The first swing of Fourier’s mighty fist cracked the glass of the stranger’s faceplate. The fat gold buttons that he had slipped off his coat and wrapped around his knuckles left three big chips in the shiny surface, and he swung again like a prisoner breaking rocks with a hammer. I felt the stranger’s arm go limp in mine and I let it go.
“It’s unconscious,” I said. “At least, I think it is. Looks that way.”
“Looks that way,” Fourier agreed, then punched the stranger again. He hmphed, satisfied, and turned his attention on Moran, who shrank back.
“That’s your big plan, huh? Play sick till they open the door? A child could have thought of that!”
“It did work, captain,” offered Viol hesitantly.
“I know it worked! I expected a little bit more from- what’s your line, son?”
“My l-line?” Moran stammered.
“Who pays you?” said Fourier, as if he were speaking to a three-year old.
“The uh, the Tritreme company,” he said, stumbling over his words.
“Trireme’s finest, their favourite son, I expected a little more! I’ve read a book, son. I know that trick.”
Moran gulped audibly. “I know you would, sir. But I was thinking. They might not. They don’t look… literary. Sir.”
Fourier stared at Moran for what felt like hours. We all knew this look. He was trying to decide if he was the butt of a joke.
Inexorably, my eyes were drawn to the gold buttons protruding between his fingers in his still-balled right fist.
The captain laughed violently, like he’d been trying to keep it down after a particularly heavy night at the brandy. “Indeed they don’t,” he said, patting Moran on the shoulder with a great paw-like hand. “Indeed they don’t.” This gesture seemed to ingratiate him greatly with the other Trireme sailors. In the space of a minute they had seen both sides of the captain – not that any man has only two sides, but these were the two most relevant in our current circumstances – and could not be faulted for falling in behind the big, roaring animal called Fourier.

There was a sharp, electrical noise. While our attention had been held by the drama playing out between the captain and Moran, Apollo had swooped down on the dozing stranger and taken up his cattle-prod device.
“Don’t just stand there, woman!” said the captain. “Get his suit off! I intend to do some reconnoitoirey before they notice he’s missing.”
“I don’t think so,” said Apollo, squeezing the trigger on the prod experimentally. It seemed to crackle louder the harder she squeezed. “For one thing, that suit is sealed tight. If I had to guess you’d need an acetylene torch to even make a start. For a second, with that faceplate they’d sniff you out in an instant.”
“How’d you figure that?”
“Don’t insult me. Suit sealed that tight, I doubt they can survive in an oxygen atmosphere. Look,” she said, pointing with the tip of the prod. Bubbles of water were oozing between the cracks in the faceplate. “Waterbreathers. You go out there in that, you’ll be plain as day an intruder. Which brings me to my third point.” Fourier raised his eyebrows, inviting her to go on.
“My third point. You’ll do no such thing, because I am assuming command. Captain,” she said curteously, levelling the business end of the prod at his chest. “Would you kindly step back and place your hands against the wall?” She looked over at me. “Petra. How many of these you trust?”
“Trust?” I said. A thorny concept among pirates.
“Alright. How many of them do you like in a fight?”
I had no idea why she was asking me, other than the real possibility that I was the only name she knew among the crew of the Beacon, but I determined to make the most of it. “I should say I like all of them in a fight,” I said. “But if you would counsel splitting us up I would certainly rather have the captain at my back than not.”
Apollo sighed. “Moran. I like your attitude too,” she said. “You’re with us. Me, the girl here, you. With a small group we’re less likely to draw attention. The rest of you, stay where you are.”
“Like hell!” grunted the captain, turning and drawing himself to his full height. “Let you walk off and abandon us? I don’t think so, woman! Don’t forget that we outnumber you three near enough ten to one!”
I was about to offer that I didn’t wish to be counted alongside Apollo if battle-lines were drawn, but I held my tongue since I also didn’t want to be counted against her.

