“Hey, sword jockey,” a man said sleepily. One leg dangled off the edge of his cot, and was long enough to rest his bare foot flat on the ground. This was Suhonen, the biggest man aboard, a towering piece of muscle who, I suspected, played dumber than he was. “What’s the hurry? We won’t hit the Southern Ocean for another two days.”
“I just thought of something,” I said honestly. I left out that I should’ve caught a damn month ago. No need to advertise my shortcomings.
“Must be some thought to have you busting out like a moray eel,” he said. Other heads popped up from hammocks, aroused by the voices and any break in routine.
“Nah, nothing important,” I said. I went up the stairs to the main hatch and stood halfway out as I waited for my eyes to adjust to the blinding sun. I heard a voice below me murmur, “Cap’n Jane says he’s the most vicious swordsman in Muscodia.”
“That’s not saying much,” someone replied, and I fought not to laugh.
“She also says he took a sword to the heart and lived.”
“And that’s just impossible.”
“Did you ever know Cap’n Jane to lie?”
“I never sailed with her before. All I know is what you moony-eyed schoolboys tell me about her.”
“Well, call her a liar, wake up a eunuch, so say those of us who did sail with her.”
I climbed through the main hatch and emerged on deck before I laughed out loud. Instantly the breeze hit me, a rush of clean salt air that felt especially wonderful after passing through the hold. The morning sun was about a hand’s-width above the horizon, and the heat had not reached the eggboiling proportions it would by midday. If this was what it was like at this latitude, I really wasn’t looking forward to the heat of the Southern Ocean.
But at the moment, the heat I was most concerned with was my own temper. I looked around the ship that had been my home for the last two weeks, seeking Jane Argo.
Our ship bore the unlikely name Red Cow. She was a twomasted schooner eighty feet long and weighing in at about 220 tons. The crew complement was around a hundred. I knew very little about ships, but I did notice that the Red Cow sported an extra-long bowsprit, the purpose of which I had yet to discover.
She was a twenty-gunner as well, with five ballistae mounted on either side of the deck, and five more set to fire through ports below. The bolts might not pierce the hull of another ship, but they pierced the crew just fine. They could also grab fast to the other ship’s wood and allow the Red Cow to winch the two ships together, which was how pirates often secured their prey. Using their own tactic against them was just one of the ironies about the whole pirate-hunter enterprise.
The Red Cow was one of the fleet supported by the international coalition known as the Anti-Freebootery Guild, formed forty years ago in an attempt to stop the rampant criminal activity in and around the Southern Ocean ports. At first the various countries that signed the Guild charter used their navies to enforce it, but there were too many language barriers, cross purposes, and old grudges. In the first three years, twice as many naval vessels as pirates were sunk, often at the hands of so-called allies.
Finally someone clever suggested the creation of a special fleet of fast, heavily armed ships designed for the sole purpose of catching, capturing, and returning for trial any and all pirates. Someone even more clever-our old friend Queen Remy-realized that the best ones for the job were former pirates themselves.
So, for the last twenty-five years, the Anti-Freebootery Guild had done an adequate job keeping piracy confined to very specific, well- known areas of the ocean. Why had they not wiped it out entirely? For two reasons: One, pirates were as renewable a resource as corn or whores, and second, if they did wipe it out, the pirate hunters would be unemployed and might return to their old ways.
We’d been at sea for two weeks without encountering any pirates, but no one seemed too concerned. Certainly not the Red Cow ’s captain; in fact, I had yet to see him concerned about anything.
As my eyes finished adjusting, a new voice said, “Good morning, Captain.”
I turned to see Quartermaster Seaton clinging to the port mainsail shrouds. He was like many seconds-in-command I’d known, competent but happy to stay in the background. He had a goatee decorated with little bits of seabird bone, and a fringe of sun-lightened hair around his head. His otherwise bald pate was tanned dark and spotted in places with big moles. His arms sported muscles that looked like leather cords, and were covered with elaborate tattoos from ports all over the world. The captain led the crew, but Seaton made sure they followed his orders. He continued, “How’d you sleep?”
“Mostly on my back,” I deadpanned. “Still getting used to the heat. Have you seen Captain Argo?”
He nodded forward. “She’s down there jawing with Captain Clift.”
I followed his gaze. Jane, clad in billowing trousers and a sleeveless tunic tight enough to let everyone know when she got a chill, stood at the port bow rail. Beside her was our captain, Dylan Clift.
Clift was taller than Jane, slender, and deeply tanned, with a thin mustache along his upper lip. He was as likely to leap into the crow’s nest himself as send one of the crew to do it, and much like Jane, he tended to laugh a lot. He knew every crewman’s name, usually his background, and instinctively handled them in the most efficient way, goading with some, no-nonsense with others. He was the reason we-well, really Jane-had chosen the Red Cow. He’d served as Jane’s quartermaster during her pirate days, and followed her into pirate hunting. Several of the crew had also put in time under “Cap’n Jane” on both sides of the law. The rest had heard enough about her to be properly respectful, and they treated me well because I was with her. Jane’s exaggerated hints about my past helped, too.
“Interesting to see the two of them together again,” Seaton said.
“Did you serve under Jane?”
He nodded. “Aye, on her last two voyages.”
“When she captured Rody Hawk?”
Seaton’s expression hardened. “We don’t mention that name, Mr. LaCrosse. He’s bad luck. And no, that was before my time. In fact, no one who was on that voyage, except Cap’n Clift, still follows the sea.”
“My apologies,” I said. At least I wasn’t the only one leery of saying Hawk’s name aloud. “Lots of new rules to remember.”
He smiled. “Aye, it’s true. But as the man who’s paying our way, I suppose you can follow or not any rules you please.”
“I’ll still try to be less disruptive.”
Seaton saluted me. “Aye, sir, it’d be much appreciated.”
The conversation had caused a lot of my anger to burn away, but it grew hot again when I heard Jane’s laugh on the wind. I went along the rail past the windlass and joined the two captains at the bowsprit.
Clift turned to greet me. “Good morning, Mr. LaCrosse,” he said. His dark tan made his white teeth startling.
“Morning, Captain Clift. Any imminent action?”
“Not yet. Possibly tomorrow at the earliest. We’re still not in the real shipping lanes, so unless we come across a pirate skulking out of his hiding place, we have the luxury of peace and quiet.”
“I guess I can stand the wait.”
“You seem to be able to stand anything that’s necessary, Mr. LaCrosse.”
“I imagine my job is kind of like yours. Days of boredom punctuated by moments of total panic.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “That’s it exactly.”
I turned to Jane. Smiling, I said, “May I speak with you for a moment? In private?”
“Sure,” she said. “Excuse us, Dylan.”
“Certainly,” Clift said. And once again, I caught the moment that I’d seen now at least once a day since we left port. Clift smiled at Jane, then looked quickly away. He seemed to be changing clothes internally, putting on a different face for Jane than for everyone else. The “Jane face” wasn’t that different from his regular demeanor, and if I hadn’t caught on to the moment he switched, I might never have noticed. I had asked neither of them about it, because I could interpret it for myself: Captain Clift had it bad for ex-Captain Argo.