Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

‘Best you trim your beard then, Blacky, before the flagship’s launch comes to pick you up,’ said Dick Tull. ‘You don’t want to be embarrassing us all when you’re nibbling on the vice-admiral’s plump partridge breasts.’

‘I wouldn’t be getting as far as the captain’s table if I accepted his invite,’ said the commodore. ‘Vice-admiral Cockburn used to be plain speaking Captain Cockburn, and the last time we met it was the at the end of a round of depth charges after he’d spent near fourteen months chasing me across the world’s oceans, trying to stretch my neck for a privateer. Fortunately for us, our little contretemps was in my previous boat, the Sprite of the Lake, or we might have found our place in the convoy occupied by a spread of mines!’ The commodore swept his large fingers to take in the bridge crew, the sailors hunched over their boards and navigation panels. ‘While the half of my crew that didn’t once sail for the cause are known to a mite too many ports and courts as smugglers, privateers, mutineers and deserters.’

Daunt raised an eyebrow. ‘Will the absence of the Purity Queen ’s officers from the vice-admiral’s table not create a few suspicions?’

Commodore Black tossed his skipper’s cap at Daunt. ‘Well, that I don’t believe it will, Captain Daunt!’

Daunt placed both hands on the boat’s rail, the deck heaving with the roll of the waves. Apart from the jouncing of their launch in the dark waters, the sight of the convoy on the sea might have been Middlesteel viewed at night, so tight were conning towers, masts and superstructures packed in, hundreds of portholes and wheelhouses aglitter under the stars. Of course, if it had been the capital they were travelling towards, Barnabas Sadly wouldn’t be moaning and retching over the side. The oiled seaman’s coats they had borrowed seemed scant protection against the crashing waves. They had developed a false perspective of the sea travelling on the u-boat. It was only when you were tipping up the crest of waters as tall as a hill and sliding down the other side that you caught a glimpse of all its dangers and immensity. Not even the darkness can hide how vast it is.

Daunt might only have been masquerading as a skipper, but he had no trouble in identifying the convoy’s flagship, The Zealous, an ironclad with a radical new design the newssheets had termed a ‘wheelship’. A platform weighted down with mighty guns and a citadel-like superstructure, she was pierced with six slots that held a series of twinned hundred-foot high spherical wheels on either side. Turning and churning the sea, her six wheels provided both buoyancy and propulsion. Rotated by powerful steam engines pouring smoke into the sky, balance in the water was provided by a series of hydrofoils on either side. Launches that had made their rounds among the convoy waited in the shadow of lifting cranes, escaping the thunderous waves as they were winched up into the docking cradles of a boat bay under the flagship’s platform. Larger shadows hovered over the bow of the flagship, pocket airships returning from patrol to seek out the safety of the vessel’s hangars. Unconventional and ugly, The Zealous was said to be the lion of the waves, unmatchable by the men-o’war of any other nation’s fleets. She reared out of the waters as she powered forward, her guns given a stronghold’s commanding view over the ocean, contemptuous of the waves below. Unsinkable.

Boxiron moved to stand by Daunt’s side. ‘I fear I make almost as unconvincing a seaman as Barnabas Sadly.’

‘With this many vessels in the convoy commander’s care, I trust the vice-admiral will have too many guests to hone in on our nautical deficiencies,’ said Daunt. ‘Besides, the commodore’s crew appear to my eye as varied an assortment of chancers and rogues as our own company.’ He glanced back at Barnabas vomiting over the side. ‘And as the good captain assured me before we departed, some of the greatest naval commanders in history have suffered from a “mortal spot of seasickness”.’ Although, I will admit, not with quite so much gusto as Barnabas. Daunt adjusted a peaked cap slipped over the steamman’s head, a faded badge in its centre with the arms of an anchor and seahorse on the cap’s crown. And at least we look the part.

‘When a steamman starts to wear clothes,’ said Boxiron, touching his cap, ‘it is usually taken as a sign of mental illness.’

Daunt indicated the exploding waves. ‘Chased out of home by an unlikely alliance between royalists rebels and the secret police, with us heading into the heart of a war waiting to be declared, I thought that might be taken as a given.’

‘It should prove to be quite a distraction.’

‘I’m not sure I follow you, old steamer?’

‘My body may be the ramshackle product of your people,’ said Boxiron, ‘but only below my neck. My vision plate is still fully functional. I am not yet blind or insensible to what is going on. We have had many offers of work this year, yet you only accept the most dangerous and challenging of cases.’

Daunt shrugged. ‘They pay the most.’

‘We do not need the money. You are seeking to distract me from my predicament — the mind of a magnificent steamman knight inexpertly fused to this stumbling monstrosity of a body.’

Daunt tapped the hulking creature’s chest plate, just above the squeaking transaction-engine drum rotating in his centre. ‘But it is our mind that makes us who we are, old friend. Our memories, not this. All flesh is dust.’

‘In my case,’ said Boxiron, ‘I believe all flesh is rust. There are those among your race who suffer from wasting diseases, and they sometimes count it as a kindness when family and friends cut short their thread on the great pattern.’

Daunt sighed. He knew that steammen who had their design violated, corrupted outside of the pattern laid down by King Steam and his Hall of Architects in the Steamman Free State were expected to seek suicide. It was a hard code, but one a warrior of the commando militant was expected to adhere to. ‘You might be diminished, but you are by no means a cripple. You share some of the memories of the human-milled automatic whose body your head was grafted onto. You are a unique being in your own right. Hardly perfect, but which of us can say such a thing?’

‘I am neither one thing nor the other,’ said Boxiron. ‘I am stuck in an existence I did not ask for.’

‘Yes, I believe I know how you feel.’ Is that it? Daunt mused. Are you merely the steamman reflection of myself? Poor Jethro Daunt. Cast out of the church, seeking redemption where he can find it? No, there must be more to it than that. We’ve come so far together since I found you working as a hulking enforcer for the flash mob; too far for it to end like this.

‘Have I ever thanked you for saving me?’ asked Boxiron.

‘I believe we’ve saved each other,’ said Daunt. ‘Many times in fact, over the years.’ He looked at the steamman. Daunt knew his friend well enough to know what he was thinking. How easy it would be to fall over the side, allow the fury of the waves and the depths of the seas to claim his walking corpse of a body.

One day, this won’t be enough.

For Dick Tull, having a believable alias was second nature in his line of work. Second officer of a u-boat or an anarchist with a taste for sedition and assassinating parliamentarians, you observed the traits and tricks of the type, then you mirrored them right back. When you were dealing with amateurs like the ex-parson and his metal mate, you had to work with what you’d been given. A brief, tight cover story that was easy to hold onto and remember under duress. Jethro Daunt was now masquerading as a wealthy eccentric who had decided to sink the greater part of his fortune in a shipping concern, transporting high value caffeel beans and tea powder between the colony plantations and the Kingdom. A part that the churchman played to perfection with his strange habits: humming nonsense ballads and limericks to himself; the way he would drift off into a daydream and start pointing and wagging his finger as if he was conducting a debate against an invisible opponent, lecturing unseen students. Meanwhile, the steamman’s cover story was that he was the brute of a first mate whose clinking metal fist kept the unruly crewmen in order. Barnabas Sadly was the general officer who kept the stores, ran the books and oversaw the galley. There was one thing none of the party from the Purity Queen had to fake. All the u-boat crewmen in the gathering carried the same untidy, dishevelled air compared to the officers from the convoy’s surface freighters, paddle ships and liners. Living cheek by jowl in the cramped, sweaty confines of a submersible had that effect on a sailor, and even a cursory attempt to scrub up for an engagement couldn’t quite remove the impression.