The Scorched Pin

Cold void spray bit through the gaps in the timber deck, turning into foul white vapor the instant it met the boiling bilge water below. Grease smoke rolled thick off the dredge barge's forward gun mount, stinking of rancid shark tallow and wet coal dust.

Ta'ani shoved the cherry-red locking pin into the breech sleeve with the heel of his hardened work boot. The thick hide of his sole smoldered, filling his throat with the stench of charred leather, but the tapered wedge would not seat. Brine scale had crusted the housing overnight, narrowing the slot by half an inch. From the vent cock overhead, steam whistled with a shrill, yellow-tinged howl that rattled his teeth. In ten breaths, the cold feed pipe would choke on mineral mud and crack the cast-iron casing wide open.

"Hit the pig, Ta'ani!" Cook Kele shrieked from the firebox gangway, ducking as a heavy iron scraper clattered across the iron grating. "Drive it home or the draft backs up, and my kettle is already full of gray ditch water! Two pots of dried dogfish, ruined before breakfast!"

Ta'ani did not waste breath on the cook. He grabbed an eight-pound copper mallet from the tool rack, planted his feet against the canted deck coaming, and brought the flat face down upon the glowing pin.

Metal rang against metal, a flat, ugly shock that traveled up his forearms into the salt keloids on his collarbone. The pin shuddered, sheared through the yellow crust of canal salt, and drove flush into the heavy sulfur-iron breech block. The shrill whistle died, strangled into a low, guttural chug as the bypass valve took the load. White steam billowed across the forward deck, masking the gray chop of the Pao-Tu canal trough.

Through that curtain came the rhythmic thud of twin iron paddle-wheels.

It was not the slow churn of a harbor tender. The stroke fell hard and fast, beating the boiling brine into frothing swells that rocked the dredge barge against its mooring cables. A heavy hull was cutting the fog, driven by forced draft and high-grade anthracite.

"Cut the hawser!" the old helmsman yelled from the steering platform atop the wheelhouse, his voice cracking with panic. "Cartel flag! It is a cutter from the High Fire flotilla!"

A tongue of flame tore through the mist. The crash of a bow-chaser cannon split the morning air, and an iron canister round ripped across the dredge barge's bulwarks. Oak timbers exploded into jagged splinters. Two deckhands handling the forward capstan folded backward, shredded by cast-iron balls before their boots could clear the deck. Overhead, the heavy hemp hawsers parted with the sound of snapping tree trunks, whipping into the canal foam.

The enemy craft did not pause to trade warnings. An armored cartel cutter, its prow plated in blackened boiler iron, smashed through the port rail with a sickening crunch of crushed oak. The impact threw Ta'ani to his knees. Scalding wash from the canal poured through the splintered gunwale, soaking his canvas trousers and biting into the old burn scars on his shins.

Boarders vaulted the iron beak of the cutter before the timber groaned its last. They wore quilted leather coats stiff with tallow and carried barbed boarding pikes. The lead man leaped straight onto the lower ballast deck, his cleated boots catching the slimy timber three paces from the gun carriage. He had a heavy cleaver in his right fist and cartel badges pinned to his chest.

Ta'ani did not reach for a knife. He had an iron scraper bar in his left hand, four feet of rusted pry-iron he used to clear slag from the fire grates.

As the boarder lunged, the barge pitched violently to port under the weight of the intruding iron bow. The boarder's balance drifted toward his trailing foot. Ta'ani stepped inside the thrust of the cleaver, dropped his center of gravity, and drove the chiselled tip of the scraper bar straight under the man's breastbone.

Bone gave with a wet snap. The boarder let out a ragged wheeze, his jaw dropping as his fingers clawed at the rusted bar. Ta'ani did not pause to watch him die. He drove his boot into the man's groin, threw his entire weight against the bar, and shoved the carcass backward over the shattered rail. The body hit the churning canal trough with a heavy splash and was dragged instantly toward the cutter's port paddle-box.

