Chapter 3

Tulon had been at a single pitched naval battle – the defense of her home harbor, when she’d just become a Queen’s Woman. She could remember how terrible the Imperial broadsides had been as their ships had driven into the harbor and it had come down to who could win: Her fellow women and the marines that had fought with them, or the gunnery of the Imperials. In the end, while cannonballs were terrifying things, and they had lost many women to muskets and pike, they had still carried the day.

Tulon was less sure about now.

Dawn had just broken – and with it, the impossible sight of an Imperial ship gaining on her. She had slipped away from them in the night, she and her passengers. Once a ship was a few hundred yards away from their enemy at night, without a moon or man to see by? They were as good as invisible. She had then tacked off course, swung around, and then hit one of the big trade currents that wound their ways through the islands. They should have been hundreds of miles away, not right on her ass.

According to Gyre, they had a tool that let them see in the dark as well as sh ... er ... he could. Tulon paused in her examination of the Imperial ship to eyeball the strange ‘human.’ That was what he called himself, now that he could remember fragments of what he was. Those fragments had let him learn the Queen’s Speech at lightning speeds, and had given him an idea of his name. What all that meant was still too big and too scary for Tulon to really want to grapple with right now.

Besides, it wouldn’t matter if the Imperials blew them away in the next hour.

“How are they running the damn flywheel, though?” Gyre muttered with his strange, faintly musical voice. His eyes were fixed upon the rear of the Imperial ship, which was mostly concealed by their sails and the bustling of their crew. Tulon, if she squinted, could just barely see the massive paddle-wheels that were being used to add extra knots to the ship’s speed. But she was more interested in counting the cannons and examining the crew.

All women, like most Imperial ships. They were in the same Imperial uniforms she recognized from the battle of the harbor, though more of them had guns and less of them had pikes. She frowned as she considered their options.

Xan, meanwhile, was clinging to her back and warming her against the chilling sea spray that the prow of her ship was casting up. “Tulon!” He hissed in her ear. “Behind us.”

Tulon looked back.

Then her heart leaped.

“Sails!” She said, then grabbed onto Gyre’s shoulder, shaking him. As usual, she found that he was harder to shake than any woman she had ever touched – he felt like metal when she touched him, and was stronger than anything she had ever tried to move before. Unconsciously, his muscles resisted her, and those muscles terrified her. Still, it drew his attention and he snapped his head back. She actually watched his eyes, rather than the horizon. They were like clockwork mirrors – and she could see them narrowing and focusing in a way her eyes never could. Once they had finished, he nodded.

“Three ships, like yours,” he said. “There are ten women on each, their sails are painted red.”

“The Queen’s ships,” Tulon said, laughing. Her gaze swung back to the approaching Imperial ship. She chewed her lower lip. “We might be able to buy just enough time...” She said, quietly. “If we force them to have to hunt us out.” She nodded to her husband, who flitted down into the belly of the boat. She snatched up a metal ring that had a leather sack attached to it, looped around it so tightly that the ring was almost invisible. She held it out as her husband began to flow into it, causing the sack to glow with an inner light. As he moved inside of it, she looked over at Gyre, then paused. “Shit.”

“What?” Gyre asked.

“You don’t have gills,” she said, quietly. “Listen, the best plan we have right now is to drop over the side and sink and hope that their marines can’t find us before the Queen’s ships show up. But if you don’t have gills...”

“He could stick his head in my sack?” Xan asked, his voice sounding faintly muffled and distant from his position in said sack.

“No, we’re going to need to sink you,” Tulon said.

Boom.

The rumbling sound of a cannon firing caused each of them to jerk their heads around – smoke had bloomed ahead of the Imperial ship. A few seconds later, a cannonball crashed into the water ahead of their little ship, sending up a spray of water into the glittering light of the dawn.

Gyre immediately lifted his hand and aimed it at the ship, as if he expected to castigate them. Then, his face twisted into furious snarl. “What do you mean the ROE still doesn’t apply,” he snapped.

“The what?” Tulon asked, cinching her husband’s life sack shut to keep him safe from the water. “What are you talking about?”

“Ugh,” Gyre said. “I...” He sighed. “Okay. I think the best way to explain this is that ... my abilities? My powers? They’re not magic. They’re tools built into my body. And those tools follow special rules, created by the people who made them. And those rules are called the rules of engagement, and whoever wrote the rules is a goddamn fuddy duddy!” Those last three words were a complete mystery to Tulon, as they had all been in Gyre’s strange language. “It doesn’t think we’re under threat! It keeps asking me to ask my tactical officer.”

