Magnificent Devices 07 - A Lady of Integrity (25 page)

“What’s the matter, ladies?” she crooned to the hulking Daimlers, both shuddering with the effort of moving again. “Something holding you back?”

She levered herself into the gearbox between the two engines and saw the problem immediately. Like a stove whose flue has been closed, oxygen was not getting in and already the heat levels were too high for comfort. She tore off her shirt to cover her hands, and grabbed the long lever that opened up the air intake to full.

Immediately the vibrating stopped and the sound of the engines changed to an altogether different hum—the hum of a dedicated, well-designed machine getting down to business. Something pinged and ricocheted off the metal below her feet, and Alice scrambled back up into the navigation gondola, tugging her shirt on as she went.

“Maggie?”

“I got one!” came a shriek. “Two!”

But there was no longer any need for their gaseous capsaicin bombs, for in the time it had taken Alice to climb out of the engine room, the lovely sleek ship had left the Lido behind and was already out over open water.

“You beautiful thing,” Alice told it, her heart swelling with love and gratitude. “You’ve saved us.”

“And not a moment too soon,” Maggie said, coming in with her bag, her face alight with the hungry, predatory expression of a woman whose aim has been true. “Is she truly able to fly?”

“Like a bird.” Alice patted the wheel. “She had a little trouble getting off the ground—someone had closed the oxygen vents to keep the rats out who knows how many years ago, and she couldn’t breathe. But listen to her now.”

“Swans are like that,” Maggie said.

“What, as silent as our beautiful engines?”

“Well, that—but they have a hard time getting off the ground. Once they’re in the air, though, it’s like watching a poem to see them fly.”

“And this has what to do with anything?” Poor girl, the shock of evading death by a hair was finally catching up with her.

“A ship has to have a name—even a stolen one,” Maggie informed her. “We should call her
Swan
.”

“
Swan
,” Alice repeated thoughtfully. “Her fuselage is blue, and not white, and she’s spent more time surrounded by water than any ship should, but you’re right about that takeoff.” She looked up into the cabling. “What do you say, girl? Would you like to be called
Swan
instead of ZAW-eighty-nine-dash-three?”

The ship purred through the air, as sleek and comfortable in the sky as though she had never left it.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Alice said, and smiled at Maggie. “
Swan
it is.” She leaned toward the starboard viewing port. “Now, chances are they’ve already sent a pigeon to the commercial field, so if we try to land, we’ll have a welcoming committee armed with rifles and an arrest warrant. But I need to check her water pressure, and we need to find out what’s happening with the others. Any suggestions?”

Maggie peered down as well. “There are a lot of little islands in this lagoon,” she said. “We could land on one just long enough to be sure we aren’t going to fall out of the sky. I already checked the communications cage—there isn’t a single pigeon there. That was probably the first thing they confiscated so that no one could send for help.”

Alice nodded. “Inconvenient, but first things first. Let’s set down on that little island there, with the tree. At least the
acqua alta
hasn’t swallowed it up yet. And I think the two of us could do with some of that lunch, don’t you?”

25

Claire and Andrew hung from the harness inside the diving bell, as limp as a pair of wet sheets on a line.

She must not give up hope. Intellectually, she knew that. But when she idly catalogued her body’s reactions, she wondered if it had not already happened, and her mind was simply not yet ready to admit it. Her shoulders slumped, her face felt slack, and her very bones were beginning to chill under her wet clothes. She felt, in fact, very much the way Captain Hollys looked.

Her eyes narrowed, and the salt drying in her eyelashes stung.

“Captain Hollys,” she said, “what is your opinion, upon hearing our various options? Which course of action seems to offer the greatest chance of our survival?”

It took a moment for his gaze to connect with hers. “None of them,” he finally replied. “I still cannot fathom why or how you are here. Of all the foolish things I believed you capable of, Claire, this tops them all.”

“They are trying to save our lives, ye great numpty,” Jake snapped, with no regard whatever for Ian’s rank or position. “Though I don’t know why she should bother, since you’re not the least bit interested in the effort.”

