Prince of Outcasts (23 page)

“Pip will be fine,” Pete said. “She's as crazy as we were, but smarter with it. And she's got her mum's lucky choppers.”

They looked at each other again.
And look how many times we came within a thin hair of getting killed in spite of all that,
they both thought, and knew they shared the
thought.

H
ARBOR
OF
B
ARU
D
ENPASAR

C
ERAM
S
EA

O
CTOBER
21
ST

C
HANGE
Y
EAR
46/2044 AD

“O
h, bugger, she's sinking,” Lady Philippa Balwyn-Abercrombie said, lowering the telescope from her eye as she stood beside the wheel of the
Silver Surfer
. “That would be a bit disappointing.”

She spoke in the precise clipped tones she'd learned from her mother, who'd graduated from Cheltenham Ladies College not long before being stranded off Queensland by the Blackout. Hers was a very ancient family in Britain, stretching back to William the Conqueror's time through a long line of barons, crusaders, Cavaliers, enclosers of commons, colonial plunderers, flint-hearted oppressors of the poor, honorary members of corporate boards and general ne'er-do-wells, and she was some sort of distant cousin of the current King-Emperor.

It was an accent that exuded arrogant self-confidence even to people who didn't know the background, and she found it useful in convincing herself too. Those dulcet syllables announced for all the world to hear that a thoroughly English God, Fate and the Natural Order of Things had a thumb firmly planted on your side of the scales and that resistance was useless.

Though from what Mummy said, she had to leave England one step ahead of the
court bailiffs when she was younger than I am now, after Granddad was caught out in some financial roguery or another. I suppose they would have been glad enough to see me in Winchester now, though. Like a bloody thoroughbred mare turning up, to help with their dream of Deep England!

She'd avoided finding out by carrying on the family tradition: the grab for valuables, the inspired dive out the window and then running for the horizon herself, and now . . .

The strange ship running with all sail set into the harbor was moving far too sluggishly, given the amount of canvas on her three masts and the fine turn of her cutwater and flanks. And lying too low, with the water well above where her Plimsoll line would be if they had them where she came from. It would be a complete anticlimax if they slid beneath the surface now. Leaving nothing but survivors clinging to the mastheads by the time her ship, her variegated band of thirty bloodthirsty buccaneers, rogues, and quasi-reformed pirates and the hundred guardsmen lent by His Dithering Majesty Raja Dalem Seganing arrived to be slaughtered by the enraged Carcosans.

“Mebbe she's just heavy-laden, Pip,” Toa said, in a voice like gravel shifting in a bucket.

“Not with her pumps going like that. We'll have to get between her and the Carcosan galleys. The Raja's trebuchets won't keep those off.”

“Right, too many of them, small targets,” Toa said.

They'd already seen that, since they arrived and found themselves on the Raja's side of the local feud willy-nilly. His artillery would keep the . . . big ship . . . from getting out into the middle of the harbor, but that was about it.

She looked up at the sails; everything was set, but the land-breeze was light, just enough to fill the beige manila canvas, and the deck was nearly as steady and level as a dinner table. The motion of the ship was almost completely smooth, leaving a low creamy wake from her sharp bows. The
Silver Surfer
was about as small as a three-master could be, two hundred and fifty tons of sleek speed and longshore versatility. Unfortunately, this
was one of the occasions when something with oars or paddles had an advantage.

“Tally-ho! Helm, thus. Hands to sheets!”

She used her cane to point and saw the helmsmen spin the spokes in obedience, and bare feet thundered on the deck. She tapped one end of it on her hat to seat it more firmly and twirled it idly between her fingers. The speed gradually increased until it made a whir of cloven air. Then she released it to spin unsupported for an instant, and let one end smack into her right palm. It stung, but the show was worth it.

Kombagle at the wheel grinned like a shark at the sight, which was alarming given the boar's-tusk ornaments that curled up from his pierced nose and the vast mop of frizzy hair. The rest of the crew and the Raja's men were festooned with assorted cutlery and focused on their work, hauling on ropes to keep the sails precisely trimmed, giving the pintle-mounted prang-prangs a last check, or just crouched on the deck waiting, and giving kris and parang a last going-over with a hone. Or chewing betel . . . though the locals had at least grasped that they had to spit overside and not on her deck.

