The Frozen Blowout

Can a battered cutter survive an eighteen-pound iron broadside at twenty paces before its own freezing gun cracks the deck in two? Ta'ani planted his heels into the rime-slick timber of the bow platform, his palms fused by frostbite to the sulfur-iron bracket as Gunner Pari’s armored prow surged through the vapor, dead ahead.

Behind the enemy vessel's iron-plated bow, twin carronades ran out through square gunports. Orange fire erupted from the starboard tube with a concussive roar that punched the breath straight out of Ta'ani's lungs.

A hail of heavy iron grape tore through the cutter’s forward bulwark. Oak stanchions sheared into jagged lances of flying timber. Behind him, Cook Kele shrieked as a splinter ripped across his apron, throwing the fat man hard against the galley companionway. Boy Tane tumbled sideways across the grating, clutching his bleeding forearms while the iron dog on the lower stoker hatch held fast under his shoulder.

"Keep down!" Moana shouted through the smoke. She hugged the canted coaming near the port paddle housing, one hand clamped over her fresh lard bandages while her right fist gripped a filleting blade.

Down in the boiler pit, the draft roared with deafening fury. Ten atmospheres of wet anthracite steam hammered through the manifold pipes, shaking the cutter’s hull plates until the floor rivets groaned. Ha'ata was screaming curses through the open grate, his wrench clattering against iron as he fought the safety pop-valves to keep the copper tubes from blowing out.

Ta'ani did not look back. His eyes locked onto the black throat of Pari’s flagship.

The dreadnought bore down at six knots, its heavy paddle blades thrashing boiling brine into a foamy wake. On its elevated bridge stood Gunner Pari himself, hulking in boiler-bolt leather, grinning with his false iron teeth while his loaders rammed fresh powder into the port gun. Ten paces separated their prows. The dreadnought’s bow cut the water so close that Ta'ani could smell the sulfur grease baking on its iron keel. Right beneath its armored snout sat the primary boiler intake: a wide bronze grate submerged two feet below the surface, sucking hundreds of gallons of boiling brine straight into the firebox circulating pumps.

The sulfur-iron harpoon was ready. The twenty-pound firing lever sat locked in its cam, but the weapon's forged core screamed under thermodynamic hunger. White rime spread five feet out from the pivot ring, freezing brine wash into brittle glass beneath Ta'ani's boots. The chill bit through the leather of his palms, numbing his scarred fingers until he could feel only the dead weight of the iron release trip.

If he fired high, the bolt would skip off the dreadnought’s curved glacis plate. If he fired low, the canal’s boiling current would deflect the heavy head into the mud.

He leaned all seventy pounds of his torso against the pivot stock, traversing the frost-bitten barrel until the notched sight aligned with the turbulent vortex churning into Pari's intake grate.

Pari raised his cutlass to signal the port carronade.

Ta'ani brought his right heel down on the release trip with all the weight of ten years in the dredge bilges.

The forged sear dropped. The sulfur-iron core discharged its stored tension with a sound like a split anvil.

The heavy harpoon leaped from the frosted barrel in a blinding eruption of white vapor. It did not roar like black powder; it hissed with the terrible suction of a vacuum valve torn open. Crossing the churning gap in half a heartbeat, the four-foot iron bolt struck the dreadnought's submerged intake grate dead center.

The heavy barb punched through the bronze lattice, burying its cold core deep inside the dreadnought’s main feed manifold.

For one suspended breath, nothing happened.

Then the thermodynamic law of the lunar void took its toll.

The sulfur-iron core drank the heat. It drank the boiling canal water feeding the pumps. It drank the thermal energy of sixty barrels of pressurized brine surging through the dreadnought's copper boiler tubes.

The water around Pari’s bow did not splash; it turned instantly to solid white rime. A shockwave of pure frost crackled outward across the dreadnought's waterline, turning the boiling wake into jagged shelves of thick ice. Inside the enemy hull, the rapid thermal collapse shrank the pressurized steam back into liquid water within a fraction of a second, creating a catastrophic vacuum inside the boiler drums.

