Chapter 2913: The Special Ship

Just before six, his brother-in-law and Second Sister went off together to the night shift, talking and laughing. Brother-in-law, a grade-four craftsman, had risen gloriously to foreman of the forging gang; Second Sister, C-grade diploma in hand like her husband, had made storekeeper of the shipyard. A two-wage couple of the same works — rare enough even among the yard's workmates, and envied by all of them. That said nothing of Third Sister-in-Law, whose smothered sobbing in the yard's junk room kept stealing into Mai Ruibao's ears, while Mother ran on and on about this family's daughter and that household's girl, till he was revolted and weary beyond bearing. So, pleading a stroll to settle his supper, he slipped out the door and walked a long, unthinking stretch along the shore.

It was late April, after all; the small-hours chill off the sea had not come again with sundown. The fine evening wind poured into his lungs, soft and warm with salt, and Mai Ruibao let out a long breath. The sea, dyed pale red in the afterglow, stirred only with small wavelets; the skiffs and fishing boats along the strand were no more than blurred shadows rocking up and down; farther out, the water was already drowned in darkness — which was why the spread of lights on the far side of Saintess Bay showed so plainly. And then, little by little, those lights were blotted out by the huge dark mass of a ship, nearing and nearing.

Mai Ruibao watched her riding lights — red, white, and green ranged together along either side — working slowly toward the Hung Hom shore where the shipyard lay, like some great beast with gleaming eyes groping its way along the edge of night. Against the sunset glow her hull showed only a faint outline, and he dimly made out what seemed the shape of an H800. And yet, strange: the great ship spread no canvas, nor gave off any thunder of engines; a vast framework stood hazy on her afterdeck, with what looked like a funnel before it. Mai Ruibao stared hard into the blackening water, trying to take in the whole of the strange vessel. Suddenly a shrieking, shriek upon shriek, broke the hush of the Hung Hom shore: the steam pipe blasted a great cloud of white vapor skyward — the boiler blowing off its surplus. In the instant before the deck was swallowed in steam, he caught, half-seen, the silhouette of enormous naval guns; then from the bow rang out a clattering din of iron chain, the heavy anchor plunged into the water, and with the rush of the cable and the groan of the brake hauled tight, the bay sank back into silence. The second strange ship he had seen that day lay moored in the anchorage of its own choosing.

Mai Ruibao squatted on the strand a while longer, until the ship's dark silhouette had melted clean into the night and only her riding lamps hung solitary above the water, like three stars that refused to fall. Only then did he discover that his back had gone stiff at some point, a fine cold sweat seeping out between his shoulder blades. The sea wind touched him, the chill ran up his spine, and a shudder shook itself loose from him.

"Damned strange," he murmured, and the spume swallowed most of the sound.

On the walk back his steps were far slower than on the way out. His head turned the ship's shape over and over — the shadow of the guns, the funnel, that inexplicably heightened mizzen. He had seen drawings of the H800: at the Lingao Times' harbor bureau he had once leafed through a publicity piece let slip by the shipyard, its sketch done by a senior schoolmate of his own training. The H800 in that picture was round-lined and trim-masted, a typical Australian Song production piece — nothing whatever like the thing he had seen tonight.

"A conversion?" he puzzled. "But what ship would mount guns like those..."

The lantern at the mouth of the lane still burned, its dim yellow light drawing his shadow out long and thin. Mai Ruibao paused before his family's door: inside, Mother's voice had subsided, and Third Sister-in-Law's weeping had left no trace; only the leaves of the old banyan in the yard rustled in the wind. He did not go in. He turned instead and walked a stretch to the lane's far end, sat down on a stone block, drew out his notebook, and by the faint pulsing light of the distant lighthouse scrawled a few lines:

"Dingmao year, third month, twenty-eighth. At night a ship anchored in the outer roads off Hung Hom, in form like the H800 yet greatly different. Mizzen raised high, tripod pattern, fitted with a short yard; no sail. Funnel and ventilators present; no foremast. Twin guns at the bow, singular in pattern, barrels very thick. Boiler blew off at about eight sharp. No movement after anchoring."

He read the lines silently over when he had done, and felt the wording too dry — it read like one of the shipyard's technical reports. He thought a moment, and added at the end: "Barrels shaped like soda bottles (Zhengguanghe brand)."

Then he shut the book, tucked it back inside his jacket, rose, and went home.

The junk room door in the yard stood ajar, blackness within — Third Sister-in-Law, worn out with weeping, had likely gone down to sleep. Mai Ruibao crossed the yard on cat's feet and entered the side room. The rattan suitcase, the satchel, and the camera case all lay where he had left them. The camera was the most precious thing he had — issued for his use by the pictorial's office — with one split in the outer bellows mended over with black tape. He felt the hard body of it once, and drew his hand back.

A pity there were no plates left, he thought.

