Anamneschaton

chapter thirty-nine

They were English special reserves, white coats and all, though most of them had taken the bulky outer layers off. Assembling one of the infamous long guns, from the looks of it, grease up to their elbows and black spots all over their faces from wiping sweat away. Maybe twelve of them total, one officer, four patrolmen and the rest experienced artillery men. 

Harold was tugging at his coat in an urgent way, and Colin shrugged it off while he stared down at the scene.

The two apartments on this rise were long constructions, somewhat parallel but nearly meeting at their western ends. Three stories of well-decorated rooms, a fourth of slatted walls and low, corrugated metal ceilings; trees filling the courtyard, and a perfect view to the old city. Colin had managed to get to the northern building’s uppermost layer, wedging himself between two dusty chimneys; Harold had made the summit as well, and it looked like she meant to leave.

“Harold,” Colin whispered, “are there any empire patrols nearby? Any … walking, fighting men, who would help us?”

She gave that sentence, mangled amalgamation of two languages that it was, a good amount of thought. Then she shrugged.

For her benefit, Colin thought out loud. She’d pick up English eventually. “Twelve men here. They’ve got the long gun almost built; can’t be more than a couple hours until they start bombarding, and they’ve got a great view of the entire old city. They might even have some knowledge about the layout of the city, depending on whether they’ve picked up defectors.”

He peered over the edge again; they were making a lot of noise down there, and one of the taller ones had managed to catch his fingernail on a rivet. That would slow them down a bit; the guy was being a real baby about the loss of the fingernail, and Colin watched as they fumbled around inefficiently with bandages and medical tape.

“This can’t be the only emplacement, though. They’ve got nearly a dozen miles to spread these out over, if they want to remain in range of the whole city. So we could just leave this, send a message to the Pasha, and get somewhere safe.”

Colin had seen a lot of people try to get somewhere safe. On the way out of Byzantium, there had been nearly twenty solid miles of humans, baled by fear into knots that huddled around the tracks, hoping for one last train to arrive. Maybe they imagined ending up in eastern Babylon, or just continuing onwards to the Indian Empire. Maybe they thought they’d juke the invading army, get down to Eritrea, or pray that the aggression was short lived, last it out in Ankara.

But he’d seen rails from a couple miles away hit those tracks. Not many were dumb enough to stand on the actual tracks, just in case a train came, and if they had been that dumb they sure weren’t anymore. He’d seen the wreckage of the last train to leave, thirty miles down the road; sappers had been sent forward, maybe on boats from Romania, and he’d seen families trying to pull each other out of splintered wood.

The empires had more soldiers, better training, and even some recent experience with wars from their Siberian frontier. None of that mattered, because no soldier could fight against three feet of iron that appeared from a clear sky straight into his lungs.

“Harold, go get Ammanuel. Tell him about this, and get some soldiers to help you. Also, I’m going to need the gun.”

She nodded, and handed the rifle over. That was a good sign.

“Then, and this is very important, come back here. We need to get rid of these guys.”

Hopefully that had been clear enough. A couple weeks living with these people ought to have made him halfway intelligible. Assuming, of course, that she was from the Byzantine Empire, and not somewhere far deeper in the east. And that all their dialects were close to one another. And that there was no equivalent of the Welsh in Ankara, with their own little orthography and petulant ignorance.

Colin approached the camp from inside the north building, making as much noise as he could. He stumbled into a table, and swore a bit, relishing the idea that he might finally be understood. He smashed a pane of glass, carefully, and then walked to the door. It opened before he made it there, and a moustachio’d man grabbed him.

“Hey! What the hell,” Colin offered, “is this all about?”

He was shoved into the courtyard bodily, and took a look around while he tried to kick the huge man in the shin. They had a lot of tools spread out, a couple regimental cutlasses, guns aplenty and some grenadoes. There was a cart, and stacks of metal components. This place looked ripe for interference.

“Somebody get that rifle off of him,” said a bored man in regalia; a Lieutenant or better.

“That’s my rifle, jerk. You give … give that back! Do you know who I am?”

“Do you know who we are?”

“Um,” Colin thought about it. “No, not really. Special reserves? Fourth regiment, I guess, since you’re not somewhere in Africa. First company, if there’s still only one, seventh squad, judging by your jackets. I don’t know your names, though. Probably something with a ‘Mc’ in front, with that accent.”

That got him a nod of approbation; the men working on the long gun were watching, now. “McRoy, actually. Not bad. Are you supposed to be some kind of bedouin polyglot?”

“I don’t even know how to reply to that. I’m from England, you roughneck. Hear this enunciation? That’s first-class native dialect, there.”

McRoy smiled, and waved his hand to the gun crew; they started working again, and the moustache let him go. “I apologize. It’s simply that you are incredibly filthy.”

“Oh, that. Well, you know, foreign countries and children, two things that never get clean. Can I have my rifle back?”

“Probably not.”

Colin did his best to look downcast, and then canted his head to the east. “So, you’re thinking about shooting into downtown Ankara, eh. A bold plan.”

Another one of the soldiers, a woman with her hands filthy, sat back on her heels and started talking to the Lieutenant. The long gun was taking shape, now, and it looked like they might actually finish it fairly soon. They’d be able to start shooting in the fading daylight, if they kept their pace up.

“Say, is there any … uh, very fragile piece to these guns?” Colin ran his finger along the barrel. “I just ask because they look so solid, but I’m told they’re quite complex. Maybe some little pin that could be removed?”

The moustache gave him a fierce look, almost lost among a pair of huge eyebrows. The lieutenant was sending two of the patrolmen out with orders; they were whispering, clearly worried about people hearing them. They’d already been heard, the idiots, but further caution didn’t hurt them any.

“Curiousity is my great failing, of course,” Colin said, in case they were getting suspicious. “I wonder many things. Like, how do you power these guns? Is the power source volatile in any way?”

They continued to ignore him, and he started rummaging through their stuff. It wasn’t until he made it to the Lieutenant’s cutlass that they recognized his presence in the slightest. McRoy had finished talking to his men; they had some plan afoot, and now he could finally waste some time talking to Colin.

“What are you doing? Put that down.” He slapped Colin’s hand away sharply. No recognition of common courtesy from this lout. Luckily, Colin had two hands. 

“Hey, you’re the one who stole my rifle.”

“How’d you get here, kid? Are you somebody’s batman? Do we need to get you sent back to the regulars?”

