6. STILT CITY
They ran at full speed on the surface for the rest of the day. The fog held out, covering them with a varying but unbroken thickness for all the daylight hours. Percy put the crew on six-hour daytime rotations, despite the fact that they were moving on the surface, and they all finally managed to get some meaningful sleep. Down a crew member and with limited visibility due to the fog, Percy skipped posting a lookout. It was somewhat risky to charge ahead on the surface at full speed with no lookout, especially since the fog also played havoc with the radar. But the limitations of radar were also useful, since it would foul up anyone searching for them with radar as well. Percy kept either Cassandra or Hemi on sonar at all times, counting on them to hear another vessel above the sound of the Prospect’s diesels soon enough that they would be able to take action if necessary.
Even with no official lookout posted in the ring, there was almost always someone on the bridge anyway. Since the crew were free to spend their off-hours on deck, most of them chose to while away at least part of it in the open air.
The fog lasted until dark, which was all they needed. The boat plunged into the settling darkness with the exhaust stacks streaking flames above. The fog gave way to the cooler air of night, and the Prospect came out under a dome of stars. They cut their way across the surface of the planet and left behind a gash of white wake through the black water.
Hemi kept the chart accurate with their position, the dashed line straight and true and rapidly growing in the direction of the continental coast, where the chart was marred with the large black dot showing the location of Stilt City. Around nightfall they crossed out of the waters unquestionably controlled by the Consolidated States of the Archipelago Islands into the area contested by a number of different Authorities. With the fog lifted and a higher risk of Authority interference, Percy put them back on three-hour nighttime shifts and kept someone on lookout again.
Chips had spent the entire day in the deepest parts of the engine room, refusing to come up even for meals. Nobody had seen her since the late meal the night before. But with everyone taking a shift on lookout, she was now required to do her turn in the lookout ring. Hemi called for her on the PA when her shift came up in the middle part of the night, and she duly arrived in the control room on her way to the bridge a few minutes later. She climbed upwards with binoculars in hand and without a word.
It was the darkest part of the night, so Hemi appeared on the bridge a few minutes into her watch with his sextant, intending to take star sightings and get a solid fix on their course.
Hemi looked up at Chips from the bridge. “I was not entirely sure you would show for your lookout shift.”
“Have you ever known me to be anything but a fuckin’ professional, Hemi? I may not be fucking happy about working on this fucking demon-driven boat, but I’m going to do the fuckin’ job I was fuckin’ hired to do until we hit the fuckin’ dock.”
“And then what?”
“As soon as this fuckin’ bitch of a boat bumps, I’m stepping the fuck off. And not looking the fuck back. If you had any fuckin’ sense you’d be fuckin’ leaving with me. The whole fuckin’ crew should be leaving with me. How many fuckin’ times do I have to be fuckin’ pushed right up to the fuckin’ edge of the abyss for my job? How many fuckin’ times do I have to look fuckin’ death in his cold and ugly fuckin’ face? How many times do I have to watch people I fuckin’ care about fall off that abyss, Hemi?”
“What happened with Owen could not be helped, Chips. I was there. Sylvia had to make a tough choice without a clearly correct course of action, and she did. I regret what happened to Owen. I really do. But this job is dangerous, he knew that.”
“Don’t you fuckin’ defend her with your fuckin’ burden-of-command bullshit Hemi. This isn’t a fuckin’ war boat, it’s a commercial fuckin’ cargo sub. She had plenty of fuckin’ choices that could have ended with Owen alive. I’m all for moving cargo under the fuckin’ attention of Authorities, but not at the fuckin’ cost of people’s lives!
“She could have turned this fuckin’ boat over to them. It’s not like they would fuckin’ execute us. We’d just be fucked back to land for a while. Eventually we could go the fuck back out on some other fuckin’ boat — no fuckin’ shortage of need for skilled submariners. There was no fuckin’ reason for anyone to die!”
“They fired at us first, Chips. Owen was probably hit in the first barrage.”
“But he wasn’t fuckin’ dead, was he, Hemi? He was not fuckin’ dead. And she fuckin’ knew it — we all knew it Hemi. And as soon as we knew it, we should have aborted the fuckin’ dive and saved fuckin’ Owen!”