She
could
have gotten a Darwin & East Indies Trading Company crew, who'd never have dared to say boo to Pete and Fifi's honorary niece . . . but she'd preferred to find her own desperadoes, save for Toa. After she'd told them all where they were going and heard the cries of fear and rage, the two stupidest of the recruits she'd signed on before they left Darwin had taken her up on an offer of a blowie, five hundred in cash and a discharge to anyone who could shove her off the quarterdeck.

It had been a fine distraction to give the rest the chance to cheer and yell at one another as they laid side-bets, though Fool Number Two had to be pushed bodily forward by the rest after Imbecile Number One was dragged off screaming and trying to press his kneecap back together with bloodied hands. She hadn't specified any rules, except no edged weapons. Both would probably live, but not as sailors, since their legs would never work well enough again.

The rest had decided that the little rich girl should be taken seriously when she gave them an impassioned speech on how much they stood to make on shares. Drops of blood had flicked off the head of her cane as she stood on the edge of the poop deck looking down at their hungry upraised faces and waving it as a visual aid to the rhetoric.

Good advice on how to handle a lot like this, though, Mummy.

She flipped the cane again, upwards this time, and raised her hand to snap it out of the air without looking. It was of ireng wood, dense and immensely strong, an ebony the color of a moonless night sky, and just long enough to lean on with her hand down by her waist; there were grooved pear-shaped nobs on both ends cast from fourteen-carat gold, alloyed with silver and zinc, with a slogan cast into the metal in very small type:
thus I refute him
. The bowler-style hat had a low steel cap inside it. For the rest, on her mother's advice she preferred to rely on speed rather than armor and wore white cotton shorts and shirt, though there were steel toecaps on her strap-up sandals and knee and elbow pads adapted from her school's Extreme Field Hockey kit.

There were also two kukri knives hanging from the back of her belt with the handles jutting out conveniently to either side where she could whip both out simultaneously—her mother had taught her that trick too, and the knives were an inheritance. A variety of other useful and lethal devices were clipped to the belt and her suspenders, including a military slingshot with a forearm-brace and a bag of balls for it.

Everything ready,
she thought.
Except . . .

The greasepaint stick made a quick circle around her left eye, as close to mascara as she could get, and very like the striking image of some imaginary English hooligan she'd noticed in one of her mother's magazines long ago.

“So, how does that look?” she asked, blinking it at her second-incommand.

“Bloody silly, if you ask me,” Toa said. “But there's no talking to you, any more than there was with your bloody mum, both of you always up yourselves, you Pākehā are like that.”

“What, like
your
mum?” Pip said, and smiled, more a narrowing of the eyes than anything else.

“Half my mum, and anyway plain and simple's better than that makeup nonsense.”

This time she snorted. Toa was very big—a full foot on her five-six—and very broad and very brown, including his stiff roach of hair drawn back through a bone ring, his eyes and his skin. That pleasant toasty-brown skin was extremely visible since he was wearing nothing but two feathers thrust into his topknot, a broad belt of patterned flax to hold his loincloth and knives, and a sort of short string apron before and behind. Almost all the rest of him was covered with a swirling pattern of tattoos including the ones that turned his otherwise amiable coarse-featured face into a thing of brutish menace when he scowled, which was doing now. The spear he was leaning on was seven feet of the same ireng as her cane with a great palm-broad steel head polished silver-bright that made another foot of height . . . which added to the effect.

“Run up a hoist,
coming to your assistance
and
conform to my movements
. And show them the Pickled Fish,” she said.

A flag ran up the mizzen and broke out at the masthead above the colored signal pennants; a solid blue field with a white disk in the center and a fighting marlin picked out in blue in the circle, curled in an arching leap around a stylized crown. That was the compromise that had eventually been worked out, not without a little skirmishing, between the Colonelcy of Townsville and the Commonwealth of Cairns after both claimed the old Queensland state flag.