“Ah, mine is a long and impressive story.” Colin thought for a bit, and then launched into the most colorful lies he could imagine. His rifle, that he’d stolen in Baghdad during some riots. His clothes, loaned to him by a dying orphan on the very eve of the bridge’s fall in Byzantium. The rest of his things …

“Did you hear that?” said the moustache, and heads snapped to the west. They’d all heard it, several clunking noises from the wall. 

Colin smiled to himself: it was just as he’d planned.

“I guess the jig’s up, you dirty jingoists,” he said. “You’re surrounded.”

McRoy didn’t ignore him this time. He walked quickly over to Colin, grabbed him by his collar, and pulled him to eye level.

“What do you mean by that, exactly?”

The patrolmen were shouting; they’d lost one of their number, and now they were worried. With good reason. Everything was going exactly as Colin had planned. They’d be able to shut down this emplacement, steal the long gun, and maybe even get information about the other emplacements from their new prisoners.

“I mean, I can’t stand by and watch you kill innocent men and women. I won’t.” He tried to give McRoy a steely gaze, but it was difficult; his neck was pinched, and his eyes were watering at the pain.

“Rodger, Illson, you’re with me. We’ll head through the north building, try to catch them out.” McRoy didn’t even blink. “You, kid: don’t waste my time. What is happening past that wall? How many?”

“Not a waste,” Colin managed, with the last of his breath. “You underestimate me.” 

With his left hand, he flicked the pin to the side; with his right, he raised the grenadoe into McRoy’s vision.

McRoy dropped him like a hot iron, and waved to the rest of the men. They fanned out immediately, moving to the sides and walls, while Colin caught his breath. The safety lever was extremely difficult to hold down with one sweaty hand, so he didn’t rub his throat, just concentrated on not blowing himself up for a moment. Soon Ammanuel would be here, and he’d bring soldiers. People to help out.

Colin’s audience was captive; there wasn’t anywhere in the courtyard he couldn’t manage to throw to, and they knew it. Some were behind him, but he felt safe; this grenadoe, in this enclosed space, wasn’t something they’d survive. It wasn’t something he’d survive, either.

His heart was loud enough in his ears to drown out his other senses; his vision was tunneled, and everything prickled with the anxious beating.

When his concentration was broken it felt like a great weight was lifted. Windows shattered, a brutal shock to his ears, and for a few moments he couldn’t even see. Somebody must have set off an explosive inside the buildings. When he could see again, Ammanuel was there, just the top part of his head peeking through a window, and guns were firing in a constant fusillade. The English soldiers were reacting, moving to fight the new threat.

McRoy nodded, gestured to Colin, and then turned, his pistol appearing in his hand. Something metal touched the back of Colin’s neck.

He threw the grenadoe before he had a chance to think about it, tried to get it as close to McRoy as possible, twisted and ducked as much as he could before the soldier standing behind him could get over shooting a child. Not something Colin would be able to get over, but these soldier types had to do a lot of sick shit.

The concussion of the grenadoe reached him at the same time as a pain in his right collarbone.

Colin reached up, hardly noticing he was on his knees. There was the collarbone, right where he’d seen it in the hospital tent, rough where it had shattered. There was a flap of skin, squirming under his fingers, hot and wet. Maybe this was an vein? God, it’d better not be an artery. That never went …

His head hit the pavement.

Oh, god. Oh, fuck. Man down.

chapter thirty-eight

Isabelle’s recollections about the matter were non-linear, and punctuated by pauses whenever somebody tried to use the walkway they were sitting on.

To put what she said into perspective, she first told him that she was part of a movement to bring justice (in its most effective form) to King England himself. They were like no resistance Quince had ever heard of before: the group had no formal name, and only existed as a series of address books that connected various people willing to do work on the matter. Results were noted in the general trend of the nation, and points of interest were obvious confluences of power, such as the manufacturing monopoly Syntactic held.

“And to be clear, here, his monopoly extends as close to worldwide as I can tell. I visited Byzantium, Baghdad, went all the way out to Madras, and they’ve nothing like it. The restriction of technology is criminal.”

Quince had nodded sagely, and she’d continued.

What came out of Syntactic’s factories was mostly devices, and a lot of other lower-industry goods that he made good profit from. That wasn’t all, though; Syntactic also produced the schemes that brought other attempted monopolies to their knees. 

The Prelacy, operating from Rome, had been scrounging together the materials to build capacitive engines, in the hopes of buying freedom from restrictive energy laws. They’d fallen victim to some poorly finished dielectrics, sturdy at some temperatures and astonishingly porous to high fields at others. The explosion had taken out the basements of a basilica, and shortly thereafter everything that had been on top of the basements. Hundreds had been injured, and they were still digging friars out.

There were many more incidents like that, careful programs of sabotage that regulated the available technological level outside of northern England. Fires started in libraries, when things were on hard copy, and when they weren’t magnetic fields flourished in proximity to solid storage banks. Building codes weren’t followed as tightly, individuals suffered from brutal allergies to common foods, and market holdings fluctuated wildly.

In England, competitors were hanged. 

To combat this, sabotage had to be identified at it’s root. Getting into Fort William was easy enough, if one was prepared to accept a life sentence of hard labor, and commit the crimes necessary to gain the sentence, but not many people were willing to do such a thing; Baron Praxic certainly wasn’t, for all that he spoke constantly of the uneven power structure in Europe, and neither were most of the individuals literate in Difference Engines. They were soft people, like Quince.

Quince himself had been a lucky break, when his availability was noted.

“How, though? How exactly?”

“Well, we can get you on an installation team, and maybe nip something in the bud before it happens.”

“You’ve obviously got a specific thing in mind, when you say, ‘something’, right?”

Isabelle kicked her feet for a bit; they were staring out over the loch, or lake, at the mountain nestled in its crook; a sharp, cool breeze passed by, fighting with the hot exhalations that made it through the cracks in the stones.

“Your father,” she began, “has been working on …”

“Another one of his stupid projects?”

“Sort of.”

“It never comes to anything, you know. The comb factory, the devices, his horse racing league, none of them. He lacks,” Quincy searched for the word, “a certain je ne sais quoi. He’s bad at …”

“Maybe most of the time, sure, it doesn’t end up as much. The things he’s been buying, though … he recently took his ship, the Imperator Boreas, through the Irish Sea, past Duke Allyric’s holdings.”

“That old steamship?”

“Usually. Allyric’s men noted no smoke, though.”

Quince let his feet swing in the wind. “And that’s a pretty good indicator that the old man’s up to something too advanced for Syntactic’s liking, eh.”

“Luckily enough. Syndetic’s got lots of friends, lots of money, and he’s fairly well along with his project. He’s the best shot we have at wrecking up the monopoly, right now.”

