Marikesh awoke in her gently swaying hammock with the scent of old oak, stagnant saltwater and unwashed bodies. Next to her ear, the bulkhead grumbled and clunked as the Wings of Justice shouldered through shattered brash ice. The long, falling legatos of whalesong seeped dissonantly through the hull, tickling her ears at the edge of perception. Booted feet scraped the deck above her, separated from her face by a scant few inches of planking. With great reluctance, she struggled out into the chill air of Ieasu's cabin. She dressed quickly, hissing angrily at the clammy, slightly damp touch of her tunic on her scales. Shivering, she stumbled to the head, back to the cabin to struggle into her cloak and trousers, and then made her way to the officer's mess in search of breakfast and news.
Except for a surgeon's mate, the mess was deserted. The slender girl held a medical textbook in one claw, aiming one eye at it while she preened her flight feathers. She peeped in surprise as Marikesh came in, hopping up and balancing on one foot while she held the textbook in the other, and then mussing her feathers on the bulkhead as she tried to salute. Marikesh waived at her with halfhearted irritation.
"None of that, none of that," she croaked. "Just tell me where the coffee is." Marikesh couldn't parse the girl's thickly accented street Angesetti, but guessed at the meaning as she rushed out to fetch a fresh pot.
The girl returned with a scrawny Ithalos boy clutching the steaming pot to his ill-fitting cloak. He poured and handed out three steaming mugs. To Marikesh's disappointment, it was tea. She thanked them both and wedged herself into one of the benches lining the bulkheads. The boy shifted nervously from foot to foot, coiling his tail around his ankle.
"Did you have a question?" She asked.
"When the Voyagers destroy ol' Ange, we'll hit 'em back, won't we?"
"I don't think they're going to destroy Ange," she said.
"But if'n they do," he persisted. "Kelora, tha's me messmate, Kelora says you're buildin' a battery of great 'uge rockets. Big as'a 84, Kelora says. Bigger!"
"We've got a long way to go before they're ready, but yes," she allowed. His eyes went huge in his face.
"Tha'as brilliant, that is!" But then, his spirits drooped a bit. "Shame t'build somethin' like that just'a blow it all up." The surgeon's mate shot a nervous, apologetic glance at Marikesh and began to usher the boy back the way they'd come. She felt a tightness in her chest.
"I couldn't agree more," Marikesh said. From the passageway, he squirmed out from under his shipmate's flight feathers.
"Are we gonna build ships like them Voyagers got?" he piped. With a hurried gesture of apology, the surgeon's mate shut the door on the question. Belatedly, it occurred to Marikesh that neither of them were permitted the use of the officer's mess. She smiled to herself. Captain Ieasu was a stern disciplinarian on watch, but her crews enjoyed a tolerant atmosphere when off duty. Her own presence aboard disturbed a delicate web of unspoken agreements; in some theoretical senses she outranked the captain, but in others she did not, and her clumsy bafflement regarding Ange class divisions made her popular among the crew while exasperating the officers. Though, she had to admit, the cadre of officers that surrounded Ieasu tended to hold a dim view of the Angesetti aristocracy. The emperor's health was toasted at the captain's table without obvious bitterness, but also without great enthusiasm.
Marikesh sipped her tea, enjoying a rare pocket of solitude as she listened to the life of the ship around her. Presently, eight bells were struck, and her quiet moment was interrupted by the bustle of the morning watch coming down for their breakfast. Ieasu's first officer, a grizzled old Ri man with a saber scar running from his forehead to his muzzle, greeted her with a grunt as he stopped to fill a flask from the teapot on his way to take command of the forenoon watch. Two bleary-eyed Valaat lieutenants, Yaniv and Ulrich, stumbled into the mess with rumpled, dripping feathers. This same pair often acted as her assistants.
"Bloody fog," Yaniv grumbled as he dried his face with a tea towel.
"What happened to your foot?" Marikesh asked in alarm, indicating a bandage and a splint. The young man sighed and flopped onto the bench, making a rolling gesture with his uninjured foot for his companion to explain.
