Blowback

If the thirty-two touchholes caught spark before Celso lashed his ribs to the pine hounds, the sheer kinetic backlash would snap his spine across the crosstrees. He hauled three fathoms of tarred hemp around the timber frame, knotting the bight with one hand while his boots jammed hard against the trestletrees. Sixty paces beneath him, the match linstocks kissed iron.

"Bite the pine!" Celso yelled into the howling vacuum.

Eusébio buried his face into the shrouds, his skinny forearms wrapped around the iron truss. Beside him, Baltasar hooked his heavy arm through the ratlines, three scarred fingers clamping the hemp like iron dogs. Roque shoved a leather knot between his own teeth, bracing against the spreader.

A blinding pulse of emerald fire tore through the lower gun-ports.

Thirty-two phlogiston charges detonated in unison. For a split second, physics attempted to obey Admiral Paiva's rigid slate. The guns sought the magnetic parallel, trying to shove forty thousand tons of galleon forward along azimuth two-hundred-and-twelve. But the dying planet's core dipped 3.2 degrees toward the ocean floor, and Celso's rigged starboard brace held the yards dogged four inches short.

The ship answered the lie.

Because the hull was already listing three degrees on the dead swell, the immense kinetic rebound could not travel straight along the keelson. Instead of flattening the keel into splinters, the misaligned force caught the starboard carriage pins at an angle. The energy kicked sideways, screaming along the deck timbers before erupting through the open waist.

A thunderclap split the dark. It was a dry, bone-shattering snap of iron under unbearable shearing pressure.

Down on the forward battery, three main carriages tore free from their hemp breeching ropes. The bronze barrels did not merely recoil; they flipped entirely off their trucks. Two hundred pounds of boiling vitriol and magnetized iron smashed into the deckhead beams, punching through the oak grating of the forecastle.

A fountain of splintered oak, smoking tallow, and green phlogiston vapor geysered fifty feet into the air. Celso felt the shockwave slam into his chest like an iron plate. His breath vanished. The tarred hemp lashing around his ribs stretched until the fibers groaned, biting into his leather coat until he tasted copper on his tongue.

The foretop whipped viciously to port. The mast screamed. The sheared starboard stay—reinforced with the fifty yards of stolen shroud wire—shuddered under violent dynamic tension. Celso saw the braided steel strands singing, turning white-hot at the friction turn.

If the turn slipped, the entire topmast would buckle and fling the four of them into the salt-sea. Celso watched the canvas belly, reading the telltale shudder in the yardarm and waiting for the exact second the port leech went slack. The moment the sail lost tension, he kicked his boots free of the trestletree, reached across the groaning gap, and drove his iron fid straight into the cheek-block wedge. He threw his whole weight onto the lever, forcing the dogging tooth home. The iron teeth bit into the wire. The friction held. The mast whipped back into the centerline, shuddered three times, and settled with a heavy, shuddering groan.

Around the São Pelagio, the rest of the Armada was coming apart.

The sister galleons had not tilted their yards. Three cables to port, the São Jerónimo fired on Paiva’s flat vector. Without the intentional three-degree list to vent the kinetic error, the galleon took the full 3.2-degree blowback directly into her spine.

Her main deck buckled upward in a jagged ridge of split timber. Her entire middle battery imploded into her lower hold, sending a dense cloud of sulfur and atomized salt belching through her hatches. Her forward guns fell silent instantly. Signals of distress flared across her shattered bulwarks, red lanterns swinging wildly against the dark.

Out across the bay, Velha Atoll remained unbroken. The emerald broadsides had skipped high over the coral spine, their vitriol charges detonating harmlessly in the empty sky or splashing into the outer shallows miles beyond the planetary core. Paiva's calculated extraction purge had missed the mark entirely.

A heavy silence followed the roar, broken only by the crackle of burning oak and the distant screaming of maimed gun crews in the lower batteries.

"Sweet mother of salt," Roque muttered, spitting the bitten leather strap onto the platform. He wiped soot from his brow, his fingers trembling against the stay. "The battery deck is stove in. They’ll be hauling out gunners in buckets."

Baltasar spat a gob of red phlegm over the edge, squinting down through the swirling emerald smoke. "The master gunner wanted Paiva's promotion. Looks like his fancy gilded boots are floating upside down in the bilge cistern instead."

"Quiet," Celso said, his voice scraped raw from smoke.

He leaned over the edge of the foretop, wiping salty grime from his eyes. His left palm was flayed raw where the wire had whipped against his grip, blood dripping down the bone fid in his fist. He tore a strip of oiled canvas from his tool roll with his teeth and wrapped the meat of his hand tight, pulling the knot taut with a jerk of his jaw.

The wind had not returned. The sails hung limp and blackened, fouled with soot from the ruptured forecastle.

Below the São Pelagio, the sea remained clear as glass.

The translucent ribs that had phased through the vanguard hull were no longer solitary. Through the emerald-stained brine, dozens of colossal, luminous silhouettes were ascending toward the surface. The leviathans moved without fins or water disturbance, their vast rib cages glowing with faint, cold phosphorescence as they rose through the ocean strata.

One of them, easily two hundred paces from snout to spine, drifted directly beneath the flagship's keel. Celso could see the intricate lattice of its phased body—a ghostly, skeletal titan gliding upward through the dark water. It did not strike the hull. It passed through the barnacled copper plates of the bilge as though the flagship were mist, its radiant ribs illuminating the terrified men scrambling through the drowned ballast.

Judging by its steady ascent, the beast ignored the iron and timber, drawn solely to drink the lingering silence left by the dying world.

"They're coming up," Eusébio whispered, his knuckles white against the shrouds. "Every beast in the trench... they're rising into the fleet."

Across the broken line of battle, galleons drifted without steerage, their gun-decks wrecked by kinetic backlash, their signal lanterns tangled in fallen cordage. Not a single vessel had the speed or trim to clear the shallow reef.

Celso tied off the canvas bandage around his thumb. His ribs ached with every breath, bruised deep by the hemp lashing, but his rigging still stood. The foreyard was warped, the starboard brace was charred, but the mast held them above the water.

They had saved themselves from being pulverized by Paiva's suicidal guns. They had broken the fleet's broadside and spared the core below.

Yet as Celso looked down at the twelve hundred souls aboard the listing flagship, watching the phantom shadows of the deep glide through the decks like pale lanterns, he felt the cold weight of what they had bought. The Armada was dead in the water, stranded without wind or broadsides, trapped in the feeding grounds of monsters they had drawn from the abyss.