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Full Steam Ahead
An eRed Sage Publication. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2009
eRedSage is a registered trademark of Red Sage Publishing, Inc.
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ISBN: 978-1-60310-447-0; 1-60310-447-X Full Steam Ahead ePub Published
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as follows:
Full Steam Ahead © 2010 by Nathalie Gray Cover © 2010 by Kanaxa
Printed in the U.S.A.
ebook layout and conversion by jimandzetta.com Ful Steam Ahead
***
By Nathalie Gray
TO MY READER:
Dashing pirates, odious villains and mouthy heroines fight for survival in this
momentous steampunk story. I pulled out all the stops for this one. For those
unfamiliar with this awesome genre, steampunk is a delightful mix of Victorian
aesthetics and oh-so-shiny fantastical machines. If you enjoy a good historical
romance mixed with an action ride that never stops, or a romance that will sweep
you into a fantasy world of petticoats and steam pistols, armored dirigibles and
floating fortresses, then FULL STEAM
AHEAD is for you. Strap on your brass goggles, my lovelies, we’re weighing
the anchor and hoisting the mizzen. Ahoy!
Full Steam Ahead: Chapter 1
Clouds massed like god-fists low over the horizon, which only the peaks and
dips of the restless ocean broke. Brown and gray slashed the purple sky. The
temperature had dropped. High noon felt more like dusk. The sun had risen and
then disappeared an hour later, going back to bed with the petulance of a moody
teen, and Laurel had not seen it since. According to the met reports, she would
not for several hours. Days, even.
She rubbed her hair back into her baseball cap and then screwed it on low. She
was only a couple hours ahead of the other sailboats and couldn’t afford to lose a
precious minute or make a single less-than-optimum correction. The lone female
among the twenty racers, she had more to prove than any of them. Plus, she had
to prove something to herself. She’d sacrificed a lot for this, had fought and
trained and worked hard for more than three years. But she was here now!
A sense of exhilaration took her. She grinned despite the spray hitting her in the
face, despite her lips cracking from weeks of wind and sun exposure. Or perhaps
because of it. An adrenaline junkie at heart, she did not mind the conditions,
quite the contrary.
She’d always been this way, the reckless “stuntwoman” diving down the
basement stairs with her big brother’s too-large hockey equipment taped on
tight. Or a “pilot” at the command of her retrofitted pedal bike, complete with
wings made of old umbrella parts. The bump on the bridge of her broken nose
gave her a bragging right she still used at family gatherings.
This race was just a normal continuation of the life she’d led so far. The Vendée
Globe, the most grueling singlehanded yacht race around the world, had never
been annulled for bad weather, even if the sixty-foot open sailboats took water in
by the gallons. Below the whistling of the wind, the bilge pump’s rumble
whirred beneath the deck. It had held so far. She closed her eyes to savor the
sounds—the various metallic clings and clanks as rings and cleats struck the
aluminum mast. A soothing rhythm.
A slap of wind strained the mainsail. Laurel snapped out of her luxurious five
minute break and leaned on the satellite dome, looking up. Dizzying, the tip of
the mast swerved left and right against the darkening sky, forward and back with
each wave while telltales and reef lines angrily flapped in the wind. The white
and red hull—her main sponsor’s colors—glistened with the waves’ increasing
intensity and force.
“Benson!” crackled the radio.
One gloved hand on the tiller, she stretched to reach the small handheld VHF
radio strapped inside the instruments niche.
Another couple inches to her five-foot-nothing frame would be nice sometimes.
She dislodged the handheld from its Velcro straps and brought it up to her
mouth.
“Benson here,” she snarled with her lips against the radio. A wave forced her to
make an adjustment, which slowed her down.
She felt the boat sink deeper into the water, the mainsail sagging, beginning to
luff. Every second counted. Shit.
“If yoo vaunt to go beck home,” the man said. Swiss, maybe?
Austrian? “No one voot say anyssing.”
“You have a question or not?”
She heard the mocking laughter. Moron kept his finger on the transmitter so she
could hear his laugh. “Only one? Oo is in your kutchen vhile yoo are out playing
vith saw boys?”
Funny how anger dissipated the wet cold sneaking into her many layers of
clothing. She reached for the whistle tied to her PFD, kept her thumb on the
transmit button and blew a nice and loud tune into the moron’s ear.
“Asshole,” she snarled after she spit out the whistle.
Sexist jerks.
She checked her watch. Damn. Her last correction would cost her a couple
hours. She felt winds shifting again. Her uncanny skill had earned her the
nickname la sorcière from the favorable French crews. She was no witch. Just a
regular racer who had a knack for wind shifts. She felt the minute changes on her
face and in the way the mainsail strained from the bottom part up instead of the
other way around. Laurel shifted on the narrow, molded fiberglass seat—more
like a ledge—to face starboard instead of port.
As if she’d tuned it with a remote, the wind altered slightly by a few degrees.
