Ganymede (46 page)

“Locked it down, yes, sir. Early, you’d better keep my seat.”

“I was planning on it.”

The captain said, “Anyone been watching a clock?” When no one answered, he said, “By my best guess, it’s been something like half an hour—and I know Early’s men said we have more than that, but like Huey said, we have more people on board this time. It’s getting warm in here, and close. I can’t be the only one who feels it.”

“You’re not,” Early assured him.

“We’ll need to pull over and crank that hose up, and do it soon.”

Houjin asked, “Why?”

“What?” the captain asked. “What do you mean, why?”

“Why do we have to pull over? Can’t we just stick the thing up above the surface and let it pull down air as we retreat?”

Deaderick Early hemmed and hawed. “It’s
possible,
but it’s dangerous, too. You turn that generator on and the air starts sucking … that’s fine. But if we dip, or drop—or lose the ballasting loads, or anything like that … if the generator starts drawing in water, we’re in trouble.”

Cly said, “I see why it worries you, but we’ve got two other things to worry about right now. For one, they’ve damn well seen us and they know we’re here. They don’t know what to make of it yet, but it won’t be long before someone starts dropping bombs out of an airship, trying to knock us to the bottom of the bay. So we have to get moving.”

“What’s the second thing?” Houjin asked nervously.

Cly lied. “I can’t remember the second thing. But I want you to shove that tube up over the waterline and start the generator. They’ve seen us—and that’s fine, so long as we hightail it out of here. I don’t much give a shit if they watch us leave. Even if they follow us, we’ll lose them in the Gulf, once we’ve drawn down enough air to keep us down low and safe for a while.”

The second thing Cly had not wanted to say aloud was that he was fairly sure it’d been nearer to an hour—forty-five minutes at the bare minimum. They were running lower than he wanted to say. He could feel it in the press of the breathed and rebreathed air on his skin, and in the moist warmth of every breath he drew. A glance over at Deaderick Early told him that Early suspected the same but was determined to ignore it.

As for the rest of them, Cly saw no reason to worry them. Not when they only needed motivating, not frightening. Frightened people breathe faster, harder, heavier. They burn up air even quicker, and that wouldn’t help the situation.

The boy said, “Yes, sir, I’m on it.” And he fixed the scope in a downward position, running to the air tube and its generator, deploying the one and starting the other with a pull of a crank.

“If it sucks down a little water, that won’t be the end of the world. You might get wet when you bring it back down, but for now, it’ll have to do us, all right?”

No one responded, so Andan Cly urged the propulsion screws to full power. Then, with Deaderick’s assistance, he aimed
Ganymede
toward the bottleneck at the bay’s southern entrance, leaving the worst of the fighting behind them. They wouldn’t know if they’d made a difference in the battle there, not for days, but Cly was glad he’d taken a chance on it.

Maybe he was on the verge of settling down and becoming a family man, or something like it; maybe he’d go retire in the Washington Territories, leisurely swatting rotters away from Fort Decatur and the business he meant to run there.

But today he was a pirate still, and for whatever good or ill, right or wrong, holy or evil thing that word had ever meant, it felt good to wear it this one last time. Even if he wore it at the bottom of the bay, fighting the Texians by stealth and hidden in watery shadows. Even if no one would ever know he was the one who’d dropped the antiaircraft guns from the patrol ships. Even if he went down in nobody’s history for this last hurrah, that was fine by him.

Pirates didn’t have their own lands, or books, or histories, after all. Not much of it. Just one small island in one dark bay, off to the west of the Mississippi River.

But it was enough, and it was worth keeping.

“Early, how far off is this bottleneck—and Huey, how’s the air holding?”

“Getting a little sputter, sir. Keep us higher if you can do it.”

“Higher it is, kid. Watch that tube, and if you can, watch from the scope. Can you go back and forth?”

“Not really, sir.”

But Troost said, “I’ll watch the scope. I want to take another look up topside, anyway.” He redeployed it, figuring out the levers, knobs, and cranks as he went along—and aiming it up above the water, and backwards. This meant he was off the stool and standing with his backside to the captain, Fang, and Deaderick.

Deaderick was the one who asked, “What are you doing, Troost?”

“I don’t care where we’re going, but I want to know where we’ve been. It’s looking like a real mess out there, if I do say so myself.”

“Good. I like making messes,” Cly beamed.

“I ought to warn you, they’re coming up behind us. Not fast, but steady. And—” He tipped the scope so it aimed up nearly as far as it’d go. “—I think one of the big Texian warships is turning around to track us.”

“We’ll lose it in the Gulf,” Deaderick promised. “Sun won’t be up for a while yet, and they’ll never see us under the waves.”

“I expect you’re right.” Troost nodded with satisfaction. He swiveled the scope and got up into the seat that had formerly held Houjin. “Hey, good news in this direction.”

The captain asked, “How so?”

“I see both of our guys—Little and Mumler—one on each bank. Jesus Christ, they’re close together. They don’t mean for us to squeak between ’em, do they?”

“They don’t call it a bottleneck for nothing,” Deaderick said. “We’ll slow down and squeak between ’em, that’s right. They’ll pole us on through. Then we ought to see if we can grab them and pull them on board. I don’t want to leave them out there, not with Texas coming up behind us.”

Cly agreed. “Good idea. Huey—how’s the air coming?”

