“Bags open, pockets out. You know the drill,” barked a hard-faced officer as I hauled myself up a surprisingly rickety ladder and over a dented railing. And so my first view of the celebrated Nightbreaker was a scuffed steel deck – and a good dozen enforcer types who surrounded me, guns at the ready.

I saluted crisply. “Yes, ma’am!”

Copying the sailor ahead of me, who was getting searched by a different group, I dropped my overnight bag and flipped the flap all the way back. Hands up, I rose slowly, stepped away, and turned all my pockets inside out. They were empty.

The officer nodded at the enforcers. One of them patted me down thoroughly, while another squatted by the bag and rummaged through it. Beneath all the dirty laundry and used toiletries, he found a stack of, shall we say, adult magazines that the bag’s real owner was planning to sell to his frustrated shipmates. When the enforcer hesitated and looked up at the officer, I sucked in a breath, feigning anxiety.

The officer just sighed very slightly and shook her head.

The enforcer stood. “All good, ma’am.”

The one who’d patted me down reported, “All good here too.”

“You’re clear. Next!”

Hastily gathering up “my” things, I scooted out of Faith’s way, then looked around curiously for relics of the Nightbreaker’s wooden sailing ship heritage. You probably had to be a sailor to spot them though: To me, the leviathan hunter was all modern steel and electroplasmic lights and cutting-edge technology.

From the shadow of a monstrous ballista, Ash hailed me. “Wasn’t shore leave relaxing?” he called, waving me over. “I feel so invigorated! If it weren’t the middle of winter, I’d say we head out again and hunt more leviathans!” For emphasis, he patted one of the ballista’s supports, right where a giant claw had gouged a jagged line across the steel.

Running a finger along the gash, I rather thought that now I understood why the Hadrakin refused to rent their telepaths to the Iruvian leviathan hunters. “I could have done with a longer shore leave,” I grumbled, making sure that nearby sailors (but not officers) could hear me. “I was just getting my land legs back.”

“There you are!” Materializing beside us, Faith slung her bag onto the deck and cast a quick, appraising glance up and down the ballista. Her gaze lingered on a bolt the size of a gold coin, which Mylera had told us to remove in order to loosen the harpoon lock. “Shall we go put our things away?”

“No, let’s wait for them,” I said, tipping my head towards the sailors who were getting searched next. “We can all go together.”

Playing along, Ash agreed, “That’s right, he never finished telling us that story – ”

We weren’t the only ones watching the inspections with great interest: Harrington, who oversaw the confiscated goods locker, was scrutinizing each returning sailor and comparing him or her to his hazy memories of the ones who’d approached him with an intriguing proposal. During his own shore leave, we’d tracked him down in a Docks pub and explained that we wanted to smuggle drugs onto the ship. In exchange for a cut, he’d agreed to leave a certain locker unlocked on a certain day. Then we’d gotten him so drunk that he’d forgotten which of the two thousand sailors on the Nightbreaker he’d spoken to.

On the appointed day, we’d ambushed three sailors who were staggering out of a brothel and complaining about having to return to the ship so soon. We knocked them out, stole their gear, and left them tied up in a Coalridge warehouse where factory hands should find them before they starved to death. Clad in their faded navy-blue uniforms, we then proceeded to the Docks to join their nine grumpy comrades. While Ash and I distracted them with tales of our shore-leave exploits, Faith slipped assorted weaponry and sabotage devices into three of their bags.

Now we were waiting just as eagerly as Harrington for the officers to find the contraband.

“What’s this?” demanded an enforcer. He held up a pack of what was very obviously Black Lotus.

“Drugs,” spat the officer. “Take him to the brig.”

“What?” protested our victim. “That’s not mine! I don’t know how that got there!”

Ignoring him, a pair of enforcers seized his arms and marched him away. Face bright with triumph, Harrington leapt forward to confiscate the bag. Only I noticed that the pack of Black Lotus vanished into his pocket.

To the next sailor’s confusion, his bag clanked oddly when he put it down.

One look inside, and the officer’s face went grim. “Mutineers.”

“Wait!” sputtered our second victim, stunned by the miniature armory inside his own luggage. “I’ve never seen that in my life!”

