Mirage and Mutiny

Three raider hulls cut toward us through the amber glare, each one an exact duplicate cast in shimmering light.

I needed to know which one carried real cedar and iron before their prow-mounted prisms burned my catamaran down to the waterline.

"Safiya, bring us thirty degrees off the wind!" I shouted across the steering deck, my boots braced on the salt-slick timbers of the Sirocco. "Mazigh, if your surviving gunners cannot blind that center phantom, we are kindling in twenty heartbeats."

Commander Mazigh stood at the battered rail of the Vanguard's Dawn, thirty yards off our port quarter at the end of the heavy towline. Even with his mainmast sheared away and his deck littered with scorched canvas, he held his brass spyglass with parade-ground composure.

"The center vessel reflects fifty lumens above standard ambient refraction," Mazigh called back, his deep voice carrying over the hissing surf. "A deliberate decoy. The true strike craft is closing on your starboard blind."

"He's wrong, Captain!" Safiya yelled from the tiller, her straw hat pinned back against the thermal updraft. "The starboard hull throws no bow wave across the calcite bar!"

I vaulted onto the forward crossbeam, balancing barefoot over the churning turquoise water between our twin hulls. The Spire's ambient heat baked the salt dry against my skin. Mazigh had the academy numbers, but the shallow reefs of Tissint did not answer to imperial ledgers.

A true twin-hulled dhow in four feet of water left a twin trailing plume of crushed white carbonate. The starboard illusion looked razor-sharp in the air, its sails billowing with simulated wind, but the pale shallows beneath its keel remained untroubled crystal. The phantom on the far port side showed the same dead water.

Only the center craft churned two thick white furrows through the submerged coral bench.

"Mazigh, your lumens are lying to you!" I called out, reaching into my leather waist-harness for my triangular grade-four prism. "They set a counter-mirror to bleed their center glare into the wings. Focus your deck reflectors on my beam, forty-two degrees north-by-northwest!"

Mazigh hesitated for a fraction of a pulse, his dark brows drawing tight. Then his hand came down in a sharp, decisive arc. "Battery, align on corsair bearing! Forty-two degrees. Converge!"

Four polished brass mirrors on the frigate's foredeck swung on oiled swivels. Four concentrated lances of sunlight struck the back facet of my handheld crystal.

The heat kicked through the brass housing, searing hot against the thick leather of my palm. I locked my elbows, aligned the sighting groove with the center raider's waterline, and twisted the vernier screw.

A hardened beam of amber light snapped across the two hundred yards of open water.

The beam struck the raider's prow swivel squarely. The brotherhood raider had mounted an imperial-pattern quartz lens in an unshielded brass mount. Under the concentrated surge from Mazigh's battery and my focusing crystal, the raider's lens reached its critical angle of incidence in a heartbeat.

The raider's prow erupted in a shower of violet sparks. The solid light beam shattered with the sharp crack of breaking porcelain, its back-blast ripping through the attackers' foredeck and tossing two spearmen over the gunwales.

Deprived of its focusing node, both shimmering mirages on our flanks flickered and dissolved into empty sea spray. The real dhow veered sharply to port, its cedar steering oar splintered and its crew scrambling to smother a smoking sail.

"Drop the towline's slack!" I ordered. "Bashir, Idris, bring up the boarding grapnels!"

"Boarding?" Mazigh's voice lashed across the water, sharp as an officer's crop. "That vessel is disabled. Our objective is the passage through the outer reef before the Spire cycles."

"That vessel is carrying imperial munitions," I retorted, leaping from the Sirocco's prow onto the hardened amber light bridge that spanned the channel. "I want the serial stamps on their prism mount."

The light bridge hummed under my boots, solid and smooth as polished glass beneath an inch of warm seawater. Mazigh vaulted from his frigate's prow, sprinting the thirty yards along the glowing span with infuriating grace, his long naval saber drawn and his gold-braided blue coat flared against the thermal wind. He caught me just as I reached the disabled craft.

"Treason against the Light Fleet is an imperial jurisdiction, al-Ghazwani," he called out, closing the distance to match my step.

"Then consider this private salvage assisting the crown," I muttered, ducking under the raider's smoldering outrigger.

Three wounded raiders scrambled away into the bilge, hands raised, while their steersman lay groaning beside the ruined swivel mount. Mazigh stepped past them, his blade point hovering an inch from the steersman's throat, while I dropped to one knee before the shattered lens assembly.

The casing was heavy, forged from dense naval brass rather than common corsair bronze. I gripped the retaining ring, twisting it clear of the scorched cedar deck.

Stamped into the brass base was the three-pointed sunburst of the High Admiralty. Beneath it ran a deep, unfiled serial inscription: Divan Requisition, First Fleet Logistics.

"Well, Commander," I said, rising and holding the heavy brass cylinder under his chin. "It appears your High Admiral is moonlighting as a smuggler. Or does the imperial fleet routinely donate frontline targeting prisms to coastal cutthroats?"

Mazigh stared at the stamped sunburst. His jaw tightened until the tendons in his neck showed like taut rigging. For a man whose entire life had been constructed from imperial regulations and spotless honor, the mark was a physical blow.

"That serial belongs to the southern depot at Ras-al-Khat," he said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "The requisition was signed by Lord Tariq al-Fassi before his exile."

"And delivered to raiders who just tried to burn us alive," I said. "Your war isn't coming from outside the empire, Mazigh. It was armed from your own capital docks."

I shoved the salvaged brass casing into my leather satchel and stepped back onto the light bridge, Mazigh retreating with me as the burning dhow drifted away in the crosswind.

Before he could answer, a deep, bone-rattling vibration rose from the reef bed beneath the light bridge.

The water drained away in a violent surge, the shallow floor splitting along a seismic fault that opened a black, sheer-walled abyss beneath the calcite. High above the archipelago, the Great Spire let out a deafening thermal shriek, its amber core flaring from warm gold to an eye-searing white.

"The four-minute cycle," Mazigh said, his head snapping toward the sky. "The focal node is realigning."

"Safiya, cast off the towline!" I yelled toward the Sirocco, spinning on my heel. "Get the catamaran into open water!"

"Yasmina, look at the bridge!" Safiya screamed back.

Hairline fractures were racing through the glowing amber span beneath our boots. The Spire's shifting angle changed the line of sight across the channel. With a sound like tearing silk, the light bridge split behind us and ahead of us, severing the path to both ships and destroying the raider dhow's burning remnants below.

The Sirocco drifted south on the shallows with the heavy tidal drag, while the crippled Vanguard's Dawn swung toward the outer shoals.

Between the two ships, suspended sixty feet above the boiling current of the newly opened trench, remained a glowing, twenty-yard platform of hardened light.

And standing on it, cut off from our crews and surrounded by open sky, were only the imperial commander and me.

Mazigh sheathed his saber with a sharp click, his dark eyes locked on the widening gulf of open water between us and our ships.

"It seems, Captain al-Ghazwani," he said quietly, "our parley has been extended."