A second cannon blast ripped through the wheelhouse.

Splinters and shattered brass rained across the ballast deck. The iron ball tore the upper deck completely away, hurling the wheel and the helmsman into the gray water in a shower of pulverized pine. Down in the drowned lower hold, where Diver Moana and the boy had dogged the hatch to stow gear, water was already roaring against the bulkheads. In the firebox pit, someone was screaming about broken steam lines, the high, shrieking agony of a man whose flesh was coming off in hot water.

The dredge barge was dying. Beneath Ta'ani's boots, the deck plates buckled upward. The forward sulfur-iron deck gun, torn loose from its deck rings by the ramming cutter, was tilting toward the fractured bilge. Three tons of dark, unpolished metal slid six inches along the canted planking, its muzzle pointing uselessly into the wash.

If the weapon fell through the rotten bottom timbers, it would sink fifty fathoms into the boiling mud of the Pao-Tu troughs. But Ta'ani knew what held value on that iron beast. A barrel was only cast metal; the firing lever was hand-forged sulfur-iron, fitted with the internal thermal cam that allowed a harpooner to trip the thermodynamic charge without cooking his own hands.

The gun goes down, but the lever stays.

Ta'ani threw himself across the slick deck, ignoring the spray of enemy musketry chipping iron off the carriage. He wedged his pry-bar beneath the mounting bracket of the firing lever. The retaining wedge was pinned with an annealed copper key.

"Lanyard is jammed!" Cook Kele bawled from behind a coal bin, hurling a heavy lump of anthracite at a boarder climbing the broken rail. "Run for the ditch, Ta'ani! She is rolling over!"

Ta'ani ignored him. He bore down on the scraper bar with both hands, jamming his shoulder against the gun's cold breech. The copper key resisted, groaning as the soft metal sheared against the iron eyelet. The cutter fired another volley. A lead ball took a gouge out of Ta'ani's shoulder, ripping away the wool sleeve and leaving a fiery gouge in the meat of his arm.

He did not flinch. He channeled the shock into his forearms and heaved.

The copper pin snapped with a sharp crack. The heavy firing lever, curved like a butchering hook and dark with baked sulfur rind, popped free into his hands. It weighed twenty pounds, cold as mountain stone despite the boiling spray swirling around his knees.

A deep, hollow groan rose from the dredge's central boiler. The safety valves had jammed shut under the impact of the cutter's ram. White vapor had vanished from the exhaust stacks, replaced by a dull, throbbing tremor that shook the iron under Ta'ani's feet.

"Boiler blowout!" Kele screamed, tumbling over the starboard coaming into the churning canal.

Ta'ani tucked the heavy iron lever under his left arm, wrapped his hand tight around the pitted handle, and scrambled across the listing deck. The barge took a final, violent lurch to port as its keel cracked in two. Through the open hatches, boiling water met red-hot boiler plate in a blinding burst of superheated steam.

Ta'ani kicked off the shattered bulwark and threw himself outward into the canal.

The boiling brine hit him like a blanket of needles, scalding his face and neck where the dive skin left him bare. He kicked through the turbulence with desperate strokes, keeping his mouth clamped shut against the bitter salt wash. Ten yards behind him, the dredge barge's boiler let go with a thunderous roar. The blast threw a towering plume of boiling foam and jagged boiler iron into the gray sky, rattling the canal walls and knocking the wind from Ta'ani's chest.

He clawed his way to the surface, gasping for air amidst drifting soot and floating coal grease. His fingers found the slimy wood of a severed mooring pontoon and locked into place.

Across the gray waters of the trough, the cartel cutter did not check its speed. Its massive iron-shod paddle-wheels churned forward through the smoking flotsam, grinding the shattered timbers and the floating corpses of his harbor-kin into red, steaming foam. Ta'ani held the cold firing lever against his ribs and watched the black prow turn down the channel, leaving nothing behind but the stench of burned coal and the silence of the boiling deep.