Free Deathlands 118: Blood Red Tide by James Axler

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.
    Under Sabbath’s captaincy she had been the Hand of Doom, and he had ruled her with an iron hand.
    Oracle had returned her to glory and to the volunteer ship she had been for more than a century. Sabbath stared up into his junk’s rigging. The sails of his three masts were fully battened, and the bamboo slats spreading through the black, lateen rigged sails looked like the fins of a great fish. Sabbath had exaggerated the effect by painting the battens sheaths white like bones. She was a beautiful ship, and big, but she could not match the Glory ’s sailing ability. Ironman carried a respectable weight of shot, but her dramatically upswept hull and compartmentalized chambers were not ideal for blaster decks. As far as Sabbath knew, the Glory was the only perfect ship still afloat, and skydark might fall again before the hand of man could ever make another like her. “He’s heading south.”
    Dorian snapped his massive balisong shut and rose. “The Brazils! A hungry and thirsty journey in his condition but plenty of villes! He’s fast enough to make sail for it, get resupplied and...” Dorian trailed off. “Then what? He can’t make Africa or Europe from there. What is left but to come back into our teeth?”
    “He’s heading south,” Sabbath repeated.
    Blue was shocked as she saw it. “He’s going to round the horn.”
    “In the southern winter?” Dorian was appalled. “Rad-madness! Triple-stupe bastard!”
    Blue admired the gall of it. “If there is one ship that could do it...”
    “There are two I know of,” Sabbath said.
    “Aye, Father,” Blue agreed. “I can—”
    “The War Pig can chase him around the horn.” Sabbath corrected.
    Blue bit her lip. Dorian stopped short of strutting like a rooster across the stern. “Aye, Father! I can!”
    “And chase him you will, but you’ll not catch him, nor try to.”
    Dorian tapped his double hilts in his palm. “No?”
    “No, you’ll push him. Give him no rest or respite. Stay under sail down the south. He will outpace you, but when you hit the Horn? While he is tearing sails and snapping spars in the storms, you drop sail and go to your coal. Again, don’t try to catch him. Push him. Push him to breaking with his skeleton crew watch on watch, breaking with the scurvy, hunger and despair, and then push him to me.”
    Dorian smiled like a child pulling the wings off a fly. “You and sister Blue will take the Northwest Passage.”
    “It’s summer, sweet winds up the Deathlands east and no better sailing across the Great White North. With luck we beat the chem storms and have even better winds down the Deathlands west into the Cific. Oracle has never sailed outside the South Cific before. He’ll be sailing by dead reckoning and rumor. Once he rounds the Horn he’ll have to hug the western coasts, and we’ll have him.”
    Blue flipped through her chart book. Many of the maps were more than a hundred years old. The apocalypse had reshaped entire coastlines, dropped entire island chains beneath the sea and generated new ones. The Caribbean Sea was better charted than most, but beyond it, most modern charts were little more than forlorn suggestions. The fact was, like the first age of ships, vast stretches of ocean were once more uncharted. Where a modern chart read ‘Here there be monsters’ it had been written in deadly earnest. Blue collected and collated every chart she could buy, steal, copy or take in plunder. Her library took up a good portion of the captain’s cabin on the Lady . A sheet of vellum stretched from floor to ceiling on her starboard wall, and on that she laboriously pieced together her masterwork,