Compass Rose Read online

  My mother said I scared the midwife, floating like a compass needle in the birthing bath with my infant eyes wide open. She named me Compass Rose, because, as she liked to joke, there was no other possible course. I could find my cardinal points while tied upside down in a spinning sack, which was how I’d gained an early and unprecedented acceptance into Polaris Fleet Preparatory, the most elite military sailing academy in the Archipelago.

  Now that I was one of the official quartermasters under the second mate, our chief navigator, I understood why Comita had been so eager to see me enrolled. My uncanny sense of direction was useful. The ocean never stayed the same. Each minute brought new hazards, and the unpredictable winds and shifting currents obeyed mandates that even the best navigators failed to understand. It was different for me. The sea was in my blood.

  I took the steep stairs to the upper decks, listening for the sound of approaching sailors. A tiny jellyfish pulsed in the bio-light tube nearest my head. I paused to examine it, wondering how it had escaped the filters. Maybe, I reasoned, Comita had caught wind of a jelly swarm and wanted my advice about the best course to avoid it— except that she had a perfectly qualified night shift navigator on deck who was more than capable of avoiding a swarm.

  I wiped my sweaty palms on my thighs.

  I’d been to Comita’s quarters a few times, but several years had passed since it was appropriate for Harper to take me to visit her mother. Time hadn’t dimmed my memory of the rooms. Comita’s office commanded a port side view of the bow, and her desk was a sweeping curve that faced the brilliance of the window and the waves beyond. It was an imposing room. Comita didn’t believe in creature comforts.

  I knocked twice on the gray door. The smooth plastic rapped hollowly under my knuckles. My mouth was dry as I straightened my uniform, and I regretted stopping for dinner with Harper. The lateness of the hour impressed itself upon me with the silence coming from the corridor.

  • • •

  Comita opened the door, still dressed with the military efficiency expected of a fleet Admiral. I had asked Harper, once, if her mother owned anything other than that uniform. It was impossible to picture her in civilian clothes, no matter how hard I tried. Harper had offered to show me her mother’s wardrobe, but when we got to the door of her bedroom I panicked. All I could think about was Comita’s eyes, boring into the back of my head.

  “Compass Rose,” Comita said, greeting me with her firm, measured voice. Her gray eyes took in my clean uniform with approval, and she stepped back to allow me into her quarters. Bio-light revealed the familiar entry room with its hard bench. The door beyond was open, and I could see the starlight pouring in through the window. Comita led the way, passing through her office and into the smaller, more intimate living room.

  “Sit,” she said, indicating one of the two low armchairs by the window.

  I sat, tucking my hands between my knees.

  I heard the tinkle of liquid hitting glass and hid my surprise as Comita poured me a small measure of rum. She set her own glass on the small side table and let out a deep sigh as she joined me. I tried to observe her surreptitiously. Her eyes closed, briefly, and the bio-light cast dark shadows over their hollows. She looked old.

  “Forgive the informality,” she said after a moment, straightening her cuffs. “I wanted to speak with you privately.”

  I was pretty sure I twitched visibly at her words.

  “Of course, Admiral.” I was proud that my voice held steady. I swirled the rum in the glass, wondering if it would be polite to drink before she did.

  “How are you liking navigation?” she asked.

  I blinked at her words.

  “Very much.”

  “Walker is treating you well?”

  “Yes, Admiral. Second Mate Walker is very patient with me,” I said, thinking of Walker’s kind eyes, so different from Comita’s flinty ones.

  Comita gave a little snort of un-admiral-like laughter.

  “It would be easy to be patient with you, I hear. Walker swears we’ve never had a navigator of your caliber on this fleet, or possibly in the entire Archipelago.”

  “Admiral?” I said, my voice cracking at the unexpected praise.

  “You are a very valuable commodity, Rose. Walker says you can calculate direction to the nearest degree without consulting any of his instruments. You know when a storm is coming before our barometers, and you can read the currents better than the ship’s instruments. Walker tells me it is thanks to you we haven’t hit a swarm in weeks. Whatever it is you can do, it’s uncanny.”

