It was a bright day, the first day I saw Apollo Ridley. There was hardly a cloud in the sky. Around about noon the call came up from the lookout, high above my place on the deck. I was carrying a load of stale hard tack from the stores when I heard it:
“Ship to starboard!” the cry pierced through the general noise. The lookout, who was a small man with a beakish sort of face, leaned over the edge of his perch up the mast, and added: “Aye, it looks like a rich one!”
The ship lurched, and the old bird near fell over the side onto the deck ten foot below him, but he held his purchase and repeated the cry from first principles, in case any of the crew had not yet heard him.
The captain was on deck immediately the first cry sounded. Captain Fourier was a broad, seaworthy-looking man who, despite appearances, was no more brutal than was usual among a crew such as ours. For I was a hand on the notorious Bloody Beacon, a pirate, a scoundrel myself of no small talents.
“Woods!” roared the captain, honing in on me for a harangue as was seemingly his custom. “What’re you doing with that barrel o’ bread?”
I put on a sympathetic appearance and said, in the most helpful tone I could muster: “I noticed the barrel in the roundhouse was falling empty, captain, and I was carrying it to fill it up again.”
Unable to fault me for it, the captain nodded sourly. “Well, as soon as you do, fetch the pistols from the magazine! Prey on the horizon!

The pistols were kept with the rest of the armaments in the magazine in the centre of the ship, where it was least like that a stray shot might spark an explosion. I was down there among a dozen or so other hands who all had their own tasks – one carrying charges of gunpowder, another with a sling of cannonshot – in the tight quarters the air was thick with the anticipatory sweat of those who know that today might be their last.
I carried the chest of pistols up to the deck and swung the lid off with a clatter. They were cap-and-ball affairs, as the effects of the Static on modern armaments were well-documented. The pistols with their varnished wooden housings nestled in straw, each one waiting for a ready hand to load it and blast leaden doom from its wide steel mouth.
Someone else laid down a crate of paper cartridges. Lowly as I was, I was only permitted to carry two pistols and four cartridges. I snatched up a pair that I kept extra clean for this purpose and loaded the pouch on my belt from the crate of cartridges.
“Ready yourselves!” said the captain, walking among the crew as they grabbed their allotted arms. “And get below decks once you’re armed!”

All of us but a skeleton crew went below decks as we came in close to the ship. She had no flag or identifying markings, so we did the same. If they saw two dozen heavily-armed rogues on the deck as we came aside, the reasoning went, the ruse would fall apart quite quickly. It was hot and dark below, pressed into the cramped little stairway under the trapdoor, some of us bent double, so close to the top of the stairs were we. Though of course nobody from the other ship would be able to hear us over distances like this I held my breath out of a sort of compulsion towards silence, and it was clear the rest of my crewmates felt the same way for not a word was breathed among us as we waited there.
“Hail!” I heard the captain cry, as if he were in some considerable distress “What’s your destination?” This was a familar script he followed in situations like this, one of a few that he kept in his back pocket to avoid getting too well-known. As we apparently drew closer to the other ship, he let his voice fall so that I couldn’t make out his words any more, but I knew the shape of this script. He would claim to be carrying passengers who he would, for some unfortunate reason, be unable to carry to their paid-for rest.
Whatever the other ship said, he would claim to be not perfect, but close enough – to avoid drawing suspicion for overenthusiasm – and ask if the other ship could possibly spare the space. Invariably they could, once he offered to share the generous payment he had received from the imaginary passengers. The captain had always said that the most powerful way to trick a man was to get him so greedy he tricked himself. It was a good line. I think he got it somewhere.
All this was academic to those of us who remained below decks. Our role in the theatrics was to stay out of sight, like the chorus line, until we were needed.
The signal to battle was a knock on the trapdoor, ostensibly to summon the passengers from their berths. I pulled my pistols from my belt and loaded them quickly. Many of the others were doing the same, or checking the edges on their shortblades if not.
The knock came. I and a few others at the front took a second, a single deep breath to prepare ourselves for what was to come. Then, all of us in concert gave the trapdoor a mighty shove and flung it completely open. There was only a second to take stock of the situation. A gangplank had been laid from one ship to another, but a narrow one. This would be a battle fought first and foremost at range.
As one of the first up I drew my pistol and fired into the crew on the deck of the other ship, prepared to receive the new, hypothetical passengers. First impressions being the most important part of a raid. Then all hell broke loose on the deck as the rest of my shipmates flowed out of the trapdoor.
It was hard to keep track of the flow of the battle before long. I can only tell you that of my four cartridges, I fired three, and that my shortblade never left its sheath during the battle. It was over seemingly as soon as it had begun, if not sooner. Ten of theirs lay dead or dying, to three of ours. The halt had been called by their captain, and seconded by captain Fourier.
“Take their officers to the brig,” said the captain – Fourier that is, for those were the terms of the surrender – “and scour the ship. Any man wants to join us on the Beacon is welcome to.”
And that was it. Fourier was known as a taciturn man. After his speech, he retired to his cabin to await the report of the first mate, Mr. Viol, who they called “Trapper”.
That was the first time I saw her. She hadn’t taken part in the fighting, though she had the look that if a battle were to break out now it wouldn’t last long. She was sitting cross-legged below decks, with a straight sword across her knees.
“Ah,” she said. “It’s about time.”
Two men took hold of her arms, and I was sure I was about to witness a double murder, for her entire being radiated a sense that this was a woman with whom you did not want to mess. But to my surprise, she allowed herself to be dragged to her feet and marched out along with the other officers.
“Pick up my sword, won’t you?” she said to me as she passed. “I’ll be wanting that when I get out.”

