Deathlands 118: Blood Red Tide (13 page)

“Shift!” DontGo called. Mr. Squid snapped up onto the quarterdeck like a giant rubber band. Ryan’s team had to spread out to cover the small but far more open space. Mr. Squid took the opportunity to throw a sixth scrubbing arm into the mix. Captain Oracle and Commander Miles retreated to the end of the ship, grabbed a sheet and pulled themselves up on the stern rail out of the way of the contestants. Ryan glanced up as Mr. Squid passed the binnacle. It was the structure right in front of the wheel that held the ship’s master compass, master chron and barometer. The binnacle contained twin lamps under glass so that the steersman and conman could read it by night and in all weathers. The binnacle had shelves below that held master charts. Ryan slowed for one second as he beheld the glass dome atop the binnacle. A human, skeleton hand floated in a swirling blue and red miasma of liquid.

Ryan froze as the skeleton hand turned in its suspensory fluid and pointed at him.

Manrape’s rope slammed between Ryan’s shoulder blades. “Eyes to the deck and the task at hand, Ryan!”

Ryan remembered his promise to Krysty, took the blow, put his mind to his fellow teammates and tripled his efforts. They moved steadily backward and passed the skylight of the captain’s cabin. Mr. Squid steadily caught up. Crewmen on deck and in the rigging shouted and cheered. Hardstone snarled. Krysty sluiced. “Shift and turn!” Manrape called. The team turned to find the last, short section abutting the stern rail. Ryan’s team scrubbed for their lives.

“Finished!” Manrape shouted. “Fit for Captain’s inspection!”

Ryan and his team collapsed.

Mr. Squid squelched up against the stern rail seconds later. His normal gray color was ashen. Wipe shoved a bucket of seawater under his siphon and it bubbled over suspiciously like a man gasping for breath.

Captain Oracle and Commander Miles hopped down lightly and strode to the quarterdeck rail. “Miss Loral?” Oracle questioned.

The first mate stood on the main grating and opened her arms. “Clean as a whistle, Captain! Port and starboard!”

Oracle nodded. “Commander?”

Miles strode the quarterdeck, giving a rare smile. “Captain,
Glory
’s deck hasn’t been this clean in years.”

The crew cheered.

Oracle took a slow walk down the starboard gangway and back up the port. The crew on deck and in the riggings held their breath. “Very good, Commander. Very good indeed. A fine race and congratulations to port and starboard crews.”

Commander Miles continued to enjoy the gleaming decks. “And I am sure they thank you, Captain.”

The crew cheered.

“Mr. Squid is the winner,” Oracle declared.

The cheering stopped. Sweet Marie detonated. “We beat the squid! Fair and square! Right beneath your feet, Captain!”

Oracle turned his gaze on able seaman Sweet Marie. The mono-block of sailing woman paled. Oracle extended his left hand toward Commander Miles, who reached into a pocket of his blue coat and pulled out a white glove.

“Oh, here we go!” Miss Loral called.

Cheers once again erupted from deck to rigging. Captain Oracle slowly walked down the starboard side of the ship. He held the white glove behind his back as his black eyes took in Mr. Squid’s work. He walked the full length of the ship and returned back up the port side. His gloved hand did not move. The captain stopped at the port gangway to the quarterdeck. He extended one gloved finger and stroked it beneath the step at shoulder level. Oracle raised his finger high. The fingertip of his glove was black with grime. “Mr. Squid scrubbed the undersides of the treads.”

Sweet Marie couldn’t contain herself. “Beggin’ the captain’s pardon!” Crewmen who had lost bets shouted out. Even Hardstone was incensed. “The undersides? We never scrub the undersides!”

Ryan rose. “Permission to speak!”

Oracle nodded. “Granted, Mr. Ryan.”

“My team gave one hundred percent.”

Mutters of assent greeted the statement. Oracle nodded again. “I acknowledge that, Mr. Ryan.”

Ryan lifted his chin to starboard. “Mr. Squid gave one hundred and ten. Today he was a better sailor than me. Starboard beat port. I concede defeat.”

“Here! Here!” Doc applauded. Mr. Squid’s supporters cheered.

Oracle ran his gaze over the rest of the port team. Sweet Marie blew a lank, sweaty lock of red hair out of her face and shook her head. “Not a sweet, willing face to sit on for a thousand leagues, and now I am schooled in my sailor’s duty by a squid? I swear it’s enough to make a girl go back to trawling on her father’s barge!”

