Seaswept (Seabound Chronicles Book 2) (24 page)

Chapter 31—Rescue

Through broken messages,
Esther
and David gave Neal their
position. They were standing on a spur of land sticking out from the rest of
the island. It should be easy enough to spot. The
Lucinda
would give a wide berth to the battle between the Harvester
and Calderon ships. Esther pictured her friend standing in the pilothouse of
the
Lucinda
beside Dirk as they
navigated toward the island. They’d been in the vicinity for days, searching
for some sign of the Calderon facility and Esther’s signal.

They couldn’t stay
on the satellite phone for long. The watch battery would run out soon. Neal
called in every once in a while as he charted their progress. The bearings of
the device were still off, but he made the necessary adjustments. They drew
closer.

When the burnished
hull of the
Lucinda
broke the horizon,
Esther reached up and planted a huge kiss on David’s mouth. It made the cut on
her face scream in protest, but it was worth it. Together they watched the
Lucinda
grow larger. The sun started to
sink. When the sky took on a rose tint, the
Lucinda
had traversed half the distance from the horizon.

“This has been one
hell of a trip,” David said.

They sat side by
side on a rock beside a cluster of wind-torn bushes. It was getting colder.

Esther laughed.
“You didn’t use to swear this much.”

“You’re a bad
influence on me.” He nudged her with his elbow.

“When we get Zoe
back, the first thing I’m going to do is sleep for a week,” Esther said.

“The first thing?”
David asked.

Esther grinned.
“Maybe the second.”

The waves broke
gently against the steep cliff far beneath them.

Neal called in
again. “I think I see the outcropping. How close to the water are you?”

“We’re up quite
high.” David held the phone together to give Esther’s hands a rest. He balanced
it between them so they could both hear. “We’ll have to sneak down to the water
without being seen,” he said.

“How’s the fuel
supply?” Esther asked. “We’ll need to run for it as soon as we get to you.”

“Your energy
system is up and running now,” Neal said. “That’s how we were able to come
after you.”

“Great. We’ll head
to sea level.”

“You’ll do no such
thing.” A voice cut through the wind behind them. “We have you surrounded. You
didn’t really think you’d be able to hide on
our
island, did you?”

It was Chelle,
backed by a dozen Calderon men.

Esther leapt to
her feet, heart pounding. One of the ships must have returned from the fight.
Other armed men moved to the edges of the cliff, blocking their escape routes.
David stood frozen with the satellite phone in his hand. Chelle raised her
pistol. Esther made a snap decision.

“Look for us in
the water, Neal!” she shouted at the device. Then she grabbed David’s arm,
pulled him toward the cliff, and jumped.

The fall seemed to
take a lifetime and an eyeblink. There was a rush of sea spray and cold and
sound. David yelled curses into the wind. Then Esther hit the water.

She plunged deep
beneath the surface, but her bones didn’t shatter on rock as she had feared.
She kicked and struggled, fighting against the undertow, trying not to gasp at
the shocking cold. Her head broke the barrier between sea and sky.

Waves crashed
around her. The cliff face loomed nearby. They had to get away from it. She
thrashed around, frantically searching the ice-black sea. Where was he? They
were too close to the rocks.

Three terrifying
seconds later a blond head erupted out of the water beside her.

“Rust and fucking
salt. Fuck! Goddammit, Esther, are you trying to kill us both?”

David spluttered
and coughed, spewing an impressive litany of curses that she’d never heard from
him before.

“I could have let
them do it for us,” Esther shouted. “Now swim!”

She churned
through the water, trying to get as far away from the cliff as possible. The salt
stung her eyes, and her fingers were already going numb, but she forced herself
through the waves. David followed, choking out another curse every few strokes.

“Lost the phone,”
he gasped.

“Doesn’t matter.
They’ll find us.”

Esther
concentrated on pushing through the burning in her lungs and the freezing in
her limbs.

“You sure?”

“No choice.”

