Burning Woman and the Ghost Lance

Statement of the prisoner, Dr. Tlatlasihuatl. January 19, 1993 CY

The captain spent the remainder of the voyage eating his meals through a straw, and I spent that time below decks in confinement.

I wasted a few days in mourning, crying uncontrollably. I had never done that before, sobbing so hard it hurt deep in my chest, nor had I ever had reason to. I had never felt such loss before. Such guilt. It was my lights that brought them. My lights. My fault they were dead, as though I had murdered them all with my own hands. Their doom had been sealed the moment I washed up on their shore. They should have killed me then. Skewered me with their spears and used me for crab bait.

My Amina. Her blood was on my hands.

But not mine alone.

The Obsidian Jaguar killed them, as it had killed millions before, and would continue to kill.

If I let them.

If I let them.

In that moment, I decided not to let them.

That was when I stopped crying and started thinking.

I knew the Sipaktlantli was on her way back to her homeport in the SEOJ, and I knew that as soon as I set foot in my homeland I would be arrested, and swiftly executed in a most painful fashion. I had a limited amount of time to come up with a plan, but I had to be careful.

The “cabin” that I was confined to was actually a storeroom foreword of and below the engine room in the very center of the ship, just above the bilge. Apparently the ship’s brig was considered ill-suited for female prisoners of my social status. There was a cot, a washbasin and a bucket for a latrine. Barrels and crates of various tools and supplies needed for the maintenance of the ship’s steam engines and mechanical workings filled the remainder of the room.

I had more than enough material to conduct some serious mischief.

During the day there were machinist’s mates running in and out of the storeroom fetching tools, parts, or a canister of lubricating oil, so I was forced to work primarily at night. When the last of the daytime watch left the section and it became quiet, I went to work. I started by scratching off some paint from an iron bulkhead and soldering one end of a heavy-gauge copper wire to it. Then I compiled a set of barrels that I made into extraordinarily high capacity accumulators and connected them in series using the copper wire. I constructed a simple knife switch with a safety block to prevent completing the circuit until I was ready to implement my plan.

The resonating circuit was the hardest part, as there was little to work with in the way of advanced electrical parts. The final component was the resonator itself, which turned out to be relatively simple to make, being mostly mechanical in design. After I had arc-welded the resonator to the keel, the massive curved iron beam that ran the length of the ship, my little sabotage device was complete.

I still needed to charge my accumulators, but that was a matter of waiting for a good storm. The amount of current I could tap into from the ship’s dynamo was inadequate for my needs.

You see, in the days of wooden ships and iron men, lightning was a serious hazard to any ship at sea. The invention of the lightning rod improved one’s chances for survival, but arcing from the down conductor was still a danger. With the advent of metal hulls for ships, the hull itself became a conductor and the lightning was safely and reliably diverted to the sea.

I was simply going to intercept some of that lightning for my own purposes. Woe to me if we completed our journey without conflicting with a single storm!

Whether it was luck or the whim of some deity that blessed me, we were still a week away from port when we met a storm of even greater strength than the one that had sunk the Yellow Pearl. In any case, it would serve my purposes.

The contents of the storeroom tended to shift back and forth with the tossing of the ship, but I had taken care to secure everything against possible damage to my device. I was a bit concerned that the electrolyte within the accumulator barrels might splash out and render them inert, so I had sealed them with tar, and clamped them tightly to prevent bursting. I still worried that they might explode if they became over-charged, so I had added a melting bar – a thin ribbon of soft metal that had a higher impedance and lower melting point than the copper wire - to the circuit as a safety precaution.

I heard the boom of thunder echo through the hull of the ship. I had no porthole through which to see the lightning flash, so I had no idea how far away it had struck. Another boom, more distant this time.

There was a blinding flash simultaneous with a boom of thunder that shook me to my spine. I looked down to see that the melting bar had burned through without residue – vaporized in an instant! It was a good thing I was not looking in the direction of the melting bar when the lightning passed through the hull, as it had obviously been the source of the flash.

I ran to the barrels and carefully laid my hand to the nearest one. I could feel the heat through my rubber glove! I heard a soft hum of electricity and felt all the hair on my body stand up. The very air seemed to crackle and spark with it.

Once more, I held the little sister of fire captive. Tonight I would make Chantico dance to a new rhythm.

