Tale of the Thunderbolt (11 page)

 

Standing on the
Thunderbolt
's bridge, David Valentine watched as they approached the Jayport harbor. The ship threaded her way through the reefs, unmarked save for two points where the surf splashed up against the coral obstructions projecting just past the surface. A fishing trawler led the way, like a pilotfish swimming before the gray bulk of a shark, and behind came the graceful pyramid of wood and canvas, the three-masted clipper
Rigel.
She had shortened sail to keep position behind the plodding gunboat.

Valentine squinted his eyes against the glare of the sun. The light refracted off the armored glass of the bridge, glittering with spiderwebs of cracks from the bullets of last night's fight. Carrasca, the officer in charge of the prize crew, watched the
Thunderbolt
's progress from the wing projecting out of the bridge deck over the ship's side, her black hair now untied and fluttering in the landward breeze like a pennant. She watched the course of the
Thunderbolt
as carefully as if she did not have a guide through the reefs protecting the port. The pirate at the wheel wore a sleeveless, cut-at-the-knees jumpsuit, his thick legs planted wide on the deck. The helmsman looked as if he spent time fighting tiller ropes, rather than the hydraulic rudder of the
Thunderbolt.

“This reef is a bastard,” the helmsman commented to Valentine. “The gap likes to silt up — many's the time I've heard a scrape going over it.”

Valentine moved outside the enclosed wheelhouse and joined Carrasca on the starboard side. He looked down at the forward Grog deck, where the other surviving “loyal” hands of the
Thunderbolt
sat in an apathetic bunch under guard. They remained under the supervision of the chief petty officer, a frog-faced toady of the captain named Gilbert. The captain had never been found, dead or alive, and Worthington had been killed with the crew trying to load the main gun just below the bridge.

Valentine could still see the wine stain of his former wardroom mate's blood on the wooden planking. Somewhere to the rear, Ahn-Kha and the men who joined Valentine's fruitless attempt to take the ship were already scrubbing the decks clean after laying out the corpses in a neat row. By tradition they should be sewn up in their bedding, but the cloth was too valuable to waste in such a fashion. The fourteen men who had died last night would leave the world as naked as they came into it.

“Nice breeze,” Valentine commented, watching Carrasca's wind-whipped hair. Had he reached out his arm, he could just have touched the longest strands.

“We call it the Doctor. It usually blows all day. Then there's the night wind off the island, it's called the Undertaker. It doesn't smell as good, but it'll keep you cool.” Valentine enjoyed hearing her speak. There was something of the music of a Caribbean accent mixed with Hispanic pronunciation.

“Pretty view,” Valentine said, applying it both to the woman and the island, though he kept his eyes on the bay. He was used to the coastlines of North America: flat expanses of beach, wood, and marsh. On Jamaica, the hills rose right out of the ocean like a green wall.

“Yes. You'll want a hat. The sun is strong, even this time of year.”

“What's that big ship in the center?”

“She's the hospital. Once was the Royal Fleet Auxiliary
Argus.
She's been here my whole life; I was born in her. So were a lot of the men you see around here.”

“How many people do you have?”

“A census isn't one of our priorities. There are the towns-people and plantation families proper. I'd guess around seven hundred or so. Then there are the ships' crews. You could add in the folks inland and along the coast, fishermen, and a few free spirits who come in with a hold full of grain or pork when it suits them. Oh, and the rum distillery. You might say that they're allies of ours, even if their product goes out on Kurian ships, as well. Maybe six thousand people could call Jay home.”

“Jay? Does that refer to Commodore Jensen?”

She looked away from the ship's bow for the first time. “You've heard of him?”

“He's not the most popular man up north. They're starting to take Jayport seriously in the KZ.”

“KZ?”

“Kurian Zone. My former employers.”

“Ahh, I see. We call it Vampire Earth.”

Valentine smiled, his first unforced smile in days. “Lurid.”

“Saying the name is inaccurate?”

“I wish. Our maps show this island as Kurian controlled — Vampire Earth.”

“Most of Jamaica is theirs — or his. We call him the Specter.”

“Friendly terms?”

Her mouth writhed. “No. We're no lackeys of his. As long as we don't bother him, he leaves us alone. Better for us.”

“Better for the Specter, too.”

She crossed her arms, and looked him up and down. “Just like . . .” The sentiment trailed off. “Would you like to meet Commodore Jensen? I suppose he'll have to decide what to do with you and your men, in the end.”

“I'd be grateful if you could arrange a meeting, if you think you can.”

Her lips parted, revealing white teeth as she smiled. “I'm sure of it. I'm his granddaughter.”

 

The ships docked and began to disembark wounded. Valentine said a quick good-bye to Post as attendants carried him and the other injured off and placed them on wheeled litters. The attendants then pushed the litters toward the hospital ship, which in proximity dwarfed even the bulky
Thunderbolt.

