Frost on the Flue

Canister iron had chewed the cutter's foredeck into splinters and gray brine mud, but the timber king-plank held. Ta'ani dropped his boarding spade onto the coaming, bent his knees against the locked wheel, and kicked a severed grapnel shank aside. The dead steersman lay crumpled against the binnacle, dark oil pooling where his temple had met the iron spoke.

Beyond the bulwark, their old canal barge hung from the cutter's crushed paddle housing like a drowned hog, its ripped prow dragging them half a fathom into the trough. Every surge of boiling canal water slammed the dead timber against the cutter's iron plates with the sound of a split anvil.

"Kele," Ta'ani called, spitting lead-tainted grit onto the grating. "Cut the hemp lashing on the port bollard. Moana, take the axe to the barge painter. If that wreck stays pinned to our hip when Pari clears the gate, we roll."

Moana did not answer with words. She crouched behind the shattered swivel mount, her left shoulder drenched in dark red that ran down her rubber diving vest. Shrapnel burrs had peppered her collarbone, leaving three deep tears in the vulcanized hide. Cook Kele knelt beside her in the wet soot, a greasy ceramic tub clamped between his knees. He dug two fingers into yellow salted hog lard, slapping the cold smear directly into her torn flesh.

"Hold your breath, diver," Kele grumbled, smearing the grease with brutal gouges of his thumb. "Good pig fat wasted on a hide that will drown before midday anyway. Two full pots of prime frying tallow I scraped from the skiff locker, and now it feeds canal salt and rotten skin."

Moana caught Kele's wrist with her clean hand, her nails digging into his grease-blackened wrist bone until the tendons bunched. "Work the fat into the cloth and bind it tight, fat man, or I will feed your good hand into the paddle chain when the shaft turns."

"Hear her," Kele muttered, though he wrapped the coarse linen strip around her shoulder with quick, practiced pulls. "Still barking like a canal dog with three ribs showing."

Ta'ani turned his back on them. He did not waste breath checking their courage. The pain in his own bruised ribs flared with each hard heave of his lungs, and the lead burrs embedded in the left side of his neck burned like hot coal flecks, but the prize cutter had what their barge lacked: four inches of rolled iron plate shielding the bow, twin fire-tube boilers amidships, and an intact forward pivot ring where a light swivel gun had once sat.

He vaulted the sheared bulwark onto the barge's listing foredeck. The forty-pound sulfur-iron breech lay lashed across the timber dogs, rimed with gray canal mud. Ta'ani cut the hemp lashings with two strokes of his cleaving knife. Rua leaned over the cutter's coaming, knotted his thick forearms into the woven hemp sling, and hauled the heavy iron casting up onto the prize deck alongside the twenty-pound firing lever. Only then did Ta'ani raise the heavy cleaving axe from the rack and bring the iron bit down on the sodden barge painter. The hemp parted in a wet spray. Rua swung a six-foot pry bar beneath the barge's wedged timber snout and threw his entire bulk against the iron lever. The crushed barge groaned, tore free of the paddle casing, and slid backward into the boiling canal current. Relieved of the dead weight, the cutter righted itself with a shudder, its deck plates leveling against the boiling brine.

From the firebox companionway amidships, where Boy Tane guarded the dogged iron grating that sealed the cartel stokers in the flooded bilge below, white steam puffed in ragged gasps. Ha'ata's iron leg brace clanged against the ladder rungs before his pale, sweat-washed face appeared at the coaming. The lame wright hauled himself onto the deck, coughing on sulfur vapor. In his right hand he gripped an eight-pound dog-leg wrench; in his left, a dented brass pressure tube.

"The port draft is drawing mud," Ha'ata wheezed, wiping a black smear across his brow with his grease-soaked sleeve. "The cartridge bypass we clamped holds, but the crown sheet on the starboard boiler is bowed three lines out of true. If Rua shovels that heavy Ka'anua anthracite dry, the heat will burn the tube plates before we make half a knot."

"Feed it wet, then," Ta'ani said. He pointed his chin downstream, toward the swirling fog where the basalt pylons vanished into the celestial void. "Pari is already past the third pylon. Look at the smoke."

Two dense pillars of soot boiled through the vapor above the canal walls. The thudding beat of a heavy paddle engine reverberated through the iron deck plates beneath their boots. Pari's gunboat was running with forced draft, its wedge prow parting the boiling brine at ten knots, its twin eighteen-pound carronades run out and trained on the channel gap.

