The Steam Age: Gears and Bones

Chapter 15

Perfit put down his binoculars and turned to look at the three people behind him.

"We can't dock directly." Her voice was soft, as if afraid of alerting something, even though they were still nearly a nautical mile from the pier. "The situation at the port is unknown. If there are infected people on the pier, the sound of the ship approaching will attract them all, and then we won't even have a chance to retreat."

Chertzov took the binoculars she handed him, looked at the harbor for a while, and then put them down.

His face was even more somber than before, and the old scar at the corner of his eye looked particularly deep in the morning light.

Perfit noticed that his fingers, which were holding the binoculars, were trembling slightly.

"I remember where the port quarantine station is. It's at the northernmost end of the dock, that white two-story building, with the second-floor windows facing the main channel." He pointed to a building on the north side of the port that was almost smoked gray. "If there were any survivors hiding inside, they should be able to see our ship directly. But all the windows there are black."

"If there are survivors there, they probably wouldn't dare turn on the lights," Ludwig remarked from the side.

He was also looking at the port through binoculars, but his gaze wasn't on the quarantine station; instead, he was scanning the buildings around the dock.

"The port's structure is typical—warehouses flank the main pier, and behind them is Customs Avenue, which leads north to the city center. If infected individuals are entrenched here, they should be staying indoors. It's too cold. They won't be outdoors."

“Unless something wakes them up.” Perfit turned back to face the dock. “We need to send people ashore to scout. Find out how many infected people are on the dock, where they are located, and whether there are really survivors over at the clock tower—before we can decide how to land.”

She looked at Ludwig, then at the flag captain standing in the corner of the bridge.

"I need four knights, plus Major Oberstan's four knights, to form an eight-man reconnaissance squad."

The flag captain was a veteran in his early forties, with a meticulously trimmed beard and a sword and rose emblem engraved on his breastplate.

He frowned slightly when he heard the order, but did not voice any objections.

Perfit continued, “Wrap all the seams of the armor tightly with strips of cloth. Cover the soles of the boots with soft cloth. Do the same with the metal parts of the scabbard and hilt. Remember—be absolutely quiet once you’re ashore, and try not to make any noise.”

The flag captain finally couldn't help but ask, "Miss, can these infected people hear us approaching?"

"I'm not sure," Perfitt answered frankly. "Precisely because we're unsure, we have to assume they are. In Langdon's lab, Sample 7 showed a clear stress response to sound—a knock on the door, the clanging of metal, or even someone speaking loudly would cause its activity level to rise sharply."

If the infected in the port also retain the same reaction pattern, then any noise the reconnaissance team makes on shore could attract all the infected in the port.

The flag captain was silent for a moment, then nodded. He didn't ask any more questions, turned around and walked down the bridge to select personnel.

Ludwig then left, gave a few instructions to his deputy standing on the deck, and returned to Perfitt, saying, "My men are ready. They've participated in three reconnaissance missions on the Northern Front and are experienced in fighting urban ruins."

"Make sure they remember one thing," Perfit said, "this is not fighting in the ruins of a city. Your enemies are not living people; they are not afraid to die, they will not retreat, and they will not scatter because of casualties."

If discovered, do not linger. Retreat. Returning alive is more important than bringing back intelligence.

A few quarters of an hour later, eight knights and two sailors responsible for signaling assembled on the deck.

They had taken care of all the equipment that might make noise as required—the scabbards were wrapped tightly with strips of cloth, the soles of the boots were covered with several layers of canvas, and even the inside of the helmet where it rubbed against the neck guard was padded with soft cloth.

Perfit personally inspected the attire of two of the knights, then stepped back and nodded to them.

The small boat was lowered, and all eight oars entered the water at the same time, silently rowing towards the desolate city.

Perfit stood on the ship's side, using binoculars to track the small boat's trajectory.

She watched the small boat dock at a long-abandoned berth at the southernmost end of the pier; watched the eight knights disembark one by one and form a reconnaissance formation on the pier; watched them disappear into the shadows of the building, close to the outer wall of the warehouse; then she put down her binoculars and found that her fingers had gripped the copper barrel of the binoculars until they were warm.

She switched the binoculars to her left hand, wiped the sweat from her right hand on her clothes, and then raised them again, aiming them at the dock.

No one spoke on the deck.

Chertzov was still standing next to her, and Shabel had somehow arrived outside the bridge.

The eight knights on the distant dock had disappeared into the shadows of the buildings. Now, all they could do was wait.

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When the small boat docked at the pier, the entire harbor remained deathly silent.

The flag captain was the first to disembark. His boot soles made only a very slight thud as they hit the stone slabs of the dock.

He crouched down and quickly scanned his surroundings.

This berth has clearly been abandoned for a long time—the mooring bollards are rusty, and several of the stone slabs along the edge of the pier have broken and collapsed, revealing the black seawater underneath.

Several abandoned freight wagons lay overturned on the road leading to the warehouse area, their canvases long since rotted into strips, swaying slightly in the morning breeze.

The air was filled with the smell of burnt wood, mixed with a fainter but more unsettling sweet and rotten odor.

The flag captain was no stranger to this smell.

In the quarantine zone of Port Langton, the infected patients strapped to their beds in the isolation wards had this smell.

There were only six beds in the isolation ward, and the smell seemed to seep out from the cracks in every brick.

The eight knights disembarked one by one.

The flag captain made a gesture—to split into two teams, one led by him to search along the east side of the warehouse area, and the other along the west side, meeting at the intersection of Customs Street.

All communication was done through gestures; no one uttered a single word.

This was an order that Perfit had specifically emphasized before disembarking: until the infected's perception patterns were figured out, the reconnaissance team had to treat it as if they were infiltrating the lair of a sleeping behemoth.

The flag captain stopped at the entrance to the first warehouse and gestured for the knights behind him to stop.

The warehouse door was open, the sheet metal door was recessed inward, and there was a deep claw mark on it that almost dug into the sheet metal—five parallel scratches that stretched from the door frame to the center of the door.

He crouched down and used his gloved fingers to measure the width of the claw marks, which was about the width of a human finger.

He paused at the door for a moment, then cautiously peeked inside through the door frame.

The warehouse was dark, with only a few thin beams of morning light filtering through the broken walls.

Where the beams of light shone, he saw overturned shelves, shattered wooden crates, and scattered drops of dried black blood on the ground.

The drops of blood stretched from the depths of the warehouse all the way to the entrance, finally stopping near the water's surface, as if someone—or something—had crawled into the water from there.

He slowly stepped back and shook his head at the knight behind him: there were no living people or infected people inside.

But he pointed to the bloodstains on the ground, then to his own ear, and then held up two fingers.

It means: Something has been active here, possibly more than one; stay vigilant.

They continued along the edge of the warehouse district, bypassing several overturned freight wagons and passing through a narrow alleyway piled high with discarded crates.

The flag captain noticed that there were similar scratch marks all over the walls on both sides of the alley, some of which had broken fingernail fragments embedded in them, which had dried and turned black.