I wonder if he would have put the man off the ship.
I wonder if I would have.
Naomi stands up. “Permission to speak requested, Captain.” She says it loud enough for everyone in the cafeteria to hear. Brig and the others pause in the doorway.
“Permission granted.”
“I want to speak on behalf of those who went with you on your first voyage,” Naomi says. “We never had a chance to thank you. For our lives.”
“That’s not necessary,” I say. The bargain I struck with the Admiral—my armor design for the lives of the crew who lost the other dredge—isn’t something I want brought up now. I motion for her to sit down but she doesn’t, so I stay standing, too. Crew members are putting down their cutlery, leaning in to listen to Naomi.
“I went on the next voyage, you know,” she says. “The first one with your armor.”
Why is she telling me this now? In front of everyone?
“The raiders tried to board several times,” she says. “We heard them, even with all the noise of the dredge. Screaming. Scratching. Pounding with fists and weapons.”
Naomi pauses. “We looked through the bridge window when we absolutely had to to navigate,” she says. “We saw a body fall down now and then. But we didn’t go outside, of course, until we got back.”
Everyone’s still, listening to Naomi. All our beautiful food is getting cold. I can smell it. I’m hungry.
“When we got out and looked at the ship,” she says, “it looked like it had rusted. There was so much blood. They spent days cleaning and oiling it so it could leave again.”
A few of the crew members look at me with a hint of fear in their eyes.
I’m not sure what to say in the silence but right then I hear the door to the kitchen area swing open. We all turn to look at Tam.
He’s carrying a cake. A ridiculous, towering white cake. Something so frivolous and rare in any circumstance, it’s ludicrous to see here on the dredge. But somehow, he managed it.
Has he heard what we’ve been saying? Tam’s eyes meet mine over the cake. I’m only a year older than he is, but he’s so young. He’s who I used to be.
“Did I forget a wedding?” I ask, and I feel the tension in the room give, and some of the crew laughs.
“We’re all married to this ship,” Tam says. “To the Lily.”
The crew laughs again, and as Tam brings the cake closer I realize it’s the dredge. He’s turned it into a confection. A fluffy, ornate cloud.
Tam has spoken lightly, but as he hands me a knife to cut the cake he makes certain to hold my gaze. In his eyes is a warning.
About what?
I shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking Tam’s like me, the way I used to be. He might be. He might not.
I plunge the knife into the cake, and then lick the cutting edge of the blade, careful not to draw blood.
“Get another knife, Cook,” I say. I don’t use Tam’s name because there’s no reason to—crew often refer to one another by our titles—but I still see a flicker of hurt in his eyes. “We might be in the belly of the dredge now, but soon it will be in ours.”
The others laugh again and in a few moments I’m slicing into the cake, and Tam hands it around, accepting their compliments and congratulatory slaps on the back. “Save some for the other shift,” he tells them.
When the bell clangs for the shift change, everyone stands up to leave. Besides Naomi and me, Chaplain Clair is the last one out. He never did have his chance to speak.
“What do you think he wanted to say?” I ask Naomi.
“I’d imagine it’s something about the Admiral,” she says. “How working for him is a great and noble endeavor.”
I pause at the door. “So we’ve already had our first would-be deserter,” I say. “Do you think there will be more?”
“Not after that,” Naomi says. “And I’ve heard the crew talking about you. They say that the Admiral trusts you. That you’re hard.”
I suppose it could be worse. I gesture for Naomi to go through the door first, but she has more to say.
“You’ve changed.” Her eyes are shrewd.
I press my lips together. Naomi wouldn’t speak to another captain this way. Her tone is respectful but she’s calling on our past, she’s speaking of personal things.
“Thank you, Second Mate,” I say. “If you’ll excuse me. I need to prepare to speak to the next group.”
“Of course,” Naomi says.
Several people have challenged me today. The chaplain put himself forward to speak without an invitation. Tam talked to me as if I were a peer. Brig hesitated when I told him to send the man off the ship. Naomi assumes that she knows me.
I need to put an end to all of it.
CHAPTER 6
I MAKE MY WAY to the small platform down on the mining deck, where I can watch the machines work and the motor run. The two crew members standing up on the platform keeping guard nod to me. “You can go down for a bit,” I say. “I’ll take a turn.”
“Thank you, Captain,” one says.
I take their position at the watch.
This is the most dangerous place on the ship.
Everyone—the would-be deserter, the Admiral himself when I first showed him the plans—worries about someone getting on the dredge through the buckets. It’s the first spot they picture a breach now that the top deck is secure and the windows on the bridge are armored. But the most vulnerable part of the ship isn’t where the gold comes in. It’s where the rocks go out—a rectangular protrusion called the tailings stacker that juts out the back of the ship. It’s high above the river and a constant stream of tailings, or slicken—rock and debris—cascades out of it as long as the dredge is mining.
I thought for a long time about how to best secure the stacker. I gave it the same outside armor I used on the rest of the ship—gears and turns that move all the time, ready to chew up and spit out.
But after that, I was stuck. The stacker has to have an opening, needs to be constantly disposing of the slicken, or we’ll sink under all the weight. Finally, I decided to trust in the sheer force of the tailings coming out and in the fact that my armor covers everything but the opening. Those two things, plus the height of the stacker from the river, means that anyone trying to board would likely die. And it wouldn’t be a good death, to be cast out with the tailings and buried, still alive, in the refuse of the ship, body crushed under what we don’t need, can’t use, and drowned in the water besides.