Karen Memory (35 page)

Definitely a captain.

He looked me up and down, and then Priya. Then he and Standish had a rapid-fire conversation that I understood exactly one word of—
prostitutki
.

“If you’re going to talk about us,” I put in, “it’s polite to use a language we understand.”

My da didn’t raise no rude girls: I waited until one of ’em hesitated for breath.

The Russian captain looked at me. He was lean and bald on top, with white hair and a white beard cropped close to his pointed jaw. His eyebrows, though, was devilish black peaks over sparking eyes, and you could tell he knew he was handsome.

“Forgive me, miss,” he said dryly. “I was simply asking Mr. Standish how it was that he intended to infect the two of you with his
Vibrio cholerae
without exposing my men to the bacillus.”

His English was better than Miss Bethel’s, and his lordly manner made me feel small and filthy.

Well, I might be filthy. But I weren’t small. And even if I was, well, that barn cat still ran off that five-hundred-pound bear just by being a damned sight more invested in the outcome than the bear was.

“I bet you’re what’s been sinking the gold boats, aren’t you? You really are Captain Nemo.”

The captain looked at Standish all quizzical.

Standish shrugged. “It’s a code name Bantle gave you.”

“Ah,” the captain said. “As in Monsieur Verne’s books.” He seemed quite pleased by the comparison.

That was about when what he’d said about …
Vibrio cholerae
started to sink in, and I realized exactly what was going on. My da didn’t raise no dummies, even if I am a bit trusting for my own good sometimes. Still, Mama would say it’s better to think the best of people and every so often get to be disappointed than always think the worst and die alone.

“Wait. You’re going to use us to start a cholera epidemic. Which you plan to have kill off all the gold miners coming out of Rapid, and maybe even spread to Alaska. And then Russia can come take Alaska back.”

“That’s a brain that’s wasted on a woman,” Standish said.

I bit my tongue to keep from spitting on his shoe. If I had it to do over … well, quite frankly, I would of spat in his face.

I said, “Cholera is too catching. It kills too fast. Nobody still sick will make it all the way to Anchorage.”

“You just leave the details to us, little lady,” Standish said. “We have thought of everything. Our cholera bacillus is
encapsulated.
”

The way he said it made me think he was quoting somebody and he weren’t too sure what the words actually meant. I bet they had some kind of special breed, then. Something that could lie quiet before it spread and killed.

I nodded, then regretted it. “Well, you won’t be able to flog me to death if that’s your plan,” I told Standish. “Dead people don’t shit, and you know that’s how cholera gets spread. It’s in fouled water, from folks already sick with it.”

Priya was about vibrating with indignation, but she held her tongue.“Oh, flogging you
nearly
to death will suffice for my needs,” Standish said. “Besides, we need to keep you from talking. It’s all in the service of a greater good.”

He turned to the Ivans and the Borises and said something in Russian that was probably, “Take them away.”

Because that was what happened next.

*   *   *

They put Priya and me in the same cell, though, and that’s when I found out why she’d been so quiet while we was being … not interrogated. Assessed? Assayed?

Turns out, she spoke a little Russian. And she’d been memorizing what Standish and the captain said.

I’m afraid I weren’t at my most helpful. Because when she told me—we was chained up to opposite walls—all I could think to say was, “You didn’t say you spoke
Russian
.”

“I don’t,” she answered. “Well, not much. I understand a bit more of it.”

My Priya. None smarter.

Briefly, we caught up. I had more to tell her than she had to tell me, though she’d figured out most of it already. She was looking at that cut on my face—or worse, she was trying not to.

I figured it was best to just face up to it, so I ponied and said, “I’d rather it was me and not you he took a fancy to.”

Her lips stretched. Somebody who didn’t know her might have called it a smile. “You think it’s him and not Scarlet. The killer.”

There was enough slack in my chains to touch my cheek if I squatted down with my back to the wall. Touching it smarted. “I’m pretty fucking certain of it.”

“He must have had the sense not to shit in his own well.”

I guffawed, she took me so by surprise. That’s what happens, I suppose, when somebody spends too much time around Madame. You’d think Miss Bethel would be more of a civilizing influence, but I suppose there’s only so much any of us can do to counteract Madame’s level of artistry of language.

“I think he only likes American girls,” I said. Then I thought about it and corrected myself. “White American girls. That’s all he’s done, that I’ve heard tell.”

I poked the cheek again. It smarted again. I wondered if I would learn to stop doing that.

Priya thought about it and nodded. “Like them as only like black girls. Or blondes.”

“Or whatever.”

It didn’t make me feel too much better about my prospects. Or her, either, from the sorrowful look she gave me.

But then, being Priya, she shook herself hard enough to make her chains rattle, and she started patting herself like she was looking for something. I watched, losing myself in the expression of concentration she wore. But finally she sighed in frustration and shook her head.

“For once, I wish I wore a corset,” she said. “I could use a bit of whalebone now.” She held up her wrist, showing off the keyhole in the shackle on it.

What kind of a submersible ship comes with a room equipped with hasps for chaining folk, too, anyway?

“How about a hairpin?” I asked.

“This isn’t one of your dime novels, Karen my love.”

The fact that she called me “my love” took every bit of sting out of the other thing she said. I sniffed and shot back, “A hairpin’s what I have on offer. I ain’t got a set of stays on, neither. Take it or leave it.”

“Take it,” she said.

I found one that hadn’t slipped out of the mess of knots and undone braids my coiffure had become and slid it across the floor to her. It went wide, but she snagged it with a toe and pulled it to her. She sank down with her back to the wall, picked it up, snapped it in half to make two pieces, and went to work on the lock.

I wanted to talk, but I didn’t want to distract her, so I contented myself with listening to the
scratch-scratch-scratch
of the pin in the lock and watching her concentrated face.

I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at the face of somebody you love when you’re in mortal fear for your own life and also theirs. But there’s nothing lovelier nor more terrifying that I have ever seen.

I wanted to memorize everything. The way the too-bright light caught in her black amber eyes and cast the reverse of shadows there. The wrinkle of absorption in her smooth brow. Her lips pressed tight, then slowly slackening as she worked the hairpin deeper.

To keep from talking, I dug into my shirt and found the warm, slick surface of Marshal Reeves’ silver dollar still tucked into the wrap around my breasts. They hadn’t done a real good job of searching me, and at that moment I made up my mind that from then on if I lived I would always keep a penknife tucked inside my unmentionables.

I was leaning forward by then. I could tell from Priya’s face that she was making progress and also that I shouldn’t say a word. She was pressing one-half the pin down and sideways with the heel of her hand while raking the other half back and forth between forefinger and thumb. She held the shackle still against her thigh while she worked, and though it was cold in that little room, sweat beaded on her lip.

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.