Karen Memory

Chapter Twenty-two

I woke up with a drinker’s head and the taste of vomit in my mouth, unable to feel my hands. It weren’t dark — if anything it was too damned bright, and when I tried to open my eyes I slammed ’em shut again right quick, feeling as if somebody had driven an ice pick into my brain.

I hadn’t got more than a glimpse, but I had the idea that I was in a bright, small room, maybe lit with electric arcs. I couldn’t think of anything else that would make such a dazzling light, but I also couldn’t think why anybody’d light an inside room with an arc. It was like killing ants with molten lead: significant overkill.

I moaned and tried to pull my hands down, to see if I could get some blood into them. Something rattled, and I realized they was chained up over my head.

I probably should of faked I was still out, I realized. But I had to vomit again, and I didn’t want to drown in it. It took the sort of effort I’d usually reserve for mountain climbing — if I was a mountain climber, I mean — but I managed to get my shoulder down and my knees up, and toss my chuck over the edge of the narrow metal table I was laying on without either falling off it or puking on myself any more than absolutely necessary.

They’d chloroformed me. Or maybe ether. Whatever it was, it was turning my stomach something fierce. And I still couldn’t feel my hands.

As I lay there, I came aware of a vibration coming up through the table. Like if I was on a train. But I couldn’t hear the rattle of iron wheels on iron rails or the ratcheta ratcheta noise of those wheels rolling over the joints. Maybe a barge?

Either way, I was mostly surprised I weren’t dead. Bantle’d proved in his own parlor that he had a taste for hurting women and that he wasn’t about to draw the line at permanent, long-term hurt.

I pressed my burned face to the cool metal and sighed. Maybe he didn’t like ’em once they was scarred up by his prior attentions. Or maybe he was just saving me for later.

That gave me a fresh well of sick. I tried to vomit again, but all I got for my trouble was hard stomach cramps and a thin, bitter streak of bile. Straining over the edge of the table made my shoulders hurt, and straining to vomit made my belly cramp, and I was feeling pretty miserable already when I realized that I didn’t know where Priya was.

That fear you get for a loved one — that’s a motivator like no other. Even though I couldn’t feel my hands or lower arms, I scooted my butt up, angled myself sideways with my legs off the table, and leaned on the chain so I could use it for purchase to pull myself sitting. The room spun, all right, but I didn’t dare fall over — and if I fell off the table I’d probably dislocate a shoulder, and then I’d really be useful for nothing.

I turned so the chain eased and my hands dropped into my lap. I looked down at ’em, daring my eyes to open. It still hurt like hell.

But the hands were there, and attached, and a funny pale color. I tried to wiggle my fingers and got nothing — not even a shimmer. As I watched, they pinked up again a bit, though. I decided that was a hopeful sign, that blood was flowing back into them. I flapped ’em like a dying fish thumping its tail. They hit my legs like lumps of warm meat. When they bounced on my chest, I realized that the Morgan dollar was still inside my shirt, tucked against the top of my bosom.

No sign of Priya anywhere. I was in a little whitewashed metal room, on a steel table. My feet dangled over a puddle of my own vomit, and those were the only things anywhere near.

The metal walls made me think I was on a ship. That would explain the hum that was still rising up the table legs to numb my bottom. And why that table was bolted to the floor.

I was musing on that when the door swung open.

I braced myself for Bantle, but it was just Horaz Standish. I was ashamed of myself for feeling a spike of relief. He stood there, framed, with a bucket in one hand and a stack of rags in the other, and he looked at me. Maybe pityingly? His face was hard to read.

“Well,” he said, after a minute. “You’ve looked better.”

He came up to me and — stepping around the puddle of upchuck on the floor — dipped a cloth in the bucket and wiped my face clean with lukewarm water. I bit my cheek not to scream when he touched the burns. He dropped the cloth on the floor, then repeated the process. He crouched down and wiped up the vomit, then washed the floor with rags.

When he was done, he washed his hands in the bucket, piled all the dirty rags back into it, and set it by the door.

I thought about kicking his head while he was down there, but somebody’d taken off my shoes, and it seemed like a lot of risk for a more or less Pyrrhic gesture. So I just watched while Standish cleaned up up after me and then came back.