“Take him to the brig!” the officer ordered, and the enforcers hauled him off too.

They searched the remaining bags with extreme care and uncovered one more “mutineer,” whereupon the two officers rushed to the bridge to report, and Harrington gleefully bore his trophies away.

We followed.

Belowdecks, in the agreed-upon locker, we found the bags and grabbed our gear, concealing as much as we could under the uniform jackets. As part of her preparations, Faith had “stuffed some spectacularly savage specters,” as she put it, into delicate glass vials, and now Ash tucked a few into his pockets. Grandfather, regrettably, had to stay behind for now because only officers carried swords, but I planned to retrieve it before we executed the main part of the score.

Just as we shut the locker, klaxons started to blare all over the ship, echoing unbearably loudly off the steel surfaces. Running feet and shouts filled the hallway outside.

“Duty stations! All hands to duty stations!” someone bawled.

Slipping out of the locker room, we melted into the stampede and asked urgently, “What’s going on?” “What happened?” “Is there a leviathan?”

“They caught mutineers – ” began a sailor.

“No talking!” bellowed an officer, cutting her off. “Get to your stations!”

When we poured back onto the deck, we found absolute chaos. Flanked by heavily-armed enforcers, officers shouted orders that were drowned out by the din of four thousand boots tramping across steel. Two thousand (minus three) sailors zigzagged and practically bowled one another over as they ran to their stations before they got accused of mutiny too.

Gambling that no one would notice an extra person in all the confusion, Faith attached herself to a detail of five sailors and an officer who were stationed by the ballista we planned to sabotage.

When I hesitated, wondering if I should join her, an officer roared right in my face, making me jump, “Where’s your station? Get to your station!”

“I – I – ” I stuttered helplessly, clutching my head as if I had a massive hangover. “I just got back, and I – ”

Darting out of the mob, Ash caught my arm. “Over here!”

He tugged me to a detail by the railing, which was overseen by a laxer officer who let us whisper among ourselves.

“What happened?”

“Do you know what happened?”

“I heard that – ”

“ – found mutineers!”

“Mutineers? Who?”

From the sailor’s tone, she might have been more interested in joining than condemning them, and obviously the officer thought so too. “You’re patching the hull today,” he ordered. “Less talking, more working!”

Apparently, Lord Strangford had decided that the best way to keep an eye on his crew while he hunted down the remaining conspirators was to put us to work in full view of the officers. This – on top of the long, lonely months at sea; the sudden lockdown; and the abbreviated, staggered shore leaves – was not a popular decision.

Under cover of all the grumbling as our duty detail strapped on harnesses, Ash and I exchanged frustrated glances.

We won’t even be on the ship, I hand-signed.

Ash frowned slightly. We’ll have to watch for a chance to get away.

Just before I lowered myself over the railing, I glimpsed Faith sidling over to the ballista. And then I was dangling over the side of the ship, swinging at the end of my harness and fumbling open my toolbox a beat behind everyone else.

Shockingly, standing around on the docks and idly watching the sailors was not adequate preparation for patching a hull ourselves. To cover our incompetence, Ash and I threw ourselves into the task with great energy while spinning out improbable yarns about our shore-leave adventures. That, in turn, prompted our teammates to boast about all the debauchery they planned to engage in as soon as they got off this cursed ship, and so hull repairs proceeded with rather less efficiency than might have been expected.

At some point, one of the sailors groped around in her toolbox and exclaimed in disgust, “I’m out of sealant!” She scowled at her harness, obviously reluctant to unbuckle and then re-buckle it all over again.

At once, Ash offered, “I’ll go.”

“Oh, thank you!” she exclaimed.

But when he passed his own toolbox to her and climbed back over the railing, calling out, “Sir, we need more parts!” our officer’s eyes narrowed.

“Wait,” he said slowly and suspiciously. “You came on board with the mutineers.” Grabbing Ash’s arm, the officer started to march my crewmate towards the brig.

Frantically hauling myself back on deck and stripping off my harness, I rushed after them. “Sir, sir! It’s too dangerous. I’ll be back-up.”