Which lead to the reason Quince was such a find; he had a natural in, as far as contact with his father went, and he was fairly well gifted at the usage of Difference Engines.

At least, it appeared so to outside sources. When he’d whipped up his little listing to break into the main engine of King England’s palace, it had seemed simple enough to him, sending trash data at absurdly high volume until he got what he’d wanted. He’d weighted the outcomes for his listing, so that it tended to repeat input strings that caused the most effect, testing permutations, and it had worked. He’d got in, the main engine had reset itself, and everything had been fine.

On his end, at least. For everybody else it had been a nightmare. One combination of inputs had allowed him the access he wanted; around four hundred and thirty thousand had been valid as well, and had achieved all sorts of incredible things. Huge blocks of data were duplicated, hundreds of users were deleted instantaneously, multiple engines were rendered bricks for their operators, and for a brief time the entire system was rendered inert to anyone with an even username hashtag.

All of this had looked very impressive from the outside. Quince had been busy hiding some of his dirtier plates at the time.

Moving Quince to progressively higher securities was easy enough. Most everybody in Syntactic’s purvue was entirely corrupt, and willing to sell anybody they could up any river they could find for a kickback. Isabelle had worked through several layers of security, talked her way through both Edinburgh and Glasgow, even spent some time looking through the Kirkcaldy pens before she found …

“How’d you get past the wall, though?”

“Hmm?”

“I mean, were you born up here, or sent here? What do they even do with babies around here? Charge them immediately with crimes?”

“Ah, no, I was sent here. See, I was convicted of … well, to start with, I was in Northern Italy. Before you ask, yes, I was raised speaking English first; the ruling family there is mostly Welsh, but without the obsession with actually speaking Welsh.”

Around her seventeenth birthday, she’d been trying to start a free hospital in her free time. Slow going, given the language barrier, but fulfilling nonetheless. Her father, the Earl Thwnric (“a crappy little Earldom,” Isabelle said, when Quince indicated his ignorance of the name) had taken poorly to it, though, because he had his fingers in a lot of hospital-shaped pies around the region. How could he make any money off of curing people if his daughter was going to be doing the same thing for free?

He’d told her to stop, and she’d refused. The charter didn’t have his name on it, there were donations arriving from various other aristocratic families in the region, and he’d been a jerk to her since she’d been his first-born. It wasn’t clear whether he disliked daughters, or just daughters with a lot of ambition, but Isabelle had no time to figure it out. She’d left his household, started administrating the hospital full-time, and even sewed somebody’s thumb back on.

Eleven months of this, and the hospital was the largest in the region. Isabelle sent for some medical apparatuses. They were simple things, mostly, like hooks to hang bags of blood transfusions on, and tool washers that ensured sterility (for the tools), but there had been one internal imaging device. Quince had seen one of those, once, when he was quite young. Massive magnetic fields, a lot of supercooled liquids.

He could see where this was going.

“I ended up with this,” Isabelle pulled her sleeve up, “this,” she drew her hair up, tilted her head forward, “and another on my stomach.” The scar was livid red, and it curled around her forearm; when she twisted it to another position, it was straight, and Quince could almost see the length of metal that would have left it.

Her father had sent her to England, to ‘a real doctor’ (a classic father reaction, he figured), and he’d taken over the hospital.

One month, and he’d turned it into a business; a month more, and it was liquidated, hundreds of clerical errors in the books, and a prison sentence requested for Isabelle. Her father had refused to plead for her, and she’d refused to plead for herself, to show the heartless old fuck that she meant business.

Once inside, some of the civically-minded members of the unnamed resistance had contacted her, and she’d offered to help as fervently as she could. Once things had been explained to her, it was obvious what needed to happen. Syntactic had a monopoly that was physically dangerous, and King England supported it without a single thought. They acted like they owned the place, and it needed to stop.

“I mean, they kind of do, right?”

She gave him a blank look.

“Because, you know, divine right and all that,” Quince offered. He wilted as she failed to respond in any manner. “Not that I support the rampant exploding of free hospitals, you know, it’s just that …”

“Quince, your father is next. If they can’t even recognize the right of someone as powerful as Duke Syndetic to pursue his goals, how are things going to go for the rest of us? Why bother with the Wall, if everybody in Europe is in their jails?”

It was getting chilly out here. Stupid Fort William, not a proper bit of weather to be found. “Yeah, that’s true. Alright. What do we do?”

Isabelle smiled, her gaze somewhere far beyond the horizon.

“Sabotage, probably. But in a moral direction.”

chapter thirty-seven

Quince was finally out of the basement, at least.

He’d spent a pretty harrowing week convincing Claudia that he hadn’t actually caused the accident, the one that had left Balett short a hand (probably; he hadn’t actually seen the man since), but in the end she’d given up. She didn’t know enough about the difference engines in the Precisive Manufactory to make any conclusions about what had happened, and neither did anybody else. In the end, it was pretty possible that Balett had impaled himself on purpose, trying to get out of more work, like all lazy prisoners eventually would attempt.

When Quince had emerged from his confinement, he’d been tempted to blink his eyes in the sharp sunlight, and then to smile contentedly, the pure happiness of a man escaping from slights to his honor into the clear air of dignity.

All that had been available was the tarnished light of bulbs overdue their replacements, and the roiling, warm air of basements filled with machines and the rats they were cooking to death.

As expected, somebody had noticed that Quince was useful, putting him up for overflow item finalization, and he no longer was forced to work in the basements. Unfortunately, it was now clear that the basements were the roomiest part of the manufactory; down there, ores were being processed, vast machines were refining oxides and rare earth minerals, and things like that required space. Up here, everything required vacuums a dozen orders of magnitude more pure, so everything was packed to within inches of everything else, pressure transport lines snaking into every free space, and thin copper wires filling the bare few molecules of space between those.

Getting from his pallet in the north tower to one of the central extrusion stations was an exercise in human tessellation. Corridors meant for humans had been usurped by geometric growths cold enough to burn at a touch, and makeshift ladders and thin walkways loosely hooked around the outside of the castle frequently were the only possible routes from room to room.

Claudia was forced to show him around as he started work, and she was displeased by this. Quince knew this because she told him as much.

“I don’t know how you managed to get into the upper levels,” Claudia said, as she ambled through a window onto a few planks of wood that made up a path down to the south wall of the battlements.

Quince followed her out, grabbing a piece of metal embedded in the stonework. “I guess I showed ambition, and interest. A willingness to understand the …”

“Your whole way here,” she interrupted, “you’ve not had a single thing impede your way. And now, just wildly clicking through the console menus in the dewar hall, that’s good enough to move you on again.”

