From the Deep of the Dark by Stephen Hunt

broke the back of the fleet-in-exile at Porto Principe, I fled for my life. As far as my sister’s concerned, I’m a traitor and a coward. And that was before I got her son killed on some fool adventure and the board started blackmailing me. I’m never going to be on the same side as Gemma again. Not unless it’s planted in a grave four feet beneath her boots.’
    Dick supped greedily at the rich wine. ‘That’s quite a story.’
    ‘It’s the blessed truth.’
    ‘I know it is,’ said Dick.
    ‘Ah, poor little Rufus. I remember him as a lad on Porto Principe, always running around the corridors of the u-boat pens, always firing a thousand questions at us. How long did he last with the interrogation section?’
    ‘I know it’s the truth,’ continued Dick, ‘because you’ve got nothing left to lie for. You’re dying, aren’t you?’
    Commodore Black coughed and refilled his glass, a tired expression crossing his face. ‘Rufus didn’t tell you that … I never told the lad I was sick.’
    ‘I watched my mother die of black rot in her lungs. I know that cough.’
And you’re just like her, aren’t you? You haven’t told anyone, not your friends or your family. You were planning to drag yourself away one night like a wounded animal and die alone. Exactly like she did. That’s why your housemates are in the colonies and you’re finishing your cellar off alone here. Just like ma did to me. They don’t know about you, you old sod, do they?
‘But you’ve got the coins to pay for a good doctor?’
    ‘Lying rascals with their hands in my pocket,’ said the commodore. ‘There’s nothing the likes of them can do for me. I’ve seen a lot of sailors with black rot. If you spend long enough under the seas, the dust from a boat’s air scrubbers always clogs you up in the end.’ The old u-boat man raised his glass in a mocking toast to Dick. ‘I’m due a grand long rest, and that’s why the board’s threat of tossing my poor bones in jail doesn’t hold any water with old Blacky anymore. Because you give it a year, and bones are all you’ll have left of me.’
    ‘Any more of your old rebel friends show up, you send for me,’ ordered Dick. ‘The board can help them. You don’t want the gill-neck fleet and your sister bombarding our harbour towns do you?’
    ‘Fight my sister without me,’ coughed the commodore. ‘I’m not going to be around to save your skins anymore.’
    Maybe not, but you’ve saved mine, you old sod, you and your breakaway royalist friends. This intelligence is going to salvage my career and give me a pension worth more than half a penny to leave with.
    Dick glanced back at the illuminated clock face at the top of the tower as he walked away through the grounds of the house, steam venting into the cold air from grilles around the building’s basement level.
All that money it costs to heat a tower that large. Lucky, wine-warmed bastard. He’s passing away in comfort. More comfort than old ma had. More than I will.
     
    Corporal Cloake watched from the shadows of the trees as Dick Tull emerged from the tower opposite the house’s orchard; the corporal noting the silhouette of Commodore Black at the open door spilling heat into the cold winter air. What had they discussed? Well, it really didn’t matter. Another one who would have to die, along with the snitch back in that cheap slop-house of an eatery that the corporal had been watching. But that was the nice thing about being employed by the board. They had a special section that specialized in disposing of rubbish.
    It was time to call in the dustmen.
     
    Boxiron cradled the volumes in his iron hands, the books of forbidden knowledge that Jethro had asked for shaking slightly as he navigated his way across their apartment’s worn red carpet. There were so many ironies here. Once he had been a proud warrior, a steamman knight of the order militant. But that body had long since been destroyed, only his skull and his