Mine too, for all I was only watching.
By her expression, she just about had it, too, when we heard a key scrape in the door lock.
I snatched my fingers out of my shirt collar like I’d been doing something to be guilty for. That little warning was just enough for her to curse, snatch the hairpin halves out of the shackle, and make ’em vanish into her mouth. I hoped she’d just tucked ’em into her cheek rather than swallowing. Even Miss Lizzie and Crispin ain’t got no cure for a perforated bowel.
Then the door opened and in walked the captain with his dignity, flanked by one of the Ivans and the other Boris, making up a mismatched set. I wondered if they was like carriage horses and got used to working as a team in a particular way, so if you put the wheel horse to lead, or vice versa, confusion and wrecks result.
They didn’t seem confused, more’s the pity. Ivan came forward and unlocked Priya. He tossed the keys to Boris, and Boris came and unlocked me. Then each of ’em guided one of us to the door. “What’s this?” Priya asked Ivan.
He shook his head.
The captain stood aside so we could be led out the door. “I thought you might enjoy to see the next events.”
I managed to catch Priya’s eye. She didn’t look no more sanguine about that than I felt.
This time we had a slightly longer scuttle through the corridors, though still not far. I watched two seamen jump out of the way behind bulkheads as the captain came by, saluting like their lives depended on it. From what I’ve heard about how navies is run, they just about might have.
Then we came in through another little oval hatchway — more stooping — and the next thing I knew somebody was shouting an order and a roomful of people was spinning round in their chairs and saluting while still sitting. I guess I expected them to jump up and click heels and such, but I can see the sense in not doing so when you’re all crammed into a room no bigger than a good-sized pantry.
The captain said something that I expected was the Russian for “At ease,” and everybody — it was only three men, but in that little space it seemed like they had sixty elbows — went back to his job. The captain gestured to Ivan and Boris to take me and Priya over behind a railing. We stood crammed up against them there. I had the damned whitewashed pipe rail digging me in the belly and Boris’ hard-on digging me in the ass. I guess it was a while since he’d seen a woman.
In fairness to old Boris, he couldn’t help it any more than I could. And he was a perfect gentleman about it. No wandering hands, and no rubbing up on me, neither.
The captain climbed up to the only empty chair, which was in the middle of the cramped metal room full of gauges and pipes and Christ knows what. It was also up a little bit, like a coachman’s seat. A wide pipe with two handles welded on to it hung from the ceiling over his head.
“Welcome to the bridge of my ship, Os’minog. You may find this interesting,” the captain said. He didn’t look over, but it must have been for us, because he said it in English. Then he barked something in Russian, and—
I grabbed the railing in both hands.
Silently, on what must have been well-oiled tracks, a couple of jointed metal shutters slid away from the front of the submersible, revealing the biggest single pane of glass I’d ever seen. It was curved, too, fitting the prow of the ship, and I wondered how the hell they had manufactured it. It was bigger than the glass mirror over Miss Bethel’s burned-up back bar. Big as I imagined the windows in a lighthouse must be.
I gasped, and it weren’t just from that. Because beyond it I could see a swirl of bubbles and the tossing waters of the Sound.
At least, I hoped it was the Sound and not the open sea. It was daylight and the storm had broke, though the clouds hadn’t. Gray waves slapped against the glass, and it was hard to tell where they ended and the gray skies began.
But there was something black to mark the horizon, and as we came up on it I realized it was a ship. And I had a horrible feeling inside me that I knew exactly why it was that the man Bantle called Nemo had brought us to his bridge. We were here to witness his crimes.
Is there nothing so awful that men won’t use it to try to show off to girls?
The Os’minog glided through the sea, seeming silent from the inside. Only the soft hum reached our feet through the floorboards. It slid closer to the ship, and I barely noticed the stream of incomprehensible commands the captain gave and the quiet responses from his crew. We could read the lettering on the ship’s stern now—Daylily, out of Seattle — and I couldn’t believe they had not seen us. But even if they had, what could they do? It was a ship full of would-be gold miners and press-ganged dogs doomed to starve or freeze in the Yukon. It weren’t armed.
I wondered if we’d use torpedoes or if, like his namesake, our “Nemo” anticipated ramming the civilian ship.
My question was answered when the captain uttered a gently voiced command and the man directly in front of him answered, “Da,” and threw a very large lever.
A shiver ran through the Os’minog and then a shudder, and then through that forward portal it seemed as if the whole hull of the ship had twisted loose and was wriggling away, forward. There was a horrible skreeling noise and the ocean all around went white — a sea of foam — lathered and frothing. Something writhed in among it.
Tentacles. They was tentacles, arms like an octopus, only jointed metal and big as tree trunks, and instead of suckers they had big, jagged barbs or teeth like God’s own bread knife.
“Christ on crutches,” I whispered. “And His bastard brother Harry, too.”
Priya grabbed my hand on the railing. I turned mine palm up so I could squeeze hers. The Os’minog surged forward, and through the frothing water I caught a glimpse of men gathered at the railing of the Daylily, pointing, shoving, openmouthed.
There weren’t nowhere they could run.
“Os’minog,” Priya whispered. “Octopus.”
I thought Ivan would give her a rattle to shut her up, but he didn’t even seem to have heard. He and Boris was fixed in place watching just like me and Priya, but I somehow guessed the underlying emotions to be a mite different.
The submersible shuddered and bucked. I realized we’d latched on to the Daylily. Those huge arms was thrashing, denting the steamer’s steel sides. I saw rivets pop, the plating buckle. A man fell past, arms pinwheeling, tossed from the deck. I couldn’t look. I couldn’t neither look away.
“Please God,” I said. Priya muttered something in her own language. She squeezed me so hard my fingers went white.
The Os’minog’s arms was ripping through the Daylily’s hull, burrowing inside, dragging out bundles of cargo and tossing them into the snapping metal beak. It had to be some kind of a water lock, I realized: there was piracy going on here.
The man operating the arms made it look like a dance. He had slipped his hands into metal mesh gloves, and he moved ’em like the conductor in the orchestra pit at the big green opera house downtown. Every time his hand jabbed, a tentacle jabbed, too. Every time his fish clenched, a coil latched around some fixture of the Daylily and ripped it from its moorings, then tossed it out to sea. It was piteously awful and piteously easy, and my cut and burned cheek scorched from the salt of the tears leaking over it.