Blood Red Tide. James Axler
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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.”
“Aye, Father.”
“If you take Oracle before rounding the horn, head back for home with Glory in tow and we’ll see you next year.”
“Aye, Father.”
“Very good.” Sabbath snapped his book shut and turned back to the rail. He watched as a short, chubby teenaged girl was torn from her family and her homespun shift ripped from her onshore. “Mr. Kang!”
Sabbath’s seven-foot Korean second mate stepped forward. He had come with the junk as well, and after an initial period of disgruntlement, he found piracy in the Caribbean suited him quite well. He carried a cat of nine tails in a shoulder bag at all times, and every man in Sabbath’s fleet lived in horror at the prospect of feeling the lash propelled by the giant’s right arm. “Aye, Captain.”
Sabbath pointed his book at the weeping girl. “That one. Bathe her and bring her to my cabin as a belly warmer, now.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Sabbath licked his thin lips. “Ae Sook, you will assist me.”
“In all things, my captain.”
Black Sabbath strode to his cabin with his loins stirring. “We sail with the morning tide.”
* * *
RICKY CLEANED THE CAPTAIN’S blasters. Compared to the barons and warlords the youth had encountered since leaving Puerto Rico, Oracle’s personal arsenal was sparse in the extreme. Then again, Oracle’s preferred combat method seemed to be disemboweling his opponents with a mutant orangutan paw prosthesis. He had a beauty of a single-shot Thompson/Center Contender that, according to rumor, he was quite proficient with and could reload with his paw. It was chambered for .45-70. Ricky was a confirmed blaster lover, and he knew the round was ancient, pre-Deathlands American and usually used to take bison. He couldn’t imagine firing it from a fourteen-inch blaster. He aimed the oiled, tuned and gleaming blaster and yearned to shoot it. Ricky lowered the weapon as the lurking fear closed in.
He