  I stiffened at her last words.

  “You have a gift, Rose. Uncanny or not, it is nothing to be ashamed of.” She gave me a small smile. “I am not blind to the difficulties of your position. Harper lets on more than she knows, and I am not surprised. Shipboard life is cruel. Only discipline can overcome it. All that you need to know is that the fleet needs you. The fleet needs twenty of you, seas save us.”

  She shook her head and glanced out the window at the constellations. A small cloudbank scudded over Orion’s Belt.

  “Do you know why our stations are named after constellations?” she asked, continuing before I could answer. “Ancient navigators had nothing else to go by. The North Star and the sun were the only fixed points, and the constellations marked the seasons. When we learned how to navigate without them, we stopped looking up. A great deal might be different, if we hadn’t. Our names are a reminder. You don’t need a reminder, though. You’re the kind of navigator who remembers to give the stars their due.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  I didn’t know what else to say. Her praise undid all of Maddox’s bullying, washing away the years of uncertainty in an instant. My captain needed me. My fleet needed me. She wished she had more of me, placing value on the instinct that had labeled me a freak. Little bubbles of joy burst in my chest.

  “Don’t thank me yet.”

  Her voice held a wryness I hadn’t heard before, but then again I had never been summoned to her private quarters for a quiet drink. The bubbles continued their celebration, undeterred.

  “Remember this, Rose. Always question whenever someone offers you praise, even when it is deserved.”

  She took a sip of her rum. I followed suit, grateful for a chance to hide my joy and confusion behind the glass.

  It was far superior to Jonah’s brew. I savored it for a moment before its potency forced me to swallow or spit it out. I held on to the glass tightly as the warmth trickled down my chest.

  “I am going to offer you an unusual position for advancement,” she said, meeting my eyes with the full strength of her command. I held on to the warm feeling. I had a sudden premonition it wasn’t going to last much longer.

  “Advancement?” I asked.

  “Of a sort. There are those who might see it as something else. I won’t lie to you, Rose. I am taking a risk with you. You may refuse the position, but if you refuse, I will require your complete silence and cooperation. Even from Harper.”

  “Of course, Admiral Comita.” I took another sip of rum to wet my throat.

  “You are aware that pirate raids have been increasing in frequency.”

  I nodded. Part of my job was mapping out safe routes for our transport subs to and from the offshore mines. We’d been losing more ships than usual.

  “What you are not aware of is that we are at risk of losing the mines entirely.”

  I almost dropped my glass. Losing the mines was unthinkable. We depended on them for the raw materials necessary for ship and station repair, and they also provided the minerals that powered food, biofuel, and bioplastic production.

  “Why isn’t the Council doing anything?” I asked.

  “You’re a navigator, Rose. You see several possible courses and you take the one that makes the most sense. Politics are different. The Council’s choices do not always make sense to people like you and me. Our ships can’t navigate in coastal waters as well as the pirate vessel
s. Some council members fear we would expose the Archipelago to a direct attack from the pirates if we launched a full-frontal assault. They are willing to try to deal with the ringleader on her terms, something that anyone familiar with her tactics knows is a recipe for disaster. Which brings us to why you are here.

  “I have hired a mercenary named Miranda to find out more about the threat we face. She needs a navigator who can travel undetected, and who can guide a ship through the hazards of the coast.”

  I choked on my next inhale. The implications of Comita’s words reverberated through my buzzing skull, bouncing off the limited architecture of my rum-soaked mind. Comita had hired a mercenary? And unless I was mistaken, she wanted me to leave the North Star to navigate for a woman who was little more than a pirate herself, through waters infested with pirates and practically designed to swallow unwary sailors. I swallowed harshly, stifling the cough, and stared out the window to avoid meeting Comita’s eyes.

  The cloud had moved on from Orion, and I followed the invisible curve of his bow, longing to be topside with the wind stripping the sound of Comita’s voice from my ears.