The officer stopped short and eyeballed me too, although he didn’t arrest me on sight. “You’re right.” He snapped his fingers at three nearby enforcers. “You and you: Stay here and watch them.” He pointed over the railing at the rest of our duty detail. To the third enforcer: “You’re with me.”

The man fell in right behind me, making the back of my neck prickle.

That’s okay, Ash reassured me. They’ll be dead soon. As in, we’ll kill them.

As we passed the ballista, I slanted a questioning look at Faith, who quirked a tiny smile in response. I took that to mean she’d successfully sabotaged the ballista. So good to know that something was going to plan.

As soon as we entered a cramped, deserted corridor that forced us to bunch up, Ash started confessing. “Sir, sir,” he said urgently, “there’s something very dangerous here that you need to know about….”

He had the officer’s full attention now. Slowing down ever so slightly, I drifted to the back, planning my attack.

“I didn’t want to do it,” Ash babbled, as if he couldn’t hold back the words any longer. “Please believe me, I didn’t want to do it! I wouldn’t have done it, but Timoth Bow– I mean, a man, a man, is holding my sister hostage to force me to do it. And now I’m risking my sister’s life, but I have to tell you – because this is too important – it’s too big of a threat not to tell you….”

In a tense voice, the officer stated, “Timoth Bowmore is threatening this ship.”

Obviously, Ash had decided that the pair would make useful witnesses. “Yes! Yes! He’s planning to explode the bridge. Not Bowmore Bridge, the bridge of the Nightbreaker. That’s what he told me to do….”

By now, the enforcer, too, had forgotten all about me.

There. Under a broken electroplasmic light lay a large wrench, abandoned during the rush to duty stations.

Snatching it, I leaped forward and struck the two men sharply on the backs of their heads, knocking them out. They slumped to the floor, and Ash and I hauled them into the closest compartment, bound and gagged them, and left them there to wait until such time as they were rescued and could accuse Timoth Bowmore for us.

Then we rushed back to the locker room, picked up Grandfather, and hurried to the cargo hold to rendezvous with Faith.

Meanwhile, back on deck, Faith was trying to allay her own officer’s suspicions so she could escape. Feigning alarm, she reported, “Ma’am, the bolt that locks the harpoon in place is missing!”

The officer came over immediately. “Where?”

“Right here, see? It looks like it was removed. I wonder if the saboteurs did it!”

Convinced that Faith couldn’t possibly be the culprit, the officer dispatched her to get a replacement. As Faith trotted off, the officer started laying into the rest of her duty detail, demanding which one of them did it.

When Faith joined us, Ash and I were lurking behind a stack of empty barrels that had held hardtack. (I knew because not even the ship’s rats wanted to touch those crumbs.) Darting behind some crates, Faith announced, “You two go ahead. I’ll just stay here and bemoan the lack of pink in these outfits.” With a pout, she plucked at the blue fabric.

Without a word, Ash and I proceeded towards the section of the hold where the leviathan blood was walled off from everything else because it was toxic, corrosive, and explosive. Mylera had told us to look for a state-of-the-art monitoring station with fancy displays and a big red button, which we found easily enough. Through a little window in the door, we made out the forms of two technicians.

“Okay,” whispered Ash. “Here’s the plan: we wait for someone to go in and slip a ghost vial into their pocket.” He passed me one, clearly expecting me to do it.

I eyed the vial with distaste but took it.

After some waiting, a sailor approached, bearing a message for the technicians. He looked at me oddly but opted not to confront me about loitering, although I could tell that he planned to report me as soon as he entered the station. But that was fine. As he passed, I reverse-pickpocketed the vial into his coat pocket.

The door swung shut behind him.

Blue light flared inside the monitoring station. Muffled, panicked shouts broke out, and one of the technicians strained towards the big red button.

Along came Faith, traipsing right up to the door so she could peek through the window. She grinned at the chaos. “I thought it wouldn’t take much excitement to make them explode,” she remarked.

All of a sudden, the specters dove into the sailors, who froze in place as if shocked by a bolt of electroplasmic energy. A split second later, glowing blue, their faces distorted with inhuman glee, all three of them burst out of the station and shot up the stairs.

“Uh,” I said, looking after them, “did we want that to happen?”

