The rain in Le Havre didn't clean the streets. It just made the filth slicker.
Jean Chouan stood on a stack of crates at the end of Pier 4. He pulled his tricorn hat low over his eyes.
"Is this the shipment?" he asked.
Below him, a dozen of his men—rough Bretons with knives in their belts—were surrounding a longboat. The boat had rowed in from the mist, silent as a ghost.
A British sailor tossed a rope.
"Thirty crates," the sailor hissed. "Blue glass. Same as last week."
He looked up at Chouan.
"You're the Minister now, eh? Does the Republic pay better than the King?"
Chouan looked at the crates. He could see the cobalt shine of the bottles through the slats.
"The Republic pays in lead," Chouan said.
He raised his hand.
"Burn it."
The sailor's eyes widened. "What?"
Luc, Chouan's lieutenant, stepped forward. He held a torch.
He threw it into the longboat.
WHOOSH.
The boat had been soaked in pitch. It went up like a Roman candle.
The British sailors screamed. They dove into the oily black water.
The fire reached the crates.
POP. POP. POP.
The bottles exploded in the heat. A cloud of blue smoke rose up, thick and sweet-smelling.
"You're mad!" the British sailor shouted from the water. "That's worth a fortune!"
"It's worth death," Chouan spat.
He turned to his men.
"Nobody touches the cargo. If I see a blue bottle in anyone's pocket, I cut off the hand."
A roar came from the landward side of the pier.
Chouan turned.
A mob was surging out of the alleyways.
They weren't soldiers. They were dockworkers. Fishwives. Beggars.
But their eyes...
Their eyes were black holes. Pupils dilated so wide the iris was gone.
They smelled the smoke. The sweet, opium-laced smoke drifting from the burning boat.
"The Blue!" a man screamed. "They're burning the Blue!"
He charged.
He didn't have a weapon. He ran straight at the line of smugglers with his bare hands.
"Halt!" Luc shouted. He leveled his musket.
The man didn't stop. He was drooling green bile. He looked like a rabid dog.
BANG.
Luc fired. The ball hit the man in the shoulder. It spun him around.
But he didn't fall. He didn't scream.
He stumbled, regained his balance, and kept running.
"He felt nothing," Chouan whispered. "Painkiller."
The mob hit the pier like a wave.
It was chaos.
A woman clawed at a smuggler's face, trying to get to the burning boat. She wanted to inhale the smoke. She wanted the oblivion.
"Push them back!" Chouan roared. He drew his cutlass.
He kicked a man in the chest. It felt like kicking a sack of wet sand. The man fell, giggling.
"My hand!" Luc shouted.
A dockworker had bitten him. Bitten through the leather sleeve.
Chouan swung his blade. The flat of the steel connected with the biter's skull.
CRACK.
The man dropped.
But there were too many of them. They swarmed over the crates. They didn't care about the fire. One man jumped into the burning boat, trying to grab a bottle before it shattered. He burned to death while laughing.
"We're overrun!" Luc yelled. "Retreat to the warehouse!"
"Hold the line!" Chouan ordered. "If they get past us, they'll tear the city apart!"
He slashed a man's arm. The man looked at the wound with mild curiosity, then lunged for Chouan's throat.
Chouan punched him. Hard.
It was like fighting corpses.
"Minister!" Luc pointed to the road.
A rhythm. Drums. Boots on cobblestones.
A column of blue coats marched out of the fog. Bayonets fixed.
Leading them was a giant of a man with red hair.
Marshal Michel Ney. The Bravest of the Brave.
"Present... arms!" Ney bellowed.
The line of infantry snapped their muskets up.
"Fire!"
CRASH.
A volley of lead tore into the mob.
This time, the physics won. Fifty men went down. The sheer kinetic energy stopped the charge.
The survivors stopped. The noise—the gunfire—broke through the drug haze for a second.
"Charge bayonets!" Ney ordered.
The soldiers advanced. A wall of steel.
The addicts broke. They scattered into the shadows, leaving their dead on the wet stones.
Chouan wiped his blade on his coat. He was breathing hard.
Ney walked up the pier. He looked at the burning boat, then at Chouan.
He curled his lip in disgust.
"So," Ney rumbled. "You are the new Minister of Supply."
"Citizen Marshal," Chouan nodded.
"You dress like a pirate," Ney noted.
"I am a pirate," Chouan said. "But tonight, I'm on your side."
Ney looked at the dead addicts.
"My men are fighting Spaniards in the south. And here? Here we are shooting Frenchmen who fight for a bottle of poison."
He spat on the ground.
"What a glorious war."
"It's not a war," Chouan said. "It's an extermination."
He walked over to the edge of the pier.
A small waterproof bag had washed up from the wreck of the longboat.
Chouan picked it up. He cut the seal.
Inside was a manifest.
"Look at this," Chouan said.
Ney squinted in the torchlight.
"Cargo Manifest: HMS Indefatigable."
"Item 1: Tincture of Relief (10,000 units)."
"Item 2: Hydraulic Excavators (4 units)."
"Item 3: Surveying Theodolites (Specialized)."
"Excavators?" Ney asked. "Why are they sending mining equipment to France?"
"Read the destination," Chouan said.
Ney looked at the bottom of the page.
Transit Point: Gibraltar.
Final Destination: Alexandria, Egypt.
"Egypt?" Ney frowned. "Why go back there? We already looted it in '98."
"Not for gold," Chouan said. He remembered the Administrator's orders. The frantic search for maps.
"They are digging for something else," Chouan said. "Something deep."
He shoved the manifest into his pocket.
"I need a horse," Chouan said. "I have to get to Paris."
"You can't ride tonight," Ney said. "The roads are blocked by these... junkies."
"Then give me an escort," Chouan said. "Because if the British get to Egypt first, we won't have to worry about the opium."
Ney looked at him. He saw the seriousness in the pirate's eyes.
"Take a squad of Hussars," Ney said. "But Chouan?"
"Yes?"
"If I catch you selling that blue filth," Ney said, tapping the hilt of his saber, "I won't arrest you. I'll gut you."
Chouan looked at the burning blue smoke.
"Get in line, Marshal," he said.
Chouan rode through the night.
He reached the outskirts of Paris at dawn.
The city was waking up. But it wasn't the Paris of the Revolution. It was quiet. Too quiet.
He rode through the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
He saw bodies in the gutters. Not victims of violence. Victims of gravity. People who had just sat down and forgotten to get up.
He saw a child, maybe seven years old, sitting on a doorstep.
She was holding a blue bottle. It was empty. She was licking the rim, trying to get the last drop.
Her eyes were black holes.
Chouan pulled his horse up.
He felt a knot in his stomach. He was a killer. He had sunk ships. He had strangled men with garrotes.
But this?
He dismounted.
"Girl," he said.
She didn't look up.
"Give me the bottle."
She clutched it to her chest. She hissed at him. Like a cat.
"It's poison, child," Chouan whispered.
He reached into his saddlebag. He pulled out a loaf of bread.
"Trade?" he offered.
She looked at the bread. She looked at the bottle.
She chose the bottle.
She ran away, clutching the glass like a diamond.
Chouan stood there, holding the bread.
It started to rain again.
He realized then what he was fighting. Not an army. Not a bank.
He was fighting entropy. The British had weaponized despair.
He crushed the bread in his fist.
"No more," he whispered.
He mounted his horse.
He rode toward the Tuileries Palace.
He wasn't a smuggler anymore. He was a man with a debt to pay.
And he was going to pay it in British blood.