"This idiot took a hard landing and nearly lost the lantern," the other explained. As the great flotilla awaited news from the city, the Navy was tasked with marking icebergs with lanterns and bells to help civilian vessels avoid them. As a fast frigate, the Wings of Justice was posted on the vanguard to bring its stronger fliers to the search for unmarked hazards. The duty carried an alarmingly high casualty rate.
"The captain has been at it since the forenoon watch yesterday," the injured man said defensively.
"And you think you can match her, eh?" Ulrich said, tossing him the tea towel.
"Has she gotten any food?" Marikesh asked, suddenly guilty. The two lieutenants laughed. The uninjured man poured two mugs of tea and handed one to his friend, who accepted it with his unbandaged foot.
"Don't worry yourself," he said. "We take good care of her."
"Jonesy forces a mug of stew and a biscuit into her every four bells when she gets like this," meaning the first officer who'd passed through minutes earlier.
"Eventually she'll keel over, and whoever's on watch will put her to bed."
A few minutes later, Ieasu strolled into the officer's mess, deep in conversation with her bosun. The stout Ithalos woman was carrying a mangled piece of iron, which seemed to be the topic of their conversation. Marikesh's effort to eavesdrop rewarded her with an avalanche of incomprehensible nautical jargon.
"I'll see what answers, cap'n," the bosun said, knuckling a salute as she turned to go. Ieasu leaned into the passageway after her and called for breakfast to be brought up from the galley. A half dozen midshipmen piled into the mess, dripping wet and sagging with fatigue. Biscuit, smoked fish and tea was served from a basket, along with a few carefully measured servings of dried bluefruit. The handful of officers who came in took their breakfast standing, chatting with animation about the events of the watch. The captain collected a sheaf of papers from the midshipmen and sat down at the table to review their work. The cheerful look on her face began to sag as she flipped through the stack.
"Mr. Anthers," she barked, causing a spray of crumbs to erupt from a Ri boy whose patchy adolescent brown crest barely reached the belt Marikesh's trousers.
"Yessir!" he squeaked, spraying more crumbs.
"If you're going to copy your workings, do try to avoid copying Mr. Dray's misspellings in the future. The two of you will join Lieutenant Jones to take our volar and solar positions today. Meanwhile, report to the galley for scullery duty."
The two embarrassed boys saluted and began to scramble for the passageway. Ieasu pinched the bridge of her muzzle.
"Finish your damned breakfasts first," she snapped.
"Ms. Clipft," Ieasu said holding up a sheet half covered with a puddle of ink. A scrawny Ithalos girl with pink-orange scales like little jewels stepped forward, her hands clasped tightly behind her back. Her wide, delicate jaws were toothless, like Marikesh and her father. She stood at attention in a threadbare blue cloak two sizes too large for her, probably from the ship's slops.
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"How much of this did you spill on Mr. Cho's beautiful new fore topsails?" The girl's eyes bulged slightly, and she shook her head.
"Most of it went over the side, sir." She pantomimed the event with shaking, ink-stained claws. The captain flipped through the rest of the stained sheaf.
"Well, at least you know an arctangent from a topgallant," she muttered, squinting at a spidery looking mess on the unstained part of the page. "Full marks for today, but you'll report to the bosun's mates to help sort out what to do about the topsail before your next watch." The girl saluted.
"Sir!" she said. The captain waived her away in the direction of the basket of food with the sheaf. "You're not the first mudlark to aim for an officer's pip. I'll have none of these unnatural ideas about caste on my ship. Eat a proper breakfast with your mates. That's an order."
Finally done with the midshipmen, Ieasu favored Marikesh with a crooked smile. From across the cabin, Marikesh raised her mug.
"I can't complain about your tea, captain, aside from the fact that it isn't coffee," she said. Ieasu got up and moved over to the corner where Marikesh had settled herself next to a fogged-up porthole.
