Uncrashable Dakota (22 page)

“Like your last one,” Samuel pressed, “about how killing men from the sky is easier. What did you mean by that?”

“Well, ain’t it?”

“I suppose it is. Yes.”

Castor just shrugged. “Don’t matter no more, nohow.”

Samuel’s dress uniform began to itch. “Listen, Castor, I’m … sorry about your, all your, uh…” He started to apologize for the hog-tying, but thought better of it. “I’m sorry I stole your moonshine. Quite the interesting formula you’ve got there.”

Castor stepped off his porch and squinted at Samuel. “Now what do you mean by that?”

“Tasty stuff,” Samuel said quickly. “Very smooth.” He reached into his pocket and felt the pleasant heft of his money clip. Just a few dollars, and he was free. “I pay you now,” he said slowly, so there wouldn’t be any misunderstanding, “and you leave me alone. No more notes in bottles, no more sneaking around Dakota Aeronautics and bothering my men. And this is the last time we ever speak.”

Castor laughed, which became a wet cough that culminated in another brown gob of spit in the grass. “You sure are a strange bird.” He put up his hands in a gesture of mock surrender. “You kick me some good Union currency, we’re square. Don’t have to fret about me spoilin’ your sky party no more.”

Samuel produced the money clip and was about to peel off a few crisp bills when a sudden flash of movement in the doorway of the cabin—
ambush!—
made him drop the money and fumble for his pistol. Hezekiah whirled around as a pale boy with reddish-blond hair, clad in dirty overalls, stepped out onto the porch. Samuel, who had managed to bring his pistol up in the direction of the ambush, felt hot shame creep through his body.

I am pointing my gun at a child
.

His heart was pounding. But it was as if his thoughts existed in another universe from his actions, and he couldn’t make himself lower the gun right away. The boy looked at him curiously, then made a pistol shape out of his thumb and finger and pointed it at Samuel.

“You’re a thief, mister,” the boy yelled, jerking his hand back to mimic the recoil of a gun being fired. “Pcheeww!”

“Jefferson Castor!” Hezekiah yelled. “You git back in the house!” He turned back to Samuel with an apologetic shrug, and his eyes widened when he saw the gun—the real gun—aimed at his boy.

What happened next would replay over and over in Samuel’s mind every night before he fell asleep, and then again in terrible dreams where the tree branches crept across the clearing, their impossibly long shadow-fingers pointing at him in silent accusation like little Jefferson Castor’s gun hand.

Hezekiah Castor lunged for the gun, putting his body between the barrel and his boy.

It just went off
.

Samuel made the excuse even as he pulled the trigger; maybe even a split second before he did. He had been jumpy all day, and his finger slipped.

It was self-defense.

A reflex.

An accident.

It just went off.

The next few minutes were a series of still images in his mind: Hezekiah Castor lying on the ground next to the wad of cash, his arm bent unnaturally back behind his head. Little Jefferson Castor frozen, midstride, between the porch and his father’s body.

And finally, the merciful blue emptiness of the sky as Samuel Dakota made his escape.

23

DELIA LOWERED HERSELF
into the primary lift chamber. At each rung, St. Albert’s wry face seemed to appear, inches from her own. She wondered if Albertus Magnus would have sympathized with the beetle cults. He’d been an open-minded man: bishop and alchemist, saint and scientist. A doctor of the church who also discovered arsenic. Beetle keeping had taught her to see the wisdom in these contradictions. Lifting an airship into the sky required both rational thought and faith. The best machines amounted to a pile of scrap if the beetles suddenly refused to consume whiskey-sap halfway through the flight.

If St. Albert were alive today, she decided, he would have written a work of great scholarship about the cults. Something better than
Beetle Deification: A Survey
, from which she could recall only the sketchy facts she’d retained before the book’s bone-dry text drove her away. Now she wished she’d paid more attention.

She hopped down onto the catwalk and ducked behind an abandoned lunch cart. Earlier, the place had been full of strangers. That had been disconcerting enough, but now something else was nagging at her.

The noise.