Tactical officer? Like ... an admiral? Tulon shook her head. “Shoot them!” she exclaimed.

“You’re not my tactical officer! I don’t even know what a tactical officer is!” Gyre said. “I don’t remember-”

“What does it need for us to be under threat, blood to be drawn?” Tulon snapped.

“I think we need to be shot at by guns that can actually hit the broad side of a barn,” Gyre said, the last word remaining an enigma. Bharn? What the fuck was a Bharn? She shook her head then slung her husband over her shoulder.

“I say we stick with what I know – I don’t want to rely on your magic.” She paused. “But you don’t have gills.”

“I don’t need to breathe,” Gyre said, quietly as he looked over the edge of the boat, at the rushing water.

Boom.

Another bow shot. This one was even wider than the first. Ranging shots or just the Imperials trying to show off? Tulon wished she had Gyre’s magical eyes, to see what was happening on the Imperial ship. Instead, she just took the impossibility in stride. “Good, then jump!” She said, snatching up the escape anchor, hefting it over her other shoulder and then leaped off the side of the boat feet first. Her body slammed into the water. The buoyancy of her husband’s life sack warred with the weight on the anchor and her gills opened as the fierce salt of the ocean rushed through them. She forced herself through the discomfort of switching modes – and plunged down into the water.

The sun shone down at an angle, creating shimmering, godlike rays that reached through the schools of fish that swept away from the return of their natural predator. The infinite deepness below her stretched out more and more as she saw the white flurry of Gyre plunging down...

And he didn’t sink.

He shot down.

He shot down with terrifying swiftness, as if his whole white and black body was an anchor made of solid steel. There was a single second of terrified eyes, then he was down, down, down, vanishing into the deepness.

Tulon let out a keening water-cry: “Gyre!”

But he was gone.

“Captain Yetna!” one of Yetna’s better midshipwomen shouted. “She’s diving!”

The distant mongrel ship had already begun to show signs that her motive intelligence was gone. The mongrels built fast sailors, but like anything that depended on wind and tide, without a hand to clap to a rope or adjust a sail, they started to list and drift.

Captain Yetna bit back a curse as, beside her, the Stasi shouted more orders. “Load another shot! Blow the ship to splinters! Bring us alongside them!”

“Stasi Chevalier Lidara,” Yetna barked out over the sudden confused clamor as half the hands moved to obey and the other half looked to her. Those half, she marked down mentally for reduction in grog. “The last time I checked, I was her majesty’s captain aboard this ship!”

“You’re letting them get away! We have to get the object before those-” Lidara snarled, her gills clamping tight.

“Those Queen ships are an hour away at best,” Yetna snarled, stepping down the stairs of the forecastle to the bow of her ship, where she put her hand upon Lidara’s shoulder. “I was going to catch up with them and force that mongrel to surrender before the face of our broadsides. But now you’ve scared her into diving, and-”

“I scared her?” Lidara sounded offended, as if Yetna had slapped her across a dinner table with a rotting fish. “I scared her? I was simply ensuring that your lackadaisical attitude towards this chase does not see the greatest treasure this world has ever seen go to the mongrel Queen and her alliance!” She shook her head. “You have no understanding of the situation you’ve found yourself in, Captain, and if you would simply follow my orders without balking at all of them...”

Yetna forced herself to not show teeth. She forced herself to breathe steadily. Follow ... your orders? She thought. Your orders have gotten some of my best women killed already, you trumped up, boot wearing clownfish fucker.

“ ... then we wouldn’t be in this situation. Which is something I will be sure to report to the Empress herself,” Lidara said, then shoved past Yetna, making sure to check her with her shoulder hard enough that Yetna almost stumbled. Yetna spun and watched as the Stasi stalked back to her cabin and swept inside. She closed the door behind her with a crash, and the entire crew was silent, watching the whole scene with a look of horrified, awed fascination.

Yetna rolled her shoulders. “Marines! We’re going fishing. Stow the bow chasers, keep the broadsides loaded – put the canister shot in the secondary hold, we’re not going to be boarding anything today if we can help it. Bring out pikes!” She nodded, and as the orders were obeyed, she cracked her knuckles. “And get my dive gear.”

She had been sitting on the deck long enough.