"The second dogwatch got your aerials rigged over the topgallant stays," she said. "Though, at the bosun's insistence, you're going to have to operate from the galley."
"The galley?" Marikesh asked, surprised.
"She took one look at your bits and bobs and said that if there's going to be another fire hazard aboard, she wants it somewhere she's already got her eye on."
"Fair enough," Marikesh said. "I don't want to interfere with the cook. The crew would never forgive me." The captain shook her head.
"The bosun's mates already moved the bulkhead. The crew gave up a quarter inch apiece for you!" Ieasu slapped her shoulder affectionately. "They like you!"
Marikesh made her way across the crowded deck to the galley, where she found a freshly built booth wedged between the galley and the main hatch. As she inspected the door, she felt the pressure of dozens of eyes on her. Someone had carved a beautiful pattern featuring the old alchemical symbols of Vo, and her six major satellites, Caprice, Ardor, Resolve, Accord, Reticence and Apathy. Their own world, Resolve, was picked out in the vermilion paint that was the signature motif of the ship.
Inside, she found a tiny but thoughtfully arranged space. Clearly, Yaniv and Ulrich had grasped at least the practical aspects of her demonstrations at the observatory, and from them someone had devised an ingenious, compact system of holes and pegs on which she could build her circuits without having them collapse from the ship's motion. Her valves had been carefully stored in little drawers packed with wood shavings, with little paper labels waiting for her pen. There was even an alchemist's lamp and blowpipe for making her own valves, with a clever set of clamps and clips for holding the work, fashioned from hammered brass scraps and iron nails. The aerials came in through the top of the bulkhead through a little rectangular hole, held away from the wooden deck on a series of little knob-like ceramic tubes fixed to the deck with iron nails. Marikesh wondered where those had come from. It was a clever system.
By lunchtime, she had assembled a new receiver. A middle aged Ri deckhand lingered after he brought her a bowl of stew, some biscuit and a mug of tea.
"Ma'am," he said, touching his crest with a knuckle. His eyes flicked back and forth as he traced the paths of the wires. "Me mates, we was wondering if there's anything amiss."
"Amiss?" Marikesh asked absently, squinting at a tiny steel spring she was touching up with a hone.
"Oh, well, we asked the lieutenants for their notes. They've been talking about a radioer station, see? But, we was kind of in a rush, and, well, we wasn't sure if we understood properly." The man ran out of words and halted.
Marikesh snapped the spring into a copper collet and rotated the tiny armature into contact with a hollow dowel she'd carefully wrapped with hundreds of turns of fine copper wire.
"Just a moment," she said, moving the cooling mug of tea aside on the little bench to reach the end of a loop of golden wire. She connected the coil into the circuit by looping both ends around one of the pegs, and then threw a knife switch to power up the receiver. A crunch of static came through the headphones, and Marikesh began cranking the armature, searching for the resonance that would tune the receiver. It only took a few seconds to find the signal she was looking for. She leaned back against the wall of drawers, listening. Presently, the broadcast began to repeat, and she jotted down the contents in her notepad. Finally, she smiled and took off the headphones.
"I think I'd better go talk to the captain," she said to herself. Finally, she focused on the man who'd brought her lunch. He was twisting a rag in his paws nervously, a posture that contrasted amusingly with his hulking frame and the tattoos showing through his intricately shaved pelt. "I think this is easily the best workspace I've ever used," she told him. "There are some ideas here that I'd never have thought of myself. This vertical board here is genius. It opens up possibilities for complex circuits, I think. I don't think I'll ever go back to just hanging connections over a frame. Whoever built it will need to present a paper at the next symposium." The deckhand took a step back.
"A paper? I can't do nothing like that, ma'am," he said in alarm. "I ain't even got my letters."
"Don't worry about that," Marikesh said. "You can do a practicum." At his bewildered look, she went on. "A demonstration, where the audience participates. In Taleb, it's traditional to nominate someone from the audience to write the paper. Let's talk about it later," she said.