When I shared my misgivings with the captain that evening, the first time I saw him since the attack, he laughed.
“She may be sure of herself, Woods, but that doesn’t mean she’s any more able to walk through a locked door than the rest of the prisoners. She’s our meal ticket, and no mistake!” he said.
“Aye, sir. She’ll fetch a pretty ransom, I’d wager!” roared a mate to his immediate right, and there was a general raising of mugs and sloshing of ale and spirits from the table.
I couldn’t ignore, though the gnawing doubt that we had actually inconvenienced our mysterious guest in any way sat with me.

When I crept down into the brig that night and peered into the darkness through the eye-slot of the door, she gave the impression of a woman who was exactly where she wanted to be. A model of calm.
“You,” I whispered. She was the only one of our prisoners who was awake. “Woman.”
“I have a name,” she said, rather unfairly.
“So do I. Let’s swap,” I replied. The woman gave a thin smile that I couldn’t tell from genuine.
“Apollo,” she said.
“Petra,” I returned.
“Pet-rrra,” she rolled the name around in her mouth. “So Petra, woman to woman. What am I down here for exactly?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” I said. Apollo laughed sharply, not breaking eye contact with me through the narrow gap in the door.
“You could?”
“You want to be here,” I said, somewhat accusingly. “Why?”
Apollo took a couple of steps closer. “You’re half right. I don’t want to be in the pit of this leaky old tub – no offence – any more than you do. That said, it doesn’t make much difference to me where I am as long as I’m on the water.”
“On the water?”
“Oh,” Apollo said, with a mirthful smile that didn’t set me at ease at all. “You’ll see what I mean.” She turned and sat down facing away from me on the wooden floor. Seeing that I would get no further conversation out of her, I closed the slot in the door and turned away myself.

As I ascended the rough wooden stairs that would lead me to my bunk, I sensed a kind of movement in the air. I’ve always been sensitive to such things, you understand, more so since taking to the sea.
“Paying a visit to our friend down below?” said Mr Viol. “Not sure what the captain would think of it. You know we’re forbidden from conspiring with prisoners.”
“I wasn’t conspiring anything!” I said. “I don’t trust her.”
“Thankfully, she’s locked up. You ain’t got need to trust her,” Viol said. Why he had it in for me all of a sudden I couldn’t tell you, but he was interrupted suddenly by a shuddering from the hull, followed by a dramatic lurch.
“There’s something in the water!” came the cry from above. “It looks like a whale!”