They swam onward.
The sun sank, injecting the clouds with reds and purples. They were moving away
from Calderon Island, but their progress was excruciatingly slow. Swells
towered over them, blocking their visibility as effectively as stone walls.

“I hate swimming,”
David said as he tackled the waves beside her.

“Huh.” Her laugh
came out as more of a gasp. “Neal better hurry.”

The salt in her
eyes and the constant dip and rise of the waves made it impossible to see
whether the
Lucinda
was still there.
Esther didn’t have the energy to worry. All she could do was swim.

“I meant what I
said,” David said after a while.

“What?” Esther
concentrated on not swallowing half the sea.

“To Chelle. Not
happy without you.”

“And you’re barely
staying alive with me.”

“Ha. Worth it.”

Esther smiled as
the next wave crashed into her face. “Me too.”

David slowed for a
moment to reach out and touch Esther’s shoulder. The ocean swelled beneath
them, lifting them up at the same moment. As it did, they saw the
Lucinda
less than a hundred yards away.

“We’re going to make
it, Esther,” David said.

She
grinned, teeth chattering, and waved her arms desperately at the ship. The
swells dipped them back down again. The next time the sea lifted them up, they
heard the frantic blast of a horn from the
Lucinda
.
A flare crackled low across the water straight toward them. Someone on board
had spotted them. They were saved.

Chapter 32—On the
Lucinda

Twenty minutes later Esther
and David huddled together in the
Lucinda
’s pilothouse as Neal wrapped a
blanket around their shoulders. Dirk glared down at them from the helm.

“That was a stupid
thing you did,” Dirk growled.

“Jumping off the
cliff? It worked,” Esther said.

It was surreal to
be aboard the familiar vessel. The windscreen still had a line of bullet holes,
a remnant of their escape from the
Galaxy
Flotilla
. One matched a scar on David’s shoulder. Elsewhere, the ship still
showed scorch marks from the Calderon attack.
Lucinda
had been through a lot. Esther shivered, numb after their
swim in the frigid sea. She felt like she was floating around the roof of the
pilothouse, watching herself talk to Neal and Dirk.

“I mean going off
with the Harvesters,” Dirk said.

“We had to,”
Esther said. “The Calderon Group would have killed David for sure.”

Dirk spit on the
floor. “True, but the
Harvesters
?”

“What do you know about
them?” David asked. Miraculously, his glasses had survived their swim. They
were crusted with drying salt water.

“They’re not as
squeaky clean as they pretend to be,” Dirk said.

“We figured
that
out,” Esther said. “We were kind of
in a rush at the time.”

Dirk raised his
eyebrows, the creases in his forehead squeezing together. He’d come on this
rescue mission under duress. Neal had told them Judith and Simon insisted on
sending the
Lucinda
to find Esther
and Zoe as soon as the energy system was complete. Apparently Judith had threatened
to throw Dirk overboard—among other things—if he didn’t go after
Esther.

“What news of the
fighting?” Esther asked.

“It’s pretty
vicious,” Neal said. “The Harvesters called in reinforcements. They have at
least five, maybe six ships in addition to the
Terra
.”

“What?” Esther
said. “So that’s why they’re attacking now.”

She wondered if
the Calderon ships knew what they were getting into when they went out to meet
the attack. The Calderon Group had better fighting tactics, but if too many of
their ships were away they would be hard pressed against the Harvesters’
superior numbers.

“Yeah, heard ’em
on the radio,” Neal said. “They must reckon they have a chance of taking the
Island.”

“I thought they’d
give up after how the last battle went,” Esther said. “But with that many ships
. . .”

“The Calderon
Group could be getting slaughtered right now,” David said.

“My glitch!”
Esther said. “Salt, they’ll be sitting ducks. We need to do something.”

“Wait. Now you
want to help the Calderon Group?” Neal said, tugging at his headset. “I’m
confused.”

Esther hesitated.
Images rose before her: Luke and Cody, Jacques, even Harry and Zeke and their Calderon
captors doing their best to blow each other out of the water at their captains’
commands. And all for what? Her invention. Energy. Power.