“Shut up, you young scamp,” Ian said, but he didn’t sound very convincing.

Claire widened her eyes at Jake as if to say,
What on earth is wrong with him?

But he only shrugged. “It takes some of them this way,” he said, as if she had asked the question aloud. “I suppose they can’t believe that one human being can treat another the way the Ministry treats the people it captures. It sets a man adrift, like.”

Captain Hollys was certainly adrift. “If we are to survive, then we all must be fully in our senses,” she said. “And that includes me. I apologize, Jake, for burdening you with my brief loss of hope.”

She had never thought to see that rapscallion’s half-smile again, and to see it now brought another flood of salt to her eyes. She blinked it away.

“That’s all right, Lady. The captain’s been in command of others for so long that I suspect having no say in his destiny is a new state of affairs for him.”

Andrew stirred from a contemplation even deeper than Claire’s had been. “Now, now. No need for personal remarks.”

But something in Jake’s deliberate tone told Claire there was more going on here than personal remarks. This was a cue for her—and one she had better pick up, for Jake had already made it clear it was only a matter of minutes before the Ministry men came down to find out what had gone amiss with their errant bell.

“Yes,” she said now. “I am certainly familiar enough with the captain’s air of command. Some women find it attractive, I suppose.”

“You didn’t,” Ian murmured.

“I enjoy and appreciate a man in control of his emotions and his environment, as might any woman. It is when he attempts to control mine that I object.”

Ian glanced at Andrew, who had left off thinking and was now staring at her in some consternation. Claire stifled a niggle of guilt and promised herself she would explain it all to him later, when they got out of this.

“You’ve got your hands full,” Ian observed to Andrew, and then lapsed back into apathy.

Andrew’s gaze came fully into the present. “I am lucky that I do,” he retorted. “For if I were all you had to depend on, you might be in trouble. You place far too little value on the abilities of women, sir.”

“On the contrary,” Ian said with a sigh of annoyance at being made to converse. “I value them a great deal. They just don’t seem to value me.”

“I find that hard to believe, given the swath you cut through the debutantes of London. Oh, yes,” Claire told him archly, “we all read the society columns.”

Ian gave a snort. “Silly girls and desperate bluestockings. Not one of them was as fine as you.”

“I say,” Andrew began, but Claire cut him off.

“I suppose it was much easier to carry a torch for me than to risk actually becoming acquainted with a young lady—to see into her heart and realize her good qualities?”

“No time,” Ian muttered. “Estate needs looking after and none of them seemed capable.”

“Ian Hollys, I am ashamed of you,” Claire exclaimed. “If you want someone to look after your estate, hire a housekeeper. But if you want a worthy partner to share the sky with you, to be your helpmeet when you need care, and to care for and protect in your turn, anyone with an ounce of sense knows that you must raise your eyes to someone who is worthy. Someone to whom
you
matter.”

He shifted under the lash of her tone, making the harness twist and turn, and sloshing his pale bare feet in the water. “A lot you know about it. Where am I going to find a woman like that?”

“I can think of two right off the bat,” Andrew said, clearly realizing what they were up to. “Though from the look of you now, they might not be quite so convinced about your abilities as a protector.”

“Who?” he demanded.

“For goodness sake, Ian, are you blind?” Claire said with an air of throwing up her hands. “Have you not seen how—” She stopped herself just in time, belatedly realizing that perhaps Alice might not wish her to reveal the deepest secrets of her heart—secrets that she might not even have admitted to herself but that had been clearly visible to the loving eye of a friend.

“Seen how what?” A spark had come back into Ian’s eyes, and his spine had regained a little of its iron—enough, at least, to make his harness increasingly uncomfortable.

Good. Her ruse was working.

“Seen how Gloria looks at you and hangs all over you, of course,” Andrew said. “My stars, man, while it started as a blind to distract her father, I think the girl quite believes it.”

“Gloria?” Ian said, quite as though he had been thinking of someone else.

Well, let him. If he had awakened to the fact that there might be
two
women in the world who could stand beside him without shame, then all the better.