  Comita’s earlier praise felt hollow now. She had warned me it would, in her brusque way. The bubbles of joy in my chest were gone. Popped, like foam on a whitecap.

  The hush grew between me and Comita as I watched the stars blink in and out of the reaching clouds. I wished I had Harper beside me. Instead, I had a small sip of rum remaining and my silent captain.

  Navigating along the coasts was the stuff of legend. Boiling storms and toxic seas were the norm, and then there was the occasional methane burst. Near active fault lines, those could catch fire, burning up oxygen topside and detonating with the force of a small meteorite strike. These days, we avoided the coastal surface as best we could by using only subs to access the mines, but the pirates managed to operate both above and below water, giving them the advantage. Navigating along the coast took more than skill. It had to be in your blood.

  No one else could do the job Comita was offering as well as I could. A slight thrill raced through me as I realized that there would be no Walker on that ship, no one following behind to check my calculations, nobody hoping for the inevitable slip that would prove that I was just as fallible as they were.

  Of course, there would be no Harper, either, and no Comita to protect me. I felt a current catch at the wave turbines, and a minute shifting of the vessel’s bulk. If I accepted, I would be alone, a ship without anchor or port.

  “Are you offering me a position on this ship?” I asked, just to be sure I hadn’t misunderstood.

  “I am,” Comita said, with a look on her face that might have resembled pity on someone else. “It will be very dangerous, Rose. You’re a navigator, not a fighter. There are worse things than rough seas out there. I can’t guarantee your safety.”

  “With all due respect, Admiral,” I said softly, “nobody knows that better than a navigator.”

  Comita toasted me with her glass. Her mouth twisted with the bitterness of my words, and I would have bet almost anything that her thoughts were on the vessel we’d lost a few months ago to a raid.

  “It won’t just be jelly swarms and algae blooms. You can handle methane burps and storms. It’s people I’m worried about. Harper tells me you’re not much of a boxer.”

  I looked down at my hands and shook my head.

  “Will there be fighting?” I asked.

  “On a Merc ship?” Comita laughed humorlessly. “Miranda has given me her word that you won’t come to harm. It is one of our conditions.” She scowled, as if remembering something unpleasant, and I jumped a little in my seat as she leaned forward. Her gray eyes speared mine.

  “You are to do exactly as she says, no matter what happens and no matter what you see. Your safety depends on that. If she reneges on our parley, she reneges. She’s a mercenary. You, though, are a valuable tool. Pirates and mercenaries don’t just throw tools away, not if they think they can use them. Obey Miranda as you would me, and even if the worst comes to pass you’ll have a place on a ship. It’s a bitter bargain. I wouldn’t ask it of any of my crew if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.”

  “How long would I be gone?” I turned the word “renege” over in my mind. It sent out ripples with each rotation.

  “I can’t give you a time frame. I will, however, give you a few days to think it over.” She ran a hand through her cropped hair. It fell back into perfect military precision.

  The stars swirled slightly as I tried to clear my head. The rum and the unrealness of the conversation made it hard to think.

  I remembered the first time I sensed a jellyfish swarm. I was six or so, swimming in one of the filter pools on Cassiopeia with a few other children. I loved swimming close to the edge, where deep ocean hung beneath the catchment in all its murky glory. I was diving when I felt the shift in the current, as if the ocean were taking a deep breath.

  The jellyfish appeared a few moments later. I heard my mother yelling my name from the upper walk, and I swam toward her, hardly able to contain my excitement. I knew with the certainty of a child that I had felt the jellyfish coming.

  Later I learned the reason for this queer prescience. The languid motions of the giant swarms pulled cooler water up from the depths, circulating where the weakened winds had failed. That was the thing about the swarms. They always left cooler water behind, even as their presence clogged the filters of our submerged cities and warned of warmer waters and the toxic algae blooms to come.

  “You can’t feel jellies coming,” my mother had scolded.

  I wondered at the tiny jelly I had seen today, trapped in the bio-light, and tried not to feel it had been a warning.