“I don’t know about ‘wildly’,” Quince said, cautiously sliding his feet down the planks one at a time. They had about two hundred feet to drop, here, if he was any judge. And no railing, of course. “It seemed pretty directed to me.”

“Of course you think that. You’re lucky, Quince, that you saved Balett.”

“Well, yeah, it was nothing really.”

“I hate lucky people.”

They made it to the landing, edged around the outwardly-opening shutters of the Engine Sheave room’s only window, and stepped inside.

“To be clear, here, I mean that I hate you, Quince.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

“Everything you do comes up roses, regardless of how stupid you were to do it. Thrown into jail, and you get sweeping duty. Convicted of murder, and you end up at the Precisive, when sulfur mining is really more your speed. We stick your dumb ass in mineral refining, and that lasts only long enough for you to get bored.” She twisted her lips, and then moved to the console. “Somebody has their eye out for you.”

The whole room was operating as normal, which meant that the heat being generated was immense. Despite a brisk breeze through the window, only about half a percent of the room was below a hundred and ten degrees, and that was directly where the cool wind was being annihilated by the dead heat. Next to the machines, it was worse; their solid exterior belied trembles of interfering vibrations, and occasionally anodized sheets of titanium would jump all at once.

This was the end point of the production process for IBs, and Quince was well excited to finally see it. 

“Not much to see, here,” Claudia declaimed. “The console warns you when it’s finished its current run, and then it will drop right out of here,” she indicated a rectangular port, flat and wide. “We’ll wait. Shouldn’t be more than half an hour.”

When eventually it did arrive, the still-warm core of an IB, Quince was shocked to see it. It almost dripped out of the slot, a solid rectangle as large as a page and half an inch thick, of a translucent green … material. Claudia grabbed it with a pair of thick gloves, then waved it around for Quince’s benefit.

“Transparent from the side, sort of, but opaque from the top. If you move it around like this, you can see pretty much any color you can imagine. If you put a flashlight behind it …” she scowled, remembering how much she hated Quince. “That doesn’t matter, though. Follow me.” 

A wall had been knocked out to the east, and through there were several long tables, staffed by no fewer than two men. Both were large convicts, and he recognized one of them as Carter. They all three studiously ignored one another until Claudia slapped the core down on the table.

“Show him how to package it,” she said, and then stood behind Carter looking angry. What was her problem?

The steps were simple enough; a plastic case had already been extruded somewhere else, and the screws that held it together. The keys for input were mechanical, and Carter carefully lined them up near the bottom of the core using a ruler. Another button was pasted to the top, checked by whoever the other guy was, and a few contacts were placed on the back to connect an antenna assemblage.

Carter measured all these steps carefully, using a ruler that went all the way down to thirty-seconds of an inch, and Quince would have scoffed at the imprecision if he could figure out what the hell was going on. Sure, the contacts went somewhere, but … well, the whole core was completely blank, no point showing the least evidence of any device.

When Carter placed the core carefully on a mount and cut off one of the corners, biting his tongue with the effort of keeping it smooth, Quince could take it no longer.

“What the hell are you doing? How … these engines are incredibly complex, devices that are designed down to the nanometer! How can you just cut some of it off?”

“Pretty cleanly, with this thing,” Carter replied, indicating the steel blade. “Then we stick the contacts to the side, wedge in the crystal resonators, and stick the display to the …”

“No, you … idiot, where do you get the measurements? Do you even know if you’ve got the core right side up?”

“Maybe it’s symmetric. You ever think of that?”

“Well, no, but … What I mean to say is that this is totally dogmatic.”

“Yes.”

“You’re like priests, mindlessly repeating a catechism …”

Carter shook his head and bent back to his work. “No, we’re not. No robes.”

“Sure, but philosophically …”

“Philosophically speaking, we’re convicts. We’d be following ridiculous instructions wherever we ended up, and we’d have no time for sophism.”

Claudia clapped her hands together loudly, and there wasn’t any speaking after that. Carter and the other one were content to piece together the IB casing, testing all the keys a couple time for sticking, sanding down the little shards of core that hadn’t come cleanly off with the cut, and painstakingly etching a serial number into the back of the casing. After that, the IBs were loaded with listings and sold.

Every inquisitive instinct in Quince’s brain was being ruthlessly shit on. He’d examined IBs before he’d gone into prison, and they’d been inscrutable, their casing unassailable. He’d imagined learned gentlemen assembling them, fine tuning them, writing the listings that ran on them, some sort of intellectual community, but that simply didn’t exist. Materials went in, gathered into rough piles by convicts; thugs put them together, demonstrating a clumsy usage of screwdrivers and epoxy. Between, there wasn’t much but basic maintenance.

The manufactory wasn’t recently designed. From the level of understanding here, it was easily hundreds of years since anybody had known anything worthwhile about these machines, and maybe hundreds more since they’d known how to build one themselves.

Lord Syntactic wasn’t a genius, he was a squatter. He fed electricity, from … well, from somewhere, into these factories, kept the northern wall in good shape, and reaped the benefits. How long had it been since the title of Aether Progenitus had meant anything?

Quince ambled quietly behind Claudia, his head wholly absent, as she led him further along the production floors, past the extrusion points of the other items. Solid storage, and its layered round plates slotting silently into place; shielded wires, their intermittent bulges signifying something or other; central difference units, interlocking pieces lying around carelessly; fans, antennas, huge panel displays, consoles, keys aplenty, switches and cases and power units and parallel accelerators and more.

At the end of the line, Claudia stalked off through a hole somebody had smashed through a wall, and he was left alone.

What worried him the most was that the devices he’d seen defied reverse engineering; at some point in the past, they’d become too complex to take apart, to guess at the principles that allowed them to work. Syntactic enjoyed a monopoly not simply because he didn’t allow information out of the manufactory, but because the information couldn’t leave; no brain could hold it, and no difference engine would dispense it.

“Quince!” came a whisper.

For his part, Quince nearly jumped out of his skin, but managed to avoid falling over. He knew that voice.

“Isabelle?” He looked around for her cautiously, but after a few seconds felt stupid and straightened. “How …” A few questions, and the intimation of a few hundred more, were swarming through his brain, but all he managed was to say, “How are you, uh, here?”

She tapped him on the shoulder, having emerged like some kind of fucking mirage out of nothing, and laughed.

“Listen, I want to show you something. Or, look and listen.” Without waiting, she walked into a dark corner and disappeared.

Quince focused on keeping his head above metaphorical water. Isabelle arriving was surprising, but … well, he didn’t know if it was lucky yet, and even if it was, maybe it was just coincidence. He shook his head as he thought; no, something was fishy.

