The ship has little time.

You and the other still-living belowdecks sailors scramble as cannonades burst outside, men shouting and screaming. You reach the base of the ladder first. Above you, a face fills the square of twilight. The old first mate. “Arms!” he cries. “To arms–” and another boom rattles topdecks, and the wood shrieks with the cries of the men suffering its deadly splinters. Now as he gazes down at you, the first mate’s face is strangely gentle, a thin red spiderweb skittering across his face. Then he tumbles through the opening.

You swing to the side, avoiding the plummeting the dead man.

“We are lost!” the sailors around you murmur. “Lost!”

No. Now your training (where did your training come from? why can you remember so little?) flows through you: you snap at the men to live rather than die, to arm themselves with what steel they can find. This is all they ever need: a voice come to them from the darkness, commanding. They fall-to as again you press up the ladder.

With each step you can feel the ship’s fading heart, like a rotten manuscript attacked by an editor, like a whale struck through, heaving blood.

Topdecks, you see that another ship has come broadsides, sailing a flag of astral constellation. Sailors run about madly, faces streaked with smoke and blood, limping on shattered limbs, preparing for doom. The Captain is nowhere to be seen.

And, at the stern, the cargo-hold is unguarded.

As you step between the frightened sailors, you see, across the narrowing gulf between the two ships, on the constellated attacking ship, a figure holding a rope. A man. Staring straight at you. His garb is feminine: red dress, and though his beard is thick and black, a wig of flowing blond hair rests atop his head. The first of the pirates, you suppose. Or someone sent here to kill you—maybe, even, the Company of Men.

The sailors you’ve rallied below swarm behind you onto the deck, gathering in angry mass, raising their sad kitchen knives and ladles, pots and pans, a dagger here, a cutlass there. Soft-hearted, again you rally them, you cry to them to steady their nerves, to steady their steel, to fight for the blood in their veins, for that is what the enemy wants to pull from them, to the last drop.

Even as you urge the men on, the strangely attired man opposite, holding the rope, watches you with curiosity.

In his left hand he holds a slender dagger, which he points at you now …

… and runs leaping across the abyss.

If you feel sympathy for these doomed souls and join their fray, 91.

If it’s a conniving heart that beats within you, go instead to the cargohold, 36.