“You know she could never turn over this boat like that.”
“That is why that’s the fuckin’ hard call Hemi. That’s the actual fucking burden of command.” Chips was breathing hard through her nostrils, barely able to keep the binoculars raised, and repeatedly interrupting her scanning arc of the horizon and beginning again. “You’re guilty too, Hemi Howell. Don’t fuckin’ think this is all on fuckin’ Percy. You could have easily aborted the dive.”
Hemi looked off at the ocean. “But I did not. I made the decision I did in the moment. Aborting the dive did not even occur to me. I did what I was supposed to do as deck boss.”
“And that right fuckin’ there is why I’m leaving this fuckin’ boat. I respect you, Hemi, and I like workin’ with you. But this boat is hers, from fuckin’ bridge to fuckin’ keel, and she’s a fuckin’ stubborn piece of fuckin’ dried shit the odor of which is foulin’ the fuckin’ air of my whole fucking life right now. Yours, too…fuck.”
Hemi looked through the sextant and adjusted it with slow, smooth motions, watching the bright star in the finder fall from the sky to meet the rising black pool of the horizon line. He noted their position on his clipboard and climbed silently down off the bridge.
They continued to run at high speed on the surface for the rest of the night. At dawn the Prospect dove, and they moved slowly under the remaining contested territory, tracing the gradual rise of the continental shelf as it approached the shore. They surfaced about midday well inside the area controlled by the Eastern Coastal Collective. That Authority aggressively defended open commerce in the waters leading into Stilt City. This police protection of free trade had led in the last twenty years to the rapid growth of what had come to be known worldwide as Stilt City. This policing was also the root cause of the heavy contesting of the waters farther out from the Collective’s control.
The Prospect moved into Stilt City under a high gray sky. The seas were calm and the air was warm. Percy had Hemi open the big cargo hatch on the deck and fresh air blew through it and down into even the deepest and most stagnant bilge wells of the ship.
They passed a number of Collective enforcement ships holding station in an array around the protected waters as cargo vessels made the run into the city. But, as was customary, those ships did not interfere with anyone who was not interfering with another ship. They were there to stop other Authorities from delaying or preventing cargo from moving into or out of their port. The policy here was that policing the contents of cargo boats was a matter for the Authority forces on land.
The moniker “Stilt City” might have been somewhat pejorative, but it was accurate. It was built on a vast river delta which rapidly attenuated the big ocean rollers down to calm, flat, and brown water. The structures built on pylons began to appear relatively far out into the ocean — some in places where the water was dozens of meters deep. The buildings teetered high above the larger waves they needed to clear in those deeper waters. They stood atop artificial underwater forests of rigidly spaced trees, placed by the work of human hands. The structures farthest out from the mainland popped up in clumps in the distance on both sides of the Prospect. It was hard not to see them as circus performers striding around on tall stilts.
The Prospect floated into the main channel that led into the city. It was nearly a mile wide for much of its passage, forming an artificial equivalent to the large river that bisects so many coastal cities.
The rapid growth of Stilt City and large volume of trade had brought wealth in, but the wealth did not flow down to all residents. The channel was thus filled with all manner of sea craft, from enormous steel cargo ships under the flags of various Authorities to tiny canoes from which the marrow of the boat had been scraped by the application of fire and ax blade. The most common craft, of which there must have been thousands, was an angular home-built wooden boat, driven either by singular canvas sails bound taught on rough wood masts and booms, or by long thin oars that were used to row the boats in deep waters and pole the boats through shallower waters.
Virtually all the trade of Stilt City was done on the open water or on the docks. In many places, boats of all sizes were rafted up, and people traded goods across the networks of hulls.
As the Prospect made its way up the main channel, more and more sea craft moved about them. Speed was reduced to three knots and they crawled along through the still murky water leaving no wake. The stillness of the surface belied the powerful slow current that carried massive amounts of freshwater far out to sea, down in the depths.
Percy, Cassandra, and Hemi stood on the bridge. Hemi held binoculars and carefully piloted the steel bulk of the Prospect among the dense traffic of small wooden craft that swarmed around them. He called maneuvers down through the hatch to Gregory and Bastian, who sat at the controls.