Besides, she thought. The Stasi needs to see that I’m not completely useless, or she’ll whine her ass off. And ... She paused. The thought had started as an entertaining aside – an excuse for her to get into dive gear and go and bloody her knife, something she badly wanted to do ever since this mission had started. Albeit, she’d have to settle for a Queen’s Chevalier and not Lidara’s Stasi guts. But the realization had settled in, slowly, that ... that was not an entirely idle threat. The Stasi reported to the Empress, and the Empress’ word was law.

She alone spoke for the gods. She alone had brought so many innovations to the Empire. She...

She absolutely could have Yetna broken for anything less than complete and utter success.

Yetna clenched her jaw as one of her hands emerged from the forecastle decks, bringing back her diving gear. It was the best on the ship – Yetna had earned her step as a diver, capturing a Two Chip ship off the coast of the Necropolis Island. Everyone else on her ship had been too skittish about the ‘ghosts’ in the water around Necropolis, but she’d swum further, faster, and gotten up onto the anchor chain of the Two Chip vessel, then swarmed her way up and into their command crew before they’d known thing one was wrong.

A proper set of diver’s gear started with a simple harness for carrying the traditional short bladed, curved knives – they had narrow points for an easy stab, and a broad edge for a deep cut. They were single sided and their hilts base had narrow spikes that could drive into soft wood. You could use the knives to climb a hull, slit a throat, stab in a deep water struggle. Then there was the fiber woven armor that was not so good against a powerful swing above water, but could slow a cut and tangle a point under the water, doubly so when the water soaked into the fibers and made them tougher and slipper, harder for enemies to grip onto or slash through.

But in all the collection of gear, there was something new – something only the Empire had access too.

There were two narrow tubes full of ... eunuchs. Making a eunuch was a tiresome process, but the Empire had specialized facilities where women worked with wax in their ears to block out the shrieking.

Honestly ... the tubes filled Yetna with a creeping disgust, even as she strapped them on. Her mother had told her that, in her day, their island’s navy had been like everyone else’s, with mixed gendered crews. That was before the Empress and her dictates on proper breeding programs and the role of men and women. Men were the weaker gender – they couldn’t lift anything, they could barely untie a knot or tighten a strap. Their main ability was in siring children, providing pleasure, and producing illumination and heat.

Those last two?

Those were what had led to the creation of eunuchs. They just ... squashed the parts of a male that spoke and thought, until there was a pliable cloud of shimmering sparks that just needed to be woken from its sleep, fed some sugars, and ... it glowed.

Yetna forced herself to not think about the ... about what it took to make eunuchs. Instead, she tapped both of the tubes to waken the eunuchs inside and felt the warmth and glow suffusing her. That would allow her and her other divers to go deeper than any Queen’s mongrel, no matter how many escape anchors she weighed herself down with. The tubes were flush with her skin, rather than separated by an insulated leather balloon, and they were made of thin glass to let all the light shine out. Once they were fully warmed up and lit, Yetna glanced from her own preparations to her divers.

“We are going after the object – not the Chevalier. She can go back to her island and rot for all I care,” Yetna said. “But if she gets in the way, you know what to do women.”

Her divers all nodded.

They stepped to the side of the ship. The mongrel’s boat had already stopped going forward, the wind having blown it so that it was now luffed and limp. Yetna judged as best she could where the mongrel had dived, then leaped over the side of her ship, feet first. She plunged into the water and gritted her teeth as her lungs switched over, her gills snapping opening – the faint roaring splash of each of her fellow divers rushing through her ears.

Where are you little Chevalier? She thought, then looked down. She could see the winking light of a husband’s life sack, gleaming like a guide star. She showed her teeth and began to swim down, powerful strokes warring against her own natural buoyancy as her gills worked in steady rhythm.

She and her divers went down. Down.

Down.

Gyre was falling through space...

And through...

Memories?

It’s just microgravity, Tuggatharta, you fucking nerd! If you can’t handle this, how can you expect to become a Starship?

He closed his eyes, trying to cling to that. But it slipped through his fingers like sand, leaving him only with the goddamn nonsense!

RA = 12h 51.4m | RA = 17h 45.6m,

DEC = +27⁰ 07’ (2000.0), Dec = -28⁰ 56’ (2000.0).

INC: 63⁰

Timecode: 1.44112e+17 Seconds Prior

“What do you mean?” He asked – and his voice warbled strangely through the vacuum he fell through. Because it wasn’t vacuum. He was plunging down through water, water so dark and black that he could see nothing at all, save for the tiniest motes of dust that gleamed in the pale ... illumination coming from his chest!? He looked down at himself and saw that there were a few beads of light, shining on his person, seaming through the cracks of his body.

