James Axler - Blood Red Tide

“Captain Dorian is correct. Oracle is moved by his visions. It makes him difficult to predict. Captain Blue is also correct—in the end, the needs of Oracle’s ship must dictate his actions. If he avoided this last chance here, then we must look for the desperate and the unlikely.”

Sabbath gazed on his available fleet. He had two ships besides the Ironman beneath his feet.

His son’s red painted ship the War Pig was aptly named. She had two screws that had been converted to coal and that gave her the power to maneuver any way she liked and push against bad weather. But she ate that coal like a pig, and in the intervening century her steel masts and spars had been replaced by wood and she had never sailed efficiently since. Still, she carried a devastating weight of shot with her cannons, she had a very large crew of very dangerous men and muties and few could match her in a stand-up fight. Sabbath had been recently tempted to move his ensign to her and make her the flagship of his fleet, but the ship was best suited to his son’s middling sailing ability.

Sabbath sighed as he looked on his daughter’s ship, Lady Evil. The Lady was a schooner, her flush deck, deep vee hull and two steeply raked masts were a delight; she was painted sky blue and it was just possible she was the fastest sailing ship left in the broken world. The Lady was the terror of the Caribbean and the Gulf coasts of the Deathlands, but she was small in the scheme of things. There was only one ship Sabbath knew of that could freely sail the great oceans with the weight of shot and yards of sail to ask by your leave from no pirate or baron, and that was the Hand of Glory. She had once been his. She had been his flagship. Sabbath’s fist clenched around the hilt of his butcher blade.

Oracle had taken her from him.

Under Sabbath’s captaincy she had been the Hand of Doom, and he had ruled her with an iron hand.

Oracle had returned her to glory and to the volunteer ship she had been for more than a century. Sabbath stared up into his junk’s rigging. The sails of his three masts were fully battened, and the bamboo slats spreading through the black, lateen rigged sails looked like the fins of a great fish. Sabbath had exaggerated the effect by painting the battens sheaths white like bones. She was a beautiful ship, and big, but she could not match the Glory’s sailing ability. Ironman carried a respectable weight of shot, but her dramatically upswept hull and compartmentalized chambers were not ideal for blaster decks. As far as Sabbath knew, the Glory was the only perfect ship still afloat, and skydark might fall again before the hand of man could ever make another like her. “He’s heading south.”

Dorian snapped his massive balisong shut and rose. “The Brazils! A hungry and thirsty journey in his condition but plenty of villes! He’s fast enough to make sail for it, get resupplied and...” Dorian trailed off. “Then what? He can’t make Africa or Europe from there. What is left but to come back into our teeth?”

“He’s heading south,” Sabbath repeated.

Blue was shocked as she saw it. “He’s going to round the horn.”

“In the southern winter?” Dorian was appalled. “Rad-madness! Triple-stupe bastard!”

Blue admired the gall of it. “If there is one ship that could do it...”

“There are two I know of,” Sabbath said.

“Aye, Father,” Blue agreed. “I can—”

“The War Pig can chase him around the horn.” Sabbath corrected.

Blue bit her lip. Dorian stopped short of strutting like a rooster across the stern. “Aye, Father! I can!”

“And chase him you will, but you’ll not catch him, nor try to.”

Dorian tapped his double hilts in his palm. “No?”

“No, you’ll push him. Give him no rest or respite. Stay under sail down the south. He will outpace you, but when you hit the Horn? While he is tearing sails and snapping spars in the storms, you drop sail and go to your coal. Again, don’t try to catch him. Push him. Push him to breaking with his skeleton crew watch on watch, breaking with the scurvy, hunger and despair, and then push him to me.”

Dorian smiled like a child pulling the wings off a fly. “You and sister Blue will take the Northwest Passage.”

“It’s summer, sweet winds up the Deathlands east and no better sailing across the Great White North. With luck we beat the chem storms and have even better winds down the Deathlands west into the Cific. Oracle has never sailed outside the South Cific before. He’ll be sailing by dead reckoning and rumor. Once he rounds the Horn he’ll have to hug the western coasts, and we’ll have him.”

Blue flipped through her chart book. Many of the maps were more than a hundred years old. The apocalypse had reshaped entire coastlines, dropped entire island chains beneath the sea and generated new ones. The Caribbean Sea was better charted than most, but beyond it, most modern charts were little more than forlorn suggestions. The fact was, like the first age of ships, vast stretches of ocean were once more uncharted. Where a modern chart read ‘Here there be monsters’ it had been written in deadly earnest. Blue collected and collated every chart she could buy, steal, copy or take in plunder. Her library took up a good portion of the captain’s cabin on the Lady. A sheet of vellum stretched from floor to ceiling on her starboard wall, and on that she laboriously pieced together her masterwork, her chart of the world. Blue sighed.

By her estimate it was ninety percent incomplete.

She had never sailed farther south than the night-glowing ruins of Recife; however, her initial jealousy toward her brother’s southern run around the Horn was tempered by the idea of taking the Northwest Passage in convoy with her father and sailing the Cific. “What course?”

Sabbath turned his eye to the operations on shore. The surviving ville people howled in mourning and loss. Pigs squealed as they were slaughtered. Meat roasted in huge pits for the ships’ dinner while pork side, belly and fat back were cut into bricks and salted away. Crewmen loaded the small boats with plundered lumber and cordage and fresh fruits and vegetables and topped off water casks. The choicer of the ville’s young men and women were argued over and divided up for entertainment purposes.

“Set me a straight course, north for the Rock. It will be hard sail, across open ocean, but I don’t want anything to do with any Deathlanders. We’ll be running short on supplies by then so when we get there we’ll relieve a few Newfie villes of their women and salt cod before we round into the Labrador Sea and take the Passage.”

Blue was already flipping through her charts. “Aye, Father.”

Sabbath opened his own chart book. “Dorian, you’re going to do just about opposite. Head south until you hit the southern continent and follow the coast down. I’ve never heard of anything big enough down there to match you, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try. Don’t get night creeped by a horde of war canoes or let a bunch of motorboats take a run at you. Stay out of sight of the coast as much as possible. Stop only for water and supplies.” Sabbath gave his son a stern look. “And no prizes. Stick to the mission. You don’t fight anyone unless they attack you first.”

Dorian quirked his lips in disappointment but nodded. “Aye, Father.”

“And you don’t attack Oracle, not unless he turns to fight you, or you come on him at anchor in a bay and he can’t maneuver. If it all goes glowing night shit and Oracle sinks or somehow escapes us, we’ll meet up here in August.” Sabbath tapped a point on South America’s west coast. “There’s a ville called Coquimbo, about two hundred miles north of the Valparaiso Crater. The baron there’s name is Zarro. When I first traveled the western coast I stopped there for supplies. Zarro and I came to an agreement and I helped him and his sons take a rival ville by loaning them some cannons and men to man them. You sail in to port and say your name is Sabbath, you’ll be feasted well until we arrive.”