Go tell the Spartans passerby,
that here obedient to their laws we lie.
Epitaph carved at Thermopylae.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Some years ago.
Luck. Her survival was all to do with her luck. That much Gemma Dark knew, such a small hope to cling to, clutching the old lucky shark’s tooth so tight between her fingers it left an impression on her thumb. Not as much of an impression as its original owner had bitten out of the wooden paddle she’d used to beat back the great white, and certainly not as much an impression as – BANG – the thump of the distant depth charge echoing off her U-boat’s hull.
‘Exploding high,’ hissed Gemma’s first mate, wiping an oil-streaked hand against his forehead. ‘And wide.’
Not quite high enough for her tastes. Captain Dark hovered behind the pilot and navigator’s chairs on the bridge; an angel of death for submariners that believed in such things.
‘Take us down deeper,’ Gemma ordered, ignoring the rebuke sounding back from the hull, the creaking of straining metal. ‘When our friends up there don’t spot any wreckage, they’ll start setting their fuses longer.’
Gemma’s voice, so deep and rich like honey, even with the march of years, sounded hollow and tinny at their current depth. The air recycling was struggling, just like the rest of her beautiful, ancient boat. A trusted sabre to slice into enemies of the cause. But not like this. Damn the aerial vessel, a long-range Royal Aerostatical Navy scout, hanging out of sight to catch any privateer rash enough to raid the Kingdom of Jackals’ surface shipping – like the richly laden merchantman Gemma had targeted. From hunter to hunted in one ill-starred transition. Gemma’s pursuer only had to be lucky once with the depth charges they were rolling out of their bomb-bay slides, while the deeper Gemma drove her boat to escape, the more dangerous the impact of any concussion wave that found its mark.
She was ancient, their u-boat, the Princess Clara, practically a family heirloom. Hundreds of years old like all of the royalist fleet. And Gemma could hear her pain, the groaning from the hull growing louder as they sank, the ratcheting of the gas-driven turbines deep beneath Gemma’s calf-length leather boots increasingly strident with every extra fathom of depth their screws thrust against.
The boat demonstrated her petulance by blowing a valve on the pipes at the far end of the bridge, two of Gemma’s crew leaping to close off the venting steam that began filling their compartment. The Princess Clara was in the ocean’s grasp, and the ocean was slowly crushing the life out of the submersible.
‘We could jettison cargo,’ said the first mate. ‘Flood the torpedo tubes and send more junk towards the surface. We might get lucky.’
Lucky. Yes. But the clever dog of a skipper standing on the bridge of the airship would know the difference between a real hit and the Princess expelling fake wreckage. He was an experienced submersible hunter; any fool could see that from the position of his ambush and the classic stovepipe hat-shaped spread of his depth charges. Shallow brim with a deep side-band … and deep shit for all of them. He was a professional, this one. A shark, as sharp as the tooth Gemma was rolling between her fingers. Of course, he might be a she. A female airfleet officer. Someone like Gemma, a face once considered beautiful, hardened by the privations of age and the cause and the fight – not ready to be pensioned off yet, for all of her silvery grey hair.
Those who never experienced the pleasure of serving under Gemma often mistook her vivaciousness for greed, her appetite for life for swinishness. Curse the lot of them. Lubbers and cowards and weaklings, afraid of a strong-willed captain. Pirates and rebels. The two terms had become interchangeable long before she’d been born. Gemma stole every cargo she came across, and if she had to hang a couple of captured officers to make the taking of the next cargo easier, that was only to build her reputation. A privateer could never have too much of a reputation. That wasn’t vanity – hardly any compensation for her age-faded beauty at all. Just cold economic sense. Manacle a crew to their ship and send her to the bottom of the seabed with a torpedo, and the handful of survivors you let out in the lifeboat would soon spread word that resisting