LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Seven

      The Caribbean

      Captain Emmanuel “Black” Sabbath stood on the incredibly high stern of his ocean-going junk Ironman and watched the island ville burn. Despite the Caribbean summer heat he wore a black frock coat, black knee breeches and hose, along with a wide-brimmed black cockle hat with a silver buckle. At his hip he carried a hooked cane knife. He drummed long fingers on the worn rosewood hilt in meditation. “Oracle’s not here.”

      Blue snarled and tapped the little island on her chart. She didn’t like being wrong. “He’d have to have come here! This is the only ville with a ropewalk within range. Much less manioc fields, a sawmill and a pig farm. He has to resupply.”

      Sabbath glanced at his daughter. Blue was pretty, black haired, and would have been beautiful like her mother except that visible blue capillaries formed a delicate, spiderweb tracery beneath every visible inch of her skin. She wore black as was the custom of many ship’s captains in this age, but her blouse and breeches were deliberately cut to hug her slender curves. Her logic was flawless. The burning ville would have been the last chance to take on cordage, lumber and salted meat and fish while allowing a window of escape. The smoke rising into the sky and the recently cleaned blade at Sabbath’s hip had determined the Glory had not come into port. “And yet he is not here, nor has he been.”

      “And we know why.” Sabbath’s son, Dorian, lolled against the taff rail. His giant, brass and ivory-handled butterfly knife made lazy, flashing figure eights in the morning sunlight. Open, the weapon was thirty inches long and was a short two-handed sword. Closed, the double handles served as his baton of office. He was tall and rangy like his father and had his mother’s good looks in masculine form without the mutations. Dorian tossed his black, unbound hair contemptuously. “Oracle’s gone all doomie again.”

      If Blue were a cat, she would have arched her back and hissed. She was a pure sailor, one of the best, and believed in little besides winds, tides, a well-oiled blaster and sharp steel. Despite being a mutant herself she had no use for prophecy or mutie visions.

      Sabbath knew better.

      He turned to his astrologer. “Oracle’s not here.”

      Ae Sook was beautiful, Korean, and when Sabbath had taken the junk years ago she had come with it. Her manicured, gaudy-red nails tapped the intricate brass astrolabe in her lap. Skydark had broken the world and compasses were often unreliable given the rampant electromagnetic anomalies, much less the irritating habit of the poles themselves to wander. Nevertheless, despite the poor, broken and battered Earth’s condition, the stars still looked down on her from their fixed positions and they could be used as tools for navigation. Ae Sook was not a doomie, but she observed the movements of the stars and planets as her mother and her mother before her and divined horoscopes. She spoke with a thick accent.

      “Captain Dorian is correct. Oracle is moved by his visions. It makes him difficult to predict. Captain Blue is also correct—in the end, the needs of Oracle’s ship must dictate his actions. If he avoided this last chance here, then we must look for the desperate and the unlikely.”

      Sabbath gazed on his available fleet. He had two ships besides the Ironman beneath his feet.

      His son’s red painted ship the War Pig was aptly named. She had two screws that had been converted to coal and that gave her the power to maneuver any way she liked and push against bad weather. But she ate that coal like a pig, and in the intervening century her steel masts and spars had been replaced by wood and she had never sailed efficiently since. Still, she carried a devastating weight of shot with her cannons, she had a very large crew of very dangerous men and muties and few could match her in a stand-up fight. Sabbath had been recently tempted to move his ensign to her and make her the flagship of his fleet, but the ship was best suited to his son’s middling sailing ability.

      Sabbath sighed as he looked on his daughter’s ship, Lady Evil. The Lady was a schooner, her flush deck, deep vee hull and two steeply raked masts were a delight; she was painted sky blue and it was just possible she was the fastest sailing ship left in the broken world. The Lady was the terror of the Caribbean and the Gulf coasts of the Deathlands, but she was small in the scheme of things. There was only one ship Sabbath knew of that could freely sail the great oceans with the weight of shot and yards of sail to ask by your leave from no pirate or baron, and that was the Hand of Glory. She had once been his. She had been his flagship. Sabbath’s fist clenched around the hilt of his butcher blade.

      Oracle had taken her from him.

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