When he caught up with her, they’d made it to another room, this one with IBs stacked around, sorted into piles and marked for distribution.

Before he could speak, she started talking, her face lit up with excitement. “No reselling of Syntactic’s devices, right? All of them are sold by him, so he owns which devices go where.”

“I admit that I’m not clear on …”

“So I got to wondering, as I was here,” she pushed her hand over his mouth when he tried to ask just how, exactly she was here, “are all of the devices the same when they go out? Or does he personalize them for different buyers?”

“I’ve seen the purchase listing, and no, there’s nothing about …”

“Quince, shh. Shut up. I’m saying, what could Syntactic achieve if he got to choose which listings went on particular IBs?”

“I don’t know. Can we skip to you telling me?”

Isabelle smiled and flapped her hands around dismissively. “I don’t know either, Quince. That’s why I’m asking you.”

“Is that why you got me sent here?” Quince swallowed; this was the important question. “Is that why you killed that guy?”

She was silent, cocking her head in an exaggerated thinking stance.

“Because somebody did, and it wasn’t me. I’m … I’m alright that it happened, I guess, because, well, he wasn’t my favorite person, and it got me sent here, but I didn’t do it. You did. I don’t really want to look extensively into the morality of the situation, because O’Brien wasn’t … I just don’t want to be in the dark about what happened.” There was a high note in his voice, something caught as he teetered on the edge of pleading. “I want to know.”

Isabelle nodded, and patted him gravely on the shoulder. “Quince, has anyone ever told you anything about gift horses?”

“Look gift horses in the mouth, if they might be trying to kill you?”

“Alright, I get it. Later. Right now, the guys who work here are on break, so let’s make the most of it? I’ll tell you the rest of the story, and you can go about your life fat and happy.”

He shrugged. “Fine.”

“What can you tell me about this room?”

“Well, this is holding for distribution. IBs come in that way,” he indicated the cleft in the wall that did door duty, “get sorted, and go out to … well, I guess through there is loading for their final listings. I don’t know much about how those machines are run. Lots of buttons.”

“So, we assume that Syntactic can mess around with them based on where they’re going.” Quince nodded, and Isabelle continued. “Where are they going?”

“Five general stacks. One pile for small orders, four for big orders.” He pointed to the papers glued to the metal above the stacks. “Spain, four units, buyer anonymous. Denmark, seven units, Baron Copenhagen. Iceland, wow, thirty-two units …”

“They’re going to your father.”

“No, Iceland. I don’t think anybody actually lives there anymore … oh. Oh, I see. What is he doing in Iceland?”

“Hard to say, sport. Can you tell if the production orders are different?”

“I have no idea. I’m surprised anybody knows anything around here, really.” Quince sat down on a stack and sighed heavily. “You know, nobody has the slightest clue what’s going on here? It’s really depressing. We’re like mice, living in a grandfather clock, repairing it without ever understanding what the chiming of the hour is for …”

Isabelle was going through the orders, but still managed to respond distractedly. “Sure, if the mice also knew what pendulums and gears were for, and had seen sundials … I’m saying that you’ve got a dumb analogy there.”

“Well, if you know so much …”

“I don’t! We’ve been over this. There are people that do, and they sure as shit aren’t convicts. Syntactic’s not an idiot.”

“How can you say that?”

“He’s clearly sabotaging these IBs with nonstandard listings.” She tapped the order forms; they held things for her, apparently, that they didn’t for Quince. “I may not be able to understand them, but I can tell when somebody’s trying to sneak changes past.”

“Sabotage is a pretty strong word.”

“And I don’t use it lightly. Or, I’m not using it lightly right now.”

“Somebody, Syntactic maybe, is sabotaging my father’s work? Why bother?”

“Why indeed.” Isabelle’s grin went from ear to ear, and then some. “Isn’t this interesting? Sabotage, high industry, hanging out with girls? Almost makes you not care so much about one tiny little murder.”

“What? No!” Quince thought for a bit. “Well, maybe. He was a jerk.”

chapter thirty-six

This hapless motherfucker had a cut on his thigh a foot long, and it was leaking like crazy.

Tourniquets, sure, and applying pressure to the wound, that was well enough, but it didn’t totally cover the situation. The guy, Abir, he was skinny; if he was standing upright, his whole torso could probably slide right out through a hole that size. Bone was visible, big ol’ swaths of flesh. It was disgusting.

Colin stuck his hands into some hot water, rustled around a bit with some soap, which he’d been surprised to find way out here in the empires, and heated a needle on the stove until it was glowing. It wasn’t a particularly sharp needle, but it was smooth, and slim enough that he couldn’t hope to guess how the fraction of an inch that it was across; considering all that, it was shocking how much the fellow hammed it up as Colin started sewing his leg back into a more reasonable state. At the first puncture, he winced, and at the second he started making really pitiful noises, even though he was fortified on some medicinal alcohol, 130 proof, that they’d pulled out of Lake Sapanca.

Third puncture, he squirted blood all over Colin’s shirt.

There weren’t many of Colin’s clothes that were clean at this point. There was mud and dust on the stuff he’d been wearing earlier, and blood on the stuff he was wearing now, and one pair of clothes had been badly burnt despite being soaked in the Bosphorus. In many ways, he enjoyed the same journey as his clothes; his feet were dark with all manner of exotic dirts that refused to wash loose, his back still smarted from an impressive burn, and the scars on the top of his left arm were mirrored on the bottom, with some added exit wounds from fibers that had splintered halfway through.

Abir wasn’t much good for conversation, and the rest of the hospital was busy as well. Around noon they’d brought through thirty-odd soldiers who’d suffered a barrage earlier and had just barely stumbled back into empire-held Ankara, half of them being carried and half of those getting colder. Kaurosh had shouted something at his staff, who’d distributed them to cots, and when it was all sorted out there had been five without any assistance. Abir had been one of them.

Sewing was a simple motion, and mechanically not too demanding, unless the aim was a really clean scar, very regular threads, rather than simply keeping a guy from dribbling to death.

Colin let his mind wander; it was easier to do that than to keep his mind on how much of Abir’s biomass was being smeared on his hands.

It was clear that the empires were on their back foot from this. The lazy artillery shots across the Bosphorus had been one things, and something that the eastern bank had been able to respond to. The moment the bridge had gone down, though, it had been a whole different story; the train, had it been successful in making it across the strait, would have been accompanied by a few dozen tons of long-distance rails, set up miles from the conflict.

Every rail whistled its own little tune as it approached, arpeggios and dopplered key changes the chiseled regimental marks of Syntactic’s engineer corps on the long shafts of the rails.