Laughter broke out.

“Commander,” Oracle grated. “Is there any beer left?”

Miles made a face. “Just a half cask of that banana beer we picked up in the Dominicas, and it’s turning fast.”

“I doubt the portside crew will complain. A stoop each.”

“Aye, Captain!”

The captain regarded his subaqueous specialist. “You are victorious, Mr. Squid. I know not what spoils to give you.”

“I am tired,” Mr. Squid replied. “I would like to rest in my barrel.”

“Of course. Nothing else?”

“I would like Doc to sit with me. If the ship can spare him.”

A number of very rude, man-on-squid suggestions rang out. It was difficult to discern in his stygian dark face, but Oracle might have been amused. “Doc?”

“Captain, you reward me as much as Mr. Squid, if you find I can be spared.”

“You can be spared, Doc. But I will require two errands of you while Mr. Squid’s barrel is emptied and filled with fresh water.”

“I am at your service, Captain.”

“Go down to the tech room and bring me Mr. Rood’s report about the radio transmissions he has been receiving.”

“At once.”

“Before you do, sign the book.”

The ship got quiet.

Doc bowed low. “Humbly, and with honor, my captain.”

Forgiven took the massive book from under his arm and presented Doc with a pen. Doc signed on the indicated line. Manrape’s voice boomed, “Hip! Hip!”

“Huzzah!” the crew roared.

“Hip! Hip!”

“Huzzah!”

“Hip! Hip!”

“Huzzah!”

Gypsyfair came forward with a deep blue garment draped over her arms. “This is for you, shipmate. I sewed it myself.”

Doc unfolded a blue coat much like that of Commander Miles, Miss Loral and Purser Forgiven. His eyes stung and his throat tightened. “Oh my stars and garters...”

“You serve in the captain’s cabin, you shall keep the captain’s log and serve as well as purser’s assistant,” Miles intoned. “You must look the part. Your pantaloons, hat and shoes will follow shortly.”

Atlast and Koa peeled off Doc’s coat and helped him don the ship’s jacket. It was common knowledge that no one sewed better than Gypsyfair. The coat fit perfectly. Doc felt overcome with emotion. “Oh dear, oh dear...”

“Doc,” Oracle said softly but firmly, “I believe I gave you an order.”

Doc straightened. “Aye, Captain! The tech room and Mr. Rood’s report. At once!” Doc strode swiftly to the main gangway with a genuine swagger. Krysty shot Ryan a bemused look. Ryan accepted a stoop of past-its-prime banana beer from Wipe and nodded at her.

For good or ill, he and his companions were aboard the
Glory
until she saw the Cific.

* * *

D
OC STRODE JAUNTILY
to the tech cabin. Crewmen grinned, whistled, gave him the thumbs up and called him shipmate as he passed. None seemed surprised. Apparently the fix had been well in. Doc stuck his head into the tech room. Mr. Rood sat at his worktable hunched over logs and making notes. Three radio transceivers of different makes and ages dominated the room. Doc found the soft glow of their dials pleasing. Rood had both a fuel and a hand crank generator, although Doc noted smaller cables snaking up the mizzenmast next to the antenna, and he knew there were some solar panels and small, cobbled together wind-turbines up in the tops. Doc rapped politely on the thin wooden doorframe set into the canvass divider that formed the room. “Mr. Rood, are you free?”

The ship’s techman glanced up from his worktable. Unlike many of the crew, he kept his hair cut short. The sleeves of his jersey were rolled up and tied. His eyes were red rimmed from long hours in not particularly good light, but he grinned. “Hello, Doc. Nice coat!”

Doc flushed with pleasure.

“What can I do you for?”

“Captain’s business. He asks if you have intercepted any more transmissions and wishes your report.”

“Half a dozen just today, and just like all the days before, they make no sense.”

“Are they in a foreign language?” Doc asked. “I am familiar with several.”

“No language at all, unless I’m missing something.”

Doc stepped inside and peered at Rood’s extensive log entries. They consisted of many long series of dots and dashes with corresponding letters written beneath them. “Well,” Doc observed, “whomever our chatty friends may be, they appear to be using Morse code. I gather most sailors of this time use it?”

“Most don’t. Most ships don’t have radios, and most ships’ complements right up to captain are illiterate.” Rood made a derisive noise. “Some of the more sophisticated types use semaphore. This stuff makes no sense. Must be some broken piece of tech on auto.”