But she was waiting and she harvested each iota of energy by winching hard on
the line and anchoring it into the clam cleat. The mainsail strained against its
lines and moorings. With a sound like a giant water hose, the force of the wind
pushed against the sails. The boat leaned portside. Laurel let out a whoop of
thrill when the angle forced her to her feet. Above, the sky seemed to become a
tableau from a mad painter. Slashes of gray and brown against purple.
Temperatures dropped further. She shivered despite the nylon jacket, polar
fleece sweater and Nomex undergarments.
Because of her French Canadian father’s work as merchant mariner, she’d lived
in Montreal for several years yet had never, ever been so cold. To her shock, she
noticed ice forming on the glistening bow. What the hell was going on? Ice
meant added weight to her boat, which could cost her more than just hours.
“Benson,” the radio sputtered.
“Oh, what now, you annoying prick!” She didn’t get up. Screw them. Screw
their sexist jokes.
“Benson…weather reports….” The radio spattered and fizzed, lost the channel,
and then picked it up again. She recognized her shore crew manager’s voice. He
sounded worried. Himself a seasoned seafarer and father of five girls, nothing
fazed Jacques Durand. “Benson…sat phone….”
She’d stuffed the satellite phone in the cabin earlier because she’d been in a
hurry. She couldn’t put the autopilot on right now, not with the kind of weather
presently assaulting her boat. Plus, she was having a riot of a time. This was true
freedom. Alone on the open sea. Standing, she strained against the wind, mouth
stretched in a wide grin, eyes set on the prize. Always on the prize.
She could do this. She’d done this before, if never in this particular race. The
boat responded by cutting the waves like a knife would meringue. The raging sea
tried its best to suck her boat into the water. The mast quivered and bowed. The
sails shivered. More ice accumulated on the bits and pieces of aluminum
moorings, on a section of exposed lines she hadn’t touched in a while, on the
bow.
It even crystallized the water dripping off her cap.
“Benson!” the radio clamored.
“Argh, goddammit, all right!” She reached for the radio. Just as her fingers
touched it, a blue arc of electricity linked her to the radio, which fizzed and went
silent. She brought it up, mashed the button. “Benson here!”
Nothing. Not even the deep-fryer sound. Laurel gave it a good shake, her usual
way of fixing things. Still dead.
Ahead, waves reached proportions she’d never encountered.
The radio slipped from her hand.
“Holy cow.”
The size of that thing.
Ragged scuds and vortices lined one of the biggest shelf clouds she’d ever seen.
The large wedge-shaped cloud, low over the horizon, looked ominous enough
for Laurel to zip her jacket all the way up. A sure sign of trouble. She was
headed straight for a massive storm. No wonder Jacques had sounded worried.
Her shore crew must have been going nuts trying to contact her. And the sat
phone nice and warm in the cabin.
The Swiss team’s sexist jokes had suddenly become the least of her worries. She
had work to do and needed all her neurons. She’d call the team as soon as
possible. For now, she was about to enter the ring with the deadliest of all
fighters—the sea.
“Here we go!”
She released the line from the cleat, let it out a bit as she nudged the tiller, just a
tad, enough to angle her boat at the massive series of waves coming dead center.
The first, she crested diagonally, rode it up like a Russian Mountain and could
almost hear the clack-clack-clack of the initial lift hill. High. Higher still. The
boat crested the giant wave. A split second of quasi-zero g.
Exhilaration. The thrill of anticipation. Laurel spread her feet wide and wedged
her butt into the seat’s corner. Then descent.
She yelled the whole way down.
Shitloads of joules of potential energy transferred into the kinetic kind,
propelling her downward at rates she’d be hard-pressed to gauge. Crazy Fast, if
she were pushed to name it.
The second wave, she didn’t take so well. Still winching in lines and keeping the
tiller put with her knee for a hard tack, Laurel didn’t have time to adjust before
the monstrous wall of water rose in front of her bow. A Hoover Dam made of
liquid emerald. The sea was such a beautiful, beautiful bitch. The veritable
mountain of water hit her boat slightly tighter than forty-five degrees to portside.
The hull moaned, as did the mast. One of the instruments niche tethers snapped,
which released the fire extinguisher to roll all the way back and stop between her
feet. She couldn’t anchor it back into its place. It was all she could do to keep
her boat from pulling a cartwheel. She crested just in time to see the third wave.
“Damn.”
She was so toast.
But instead of slamming into the liquid version of Mount Fuji, her boat decided
to do its own thing and swerved right. Before she could pull back from this
demented course, the bow had already engaged three-feet deep into water, only
to emerge and start to cut the base of the wave. Like surfing. On a sixty-foot
open sailboat.
Jesus!
What the hell’s wrong with this ship!
A sort of tunnel of water opened up in front of her. Water changed colors. Even
the sky at the other end looked different. But it was better than taking a nosedive
into unfathomable depths.
Cursing and winching as hard as she could, Laurel aimed for the sky at the end