Ash shrugged. “They can sow more chaos.”

Fair enough.

Leaving Faith outside, Ash and I rushed into the monitoring station, which was basically a cramped office with two chairs, an instrument panel, a complicated thermometer array for checking the leviathan blood temperature, and a speaking tube connected to the bridge. Behind a thick observation window, the curved sides of massive steel drums gleamed sullenly.

Seating himself in front of the speaking tube, Ash began to practice his desperate-technician voice. “Sir, the numbers are off the charts! I’ve never seen them so high!” and “What should we do? What are the admiral’s orders? There’s no way we can get this under control!”

Improvisational theater obviously piqued Faith’s interest. The door opened a crack and in she sidled. Poking curiously at the dials, she added her own, amused voice to the charade: “The fuel and recording rooms are filling with electroplasmic blood! We’re fleeing because it’s not safe for us here. We don’t want to die. If the blood spreads any further, it might hit something that sparks and take out the entire ship. But, unfortunately, we are prevented by our human physiology from getting close enough to the leak to fix it.”

Thank goodness we were still in rehearsals. “Won’t that make Strangford abandon ship instead of coming down here?” I objected.

She didn’t bother to acknowledge that, but she did cry out in anguish, “If only there were somebody with electroplasmically-charged blood who is immune to the effects of this! Who can come here and save everyone! And the ship!” In an exaggeratedly earnest tone, she pointed out, “It’s just the sort of situation that only he can deal with.”

And it was true that Lord Strangford loved the Nightbreaker.

We ran our lines a few more times, tweaking the phrasing and tone until they sounded plausible.

“All right,” said Ash. “Are we ready?”

Faith plopped into the chair next to me, leaving me to hover awkwardly by the thermometers. “Yes,” she said with a sweet smile in my direction. Then she contorted her face into a horrified expression for the performance.

“All right.” Ash activated the speaking tube and pointed it between the three of us. “Sir! Sir!” he called into it. “Something is terribly wrong with the leviathan blood!”

A garbled male voice demanded, “What happened? Report.”

“The numbers are off the charts! The temperature is a hundred degrees – ”

“No!” I cut him off frantically. “One-nineteen now! And it keeps rising! And the pressure too!”

“One-nineteen – ” Ash started.

Faith yelled, “One of the drums looks like it’s bulging! It’s going to explode!”

“We have to get out of here!” I shouted into the speaking tube.

The connection broke off abruptly. Moments later, the abandon-ship bell started to ring, and the sounds of running boots and shouts drifted to us from above. But before we could exit the monitoring station for the next part of our plan, six would-be heroes burst through the door, clearly intending to sacrifice themselves to save the ship.

At the sight of a perfectly normal instrument panel and perfectly normal drums of blood, they stuttered to a halt and stared around the station, bewildered.

“Get down!” Ash yelled at Faith and me. Diving under a table, he whipped out his lightning hook, aimed at one of the steel drums, and shot a lightning bolt straight at it.

The drum exploded. The shock wave shattered the observation window, driving jagged pieces of glass and steel through the sailors like so many spears. They collapsed to the floor, bleeding and motionless.

Now, indeed, dark leviathan blood was beginning to ooze down the sides of the steel drums, sizzling and blistering the metal. We hurled ourselves out of the monitoring station and slammed the door behind us.

“We need to get to the ballista,” Ash gasped, already poised to sprint out of the cargo hold.

“You two go,” I ordered. “I’ll drive Strangford up there.”

He and Faith vanished. Meanwhile, I found a hiding place about midway between the stairs and the monitoring station, settled down with Grandfather at the ready, and waited for my quarry. I didn’t have to wait long.

Calm, measured footsteps announced his arrival, and then the admiral descended the stairs, one step at a time. Even more than Djera Maha, who had, after all, grown up in extreme poverty, Lord Thaddeus Strangford projected an air of complete confidence and authority. Everything about his bearing showed that he was in command, had always been in command, and knew that he always would be in command. Even after all those years of observing the Iruvian Patriarchs, I still felt reluctantly impressed by the old admiral.

Not noticing me, Strangford proceeded straight into the monitoring station, where he found no alarms or warning lights – but did see six dead crewmen and a single exploded drum. Face set in a suspicious scowl, he stalked back out and up the stairs.