Anyone on the ground started running when they heard that, even though the rails usually preceded their warnings, and Colin was among them. He’d been near a house that was hit, and the report hadn’t just deafened him, it had smacked him into a wall and left him wandering in little circles for five minutes. This was a one-sided war, a technological leviathan looping itself around a tribe of bark-wearing, superstitious fools.

Colin was one of the fools, apparently, and the realization smarted.

Fifteen feet of swathed bandages later, Abir had passed out and was breathing shallowly. Colin spent the time to wash his hands, which in practical terms really just spread the blood around and mixed it with soap. He breathed in deeply, letting his heart calm down a bit; something about the surprise of being smacked with blood never really died out.

Kaurosh arrived, and started shouting at Colin.

It was very difficult to explain that he’d been watching the surgeons, and knew exactly what he was doing, since he didn’t know the least bit of Kaurosh’s dialect, and the man wasn’t interested in listening regardless. This was just like when Colin had apprenticed himself as a railway engineer in Düzce; sure, he’d managed to wedge an engine between two boxcars, but he hadn’t deserved to be banished from the railyard. These bashi-bazouks had probably never encountered a child so drive, and were most likely embarrassed.

It was time to go outside for a bit; it smelled like somebody had flattened a herd of sheep in the tent, and sounded like that as well. Also, Kaurosh managed to toss Colin bodily through the front flap.

Once outside, it was far cooler, and Ammanuel was gathering kids up to head into the west city and grab up any citizens that hadn’t managed to evacuate yet. The east city was walled, and built mostly of stone, which made it about thirty times safer to be in than the wood-and-tar west city.

“Hello, Colin,” Ammanuel approximated in English, before switching back to … back to whatever the language of choice was here. “Helping something us?”

“Yes,” Colin replied, in their barbarous tongue.

This would be a great opportunity to steal some money.

There were four kids, all of them Colin’s height or taller, and Ammanuel, who had at least a head on Colin. Ibraset, skinny and weak; Talin, always reading the messages she was supposed to deliver; somebody the rest insisted was named Harold, laughing loudly and shouting her down whenever she denied it; a tough-looking little fellow named Baran; and Ammanuel, who head was shaped as hilariously as his laugh.

He’d learned their names through a pretty tortuous process.

Downslope, the houses were ratty little things. Long alleyways petered out under rusty sheets of metal draped over freestanding walls, roads wound in angular jaunts, and finding people was almost impossible. Sometimes Colin could hear a family, just over a wall, but unless he climbed directly over a path might never be found. That was why he and the others were doing the looking: great climbing skills, and quick adaptation to new circumstances. Colin was nothing if not … Colin was many things, and one of them was very adaptable.

“Split here, meet up soon somewhere northwest-ish of here,” Ammanuel communicated with a series of motions and a few words, “Take Harold, be careful.”

“How far?”

“Two units, probably hours, until we meet. After that, until the sun is down. No rush.”

“A positive reaction,” Colin replied. “We’ll take everything south of this street. Kaurosh said there were a lot of … hmm. That is,” he struggled for words that he knew, “South side of this line that I am indicating with my arm presently, tall, uh, many … fuck it. See you soon.”

They ambled off, Ammanuel walking backwards a bit while he mimed using a gun and said some further things to Harold. Talking was so easy for them; every conversation he had was mostly his internal transcription of a long bout of guesswork.

“Alright, Harold, let’s go.” Colin spoke in English, half in the hope that the people around him would pick up the mother tongue, and half because it gave his mouth some exercise. “Hey, do you think I could carry the rifle? I’m pretty good with it.”

Harold pushed him away when he reached for it. That was alright; the only time he’d managed to get his hands on a rifle, the recoil had nailed him in the forehead with the butt, and he’d spent two days rubbing a red semicircle.

“You win this round, Harold.”

He was content to just walk for a while; this was one of the few straight streets in Ankara, and it had only gardens on either side. Somebody was firing a gun, way back in the older city, but in a lazy way; the pops were soft and almost rhythmic.

“It’s funny that Ammanuel has you doing this evacuation stuff. I guess that means you’re with the empire’s army officially now. Not a bad deal, really. They feed us, and you get a pillow. Well, there are pillows around. Pillows that, I suppose, technically belong to a variety of people, but my head hasn’t gone uncushioned in a while, which is quite a boon.”

At the next neighborhood, Colin pushed doors open with a stick, and Harold wandered in with a guileless smile, like she belonged in every house from here to Byzantium.

“Probably not going to be fun, next time we retreat. Byzantium was bad enough, as I’m sure you recall, but Düzce was worse, all those hills, all those guys in the dress shirts shoving around like they owned the place. I admit, they might actually have owned the place, but I was never clear on the matter.”

There was a courtyard, stinking of rotting food, and a family just kind of sitting around on chairs they’d dragged outdoors. Colin shut up, because some people took it poorly when they heard the variegated over-done vowels of the King’s while they were trying to contemplate the ruthless rule of that same King. Harold started talking, though, shouting at them, and Colin made arm motions to cement the things he thought she was probably saying.

“Something safe something something family,” one dried-up old bastard managed, when he could get a word past George.

“Listen,” Colin pointed at his ear, and continued in a passable pidgin, “English people, like me, are coming from the direction I am pointing to this place, which I am pointing at now. Then they will kill you, as in this crude pantomime.” He looked at them expectantly from the ground, where he lay prone.

Lots of blank gazes for that one, but their old lady was laughing when Colin was dusting himself off, and some kids started pulling possessions out of the house. They continued to speak to Harold, though they spared a few laughs for Colin, ruffled his hair a bit in their inane confusion.

Colin watched the arm motions, and was surprised to see Harold motioning a little bit west of south, away from the center of town.

“Out to the fields? We can’t be full up behind the walls, can we? I’d have noticed.”

He thought about the situation. Ankara was pushed up against some hills to the east, it was true, a low hook that encompassed the northern part of the city, but that was part of what made it secure. At this particular time, though …

“We’re going to lose the city, eh. On the move again, and only a week and a half after getting here. I wish we had some proper long guns, or that they’d run some damn trains from here to somewhere safer.”

Harold looked at him blankly, and then said something that he caught none of. That was alright; she walked out the gate, headed further along, and he followed while he thought.

“I’d be a lot happier with this if anybody here spoke English besides those jerks in the blue uniforms, the Persian marines or whatever. I wish Gwynedd was around. She spoke an impressive number of languages. We probably could have set up some sort of chain of translations if she were here.” He followed Harold up a wall, dropped onto some crates on the other side. “She’s probably happier where she is, though, spending quality time with her surviving family.”