The primary lift chamber was home to the largest of the
Wendell Dakota
’s sixteen brand-new Sorter/Picker/Dispenser machines. Yesterday, Hollis and Rob had been able to hear the rhythmic shuffle from all the way up on the catwalk; spiders didn’t exactly run whisper-quiet. But now, the distant sounds were human rather than mechanical: the sharp echo of orders being given, revised, given again.

Refill on eleven, two liters.

Four won’t close. They’re coming back up here.

Siphon forty-one into twenty-nine!

Delia pressed her forehead against the side of the cart. These were the sounds of amateurs trying to manually operate the compartments that fed whiskey-sap to the beetles. Now she was sure that Chief Owens was a captive, or worse. There was no way he would allow his crew to shut off the spiders and work for the hijackers.

She had to get down to the chamber floor. Maybe she could take out a few guards with the immobilizer and try to restart the spider. Even if she succeeded, it was still only one of sixteen. But what else could she do? She turned her wrist and glanced at St. Albert’s face on her bracelet. Then she stood up.

“Are there any more of those exquisite jelly rolls back there?”

Delia found herself face-to-face with a woman who had been about to peek behind the cart. She was delicate and thin, with long eyelashes and a pale, high-cheekboned face. Her hair curled beneath the brim of her felt hat. She looked like the kind of young society lady who strutted about beneath a twirling parasol, except her skirt and blouse were covered in clotted whiskey-sap. A hint of black ink peeked above her neckline along her shoulders. Delia remembered that the Sons of Solomon liked to ink toy trains on their bodies, while the Order of the First Beetle preferred a corrupted version of the Dakota logo. And the Liberation Front’s insignia was a raised fist, but she didn’t know if the members tattooed it on themselves. If only there was a way to ask about the woman’s ink without arousing suspicion. Her questions would have to be much less direct.

“Jelly rolls!” Delia said. “I was just looking for them myself.”

The woman laughed. “Perhaps we can share one. Did you just come off shift?”

Delia thought quickly. “Sure did,” she said. “In chamber two.”

The woman began sifting through the shelves of the cart.

“Nothing. Too bad. I’m on break, and I’m starving.”

Delia marveled at the woman’s calm. She’d assumed everyone down here would be frantic.

“I’m Delia,” she said, extending her hand.

“Nice to meet you, Sister Delia. My name is Ada.” The woman clasped Delia’s fingers in some kind of intricate pattern.

“How’s everything going in your chamber?”

“Oh, fine,” Ada said. “The beetles do all the work. They know where they’re going.” She smiled dreamily. “We are so near, Sister Delia.”

Delia’s heart pounded. Ada’s words recalled Marius’s:
They know their mother is near.

“I was sort of worried when the telephones went dead, since we turned all the spiders off.”

Ada seemed taken aback. “The tools of enslavement?”

“I know we had to shut them down. It’s just a little scary to be flying blind.”

“Blind!” Ada was incredulous. “Their womb-seeking instincts will guide us.”

Now Delia had it. The Order of the First Beetle believed that Samuel Dakota had discovered a powerful mother beetle. According to the Order, flight was only a small part of what these creatures were capable of, and they were going to prove it by recovering Samuel’s long-lost ship, where the mother was supposedly stashed away, oozing with undiscovered potential. That was all she could remember.

“Sister Delia, are you all right?”

Delia tried to smile sweetly, but she was hopelessly distracted. Jefferson Castor had placed the fate of the greatest airship ever built into the hands of a Confederate militia and a beetle-worshipping cult. She wondered if the only true motive for the hijacking of the
Wendell Dakota
was complete and utter insanity.

She willed the muscles of her face into a vacant smile. “Of course, forgive me. Sister Ada, may I ask you something?”

“Yes, Sister Delia.”

“Do you ever worry that we’ve come so far, but we—they—still won’t be able to find the ship?”

“You poor child,” Ada said, pulling Delia in for an embrace. “We all wrestle with doubt from time to time.”

Delia wriggled out of Ada’s grip as politely as she could. “I’m full of nerves today, that’s all.”

“Remember our words, Sister.”

“I do.”

“Say them with me.”

Delia mumbled along while Ada said, “As the mother delivered her beetles unto us, so we deliver our beetles to the mother.”

Delia thought of the X on the map in her bag. These people actually believed they were taking the beetles home. “Thank you, Sister Ada. Very inspiring.”

