James Axler - Dectra Chain

"Can ye promise to chill the witch queen of the Lantic?"

"Yes," Krysty said.

"Sure an' certain? If I help ye and Pyra Quadde wins out, then I'm dead meat. I'll be walking around, but I'll be deader'n a sharkskin hat."

Krysty didn't dare to look back. It could only be a matter of minutes before someone found the corpses of Rodriguez and the two sec men. Then the hue and cry would begin, and it wouldn't take long for the hunt to lead to the docks.

It would be a bloody firefight.

J.B. was thinking the same. "You got ten seconds, Captain. Set sails and go after the woman now. Or I chill you. Now."

The captain sniffed, glancing at the sky. Stars peeked through the ragged curtain of cold, salt mist. "Never liked the bitch, anyways."

"Loose lines, Mr. Mate! Bow line and hold one stern line. Set t'gallants. Main sails when we reach the channel. Let go forward and aft on my command! Lively, now!"

So the whaling ship Phoenix moved slowly away from the quay of Claggartville, into the dark waters of the Lantic Ocean — hunting not her usual prey, but going after something far more deadly.

Krysty and the others took over the captain's quarters, making sure that they kept it secure with their blasters. But Deacon didn't seem concerned about the way they had hijacked his vessel, going about his business with a calm, unflustered efficiency.

And the crew took their lead from him.

The weather was kind, and Deacon knew from experience where Pyra Quadde was likely to have gone.

It wasn't many days out from port before they heard the shout from the lookout in the crow's nest, high above the deck. "Sail ho! Sail on the port beam! A ship!"

"Canst thou make her?" Captain Quadde shouted, standing with legs spread against the pitching of the short westerly sea.

"No, ma'am. Dark hull. Can't make her ensign at this distance."

She bellowed him down, glancing around, her eyes falling on Ryan. Her face lightened, her smile showing the hideous false teeth, which were worse than any plas-dents he'd ever seen.

"Outlander Cawdor. Thou hast more seeing in thy one good glim than these offal with their brace. Take the spyglass and get aloft. Tell me what thou seest there."

Ryan slipped off his seaboots, taking the telescope with a muttered word of assent. The ship was rolling in the swell, with an uncomfortable, chopping motion. But he knew well enough what a refusal would mean. As he had no desire to be tied naked to the mast for the woman to use for her pleasure, he climbed as nimbly as he could into the spidery rigging. He drew a deep breath of relief as he reached the relative safety of the crosstrees, swinging across to the narrow barrel of the crow's nest.

"Quickly or I'll have thee flogged for it. What ship is she? What flag does she fly, outlander? I can't hear thee!"

The shout rose almost to a scream. Ryan had heard the crew say that other captains from the region took good care to steer well wide of Pyra Quadde. One or two that didn't had been found floating belly-down among the fish guts of Claggartville harbor. So another ship coming close to them meant something out of the ordinary.

He steadied the glass on the flag that fluttered from the masthead of the approaching ship, trying to make it out, fumbling with the brass focusing screw.

"Fireblast! Can't... Ah, there it is."

From the earliest days, every ship out of New England had her own pennant, so that she could easily be recognized at a distance by any of her fellows. Even now, in the heart of the Deathlands, a hundred years after the skydark, the practice was maintained by everyone.

Even by Pyra Quadde.

Her flag cracked and snapped in the wind, only a few feet from Ryan's head.

It was a circle of crimson upon a rectangle of plain white. But as the wind tugged at the ensign it distorted the circle, elongating the bottom half, so that it sometimes resembled a bloody skull.

The oncoming vessel sported a flag of blue, with two horizontal white stripes on it. Ryan hallooed that information down to the woman on the deck, cupping his hands against the wind.

"Two slant whites on blue, thou sayest?" came the reply.

"Aye, ma'am."

"That be the Bartleby under Delano. Old Preaching Biddy hisself. Does she show any signal?"

Ryan could hardly hear the woman's words, but he leaned half out of the iron-hooped barrel and managed to catch them.

"No signal. But she's heading straight for us, ma'am."

Captain Quadde beckoned him back from the masthead, sending up another member of the crew to replace him as lookout. Ryan sat on the deck and gratefully pulled on his seaboots again. Though he had a good enough head for heights, the rolling crow's nest wasn't the best place in the world to be.

The whole of the crew came out to watch the approaching vessel. Ryan recalled again that such an encounter was very rare, particularly as most of the skippers along the New England coast knew Quadde's reputation and kept plenty of sea room between themselves and the ill-starred Salvation ,

Slowly, tacking her way against the breeze, the Bartleby drew closer. As she did, the wind fell away to a mild zephyr, barely breathing enough air to enable the two whaling ships to maintain their forward momentum through the flattened waves.

Captain Quadde took her place at the port side of her ship. Ryan noticed that she had buckled on the Spanish Astra short-muzzle .44 and wondered whether she was anticipating trouble.

The ships would pass port side to port side. The crew of the Bartleby was also lined up along the rail, staring in silence at the Salvation and her crew. A short, skinny man in a bottle-green tailcoat stood alone near the stem. He had a mane of white hair that made him look like pictures of Old Testament prophets that Ryan had seen in some of the many Bibles that still survived in the Deathlands. It was an odd fact that around half of the books he'd ever seen in his life had been Bibles from before the long winters. Yet he'd never read anything to confirm that the old United States had been such a profoundly religious country.

"Captain Quadde!" the man hailed, using a battered tin megaphone.

"Good day to thee, Captain Delano. What bringest thee to my waters?"

"The waters are not thine, Captain Quadde, and it be blasphemous to claim them."

"When the Almighty comes sailing and whaling across these banks with a brace of big fish hauled tight to his flanks, then I shall allow him to share of my waters, Captain."

"Thou art...!" The man controlled himself with what was an obvious effort of will. The ships were still nearly a hundred paces apart, their courses meaning they'd pass within about ten feet of each other on their parallel ways.

"Make thy speech quickly, Preaching Biddy!" Quadde shouted, beaming at the ripple of laughter from her own crew.

"If I did not..." Delano began. "I will not quarrel with thee or damn thee, Pyra Quadde. The savior sees all, and he will judge at the ending of thy life. I seek thine aid."

The request sounded as though it had been torn from the man's soul with white-hot pincers.

"What aid, man? Wouldst thou know where the great whales sport? I slew one within the day, and he be the first of a bounteous harvest in rich lays for my lads here."

"I have hunted well. Too well," Delano replied. Now the ships were closer, the figureheads barely thirty yards apart.

"Then what?.."

"Both my brothers are lost, Captain Quadde. Dearest to my heart."

"Lost? Both?"

"Aye." The man was on the verge of tears, and Ryan could see the whiteness of his knuckles gripping the carved rail.

"To lose one brother is unfortunate, Captain Delano. To lose both seems like foolishness."