Alex Archer - Serpent's Kiss

“You can always threaten them with their grades.” Annja smiled.

“Hey!” someone shouted. “I found gold!”

The unusual cry drew Annja’s attention at once. Across the water, brown and thick with dirt and debris, one of the male college students held up an object that held the dark yellow luster of gold. He had to use both hands to hold the object.

Lochata and Annja trudged through the water and joined him.

“Let me see that.” Lochata took glasses from her vest pocket, slipped them on, then reached for the object the young man held.

Annja peered over the diminutive professor’s shoulder for a better look.

The object was hardly larger than Annja’s closed fist, but it was too heavy to be common metal. It looked like an egg, elliptical in shape. But at the top a fist poked through.

“What is it?” someone asked.

“It appears to be a mechanism of some sort,” Lochata answered.

“Is it gold?” someone else asked.

“I believe so, yes.” Lochata’s fingers glided around the figure.

“Where did you find it?” Annja asked the student who’d found it.

He pointed at the calf-deep water. “Here. I stubbed my toe against it. I figured it was just a rock, but when I looked down I saw that gold color. When I picked it up, that’s what I found.”

Several of the students took renewed interest in the surrounding area.

“Am I going to get to keep it?” the student asked.

“Dude,” Jason said, “if I can’t keep one lousy skull out of the dozens we found, there’s no way they’re going to let you keep a solid-gold paperweight.”

“It’s not a paperweight,” Annja said.

“Then what is it?”

“No one makes a paperweight out of solid gold,” one of the female students said. “Except maybe Paris Hilton or Britney Spears.”

Annja ignored the chatter. She watched as Lochata’s fingers found the hidden release. The mechanism inside the egg-shape whirred to life. The device split open like the sections of an orange to reveal the figurine inside.

It was a woman.

At least, part of it was a woman. From the waist up, the fantastic creature was a woman. She held one fist above her head. In the other she held a short whip.

But below the waist she was a snake. Her serpentine half sat in a tight coil and balanced her.

“A ship! I see a ship!”

Wearily, Goraksh Shivaji lifted his head and stared out at the bleak expanse of the Indian Ocean from the deck of his father’s ship, the Black Swan. He’d barely managed a handful of catnaps during the night.

He should have been home in Kanyakumari studying algorithmic design paradigms. The professor this semester was harsh. College life wasn’t easy for him. It didn’t help that his father expected him to work a fifty-hour week in the warehouse.

Over the past two years of his career at university, Goraksh had thought about telling his father that he was quitting the warehouse. But he needed the pittance his father paid him to pay his tuition.

Jobs were hard to come by, especially ones that worked around a college schedule. Also, working in the warehouse guaranteed that he could live in his father’s house. If he was on his own, he knew he wouldn’t be able to make ends meet.

As it was, when Goraksh finally graduated, he was going to owe a small fortune to the university. He would have his degree in computer science. Then he would be able to get a good job in the United States, maybe designing video games, and finally leave his father’s warehouse behind for good.

But that was the dream. Tonight was all about working for his father. If you could call piracy work, Goraksh grumbled sourly.

“Goraksh, do you see the ship?” His father’s voice was stern. Rajiv Shivaji was a hard, lean man in his early fifties. He wore the turban and steel bracelet—the kara —of the Sikh, and his beard was full. He also carried a .357 Magnum revolver in a shoulder holster.

“Not yet, Father,” Goraksh replied. He held the high-powered binoculars to his eyes and swept the surface of the sea. The light hurt his eyes. He swayed to the rise and fall of the waves as the cargo ship strained under full sail.

Rajiv stood at the prow of the ship and held on to the railing. Goraksh had never seen a man more able who had taken to sea. It was easy to imagine him sailing with the likes of Sinbad the Sailor and other heroes.

Except that Rajiv wasn’t a hero. He was a pirate and a thief, and he had set sail with his crew after learning the tsunami had struck. They’d expected to find several ships swamped at sea. So far they’d found none.

“Fyzee,” Rajiv yelled up to the old man standing in the wire crow’s nest twenty feet above the pitching deck.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Do you still see the ship?”

“I do. It’s only a short distance away.” Fyzee pointed. He was old and potbellied. His beard and hair had turned snow-white long ago.

Goraksh followed the direction the old man was pointing, then lifted the binoculars to his eyes again. This time he saw the ship. He knew then why he’d lost it—the ship was upside down.

Judging from the rough, unadorned exterior and the barnacle-covered hull, the craft was a cargo ship. It was one of the lunkers that local businesses used to cross the Indian Ocean on regular routes. They were operated for a song and only required a skeleton crew. Goraksh thought of the ship’s crew and wondered what had happened to them.

Sickness lurched through Goraksh’s stomach when he thought of how cruel the sea could be to those who were lost in it. He’d been with his father when they’d reclaimed bodies from the ocean. Sometimes, after the sharks had gotten at them, there were only parts of bodies. But they’d inspected them for anything worth stealing and quickly shoved the gruesome remains back into the sea.

“Well?” his father demanded.

“I see it,” Goraksh replied.

“Where is it?”

“South by southwest.”

Rajiv called orders back to the helmsmen. The crew came about sharply as the ship took on a new heading.

“Are there any survivors?” Rajiv asked.

“None that I can see.” Goraksh kept scanning the boat from prow to stern. He knew they weren’t looking for survivors. Anyone who had lived through the storm would only complicate things.

Rajiv gave orders to trim the sails. Goraksh put his binoculars back in their protective case. Tension knotted in his stomach when he thought of what might lie in the overturned ship’s hold.

G ORAKSH BRACED HIMSELF as the ship came alongside the cargo vessel expertly. Tires tied along the length of their port side muffled the impact.

“All right,” his father growled as he paced the ship’s deck, “get aboard and discover what the gods have favored us with on this trip.” He stopped in front of Goraksh. “Go with them, college boy. See how a man dirties his hands to put food on the table.”

Goraksh wanted to argue but he couldn’t meet his father’s gaze. His father had been angry with him ever since Professor Harbhajan stopped by the warehouse early in the week.

The warehouse had been full of stolen and illegally salvaged items. Fortunately the professor hadn’t recognized any of it. But Goraksh’s father hadn’t let him forget that the professor could just as easily have turned them in to the police.

Professor Harbhajan had graded the projects his class had turned in at the start of the semester. He’d stated that he’d been particularly impressed by Goraksh’s work. His father had been incensed when he’d heard about the visit and the topic.

Rajiv was one to hold grudges for years. Goraksh knew that no matter how long he lived he would never be forgiven the trespass he himself had not caused.