Then the Jamaican soldiers, then prisoners, and finally sailors came down the gangway Valentine had last climbed a week ago in New Orleans.

Valentine, with nothing to do but wait, watched Jayport's inhabitants. They were for the most part black-skinned, long-limbed, and healthy looking. A messenger boy received a hollow wooden tube from an officer on the
Rigel
and sprinted off toward the shore like a runner in a relay race. He wondered which building held whatever passed for government headquarters among the low, whitewashed buildings clustered around the bay. Fishing shacks and a few hung nets dotted the beach.

Valentine felt the odd sensation of standing on a firm surface after days at sea. Some of the Grogs sat down hard, holding their heads in their hands at the motionless feel of terra firma. He enjoyed the brassy sunshine — the climatic changes still echoing from the cataclysm of 2022 that cut the amount of sunlight north of the tropics were not so noticeable in the central Caribbean. Farther down the dock, the “loyal” hands of the
Thunderbolt
squatted on the bare concrete surface, slapping at flies hardy enough to venture out this far from shore. Some glared in his direction, some looked to him plaintively, but most just contemplated their surroundings with a fatalism bred by a lifetime in the KZ.

Dockside idlers examined the
Thunderbolt
from behind a rope line that divided the captured ship's part of the dock from the landward extension, where a few armed men in white T-shirts and khaki shorts that looked more like school uniforms than police kept locals and new arrivals apart. Men bearing platters of fruit followed by graceful women with tall wooden tumblers of water were allowed past the line, and they began distributing the island's bounty to Valentine's men and prisoners alike.

“Enjoy, mon, enjoy!” said one, handing out bananas and halves of coconuts.

“No worries, mon! Spring water for now, maybe some rum later,” added a woman, her voice bringing out the cadenced phrases more as if she were singing than speaking. She exchanged a few words and a smile with a dockhand, but Valentine could make no more out of it than he could Ahn-Kha's Grog patois.

One man leaned toward a guard's ear, pointed at Valentine, and spoke. A few others craned their necks, and Valentine wondered what sort of dockside rumors were already floating around about the fight on the
Thunderbolt.

Valentine tasted his first fresh banana — he'd had banana bread and a pudding mix in New Orleans, and there was no comparison — and followed it with the meat and milk of a coconut. He strolled over to Ahn-Kha and the Grogs, who were learning to peel their fruit before eating it in imitation of the humans. A knot of the Chief's men crammed down the colorful fruit with Went and Torres.

“What do they have in mind for us, my David?” Ahn-Kha asked, scooping meat from his coconut shell with his strong, flexible lips.

“We're safe for now. It seems they give the royal treatment to prisoners. They'll try to recruit the captain's men, I suppose. They don't know which category we're in. We're not under guard, but I don't think those men at the rope gate will let us just wander into town.”

“They left you your weapons. They locked the rest back up in the small-arms room. They are either very trusting or very confident,” Ahn-Kha mused.

“Either suits me, for now. We're lucky to be alive, old horse.”

“Your race needs to learn to greet every day with those thoughts.”

“There's something kind of old-fashionedly formal about the way they've handled us. It's like we've stepped back three hundred years or so. Like letting me keep my guns: a captured officer used to be allowed to retain his sidearms in the days when wars were fought by gentlemen against other gentlemen. I'm half expecting an invitation to dinner, rather than an interrogation.”

 

The invitation to dinner arrived two hours later, waking him from a shaded nap. Like humans, Grogs laugh to indicate amusement, so when a barefoot sprout of a boy in ragged white ducks and a straw hat arrived with a note from the commodore requesting Valentine's presence at the Governor's House for dinner, Ahn-Kha laughed loudly enough to send the flies fleeing in alarm. Carrasca arrived shortly thereafter with an escort, announcing that they were to be moved to more comfortable quarters. They formed up behind her, and the procession of visitors walked the pier toward town.

The wide pier reminded Valentine of an etching of London Bridge he'd seen long ago in a book. Crowded with buildings at the landward end, so much so that it resembled a narrow street for the last hundred yards before it reached the shore, the walkway was where goods from land and sea traded owners. Two-story buildings, making up in floors what they lacked in width and depth, overhung both the street to the inside and the water to the outside, creating a shaded corridor leading toward the town proper. Carrasca explained that the twentieth-century dock was one of the best-built foundations in the bay, an important consideration on an earthquake-prone island. Valentine's men and their baggage were placed in a series of rooms above a clothing-reclamation shop, next to an empty storage room that would accommodate Ahn-Kha's Grogs. The prisoners from the
Thunderbolt
were placed alongside the dock in a permanently moored ship, where Carrasca assured him they would be well looked after. Valentine asked to see the wounded who'd been taken to the hospital ship, and Carrasca wrote him a note that would get him on board. He and his men were free to move about the pier as they wished.