Ballast and Blood

The shattered companionway ladder lay in the flooded bilge below, six feet of twisted iron and sheared mounting bolts submerged in black engine grease. Above them, the overhead hatch hung out of reach, framed by the pale square of dry-dock arc light.

Reese did not waste time looking up at what was gone. She adjusted her grip on the B-07 spud wrench, keeping her boots square on the ribbed steel plates of the lower catwalk.

Behind her, Tobias Corby backed into the recess between the lubricating oil drums, his wet shoes squeaking against the non-skid deck. His tailored wool overcoat was streaked with soot and bilge scum, clinging to his ribs like wet seaweed.

"He's going to butcher us," Corby whispered, his teeth knocking together so hard the sound carried over the drip of cooling exhaust pipes. "Reese. He's got the cargo hook. He's out of his mind."

"Keep your mouth shut and stay behind the fuel manifold," Reese said. Her voice remained level, pitched just beneath the low hum of the dry dock's auxiliary pumps. "If you move into the center lane, you become his backstop. Stay where the steel is thick."

Owen Mercer did not rush. He was two hundred and forty pounds of shipyard muscle, seasoned by twenty years of manhandling timber balks and anchor chain. The heavy steel pinch bar rested in his left palm; the pointed brass cargo hook glinted in his right fist, its curved bill honed to a needle point for biting into frozen halibut boxes and canvas sacks.

"You should have stayed in the front office, girl," Mercer said. He took a heavy, dragging step along the narrow walkway that ran between the twin diesel blocks. His right knee hitched on every third pace, a stiff hitch that ground audibly against the iron deck. "And you, Corby. You sold the Osprey down the river. You sold Gentry to the deep water for thirty pieces of scrap silver."

"I paid him his full charter!" Corby yelled from behind the drums, his voice cracking into a frantic falsetto. "It was an extraction! A legitimate salvage survey! Royston changed the terms after they cleared the spit!"

"Shut up, Tobias," Reese said without turning her head.

Mercer lunged.

In the confined corridor between the cylinder heads, there was no room for a sweeping lateral swing. Mercer understood the geometry of the engine bay better than a street brawler; he drove the chisel point of the pinch bar straight forward like a boarding pike, aiming for Reese's sternum.

Reese did not try to parry two feet of hardened hexagonal steel. She stepped hard to the left, letting her shoulder glance off the copper cooling line, and drove the heavy jaw of her spud wrench down against the side of Mercer's thrust.

Steel struck steel with a sharp, ringing crack that threw sparks into the shadows.

The impact deflected the pinch bar into the cast-iron valve cover of the port diesel. The tip gouged a ragged furrow through the green paint, screeching as it bound against a cylinder head stud. For a fraction of a second, Mercer’s forward momentum pulled his weight over his compromised right knee.

Reese drove her heel straight into the side of that joint.

Mercer grunted, a thick, wet sound in his chest. His leg buckled two inches, but the man was too heavy to go down on a single strike. Instead of retreating, he dropped the pinch bar entirely, snapped his left arm around to lock Reese against the engine casing, and brought the brass cargo hook down in a vicious overhead rake toward her throat.

Reese caught his thick wrist with both hands, jamming the heel of her palms against the base of his thumb to kill the hook's downward arc. The curved point stopped four inches above her collarbone.

The smell of Mercer was overwhelming: stale pipe tobacco, diesel oil, damp wool, and the sour heat of adrenaline. His bloodshot eyes bulged as he leaned all two hundred and forty pounds into the downward press.

"You're fast, girl," Mercer growled through clenched teeth, flecks of spit hitting Reese's cheek. "But iron doesn't care how fast you are."

"Neither does water," Reese replied.

She did not strain against his bulk. Instead of pushing up, she snapped her left knee upward into his groin, then immediately released her upward resistance and threw her entire weight backward.

The sudden absence of counter-pressure sent Mercer pitching forward into the narrow service gap between the cylinder bank and the bulkhead. His forehead cracked hard against the brass casing of the main fuel pressure gauge, shattering the sight glass in a burst of needle-fine fragments.

Reese rolled across the non-skid grating, coming to her feet near the open access trunk at the aft end of the bay. Her breath came in controlled, rhythmic draws. Her knuckles throbbed from the impact, but her fingers remained supple and responsive around the forged handle of the wrench.

"Reese!" Corby shrieked. He was crouched in the dirt beneath the manifold, clutching his silver pocket watch chain like a rosary. "He's getting up! Use the gun!"

"I don't carry a gun in a ship's hold," Reese said dryly, sidestepping toward the low hatchway marked BALLAST TRUNK NO. 3 - ACCESS ONLY. "A ricochet off six-inch frames kills the person behind the trigger. And if you ruin another pair of trousers, Corby, I'm adding dry cleaning to your invoice."

"You're joking," Corby choked out, staring at her in disbelief. "We are trapped in a dead hull and you are charging me for laundry?"

"I charge for everything that requires my attention," Reese said.

Mercer pushed himself off the diesel block. Blood dripped steadily from a jagged cut across his left brow, running down into the gray bristles of his beard. He wiped his face with the back of his forearm, smearing the crimson into the grime. The cargo hook was still gripped tight in his calloused right hand.

"You think this is a joke, broker?" Mercer snarled, his gaze locking back onto Corby. "Gentry had three boys on that deck who never saw their twentieth winter. Martin, Hayes, the little one from Wharf Street. They didn't get an invoice. They got three hundred fathoms of tide and a chain around their ankles."

Mercer ignored Reese and took two heavy, thumping strides toward the oil drums where Corby cowered.

"Mercer," Reese called out. Her voice was sharp, carrying the precise authority of a dockmaster calling a berth violation. "He didn't sign the kill order alone."

