“No, the Baltic League organized the rest of the trip through the Refugee Network,” Sime said. “I just had orders to get to Halifax by a certain date.”
“Hmmm. Let’s hope we’re not sharing.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Ahn-Kha said. “I put in a request to bunk with you. We settled it while you were napping off the wine yesterday. I hope I get you. You’re so clean and quiet. But I must warn you, when I get seasick, I become very gassy.”
“What?” Stamp asked, shocked.
“A joke,” Ahn-Kha said. “I suspect we’ll be down in a hold somewhere for at least part of the trip. We’ll be lucky if we’re just sharing with each other and not the ship’s rats.”
“He’s contrary from not being able to stretch out in bed,” Valentine said. “I’m looking forward to it. The only blue water I’ve ever been on was the Caribbean. The North Atlantic will probably be a little more exciting.”
“I prefer my jokes starting with animals walking into a saloon,” Stamp said.
Sime wanted their departure quiet and discreet. Their transport couldn’t have been more humble.
The Out for Lunch was a disappointment to Stamp. Her pleasure-cruise outfit seemed clownish when set in front of a rust-sided fishing boat that had a definite odor of fish to it.
It was a wide-bodied boat with high sides, with roughly the proportions and lines of an oversized rowboat, except for the big control house amidships. Masts with yardarms for nets and the placement or extraction of fishing gear stood to either side just behind the control house. Much of the woodwork on deck looked newly replaced, and the control house had a fresh coat of paint. It seemed the captain-owner maintained the boat by working on whatever was the most pressing need in the winter off-season.
Instead of a steward ready to hand them welcome-aboard beverages, they were greeted by a line of men in yellow plasticized overalls and thick rubber boots. Most of them had scruffy beards, but they smiled in greeting regularly enough.
You also had to walk down from the high pier to get into the boat. Stamp made the descent tentatively, as though aware that the next leg of the voyage wasn’t the sort of conveyance she was used to.
“Gew, what are we going to do with him?” one of the crew asked as they sized up Ahn-Kha. “Hope this’un likes fish.”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Ahn-Kha rumbled. “I can catch my own on a long line.”
Appearances aside, once the captain took them below, Duvalier was impressed. It was a ship designed to smuggle people. The fishermen on board could create, with their ice machine and a realistic, permanent board of fish heads and tails (mostly haddock and cod), false fronts to the fish bins below that could conceal two people in each bay.
They were little compartments, about the size of a large closet. Duvalier thought them perfectly sized—indeed, cozy—but Ahn-Kha could barely squeeze into one of them, folded up like a card table. Because you did not stretch out your full length in a hammock, you could sleep comfortably—if you weren’t a Golden One, that is. There were little grates between the compartments, allowing you to converse in the manner of a Catholic confessional.
Their passengers did not have to spend the whole voyage in hiding, of course. During the day they could move about the ship—there was a small galley and recreation area with a little locker full of books in various languages, plus the control room for the captain.
Captain Ableyard of the Out for Lunch was a very young man with sandy hair and permanently windburned skin. Duvalier doubted he could be much into his mid-twenties.
“Been at sea since I was twelve, apprenticed to a tuna fisherman,” Ableyard said. “I know, the boat has a day-sailor’s name. Most working boats have women’s names, a mother or a wife or a daughter. Old Captain Spangler had a real odd sense of humor—never really fit in with the other captains and men. He was the one who converted it into a refugee boat. Honestly, he didn’t care much about fishing. I like to bring in a commercial-sized catch, in case I’m searched.”
“It’s a new experience to have people outbound,” Ableyard said. “We’re usually picking up midocean.”
She learned a little about the refugee extraction system from Europe. The European fishing boats would take a few out and pass them off to fishing boats of another nation, Ireland or Iceland most frequently. They in turn would pass them to the Canadians.
“There used to be a great line through the Azores to Florida or the Caribbean or South America, but the Kurians occupied the Azores and cut that off. Everyone always asks me what good I think I’m doing, bringing them over in threes and fours a few times a year. They wouldn’t ask if they could see the faces of the three or four when we pass the Sambro Island Lighthouse.”
Valentine nodded heartily. He was always of the opinion that everyone making a tiny contribution would create a tsunami that not even the Kurian Order could stop.
The captain showed them some marks near his boat’s steering wheel. It was in the traditional wood, though without spokes. The wood-panel console beneath had dozens of little hash marks running just out of sight from a man standing at the wheel.
“Every time I bring human cargo in through the narrows, I kneel down, thank God, and make a mark.”
“Will you make one for us?”
“You’re not escaping anything. But it’s nice to have celebrities on board.”
“We’re celebrities?”
“I don’t have the faintest idea of what you’ve done, but you must be somebody important if you’re headed over to the Baltic League. Glad to do my bit in the other direction.”
The net boats they followed out of the harbor turned north. Behind them, a larger vessel Ableyard identified as a crab boat rolled more gently on the waves owing to its deeper keel. Its centerline had a sort of rack-catwalk running back from the prow to the bridge, filled with blue plastic barrels that served as markers for the crab traps. It was a big, powerful-looking boat, and rolled less than the Out for Lunch.