Iron Gray Sea

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The sky was corroded lead, cold and gray with splotches of white. It was lighter in the east, where the sun lingered behind the heavy blanket of cloud, but there was no chance it would make an appearance that day. Beneath the sky the sea roiled, a darker, more tempestuous reflection, and alone upon it-in all the world, it seemed- Mizuki Maru shouldered her way through the unkind swells. She was an old ship, smallish, and battered by a lifetime of toil. She’d done honorable service and carried honest freight for most of her many years, but her past few voyages had been of a different sort. She’d been engaged in carrying men-worn, beaten, wretched men-to the last place on earth they could possibly want to go.

If she’d had a soul, it would have broken and fled her to escape the suffering and misery confined within her sad, rusty hull. Particularly after the last voyage. It had been the worst of all. Only a few dozen of the more than five hundred prisoners of war she’d carried-Malays, Aussies, Dutch, Brits, and Americans-had ultimately survived, and it wasn’t because they were supposed to. At some point she’d vanished from the world where her Japanese masters made her carry such dreadful cargo and arrived on a world very much the same but entirely, fundamentally different. It was no less savage, however, and her crew-and the crew of the destroyer Hidoiame, which escorted her and a war-weary oiler-had murdered as many of her “cargo” as they possibly could. They’d then abandoned Mizuki Maru, damaged and sinking. Or so they thought.

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