In the next stretch, four-story blocks of apartments mouldered silently; they were well into the west city, now, and this had been a pretty high-rent district, which meant it had been abandoned the quickest. Not a bad vantage on the city, though.

“I mean, assuming that she’s alright. Not … well, dead, I guess, or drowned, or missing limbs, or anything like that. I kind of …”

Harold stopped walking, and looked at him.

Colin wiped his nose on his sleeve, and then wiped his sleeve on his pants. “What?”

Harold pointed at her ear, and Colin nodded; she pointed northwest, and he followed her. There was caution in her steps, though, and he mirrored her quiet steps when he noticed that. Lucky that something had come up; thinking about Gwynedd, and all the various ways she could absolutely have been crushed by falling exploded train left him short of breath.

It was a long row, apartments on both sides, and it tended upwards until it hit a hill, where steps lead the rest of the way to a few fancier houses on top. There were a lot of trees, various plants and whatnot, a wall of green frippery for affluent agoraphobes, but when Colin turned around he had a good view of the east city.

A great view, really. The street was pointed almost perfectly to the Ankara city center, the rising tiers of white buildings framed by the apartments. There was the fort, and the hospital’s flags were visible, and …

The noise Harold had heard (probably) was finally audible to Colin as well. It was men and women speaking.

If they’d been speaking Byzantine, fine, he’d just have walked up. Something from eastern Europe, that wasn’t so bad; they could barely find their asses with both hands, let alone wage a war.

That wasn’t Hungarian, though, and it wasn’t Swiss or … Belgium-ish, or anything but English. That, peeking through the trees, wasn’t the snub barrel of a cannon; it was the braided length of a long gun.

How badly would this affect his dinner?

chapter thirty-five further contd

It took less than ten seconds to incapacitate the marines on the lowest gun deck, and then Elaine and Henry broke from the rest of the group.

The Magellan Intercessor was an old four-mast barque, most of it made of wood and whatnot, but sometime in the last hundred and fifty years England’s navy had rehauled it. They’d stuck in the long guns, put in all the electric support for the rails, filled the hold with the capacative discharge piles (according to Lucas). Then, they’d wrapped the whole thing in iron, strengthened every beam, laid steel support along the decks, riveted the whole boat into a single solid unit. Otherwise, firing one of its guns would result in a long gun’s barrel flying out the opposite direction, taking a chunk of the ship with it, maybe some sailors as well.

It was an odd mix of metal and wood, electric devices and huge analog machinery. The guns themselves, masterful creations of Syntactic’s manufactories, were mounted on gimbals and moved by hand, notches indicating degrees of orientation. There was an intercom, providing communication between decks, but the device was hanging haphazardly from the ceiling, wires spilling out around it, and at least one of its other speakers was lost in the sheets somewhere. Elaine was a bit disappointed in her country’s navy, for a moment.

As they made their way through the ship, Elaine could hear thumps from amidships. Barlow had brought a bag of granadoes, a few stun charges, and they were using them as much as possible, hoping that there was no explosive ordnance lying around. Hopefully they’d be able to incapacitate enough of the marines to take control of the ship.

The real trick would be finding some way to convince Renshaw not to do anything stupid. He was the sort of man who’d gladly ride his boat to the bottom of the bay, shouting happily the whole way, so it wasn’t going to be easy. 

The third bulkhead they made it to led to stairs downwards, and Elaine heard some thumping steps ahead of them, clattering where the stairs were suddenly metal.

Expecting no marines this deep would have been a mistake, and expecting them to fight them head on would have been naive. Henry was almost too tall for these hallways, and he was holding three feet of saber in one hand and a rifle in the other; beside him, Elaine felt redundant, but held her own rifle ready regardless.

The fourth bulkhead was locked, and there was a lot of whispering on the other side. The marines were making plans.

“You didn’t bring any explosives, did you?” Elaine whispered. She corrected herself immediately, “I mean, besides the big one?”

Henry shook his head. “Wouldn’t set them off if I had. We’re too near the piles.”

Another rippling shock traveled through the ship from somewhere overhead. At least Lucas’ men hadn’t been wiped out immediately.

“Have you ever been down here? Do you know the layout?”

“Eighteen piles, nine on each side. A thin course between them, and places to hide in every gap. If they have any number of men, we’re most likely going to eat buckshot.”

“Say we get in, though. Is there anything we don’t want to shoot?”

“I don’t really want to shoot anything, but … well, keep away from the discharge terminals.”

“Keep away, as in don’t shoot them, or …”

“As in, please don’t touch them.”

“Hmm.” The whispering from the other side of the door was nearly loud enough to be clear in her ears, but it was only the occasional fragment that she could understand.

Elaine nodded to Henry, and then spoke in a louder voice. Hopefully enough to be heard. “We should turn around, find another way in. Are there other doors?”

He looked confused for only a moment, and then joined in. “I think there should be, yes. On the other side of the ship. They can’t possibly be guarding that one.”

“That is true. They are few, and we are many?” She shrugged when that came out. A bit too much, perhaps.

The whispering on the other side of the door had died out, and there were creaks from the floorboards (deckboards?). The marines were moving around. Give it maybe five minutes, then Henry could shoot the lock off the door, and maybe hit them with their backs turned. 

“… seems to be the case.” A voice, one of the marines. They were speaking up, now that they thought Elaine and Henry were no longer close by. The marine cleared his throat, and then continued. “Well, that certainly seems to be the case. There are, indeed, two doors, and the other could be breached.”

“Certainly. We should head there now, lest we be surprised.”

“Indeed.”

“Caution is our watchword.”

“Yes, as marines. Also honor. Come, to the other door.” Careful footsteps, and then a watchful silence resumed, small arms fire once again audible from the upper deck.

Henry rolled his eyes, and Elaine slumped against the wall. The marines were not nearly as stupid as she’d hoped; either that, or she really needed to work on her delivery. She looked at Henry, tried to communicate with him silently, and they both shrugged their way through a silent conversation, presumably communicating their current difficulty. He had no plan. She had …

“They must be gone by now,” she said loudly, weighting her words. Henry mouthed, ‘really?’ to her in response; she flapped her hand at him dismissively. “On the count of three, we go through this door.”

Some boots scraped the floor as she began to count. Insofar as it was possible to identify a confused shuffle from the sound, she did. “One, two … three!”

Henry was immobile for a moment, not quite up to speed, but he got the idea when she started to run at the bulkhead, and caught up to her by the time her boot hit the door. It was wooden, with iron bands around it, and between their combined momenta it shattered into two useless metal lengths and a lot of splinters.