I turned to the knife switch and threw it, closing the circuit to the resonator. It began a loud buzzing sound, like a billion honeybees trying to escape their hive. I rotated the potentiometer on the resonating circuit, changing the rate of magnetic pulses given off by the resonator. The buzzing sound changed in pitch, though not in intensity, dropping or raising an octave with each quarter-turn of the potentiometer.

I tried to stay calm, taking deep breaths and holding them, while I struggled to tune the resonator to the correct frequency. I knew instantly when I had the right setting, for the iron deck I was standing upon began to vibrate in sympathy with it.

I covered the device with a piece of oiled canvas and set to work on the door with a crowbar that I had set aside for that purpose. I am not a strong woman, but I knew that my life depended on breaking that door as quickly as possible, or drown like a trapped rat aboard this doomed ship.

I could feel the vibrations through the crowbar as I strained against it. They seemed to be growing stronger the harder I pulled, and my hands became numb. I heard the zzzzip-CLANG of rivets popping from the hull plates, and I pulled with all my will.

I could barely hear the shouts of the crew over the buzz of the resonator, and the storm itself seemed to fade into the background. Only the thunder was louder than the popping of rivets and the tearing scream of iron plates buckling in against the pressure of the sea, stressed beyond their engineered tolerances. The whole of the iron hull shook like a dying rat.

The door finally gave way to my determination, and I quickly seized the life-ring and oilcloth bag full of supplies that I had prepared, and then made my way down the passageway into the engine room.

The crew was frantically trying to keep the mighty steam engines going – stokers were shoveling coal, engineers were adjusting valves and trying to determine the source of the vibration – incorrectly assuming it was a fault in their own engines. They dared not shut them down during the storm, for only by keeping the ship facing into the waves could it avoid being rolled over and capsized. Nevertheless, they were at a loss to determine why the vessel seemed to be coming apart around them.

There was water coming in everywhere, overwhelming the mechanical pumps and washing across the deck of the engine room. The crew was starting to panic – I could see it in their eyes as they struggled to save their ship.

I remembered the eyes of the island people – Amina’s eyes, as she watched me leave. And the others, all with the same sad expression. They knew the one thing that I did not: That I would never return.

My heart hardened to the plight of the crew. My hatred for these people, my own people, burned like a furnace.

No. These were not my people anymore. I could never call them my people again. My people had been butchered on that island.

I turned my back and climbed the ladder to the upper decks. The ship had begun to list by the time I made my way into the storm. The engines had stopped – probably shut down to avoid exploding when the cold seawater engulfed the boilers – and I could still feel the resonating vibration pulsing through every deck-plate, bulkhead, and ladder.

I stood at the guardrail – the raging sea and wind before me – did I have the courage to face that again, adrift on my own? I had no comforting electric light this time, though I had prepared supplies and a sturdy life-ring to keep me afloat.

I heard a hatch slam shut, and saw a figure moving on the deck nearby – it was subaltern Holtlac. Our eyes locked for a moment, and I could see it dawn upon him that I must be the saboteur, though it was beyond him to understand how I had done it.

With a sneer, he brought up his revolver, aimed it in my direction, and pulled the trigger. The storm and the tossing of the ship threw off his aim, and I felt the bullet like a flick of a candle flame against my cheek for just an instant.

I shouted at him in my rage, caring not if he could hear me over the storm’s howl: “Do you think your bullets frighten me, sir? I am no simple islander! I am Matla Tlatlasihuatl, the Burning Woman! I have killed you and your mighty warship with the power of science! Pray your Gods have more mercy upon you than I!”

In truth, I was afraid of his bullets, and when I saw him draw aim upon me to fire again, I threw myself over the railing and fell into the sea, welcoming her chill embrace once more.

Once in the water, the screams of tortured metal made a chaotic symphony playing in time with the steady background rhythm of the resonator. Breaking surface, all I could hear was the storm. The wind and waves carried me away from the ship, and I knew it was sinking only when I ducked my head under the water to hear the gong-like death knell of the ironclad as it broke apart, and the hum of the resonator stopped. The crashing and popping sounds faded.

Then there was only the sound of the storm.

Captain’s log. January 19, 1993 CY

I must remember to buy sonar technician Ama’gitli a bottle of fine whiskey when we reach Ogeechee.