Marikesh barged past the marine guarding the captain's door to find Ieasu asleep in her damp uniform, but she came awake instantly as Marikesh entered the cabin.
"Birh," she said, reprovingly. "Let me get you out of that wretched coat. Your fur is going to stink if you sleep like that." She helped the captain out of her deck clothes and brushed the dampness out of her fur, ignoring her indignant protests at being fussed over. Once Ieasu was in a state to be seen, the marine accepted the wet bundle of clothes with a whispered thanks.
"Use my hammock," Marikesh said. "You've gotten yours all wet. You can sleep well on the news from Taleb."
"Already?" She reached for her second uniform hanging on a peg on the back of the door. Marikesh swatted her paw away from it.
"It doesn't require any action on your part," she said. "And you're no use to anyone if you can hardly stand." The captain gave her a petulant look, but climbed into the dry hammock. Once she was settled, Marikesh pulled out the notebook and read the broadcast.
"Taleb Marine Observation Fleet bulletin for the head of the first hour of the first watch. The approaches to Ange Harbor remain under a flag of dread interdict. The harbormaster continues to signal that vessels are not to approach the city. A minor eruption at Kaskari Seamount has produced a raft of pumice, drifting south by southwest at less than one knot. Vessels are advised to avoid the area unless equipped with booms," it read. Ieasu waived her paw to continue. Marikesh read on.
"Naval Observatory bulletin for the head of the first hour of the first watch. Voyager vessels have been observed maneuvering between the orbits of Reticence and Apathy. Orbital projections predict that nine vessels will begin to closely approach Accord twenty three days from now, four vessels will closely approach Ardor starting nine days from now, and three vessels will closely approach Resolve in 48 hours. It is not known what trajectories the Voyager vessels will follow after encountering Accord, Ardor and Resolve. Voyager free-flight trajectories are consistent with orbit-lowering."
"So, the day after tomorrow, we'll know if we're at war," Ieasu said.
"I don't think so," Marikesh said. "It's very unlikely that they are aware that we exist. It's possible they might be able to see a few city seats for the first time, depending on how close they get. Depending on the weather."
"How could they not know we exist?" Ieasu asked, astonished. "How could you miss hundreds of cities when you can see them from above?"
"If there are cities on Ardor or Accord, we wouldn't be able to see them, even with our biggest telescopes. We can see continents and oceans on Accord, but the smallest feature we can see clearly is much bigger than any island on our world. Astronomers have speculated for centuries about whether there is life on Accord, but all we can say for sure is that there is water, air and stone. We know even less about Ardor, which is almost always covered in clouds. The closest the Voyagers have gotten to Resolve is when they scraped the surface of Vo and then immediately shot back out beyond Apathy. Also, I don't think I have to remind you, Resolve is about half covered in clouds, especially this time of year."
Ieasu lay back in the hammock, thinking.
"I had just assumed that they could see us as well as any Valaat," she said, finally.
"The entire nation of Ange is at sea right now, aboard tens of thousands of vessels. How many of them can we see directly? Yesterday it was no more than six or seven. The sea is vast, and the sea itself is just a tiny speck in the universe." Ieasu smiled.
"May our insignificance protect us," she said, yawning. Then, her eyes snapped open in alarm. "Won't the Voyagers be able to receive the broadcast from Taleb?" Marikesh shook her head.
"No," she said. "How far can the lookouts see from the topmasts?"
"Topsails can be spotted at five leagues, more or less," the captain said, automatically.
"Taleb is a third of the way around the world from here. Frequencies that escape into space aren't useful for transmitting beyond the horizon." She watched Ieasu's face as she worked through the implications.
"So, it reflects off of something," she said, her eyelids beginning to drop again.
"If you could see with radio, the top of the atmosphere would look like the surface of the ocean. It's transparent if you look straight at it, but at an angle it's reflective. So, we launch the radio waves towards the horizon, and they bounce between the two surfaces," Marikesh said. Ieasu nodded, her eyes closed. She was instantly asleep.