The five marines on the other side were in various stages of confusion when the door’s pieces flew in the faces, and Elaine let the stock of her gun smack the first in his face while he was still brushing wood from his eyes. Henry threw the saber end over end at the cautious one in the back, while Elaine tried to shoulder her weapon to get another; the saber hit the marine handle first in the temple, and Elaine’s target dodged between piles before she could fire.

Of those that remained, one managed to shoot the floor in a wild motion, and the other threw himself to the floor and did a pretty good impression of cardiac arrest. Henry stalked forward, grabbed weapons, snapped them in half, and Elaine crouched down to shoot the final marine in the foot, the only part of him visible.

“Alright.” Her heart was pounding in her ears, making her own voice sound ridiculous. “I’m heading back up. Do you have everything?”

Henry hefted the sack, and pointed to the wall. “The intercom should be ready.”

She nodded her head, and then sprinted to the stairs. There hadn’t been much noise from above in too long; fights were over quickly, she knew that, and if there was no shooting, it was possible that … well, she just had to get to the deck. That was all.

By the time she reached the forecastle, the rest of the marines were gathered out under the rigging, staring back at the Godqueen. Renshaw was shouting something, as usual, and … shit, there was Lucas, and there were the rest of them, tied up and face down on the deck. It was hard to tell, but Lucas’ slump looked unnatural; he was either dead or severely concussed. Either way, he needed … one of those ways, he needed a doctor, and either way, she couldn’t wait.

“Captain Renshaw!”

Thirty marines, two captains, three sailors, one longshoreman and the blackened face of the Duke turned to her.

“Renshaw, I demand the release of every prisoner this-“

“Countess. You’ve noticed, probably, that all your men are restrained, and that you have …” he smiled as he glanced around. “Twenty-eight rifles trained on you.”

Elaine had trouble getting the words out, but there really was no other option, now. “I did notice that, Captain. Nevertheless.” There was an intercom around, somewhere; Henry should be able to hear all of this. “If you don’t release everyone this moment, your boat will be destroyed.”

He laughed richly. “How are you going to manage that? Someone shoot her, in the knee or something.”

The marines looked a little nonplussed, and there was a short pause before one of them raised his gun and fired, missing her foot by inches.

“No! Wait!”

“Why? You’re a distraction at best, Elaine.”

“Not you, Captain! The man with his finger on the detonator, in the hold!”

“What?”

“You know, next to however many millions of volts or whatever you have stored up in those capacitors? A simple explosion, and then the discharge of all that energy simultaneously? I’m told it’s a lot; throwing chunks of metal miles across the ocean takes a lot of electricity, and …”

Renshaw’s face had grown mottled while she spoke, darkening with rage, and he suddenly slapped the railing, clearly overcome. “Ridiculous! I will not stand for these mutinous threats, not from some jumped-up quarantined countess!”

“You have to, though,” she replied, “Or your ship will be destroyed-“

“Not before yours! Somebody fire on the Godqueen! Send these traitors to the bottom of the ocean!”

Elaine tried to speak, to say something else to slow him down, but he’d already grabbed the end of one of the long guns and was swinging it downwards, groaning at the weight, directly towards the center of the Godqueen. She ran forward, and somebody fired at her; she ducked, and from across the way, more shots came, a short hail of bullets towards the marines, and her path was suddenly clear and incredibly dangerous.

Instead of heading directly for Renshaw, she pulled herself to the intercom and shouted as clearly as she could. “Do not detonate! Not yet!”

“Wasn’t planning on it,” came Henry’s placid voice, and then Elaine had no more time to listen.

At the mainmast, Barlow had struggled to his feet, his bonds somehow cut, and he was laying about himself with the butt of a rifle; the other sailors were still tied, but were inexpertly clubbing their way through marines ducking underneath the barrage of shots from the Godqueen. The rest of the long guns were unmanned, but some of the marines were trying to get to their firing pins; bullets ricocheted from their barrels in response.

Renshaw took a bullet to the leg, and shook it off. Before she could stop him, he was at the pin, and he slapped it down with an angry smile, triumph in his eyes.

The shot rocked the entire ship, knocking unsteady combatants from their feet, and a hole appeared in the side of the Godqueen, metal and rivets torn to pieces in the path of the rail.

Before she could reach the man, Duke Patrick was there, forcing Renshaw away from the guns with his hands tied behind his back. He looked like he was nearly dead, but every step Renshaw took the Duke took first, knocking him backwards with his shoulder and shoving his knee into the Captain’s stomach.

Renshaw stumbled backwards, pulled a revolver from its holster, and fired; the Duke was already falling, throwing himself to the side, and the bullet hit him in the knee.

Elaine reached Renshaw, punched him in the back of the wrist as hard as she could, and then kicked him as hard as she could in his chest. He stumbled backwards, hit the railing hard, the bullet-wound in his leg keeping him from balancing.

She debated saying something, to let him know what was wrong with him, but settled on placing her foot squarely on his sternum and shoving.

When she leaned over the railing, all that was left was a splash. He’d probably manage to swim to one of the boats; old sailors usually dealt well with being in the water, or they didn’t manage to become old sailors.

“Back to the Godqueen?” came Henry’s voice from behind. “We’ve settled this, I believe.”

“Hmm,” Elaine replied, looking at the water for a bit more.

The Duke was pulling the binding from his mouth; somebody had cut him loose, which was a pity. He was still seated, though, his knee bleeding heavily; that was alright. “We should leave as quickly as possible. The rest of the fleet is not unarmed, and we want to be well away from the Intercessor by the time the marines free themselves.”

“No.”

“No? No to what?”

“Renshaw could have been reasonable, you know. We gave him the opportunity. Multiple opportunities, I feel. He sold us out for some order from a monarch thousands of leagues away.”

“So we’ll leave him here,” Henry said. “Good enough. He can have America, if he wants it so badly.”

“Yeah, but I’m taking this ship.” Elaine turned around, smiled. “Throw the marines off, and pull the anchor up. Head for open water first, and then we’ll decide what to do from there.”

The look Duke Patrick Antistrophic gave her was unsurprised, and a little bit unctuous, if she was any judge. After a moment, he smiled, that damn sunny grin of his marred by the bruises on his face. “Alright, Admiral Syndetic.” He winced as he tried to move. “Do you think I could see a medic? Or, better, be carried to a medic?”

Henry obliged the crippled Duke, who complained as he was lifted, and Elaine walked with them back to the gangplank that still hung between the two ships. 

Fuck America. It was time to go home.