Seaswept (Seabound Chronicles Book 2) (12 page)

Chapter 15—Harvesters

Early the next morning,
after a quick breakfast of reheated shrimp and seaweed
rolls, the first mate shoved a bucket and rag into Zoe’s hands and told Esther
to report to the engine room.

“Make yourselves
useful,” she said.

“Have you heard
anything about the—?” Esther began.

“I don’t have time
for questions,” the first mate barked. “Captain told you your place on this
ship.”

She darted off to
screech at a young woman who had tried to sneak past with her shoes in her
hand.

“Don’t think I
don’t know who you’ve been bunking with, Simmons . . .”

Zoe winced and
went off to scrub the deck. Esther headed down a ladder into the bowels of the
trawler. She couldn’t figure the first mate out. She seemed more aggressive
than all the men on the ship combined, but there was something strained about
her, as if she was forcing herself to be the harshest of them all. It couldn’t
be easy being the only female officer in charge of a crew like this.

It was dark in the
lower passageway. Esther could feel the ship’s movement through the soles of
her boots. She wished she knew exactly where they were going. As she approached
the end of the corridor, she could hear a man swearing profusely over the roar
of the engines. She pushed open the door.

The engine room
was cramped and stifling. There were far too many workers, at least compared to
the skeleton crew Esther was used to on the
Catalina
.
The men gathered in corners, studiously avoiding the attention of a burly,
tattooed fellow, who was busy berating one of their number. He wore overalls,
and he’d sweated through his grimy undershirt. His face was lobster red from a
combination of heat and sheer rage.

Esther cleared her
throat, but the tirade of vulgarities continued. As far as she could tell, one
of the men had knocked over a barrel, which had careened into a fuel injector,
pushing some of the wiring loose. The unit shuddered dangerously. The
apoplectic engine boss didn’t seem to notice.

Esther walked
forward and replaced the wiring, securing it with a swift turn of the wrench
from her belt.

The opera of
curses ceased abruptly.

The engine boss
took a breath, swelling the cartoon crab tattooed on his neck. “Who. The. Hell.
Are. You?” he growled.

“I’m Esther.” She
craned her neck up to meet his eyes. “The first mate sent me down to work here.
I was head of engine maintenance on the—”

“Do you think I
give a storming fuck what you did on some rust-beaten, salt-bag ship?”

“No, I—”

“No. Sir.” The leg
of the crab tattoo pulsed above the engine boss’s jugular as if it were
dancing.

“Sorry?”

“Sir.” The word
was like a slap.

“Sir,” Esther
repeated. Sweat dripped below her hairline, but she didn’t wipe it away.

“Did I tell you to
fix that injector?” the boss said.

“No, sir.”

“Then why in the
mother-sinking, boiling ocean did you fix it?”

No one moved.
Esther’s heartbeat was nearly as loud as the clunk of the engines.

“I’m sorry, sir.
The first mate said to make myself useful.”

The man’s face
swelled further, as if his jaw were growing. “I’m up to my rusted and corroded
throat in young krill like you trying to ‘make themselves useful.’ Don’t know
what she’s playing at with all these recruits. This ship is far beyond
capacity, and I can’t use all of the sea slugs she sends down here. It ain’t
fuckin’ efficient.”

“Did I fix the
injector incorrectly?” Esther asked evenly. “Sir.”

“That,” he said,
“is beside the point. You do what I tell you when I tell you to salting do it.
Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Now get
over there and help Cody clean that oil drum.”

“Yes, sir.”

He whirled around
to continue shouting at the man who had knocked loose the wires in the first
place, this time chastising him for allowing “a mother-sinking little girl” to
show him up.

Esther joined Cody
on the far side of the cramped space, avoiding eye contact with the other
workers. Most were men, but a muscle-bound lass lounged against a rack of pipes
in the corner. She watched Esther with a flat expression. Cody straightened
from where he’d been cleaning muck from the bottom of the oil drum. His jacket,
with its multitude of pockets, was tied around his waist. He seemed pleased to
see her.

“Is he always like
that?” Esther asked.

To her surprise,
Cody laughed.

“Ol’ Jacques isn’t
bad,” Cody said. “He looks scary, but I’d bet my berth he actually likes you.
That was ballsy of you to interrupt him and fix the engine when he was on a
wave. How’d you know that would work?”

“It’s basic
maintenance stuff,” Esther said. “I’m sure most of the guys with any experience
in here can do it.”

“That’s just it,”
Cody said. “Most of us don’t have much experience. Jacques and Rawlins are the
only old-timers here, besides the officers. That’s why Jacques is so pissed off
all the time.”

“Why are they
recruiting so many people?”

Cody shrugged. “Gotta
compete with the Calderon Group, don’t they?”

He bent back over
the oil drum. Esther wondered if that was all they wanted to do. They would
need more ships if they wanted to bring in more metal and supplies to sell.
More men wouldn’t necessarily help, especially if they were this inefficient.

Dredging the oil
drum was hard work, and soon Esther was sweating into the dark pools that
gathered beneath their boots. Cody was a hard worker, though, and it was nice
to have the company of a familiar face.

“How’d you end up
here anyway?” she asked him. “Are you from the
Amsterdam
?”

“Nope,” Cody said.
“Grew up on a freighter. I’m too young to remember it that well, but when the
disaster hit, my parents, big sister, and I were passengers on a cargo ship. My
parents were adventurous types, wanting to travel the world with their family,
and some freighters took a handful of passengers for cheap. After the volcano
we just stayed on the ship and ate our way through a hundred shipping containers’
worth of canned food. We were doing all right, so my parents kept having kids,
and we were living like a regular Swiss Family Robinson aboard that freighter.
I’ve got six little brothers and sisters.”