  “I’ll do it,” I told Comita.

  “Think about it,” she cautioned me. “Speak to me before the end of your shift tomorrow. And remember, Rose, not a word of this to the rest of the crew. Or my daughter.”

  Chapter Two

  “So what did she want?” Harper asked when I slipped into her room later on that evening.

  I had decided it would look more suspicious to Harper if I stayed away. I knew from experience that it was much better to feed her a white lie early on than to try and cover my tracks later.

  “I’m not supposed to tell you,” I said, collapsing into my usual chair.

  Her quarters could have fit into Comita’s closet. Her bunk took up one wall, and the folding table and two chairs filled the space in between. There was a small sink with a washbasin at the far end. Like me, she used the bathroom down the hall, and we ate all of our meals in the ship’s cafeteria. Being the admiral’s daughter had precious few perks. Her quarters, in short, were identical to mine, with one glaring exception: a jug of Jonah’s brew lurked evilly on the small table, glowing an unhealthy orange in the greenish cast of Harper’s bio-lights. Jonah Juice, he called it. I averted my eyes before my head started to pound in sympathetic memory of the last time I’d encountered it.

  “Come on. I tell you everything that happens in engineering,” she pleaded.

  “That’s because nothing happens in engineering. Except that.”

  I pointed at the foul liquid.

  “Let me get you a glass then,” she said with an impish grin.

  She leaned across me to grab two cups from the tiny cabinet, which was tucked neatly into the recess behind the folding table. I held my breath and hoped she didn’t catch a whiff of her mother’s rum on my lips. With a sickening lurch of my stomach, I realized that there was only one possible way I could evade Harper’s nose— masking the rum with the liquid fumes in the jar before me.

  “This is rank, Harp,” I said as I choked down a sip.

  “What did you expect? It’s Jonah’s finest. And in case you wondered, it only gets worse with age, so drink up.” She tossed back her glass to illustrate her statement, wrinkling her nose as it went down.

  “If you won’t tell me,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me, “I’ll have to guess.”
<
br />   “Why don’t you ask your mother?” I suggested, holding the alcohol as far away from my nose as possible.

  “And get sent to the bilges for insubordination? No thank you!”

  I had a brief vision of Harper in the bilges, wearing the waders and high boots of a bilge hand while she slaved away in the bowels of the ship, operating the pumps that allowed the fleet ships to submerge in unfavorable seas.

  Harper raised her glass in a mock toast. The gesture reminded me of her mother’s an hour and several lifetimes ago. For a split second the similarities between them shone through, despite Harper’s infectious charm. Her eyes were brown, unlike Comita’s gray, and her hair curled sleekly around her shoulders in dark waves, but the steel lay just beneath the veneer of youth. The steel, and the discipline. Harper would turn out all right.

  The morbidity of the thought shook me, as I faced a future where I might not get to see Harper come into her own. Something on my face must have shown the tenor of my thoughts, because Harper’s voice lost a little of its playful edge.

  “It can’t be that bad. What, is she sending you to the bilges instead?”

  “Hardly,” I said, trying to force a smile.

  “Okay. So it’s not a punishment, but you’re not excited, and she wanted to speak with you privately about it. That can only mean one thing.” She gave me a grin. “You’re getting promoted and you’re worried I’ll be jealous.”

  I laughed, shaking my head at her. “I can’t keep anything a secret from you,” I said in mock surrender.

  “Okay,” she said, rolling her eyes, “not a promotion then. So, if she didn’t promote you, why did my mother have me send you to her private lair?”

  That was an excellent question, I realized. Comita knew I was close with Harper, and she had to know that Harper would try to pry the truth out of me. Either she had been distracted by the prospect of war with the pirates, or it was a test to see if I really could keep my mouth shut. My brain spun, and I regretted drinking both the rum and the Jonah Juice. I needed a story that would pass inspection if Comita followed up with Harper. I didn’t think Harper would rat me out, but I didn’t fancy her chances against Comita’s iron will, either.