They spent a few minutes perusing his family photos. She made appropriately appreciative noises at the grainy, bent images. He wasn’t much better as a child than as an adult, but ugly on the outside meant just as little as handsome.
He cautiously questioned her about her childhood. She mostly talked about her mom’s struggles. He probed a little on her service as a Cat. “If it’s okay for you to talk about it. I’m curious.”
“What rumors have you heard?” she asked.
“That you can see in the dark. Disappear at will. You can be silent when you wish. Reflexes that make you a blur.”
“The disappear one is false. Stage magician tricks aren’t our style,” she said. “I can be inconspicuous. You’ve seen me in action—was I a blur?”
“Hard for someone as beautiful as you to be inconspicuous,” he said. “In the fight last month, I’ve no memory of seeing you at all while it was going on—I don’t mean that as an accusation. I was focused on my gun sights. Watching you would have been a distraction.”
He’d been avoiding flirting with her since they landed in Halifax until this instance. But this was the nicest kind of flirting.
She let it lie.
He rose, wobbled for a moment as his legs got used to the deck again. “Want a hot drink from the galley?”
“Not just now,” she said. She had a lot to sort out about him. Parts of him she admired, but there was another half of him she didn’t quite trust. He was reasonably safe on a trip with plenty to eat and drink, so his penis was moving up the to-do list. Overly attentive men were usually this way right until they were sexually satisfied, but then they lost interest until the juices built up again.
“You and David have a past; am I right?” he asked.
“We’ve been partners on three big jobs and two campaigns. That doesn’t count the Rising in Ozarks a few years back, either. We’re like any couple of partners who’ve served in a high-stress, high-risk job.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s kind of like a marriage with no sex.”
“Kind of like a marriage, in other words.” He chuckled at his own joke. She always found that annoying.
“Wouldn’t know. I haven’t been married,” she said. “Doubt I ever will be. I think I’ll have that drink after all.”
They went down to the galley for more punch. Ahn-Kha was asleep, stretched out on the forward cabin floor like a bearskin rug. Valentine was reading one of the English books in the little ship’s library, and Sime was shaving his head in a basin, checking his reflection in a mirror.
“It’s getting cool up on deck,” she said, grabbing her scarf.
Valentine looked up from his book—she couldn’t see the title, but it was thick—and the others ignored her.
Back on deck, they tried to get the talk going again, but the camaraderie was gone and everything was awkward. They settled for watching the wake. Duvalier spoke a little of the seasickness, now vanished in the calmer summer Baltic.
Valentine’s Polish gal at the wheel had been replaced by another crew member. The Polish sailing master, or whatever her title was, had a blanket around her shoulders and dozed in a hammock chair as she waited to be called by a nudge of the helmsman’s foot. The fishing boats had autopilots that could maintain course for a while; perhaps with sailcraft the wind had to be taken into account in ways a machine couldn’t handle.
Von Krebs came up on deck. He avoided them, lighted a cigar and politely smoked it downwind from them. He leaned against the rail, watching them with hands in his pockets except for the moments when he flicked cigar ash overboard.
The steady stare made her nervous. He looked like he was sizing them up to determine worth in trade. Would he hand them over to seagoing bounty hunters? No, if he was a resource with the Baltic League, he must possess a trustworthy enough background.
She didn’t care for being stared at. She watched the ship’s wake, so different from the churned water left by a propeller-driven vessel. The mild Baltic night and small waves meant that the Windkraft left a long, hairpinlike wake under her sails.
Something blacker than the night water appeared in the far wake briefly, disrupting the wave pattern. All she could make of it was that it was dark and shiny. Water ran off its back in little sheets and rivers in all directions. It disappeared at the same one-two-three pace that it appeared, leaving a flat circle of water.
Something about it sent anxious pins up her spine. Maybe in daylight it would have been less ominous… .
“What was that?” she asked, pointing.
No one else had seen it. A couple of the sailors searched astern, exchanging quiet words in their own language. The helmsman glanced over his shoulder and Von Krebs came back to the rail.
“What did you see?” he asked.
“A black something breaking the water. It came up and went down again, maybe five seconds in all.”