They had to squeeze the Prospect over two more shallow spots before Sir Piero finally turned them out into a somewhat larger channel — maybe twice the width of the Prospect’s beam. This channel was consistently deeper and there was more commercial traffic moving on it. Sir Piero steamed the Prospect along this channel for another mile or so, picking his way through a number of places where the channel branched left or right. The structures along the channel got larger and larger, and the traffic on the water thinned out as they moved into a part of the city that had less day-to-day trading and was more focused on storage and warehouses. The structures here tended to be large flat platforms, open on the side. Some had roofs built over them and some were open to the sky as well. Some were stacked high with cargo waiting for a ship to be loaded onto, and others were cleared waiting for a loaded ship to come in. The platforms either had one side set with a row of docking pylons, or were otherwise connected to rickety piers of weathered and gray wood that extended out from the platforms into small bays that were left as open water so that bigger ships would have enough room to maneuver in them. Many of these piers had ships of various sizes moored up against them. Only a few people were about, though, since this area was far more heavily populated with cargo than people.
Finally, Sir Piero pointed to a bay ahead off the port side while looking through the binoculars. He turned the Prospect into the bay, and Hemi could see through his own binoculars that the third dock in from the channel had a small hand-lettered sign matching the dock number they were looking for. As Sir Piero and Bastian worked to bring the boat alongside the dock, Hemi got on the PA and asked Chips and Gregory to meet him on the deck. The three of them brought thick docking hawsers up from the cargo hold through the big hatch and secured them to cleats on the deck. Gregory made a daring leap from the handholds on the side of the Prospect to the dock over the sloshing water in the closing gap. Hemi and Chips tossed the lines over to him so he could secure them to the docking pylons.
The dock was exceedingly narrow for handling a ship of the Prospect’s size, maybe just two meters or so wide, and when the Prospect leaned its weight up against it, the whole dock shifted its center of gravity towards the other side. The Prospect took up the entire length of the dock, and then extended another quarter ship-length out beyond it into the turnaround bay. The dock was supported by ancient poles of wood, weathered to a smooth but grainy gray texture. The cross planks had many knot holes and splintered easily under scuffing feet. About halfway out, the dock widened to accommodate the base of a rusty and flimsy looking crane which was left angled at its joints in such a way that it looked like the giant crooked finger of a crone cursing the fates before her. Further out from the crane, the dock narrowed again to just enough space for an individual to walk.
The dock ran into a large and mostly empty platform. It was one of the platforms that had a roof built over it, supported on the same graying wood pylons as the dock, and roofed with roughly hewn old boards that had gaps and holes that let light, and presumably rain, pass through in many places. At the far end of the platform was a squat little cube of an office with a few stacks of crates near it, from which the business of the platform and dock was executed.
As soon as the lines were secured, Chips hauled two large and frayed canvas duffels containing all her gear up from the cargo hold catwalk and onto the deck. From there she threw the heavy bags across to the dock, where Gregory made sure they landed without falling off into the water on the other side.
Hemi joined her on the deck. “Take care of yourself, Irene.”
“You too, Hemi. And this fuckin’ boat. Maybe it will be yours someday, and you’ll need an engineer who isn’t fuckin’ shit at their work.” She looked over at Gregory on the dock. “Watch out for those fuckin’ guys too. I don’t want this to become one of those fuckin’ premonition stories I have to tell in a fuckin bar someday, about how I got off this doomed boat just in the fuckin’ nick of time. But I can’t say I have a good feeling about y’all’s future prospects, as it fuckin’ were.”
Hemi looked grim. She left him with an awkward hug around his middle and made the jump across to the dock where she hefted her bags and patted Gregory on the back before walking up the dock towards the platform. Hemi and Gregory watched her until she got to the far side of the platform, where it did not take long for her to hail a passing boat that would carry her into the center-city labor yards for shipping.
After Chips had disappeared off the far side of the platform, Gregory was ready to get to work. “Should we set up the gangway, Hemi?”
“Yes. But rather than messing with our own winch, let’s ask if we can use the crane.” Hemi pointed to the rusty metal structure leaning above their heads.