“So this entire place is built on stilts?” asked Cassandra.
“That’s why they call it fuckin’ Stilt City,” said Percy.
“Again, ‘they’ does not include the people who actually live here,” Hemi said. “But yes, almost all of it is on stilts above the delta waters, except for the old part of the city that clings to the dry land. Many cities around the world are built on swamps because that is where the large rivers meet the sea, and that is where major ports come together. In richer places, they drain the swamps to get to dry land under them. Here, they found it more economical to just build above the water line on stilts, at least in recent years.”
“All these structures don’t get washed away in storms?” Cassandra asked.
“The river delta makes the water very shallow deep into the ocean. Most of the construction is built far enough up the delta that the waves of the ocean are completely flattened. But…there are many who worry that a really big storm could wipe the entire thing out. The residents here may simply be lucky that it has not happened yet.”
“Where does all the material for building come from?”
“Mostly trees are cut down on shore and then floated out. That is why nearly everything is made of wood. I think they do sometimes pull sunken waterlogged trees up from the bottom, though.”
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The channel began to narrow, pushing the sea craft using it together. Hemi steered the Prospect to take advantage of a path carved through the smaller boats by a huge oiler making its way slowly up the channel ahead of them. On either side of the channel, the structures raised on pylons above the water grew denser. In places there were masses of small thatched-roof huts, with walls made of thin rotting wood panels and the roofs of cut and dried shore grasses. There were dozens of huts clumped together, as if they gained strength to stand on their wobbling stilts by leaning against each other. Between the clumps ran narrow channels of dark water, in many places only passable by the smallest of the vessels that traversed back and forth across Stilt City. Those narrow channels fed into slightly larger winding passages, which gave access to buildings and homes buried deep in the dense clumps of development.
Every so often, the masses of huts were broken up by a large access channel running off the main channel. Around these access channels had risen most of the commercial trade, which had led to the building of long docks and piers, more substantial warehouses, and larger buildings — always sitting on stilts above the water. The fancier buildings had paid extra to ship out and install steel roofs. Big steel cargo and transport ships would make their way into these access channels and dock against the flimsy, leaning piers of crunching wood that barely seemed able to keep the big ships immobile, and perhaps would not have at all if the waters were not so still. The cargo was unloaded onto these docks and from there moved off to its destination by local labor: either into the warehouses, onto other cargo ships, or dispersed around Stilt City — sometimes up onto the mainland and ground-based logistical connections.
As they pushed their way slowly up the main channel and deeper into Stilt City, Percy became a little concerned. “Hemi, do you know how to find the fuckin’ dock we are supposed to unload at in all this fuckin’ mess?”
“There is a system to the dock numbers,” said Hemi. “I am fairly certain that we are moving in the right direction. However, the system is complex and poorly maintained. We shall have to ask for guidance at some point.”
Percy asked Cassandra to use the binoculars to scout out the hand-painted signs that indicated the dock numbers accessible from each access channel they passed, and report them to Hemi. The descending order of the dock numbers reassured Percy somewhat, but she would have been much more satisfied with a quality chart of Stilt City’s many passages and byways.
The open lane of the oiler in front of them made navigating much easier. The local boats generally tried to stay out of the way of the bigger ships, knowing that the big ships were far less maneuverable and took much longer to stop. But a ship making its way up the channel still had a bit of a job clearing a path, whereas few local boats would try to cut between two ships moving up the channel.
One did though. A small flat-bottomed boat, a kind of a wherry, that moved slowly into the lane between the oiler and the Prospect, at such a speed that there was no chance it would make its way across the lane before the Prospect was on top of the tiny craft. The man paddling the wherry kept pausing and raising one arm. At first Hemi thought he was trying to make sure the people guiding the Prospect saw him, but then Hemi realized he was actually hailing them. Hemi called down through the hatch to Bastian to reverse thrust and bring the Prospect to a stop. The man in the wherry angled his tiny tree of a craft alongside the huge gray metal cylinder and bumped up against the Prospect’s hull. He deftly grabbed the handholds on the hull as they swept past and stepped one foot up onto a rung while holding his boat still with the other. He looped a painter from the wherry around one of the step rungs so it could not get away and then shimmied up the handholds to the deck.