“Before I unchain you,” he said, “you ought to know that there’s no escaping.”

“We’re on a boat,” I said. “Where are we going?”

He laughed. “We’re in a boat,” he corrected. “A submersible ship. We’re four leagues under the Sound, and all the hatches are dogged and pressure locked. You have no way out.”

“A submersible ship?”

He smiled. “Think of it as a mechanical fish.”

“It’s the Nautilus!” I cried. “He really is Captain Nemo!”

Standish looked amused. “And Peter thought you weren’t clever,” he said. “Here. Hold out your hands.”

I did, as best I could. I extended them, though they hung like dead flowers from my wrists. Standish unchained them, and I let them drop back down against my thighs. They lay against my lap like two warm, limp bladders. I tried to move them from the shoulders, and all I managed was to flop ’em against my chest and belly disgustingly.

Standish watched silently for a few moments. Then the pins and needles started and, after those, the pain.

I didn’t scream. But I did say “aaahah!” loud enough for anyone to hear it two rooms over. And I did rock back and forth on the table, huddling my arms up to my chest and kind of shaking them.

It hurt worse than my burned face, and the rocking back and forth wasn’t doing my splitting head any favors. Standish reached out and put a hand on my shoulder, ever so gently. “There, there, Miss Memery,” he said. “The pain will pass.”

And, more or less, given time, it did.

He touched my cheek gently — but not so gently the burned skin didn’t smart something awful. I jerked away and hissed.

“Pity about your face,” he said. “You were lovely.”

And a lot of good it did me. His words still smarted, though I determined to do everything possible to keep him from noticing. I hoped he’d think my stung look was just pain. Christ knows I had plenty of it.

Besides, I never met more than one man in a hundred who was ever nice to a whore except out of pity or because he wanted something. Standish had the charm, sure, and I knew Priya said he was kind, by the standards of them as work for Bantle. But he wasn’t entirely enticing me to let my guard down.

“Where’s Priya?” I asked. I’d thought about keeping mum, not letting on that I cared. But who would I think I was fooling?

“I’m going to see her next. I’ll let her know you were asking after her.” He smiled. “I convinced Peter not to just kill both of you outright, you know. You owe me, Miss Memery.”

Ah, there it was. I could do something for him. “What do you want?”

“Right now, I want you to rest and get your strength up,” he said.

Well, that could sound as ominous as I wanted to make it.“I’ll send someone with food presently.”

That, however, couldn’t sound ominous. My stomach rumbled, and I winced. I didn’t want to admit to human weakness in front of any of Bantle’s men.

At least I managed not to say, Thank you.

* * *

Standish took the bucket with him, and pretty soon the room only smelled faintly of vomit. I guess the air circulation worked pretty good, if he was telling the truth and we was in a submersible boat. In any case, it weren’t pitching up and down with the waves the way a boat on the surface would.

The food came. The seaman who brought it was a white man, with high cheekbones and dark eyes. I tried talking to him, but he just shook his head and muttered, “No English,” with a heavy accent. I might could have tried to brain him with the bowl, but then where would I go? Besides, there was another one in the corridor outside.

It weren’t anything I’d eaten before — some kind of gritty tan grain, boiled, with turnips and mushrooms in it and a scrambled egg. I wondered if this were the sort of food Priya had grown up with. From her descriptions, I had expected more spices.

Unfamiliar or not, I ate it and didn’t fuss. I figured if they wanted me dead they wouldn’t waste poison when they could just drown me. And now that my belly had settled from the ether or the chloroform or whatever they’d used, I was ravenous.

I figured that since Standish hadn’t mentioned Merry Lee or Marshal Reeves that maybe meant they’d gotten away clean. Which meant they was looking for us. Which meant I had all the reason in the world to stay alive and stay strong.

After I ate, I slept on that narrow table again, wishing I was wearing girl clothes. I could have used my top layer of skirts as a blanket, if I had any. And to cover my eyes from the glare of that awful, hissing electric light.

I was awakened by a terrible lurching and a horrible series of thuds that reverberated through the whole hull. I clutched the edges of the table to keep from being pitched bodily to the floor.

Well, of course I thought of Mr. Verne again and his Nautilus. Which was more like a narwhal, when it come right down to it — the Nautilus had a screw on its nose, a sort of augur that it used to rip open the bellies of enemy ships so they would founder and sink.

