The Iron Deck

Could six dredge hands hold an armored cutter against the crew locked below before the canal current swept both hulls into the void weir? Ta'ani vaulted the crushed paddle housing without waiting for the scalding spray to clear, his five-foot iron boarding spade gripped in burned palms. His mark was the raised wheelhouse thirty paces forward. The dredge barge behind him was dead timber, its rudder torn away by canister shot, but the cartel ironclad still had twin working boilers thumping in its belly. If they did not take the brass helm now, they would drift into the outer drop like slaughtered cattle.

Boiling canal brine pooled an inch deep over the cutter's riveted deck plates, hissing against the hot iron of the gun mounts. A cartel deckhand in quilted whale-hide lunged from behind the shattered paddle shield, swinging a boarding ax at Ta'ani's throat.

Ta'ani did not try to parry. He stepped inside the swing, planted his left shoulder into the man's breastplate, and drove the flat blade of the spade upward into the watchman's neck. Cartilage crunched beneath the forged edge. The man dropped into the wash with a wet cough, his boots drumming against the rivets until the brine took him.

"Clear the midship coaming!" Ta'ani barked over escaping flue vapor.

Moana was already over the bulwark. She moved low, water dripping from the greasy seams of her diving skin, two earthenware jars of rancid shark tallow in her grip. A cartel gunner kneeling near the starboard swivel swung a priming horn toward her, but she hurled the first jar through the slit of the armored pilot house. The clay broke against the viewing plate in a spray of thick black sludge. The gunner cursed, wiping grease from his eyes, and Moana drove her filleting knife between his collarbone and neck ring. He folded without a shout.

Behind them, Cook Kele scrambled onto the iron plating, dragging an eight-pound copper mallet and a butcher's cleaver. He kicked the dead gunner's fallen haversack with his boot, scattering dry biscuits and white slabs of cured belly fat into the scald.

"Salted pig fat," Kele snarled, spitting tobacco into the brine. "The bastards eat cured pork while my kettle boiled rotten dogfish fins for three weeks. I ought to cook the lot of them in their own flue."

"Shut your hole and watch the starboard gangway," Moana snapped, kicking the fallen swivel gun onto its side so its muzzle pointed into the open canal.

Iron clattered against iron along the midship deck. From the companionway hatch leading down to the twin boilers, three cartel stokers were clawing upward with glowing coal pokers, their chests bare and red from the firebox heat.

"Dog the hatch!" Ta'ani shouted.

Boy Tane darted between the whistling copper pipes. Thin as a dried rib, the boy slid along the slippery plating on his shins, dodging the thrust of an iron poker that scorched the air above his hair. He reached the hatch coaming, caught the iron ring, and slammed the heavy plate downward with the full drop of his body. The latch caught. Tane threw the forged iron dog across the keeper and drove a rusted pin through the eyelet with a heel blow, trapping the stokers in the dark below. Muffled hammer blows began thudding against the iron plate, accompanied by the frantic hiss of an open relief valve.

"They have the bypass open!" Ha'ata hobbled over the broken paddle frame, his iron knee brace clanking against the rivets as he dragged his dead leg forward. Soot clung to the wright's wet gray beard, his eyes wide with fury. "The idiots are venting boiler steam into the bilge! If they blow the crown plate, this whole deck will pop like an over-boiled bladder!"

"Can you trace the copper lines?" Ta'ani demanded, his eyes on the pilot house.

"Rua and I can cut the auxiliary pipe from the deck manifold," Ha'ata panted, waving the mute stoker forward with a heavy spanner. Rua hurried past, carrying a sledge and two cold chisels. "Give me three minutes at the midship junction before they build fifty atmospheres, or we drown in white vapor!"

"Take the junction," Ta'ani said. "I am taking the helm."