“’Hoy there! Do you need a pilot?” he shouted up to the bridge of the sail as he continued to move towards them. “I can bring your sub marine in to where-the-fuck-ever. I know all the ways and docks around here. I can make sure you don’t ground — the water is very suddenly shallow in many places.”
Hemi waved him up the sail, and he climbed quickly and nimbly up and over the fairing to join them. He was a small, thin man. His pure white, shortly trimmed beard and hair stood out in stark contrast to his leathery skin, which all the older locals developed after spending their adult working years on the unshaded open water. He was wearing an oddly fitted and assuredly ancient three-piece wool suit into which he was sweating profusely after climbing up the sail.
“Name’s Sir Piero — pee-ahr-oh, at least that’s how most off-shore folks pronounce it.”
“Sir Piero?” Percy asked.
“Knighted for my prest-ee-jee-ous piloting work. Respect the title, if you please.”
“Knighted by whom?” Hemi asked. Then, letting that pass, proceeded to introduce himself and the others on the bridge before outlining the issue they were facing. “We were in fact just thinking that we may need some guidance to our dock. Here is our dock number.” Hemi handed over a small piece of paper with a long number broken up by dashes on it. “Can you get us there?”
The man looked it over. “Surely. That’s no great fuckin’ way from here.”
“Have you ever piloted a submarine before, Sir Piero?” Percy asked. “It’s not totally like fuckin’ surface ships.”
“Surely! I piloted lots of sub marines in and out.” He pronounced “sub marine” like it was two separate words. “I’m a knighted pro-fessional, all manner of craft experienced. I even had a pilot’s license — back when those used to be more strictly required.”
“How much money will it cost to hire you?” Hemi asked.
“Depends on what kind of money you have.”
“Coin,” said Percy, showing him one from her pocket.
“Ten coin. Both in and out. If you go back out today.”
Hemi agreed and paid him an advance. Sir Piero made a move to go retrieve his boat, but Hemi asked Cassandra to do it while he showed Sir Piero the control room. Even though Bastian and Gregory would continue to execute the actual maneuvering operations, Hemi always thought it was good practice for a pilot to know what the control room of a boat looked like.
Sir Piero took over command of the Prospect. He stood on the bridge and lit a cigar that resembled a root vegetable. Chomping the torpedo between his teeth, he read the numbers of the channels and water lanes they passed by through borrowed binoculars. After a quarter mile or so he had Bastian bring the bow around, and without slowing speed — and with a great deal of confidence — he plunged the Prospect into a narrow way that was barely wider than the beam of the ship.
They passed along this channel for a long way, through a more residential area with densely clustered huts on either side. The gentle wake from the passing submarine washed up under and smacked against the floorboards of the huts. In some places children played, jumping from platforms in front of the huts into the thick brown water. Percy was concerned one of the children might get it into their heads that they wanted to jump onto the Prospect as it passed, and certainly they were close enough that it could be done. But huge steel ships passing close by their tiny wooden homes was a daily and dull occurrence here, and none of the children showed any exceptional interest in her submarine.
Percy was beginning to find it hard to imagine how there could be a dock that could handle a ship as large as the Prospect in a residential part of the city like this, and she expressed her doubts to Sir Piero.
“This is a short way,” he told her. “We will come out in a larger channel soon, but it is longer around to follow that way from the main channel.”
The Prospect, which so often felt like a small, cramped place, suddenly seemed to take on enormous proportions relative to the huts around them. The bow was the length of dozens of huts put together, and from the sail they towered over the low thatched roofs that spread out on either side in a huge field of sprouted homes. The passage they were taking, cutting through the dense huts, reminded Percy of rowing a canoe on clear paths through reed patches in a wetland.
Bastian suddenly called up from the control room with a sense of urgency. “Up on the bridge: the depth-under-keel has a warning light and is showing very shallow — two meters.”
“Umm, Sir Piero…are you sure there’s enough fuckin’ water here?” Percy asked him.
“Plenty of water. I have taken many ships through here.”
“But subs…we draft a little fucking deeper, you know.”
“Sub marines. Ya, ya.”
