Cuttlefish Read online

  The captain took a brief turn about the floor while gathering himself to speak. “I'm afraid I didn't grasp all the implications, or why the Americans would be so eager to give you refuge. But it seems that they are very keen to get their hands on you. It makes sense of this frantically intensive pursuit we have suffered. I realised that there had to be more to it than I'd been told, but not that such a thing could change the world's power structures entirely. I honestly don't know what level of trust you can repose in the Americans. They may be acting in good faith, but their shooting and the use of explosives does not inspire trust.”

  Dr. Calland looked as if the cares of the world were all on her shoulders. “My daughter is of the same opinion. She behaved extremely foolishly but—”

  “She had no idea of the risks she took, or the dangers she faced, Dr. Calland,” said the captain, gently. “She's an innocent young girl, unaware of the ways of the wider world, and of places like Rivas. She felt that she had a debt to repay. Unwise, but honourable, and with no real idea of the dangers to a young girl alone here.”

  Tim nearly said something in Clara's defence. He felt he ought to. But you didn't just interrupt the captain. Well. Not yet, anyway. He would if they didn't let him speak.

  Clara's mother sighed. “She has ideas, but a great deal of foolishness and idealism too. She takes after her father.”

  The captain hid his mouth briefly by sliding his hand down his beard, to hide the smile. “Not like her mother, at all.”

  The idea seemed to almost startle Dr. Calland. “Oh, no. It'd be easier to stay angry with her if she was more like me. Anyway, to return to the Americans. It seems to me they voided any chance of my trusting them by trying to capture this young man,” said Dr. Calland, waving a hand at Tim.

  It made Tim feel very awkward. Clara had come to rescue him, and they hadn't. That brought back the memory of the very English-sounding man who had offered him money to capture Clara.

  “And, by the lack of response to our Marconi wireless calls, and from our examination through binoculars, they've destroyed our smuggler contact's villa, if not him as well. I'm afraid, Dr. Calland, they have either decided to cooperate with the British Empire or they—”

  “Can't be relied on to keep their word,” finished Dr. Calland. “They offered me refuge, assistance to continue my work, and strictly no coercion or militarisation of that work. I asked for that, and they agreed. I should have been more suspicious, demanded some guarantees, but I was at a loss as to how to. I'm…still at a loss, Captain. If I could just broadcast my mother and Fritz's work—maybe even post the methods and results they achieved and the work I've done, to the whole world. That's what I was trying to do—to get it published in a paper on experimental chemistry. The two peers I consulted were Russian…and that's where it all started. And now I literally don't know where to go.”

  “Well, that's why I asked you to come up and talk to me, Dr. Calland. You see, I thought we might take advantage of their new canal before the Royal Navy attempts to put it out of use. The Americans have of course camouflaged it with netting, set up anti-airship guns, and set mine fields to protect it, but it's only a matter of time before spies get a very good idea of its route and airships are used to bomb it, and naval guns pound much of it. We have received coded shortwave instructions relayed from London, about our own course. We are to go and collect our cargo of caliche from Peru, and then head for Western Australia. We pick up the drogues at sea off the Galapagos, and Peru is probably not a safe country for you. But the Republic of Westralia would be. Besides the fact that they'd be, I would think, grateful for the knowledge you have, it's also a republic which resents the fact that it was abandoned by the British Empire and values its independence. The Big Dry has forced them to be a very clever and forward-looking people. When the Swan River dried up and the British governor-general ordered the territory abandoned…well, those who stayed had to learn fast.”

  Dr. Calland looked as if she might burst into tears. “We cannot impose further on you, Captain. But I am so very appreciative and grateful for what you've done, both for my daughter and for me. You and your crew have been wonderful. I am so sorry for the danger and the trouble we've brought to you. I would like to go to Westralia, of all things, but it is far too much to ask of you.”

  The Captain bowed. “Ma'am, that will now be our destination, and feeding two more people is no particular hardship.” He smiled.

  Tim did too. And while he managed to stop himself from cheering—or even saying “Yes!”—by biting his lip, he couldn't help but nod.