He moved toward the wheelhouse. The armored box sat three feet above the main deck, protected by one-inch iron plates and narrow viewing slits. The oak door hung crooked on its hinges, bent inward by the ramming impact, but the inside drop-bolt remained seated. Through the slit, Ta'ani caught the dull gleam of a brass blunderbuss leveling straight at his chest.

Ta'ani dropped low behind the coaming, testing the doorframe angle with calloused fingers. As a ballast-trimmer on the deep dredge, he had spent ten years using pry bars against sixty-ton counterweights in flooded holds; he knew exactly where metal yielded to leverage. He rammed the chisel edge of the boarding spade into the gap between door and jamb, right beside the upper hinge pintle.

Inside, the helmsman yelled and pulled the lock. The blunderbuss roared through the slit, vomiting lead scrap and white sulfur smoke. The blast peppered the bulwark above Ta'ani's leather cowl, showering his neck with stinging lead burrs.

Before the smoke cleared, Ta'ani threw all two hundred pounds of his body against the spade's ash handle.

The hinge gave with a screech of shearing iron. The door buckled inward, jamming against the wheelhouse decking. Ta'ani kicked through the opening, dropping the spade into his left hand and drawing the short scraper bar from his belt.

The cartel steersman was a heavy, bull-necked veteran with oil-slicked hair and a burned ear. He dropped the empty blunderbuss, drew a broad cutlass, and slashed at Ta'ani's face.

Ta'ani caught the cutlass blade across the iron shank of his scraper bar, sparks showering into the cramped pilot house. The impact sent fire through the bruised ribs he took during the ramming, but he did not yield an inch of deck. He drove the heel of his heavy boot into the steersman's kneecap. The man grunted, slipping on the grease Moana had hurled through the slit moments earlier. As the steersman stumbled, Ta'ani twisted the spade and hooked its curved heel directly into the exposed steering chain linkage beside the helm pedestal.

The iron chain jammed tight against the sprocket teeth, freezing the cutter's twin rudders in mid-throw. With the same heave, Ta'ani drove the butt of the spade into the man's temple.

The helmsman crashed onto the bronze deck grating, blood welled from his scalp into the gray brine.

Ta'ani stood over the fallen man, chest heaving, his blistered hands gripping the polished spokes of the brass wheel. Beneath his boots, the thrum of the cutter's twin boilers vibrated through the deck plates—strained, violent, but alive.

"Ha'ata!" Ta'ani shouted out the broken doorway. "Is the valve dead?"

From the midship deck, a blast of scalding steam vented upward through a severed copper lead, screaming into the canal mist before tapering into a weak hiss. Ha'ata stood beside the manifold, his spanner dripping tallow, his face streaked with black soot. Rua leaned against the bulkhead, holding a severed brass coupling and grinning through broken teeth.

"Bypass is clamped!" the wright yelled back, wiping his scalded cheek with a greasy sleeve. "Boiler pressure is holding at eight atmospheres on the forward kettle! But we only have one paddle wheel turning, you mad dog! She will pull to port like an ox with a broken leg!"

"She steers," Ta'ani muttered. He wiped brine and sweat from his eyebrows with his wrist. Down on the gun deck, Moana was already kicking dead cartel bodies over the outer gunwale into the void trough, clearing the deck for their salvaged sulfur-iron gun.

They had their iron deck. They had their fire, their coal, and their rudder.

Then the air along the canal trough trembled.

Downstream, where the boiling water ran between the basalt pylons toward the open void troughs, twin plumes of black coal smoke rose above the gray bank of steam. Through the viewing slit, Ta'ani watched the wedge-shaped iron prow of Gunner Pari's dreadnought glide into the channel, its heavy carronades run out and silent in the fog.

Ta'ani did not shout. He reached down and drove the iron pin through the brass helm keeper, locking the wheel true against the rip of the canal current.

Outside on the lashed barge's fore-deck, the scalding spray met the void draft, drifting across the plating like shredded wool. Where the mist touched the cold bracket of their salvaged sulfur gun, the droplets ceased boiling, settling against the iron as thin, silent rime.