"But as scouts, Rowan, as scouts?" the exec asked.
"Like dogs who can shoot guns. Fine marksmen. Good eyes and ears. Not a whole lot smarter than a dog, though. Decision making isn't their forte; they'll come back and hoot at you to let you know they've found something. Uncle can make more sense out of their tongue than I can."
"Very well, Captain Rowan," Saunders said. "That settles my mind, knowing you are confident in the matter. I'm sure they'll be an asset."
The rest of the evening passed in the captain telling stories to his captive audience. Valentine leaned back in his chair, keeping his eyes open while his brain turned itself off. He shifted his gaze to Post, who had restricted his conversation to a few polite phrases during dinner. His lieutenant remained silent, failing to murmur appreciatively at Saunders's yarns. Post finished the second bottle of wine before turning to the brandy.
The Caribbean: An empty, brilliant blue sky is mirrored by an equally blue sea. The gunboat has left the rainy gloom of New Orleans behind her, pushing her hardened prow southeast into the Gulf under the power of her eleven-foot propeller at a steady ten knots. Diesel-electric engines provide the motive force for the propeller, giving her a throbbing, piston-driven heartbeat and sending sky-staining wisps of black carbon into the air from the central smokestack. Below the exhaust she leaves behind a trail of churned water over a mile long, flanked by the low waves of her wake.
The gray ship with her bleached white decks flies no flag, letting her armored bulk identify her, leaving the mouth of the Mississippi coasters and fishing ships scattered, parting like an antelope herd with a lion trotting through. The smaller boats fear an inspection shakedown or impressment of valuable crew. But once in the Gulf proper, only a two-mast schooner approached, and even that turned tail and put the wind to her quarter before binoculars and telescopes allowed positive identification.
The Kurian Masters of the Earth are not a sea-minded race. They avoid blue water and leave its security and commerce to their Quislings. There are few armed vessels anymore. The old navies of the world have been broken up for scrap and spare parts. The great tankers, merchant ships, and passenger vessels now lie in their last moorings, giant rolling stones come to barnacle-encrusted rest as the world fell apart. A few have been put to other uses: agricultural workers in what is left of Florida after the Great Wave that washed across it in 2022 go home from oyster beds, crab farms, and orange groves each night to cruise ships, living in cramped squalor under the last vestiges of the vessels' glitzy luxury of former days.
As the sea is out of reach of the Kurians and their Reapers, a loose Confederation of the Waves exists, nomadic oceangoing caravans of anything from a few sailing ships to hundreds, visiting land only in the most unoccupied areas for supplies. But the sea is a cruel provider. She takes her toll in lives, as well, probably more than the same number of people would suffer under the Kur. Some of these bands have turned pirate, raiding rather than trading for necessities the sea and isolated coastline cannot provide. When their depredations become too troublesome, an armed ship is sent to deal with the menace. While they have little use for it, the Kurians won't let a trifling thing like the sea stand between them and vengeance.
It was the third day out, and life on the plodding Thunderbolt had already turned into routine. The first light of dawn saw the Grogs hosing down and cleaning the decks. They devoured their morning fare with work-sharpened appetite. The cook, his mate, and the officers' steward then cleaned up the kitchen and prepared the meals for everyone else. The men tolerated the presence of the Grogs on the ship, especially since they took on so many of the petty labors, but drew the line at eating with them, or indeed sharing the same space. Grogs in tight quarters smell (even to noses not sharpened by the Lifeweavers) like a kennelful of mating ferrets, so they lived on deck in shelters rigged to the bulkheads of the forward well deck.
With their routine duties and weapons drill done, Ahn-Kha gave them leisure to fish. The rod-and-reel obsession began when a pair of flying fish broke the surface, leaving furrows in the calm ocean in their dash away from the ship.
The Grogs hooted until Ahn-Kha reported that his team wanted to know if the "sea chickens" were good to eat and how they could catch them. Both Valentine and Ahn-Kha were strangers to deep-sea fishing, so he asked around the crew until one old bluewater man, less fastidious than the rest as to who he associated with, descended to the "Grog deck" to teach them how to use the ship's store of fishing poles and reels. Afterwards, the Grogs spent every spare moment fashioning lures, rods, and reels. Valentine prevailed on the captain to slow the ship to a crawl for an hour a day, when the garbage would be dumped overboard and the Grogs, wild with excitement foreign to human fishermen, pulled in all they could catch. It was just as well, for Grog appetites could tax the ship's stores on the three-month patrol.