Ha'ata peered into the gray fog, his narrow jaw tightening until the cords of his neck stood out like rigging rope. "Eight atmospheres will not give us the speed to dodge his broadside, Ta'ani. He has twenty ironclads' worth of boiler plating and six gunners who eat salt-beef while we bleed on scrap. If we take one solid hit to the midship casing, the steam will peel the skin off our ribs."

"We are not dodging," Ta'ani said. "Rua! On deck!"

The mute stoker seized the heavy woven sling from the midship deck, dragging it forward across the iron plating. Within the wet hemp ropes lay the forty-pound sulfur-iron deck gun breech and its forged mounting collar. Beside it sat the twenty-pound forged sulfur-iron firing lever, its dark alloy cold to the eye despite the boiling mist.

"Ha'ata," Ta'ani ordered, dropping to one knee beside the empty forward pivot mount. "Set the collar pins. Rua, lift the breech."

Ha'ata cursed through his teeth, but his lame knee hit the deck plates without hesitation. He drove two tapered iron drift-pins through the pivot socket, aligning the cutter's deck ring with the breech collar. Rua bent his knees, knotted his thick forearms through the hemp sling, and hoisted the massive iron casting with a grunt that blew red coal dust from his lips.

The breech came down upon the bronze ring with a flat, ringing chime. Ta'ani grabbed the twenty-pound sulfur-iron lever, fitted its machined lugs into the breech cam, and shoved the heavy pivot pin through the housing with the heel of his boot. The steel dog clicked home. The salvaged weapon was wedged and bolted to the warship's foredeck, its dark snout trained over the bow bulwark.

Moana limped across the deck, her shoulder wrapped in blood-soaked linen, carrying a sealed tin canister lined with oiled sheepskin. Inside rested their single primed thermodynamic harpoon cartridge, packed with refined sulfur-iron ingots and a copper-sleeved detonator pin.

"Three rounds was what we took," she said, her voice raspy from smoke. "Two cracked in the bin. This is the only whole core left."

Ta'ani flipped the breech cam open. The dark chamber yawned before him, smelling of cold void stone and bitter brimstone. "One is enough if the wright does his work. Ha'ata, what is the gauge reading?"

Beside the companionway, Boy Tane struck the dogged hatch grating with an iron pin, pointing at the bulkhead gauge. "Ten atmospheres! The copper needle is past the black mark, Wrench! The safety weight is jumping on the lever!"

"Tie the dog down!" Ha'ata yelled back, his voice cracking into a dry bark. "Rua, throw three scoops of sulfur-coal into the port belly and shut the fire door! Ta'ani, when that cartridge seats, the core will drink every calorie in thirty feet of iron! If your seal fails, the cold will shatter our own bow plates before the bolt leaves the tube!"

"It will not fail," Ta'ani said.

He took the thermodynamic cartridge from Moana's hands. The casing was heavy, its polished iron shell already gathering beads of foul condensation as the canal air washed over it. He slid the long, heavy cylinder into the open breech bore. The metal slid along the oiled bronze rifling with a low, hydraulic sigh.

Downstream, the fog tore apart.

Pari's heavy armored dreadnought broke through the boiling veil two hundred paces out, its massive paddle wheels churning white froth against the basalt canal walls. Black iron plating sheathed its towering wedge bow, studded with double rows of rivet heads. On the raised forward gun deck, Gunner Pari stood behind the starboard carronade, his iron-studded leather coat gleaming with boiler grease, his jutted jaw bare to the canal wind. The gunner raised an iron firing quill, shouting an order that was swallowed by the roar of his paddle engines.

Ta'ani did not look at Pari's face. He looked at the dreadnought's waterline, where the main steam intake grate sucked boiling canal water directly into the enemy boiler flues.

With both hands, Ta'ani slammed the twenty-pound sulfur-iron lever down into the locked notch.

The locking cam seated with a deafening metallic shriek. Instant, violent cold surged through the weapon's forged frame. The boiling mist washing over the foredeck died in mid-air, replaced by a sudden, sucking draft that pulled the breath from Ta'ani's throat. Along the barrel, along the heavy mounting collar, and outward across the cutter's forward deck plates, water droplets ceased their boiling. A thick, blinding coat of white rime frost crept over the iron, crackling like breaking bone as the sulfur-iron core began to drink the heat.