Ableyard’s fingers tightened on the wheel. His eyes didn’t leave the little boat zipping to the wreck. “They’re enemies right up until they drop into the sea. Then they’re fellow sailors in distress. Heck, if they pull anyone out, they’ll probably want to settle down in free land.”
“If they pick up any officers, would there be a chance to question them?” Valentine asked.
“They’ll be in the hands of the Coast Guard. They won’t turn them over to anyone, except provincial authorities.”
“Of course,” Valentine said. “They probably wouldn’t know anything after all.”
Ableyard shrugged off the supposition that the Kurians had been informed of the name of his boat and its secret purpose. “I still don’t understand it. There has to be twenty or thirty guys who think like I do for every one that wants to keep the Kurian regime propped up. Yet they still manage to find men to go do their fighting for them. At sea, yet. All they’d have to do is sail into Halifax and jump ship.”
Valentine borrowed the binoculars and watched the Skylark’s rescue efforts. “Typically they have hostages left behind. They’re comfortable, but they’re hostages nonetheless.” He handed the binoculars back to the captain.
Valentine looked over at Duvalier, and they shared a smile and a memory. For a moment, she felt a ghostly presence on her ring finger that had once held a fake wedding ring for almost a year.
The fishing ship followed a chain of islands leading northeast, navigating by getting radio bearings on stations that transmitted canned music or a tone. According to Ableyard, there were some unenviable Coast Guard duty stations on some of the little islands that were the first land ships crossing the North Atlantic hit in the northern latitudes.
Valentine, Duvalier, and Ahn-Kha offered to clean up the blood spilled on the deck. They talked as they worked.
“What’s interesting is the failure point in the chain. Southern Command was responsible for the travel arrangements to Halifax. From there, it’s the Refugee Network. Makes sense—they’re used to moving people in secret, know how to do it better than anyone across the Atlantic and Northern Europe. So either the Kurians know a lot about their doings, which seems unlikely because they’re otherwise successful, or someone from Southern Command tipped them, giving the day and endpoint of our journey that they knew about.”
“You’re being paranoid, Valentine,” Duvalier said. “Things were sloppy in Halifax. I shouldn’t have wandered around town with Stamp. We should have stayed in tight.”
By the second night out, Ableyard judged them safe from the Kurian net. They were in the wide-open Atlantic and rolling in the waves, though the weather had turned a little warmer. Sun and warm air from the south brightened everyone’s spirits. He, his old and weather-beaten boat chief, O’Neill, Valentine, and Sime chatted over beers in the crew galley.
Duvalier sort of joined in, half listening and wishing for oblivion. O’Neill said that she’d get her sea legs soon; he’d seen plenty go to sea and get sick. Since she’d kept her preboarding breakfast down, he predicted that by the end of day two of the trip she’d be able to eat a little soup, and by day three the symptoms would be gone.
“There have been three Battles of Halifax. I guess four now, if this little encounter counts,” O’Neill said. As there was plenty of time for stories, he relayed the history of the Kurian gambits against Halifax.
A Kurian and his Reapers arrived at the town to help “organize” in the wake of the 2022 ravies plague and other disasters. Nova Scotia hadn’t suffered greatly from ravies. The population was just too spread out and with too few roads, letting the locals set up checkpoints and choke points where a few military weapons and some tough volunteers made all the difference. “They had to be… ruthless,” O’Neill said, summing up worlds of agony in one little word. Duvalier understood it to mean that they shot down anyone with the slightest sign of the plague like mad dogs.
The Kurian was evicted as soon as he started demanding that a new list of offenses should be enforced and criminals moved out to a special compound on the other side of the island from Halifax.
The locals, while suffering from some shortages, didn’t much care for his ideas about how to organize themselves, and he lacked the muscle to
ram his demands down their throats. They turned against the Kurian and sent him on a lobster boat back to Maine.
A few months later, pieces of the U.S. Navy led by a frigate now in Kurian control powered up into the harbor and shelled the town. The frigate’s helicopter dropped flyers over the town, assuring the people that whatever idiotic rumors they might have heard, the Kurians were here to help, not harm.
The Canadians replied that they had some privation, but were making do. If anyone wanted to press the matter further, they could take it up with the government. In Quebec City.
The second time, in 2024, they tried to take Nova Scotia. A combination of human “militia” and Grogs landed under the guns of four destroyers and a rocket-battery support ship in order to “suppress the flow of weapons” moving south. The people of Halifax and the smaller towns knew that next to nothing was flowing south, except a few boats shuffling refugees.
While there wasn’t much they could do about the guns of the ships in the harbor, at least initially, they did make life difficult for the occupying troops. Their equipment was sabotaged, and when that led to a few hangings, men and Grogs started finding themselves the target of everything from snipers to hidden bear traps. A preserved Grog-leg and the trap that crushed it (severing a vital artery) sits in the Resistance Museum in Halifax to this day.
The Kurians shelled some government buildings in return.
The Nova Scotians, showing tremendous courage, carried out, on one night of rain so heavy it was difficult to see more than a dozen meters, a small boat raid on the ships in the harbor, planting improvised limpet mines on the hulls. They sank three of the four destroyers—the crew was a far cry from the trained USN crews that had once operated the destroyers, and when the bombs went off they panicked and jumped overboard—and the rocket-battery ship managed to blow itself up in a spectacular explosion while firing a reprisal attack into the heart of the city.
The surviving destroyer hurried south, never to return. The garrison in town decided to give up and handed over all light and heavy weapons, and a good deal of valuable material was salvaged from the wrecks of the destroyers and the rocket ship.
The third “battle” took place a year later, when long-range planes bombed the harbor, mostly ineffectively, over a course of weeks. The Nova Scotians had nothing to fight aircraft with other than a few old cannons. They noted that every raid consisted of fewer aircraft. The Kurians were losing some due to mechanical failure and not a few defections with each wave, and while there was a good deal of loss of life on the ground, the Kurians finally decided that Halifax could be left on its own.
Which may have been a mistake. Over the decades, the Free Canadians built up a small but powerful Coast Guard, mostly small boats that waged seagoing guerilla warfare against the Kurian Order from the Maine and Massachusetts coasts to the Great Lakes. The Kurians produced a few seagoing surprises of their own, including amphibian Grogs, which Valentine identified as “Big Mouths,” having had some experience with them on the Great Lakes and in the Pacific Northwest. Big Mouths could be trained to be adept at the sort of raids that had sunk the three destroyers at the Second Battle of Halifax. The Free Canadians now offered a bounty on Big Mouth heads, and there were a few tough crews who maintained a very nice, but sometimes short-lived, lifestyle as Grog hunters on the bounty system.
“Big Mouths are vicious bastards. Anyone who goes after them deserves their money,” Valentine said. “If you can find the bases and get their trainers, they’ll cause just as much trouble for the Kurians.” Valentine told a few stories of his own experiences with them in the Pacific Northwest. Some of them Duvalier hadn’t heard in full before.
“Maybe on your return trip, you could spend a few months as a technical adviser,” Ableyard said. “The Coast Guard would love to pick your brain.”
“We’ll see how things are going back home,” Valentine said.