The dreadnought's forward boiler imploded with a hollow, monstrous crunch.

Iron flues buckled inward like crushed eggshells. A split second later, the sudden surge of cold water struck the glowing fireboxes. The violent thermodynamic imbalance blew the manifold apart from the inside out.

An explosion of superheated steam and shattered iron plating tore through the dreadnought's forward deck. The port carronade vaulted sixty feet into the air, spinning over the canal before crashing into the distant lock wall. Gunner Pari’s bridge disintegrated into a storm of blackened timbers and whistling copper rivets. The cartel captain was hurled outward through the fog, his heavy armored body smashing against the basalt canal sill before tumbling into the churning foam.

The shockwave hit Ta'ani's cutter like an iron sledge. The small warship reared backward, its keel grinding violently against the canal bottom as the water beneath them suddenly vanished.

The thermal drain did not stop at Pari's hull. The massive sulfur-iron core, fully submerged in the shallow lock channel, leached heat from the entire canal basin.

Cracking sounds like artillery thunder ripped through the aqueduct. The boiling brine that sustained the lock channel flash-froze into massive, buckling ridges of white shelf ice. As the water froze, the hydraulic pressure holding the lock basin collapsed. With a terrifying groan of failing masonry, the outer basalt sill fractured.

Millions of gallons of boiling brine poured through the breach, cascading off the edge of moon Pao-Tu and venting straight into the freezing void below in colossal plumes of sparkling vapor.

Within two minutes, the roaring water was gone.

The canal lock lay completely dry.

A thick silence settled over the ruined channel, broken only by the hiss of cooling metal and the distant whistle of the void winds.

Ta'ani pushed himself up from the frosted deck planks. His hands throbbed with white agony where the skin of his palms had torn away against the frozen gun mount. Blood dripped from his torn forearm, freezing into black beads before it hit the rime-coated timber.

He climbed down from the bow platform, stepping over split timbers and scattered iron grape.

Cook Kele sat propped against the wheelhouse bulkhead, breathing heavily through his teeth while clutching a bleeding gash along his ribs. "Tell me we killed the bastard," the cook wheezed, his voice cracked with coal smoke. "Tell me I did not take an iron splinter in the flank just to freeze out here like a gut-shot hog."

"Pari is done," Ta'ani said.

Boy Tane crawled out from behind the stoker hatch, his soot-streaked face pale as lard, but his dark eyes wide and intact. Across the deck, Ha'ata pulled himself up through the engine companionway, his iron leg brace scraping against the frosted ladder rungs. The wright's pale face was smeared with black grease, his eyes frantic as he checked the cutter’s steam gauges.

"Boilers are dead," Ha'ata croaked, wiping sulfur soot from his mouth with a trembling sleeve. "The intake is choked with mud. We have no draft, no feed water, and ten atmospheres of pressure bled to cold iron in under three minutes."

Moana stepped to the shattered starboard rail, peering down into the empty canal trough.

Twenty paces ahead, the smoking, broken carcass of Pari's dreadnought lay crumpled in the frozen mud, crushed like a discarded tin pot between ridges of fractured shelf ice. Near its crumpled bow, half-buried in gray silt and freezing rime, Gunner Pari lay motionless, his iron teeth bared to the empty sky.

Beyond the wreck, the canal gate was an open wound. The aqueduct trough stretched ahead into the gray fog, barren and bone-dry, its ancient basalt floor paved with dying fish and steaming silt.

"We have the boat," Moana said, turning her head toward Ta'ani. Her voice was flat, hard as a filleting stone. "We have the gun. But there is not a drop of water left between here and the outer gate of Lock Roto'uri."

Ta'ani walked to the bow and rested his blistered hand on the cold iron rail. The cutter was theirs, won with blood and fire, but it sat marooned on a frozen seabed forty leagues from deep water. He looked out over the dead channel, where the void wind moaned through the cracked stone, and drew the freezing air into his lungs.