Valentine's particular responsibility was the Coastal Marines. The Coastal Patrols looked on the marines as only one rung above the Grogs on the evolutionary ladder, and a short rung at that: gun-toting, useless ballast for most of the trip. Valentine put the rivalry to good use, organizing physical contests between them. Races around the deck, arm-wrestling matches, and boxing contests occurred each night, giving the two sides a chance to scream their lungs out supporting their contestant and abusing the opponent. Not all the diversions were physical; singing and musical entertainment were often a spontaneous part of the after-dinner leisure hours. As Valentine stood next to the Oerlikon on the aft gun deck, listening to the music produced by an improvising group of players and singers, he almost forgot these men were technically his sworn enemies. Under different circumstances, he might have been ordered to sneak aboard the ship and plant a bomb that would blow musician, wrestler, and fishing instructor to bloody shreds. All the while, a long line of stormclouds on his mental horizon, came the worries about what he had to do and how to go about doing it.
Valentine felt for the sailors. The captain believed him- self an expert disciplinarian, when in fact his rules verged on pointless sadism. He had an elaborate system of uncomfortable punishments for the last man out of his bunk on a watch, the last man on deck for inspection, the last man in line at mess call. Since physics required someone to be last, Valentine thought the practice cruel: spending a watch-on-watch at the top of the old communications tower without food or water for being shoved out of the way coming up a hatchway improved no one. Of course, the captain's distemper was exacerbated by the ship's radio breaking down after leaving port. Valentine pointed out that their orders demanded radio silence until the pirates were dealt with, so the loss of communications made no difference, but Saunders just grumbled out his familiar "want of a nail" liturgy again.
The executive officer was even worse. Wishing to emulate his captain, thereby showing himself fit for command, Worthington out-Heroded Herod in his punishments.
Valentine and Post kept their marines busy, and as far from the eyes of Saunders and Worthington as the ship would allow.
Valentine felt nervous, bottled up. If he'd been on land, he would have quartered logs and chopped kindling, but there was no firewood to cut on a gunboat at sea. After they grabbed a quick dinner with the marines, they returned to the cabin and undressed. Valentine picked up one of his lieutenant's bottles and sniffed the mouth. It smelled like rubbing alcohol stored in an old boot. "Will, why do you do that to yourself?"
The two officers kept to first names when out of uniform.
"I'm still trying to figure out why you don't."
Valentine marked the tiny blue veins crisscrossing Post's nose and forehead. "Maybe I want to live a few more years. The way you're going, your liver will abandon ship or you'll get drummed out. Either way, you'll be finished."
"Hear hear," Post agreed, refilling his glass, his thick features under the salt-and-pepper hair taking on a red flush. "I figure you for the type to step into the shower, close the curtain, and blow your brains out with your service revolver. The system's rotten, and you know it same as I."
Post either trusted Valentine or did not care about being turned in. Either way, from their first days sharing a cabin, they began to tentatively express to each other unorthodox opinions about their Kurian masters. But neither had yet expressed it so directly.
"Did you lose someone, Will?"
"I was married once, yeah. Close to six years ago now. That's why I tried so hard for officer-it helped us get better housing. But it all went wrong." He took another gulp. "Not worth talking about. You're lucky, your wife gives you someone to live for. Not sure I even want to live for me anymore."
Valentine nerved himself for the plunge. "She's not my wife, Will. The license is forged."
Post looked up at him. "Yeah? What, you pretending for some reason? Might as well get married, that way you don't need false documents to get your allotments. If it goes wrong, just toss her, plenty other officers have done it, hasn't hurt their careers one bit."
Valentine opened the door briefly to check the corridor. He shut the door to their cabin again and sat down on the bed opposite Post. "Will, everything about me is faked. Her, my commission and service record from up north, even the name 'Rowan's not my own. My name is David Valentine."
Post turned over in his bunk, lying on his side. He put the bottle on the floor between them and took another sip from his glass. "Okay, you've got a false name. I don't get it. What is it then, an escape attempt?" Post asked, also lowering his voice. "Damn elaborate one. You'd better pick the right island-go to the wrong one, and the residents will eat you alive. I mean that literally."
"I need the Thunderbolt, and I'm going to take it," Valentine said. He let the words sink in for a moment. Post's face rippled from blank astonishment to incredulity, then back again to astonishment as the idea took hold.
"The original plan was to try with a small group of men I would bring on board," he continued. "That didn't work out, so I'm going to make do with what's already on the ship. The Chief is on our side, and so is Ahn-Kha, the Grog foreman."
"Our side? Whose side is that?" Post finally asked, his liquor-lubricated train of thought finally leaving the platform.