Surviving Arkadia

The moment the crowd surged the Chief Steward made the shrillest sound I ever heard him make. He sounded like every effeminate impression of a gay man that I ever heard. I half expected him to follow it up with an AIDS joke, but then I remembered that I wasn’t on Earth any more. Instead, he clutched at the lapel of the Uniform in charge and said something like, “What if they get on board? Will they try to take the children?”

The Uniforms fled back down the gangplank. As the last of our crew ran back up it. I stood by, curious to see if the Uniforms would actually try to stop the mob or if they were just going to run for their lives.

I never did find out because I was too busy helping the Chief Steward to raise the gangplank.

The ship was already moving, sliding away from the quay at an angle, still connected by the pipe we were using to take on drinking water.

I asked the helmsman later and he told me that the Captain had planned the manoeuvre when she saw the crowd and the flimsy fence. She didn’t know for sure that the mob would surge towards us but she recognised the possibility and planned for it.

All the crew knew that the Captain was a master of Tide Magic and the helmsman was her apprentice. She couldn’t control the ship, but she could control at least some of the water the ship was in. Pushing one end of the ship away from the quay was relatively minor magic. That was why she left it to the helmsman.

The ship pivoted away from the quay, keeping that vital water link intact for as long as possible. The Captain came to the rail and shouted down to the Uniforms that she would not allow the ship to dock again until the crowd was back under control.

She returned to the bridge and seconds later the freshwater pipeline was unhooked and the ship moved away from the quay entirely. The captain must have been waiting to hear from the Quartermaster that we had enough water.

I leaned on the rail and watched the mob slowly turn back into a crowd when they realised that they couldn’t reach the ship. There was a long horrible moment when the people nearest the ship realised that they couldn’t reach us but the people behind them didn’t know yet. I wondered if I was about to see a lot of people end up in the harbour. Would I have to choose between hauling them out or letting them drown?

Fortunately the uniforms did a better job of herding the crowd than I had expected. There was a lot of noise and chaos. The Uniforms laid into the crowd with sticks and I saw a few people go down, but no-one ended up in the drink.

I don’t think that any of the Uniforms realised that there was something wrong with their harbour. I doubt that any of them knew the tide tables by heart. The Harbour Master probably did, and certainly would have noticed that the water level in the harbour was higher than it should have been, but he was still sleeping off the hangover.

The water level was so high because of the Captain’s magic. Tide magic can push large volumes of water around but it’s easier to hold large volumes of water in one place. Our Captain had captured the water in the Harbour at high tide and held it there.

The moment the ship was clear of the quay and the freshwater pipeline, the Captain released the spell that was holding the water in the harbour and reformed the excess water into a huge swell that caught our ship up and drove it right out of the harbour. The wall of water carried us safely over the sandbars beyond the safe navigation channel, and pushed us out into the Kaltzee proper.

We never did find out the name of the person who’d warned us. My hope is that some day they’ll read this account and know that we did heed their warning and that it saved lives.

By fleeing Ostia we had defied not only the Ostian authorities but also our own bosses at the Halcyon Line. None of us were sure what kind of trouble we were in. Would this be counted as a mutiny? Could we be charged with stealing our own ship? Not even the Captain knew.

She put our next course of action to the vote. Every crew member had an equal vote. I don’t remember most of the options but in the end we decided to sail for the Northern branch of the Kaltzee, as the Doctor wanted. We would get our supplies from the smaller ports, even if it meant many trips in the small boats. We would not attempt to contact Halcyon Line until all the children were either fully recovered or dead, in spite of all that we could do for them.

The ships of the Halcyon Line can be shockingly fast for their size but they very rarely get to use all of that speed. As much as I feared for the children and fretted about my own career it was exhilarating to be cutting through the waves at nearly thirty knots. The one thing we didn’t fear was other ships. Very little afloat could catch us, no-one knew where we were, and if anything did get in our way I was confident that we could cut right through it like RMS Queen Mary slicing its own escort ship, HMS Curacoa, in half, during World War II*.

It turned out that it wasn’t ships that we had to worry about.