Maybe this Nemo had built his ship to be like the Nautilus in addition to taking the captain’s name. Or maybe Mr. Verne has somehow heard about this Nemo and his submersible and put them into his book wholesale.

I hoped not.

I paced the room then, tried the door, tried to climb up to the ventilation shaft. I scrambled up, but it was too narrow for my shoulders. And I didn’t hear anything down it but the deep hum of machines.

So I laid my head back down on my arms, then, 100 percent certain that I no longer knew what to think, and I hoped like hell Merry and the Marshal would come for us quick.

* * *

Some time went by. Having no clock and no light but the electric arc, I’d be hard-pressed to say how much time, except I was getting that desperate for a toilet. And that thirsty, too, because bodies is perverse and a trial. My face had settled into a sharp kind of itching, and I spent most of my time trying not to pick and peel at it.

I discovered I could use the polished steel of the table as a sort of clumsy mirror, and when I poked my face in it I could tell that those soft white bulges along my jaw was blisters. I didn’t look forward to when they popped and peeled and left raw red behind ’em, so I tried not to poke at ’em too much. Anybody who’s ever had a blister can tell you how well that went.

In what might of been the morning, the man with the dark eyes and no English brought me a bucket, a cup of water, and another bowl of mush. He had the decency to turn his back while I used the bucket, too, though at that point I wouldn’t of thought much of dropping my trousers and peeing on his foot. If I could aim like a boy, I might of even tried it.

I drank the water and ate the mush, and he took the things away again. I commenced to my non-sleep pastime, which was pacing in circles around the table, twiddling my thumbs.

Thumb twiddling is harder than it looks, it turns out. Unless you go pretty slow, your thumbs have a tendency to brush together. But I got pretty good at it after what I figure was an hour or so.

Some more time later, Horaz Standish came back in.

His timing was good enough to make me wonder if there were spyholes in the walls, or those half-silvered mirrors you get in some whorehouses so people can spy on the clientele. Madame doesn’t hold with such chicanery, but I know there’s them that do.

I’d worn myself to a frazzle with the pacing, but every time I sat still for more than a moment the anxiousness started spinning around in me like an unhinged gyroscope until I felt like bits was going to start flinging off me in all directions. So even though I’d been watching the door like a mouse in front of a cathole, I still jumped half out of my skin when it opened.

He came in all mild, like before. But what I didn’t like was that he had two big seamen with him, dressed like they fell out of a burlesque about the Happy Sailor, white shirts and bulging arms and little blue neckerchiefs and all.

They didn’t look happy, though. Their hair was cropped off into brown-blond bristles. One had a cauliflower ear and a low forehead. The other was balding at the temples and had a flattened nose and was missing a couple of fingers. Neither one of ’em looked as if they was from India.

I turned to face them. At least the pacing had dried off the parts of my clothes that had still been wet and clammy when I woke up. It’s one way to keep warm. And it ain’t too cozy in a submersible.

In my head, when I was thinking about this moment, I’d rehearsed all sorts of clever things I might say. I’d wracked my brains, trying to come up with some bit of badinage worthy of Calamity Jane. But I looked Horatio Standish in the eye, and all that came out was, “Can I be of some assistance to you gentlemen?”

“These aren’t gentlemen,” Standish said. “They’re Cossacks.”

Then he did something that purely blindsided me, though looking back now, I can’t tell you that I know why I didn’t see it coming. It was just that he was so polite, even working for Bantle. And in my defense, I was so busy being surprised by my realization that this was a Russian submersible, and that whoever Bantle was working for was a Russian agent, I didn’t have much thinking space left over to be spotting other stuff in advance.

Horaz Standish pulled a riding crop out of his boot and slashed me once hard across the burned cheek with it.

Reader, I ain’t never felt a thing that hurt like that before.

I rocked over sideways and then went down on my knees. Or would of done, except the table caught me across the floating ribs and the next thing I knew I was on the floor on my back, a cramp in my midsection I couldn’t breathe around, and sticky-slick heat welling over the fingers I had clutched to my face. I stared up at Standish and his thugs, wondering if I was going to die of not being able to inhale.

