Protocol and Prisms

The black-and-brass war frigate sat across the channel like a wall of iron.

Its massive three-masted hull locked off the only deep-water trench between the calcite teeth of the reef. If we turned south, our shallow cedar hulls would split across the shoals. If we held course, Commander Mazigh Boubara would have twelve imperial boarding irons through our deck before we could trim the sail.

"He does not look like he is in the mood to bargain," Safiya muttered behind me.

Her bronze knuckles tapped a rapid, nervous rhythm against the cedar tiller. Behind her, Bashir and Idris crouched beside the mast, their hands steady on the halyards, waiting for an order that did not end with chains around our necks.

"Commander Boubara is never in the mood to bargain," I said, stepping onto the raised gunwale of our port hull. I kept one bare foot hooked into the netting, the sea breeze whipping salt across my throat. "That is what makes him so charming."

Across thirty paces of azure water, Mazigh stood at his quarterdeck rail. He had not drawn his saber. His hands remained clasped behind the pristine midnight-blue wool of his coat, his silver collar catching the midday glare without a speck of brine on it. The man looked as if he had dressed for a court gala rather than a chase through treacherous shallows.

"Captain al-Ghazwani," Mazigh's voice carried clearly across the swell, crisp and unhurried. "You are in violation of maritime charter forty-two. You will heave to, surrender the seized royal optical freight, and submit to imperial custody."

"Charter forty-two?" I called back, shading my eyes with one hand while the other slipped into my sash. "You memorized the numbers just for me, Commander? I am flattered."

A muscle twitched along the clean line of his jaw. "You have ten seconds to drop your mainsail."

"Your uniform is spotless, Mazigh. It would be a tragedy to ruin it with bilge water."

"Nine seconds."

"Safiya," I murmured without turning my head, keeping my gaze locked on his silver-trimmed figure. "When I drop my left arm, throw the helm hard to starboard. Do not wait for the wave to crest."

"The starboard shoal is barely four feet deep," Safiya hissed under her breath. "We will grind the keels off."

"Only if we hit the bottom," I said. "And we are not going to hit the bottom."

On the frigate's foredeck, two imperial lens-men adjusted a pair of heavy brass gimbals. The curved mirrors rotated in unison, catching the brutal noon sun and funneling the light through an array of cut crystals mounted along the prow.

"Five seconds," Mazigh said.

"You really have no sense of theatricality," I sighed.

I dipped one hand down to the captured sea-chest beside the hatch, slipping my fingers beneath the oiled sheepskin to lift out one of the stolen triangular quartz prisms. The crystal was cold and razor-sharp, its three facets cut to absolute mathematical perfection. Imperial grade-four glass. The purest refractive medium the royal workshops could grind.

Mazigh raised his right hand, gloved in white kidskin. "Engage the perimeter."

The frigate's mirrors flashed.

Two blinding beams of hardened light lanced across the water. They struck the surface with an audible hiss, sizzling as they cut through the spray and formed a solid, glowing lattice across the channel mouth. The light did not merely illuminate; it solidified, a barricade of compressed solar force that would shear our wooden hulls in half if we struck it at speed.

"Now!" I dropped my arm.

Safiya hauled the tiller toward her ribs with a sharp grunt.

The catamaran banked violently to starboard. The port hull lifted clean out of the water, skimming on a sheet of foamy spray as the wind caught our lateen sail. Idris threw his entire weight onto the stabilizer line, keeping us balanced on the knife-edge between flight and capsizing.

"Second battery!" Mazigh commanded across the water, his tone flat and unflinching. "Box their stern."

A second pair of beams snapped out from the frigate's lower deck, angling down to intercept our turn and seal off the shallows behind us. They were moving to trap us in an equilateral cage of light.

I brought the grade-four quartz prism up before my right eye, squinting through the crystalline facet.

The optical world snapped into sharp geometric lines. I did not look at the warship or the water; I looked at the angles of incidence. The imperial beams were falling at sixty-two degrees from the zenith. If a beam hit the prism head-on, the energy would shatter the crystal and cook my hand to the bone.

But if I caught the light along the prism's forty-five-degree flank at the exact moment the hull crested the wave—

"Idris, slack the main sheet by two inches!" I shouted over the rush of the sea.

The catamaran dipped. A fan of crystalline sea spray exploded over the bow, filling the air between our hulls with a million suspended water droplets.

I thrust the quartz prism into the descending solar beam.

The impact hit my wrist with the force of an iron cudgel. Heat flared against my skin, fierce and biting, but the grade-four cut held. The pure quartz caught the imperial beam, bent it through its internal lattice, and cast it wide into the cloud of sea spray.

The spray acted as an infinite field of micro-lenses. The solid imperial light chain shattered into a roaring fan of harmless, blinding rainbow mist.

A clear gap opened in Mazigh's perimeter.

"Hold the line!" I yelled, grinning despite the stinging heat in my fingers. "Thread the needle, Safiya!"

Our catamaran sliced cleanly through the shattered light barrier, our keels skimming barely three inches above the pale calcite reef. The hull shuddered as we cleared the narrows, leaving Mazigh's heavy warship locked in the deeper channel behind us.

I turned back toward the frigate, raising two fingers to my brow in a mocking salute. "A lovely attempt, Commander! Next time, try sixty-five degrees!"

Mazigh stepped to the very edge of his ship's rail. For a single heartbeat, the austere mask of imperial perfection slipped, replaced by an intense, searing stare that tracked me across the water. He did not shout orders. He did not rage. He simply raised his glass, watching my escape with a cold, measuring focus that sent a sudden spike of adrenaline down my spine.

Then, the world stopped.

The air went completely dead. The wind died in our sail in a fraction of a second.

The ocean beneath our hulls began to hiss.

"Yasmina," Safiya's voice lost all its sharp bravado, dropping to a breathless whisper. "Look at the water."

Around both our catamaran and the imperial frigate, the crystal-clear azure sea was turning milky white. Tiny, furious bubbles erupted across the shallows by the thousands, rising from the deep trench beyond the reef. The temperature of the salt spray suddenly climbed, smelling of sulfur and baked stone.

"What did you do?" Bashir cried from the deck, staring at the boiling sea.

"I didn't do this," I said, the humor vanishing from my chest.

A low, subterranean hum vibrated through the timbers of the ship, shaking my soles so violently that my teeth clicked together. Across the narrowing distance, I saw Mazigh turn away from our ship, his gaze snapping toward the southern horizon.

A second later, the sky tore open.

Ten miles to the south, where the uninhabited calcite spires rose from the deep ocean, a massive pillar of blinding, concentrated amber light erupted into the heavens. It was not a beam from a warship's mirror. It was wider than a citadel tower, a terrifying geyser of unbridled solar fire that turned the noon sky into a furnace of burning gold.

The shockwave hit us before the sound did.

A wall of superheated air slammed into our sails, cracking the cedar yardarm with a deafening snap. Behind us, Mazigh's warship rolled hard to its port side, its pristine optical mirrors shattering against their brass frames as the ocean surged in an unnatural, boiling tide.

The horizon was no longer sea and sky. It was a blinding wall of light, and it was expanding.