then, so did he.”
Caledonia tried not to focus on the numbers. She’d expected Tassos to have more; she’d expected the Net to be more of a resource. But she needed to consider what she did have: sixty-two ships, hundreds of soldiers, and not much time before Tassos’s diminishing supply of Silt made both irrelevant. Silt aside, she had as many ships as she’d had in Cloudbreak, and she’d been ready to attack then. She could do it again now.
“How many ships does Lir have?” Caledonia asked. “Last count we had was near two hundred.”
“He did have that many and he brought them all to my doorstep!” Tassos shouted, a wild glint in his eyes.
“You held off two hundred ships?” Caledonia asked, disbelieving.
“Didn’t have to. Not for long.” Tassos smirked. Cocky and amused. “Because I have something he wants almost as much as he wants me dead.”
“The rig?” Caledonia asked.
“No.” Tassos rose to his full height, looming over her with an excited smile. “His brother Donnally.”