A big burp of water sloshed inside, soaking the boy from the waist down, but he laughed. “Gotta stop for now, but that should be plenty. It was more than a couple of minutes, wasn’t it?”

“Hey, Early,” Troost said. “I’ve got another idea for an improvement on your next model.”

“Clocks?”

“Damn right. You need some clocks in here.”

Before long, the first tap of a pole clanked down into Ganymede’s interior, and before much longer than that, they were through the bottleneck between Grande Terre and Grand Isle. With two new passengers, they struck out for the prearranged position in the Gulf of Mexico, where the Union airship carrier
Valiant
awaited—surrounded at a distance by curious Texians who were too smart to come any closer, but too wily to let it alone altogether.

*   *   *

When
Ganymede
reached
the
Valiant,
Captain Cly and First Mate Fang held the ship steady as an enormous winch—designed to retrieve airships, should they fall into the ocean during landing or takeoff—craned out over the water and affixed itself to
Ganymede
’s hull. A series of hydraulic cinches compressed, squeezed, and, after a few false starts … established a secure grip on the huge steel watercraft.

A crank turned, and more hydraulics stabilized the affair, counteracting the tremendous weight of something being heaved from the water. A giant arm swung, and dropped the craft onto a platform that was ordinarily used to land and park airships.

But
Ganymede
had the same shape as an airship. And it had similar controls, so a pilot like Andan Cly could get her from Pontchartrain to the Gulf. And in the end, everything went just as Josephine had planned.

Or perhaps not
just
as she’d planned, but so close to her original scheme that she was prepared to take credit for it. This had worked out, hadn’t it? It’d gone as well as anyone could have hoped—better, even. She had not merely delivered the ship, but, thanks to the captain and her brother, they could provide a detailed report of the weapons system: what parts were satisfactory, which aspects could stand improvement. How the ammunition could be better designed, and how it ought to be stored. How the controls might be calibrated for surer accuracy with every shot.

Josephine did not mind admitting that none of those things would have occurred if they hadn’t made it to the bay and assisted the pirates against the Texians. So she refused to regret the delay or the spent ammunition.

With conscious, sincere effort, she declined to fret over the change in plans.

Instead, she waited until
Ganymede
had settled and been released from the winch’s grasping claw, and there was no more motion except for the distant, almost undetectable flutter of the Gulf moving beneath the
Valiant
. Then she went to the ladder and climbed it, with Ruthie right behind her, and unscrewed the portal door, opening the hatch and letting the clear night air spill down into
Ganymede
’s gut.

The sky outside smelled of salt and birds, and it was littered with the peaceful twinkle of stars, shrouded in part by a faint mist that might have been cloud cover, or might have been smoke drifting out to sea.

No longer could she hear the interminable din of artillery and the crashing and burning of airships or boats. Only the murmurs of curious men reached her ears, accompanied by an official-sounding bark of, “Hail
Ganymede,
and its occupants. This is Admiral Herman Partridge of the United States Airship Carrier
Valiant
. Declare yourself, and your intent. How do you reply?”

Casting a brilliant smile at Ruthie, Josephine flipped the hatch door back and emerged. She said, “I am Josephine Parella Rawling Early. And I am proud to deliver this Rebel device into your hands.”

  
Sixteen

The
Naamah Darling
was four days late returning to Seattle, but Cly had sent a telegram from Denver explaining the situation. A freak late-season blizzard had come swooping down across the mountains, stranding the crew in the Colorado Territory, but they hunkered down in a boarding house on the west side of the city and made the best of it. There wasn’t much else to be done, and Andan Cly figured that if Yaozu wanted to make a huge fuss about the delay, then that was his business. But until the other man could control the weather, he’d have to get used to disappointment.

Cly didn’t expect it to be a problem. The business of cross-continental travel was one of luck and coincidence, fortune and ill wind. When more than a thousand miles stand between you and your destination, it’s important to stay flexible. Even the railways knew that much, and the variables in the sky were considerably more troublesome. A train could bully through a thunderstorm, and push past ice and snow, if it had the right equipment. An airship must land and wait for better skies, or else risk being dashed to pieces against the nearest mountain, or into the handiest plain.

If it’d been only Yaozu awaiting them, Cly probably wouldn’t have bothered with the telegram. Yaozu could wait. But he didn’t want Briar to worry, so he’d sent it—and directed it courtesy of the Western Union station at the railway terminus in Tacoma, Washington Territory, to the attention of Angeline Sealth or her nearest reliable kin.

One way or another, it’d find its way to the city named loosely for Angeline’s father. The captain could count on that, if not on the weather.

The flash storm that held them in Colorado was half-frozen, driving and wet, with ice building up and layering across everything immobile, like very cold frosting on an unwilling cake. Troost made some passing complaint about wishing for the Gulf Coast again, but Cly shook his head and declined to agree.

This was better. The damp and chill suited him, with the accompanying dark and low skies, and the night that fell early. The cover of darkness felt like a friend.

Colorado was colder than he wished, yes. But it was more like what he wanted, and more of what he missed, than the sunken, soaking bayous with their verdant canopies and cold-blooded creatures that never got cold. The frigid rain reassured him that he’d made the right decision when he left New Orleans all those years ago. But ultimately, it was a fine place to visit, and he was glad to have seen it again.