The Scavenger's Toll

Ta'ani needed dry coal before the frost on his deck gun cracked its casing, and the only fuel left in the canal sat forty yards away in an enemy skiff.

He crouched among the reed stalks crowding the embankment, boiling brine scalding his shins while void air bit through his leather tunic. Behind him, wedged into a drainage culvert under the quay, sat their rusted maintenance pontoon. Boy Tane lay flat upon its deck, pressing wet reed mats over the salvaged forty-pound harpoon breech. It did little good. The leaking sulfur-iron alloy drank heat through the timber, exhaling pale vapor that smelled of brimstone and killed the canal moss within reach.

"My knuckles are gray," Cook Kele hissed from the mud beside Ta'ani, his three-fingered hand clutching an iron cleaver. "We haul forty pounds of cursed scrap out of the dredge, and now it freezes the bilge while we boil our shins in ditch wash. If we starve here, take my share out of that dead dogfish tail."

"Chew your fish and keep down," Moana said without turning. Her lean shoulder pressed against Ta'ani's arm, her diving leathers reeking of shark lard. She held a curved filleting blade flat against her thigh, watching the open trough. "Three men on deck. One at the steering oar, one hooking floating timber, one standing guard over the steam whistle."

Ta'ani watched the cartel skiff drift through the morning mist. It was an iron-ribbed forager, sixteen feet from stem to stern, powered by a charcoal auxiliary pot that chattered like dry teeth. High Fire crews did not waste paddle-cutters on floating debris. They sent scavenging boats with heavy timber gaffs to comb the wake of an ambush, stripping copper valves, unburned coal sacks, and dead men's boots before currents carried them over the void weir.

In the skiff's open waist, piled high under oiled canvas, rested twenty burlap sacks. Black anthracite dust streaked the canvas folds. Dry deep-seam carbon from Ka'anua, mined to feed high-pressure forced drafts. Beside the bags lay three lead-lined wooden canisters, each locked with a brass pin—harpoon ammunition.

"The whistle lanyard runs up the canopy pole," Ta'ani murmured, his voice a low scrape. "The guard keeps his thumb two inches from the ring. If he pulls it, the cutter downstream turns around."

"He will not pull it," Moana said. "I take the bow man. You take the guard."

"Take the steersman third," Ta'ani said. "Kele stays with Tane. Keep the pontoon tucked in the dark."

Kele spat into the boiling brine. "Do not bleed in the coal sacks. Wet dust burns foul."

Ta'ani slipped over the basalt ledge, sinking beneath the opaque gray water.

The heat closed over his head like scalded wool. Down in the belly of the trough, four feet beneath the surface, a colder undercurrent crawled against the basalt wall. Ta'ani kicked with deliberate strokes, his calloused feet finding the hydraulic seams where ancient stonework met. His burned shoulder throbbed with a dull ache as the current pulled at the scab, but he ignored it. A ballast-trimmer learned early that pain was bad weight in the bilge: pay attention to it and you capsized; trim against it and you stayed level.

Shadow darkened the water above him. The skiff's flat bottom glided through the surface film, trailing gray grease.

Ta'ani reached up. His left hand broke the surface beneath the stern quarter, finding the oak rudder bracket. He waited until the charcoal pot let out a rattling cough.

Through the timber, he heard the guard shift his boots, iron heel-plates clicking on wet grating.

Ta'ani surged upward.

His right hand shot out of the scald, clamping shut around the guard's greasy boot ankle. With the leverage of his back and thighs, Ta'ani drove his heels against the rudder post and heaved downward.

The guard vanished off the gunwale before his mouth could open, hitting the boiling brine with a muffled slap. His iron-rimmed helm struck Ta'ani's chest, but Ta'ani already had his left forearm locked around the man's throat, dragging him into the suffocating bottom drift. The guard flailed, clawing at Ta'ani's collar with frantic hands, trying to reach the brass horn slung across his chest. Ta'ani tightened the choke, pressing his hip into the man's spine until the thrashing slowed and went limp.