Mercer paused, his chest heaving under his salt-stiffened canvas coat. He turned his head slowly, his one unbloodied eye narrowing at her. "He gave the clearance slip to Gentry. I saw the ink."

"He gave the clearance for the dredge," Reese said, tapping the flat of her wrench against the steel rim of the ballast hatch. "He wanted the 1888 ledger from the Sovereign. But Tobias Corby is a coward who trembles when a surveyor raises an eyebrow. He doesn't have the stomach to order four drownings in cold water. You know who gave that order. And you know who paid you to come down here and make sure neither of us climbed out of this dry dock."

Mercer’s jaw worked silently. The cargo hook lowered an inch. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"Calista Royston," Reese said clearly.

The name dropped into the quiet of the engine room like an iron slug hitting the bottom of a bucket.

"Royston holds the syndicate's purse," Reese continued, her tone conversational, clinical, stripping away every shred of Mercer's righteous fury. "She financed the salvage dredge. When Gentry found out what was inside that iron-bound chest and threatened to blow the whistle at the union hall, Corby panicked. But Royston didn't panic. Royston sent an offshore boarding party to wipe the deck, scuttle the witnesses, and let the Osprey drift back on auxiliary power to create an administrative puzzle."

Mercer stepped closer to the hatch, his face twitching. "Royston looks out for the harbor. She pays the widows' pensions."

"Royston pays for silence," Reese said. "She promised you ten thousand dollars to clean up the broker before he talked to the magistrates. But she didn't give you bank drafts, did she? She gave you promissory scrip drawn on the Old Harbor Trust—the exact entity that ceases to exist the moment that founding ledger is read in open court. She sent you into a locked dry dock with a pinch bar and a cargo hook to kill two people, knowing Naomi Teague’s patrol would find you over our bodies. You weren't hired as an enforcer, Owen. You were hired as the final loose end."

"Liar!" Mercer roared.

The truth did not calm him; it drove him into a frenzy. He lunged across the narrow walkway, abandoning all caution, the brass hook aimed straight for Reese's chest.

Reese did not stand her ground. She dropped through the narrow circular manhole into Ballast Trunk Number Three.

The ballast trunk was a claustrophobic steel tunnel running along the double-bottom spine of the trawler, scarcely four feet high and three feet wide. The air here was freezing, heavy with the stench of stagnant sea slime, zinc rust, and ancient salt.

Mercer dropped through the coaming right behind her, his boots crashing onto the bottom ribs. In the cramped horizontal pipe, his massive shoulders brushed both bulkheads at once. He could not swing the hook with any leverage, but his reach was long, and he scrambled forward on his knees like an enraged bull in a culvert.

"You can't run down here, girl!" Mercer bellowed, his head scraping against the overhead stringers. "There's no way out forward!"

"I don't need a way out forward," Reese's voice echoed back through the dark.

She was already ten feet ahead, crouched beside the main sea-chest cross-over manifold. Her hands moved across the brass wheels with practiced, instinctive speed. She knew the pipe layout from the blueprints she had memorized in Teague's outer office.

The Osprey was sitting on dry-dock keel blocks, but the dock's auxiliary flooding culverts were still pressurized to maintain ballast trim.

Reese seized the high-pressure sea-cock bypass valve. The heavy bronze wheel was stiff, encrusted with verdigris and dried salt crust. She slotted the jaws of the B-07 spud wrench across the wheel's four-spoke hub, braced her feet against the transverse frame, and threw her weight into the lever.

The valve broke free with a loud, metallic screech.

A deafening hiss tore through the lower trunk as twelve tons of pressurized dock water surged through the auxiliary suction line. A violent torrent of freezing salt water burst from the sea-chest strainer, erupting into the narrow conduit at chest height.

The wall of dark water slammed into Mercer like a freight car.

Mercer let out a strangled gasp as forty gallons a second of icy bay water hit him square in the face, knocking him flat on his back against the steel bottom plates. The brass cargo hook slipped from his numbed fingers and vanished into the churning foam. Blinded, choking, and fighting the freezing undertow in pitch darkness, he scrambled backward toward the only opening—the access manhole.

He shoved his head and shoulders up through the circular ring, gasping for air, his hands clawing at the engine bay's non-skid deck.

Reese was already there. She had slipped through the forward inspection scuttle and stood over the open coaming.

Before Mercer could haul his torso through, Reese kicked the heavy hinged steel hatch cover shut. It slammed down onto his collarbone with a brutal iron thud.

Mercer roared in pain, trying to wedge his shoulder upward, but Reese dropped her full weight onto the hatch rim, pinning him against the coaming. With her right hand, she slid the forged shaft of the B-07 spud wrench straight through the heavy locking lugs on the dogging bracket, jamming the dogging lever in the fully secured position.

The mechanism snapped into place with an unyielding clink.

Mercer was locked in the ballast trunk from the waist down, his head and left arm trapped beneath the bolted grating, completely immobilized. Below him, the freezing water swirled harmlessly through the open bilge drain into the sump, leaving him drenched, shivering violently, and powerless.

The engine room went abruptly silent, save for the rhythmic dripping of water and Mercer’s ragged, wheezing gasps.

Reese stepped off the hatch. She picked up a clean piece of cotton waste from an open tool crate, wiped the grease from her palms, and looked down at the trapped cargo supervisor.

"Owen," Reese said evenly. "We're going to have a brief, orderly conversation."

Mercer pressed his forehead against the damp steel rim. His face was gray, the fight draining out of him with every shuddering breath. "Go to hell, Adler."

"Hell is thirty minutes away when Teague turns the main dry-dock pumps back on and floods this pit," Reese said. "Let's talk about Calista Royston."