  The captain, unfortunately, noticed. So did Clara's mother. But other than raising his eyebrow, Captain Malkis said nothing, just continued as if he hadn't seen it. Tim knew that was worse. “I know this as the cook—who is from Western Australia himself—took the unusual step, for him, of coming to see me, and suggesting it. And he wouldn't have done that if he didn't want to feed you. Besides, your daughter did save all of us when we were trapped in the net in the Wash. And she freed my young crewman. Of course”—and here he looked directly at Tim—“we'll have to take steps to see that she doesn't engage in any more madcap schemes.”

  At this point Clara's mother did start crying. The captain patted her awkwardly. “Thank you so very much,” she said, after a determined sniff. “It's such a relief. And I'll see that Clara stays out of any more trouble. It…it isn't really like her.”

  The captain looked at Tim again. “Yes. I suspected so, ma'am. Which is why I thought we needed to have a word with young Master Barnabas here. I did make it clear to all the submariners that…you were all to stay at arm's length from Miss Calland, did I not, Master Barnabas?”

  Tim felt himself blush. “Yes, sir. I have. Well, I've done my best to, sir. Really.” She'd kissed him. Not the other way around. He'd never even touched her otherwise, except to stop her falling over or washing away. And that kiss was only to stop them being caught, really. No matter how he might like it to be otherwise.…“I've not disobeyed your orders on the boat, sir.” That was true. Questions about what he'd done in an alley, in a village outside Rivas, were a different matter. He'd decided that you might as well kiss back if you were going to be caught. The tongue bit was a bit confusing.

  “I believe him, Captain,” said Clara's mother, although Tim felt the glow from his face made him out to be a total liar. “I…um…asked Clara the same sort of questions.”

  To Tim's surprise, Captain Malkis seemed happy to accept this. “Nonetheless, I think we need to see to it that the two of them interact as little as possible. For the sake of the smooth running of the boat,” said the captain, “I think we'll have to see that Miss Calland is abed while Tim is at work, instead of having them awake on the same watch.”

  Tim's heart sank. Lieutenant Ambrose was all right, but Mate Werner frightened him a bit. “Um, sir…”

  “I'm aware that you're a good lad, Barnabas,” said the captain. “I believe you've kept to the rules, although you two are the youngest on the boat and have been in difficult circumstances together. I also understand just how Dr. Calland's daughter feels that she owes you a debt. That could lead to trouble, for her, for you, and in my crew.”

  “She doesn't owe me anything, sir. Never. She paid me back in spades. But sir, what I wanted to say is…we must have a spy on the boat. That's the only way all of this could have happened. That's how they're onto us all the time.”

  The captain shook his head. “Barnabas, any spy would be risking their own life. In the ports, yes, there are spies and informers. Almost certainly here in Rivas where everything is for sale, it seems. We're aware of that. That is why our destinations are secret. I'm entrusting you with a great deal, but you've proved yourself reliable.”

  “Well,” said Tim, knowing it actually made it worse for both him and Clara, but knowing it had to be said. “Someone tried to bribe me while I was in that jail, sir. Someone who knew I was…friends with Miss Calland. That could only be known to someone on t
he boat, sir. They must be getting information from inside the crew.”

  “It's not possible,” said the captain with finality. “Now get along with you, Barnabas. You'll have to swap duties and bunks with Standard. And young man, you'll have no further contact with Miss Calland. Understood?”

  So Tim had to salute and leave, pack his kit and move. He had no part to play in the crew who were sent topside to strap piles of cut reeds and rushes onto the deck-brackets. He did have to listen to the mate complaining about how they affected the buoyancy later, though.

  During his watch the submarine was under way, and soon the “all quiet” light came on. Then a little later, the light went off, but the engines did not restart. Tim—now on the same watch as Big Eddie, and doing dishes again, saw him when he came into the mess, demanding tea. “Water out there is like brown soup,” he said cheerfully. “I hope I've got us under the right ship, and not a tramp steamer heading for Cuba.”