Standish eyed the whip thoughtfully, gave it a snap as if he was shaking it off, and slid it back into his boot. “That’s just so you have something to think about,” he said. “For later.”

He turned and said something in what I assumed was Russian that might of been, “Now help her up, lads.”

So they did, and they were the only reason I stayed standing, because when they pulled me to my feet the world went black around the edges and nausea cramped me. I still couldn’t breathe, and the idea of vomiting when I couldn’t pull a breath in was so scary I started to yank against the sailors’ grip. But I couldn’t manage much more than a kitten thrash, and at least kittens have claws.

One of the sailors thumped me on the back — hard — and somehow that started me up breathing again. Released the cramp or something. The air came in with a whoosh and went right back out again on a scream. I ain’t never been much of a screamer — but for that incident right then I made an exception. I gave another yank against the sailors, but I might as well have been pulling at iron bars set in stone. They were big, and as hard as a plowhorse’s haunches.

I kicked at Standish, since they had my arms and all. He caught the ankle and gave it a fond squeeze before letting go of me again.“Don’t worry, Miss Memery. We’ll have plenty of time together later. Why do you think I argued so hard to keep you and your friend alive?”

He touched my bruised and burned and split-open cheek, and I tell you true — though I didn’t mean to, I shivered. I thought of the girl in the alley, tossed in with the trash. I thought about Priya saying that things were always better when Standish was in town but that he traveled a lot. Because I realized something — something I should have comprehended as soon as he pulled that crop out of his boot. The Devil can quote scripture, after all. And monsters can say “please” and “thank you” same as any mother’s son.

“How did you like the Indian Territory?” I asked. “Lose a cuff link there?”

His eyes narrowed. I might of regretted my bravado if it hadn’t of been the only thing keeping me on my feet. I thought about this barn cat Da used to have that run off a brown bear once out of pure cussedness, and I made up my mind to be like her. Then he smiled and pulled out his crop again and tapped me lightly on the tip of the nose with it.

I flinched, all right. But then I made myself pick my chin up and smile right back at him.

“Oh,” he said. “I’m going to like breaking you.”

* * *

I had expected a long walk, sort of tromping through endless corridors. Instead it was just a few yards, and we did it in a sort of hunched-over shuffle because the corridors was that narrow and short. It was uncomfortable enough for me. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for Ivan and Boris, the two Russian sides of beef. But in all honesty, I didn’t mind seeing them suffer.

That short walk seemed long enough, with me dwelling on what Standish had said about breaking, and me thinking about my da and Priya and the ones you can’t break. I didn’t think I was one of those. But I wondered if I could make myself be, if I knew that no matter what he was going to kill me anyway.

Either Ivan or Boris stepped forward to open a hatch, and the other one guided me through it by my elbows. I’d expected … some sort of control room, I guessed. A bridge, right out of the illustrations for Monsieur Verne’s book. But it was just a narrow room with a long table in it, and a lingering smell of onions and sour cream.

My stomach growled. Da would say that nothing in the history of ever has upset my appetite. And then he’d point out that Chinese recorded history is three thousand years long.

Endure this, I thought. And you’ll be seeing him soon. And Mama, too.

Some would say a whore don’t have no expectation of Heaven. I’d say, if she gives value for cash, she’s got a better shot at God’s blessing than your average banker.

Jesus loved Mary Magdalene. He kicked over tables when He met a moneylender.

Well, that made me feel so much immeasurably better about everything that I was just about ready to trust to Providence and commend my soul into the hands of the Almighty — because whatever the preachers say, I know and you know that the flesh ain’t His concern and He don’t take no truck with what befalls it — when the door at the far end of the room opened up and another set of Boris and Ivan so like my own I could only tell ’em apart by hairline walked in, escorting Priya.

And it occurred to me that Da and Mama might be waiting for me … but whatever happened to Priya, if her religion was as right as mine, she was coming around for another cycle on her great wheel of being and me, I was going to Heaven or maybe Hell.

Well, dammit. If I had any say in the matter, I wasn’t going anywhere without a chance at a good long life with Priya first.

She looked up at me, and even across the room I saw her mouth tighten. At least she didn’t seem to be any more banged up than when I had saw her last.