Having retrieved a clipboard full of papers that he had left on the catwalk, Hemi climbed down the side of the Prospect and jumped over to the dock to join Gregory. They made their way along the dock and onto the platform. Nobody had yet come out to greet them. Hemi knocked heavily on the door of the little square building.
A few minutes later it was opened by a squat, fat man wearing pince-nez. “Who are you?” he asked Hemi.
“Hemi Howell, deck boss on the Prospect.” Hemi nodded towards the boat. “We have a delivery.” Hemi handed the fat man the clipboard.
“Ah. I’m the dock boss here,” said the man as he scanned the top page, lifted it, and ran a bulbous finger down the center of the second page. Unlike most of the residents in Stilt City, the dock boss looked like he had spent most of his working life inside. “Ah, Miss Mai. We expected you two fucking days ago.” He looked disappointed. “Authority trouble?”
“An Authority boat took its toll on our progress,” Hemi confirmed.
The man let out a small sound of indignation. “Well, you can start unloading if you want to. I’ll bring my crew in to help. It’ll take them an hour or two to assemble though.”
“Can we use your crane?”
“Sure, if you think you know how to drive it. I’m not fucking responsible if you damage your boat in any way, though, got it?”
Hemi nodded.
“There’s also some carts over there at the end of the platform. You can use them to offload cargo and move it onto the platform.”
“OK…thank you,” said Hemi as he took Gregory’s arm and turned him back towards the dock.
“And, uh, be careful,” continued the dock boss. “If you damage the platform, or say, blow it up, you are fucking responsible, understood?”
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Hemi waved an arm in acknowledgment but did not bother turning to look back at the man.
Out of earshot, Gregory asked quietly, “Are we going to start unloading the Prospect by ourselves?” He imagined the total weight of the hundreds of heavy crates in the hold.
“No. That is their responsibility. They want the cargo, they need to move it. You and I are going to set up the gangway.”
Hemi got the engine for the crane started, and when it was pouring black diesel smoke at a nice consistent rate out over the channel, he lowered the boom and dropped the hook into the cargo hold of the Prospect. Gregory, down on the deck in the cargo hold, rigged the gangway to it, and Hemi lifted it up and settled it down on deck. Hemi waited for Gregory to appear on deck, and then moved the gangway out over the gap between the boat and the dock, while Gregory guided it into place, and then lashed it down.
With the gangway set, Hemi shut down the crane and made his way back aboard the Prospect. He found Percy and advised her they should lay low inside the boat until the dock boss’s crew got there. So Percy, Hemi, Bastian, Gregory, and Sir Piero rounded up in the galley around a new pot of coffee. Cassandra had gone off to her rack to catch up on sleep. Hemi sat in the corner of the galley reading a novel the size of a footstone with an illustration on the cover of some tortured pious soul, while the rest got a game of dominoes going.
They proceeded to drink two and a half pots of coffee as a couple of hours passed, but eventually there was the sound of feet on the Prospect’s deck above and the grind of the crane’s diesel starting up. When Percy got down to the cargo hold, the dock boss’s crew of people — men and women, but all of a hefty dockworker build and wearing tough, undyed canvas clothing — were already rigging crates onto the hook of the crane and preparing to unload.
The dock and platform that had been so quiet and empty was now full of noise and people. The crates were hoisted out of the cargo hold one-by-one, carefully stacked four to a cart. Then a team of dockworkers hauled the creaking carts up to the platform where the team would unload and stack the crates by hand.
The dock crew worked steadily at it for a few hours, with Percy and Hemi observing from the bridge of the sail where they could keep an eye on things without getting in the way. Generally, there was not much to say. Percy was getting sleepy in the warm and still afternoon air.
Then Percy asked, “So Chips is fucking gone?”
“Yes, gone,” said Hemi.
“What are we going to do about that? We need a fucking engineer.”
“I think we will feel the loss of Chips poignantly,” Hemi said with only the tiniest trace of blame in his voice. “We will have to hire someone qualified eventually. But for the moment, I suppose I will have to take on much of the engineering work.”
“That’s why you’re my fuckin’ deck boss, Hemi — is there nothing you can’t do?”