Or as I prefer to think of it, between the noble, enlightened, disciplined and civilized folk of Townsville and the brainless bogan horde of His Degenerate Idiocy Joh the Third, the you-know-what of Cairns.

She'd actually taken the banner from home, along with her mother's kukris from over the drawing-room fireplace. Usually it was run up the flagpole in front of the Station's main house every morning when the Balwyn-Abercrombies were in residence. She'd taken supplies and the six best long-range racing camels, too, but that had been strictly
practical and she firmly intended to remit their sale price when she found the time.

And the money.

And when her father stopped mucking about with technicalities about her age and forwarded the shares in the Darwin & East India Trading Company she'd inherited from her mother.

I don't actually hate Daddy, whatever I said. He just
monumentally
pissed me off. He's gotten utterly impossible since Mummy died. Grief, I suppose, but that's no excuse. I miss her too, but it hasn't driven me bonkers.

Though considering where she was now, and that she could have been sitting on the verandah at Tanumgera Station drinking a cold G&T and watching the stationhands pretend to work . . .

Pip wasn't even angry now as she watched the Carcosan praus and galleys, and her mind reeled off distances and numbers as they grew from tiny dots to centipede-walking shapes against the blue-green water. The galleys were about as long as her ship, but much more lightly built, with an open framework between the hold and the deck. You could see the slaves heaving at the oars, and the marines waiting under a thicket of spearheads and long bamboo bowstaves, and the single heavy catapult crouching on its turntable in the bows.

Also the rows of skulls along the edge of the deck.

Before she'd encountered danger she'd wondered how it would take her; being the daughter of a legendary adventurer like her mother and granddaughter of the first Colonel of Townsville put a lot of pressure on you. Mostly she found there wasn't much time for actual fear, because she was too busy and too much depended on her. She suspected this would be much harder if she was just waiting rather than in charge. Her gaze flicked the hundred or so feet of the
Silver Surfer
's deck, conscious of the looks she was getting.

The wind stirred her bobbed hair; it was tawny, since she took after her father in that respect. He'd also contributed her gray eyes and skin that took a sort of blond tan. The rest, the sharp features and wiry ferret quickness, were her mother's.

Now let's see what I am by myself,
she thought.
Or possibly what I can convincingly put on for this bunch. Be what you want to seem, eh?

Toa blew out his cheeks in relief. “Schooner's making for us,” he said.

The big foreigner
was
heading towards them, which was essential . . . but rather slowly. Pip looked behind her; the shore was over a mile that way, though part of that was because this was nearly high tide and it was shallow water all the way. Good firm sand and gently sloping, though. So if the stranger was in danger of foundering, that would be the right place to beach her . . . though it was uncomfortably close to Carcosa and the causeway. On the other hand, as she'd discovered since her arrival months ago, everything in Baru Denpasar was far too close to Carcosa. Everything on this bloody island was, for that matter. It was also all far too close to Uncle Pete's preferred type of pre-Change adventure tales as well, which had mostly featured brawny Men with Swords and toadlike Things with Tentacles.

“There we go,” Toa said quietly.

A faint
tung-whap
came over the water. Something arced out from the bows of the closest Carcosan galley, something barely visible. It landed about fifty yards short of the foreign schooner and a brief spout of white foam announced its kind.

“Roundshot,” Toa said. “Tryin' to batter 'nd dismast her.”

“They must really want that ship badly,” Pip observed.

The schooner put her nose a little further north of west for an instant, and the hard cracking sounds of catapults echoed over the calm water in a single quick ripple. They would have a slight advantage, with the sun low in the west behind them and the target to the east. Pip raised the telescope again, and the foreign schooner leapt close—they were within a thousand yards now. Close enough to see her jerk in the water slightly under the savage recoil of the weapons. They were a little higher off the water and the range had closed. . . .

“Ten,” Toa said, cocking his head. “Two heavies, bow and stern chasers, eight on the broadside.”