“Come, take a shift alongside me. Extra hands are always welcome in chamber one. It will remind you that our work is not in vain.”

“That’s … actually a good idea.”

From catwalk to ladder to ledge, sidling past steel casks of whiskey-sap, they descended. Halfway down, in the center of the chamber, was a glass bubble dotted with reflections from the lamps that hung from the walls. This was the spider’s head, where keepers helped guide its movements. The bubble was empty. Lower still, with Ada chattering on, Delia studied the dormant limbs. Eight thick legs angled upward from the base of the control bubble, each an assemblage of pipe and wire, tightly wound. Jointed pistonlike to each main limb, a trident of three lesser segments pointed toward the floor. Splitting again and narrowing, these twenty-four arms became forty-eight stumpy aluminum hands, out of which burst two hundred and forty hoses. At the bottom, Delia and Ada shuffled through dendrites of legs-become-fingers, hundreds of nozzles dangling above the compartments they’d once fed.

The machine’s stillness depressed her. Everywhere she looked, Order acolytes were pouring whiskey-sap down the hatches in the hull. They were chanting in Latin; Delia recognized the language from mass at St. Theresa’s. Militia hijackers poked warily about the forest of limbs, while others patrolled with rifles over their shoulders. Above her head, a convex sliver of glass distorted their movements.

“I’ll just go make myself useful,” Delia said absently, trying to avoid the eyes of the militiamen. All around her, the chanting of the false keepers became fervent.

“Blessings!” Ada held out her hands with palms down, parallel to the floor, and wiggled her fingers. Then she was gone. Delia moved swiftly. Underneath the bubble was a ladder that would take her to the meeting point of the main limbs. There she’d find a trapdoor. Maybe she could go unseen long enough to get the spider started again.

“I think this one is really trying to commune with me,” said a man as Delia flitted past. He had paused in his work to examine a beetle up close. “Look at its little feelers!”

Delia had been trying not to think about it—the idea of behaving like a cult member made her ill—but there were times when she felt a majestic vibration rippling through the beetle population. Sometimes she could get a single beetle to respond, like a pet, to whispered coaxing. Other times they were simply mindless insects.

Nearby a woman giggled excitedly.

“It doesn’t taste that bad!” she exclaimed.

Delia gagged and forced herself to keep moving. She might be willing to entertain a wild notion or two about the beetles, but she drew the line at actually
eating
them.

Movement off to her right: a small group of militia coming closer. The ladder to the bubble was about thirty feet away. If she made a run for it, they would see her. She was tempted to pull the immobilizer from her bag, but she knew she couldn’t zap them all. Going against everything she believed in as an apprentice beetle keeper, she walked casually to the nearest compartment, pulling it open. The dark space beneath was swarming with beetles. Delia grabbed hold of a feeding tube and turned the handle. She chanted nonsensically. Without looking up, she sensed the patrol no more than a few steps away. Instead of passing her by, they stopped. She felt eyes upon her and reluctantly looked up to meet them.

The armed porter from yesterday’s trip to chamber two was studying her face.

“I know you,” he said.

She smiled dumbly, shrugged, and resumed her chant.

“You’re not one of them. Who are you?”

The militia men weren’t budging. She dropped the Order act. “I just work here.”

“Do you?” His hands rested casually on the ivory grips of his pistols. “Then it’s time you met the boss, cupcake.”

24

“
I
SEEN THOSE TATTOOS
before,” Maggie said. “Painted on a wall.”

Chester agreed. “All the way over by the pier, crawling up a lamppost. And on a sammich board down at the Four Aces.”

“My father thought they were kind of funny,” Hollis said. “The beetle religions. The cults, I mean.”

“Yeah, real funny,” Maggie said. “Until you find yourself coughing up beetles and floating.”

They were sprawled along three rococo divans, a fraction of the expensive furniture that lined the walls of Edmund Juniper’s personal storage space. At one end of the long room, the splintered door was propped awkwardly in its frame. Chester’s shoulder had succeeded where Maggie’s lock picking had failed. The two guards who had been stationed outside were slumped against the wall, unconscious, hands trussed with scaly rope from a box labeled
SNAKE-CHARMING SUPPLIES
.