“We have to stop
the fighting,” she said.

David gave her an
appraising look but kept silent.

“Can you get a
message to them?” Esther asked. “Tell the Harvesters we’ll give them the plans
for the system if they withdraw their attack and release Zoe. It should give
the Calderon ships enough of a reprieve to get away.”

“You sure you want
to do that?” said Dirk.

“Why wouldn’t we?”
Esther said.

Everything had become
freshwater clear to her. This technology was not worth dying for—for
anyone. She looked at David. Other things were.

“I used to do
business with the Harvesters,” Dirk said, “before I lived on the
Galaxy
. Not that the
Galaxy
folk were particularly scrupulous
either. The Harvesters aren’t as flashy as the Calderon boys, but their leaders
are ruthless. And their numbers are growing. They’d be unstoppable with your
energy tech.”

“But the Calderon
Group have it now too, as soon as they figure out how to fix my glitch,” Esther
said. She met David’s eyes. “We had no choice.”

Dirk rolled his
big shoulders. “That’ll even up the playing field for the two of them. They
kept each other in check well enough before. It’s everyone else I’m worried
about. The other ships will get swallowed up like krill.”

Esther’s stomach
sank. A terrible image flashed before her: the Harvester and Calderon ships,
indistinguishable from one another, sailing across the sea at will, relentless,
consuming ship after ship as they ran out of fuel, unable to escape. Again she
saw the faces of her friends—Luke and Cody, Harry and
Zeke—transformed into monsters, glowering with teeth like a shark’s. How
could she have messed things up this badly? She knew her technology would
change their world, but she didn’t want this. It was supposed to make things
better.

But it was already
done, and Esther’s friends and family came first. “We have to give it to the
Harvesters to get Zoe back.” She hesitated, then asked Dirk, “Did you ever meet
the captain of the
Terra Firma
?”

“Alder? Once. A
hard man, that one.”

“Would he harm a
prisoner out of spite?”

Neal and Dirk
exchanged glances.

“What?” Esther
stood, letting the blanket fall from her shoulders. “What do you know?”

“Maybe you guys
should get warmed up and rested,” Neal said. “We can’t do anything rash.”

“Why would we do
something rash?” Esther said. “What happened?”

Neal avoided her
gaze. “We . . . intercepted a message between two Harvester ships just before
picking you up. The Harvesters said something about hurting a prisoner if conditions
weren’t met. We were confused because we thought you were still with the
Calderon Group but . . .”

“Zoe. The
Harvesters are going to do something to Zoe,” Esther said. “They have to know
by now that I helped the Calderon guys install my technology. Luke and Cody
must think I abandoned the bargain . . . Either that or they can’t hold off
anymore. Rust.”

She paced back and
forth across the pilothouse. Wind whistled through the bullet holes in the
glass.

“What did you
think would happen when you left her behind?” Dirk growled.

“I didn’t know I’d
be on the Island for so long,” Esther snapped.

She didn’t need
Dirk to drive home the guilt. Every thought of Zoe was like a twist from her
friend’s pocketknife. It felt like a year since they had last seen each other
in their cabin on the
Terra Firma
.

“Look,” David
said, standing and putting a steadying hand on her shoulder. “They’re in the
middle of a battle. If they haven’t hurt her yet—and to be honest, we
don’t know they haven’t—then they won’t do it right now. Stopping the
fighting is the best we can do for everyone right now.”

“It’s up to you,
Esther,” Neal said.

All eyes turned to
her.

Esther nodded.
“I’m going to give the Harvesters the technology,” she said.
And may the New Pacific forgive me.
“We
have to contact them and get them to withdraw from the battle.”

The faces still swam
in front of her: Luke and Cody, Jacques, Harry and Zeke. Now Zoe. Cally and
Dax. Judith. Her father. It was all so pointless. It would be better if none of
them had the technology. None of them or . . .

“Neal!”
she said. “I have a better idea. I need your help.”