“Hmm.” Doc frowned. He and his companions had encountered numerous pieces of technology that had survived skydark and kept on operating, some in endless loop, some having jumped their original programming, some chilling deadly and others heartbreaking in their mechanical devotion to duty. “I see three possibilities, my good Mr. Rood. One, you are correct and there is a piece of tech somewhere beyond our horizon, emitting gobbledygook. Two, there is a monkey, or an illiterate child chained to a desk similar to yours, with nothing better to do than randomly pound upon a transmission bar day and night.”

Rood laughed.

“Or three,” Doc continued. “Let us assume willful, perhaps hostile, intent behind these transmissions, and, for the nonce, let us assume this is a simple Caesar cipher.”

“A what?”

“Julius Caesar,” Doc explained. “A mega-baron of long ago.”

“Powerful?”

“One of the most powerful the world has ever known. When he sent a message that was private or of military significance he would encrypt it with a substitution cipher.”

“A what?”

Doc remained patient and pointed at the strings of meaningless letters. “Those are words. For example, here is the alphabet.” Doc wrote out the alphabet A to Z on a sheet of paper. “Let us assume I am so foolish that my own, personal substitution cipher is simply the alphabet backward.” Doc wrote the alphabet Z to A directly beneath.

“Now...” Doc swiftly wrote eight words of Z to A backward nonsense. “Match each letter in the alphabet above, each letter corresponding to the letter of my cipher below it.”

Rood looked at Doc like he might be losing it but swiftly matched letters and scratched out a sentence below Doc’s. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog?”

“It is a panagram.”

“A what?”

“A phrase that contains all letters of a given alphabet. In this case it is the most commonly used panagram in predark English.”

“What does it mean?

“It means you have deciphered my code, Mr. Rood.”

“Rads, thunder and fallout!” Rood was amazed. “That’s incredible!”

“Clever but not incredible. The concept is thousands of years old. It seems in your bold new Caribbean someone has rediscovered it.”

Rood’s face fell as he scanned his own notes. “But the tech men, out there, they ain’t using the alphabet backward.”

“Indeed not. I fear they have devised an alphabet of their own. Julius Caesar, for example, was known by historians for using a left shift of three.”

“Well, if they have their own cipher, how do we decipher it?”

“We must break it, my friend.”

“Break it? How?” Rood asked.

“Frequency analysis.”

Rood tapped his radio dial. “I already got his frequency.”

“I speak of the frequency of letters, shipmate. Though perhaps our first, best course would be pattern words.”

“Pattern words...”

“Let us surmise that these voices out in the ethers are speaking about us. Thusly, I might be tempted to subscribe the word ‘Glory’ to the more frequent, identical, four-letter words. Since we are aboard ship, and being pursued, we might also look for ‘latitude’ and ‘longitude’ or their Latin abbreviations. Now, should he also have a word substitution code atop his cipher, or be engaging in multiple alphabet shifts, then you and I, good Rood, will be burning the midnight oil.”

Rood’s eyes seemed in severe danger of glazing over.

Doc held up a calming finger. “However, let us, you and I, just as a starting point, assume that our opponent has dreadfully underestimated us and assumes that we, along with nearly everyone else in the Caribbean Sea, has never heard of a Caesar cipher.” Doc spread out a sheaf of Mr. Rood’s notes.

The old man’s eyes danced across the pages and his long finger followed and tapped. “See! Here, here and here! I detect the corresponding patterns of latitude and longitude. The U, D and E all correspond, and the two words between them have given us all the vowels except the sometimes Y. I believe much of these communications are coordinates!”

“I see it.” Techman Rood’s world visibly expanded. “I see it!”

“Indeed!” Doc picked up a pen. “With your permission?”

Rood leaned in like a hound on the scent. “Break him!”

Doc swiftly began scratching beneath Rood’s lines of copied code. “Yes, this can only be
Glory!
And here, this, this and...” Doc’s pen hand wilted.

“What?” Rood asked. “What happened?”

“My worst fear. Everything made sense until it made no sense.”

“You ain’t making no sense.”

“I am afraid we have fallen into a trap. It was too easy, and now we are confounded by translations in the code that make no sense, which means we are on the wrong tack entirely or have been duped.”

“You’re still making no sense,” Rood reiterated.

“Perhaps not. Then I pray you, good techman, do the words ‘war’ and ‘pig’ in any conjunction mean anything to you?”