The Cataract Descent

Grease from a dead beast's belly never froze clean. It turned into gray lard that slicked the brass grommets and glued a rigger's knuckles to the ash yardarm. Celso Valdevez held a curved bone bodkin between his teeth, tasted salt and rancid liver oil, and leaned his breastbone against the freezing timber. He had four inches of split seam left to close on the starboard slip-sail, forty heartbeats before the flagship reached the lip, and neither the cold void nor the imperial contract cared about his skin.

Ninety paces below his dangling boots, the shallow green brine of the First Basin rushed across the oak decks of the São Pelagio. The water foamed against the coamings, swirling around the chained carriages of thirty-two phlogiston cannons before spilling through the scuppers into bottomless dark.

Beyond the galleon's carved prow lay no coastline. The world ended at the shelf. Three leagues of open ocean broke across a sheer drop, falling into the vacuum of the Great Cataract in a roaring, vertical torrent that vanished into the pitch below.

"Hold the leech, boy," Celso spat around the bone tool.

Beside him on the footrope, Eusébio had both hands locked to the jackstay. The boy was seventeen, his second month out of the dockside slums of Porto Real, and his grease-caked wool cowl could not hide the gray panic in his cheeks.

"She's pulling wide, Celso!" Eusébio shouted over the cataract's thunder. "The tiller isn't taking the current. If that slip-canvas doesn't bite when the bow dips, the keel hits the shelf-horn and grinds us into matchwood!"

"Then pull the leech line and stop screaming," Celso said. "The fall will kill you just as quick if you're quiet, and it saves my ears the ache."

He worked his needle through the greasy hide. The canvas was not woven flax. Ordinary sailcloth tore into ribbons under the gravitational shear between planetary basins, shredded by the violent magnetic slipstreams that linked the shallow seas. The armada used the cured mantles of pelagic void-rays, stripped from carcasses dragged out of the black troughs, pickled in vitriol brine, and beaten flat with lead mauls. The hide was tough as boiled leather, slick with foul black tallow, and colder than grave-dirt. When the wind blew hard, the torn seam whistled with the sound of a strangled throat.

A sharp snap cracked across the void.

A needle-slug punched through the manta hide six inches from Celso's wrist. The frozen iron slug hummed with sulfur, leaving a scorching black pinprick in the leathery skin before tumbling into the abyss. Two more slugs cracked against the ash spar, throwing sharp white splinters across Celso's greasy leather tunic.

"Reef skirmishers!" Eusébio shrieked, ducking his head beneath the yard. "They're on the shelf crags!"

"They're shooting at the cloth," Celso grunted, not flinching. "Fools. If they had three brains between their clans, they'd aim for the quarterdeck and put an iron needle through the Admiral's gilded collar. Less work for everybody."

He felt the hull lurch beneath his soles. The deep vibration of the timbers changed, shifting from the rolling chop of the shallow sea to the high, screaming rattle of water accelerating toward the drop. The São Pelagio was caught in the lip-current. In ten seconds, twenty thousand tons of warship would plunge over the edge.

If the starboard slip-sail remained torn, the sudden drop would catch only the port side of the hull. The ship would yaw ninety degrees on the lip, rolling belly-up into the void before the fall even began.

Celso pressed his boots hard into the hemp footrope. The void-wind tore at his clothes, numbing his fingertips until he could barely feel the bodkin's notch.

If I lose the thread, I drop with the ship. If I hold it, I might make port to draw my miserable groat.

He read the violent tremor humming through the ash spar with his shins, waiting for the brief trough between the bow's shuddering lifts. As the nose dipped, the canvas went slack for half a heartbeat.

Celso drove the bone bodkin through the doubled mantle with the heel of his palm. He whipped the oiled sinew through the puncture, caught the trailing end with his thumb, and threw a blind clove-hitch around the brass grommet. He jammed the iron locking dog into the traveler ring and hammered it home with his fist.

The ring clicked shut.

"Clear the yard!" Celso roared, grabbing Eusébio by the collar of his grease-stained vest. "Get belly-down on the timber!"

The world dropped out from under them.

The São Pelagio cleared the shelf-lip. The ocean gave way to raw vacuum, and the warship plunged headlong down the roaring saltwater chute of the cataract. Gravity turned inside out, yanking Celso's guts toward his throat. The noise swallowed everything: a deafening, continuous crash of an entire ocean falling into space, roaring along the ship's coppered hull plates.

Then the repaired slip-sail took the slipstream.

The cured manta hide snapped taut with the sound of a thunderclap. The leathery mantle ballooned against the rushing wall of spray, rigid and glistening with black slime. It bit into the localized magnetic chute, dragging the galleon's heavy prow true to the falling current. The violent yaw arrested in a violent shudder that nearly shook Celso's teeth from his jaw, but the oak frame held. The ship leveled on its descent, surfing the roaring vertical river between worlds.

Celso let out a harsh, rasping breath. His left palm was scraped raw where the locking dog had recoiled, but his fingers were still attached, and the ship was plunging on its proper line.

A high, singing shriek pierced the roar of the falls.

An explosive needle-slug, fired from a long-barrel espingarda hidden high on the retreating shelf, struck the thickest part of the starboard primary stay.

The heavy cable sheared with a sound like a fracturing bell.

The braided hemp-and-wire stay parted in a spray of severed strands. The lower length whipped through the air like a striking serpent, taking off three feet of the upper gallery railing before coiling uselessly against the lower rigging. The main foreyard groaned under the sudden, uneven torque, shuddering violently as the full strain of the descent shifted onto the remaining port ropes.

"The stay!" Eusébio yelled, clutching the ash spar with bleeding knuckles. "Celso, the whole yard is twisting!"

Celso looked down past the bowsprit, past the churning foam of the vertical cataract.

Two leagues below in the dark, the Second Shallow opened like an azure wound in the void. It was a sprawling basin of white sandbars, turquoise lagoons, and densely clustered coral atolls.

It was already burning.

Rolling white clouds of phlogiston smoke rose from the lower sea, drifting like poisoned wool across the archipelagos. The vanguard of the imperial purge armada was already formed in line of battle. From their gunports, great violet flashes tore through the lagoons as the fleet pounded the atolls with magnetic broadsides, blasting the coral foundations to dust to lay bare the planetary core beneath.

The severed upper end of the stay slapped frantically against the mast above Celso's head, threatening to tear the yardarm loose before the ship ever touched the lower sea.

"Don't look at the smoke, boy," Celso muttered, pulling his bodkin back into his grip. "We've got to splice this line before we hit the trough, or Paiva won't even need to shoot us for treason."