The morning after our escape from Ostia I found more scratches on the outside of the Infirmary. This time there were also scrapes and scratches and splintered boards on the deck by the infirmary, and some chipped paint on the nearby rail.

I repaired such damage as could be easily repaired, and I reported it to the Doctor and the Captain. They believed me, or at least seemed to, but they didn’t think that it was anything to worry about. I was tempted to agree with them but there was something about it that my mind would not let me ignore, even if the Captain wanted me to consider the matter closed.

In the following days, as we sailed North as fast as the Source winds would let us, I continued to worry about the scratches, and the scratches continued to appear. I spoke to the rest of the crew. I let it be known that I was investigating the cause.

On the evening of the third day since our departure from Ostia one of the Junior Engineers came to me. He told me that many of the engineering crew were spooked by something and it might be related to the scratches.

I agreed to listen to what they had to say. They told me that they’d been hearing weird noises at night. Every night. Since before our visit to Ostia. The Engineering crew had their berths low down in the ship, below the waterline, close to where the base of the Etheric sails were mounted to the hull.

The first people to hear the noises had been the overnight crew. They were unsettled when they heard them but everyone knows that people hear and see things on overnight shifts. At first they didn’t talk about it, even to each other, so none of them knew that the entire overnight crew had heard these noises through the hull.

Since leaving Ostia the noises had become louder and much more insistent and was now so bad that it had woken up the day crew during the night. They wanted me to intercede with the Captain. They’d tried talking to the Chief Engineer and he had told them to stop bothering him with trivialities at a time like this. They thought that I could have a quiet word with the Captain. I won’t write here exactly what they asked me to do but the words “pillow talk” were bandied about.

I said that I would do no such thing but that since we were friends I would listen with them and once I had my own experience to relate I would ask her to come down and listen the next night.

What I heard convinced me that she needed to hear it. I almost dragged her out of bed to hear it then and there but I suspected that she’d be more willing to listen if I didn’t burst into her cabin and wake her in the middle of the night.

The Captain took very little persuading to come down to engineering in the small hours, even though it meant disturbing her sleep. I suspect that the look on my face and the dark circles under the eyes of half the Engineering Crew probably helped. She dragged the Chief Engineer with her. After they had both heard the chorus of creaks, scratches and whispers for themselves she took the Chief aside for a quiet word. Nobody heard what she said but afterwards he apologised to the Engineering Crew for not taking them more seriously.

The Chief Engineer decided to move the day crew to passenger cabins for sleeping so that at least they would get a decent rest. The Captain added monitoring the sounds to the duties of the Officer On Watch.

By then I’d done a survey of superficial damage to the ship and found a pattern of scratches, scores and damaged paintwork on both sides of the ship that lined up with the position of the infirmary. It looked a lot like something was coming out of the water and trying to drag itself into the infirmary. It didn’t make any sense. No one had seen any such thing and I did not believe that it was because no one was keeping watch. I had not seen any slackness in the crew, even in the face of our many distractions.

While all this had been going on the children were getting sicker, and hotter. They had gotten so hot that the crew in the infirmary were down to their underwear and no-one could stand the heat for more than an hour at a time. We were still at least a day away from the truly icy waters. I had a single night remaining when I knew that the children would be safe inside the infirmary. I resolved to use it to try and find out what was causing the scratches and the noise.

As the sun set I dragged one of the reclining lounge chairs that the passengers used out, and I set it up next to the infirmary. I chose a spot next to the window with the most scratches on it and settled down to wait.

I fell into a surprisingly deep sleep as I waited, and I did not wake until well after midnight. I was woken by a voice. I was sure I heard someone calling my name but once I was awake there was no-one around who could have spoken.

Once I’d shaken off sleep I got up and went to the rail to see if I could catch sight of whatever thing had been crawling all over the Idyllic and scratching it up. I looked down, expecting to see the dark waters of the Kaltzee and perhaps a little phosphorescent plankton.

What I saw were waves milky with sea creatures. Fins and tails and teeth all scratching at the hull of the ship. As if every living thing in the Kaltzee was trying to force its way aboard.