Cape Storm Page 0,59
miles across, like a hot purple zipper letting in the darkness.
It lit up low, thick, black clouds that fired rain down like arrows from the battlements.
I was on my back on the deck, reclining in a white padded chair that was made for lounging.
It slid hard to starboard, and I jerked and rolled off and to my feet before it slammed into the promenade railing. My bare soles hit cold, wet wood, and I shivered. I was soaked to the skin. How had I gotten here? And why? And what the hell was going on?
Nothing good, obviously. The deck was thick with uniformed crew and a chaotic swirl of passengers. It was too dangerous out here, but that didn't seem to be stopping anybody; I wondered why they hadn't taken refuge inside, but some practical knowledge finally kicked in, and I knew.
Either the crew understood that there was an excellent chance that this ship was going down, or there was something below that was even more dangerous than the storm. Either way, not good news for me or anybody else.
"Jo!" Cherise. I barely recognized my best friend, because I'd rarely seen her look this -
well, bedraggled. Drowned-rat wet, pale, and shivering with cold. "God, I thought you'd never wake up. Come on!"
She dragged me off in some random direction. No one had told her that I was prone to irrational bursts of killing fury, I supposed. Good. That would make it easier.
"We need to get to the lifeboat - "
My senses were coming back online, all of them, and in Oversight I saw the thick red streams sweeping around us, closing in.
The storm that Bad Bob had dispatched, the one powered by the Unmaking he'd pulled out of the spear, was almost on us, and it was devastating.
Cherise's words were lost in a fresh blast of wind, a gust so flat and hard that it slammed her bodily against the metal wall. I suppose that in better times I might have tried to help her. Instead, I just clung to a metal stanchion and watched her struggle.
I saw one of the heavy lounge chairs topple right over the railing and disappear as the ship lurched to starboard again. We were heeling around, getting hammered by churning waves like a punch-drunk boxer.
The ship was still stuck in one spot, anchored by the suction coming from deep beneath the ocean. I could feel it, and it was growing stronger, not weaker.
The Djinn were losing the fight.
"Hang on!" Cherise screamed, and another gigantic wave crested and fell, pounding us with spray like nails. "We have to get off the ship, now !" How exactly that was going to be accomplished I had no idea, but I nodded. In the brief lull between lashing waves, we staggered to the next handhold. Along the way we ran into more castaways. I barely recognized a sopping-wet Cynthia Clark, who surely hadn't been this miserable since she'd made that epic disaster movie with Gene Hackman, back in the day. I also recognized Cho Chu Wing, one of our Weather Wardens. Cho was a tiny little thing, skinny as a restaurant greeter. She'd managed to keep herself mostly together; her black hair was pegged back in a tight ball, and only random strands of it clung to her damp face. She'd worn a storm slicker, neon orange, and beneath it she seemed to be drier than any of the rest of us. She waved us frantically toward the bow of the ship. As we slipped and fought our way through blinding spray and stinging, whipping rain, we gathered Weather Wardens in ones and twos, until there was a tight knot of them linking arms together, like a rugby team in a scrum.
I stood apart from them. Remote, even in the midst of my fellow Wardens.
"We need to get a bubble!" Cho screamed. "Focus on giving us clear water for a hundred feet in every direction!"
That wasn't as hard as it might seem; it was basically wave cancellation, which is a fundamental principle of the physics of anything that moves as a unit - sound, water, a rippling flag. You need to find the specific frequency of the wave and cancel it out, and move the energy elsewhere. Normally that was the tricky part; bleed-off energy could destabilize everything, and whip up a whole mess of side problems you'd never anticipate.
In this melting stew of uncontrolled energy, another few mega joules in the wrong place would hardly matter.
"Tornado!"