  “What?” asked Tim, puzzled.

  “The sub is hanging like a leech underneath a gunboat about to go down the canal,” said Big Eddie. “We've got magnetic grapples hooked to the catfish-feelers. The reeds and rushes on the deck act as buffers, and now all we have to do is hope the water is deep enough, and the mate can keep us lined up underneath, and next thing we'll be out in San Juan del Sur bay and no one any the wiser. Mind you, the water out there is so dirty, we hardly need a boat to hide under, except to get through the locks.”

  In the hot little cabin Clara was angry. Yes, she'd known there'd be trouble. It was just the kind of trouble that she'd not guessed at. She'd not even imagined it could happen this way! Huh. So now they were punishing Tim, who really hadn't done anything wrong. Because he was a boy. Honestly, her mother talked about women and equality, but didn't believe that if one of the two of them was keen on what mother called “initiating physical contact” in that tone, it was her. If there was one thing she liked more about Tim than any of the others, it was that he hadn't even tried to touch her. It was…rather why he was more interesting in that sort of way. Safer. And now, to add to that injustice, the captain didn't believe him, any more than her mother believed her, that somehow there must be a traitor on the submarine.

  On the other hand, they had a long journey still, halfway around the world, on the submarine. She'd sort it all out. Somehow.

  But it wasn't fair.

  The air grew older and staler as the boat made its way down the canal under the American gunboat, a ship they'd deliberately chosen for its shallow draught. Tim was on messenger duty on the bridge, and like everyone else there, was watching the mate and the instruments. He had to admit, watching the big telltale dials from the catfish-feelers and the magnetic grapples, that the mate was a master at controlling the submarine. The ship was moving slowly and had to go up the locks and then down onto the Pacific side. It was an exercise in navigation too, as they had to know when they could break free. You could see the sweat bead the mate's forehead as the stress told…but they got there.

  “We come out, ja. Prepare to dive,” said the mate with obvious relief, reaching for the lever that channelled their battery power into the fore and aft electromagnetic grapples. There was a sharp click, and the Cuttlefish slipped free.

  And then things went wrong.

  The explosion nearly rattled them off their feet. It was the closest blast they'd experienced in all their brushes with the Royal Navy. Tim nearly panicked. But the mate stayed as cool as if it had not happened, pulling the dive levers, giving the twin screws of the Cuttlefish full thrust. Turning and corkscrewing away. “Damage reports, sectors,” he snapped into the speaking tube.

  One by one the sectors reported in. A minor leakage aft in upper steerage appeared to be all the damage there was. The “all quiet” light burned. There were no more explosions, and the mate began to adjust the dive levers. They were already at 220 feet. The Cuttlefish could not take much more, Tim knew. Three hundred feet was supposed to be her maximum dive depth.

  Slowly, they began to rise again, still moving steadily away from the scene, still on dead quiet. By this time Captain Malkis had come up to the bridge too. There were no more sounds of the hydrophones, though, as the pressure gauge showed they were back to thirty feet, then twenty, and then ten feet—maximum periscope depth. They stopped there. “Raise the periscope,” said the captain. Tim and the other rating on bridge duty wound the double cranks.

  “Ah,” said Captain Malkis. “It appears that the Americans were not as good at keeping the canal secret as they might have been. Their gunboat appears to be sinking. I would guess that the bay has been mined, probably by the Royal Navy. That was unlucky for them, and lucky for us that we did not strike it.” He sighed. “We'd better see if we can render any assistance, and hope we do not strike a mine ourselves.”

  The Cuttlefish turned back towards the coast, coming slowly to the surface. “We'll need a deck party, Mr. Mate,” said the captain. “By the looks of it there are a number of men in the water.”

  The submarine surfaced.…

  But an explosion and a waterspout soon changed that.

  “We're being fired on by the shore batteries, sir!” said the periscope man.

  The mate swore. The captain took a deep breath. “It appears they don't want our help, gentlemen. It is time to turn and run.”

  So they did.