“You know it is not about what I cannot do, it is about having the time to do it. We did well with Cassandra, but we need to hire skilled people. After all, I do not think I need to remind you that we did not just lose Chips, we lost Owen too…”
Into the middle of their conversation crept the roll of heavy diesels from a large ship moving up the channel. When a horn sounded, they turned to find there was no ship coming from the direction of the engine sound. Hemi lifted his binoculars and scanned the channel until he saw the familiar low outline of the Gnat’s sail with a spiky-haired head sticking out of it, and a stream of diesel exhaust flowing out behind.
“Sylvia,” said Hemi, “it is the Gnat.”
“Fuckin’ Shakes!” Percy shouted to him and waved her arm in the air.
Shakes waved one arm back at them.
Hemi and Percy made their way down to the dock as Shakes was bringing the Gnat in carefully along the opposite side from the Prospect. He put the engine in neutral and hopped out of the sail to catch a dock line tossed to him from Hemi which he secured to the deck cleats.
“How y’all be fuckin’ doing?” he asked, while still standing on the deck of the Gnat.
“Job completed, and unloading, as you can see,” said Percy. “How’d you find us, Shakes?”
“Captain Shakes, if you please. As for finding you: it was fuckin’ Herschel, of course! Hang on…” He disappeared into the sail and came back up with a little gray puff of feathers in his hand. Once he got his arms up above the sail, he tossed Herschel into the air. Herschel flapped and then flew circles around the Gnat excitedly while Shakes leapt over to the dock to join Hemi and Percy.
“So the bird actually fucking worked?” Percy asked, unable to totally get the skepticism out of her voice as her eyes continued to follow the bird above.
“Herschel was a total fucking champ! Found me cruising out in the middle of fucking endless expanse of green water. He gave me your message with the dock number…but Herschel was the easy part. The hard part was finding the dock on the way into Stilt City here. Had to stop and ask people probably a dozen fuckin’ times — and folks around here speak a strange fuckin’ mix of languages I don’t fuckin’ understand, mostly.”
“It is good to see you, Captain Shakes,” said Hemi, “and Herschel. What happened after you left us?”
“Well, there’s not much to fuckin’ tell of it, really. I drove the Gnat hard in a sorta random northerly direction — away from the Prospect’s location. Did some weaving back and forth and shit, just in case they fired a torp or something, but kept the fuckin’ throttle up the whole time. With the volume of the Gnat’s engines, I couldn’t really be listening to sonar or anything, so I just kept pinging them every ten minutes or so to see how far behind me they were.”
“Ah,” Hemi interrupted, “so the Gnat does have an active sonar system?”
“Say again? I seem to fuckin’ be harder of hearing these days.”
Hemi repeated his question.
“Of course! I don’t cheap out on anything on my fuckin’ boat. So anyways, I kept that Grackle a few miles off and ran them northwards for three or four hours. But by that time the sea was starting to chop up from the storm. The Gnat was taking frothy green water right up against the sail. I figured we were probably far enough from the Prospect, so I went silent and dove the Gnat and disappeared under the waves for the duration of the storm. Lost track of the pursuing sub at that point. How’d you all do in that fucking storm?”
“Hemi brought the Prospect up to the surface in the ditch of a ten-meter wave, rolled her right the fuck over. She was completely on her side for a bit, but eventually came upright again,” said Percy.
Shakes whistled. “Shit, I never saw weather that fuckin’ big on this trip. You must have been much more toward the center of the storm.”
Percy went on to fill Shakes in on running into the Grackle on the surface during the storm, and the loss of Owen. Hemi also added that Chips had quit the boat.
“Motherfucker,” said Shakes, “you’ve all had it rough. I feel like I had the easy part of the job. Yet here I fuckin’ am to collect my due!”
“It looks like the dockworkers have finished unloading.” Hemi noticed that small groups of them had begun to clump up in various places around the platform, idly smoking. “Let’s go find that dock boss and settle up.”
“You two go on,” said Percy. “I’m going to check my cargo hold and make sure they didn’t fuck any shit up when they were swinging that iron hook around down there.”