I resolved then and there to do what it took to keep Horatio Standish’s affections to myself for as long as possible. I wondered if I knew what I was getting into. Thinking about that poor girl cut to ribbons in the trash, I decided I probably had no idea.

I figured Standish must have a purpose for letting Priya and me see each other, so I kept my face as blank as I could. She stared at me hard, then let her gaze drop to her feet.

Boris and Ivan Mark Two brought Priya down to my end of the table. We stood side by side, not touching or talking or even acknowledging each other’s existence, though it was all I could do not to lean toward her and soak up her warmth through my skin. She made me stronger and better just standing there.

That door she’d come in through opened again, and this time the person who walked in looked like a captain. He wore a black wool coat, double-breasted with silver buttons. A high collar embroidered with silver bullion and scarlet edging lifted his chin. His cuffs were embroidered, too, and his epaulets were gold, with a design of an anchor topped by a two-headed, crowned eagle on each one.

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.

The submersible shuddered and bucked. I realized we’d latched on to the Daylily. Those huge arms was thrashing, denting the steamer’s steel sides. I saw rivets pop, the plating buckle. A man fell past, arms pinwheeling, tossed from the deck. I couldn’t look. I couldn’t neither look away.

“Please God,” I said. Priya muttered something in her own language. She squeezed me so hard my fingers went white.

The Os’minog’s arms was ripping through the Daylily’s hull, burrowing inside, dragging out bundles of cargo and tossing them into the snapping metal beak. It had to be some kind of a water lock, I realized: there was piracy going on here.

The man operating the arms made it look like a dance. He had slipped his hands into metal mesh gloves, and he moved ’em like the conductor in the orchestra pit at the big green opera house downtown. Every time his hand jabbed, a tentacle jabbed, too. Every time his fish clenched, a coil latched around some fixture of the Daylily and ripped it from its moorings, then tossed it out to sea. It was piteously awful and piteously easy, and my cut and burned cheek scorched from the salt of the tears leaking over it.

It was over soon.

There was a moment of silence, a moment of bobbing wreckage and bodies going still in the froth and oil slick of the present battle, during which the bridge grew hushed and I almost thought that these men quietly giving and following lethal orders might regret what they had done as a military necessity. When all eyes were on that forward port.

That moment ended when the captain, who had been leaning toward the scene of the massacre, congratulated his crew and gave the order to shield the port, stow the arms, and submerge. Then he stood up, and turned to us with the glow of a man well satisfied. “What do you think of my beautiful machine?”

I champed my jaw, my whole mouth wet with nausea. I couldn’t talk. I shook my head.

Priya could. “I think you’re a monster.”

The captain smiled. “I so rarely get to share these triumphs with anyone who will appreciate them. But it doesn’t matter what you see, does it, ladies? You’ll never get the chance to tell anyone.”

I drew myself up and found my voice. “You think President Hayes won’t go to war to keep Alaska?”

“Your government has no resources with which to fight another war, currently. We can’t drive the Americans out of Alaska. But we can make it too costly for you to stay. Who’s to argue with a cholera epidemic? And once the country is vacant…” He shrugged expressively. “It’s open to settlement, isn’t it?”

“That’s horrible.”

“Ah,” he said. “But my country is only using the tactics pioneered by yours. Have you not heard of the use of blankets tainted with smallpox against the native tribes of North America by the English settlers here?”

I didn’t do much more, quite frankly, than gape at him. Which seemed to make him think the argument was won. He cocked one of those saturnine eyebrows at me and winked while my stomach writched around inside me like I’d swallowed a pint of live worms.

“I thought you’d see it my way. Good evening, ladies.” He added something in Russian to the seamen, who took us by the elbows and drew us away. I tried to think of something to shout after him, but words deserted me, and by now you’ll know that that don’t happen too much.

I was staggering when they pushed us down the corridor. I’d like to blame it on exhaustion and injury, but I think it was the pure horror of what I’d just seen dragging at my feet. So many dead. With no chance to do nothing about it. Even if they could swim, anyone who jumped into the sea and avoided the wreck and the killer arms and the thrashing would freeze to death in minutes.

At least I’ll say this for Ivan and Boris. They wasn’t any meaner than they had to be. And after Bantle and Standish and Nemo, that seemed near enough to a kindness, just then.