“But you left?”

“Yeah, it gets
claustrophobic, you know? I needed to get out on my own. We bumped into the
Amsterdam
by accident, and it seemed
like the right time to jump ship.”

Esther wondered
how old Cody was. Probably twenty at most. There was something fresh-faced
about him, despite the tracks of oil and sweat on his cheeks.

“Did your family
stay with the
Amsterdam
?” she asked.

“Nope. They’re out
there still, floating around, arguing and fishing and trying to get by as
always.”

“Doesn’t sound too
bad.”

“Not really, but I
wanted a change. Maybe on a big cruise ship like the
Catalina
you have enough different people around that it’s not so
boring.”

Esther laughed.
“The ship’s smaller than you’d think. Until recently I couldn’t wait to get
off.”

“And now?”

“I don’t know,”
Esther said. “It’s not a bad life, all things considered.”

She hoped everyone
was all right on the
Catalina
.

They were put on
cleaning duty next. As Esther scrubbed down the outside of the humming engine,
she planned out how she would rearrange the machinery to make room for her
algae system. The vessel could be even faster when it didn’t have to rely on
diesel made from grungy crude oil. With her technology, this old ship could go
anywhere.

The engine room
crew was inexperienced, but they seemed open to newcomers. They questioned her
knowledge of mechanics and fuel injection techniques and teased her good-naturedly.
Once, the boss, Jacques, came over and hovered behind her as she took apart and
reassembled a pump so she could clean it more thoroughly. He breathed heavily
over her shoulder but didn’t stop her as she laid out the pieces systematically
on the deck. When she tightened the last screw, he grunted and moved on. He
burst out a string of curses half a second later, not directed at her this
time.

Their shift lasted
late into the afternoon. At the ring of the bell signaling the shift change,
Esther stretched out her back and scrubbed at the grease on her hands. She and
Cody went up to the mess hall, where the first shifters jovially pushed the
second shifters out of their seats to make room at the crowded benches.

At the galley
line, Esther picked up a metal bowl with a thumb-sized dent and dumped a lumpy
mess of fish soup into it. Zoe arrived as she turned toward the tables. Esther
waved at her across the heads of the seated sailors. Luke stood up from a seat
beside Patrick, the Australian they had met yesterday, to wave at Zoe too. Cody
had already crowded onto the bench across from them. Zoe arched one eyebrow at
Luke and then joined Esther by the soup line.

“How was it?” Zoe
asked.

“Not too bad. I
can do this kind of work,” Esther said quietly.

Rawlins was
watching them from the galley door.

“My day sucked. If
I never scrub another deck in my life, it’ll be too soon.”

“Sorry about
that,” Esther said.

Zoe had worked on
the gardening ship on the
Galaxy Flotilla
,
caring for young plants in the greenhouse. There were no such jobs here.

“Notice anything
strange today?” Zoe asked.

“They are way
overmanned,” Esther said. “I bet they only need a third of these guys to do all
the metal harvesting they can manage on a ship this size.”

Zoe twisted her
finger around a loose string of blond hair and pushed it back into her
ponytail. “Didn’t even think about that,” she said. “I was talking about the
weapons.”

“What?”

“Come on, Esther.
Everyone on this ship is armed, even though we’re way out to sea. Can’t you
tell?” Zoe nodded toward a knife handle sticking out of the tattered jacket of
a man with smooth brown skin sitting nearby, then across the table to a bulge
in the pocket of the muscular woman Esther had seen in the engine room. The
woman rested a hand briefly on the shape before leaning her broad shoulders
over her soup.

“The knives could
be for work,” Esther said.

“It’s not just the
knives.” Zoe dropped her voice lower, so that Esther could barely hear it over
the babble of the sailors. “There are stashes of munitions all over this ship.
You saw the guns mounted on the railings, and I even found a cache of dynamite
when I was looking for a place to stash the cleaning gear. Rawlins caught me
opening a storage container. When I asked, he said the dynamite was for fishing,
but I don’t buy it. Something’s up.”

“That’s what we
want, isn’t it? People who can help us fight the Calderon Group. We assumed
they would be armed.”

Esther scanned the
mess hall as the sailors went about their meal. The men themselves didn’t look especially
dangerous. There was no sign of the first mate or of Captain Alder.

“Maybe. But an
overloaded, green crew with some serious weaponry and explosives doesn’t
exactly make me feel comfortable.”

“Think we should
ask the boys about it?” Esther jerked her head in the direction of Luke, Cody,
and Patrick.

Zoe shrugged.
“Doubt they know anything. We need to keep our eyes open and our weapons on us.
That’s all.”

“Agreed.”

They went over to
join the boys, preparing to be as casual as possible. Esther noticed signs of
weapons amongst the dining sailors. It was beginning to look more and more like
a fighting force. She frowned. Zoe was right: the combination of an overloaded,
inexperienced crew and a huge supply of artillery could be dangerous—and
not just to the group they were hunting.

Luke was in the
middle of a story when they sat down. “This was on a sailboat, right? So after
she says it, she climbs up into the rigging—I swear this was on
purpose—and it was a windy day, you know? So I look up and I see—”

“Hold it, mate.
The girls are here,” Cody said, tossing a crust of green seaweed bread across
the table at him.

“Want me to start
over?” Luke asked, flashing all of his teeth.

“You can’t tell a
story like that around
girls
,” Cody
hissed.

“There are only a
few things you could possibly have seen up a skirt on a windy day,” Zoe said
lightly. “Got anything better?”

Luke blinked
slowly.

“Ha!” Patrick
guffawed. “You tell a story then, Zoe.”

“All right,” she
said, and launched into the tale of their dramatic escape from the
Galaxy Flotilla
a few months ago.