Giving him a good head start in case Ascendency granted superhuman hearing, I tailed him up a couple levels to a cabin deck, where he exited the stairwell. At that point, I started to worry that he would simply rip through the hull and jump out right here, instead of going all the way to the top where Ash, Faith, and the sabotaged ballista awaited. Darting through the empty cabins, I locked down all the bulkheads, making the top deck the path of least resistance.

When he reached the first bulkhead and found it locked, Strangford hesitated, rattling it and debating with himself whether he should tear it down and escape now – but expose his secret in the process. After a heart-stopping moment (for me, anyway), he dropped his hand and turned back towards the stairwell.

Scrambling ahead of him, I burst onto the top deck a split before he did, and dove into the shadows to hide. Strangford strode right past me, making a beeline for the railing.

Behind the sabotaged ballista, Ash slowly began rotating the harpoon point towards our target, trying not to make any noise.

I could help with that. Drawing Grandfather, I leaped out and ambushed Strangford, trying to herd him in range of the ballista. The Ascendent clearly thought he could swat me aside like a fly, but the fragment of Ixis inside the sword distracted and slowed him just enough. My counterattack caught him off guard, and I managed to drive him right in front of Ash.

A dull thunk.

A thick steel harpoon, trailing a snakelike rope woven from steel strands and wound round and round with clear tubing, shot out of the ballista.

It rammed straight into Strangford’s chest, pierced his spine, and jutted out his back. Blood welled up around the harpoon, but instead of pulling it out, he lunged forward, seized Ash bodily, and ran for the railing.

Ash flailed and pounded on Strangford’s arms and chest, but the Ascendent only tightened his hold, squeezing the air out of my crewmate’s lungs.

Now Faith made her move. Sprinting to the ballista, she started cranking it rapidly, playing out the chain so the harpoon head wouldn’t get ripped out of Strangford. A vacuum pump whirred to life, and all of a sudden, dark red fluid was streaming through the tube into a vat by the ballista.

At the same time, I rammed Grandfather back into its sheath, bolted across the deck, made a running leap, and snatched Ash out of Strangford’s arms right as the Ascendent sailed over the railing.

We landed on the deck with a thud. As soon as we rolled to a stop, we scrambled to our feet, dashed to the railing, and looked down. Although I half-expected to see a bloody harpoon swinging idly back and forth, there dangled Strangford’s body, hanging limply halfway down the side of the Nightbreaker. The death bell didn’t ring, as usual, but the rumble of the vacuum pump and the blood that flowed steadily into the vat told me everything I needed to know.

“We did it,” I said, almost not believing my own words. “We really did it.”

Ash, Faith, and I had really just taken out one of the top three Ascendent and one of the most powerful men in Doskvol – in the Imperium, even – and were just that much closer to staving off an Iruvian invasion.

In the distance, tiny figures packed the docks. Their shouts drifted across the water to us. A lone Bluecoat whistle shrilled, but tentatively, in a way that suggested its owner wanted no part in this mess and would much prefer the leviathan hunter captains to sort it out themselves.

Thumps from the other side of the ship made me jump and whirl. Over the railing poured a horde of Skovlanders wearing bulky protective suits and carrying giant steel barrels. At a barked order in Skovic, they rushed into the stairwell. Their leader saluted Ash, who raised a hand in reply.

“Oh, by the way,” Ash announced offhandedly, “I told some people to steal lots of leviathan blood.”

“Is that Hutton?” I asked incredulously. “And the Grinders?”

If so, that explained a lot. The Grinders included a number of mutated ex-leviathan blood refinery workers who dreamed of raising an army to “liberate” Lockport.

“Yep,” said Ash. “We should leave with them.”

Somewhere in Whitecrown, a Bluecoat whistle shrilled. The owner of that one would probably be more proactive. The first Grinders started to reemerge from the hold, staggering under the weight of their barrels.

“Good idea,” I replied.

There was a clink from the ballista. Up popped Faith, tucking a bottle of blood into her bulging satchel. She grinned at my horrified expression. “Think Hutton knows where we can get some fresh mint?”