“Enough of this hanging about feeling sorry for yourself,” Jake said impatiently. “We are running out of—” A brilliant flash of light made him flinch so badly that he bumped into Claire’s harness, setting them both swinging.

“What was that?” she whispered, blinking away the dazzled spots in front of her eyes. “Are they coming for us with lights?”

A line of bubbles zipped past outside the bell, like the tail of a falling star, and another flash seared their eyes from the depths below.

“Did you see that?” Andrew cried.

“I can’t see anything.” Jake rubbed his salt-encrusted lids. “It’s not the Ministry men, I’ll tell you that much.”

Flash!

“We are under attack,” Ian said with conviction. “We must get out of here at once before we are struck.”

“No, that’s just it!” Feverishly, Andrew began to pull at Claire’s buckles, then his own. “Those are my Short-Range Dazzling Incendiaries!”

“Yours, sir?” Jake said blankly. “What if one of them hits us?”

“There is no charge—they are simply for distraction.” He had Claire out of her harness now, and treading water. With one tug of Ian’s last buckle, he dumped him unceremoniously into the water as well. “And for getting one’s attention. It means that Lizzie and Tigg are directly above us in
Athena
. It means we are saved!”

Before he even finished speaking, Claire’s mind had calculated the angle of the incendiaries’ descent and triangulated
Athena
’s approximate position. But then, when another incendiary zipped through the water and detonated, she realized something else.

“They are moving away!” she cried. “They are clearly searching for us—quickly, we must get their attention!”

“Take the rucksack and surface,” Andrew told her. “Now!”

“I am not leaving you!”

Jake grabbed her hand and yanked on it to get her attention. “The air hose. Go outside and disconnect it, and aim it at the surface. We’ll have one minute of air after you do.”

Andrew clapped the breathing globe upon her head, hooked up its hose, and thrust her under the lip of the diving bell. It only took a couple of kicks before she landed on the top of it, and a few seconds more to disconnect the air hose.

The thing came alive in her hands like a very angry python, writhing and blowing huge bubbles of oxygen every which way. She flung her body upon it and wrestled it into submission, finally using her own weight to point it up toward the surface.

How many seconds of her companions’ air had she lost? How long would it take before someone on the ship observed the boiling of the water? Would they understand its significance?

Someone banged on the glass and she let go of the hose. It whipped away from her and wrapped itself around the cable on which the bell ascended and descended. By the time she had swum to the base of the bell, all three men had come out from under it, and she saw at once what they intended.

They had only one choice, after all.

And only one chance.

Andrew clasped her to himself, and Ian wrapped his arms around both of them. Jake grabbed Andrew’s waist and pressed himself to his back, and then Claire released the cord on the rucksack.

They rose toward the surface like an unwieldy comet, trailing bubbles behind them.

Torn between watching where she was going and terror lest they attract a kraken, Claire glanced frantically in every direction. The green of the water grew lighter … its quality changed as sunlight penetrated … wavering light surrounded them like a nimbus …

And they exploded from the water into the warmth of the Venetian day.

*

“Tigg—Claude—what is that?” Lizzie had opened the viewing port and hung halfway out of it, scanning the waterways with every ounce of concentration she possessed. Every time she launched one of the walnut-sized bombs Mr. Andrew had left with them, she waited at least a minute, in case by some miracle somebody under the water could respond. “Look, there, to the west of that great fancy church.”

Tigg spun the wheel to come about, and
Athena
tilted into the turn.

“It’s a bloody great kraken again, is what it is,” Claude told them grimly, from his position on the other side of the gondola. “Remember? All that boiling about and the poor devil shooting up out of it?”

Hardly had the words left his lips than something exploded out of the depths like a waterspout. Something with eight legs, but oddly disciplined. There was no kicking here, no frantic near-death movements that would draw the kraken, simply a smooth, last-ditch flight into the air.

And, since the laws of physics again dictated that what went up must come down, they began to fall back toward the water. Four heads—one in a glass breathing globe—turned desperately toward
Athena
.