In the end, a compromise was reached, which was that Apollo was still allowed to lead the escape efforts, but that the entire crew would follow along with her, to prevent her effecting a vanishing act without the rest of them. She grumbled a little at this, but acquiesced, asking only that she be given ten paces head on the rest of the rabble to check corners.
Giving her those ten paces was a blessing, since as we came close to the first of the many twists in the creaking metallic passageways she held a finger to her lips and pressed herself against the wall. At the front of the crew, just behind her, I could hear the echoing bootsteps of one of the strangers approaching.
Just as it seemed the bootsteps could come no closer, Apollo squeezed the trigger of the prod and swung it around the corner as it crackled, jabbing into a metal structural ring around the waist of the diving suit. The thing came round the corner on momentum, spasming and jerking, and then collapsed to the floor. Its own prod fell from its hand, and Apollo scooped it up and tossed it to me.
“Send it to the back. We need someone guarding our rear,” she said. I took a moment to covet the small amount of power I had been handed, and then passed the prod into the hands of the beakish lookout, who looked downright outlandish against the riveted steel walls of the passageway. He brandished it, and then it was quickly snatched out of his hands. Looking over the crush behind me I saw the prod wave in the air at the far end of the group and, satisfied that Apollo’s word had been carried out, turned back.

How long we rambled around the inside of that great metal beast I could not honestly say, but it quickly became clear to us that the vast maw that had swallowed us was only a fraction the size of the belly we now found ourselves traipsing through. Eventually though, Apollo cranked open a door and found it to her liking.
“We’ve got it!” she said, beckoning Moran and myself in. The rest of the crews she left standing in the doorway.
The control room was cramped and hot, snaking pipes venting steam into open air in a way that looked very dangerous indeed. Apollo gathered Moran and I into a huddle.
“Mark well,” she said. “What I’m about to say cannot pass into the ears of your crewmates.”
“I’m bound to keep no secrets from them,” said Moran earnestly, which earned him a snort of laughter from Apollo.
“Well, this isn’t just any secret,” she said.
“I can keep secrets,” I said, not oppositionally but out of a genuine desire to seem useful.
“Well,” said Apollo. “I’ve looked around this control room.”
“Marvellous, isn’t it? All mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic,” said Moran. “Explains how they make it work without electricity.”
“It is marvellous, I’m sure, if you’re inclined that way,” Apollo said, with a hint of sarcasm. “It’s also a trap.”
“A trap?” Moran said, a little louder than he clearly intended to.
“One way in, no way out. I’d guess they’re already closing in behind us. That, and there’s no way I can do anything with these controls. Not without a chance to observe them in use.”
The captain, who had shouldered his way to the front and was waving a prod belligerently, shouted “Useless!”
“Who gave him that?” asked Apollo matter-of-factly, then “No matter. My swordplay is a little rusty-” She raised her own weapon. “-but this is no sword.”
The two combatants faced each other, remaining at arm’s length, for a long time. It was Apollo who moved first, testing the captain’s guard. It was unlike any duel I had ever witnessed, due to the unique nature of the weapons being used. Somehow the silences seemed more protracted, the bouts of action more furious. It seemed that the tie would never break.
A cry went up from the far end of the passageway, and the sharp crack of the prods gave pause to both the captain and Apollo. It was over in a moment, and they went back at each other with what seemed like redoubled ferocity, clashing and feinting and parrying so fast my eye could scarcely follow. Whether the strangers or the crew were winning the day outside I couldn’t tell, but even if I had known, I would never have been able to tear myself away from that battle.
Moran took up arms before I did. Not to interfere with the duel, which I think we had both silently agreed was a kind of sacrosanct, but against the strangers, who were definitively pushing their way through the crush of sailors and pirates alike by this time. Seeing us, even Apollo and the captain broke away from their battle, recognising a greater enemy.
“Blackguards!” yelled the captain. “Renegades!” He drove his prod into the chest of an approaching stranger, who batted at it with slow, inarticulate arms as he savoured the moment of panic before squeezing the trigger and sending the reverse-diving-suit flailing backwards. He laughed, self-satisfied.
We must have blasted dozens of the strangers before Apollo suddenly stopped, throwing down her prod.
“What in death are you doing, woman?” hissed the captain, stepping forward to fight all the more ferociously.
“They don’t want us dead, and we can’t fight this battle forever,” she said. “Relinquish your weapon.”
“Like hell!” said the captain, and knocked one down with a swift kick to the midsection. “Maybe you can’t!”
I looked from my captain to Apollo, this strange woman I barely knew, and suddenly knew what I had to do. I threw my weapon down beside hers, and raised my hands in surrender.
Scoffing, I saw Moran take up mine alongside his own and step out beside the captain.
It wasn’t long before they were overrun, and strong, strange hands clamped around our wrists and took us off deeper, deeper into the labyrinth…