"Tomorrow — first to the Tsim Sha Tsui wharf, ask after sailings." He said it to himself, turned over, and could not sleep for anything. Outside the window the sea tide came surging in wave upon wave, mingled now and then with the muffled stroke of the shipyard's night-shift hammers. Eyes shut, he saw always those two round-barreled great guns, set side by side, like a pair of silent enormous eyes staring coldly at him across the water.

Early the next morning, Mai Ruibao had fully meant to go to the Tsim Sha Tsui wharf and ask whether any ship was soon bound for Lingao; but the moment he stepped out the door, as though some ghost were steering him, his feet turned of their own accord toward that same stretch of evening shore. Deep down he already knew: the ship would still be there.

Just as he expected, the great vessel still rode where she had lain — only far busier now, figures swarming on foredeck and quarterdeck and even up the masts, a small steam launch lying close in against her side. The morning light slanted in from the east, from Lei Yue Mun, gilding her outline with a thin wash of gold, and every detail last night's darkness had blurred now lay open to the daylight.

A little difficulty like the lack of a camera was hardly going to stump Reporter Mai, who had been taught art at the Chiefs' own knee. Out came the sketchbook and pencil that never left his person, and he sat down cross-legged on the beach and set to drawing the ship.

He began with the mast that stood alone on the afterdeck, laying it down carefully. Mai Ruibao could be certain he was looking at an H800 rebuilt past all recognition. Most of the class were pure sailers, three-masted; a very few, their engine spaces taking over the mainmast's berth, had been rebuilt as two-masted sail-and-steam auxiliaries. Beside either of those this ship was a rarity: she had funnel and ventilators — so she must be a steamer — and yet the foremast was gone, while the mizzen stood conspicuously raised and strutted with two spars besides. So stable a tripod mast, and furnished only with one short little yard — how small a sail could that ever set? And no canvas bent on the yard at all; instead, halyards strung up little flags of every color — genuinely baffling.

His pencil paused; he circled the flags and annotated them in small characters: "Signal flags? Or ornament?" Another glance upward confirmed a slender lightning rod at the masthead too, its point flashing silver-white in the sun.

The foredeck, deprived of its foremast, looked rather bare. Mai Ruibao noticed the hands there raising wooden posts, busy rigging spars — for an awning against the sun, he made no doubt — so he must hurry and get the bow guns onto paper before awning posts and canvas blocked them off. Even at this distance he could gauge that these guns far outsized the Jieyun's 12-pounders; only, why did the barrels look so round? It put Mai Ruibao inexplicably in mind of the Zhengguanghe soda bottles he had made his first acquaintance with only days before. He stood, walked a few paces, shifted his angle — good grief: the two great guns were actually mounted side by side. Mai Ruibao could not for the life of him imagine what ship could take one of their broadsides — not even the great layered-deck ships of the Far Westers could manage it, he reckoned — and all the while his pencil never slackened a stroke.

He drew on, deeper and deeper in, the pencil point whispering across the paper like spring silkworms at the mulberry leaves. The guns' details surfaced little by little — not the old muzzle-loading smoothbores; the barrels sleek and clean as cast-iron bottles, very thick, and faintly he could make out slender pipes led up from below decks and coupled to the flank of the mount. Mai Ruibao's breathing quickened.

He had read stray hints in the Lingao Times: that the Fubo Army's ordnance departments were at work on a "rifled gun," in range and accuracy far beyond the old muzzle-loaders — though every passage of detail ran "as this touches upon military secrets, publication is withheld." The two guns before him now were, in all likelihood, that very thing of legend.

"But why mount them on a ship like this..." he muttered, and the pencil hooked another stroke, laying down the turntable mechanism beneath the gun carriage as well.

"What are you doing?"

A voice, suddenly, from behind him.

Mai Ruibao turned his head, dumbfounded: four big men had come up behind him who knew when, without a sound, and the leader had snatched the sketchbook clean out of his hands before he could think. Besides the unfinished warship, the notebook held not a few of Mai Ruibao's sketches from earlier assignments with the troops and at the Specialty Chemical Zone — Fubo Army infantry at drill, the chemical regiment's fire-fighting exercises, several standing portraits of armed sentries on the wharves; the lines were spare, but gear and firearms were rendered with perfect exactness.

His brain rebooted from its momentary crash. Mai Ruibao fumbled frantically at his pockets, rummaged in a blind flurry, and finally remembered: his press pass, with all the papers that vouched for him, lay back home in his bedroll. All his fishing produced was a pencil and an enamel badge issued by The Young Companion — the one pinned at his breast that morning as he dressed, the sole thing of the kind on his person.

He pointed at it in haste. "Comrade — I'm a reporter with The Young Companion, Mai Ruibao. This is my—"

The leader was a little past thirty, brush-cut hair, square face, a faint scar across one cheekbone, dressed in faded workaday clothes worn open at the chest, a leather holster hanging from his belt. He glanced once at the badge on Mai Ruibao's chest, then, unhurried as ever, turned another page of the sketchbook, reading through the sketches one by one — and the expression on his face passed, by degrees, from cold severity into something far more meaningful.

(End of Chapter)