  Tim was relieved to be going away, even if it meant that he now had to run for strong tea. Now all they had between them and Westralia was the vastness of the Pacific. They had an offshore rendezvous to pick up a cargo of caliche drogues—which were like little submarines themselves, carefully weighed and air-buoyed to neither sink nor float—that the Cuttlefish would tow underwater past the blockades on Westralia's ports. But after they'd collected them, attached them, well, then it would be just plain sailing across the open sea, for months, in a small space, with a girl he was not supposed to speak to.

  He should have guessed that she wasn't going to put up with that. He was beginning to grasp some truths about Miss Clara Calland.

  “We can't just let him get away with it. We have to find out who it is,” she said quietly, on her way to the shower, just when he happened to be cleaning the brass fittings in the passage. She'd walked past him as if he wasn't there. Now, without looking at him, she was talking to him.

  He looked around hastily. “Get away with what?” he asked, nervously.

  “Treachery, of course. There's a spy on this ship, and we're going to have to catch him, because they won't believe us.” And then she walked on, as if she hadn't spoken to him, as Lieutenant Ambrose walked down the passage.

  It was all very well to talk of catching spies, thought Tim, methodically rubbing the brass in small circles. The trouble with boring jobs like this one is that they gave him a great deal too much time to think. But how did one do it? And who could it be?

  The problem for any spy was always going to be just how they passed information on to Imperial Security. And of course just how they didn't get killed too, as the attacks on the submarine had not been anything but real. Still…the man back in Rivas had known a great deal about who was on the boat and just who Clara's friend was. Tim wondered if she would have trusted him enough to follow him into a trap.…Not a good thought. He wished now he'd taken the man's money and at least had that for evidence.

  His suspicion lay with Sparks the Marconi operator. He could use the ship's wireless and its powerful shortwave transmitter. He told Clara this the next day when they just happened to encounter each other in the passage again. Purely by chance, Tim didn't believe.

  “Good point,” said Clara, wrinkling her high forehead. Then she shook her head. “But it couldn't be him. He knew that Mother and I were on board and not at the smuggler's house when that man was trying to bribe you. He could use the Marconi set to pass messages at any time without suspicion falling on him. And it seems as if they've been informed, but only sometimes. I know Sparks doesn't work all the time, and he jus
t leaves the Marconi wireless set on the standard channel when he's off duty. There must be another radio hidden somewhere. You'll have to look for it. I'm not allowed into other people's cabins. Hmm. I wonder if I can make a crystal radio.”

  ”A what?” asked Tim.

  “A simple radio receiver,” she explained. “We made one as part of our science class-work. Only that had some parts we put together. And an earphone. If someone else is using a radio, it must be when Sparks is off duty, or there would be a chance that he might pick up the messages. If I can make a crystal set, I could pick it up.”

  “Isn't that really hard to do?” asked Tim, doubtfully.

  “Not really, no. Not if you're not inventing it. It's doing it for the first time that's hard.”

  Tim was actually the first one to spot the Galapagos Islands, by seeing the birds. He was on masthead watch, which having been terrified of once upon a time, he'd actually come to love. Deck watch was one of the few times one got to be truly alone on the submarine, and out in the Pacific, the decks themselves, extended with spars and nets, were used by the crew for a bit of extra space and, of course, for sail handling. Out here in midocean away from the sea lanes, only the big gossamer sails were used to propel the Cuttlefish, as she rode on her hydrofoil outriggers. The sails were just fairly transparent from close up, but from a few miles off looked rather like a slight blur to any observer. From up in the crow's nest Tim was above the sails that hid the deck, and, as there was only room for two people in the crow's nest if they got very close together indeed, he was alone. It was a good place for quiet, a good place for thinking. That could distract a lookout. It had taken Tim a little while to realise that that might be Volcan Wolf, beyond the birds, and that that vast flock of birds might indicate the islet that he was supposed to be looking out for. He used the voice pipe to let the bridge know, and soon the deck crew were hauling down the sails, and the distant volcanoes were more visible on the horizon.