She held out the object and I took it with a trembling hand. If Lieutenant Markey could turn a bobby pin into a charged talisman, and if the Navy had sent her, alone, to locate a kraken, she would be one hell of a powerful friend to have.
She also scared the shit out of me. People who seem too competent always make me nervous.
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said. “This is — I mean, I don’t know how I can repay you.” What I really meant was: I don’t know why you’re helping me.
“Well,” Markey said, “you can start by finding me some trousers and boots. I don’t plan to spend the next two weeks showing off my legs.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I tucked the hairpin under the bandage wrapped around my left hand. “If there’s nothing else?”
Markey looked at me with dark, unfathomable eyes. “Tell me how you ended up here.”
“In the Navy?” That was easy: I wanted to kill Japs. I tried to think of a nicer way to say it.
“On the Bowfin,” she said.
I frowned. “I didn’t exactly get to choose my posting.”
Markey shook her head. “Why disguise yourself as a man?”
I should have figured she’d ask that. “I knew Uncle Sam wouldn’t let a girl do any real fighting. And that’s bullshit. Pardon my French.”
“Why do you want to fight?”
“You’re kidding, right?” I gaped at her. “They attacked us! Stabbed their damn aluminum planes through the Pacific defense screens and into Pearl Harbor. I was born in Honolulu. When I saw the photos — all that black smoke filling our sky — I hated them. I wanted revenge, I’m not afraid to say it.”
I felt my hands shaking, and I folded my arms to hide them. “Not to mention their Nazi pals are killing or enslaving their way through all of Europe. If we don’t stop the Axis, ma’am, they’re going to take over the world, and I don’t want to live in that world.”
Markey nodded and seemed to relax. “Sorry to interrogate you like that, Hatcher, but I’m never sure whether to trust people in disguise.”
“Yeah, well, we can’t all look like movie stars.”
“Don’t imagine for a second that makes things any easier for me,” she snapped. “And I will thank you to address me as ‘Lieutenant’ or ‘ma’am’, Seaman Hatcher.”
I looked down at the floor, my face warm. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”
“This is not a costume I’m wearing.” Markey touched her uniform. “I earned my rank. I had to fight to get this job, and I fight every day to keep it.
“Yes, there are advantages to men finding you beautiful, but that perception also limits you. They think all you are is a pretty face and a nice body. They only care about what they can see.” She shrugged. “But I don’t have to tell you how appearances can be deceiving.”
“No, ma’am.”
Markey sighed. “What you’re doing now is very brave, Hatcher. But when this war is over, you’ll have to go back home — back to being a woman. Have you thought about how you’re going to handle that?”
“Well, ma’am, since most of my time in the Navy’s been spent cleaning one thing or another, I expect I’ll be well trained to be a housewife.” My words came out sounding more bitter than I intended.
“You have the talent, Hatcher,” Markey said. “More than that, you clearly have the will. These two things are powerful in combination.”
This conversation was becoming very uncomfortable. “With all due respect, ma’am, why the hell do you care? You don’t even know me.”
Markey stood and walked over to me. “I won’t be pretty forever. I’ll get old, and men won’t want me anymore. But this?” She held up a hand, then snapped her fingers to create an illusory flame bobbing in midair. “The talent will be with me until the day I die. And to know that, to have that and not use it for something good — that would be such a waste.”
I couldn’t decipher the expression on her face. Was she feeling some misplaced maternal pity for me? Or did she have another agenda?
After a moment, I decided I really didn’t care.
“Thanks for the advice, ma’am,” I said, “but we both have to survive the fucking war first.”
The floating fire winked out. “Dismissed.”
I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
I did my best to avoid Lieutenant Markey for the next several days. It wasn’t easy, since we were both stuck on the same three-hundred-foot, sixty-person submarine. And it wasn’t that I didn’t respect her. She clearly had major pull in OP-20-G to rate a teleport halfway around the planet. But she was calling as much attention to me as she was to herself, and I didn’t need that kind of exposure.
Fortunately, she spent most of her time in the control room or the conning tower, doing whatever she did to track down the mythical kraken, and I was assigned to the aft torpedo compartment. The captain had decided we would fire the fish from there once we were ready to wake the beast — we’d be facing away and ready to run like hell.
Markey had brought aboard divining bolts to replace the magnetic detonators in our Mark 14s. The magnets were supposed to explode a torpedo right underneath a ship’s hull, causing more damage than a broadside impact, but the damn things had never worked right. Markey’s instructions were to replace the magnets with D-bolts, which would make our fish detect monsters instead of metal.
The plan was to find the kraken, poke it with a couple of torpedoes, then skedaddle before it was fully aware of its surroundings. The kraken’s reported location was close enough to populated areas that it should — should — hear the noise from those cities and move toward Japan instead of anywhere else.
Working on the torpedoes occupied me for most of the time, but Markey’s questions kept bugging me. What was I going to do after the war ended?
Maybe I wouldn’t survive. Maybe that would be the best outcome for everyone: if I died in the line of duty, and my family didn’t find out until later what had happened to their daughter — that she’d given her life for her country.
Maybe they’d be proud of me. And maybe the good ol’ U-S-of-A would stop questioning our loyalty then.
I hadn’t thought about my future in a while — not since I first enlisted. It had always angered me to know how limited my options were, and now I was angry at Markey for reminding me, for making me worry about things I couldn’t change. That’s what I was thinking about that day, when the COB pulled Roseler and me out of the torpedo bay for another special assignment.
“We’re submerged in hostile waters, less than a hundred miles from enemy shore,” the captain said as I climbed into the conning tower. “We can’t surface, and we can’t outrun anything that swims. Anything goes wrong here and we are fucked.”
He was talking to Lieutenant Markey. Roseler was already crowded into the tight space around the periscope. I handed him the Bowfin’s codex, which I had retrieved from the control room. He gave me a clipboard and a frantic look as I wedged myself into a corner next to the captain and the COB. It didn’t seem like all five of us needed to be here, but I wasn’t going to debate that.
“This will be a one-way tunnel,” Markey said. She might actually have looked better in trousers than a skirt. I tried my best not to feel jealous and failed. “There’s no danger of us being detected.”
“But why does Rosebud have to do the spell?” the COB asked. “Aren’t you the professional, Lieutenant?”
“Seaman Roseler is doing the easy part,” Markey said. “We don’t have a focus object, so I’ll need to guide the far end of the tunnel.”