Boomy Faulks came to him, tall gangling and leering, took him by the hand, and led him down onto the main deck. Jay Prescott stood hand in hand with the ruthless sailor, looking upon the broad back of Hal Thurmond, the righteous marine who had fallen under the spell of the little voodoo pigmy and had buggered Mister Pringle at the tiller all the night long.

Hal was a sight of abject humiliation, slumped against the mast and weeping.

For his wretched part Mister Pringle lie upon the deck sobbing silently, his breeches describing the hues of a filthy rainbow.

Pell Driscoll—burliest man onboard aside from Hal—a known bugger of ships boys and all around nasty hand, stalked over to Jay, even as they heard the pathetic pigmy swinging from the yardarm squeal, “Oh wee Me!” Pell leered down into Jay’s soft eyes and snarled, “Two-‘undred lashes Mister Hitchens, says. Get to it Sprat!”

With those words Pell dropped the dreaded tangle of knotted rope at his feet—the cat-‘o-nine-tails. “Fall to, Sprat, en may a kiss be yers ‘fo we go a hammockin’ tis night.”

Jay hefted the terrible instrument in his slight hand and wondered at it, wondered at the deep ochre stains. It was said that the dried flesh and skin and powdered bone of those that had fallen under this lash for their crimes at sea, had, down through the cruel years, impregnated the knots and made them the harder. Suffice it to say that the rope was no longer the color that any rope should be.

He was pushed by the large rude hands of Boomy Faulks toward the mast where the man who had been his savior from this lot was tied.

He stood holding the whip as the sloop of war cut lazily through the waters beneath the dawn-streaking sky.

The musk of the jungle island reached out to them with its fetid poison as it receded into the distance behind the still smoldering stern lamp.

The voodoo pigmy squealed his refrain from above.

Mister Pringle sobbed pitifully in the low distance.

Commander Parsons, flanked by the two weary dumbstruck marines, mumbled, as if to himself, about all seeing-eyes and such.

Mister Hitchens whistled at the wheel, like a man happily and witlessly at work.

And below, below the creaking deck, some twenty men spat, shat and died, the Yellow Jack turning their belly blood the color of the sun.

What do I here, on this deck? he thought to himself.

Then a cruel word from Pell fell to his ears like snow on flowers, “To it, Sprat!”

And once again, the kind voice of Hal Thurmond rescued him from the terrible squall of His Royal Majesty’s Bugger-in-chief, “Get to it, Mister Prescott. For my sins this day, I say, flay me, Jay.”

And nine whistling tails licked out toward that broad back, powered by a hand that astonished the gathered salts with its grace and power, but astonished none so much as he who owned that hand.

Broad hands encircled her throat as dirty legs pried her own apart, and the weight of a heavy body pressed her more heavily back against the rock she had been napping upon.

Phenyl woke from a nightmare of ancient and fantastical scale to find herself looking up into the malicious face of a dreg—a self-mutilated drone. The working class males of the Habitat were manageable by design, until they started getting unprompted erections recently; scarifying their faces to simulate beards, and had begun eating pets and even humans. Their seemed to be a drive emerging among them to turn back the hand of science and devolve into the gross and hairy forms upon which their templates were based.

Its nose was pierced with a bone, its grey eyes circled with a clay-based paint, its purple-splotched tongue questing for her mouth as she squirmed away. This Dreg had long been feral by its appearance, and was here, outside the habitat, where only Male Security Operatives were permitted, and then only briefly. Burt had not told her about feral dregs. This one appeared to have been feral for longer then dregs were known to have been devolving. Phenyl, knew then, with a deep sinking feeling, that she had been lied to, by Habitat Syra, the very habitat that had conceived, birthed and nurtured her, and by Burt, her lover, who had gotten her pregnant, and gotten her a death sentence, all with the same luscious thrust.

She struck the broad face with an elbow, and then a palm, and then it’s heavy hand came down across her jaw, her skull rang against the stone that had been—and was again—her nightmare bed, and blackness swallowed her whole.