He focused, trying to get the lights to brighten. Nothing.

Okay, he thought. What are the parts of that I do know? I don’t know what RA means, or Dec, or INC. But ... seconds? I know seconds. Seconds prior. That means before. So, it has to be about something in the past, right? But how much is 1.4 whatever whatever E plus seventeen? I have no idea.

The lights on his chest did not brighten. But something did shine out of the corner of his eye. He lifted his hand – and saw that between each of his clenched fingers shone a beam of light, clearly illuminating the motes of particulate matter around him. As if it had suddenly woke up, the strange boxes of information that sometimes flickered to life around him glowed up, and he saw a green wireframe painted onto the world, then fading away into nothingness, save for a pair of green bars at either side of his vision. One had a set of numbers, ticking up ... and he knew the notation, deep in his gut.

Meters.

He was almost three thousand meters below sea level.

Then the green wire-frame was back, below him now, sweeping up towards him as he fell through the water. It painted a jagged relief of rectangular shapes and strange irregularities – parts of the wireframe were closer to him than others. He pointed his palm at one such chunk of wireframe and the wireframe filled in with light: He was sinking past something in the deep, deep darkness. It was rectangular and regular and had several spaced holes on the side facing him, which his light shone into, illuminating lumps of scrap metal and desiccated, ancient things. Then his feet crunched into the bottom of the sea and he felt pavement crack under his weight.

A flurry of grit and dust flew up around him, but despite the fact it occluded the light entirely, he could still see with the wireframes.

And here? Standing on the bottom of the ocean, Gyre knew where he was.

I’ve been here before, he thought. The memory was intense. City streets. Buildings. Shops. Cars. He was in a city.

Just as sudden as the memory’s arrival was its departure. The silt settled and he saw that, while the buildings were arrayed in a grid, everything else was alien. The doors were too low, there were no stairs. The scrap metal lumps here and there were covered in coral and deep sea reefs. Fish that glowed with bio-luminescent spines swam in slow, stately processionals, threading through windows that had either never held glass, or were so ancient that even their jagged remains of glass were worn away. The city reeked of age and quiet and death, buried under three kilometers of ocean.

“Holy shit,” he whispered, his voice reverberating through the water – and causing the fish to flee from him even more than the light.

... Tulon.

He looked upwards, the thought reminding him that there was reason for him to be down here. His eyes swept up and he found himself cutting through the distant murk and the darkness. He could see three kilometers as easily as if he was right up near the surface. He saw no sign of Tulon or her husband – just a thin cloud of pinkish blood, dispersing, and a collection of fish, nibbling on something floating in the water. A corpse. His heart clenched ... and then he saw the bottom, barnacle covered hull of the Imperial ship. Then...

A distortion in the water. Something had dropped, darting down fast. The movement was so fast he lost sight of it – but he adjusted his vision and saw that it was something spherical and heavy. The husband life sack? Xan? He didn’t know, but he saw where it was going to land – maybe a hundred, two hundred meters away from where he was. He started forward, and fount that walking through water was easy as walking through air, though every motion he made caused rippling, cascading shockwaves to explode away from his body as his incredible strength shoved the water away from him.

He walked past ruined buildings and heaped scrap and came, after a few minutes, to the site of the dropped object.

It was a cannon-ball.

Scrawled on it in glowing, luminescent paint, were words.

“ ... I have no idea what this says,” he said.

But there was a very limited constellation of what it could be. Threats. Demands. Ransoms. He frowned, looking upwards.

How the fuck to get up there?

He felt the water around him shimmer. Bubble. Froth. He looked around himself, opening his mouth in confusion – the frothing wasn’t boiling. Instead, it was something far stranger. The bubbles appeared right against his hull ... his skin ... and then shot upwards, a few inches, before collapsing back into nothingness. The froth was so intense and only got more intense as he felt an energy growing within himself. It was as if his desire to go up had triggered something, but he had no idea what. There was a horrible sense of dislocation and loneliness and...

Sorrow?

He was supposed to have someone with him, doing this. Helping.

Then the froth vanished. The city around him vanished. The water roared past his ears, rippling and tearing as he shot upwards a thousand times faster than he had descended. He expected his ears to pop, his blood to boil with nitrogen narcosis (the fuck is nitrogen narcosis? An errant part of his mind wondered), but instead, he felt nothing but the exhilaration of...