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 Captain Gemma Dark was not a safe or sensible option. Did that make her a bad person? Her crew took fewer losses that way. And when continuing an uneven conflict between the royal family and their disloyal parliament that had been lost centuries ago, well, all was fair in such a war. Sailors might call Gemma the Black Shark in harbour-side taverns, for the predatory silhouette she’d added to her house’s personal coat of arms after surviving the sinking of her uncle’s vessel as a girl, but what was in a name? Gemma had cargoes to plunder. She had a crew to feed. Did the Kingdom’s Parliament of filthy common shopkeepers think of that when they dispatched their clever dogs to hunt her titled head? Not a bit of it. And their cargoes were so luxurious … and profitable. Precious metals. Rare jewels. Fine wines. Expensive silks and spices. The latest mechanical advances from the Royal Society. And the squawks of their owners so fine as she attached a noose to a sail and watched their boots kick and struggle.
The crewman on the pilot wheel gave a yelp of alarm as one of the gas lamps illuminating the deep of the dark outside the u-boat imploded. Little pieces of hot glass showered the armoured viewing glass at the fore of the bridge.
‘We can’t keep this up,’ cried the pilot, his eyes focused on the needle of the altimeter, the little needle pushing so far into the red at the right-hand side of the brass dial, there was nowhere left for it to go.
Before the pilot could do anything about it except bitch, Gemma Dark had a pistol out and shoved into his temple. ‘Follow my damn orders. Down bubble. Gentle declination, keep on pushing deeper.’
A crack sounded behind her. One of the pieces of oak panelling that lined the bridge splintering as the metal it was riveted to tightened. The wheel shook in the pilot’s hands as he tried to fight back his fear.
‘There!’ called the first mate. The black lines of an underwater trench lay revealed by the light of their two intact exterior lamps. ‘It’s a damn big drop, not on the charts either.’
No. None of this was on the charts. The retreat of the magma of the Fire Sea to the north was leaving a whole new topography under the surface of the sea. Underwater volcanoes, mountains and valleys to be explored. Not on their charts, and certainly not on the charts of Parliament’s deadly airship circling above them.
Gemma had chased her luck, just as she always had.
‘Head into the trench,’ ordered Gemma, counting the seconds from the last thump of a depth charge in her head.
The wheel trembled in the pilot’s hands. ‘We’ll die down there!’
‘The correct response is aye-aye, captain,’ said Gemma, pushing the pistol in tight against his temple.
‘They won’t set their charges deeper than the seabed,’ growled the first mate as he realized what his captain was looking to do.
‘No,’ Gemma agreed.
‘If we last that long,’ said the first mate, his eyes settling on the creaking armoured crystal canopy in front of them. A single piece of chemically reinforced glass. If the screen gave way …
‘Yes,’ said Gemma. If we last that long.
All around them, the Princess Clara’s complaints swelled louder and louder as the darkness of the underwater trench swallowed the vessel up. A last wave of depth charges tumbled towards where the u-boat had just been, drums buckling under extreme pressure even as the charges detonated.
Then, as the avalanche into the trench started to rain down onto her u-boat’s hull, Gemma Dark’s luck finally turned.
CHAPTER ONE
This wasn’t the normal quality of residence Dick Tull got to stake out. When you worked for the State Protection Board, the preservation of the realm was more often made in the great slums of the capital, blighted tenements their lowlife inhabitants called the rookeries. Where narrow streets and broken gas lamps simmered with the smoke of manufactories, and alehouse talk ran to rebellion and plots.
In the slums, it was easy to surveil such souls as Dick Tull’s masters suspected of treason. Anyone with a room would gratefully accept pennies from a stranger in exchange for an hour or two at a cracked window overlooking a similarly rundown tenement. Peeping Tom, arsonist, murderer, stalker, State Protection Board officer. Owners hardly cared, as long as the coin provided proved genuine. Parliament’s enemies bred like rats inside the filth and the poverty of the slums. But here? Waiting on the pavement of a well-lit boulevard? A long line of almost identical five-storey townhouses behind Dick, the fine wrought iron gates and high walls of Lord Chant’s residence in front of him on the opposite side of the street. Dick could smell their money; smell it as only someone who had never had any could. From the shining copper spears of the railings to the way manservants would imperiously emerge to greet calling guests.
Bugger the lot of them.
Dick Tull was dressed in the dark frock coat of a hansom cab driver, warming his freezing hands on the brazier at the street’s cab halt opposite his cabbie apprentice. That much of his disguise was genuine. Dick Tull was the master, while young William Beresford was standing in the apprentice’s shoes Dick had occupied some forty years before. Eager and stupid and patriotic. Too dull to realize there had never been any shine in the great game; that he and Dick were just the weight of the manacles needed to bind the common people from getting above their station. Glorified watchmen, protecting the shiny bright railings of these expensive whitewashed buildings from the forces of anarchy. And like all good watchmen, Billy-boy had been set to watch, watch with his keen young eyes.
But what about Dick? What good was it being the state’s muscle, when the muscles were growing old, aged and weak? Dick’s thin hands covered with grey fingerless wool gloves, the ageing skin on his hangdog face almost cracking in the late evening chill. Watching, always watching. Just like the State Protection Board’s motto bid them to: See all. Say nothing.
For most of his life, Dick Tull had been seeing all and saying nothing. And now he could see that he wasn’t just training another fledgling officer in the arcania and tricks of the spying trade. He was training his replacement. And where would that leave Dick? Shivering out in the cold, no doubt, like the old nag clicking its horseshoes at the front of their fake hansom cab. One step away from the knacker’s yard, that’s all Dick was.
While Dick Tull’s cheeks were pale and drawn, frigid under the long side burns, young William Beresford’s cheeks were flushed a rosy red by the cold, his eyes eager and bright. Tull could bring a flush to his cheeks too. He drew out the dented brass hip flask from under his coat and downed a burning slug of its bounty, ignoring the disapproving look from his partner.
‘Just my cover,’ said Dick.
‘There’s