At that moment the grounding alarm buzzed loudly in the control room. Percy flew down the ladder and stood behind Bastian, staring at the wall of gauges. The depth-under-keel gauge had a bright red light lit next to it, and the needle was hovering just off the zero pin. Percy punched the button that silenced the annoying buzz of the alarm.
“Piero!” she called up to the bridge. “There is very very little water under us!”
“It’s OK!” he shouted back just as the Prospect came to an abrupt stop. Even at the careful speed they had been moving at, the stop was violent enough to jolt them all forward. Empty tin coffee cups fell and clanked along the deck while clipboards fluttered through the air.
The alarm started sounding again and a second red light lit on the depth-under-keel gauge, indicating they were firmly wedged on the bottom.
“Fuck!” Percy yelled, punching the alarm-silence button a second time. “Fucking fuck! Piero, you fucking amateur, what the fuck did you do? Bastian, power down the fucking motor before we’re driven permanently into the muck.”
Bastian pulled the throttle back to zero. Percy could hear Hemi and Piero discussing the situation on the bridge. Piero’s voice was aggravated. Hemi was speaking in his usual even tone. But Percy could not quite make out what they were saying. She climbed to the bridge.
“Captain Percy, this never happened before,” Piero said as she came through the hatch. “The silt underneath sometimes moves around. This channel has always been deep enough.”
“For a fucking loaded submarine? Or have you just brought fucking empty transport ships through here before?” Percy was turning red.
“I’ll get you off, do not worry, Captain Percy.” He leaned over the hatch and cupped one small hand to the side of his mouth. “’Hoy! You at the throttle controls: reverse motor, two knots.”
“And then what? Fucking back the whole way out to the main channel? It’s not like there’s room to fucking turn around here.”
“If we have to do that, we can,” said Hemi, trying to calm the situation. “But Sir Piero pointed out we probably have some water in the main ballast and trim tanks we can blow out. If we can get the boat up even half a meter or so, we might be able to clear the silt bar.”
“Fuck,” said Percy as the Prospect slowly reversed, stirring the water behind them and pushing it forward along the hull. It washed outwards and under the nearby huts on either side where people had realized something was amiss and had come out to the platforms in front of their homes to watch.
One local saw a stuck ship as an opportunity and poled his rickety craft full of fish up to the side of the Prospect. Hemi sent Cassandra down with a few coins to buy some.
Moving backwards did get them off the bottom. As soon as Bastian reported they had some water under the keel again, they carefully forwarded the throttle to try to bring the Prospect to a dead stop, but it was impossible to have that much control over such a large vessel in such a tight space. The Prospect very slowly — but with much inertia — bumped into a cluster of huts, and the whole block of them leaned over against the push from the submarine with a sickening crack from below of the pylons supporting the huts. A surprising number of people poured out of the huts, cursing and gesturing towards the bridge of the Prospect in a variety of languages. The huts were well built and the pylons held, but the residents knew from the sound that deep structural damage had been done. Hemi was cognizant of the damage done to the foundations of the huts too, so he sent Cassandra down with more coins that she distributed among the residents until the cursing had mostly petered out.
Percy just put her face into her hands, both too embarrassed and angry to look at anyone for the moment.
Piero had Gregory open the main ballast blow valves and the high-pressure air system blew out whatever water was left in the main tanks along with a lot of excess bubbles that burbled up the side of the boat to the delight of the children who were now climbing the side of the Prospect and running around on the deck. Piero also had Gregory empty every trim tank the boat had, and turn on all the bilges. Long streams of foul water poured out from the side of the hull, in one case a cataract that squarely landed against the wall of a hut, and required yet another payment from Cassandra to ease the cursing.
Getting this excess water out of the boat did raise it up, though. When Bastian reported an additional meter of water under the keel, Piero had them slowly move forward again. Percy returned to the control room to watch the gauges. The Prospect crept over the shallow spot with the depth-under-keel gauge lowering all the way down to the zero pin and the grounding alarm coming back on. Percy could swear she heard the bottom sloshing along the hull as her boat pushed through a soft, sucking muck. But the forward progress was not stopped this time, and they soon came over the shallow spot, and the gauge showed a clear four meters of water under them.