Ta'ani kicked up into the air, blowing scalding froth from his lips.

At the bow, Moana had cleared the rail. Her diving blade came down twice into the neck of the scavenger with the gaff hook, shoving the body outward into the trailing weed.

The steersman scrambled backward, dropping his sweep oar and reaching for a broad-bladed boarding pike. His face was gray with panic. "Cartel—"

Ta'ani vaulted over the low bulwark. In his right hand he held the twenty-pound sulfur-iron lever pried from his sunken deck gun, its forged head heavy as an anvil wedge. He swung it in a short arc.

The iron head smashed into the steersman's pike shaft, splintering ash wood before crushing through the quilted wool padding of the man's shoulder. The steersman buckled with a sharp crack of collarbone, knees slamming into the floorboards. Before he could scream, Ta'ani drove the heel of his work boot into the man's throat, pinning him to the rib timbers until the gurgling stopped.

Silence settled over the trough, broken only by bubbling canal weed and the quiet spit of the charcoal burner.

Moana wiped her red-smeared knife on the dead steersman's coat. "Kele. Bring the pontoon."

The cook pole-pushed the timber raft out from the culvert, Boy Tane crouching at the bow with mooring lines coiled in his small hands. Within two minutes, they lashed the skiff against the pontoon's port timber.

Ta'ani dropped to one knee and threw back the canvas.

Twenty burlap sacks of dry anthracite coal, unspotted by water. Ta'ani cut the twine on the nearest bag, letting hard, glossy black lumps spill across his calloused palm. It was pure deep-seam carbon from Ka'anua, the fuel needed to push a boiler to critical pressure. Beside the fuel sat two wooden tubs of yellow rendered tallow grease, sealed tight with rosin wax—enough lubricant to repack the leaking thermal glands of their salvaged deck gun.

"Look at this," Kele muttered, prying open a brass latch on an ammo crate. He lifted a lead-lined canister. Inside lay three primed cylindrical harpoon cartridges, four inches thick, forged from lunar sulfur-iron and stamped with cartel proof marks. "Three charges. Unfired. The firing pins are greased."

Ta'ani set his salvaged firing lever against one of the cartridges. The socket dog matched the latch grooves to the hair. The weapon was whole again, ready to unleash the lethal thermodynamic void-blast that could flash-freeze an enemy boiler or blow their own deck into kindling.

Moana knelt beside the dead steersman's bench, using her knife point to lever open an iron dispatch box welded beneath the tiller seat. The lid popped with a snap of solder. From within, she drew out a flat slate tablet wrapped in tarred leather.

Wax seals bound the corners, pressed with a heavy iron stamp. Ta'ani stared down at the mark. He could not decipher the cramped script etched into the slate, but he recognized the round iron brand burned into the center wax: an eight-toothed gear with two canines knocked out.

"Pari," Ta'ani grunted, his throat tightening. "The gunner's mark."

Moana's fingers traced the rows of white grease-pencil lettering beneath the seal. Her face hardened, her scarred temple pulling taut.

"Not just his mark," she said, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "These are fleet dispatch orders from the Burner-Master Vaea himself. Pari has two gunboats clearing the banks because the High Fire is abandoning the outer ring."

"What does it say?" Kele demanded.

Moana looked up from the slate, her dark eyes reflecting gray steam rolling off the water. "He is sealing Lock Roto'uri at midnight. All civilian valves are ordered wedged shut. At the fourth watch, they open the outer basalt sluices, bleed the entire sector's brine into the void, and carry every stolen heat core up-canal to the inner moons."

The true horror of the cartel's design settled over the skiff like freezing ash. Draining the trough was not a punitive raid; it was planetary extermination. Without boiling brine to insulate the aqueducts, the five moons would freeze solid, while the High Fire monopolized the only geothermal cores that kept the human world breathing.

Ta'ani looked out toward the mist-shrouded channel, his fingers locking around the cold sulfur-iron lever until his burned knuckles went white.

"They are not holding the canal," he said. "They are stealing the fire. We take the cutter, or we freeze in the dark."