[h2]And The Sea Shall Yield Up….[/h2]

[h3]Part 7[/h3]

[img]https://i.imgur.com/D5MsyWB.jpg[/img]

[b]. . . - - - . . .[/b]

Hard to tell that daylight had come.  Angry black clouds raced overhead, as the roar of the wind deafened him. The table to which he labored to cling proved both blessing and curse all at once.  It’s size and bulk meant that it could ride the ocean’s tempestuous peaks without tumbling down a wave face.  The heavy legs acted as drogue anchors, adding a modicum of stability.  He struggled to remain aboard the impromptu liferaft as it sometimes went nearly vertical while riding upward.  The body straps from the life vest proved somewhat helpful, if for no other purpose than to keep the table from drifting away after he’d been tossed from its’ top.  There’d been just enough web strap to afford him a single hand grip.

[b]. . . - - - . . .[/b]

His watch was gone, torn from his wrist when the dying ship had expelled him.  Parts of the walkie talkie were ruined by the salt water, though he had coaxed a signal just before the battery failed.  With the icy cold threatening to make simple claws of his hands, Yuri set to work. As the hours passed...or were they minutes...he coupled the torch’s battery to the walkie.  The most painstaking effort involved setting the transmitter to the lowest frequency possible.  His hands shook violently as he tried to press the multitool’s knife tip into the tiny selector. Broadcasting on low frequency would boost his range, but for a radio designed to work on a thousand foot ship, he reasoned he might get a mile at best.  [i]Especially in these seas...this is a fool’s errand,[/i] the mechanic thought.  Yet still he chose to play the fool.

[b]. . . - - - . . .[/b]

This storm was his destiny, a final judgment of a mocking god.  His limbs had begun to fail him.  Hands were useless claws.  Yuri’s knees folded upward, toward his chest.  He would’ve died in the ocean. Now, the extra time this thin raft bought him was simply a prolongation of the inevitable.

[b]. .   . - - -   . . .[/b]

It seemed funny to him...the things that came to mind before dying.  The books he’d read, and the cortex vids he’d watched had all offered up heartrending images of people crying out for their mothers, or offering up final declarations of The One True Love.   To be sure, he did feel love for his parents.  In a way, he’d followed his father’s footsteps into the world of large machines, a pursuit that even the man’s death among the skyplex’s massive inner workings couldn’t blunt.  His mother, Katja, was still alive.  Still mopping floors in that man’s skyplex.  Still working to pay off a debt the man himself would never proclaim to be clear.

As such thoughts invariably led him to his brother, Yuri saw no irony.  It had been Ivan who’d drifted in and out of jail.  Ivan, the brawler, the bully who’d made his little brother’s life a daily torment.  Ivan, the robber, whose ham handed attempt to steal a mining camp’s payroll left three innocents lying in their own blood.

Ivan, whose desperate attempts to escape justice had finally landed him on the skyplex, under the hand of Adelai Niska. 
 
It was clear at the time that Ivan had found his calling, serving as Niska’s chief enforcer.  He relished the part, his zeal on full display through the tribal tattoo which crawled the left half of his face. Soon, the entire family was drawn into the spider’s web, living on the skyplex, accruing debts for which there was no explanation, and certainly no payment in this life.

[b]. .   . - -  -   .  .  .[/b]

Ivan’s fate was predictable.  He’d been killed by a ship’s captain over a deal gone wrong.  Niska raged over the death of his “Crow,” driven toward vengeance more by insult than loss. Yuri, sensing the turmoil among the crime boss’s lackeys, had escaped on a tramp freighter, never to look back. 
 
But here, facing lonely death on an unforgiving sea,  Yuri Antonov felt now as he felt then...a sense of relief.

[b].  .   . - -           - [/b]