... He’s sitting with his legs out, his belly rolling in and out, his eyes staring, his back to the greasy base of the smouldering guns. I stagger out, shaking my head. There’s cavorting on deck. Feet dance among motionless human forms. The enemy ship is a clot of flames and smoke. I’m splashed with brine as I pass the men dumping buckets to cool the Bremml guns. Numbly I respond as I am waved over to help an eviscerated man who dies under my hands. His eyes are white as snow, in a face the color of grey felt. A few other injuries to see to. I can hear again, mostly. Overhead our stepping grasshopper legs are still unscathed, and lunge and soar driving us forward at our top speed. Saskia is gripping the wheel, her face ashen, her mouth tight, confronting Makemin who lours down at her. She steps toward him raising her fist and he seizes her under the arms and shakes her so hard her helmet flies off.

“We can’t fight them all! at! once!” he roars.

The other two ships are much closer now—it’s not over—they’re coming on with a speed that’s terrible to see, and both of them warships. Already they’ve begun firing their bow guns at us.

Makemin thrusts her back, and she turns angrily to the wheel, gripping it so tightly I can hear the wood creak in her hands. Her head is down.

“They will die some day,” I hear her say in a bitter undertone. Makemin stands in the middle of the bridge like a post.

“We aren’t fast enough,” Jil Punkinflake says—I hadn’t noticed him. He’s been hiding by the other hatch, and watches out through a loophole toward the aft end of the ship.

We all turn our heads at once to him, and I think we all realize he’s right at the same time. No sound now but the groaning of our engines, and the distant, irregular but constant effusions of the gaining guns behind.

“There’s that fog bank over there ...” Thrushchurl says, softly through his grin. He points with his long duelling-pistol of a hand.

Again all our heads turn—a fogbank ahead and to port, with a black thread underlining it. I feel something nameless and freezing blanket my face and front like a chilled mold. This is a fear utterly unlike the fear of battle that I’ve been getting used to not getting used to. Makemin takes one step forward—

“We’ll make for it.”

Saskia angles the ship into the bank. I watch, paralyzed, as the point of our bow turns, and that black underline begins steadily to approach, to broaden, to extend toward us.

The fog closes around us with a flap. It’s dense and warm, with a heady, iron smell, nothing like the sea. We churn forward, and in the greater silence of the fog, the reports of the enemy guns are muffled.

“There,” Thrushchurl says, starting forward suddenly and pointing again, his face rapt, “Look there!”