Splinters of the Flagship

The diver did not flinch. Seawater streamed in dark rivulets down the hammered bronze scales of her shoulder harness, her eyes tracking every shift of my boots on the pitching cedar timber. In her left hand, she held the sodden, fibrous mass of a volcanic sponge, primed to flash-weld whatever brine pooled around our feet into razor-sharp mineral spurs.

\"Drop the sponge, diver,\" I shouted over the gale, steadying my heavy forged wrench with two hands. \"You already ruined my steering rudder. You took away three months of precision forging and eight hundred man-hours of Khanate brass-casting. The least you can do is surrender before I drop a six-ton crane spar through your ribs.\"

She spat a mouthful of bitter brine onto the deck, not yielding an inch. \"Your iron-bellied pig of an assault barge is drifting straight into the outer teeth of Odu Reef. Surrender to whom? A mechanic who needs six pulleys and a geared windlass to lift a single bucket of grease?\"

She did not wait for a rebuttal.

The diver lunged forward, slamming the pumice-soaked sponge directly into the sloshing foam beneath our boots.

A sharp, crackling hiss tore through the roar of the tempest. The seawater pooling across the deck planks turned milky white, then crystallized with violent speed into a thicket of jagged, translucent coral needles. The mineral lattice burst upward, splintering the cedar decking and racing toward my knees like a forest of rising spears.

I kicked the quick-release trip-pin on the port winch drum.

The coiled hemp tackle snapped taut with the resonant twang of a siege bowstring. Overhead, the heavy cedar crane boom swung out on its greased bronze swivel, dragging a sixty-pound cast-bronze plumb-block across the deck. The block tore through the air, smashing into the emerging coral spire just inches above the planks. The brittle mineral structure shattered on impact, exploding into a blinding hail of salty grit and chalky shards before the crystallization could lock my boots to the ship's framing.

Through the flying debris, the diver sprang forward with terrifying grace. Her bronze-tipped lance flicked toward my throat in a lethal thrust.

I stepped inside her reach, bringing the notched jaw of my forged wrench upward in a sharp diagonal sweep. Metal screeched against bronze with a spray of orange sparks. The shock of the parry traveled straight through my forearms, rattling my teeth, but I didn't yield ground. Pivoting my weight onto my rear heel, I twisted the heavy wrench handle, catching her spearhead in the forged notch and applying two hundred pounds of mechanical leverage against the shaft.

The seasoned ashwood of her lance groaned under the sudden torque.

\"A little crude for an imperial weapon, isn't it?\" she panted, her face inches from mine. Rain plastered dark hair across her forehead beneath her bronze cowl. Her breath smelled of chewed kelp and pure adrenaline.

\"It holds enough torque to snap a trireme mast, islander,\" I grunted, kicking the secondary ratcheted dog into place on the capstan. \"And your little petrified twigs dissolve into muck after ten minutes.\"

I threw my full weight into the wrench. The forged teeth locked around the bronze socket of her lance, and with a clean, brutal twist of mechanical leverage, I snapped the ashwood shaft in two. The heavy bronze spearhead dropped onto the deck. Before she could recover it, I swept my boot out, kicking the severed point into my hand and tucking the bronze-bladed head firmly into my tool belt. I kept the splintered shaft gripped like a club in my left fist, stripping her primary reach weapon entirely.

\"One nil to Khanate engineering,\" I muttered.

\"Not bad for a landlubber,\" she said. \"Now try enduring this.\"

She let go of the splintered stub. The sudden slack threw me off balance, and before I could reset my footing, she drove her open palm hard into my chest plate. The strike carried no weapon, but the sheer momentum shoved me backward across the rain-slicked deck, sending me crashing against the heavy stern capstan.

The sea roared directly behind my head. Black, foam-streaked breakers rose in monstrous heaps against the ruined stern, clawing at the severed steering rudder. A cold knot of sickness twisted in the pit of my stomach. My jaw tightened until my back teeth ached. I refused to look over the railing. To look down into that churning, bottomless black was to invite the cold to crawl inside my ribs.

Folasade did not press her advantage toward the rail. She turned and sprinted toward the main deck housing.

\"Hey! Stay away from the central hatch!\" I roared, pushing off the capstan and scrambling across the tilting deck after her.

Beneath that reinforced hatch lay the heart of the flagship's trim system—a bank of four-inch bronze ballast stopcocks. In open water, they allowed us to flood lower stabilization tanks to steady the massive forward battering ram against heavy ocean swell. If she breached those pressurized valves while the barge rode this storm surge, the incoming hydrostatic head would blow the lower bulkheads wide open.

She scrambled atop the raised hatch comb, drew a heavy diver's chisel from her belt sheath, and raised it high with both hands.

I grabbed the trailing whip-line of the overhead cargo tackle and hauled downward with my entire body weight. The counterweight plummeted from the gantry, slinging the crane's bronze grapple hook in a whistling arc across the open deck. The hook caught the edge of her dive cowl, ripping the leather hood away into the howling gale, but the strike came a fraction of a second too late.

Her bronze chisel came down on the central valve casing.

A dull, subterranean thud shuddered through the barge's entire keel, vibrating through the soles of my boots like a tolling bell struck in the deep. For a single heartbeat, the ship hung in frozen suspension.

Then the valve casing blew apart.

A pressurized geyser of white foam and saltwater blasted upward through the hatch, obliterating the cedar covers into jagged toothpicks. The deck pitched violently beneath us, dropping three feet in a sickening lurch as thousands of gallons of the Nyanza Sea flooded into the lower compartments in an unbroken rush.

The flagship groaned from bow to stern, listing sharply to starboard as the roaring breakers of Odu Reef rose to meet its shattered spine. The groan of failing cedar joints turned into a shriek of tearing iron spikes. The barge tilted at an impossible angle, throwing us both across the flooded deck toward the open fury of the sea.