Uncrashable Dakota (24 page)

Before Rob fully understood what he was doing, he was striding toward the platform. Hollis was in the doorway of the captain’s quarters, then at the rail, looking out across the bridge. His face and shoulders and arms were coated in dust and splinters. His shirt was lacerated. His hand was full of silver. Flanking him were two equally dirty strangers, a stocky lump of a boy and a frizzy-haired ferret of a girl. The lump held a pickax over his shoulder, the ferret a pointy shovel. Hollis raised his silver hand.
Gun.
It was pointed over Rob’s head, toward the wheel.

Hollis is going to shoot my father.

He screamed his stepbrother’s name and reached into his pocket. Hollis slid his gun along an invisible axis so that it was pointing at Rob, who brought his own pistol up so that Hollis’s face was bisected by the sharky little sight at the tip of the barrel. For a terrible, weightless moment they were frozen like this.

The last page in
Prince of the Cosmos
had no words. It was just the boy waving good-bye to his star, which had taken its rightful place in Ursa Major. Rob had drawn a Dakota airship into the picture, a crayon outline hanging awkwardly in the night sky. Once he’d shown it to Hollis. Why had this come to him now? He had the prickly sensation that the
Wendell Dakota
was alive, that it knew something he did not and was trying to tell him something.

There was a sound like cannon fire. Had he just been shot? His feet left the ground. The cannon became a steady roaring in his ears. There was a shriek, loud and terrible. Hollis and the lump and the ferret were in the air above the platform. And then the platform ate itself, along with the railing and the door. He wondered if Lucy Dakota had ever reached his father. He wondered if he was dying or already dead.

At least it didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel like anything at all.

THE HISTORY OF FLIGHT IN AMERICA

PART

SIX

ON THE EVENING
of December 31, 1899, three generations of Dakotas were together for the first and only time.

Wendell Dakota was in the accounting office of the Virginia manufacturing compound, checking the weekly report from the whiskey-sap department. He was mumbling to himself and tapping a pencil against the desk with his right hand, while his left curled around the belly of his infant son, Hollis, as he bounced the boy on his knee. He’d offered to watch the baby for the night so that his wife could accompany her friends to a formal New Year’s ball in Richmond. Big fancy parties made him anxious and uncomfortable. He only attended them to prove that he wasn’t a crazy recluse like his father, Samuel, who spent his days in total isolation, locked away inside his massive personal hangar in the center of the compound.

Samuel Dakota had never met his grandson and hadn’t seen his son in years. Wendell knew the old man was still alive only because of the endless clanking and pounding from inside the hangar. His father had always been withdrawn and obsessive—quite different from the man profiled in
Harper’s
magazine at the end of the Civil War, an article Wendell had read countless times as a boy, trying to reconcile the brooding father he knew with the dashing, cavalier war hero he
wished
he knew. Once Wendell had grown up to marry Lucy and prove himself a capable leader of Dakota Aeronautics, Samuel Dakota seemed to decide that his duties as a human being were finished and abruptly retired to his hangar.

Then the rumors started. Dakota Aeronautics was keeping Samuel’s body in a top-secret ice chamber to be unfrozen in a hundred years. Samuel had leprosy. Samuel had created a weapon so dangerous it could never be used. Samuel had succeeded in breeding mutant beetles with all sorts of strange powers: speech, artistic talents, poker, and—Wendell’s favorite—invisibility. At first, he had almost lost his mind trying to stop the spread of these rumors off the compound. Then, after his wife yanked yet another silver hair from his head, he decided to stop trying. Let people talk; he had bigger things to worry about. He forced himself not to care.

Wendell made sure that trays of food were slid daily through a small hole in the door, and his father slid them back when he was finished eating. That was the extent of their relationship, which explained why Wendell almost dropped his own son in shock when the door to the accounting office opened and Samuel Dakota walked in, pulled up a chair, and sat down as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

The first thing Wendell noticed was the smell. Anyone who worked closely with beetles was accustomed to the rancid odor of the gas they released after slurping up whiskey-sap. But the stench coming from his father was the tangy onion reek of someone who hadn’t washed or changed his clothes in a very long time. Samuel’s dirty-blond hair was much more dirty than blond, and it had twisted into a greasy clump surrounded by frizzy coils. His cheeks, mouth, chin, and neck were hidden by a thick beard, ornamented here and there with little bits of food. He wore the tattered remnants of an expensive suit, and a broken stopwatch dangled from his breast pocket.

“I’m leaving,” Samuel rasped. “Wanted to say good-bye.” He peeked up over the desk. “Who’s the little one?”

Wendell Dakota was speechless. His father sat back in his chair. For a while they just looked at each other until Wendell managed to ask, “Where are you going, Dad?”

“I made a mistake. A bad mistake. Long time ago. Last day of the war.”

“What mistake? What are you talking about?”

“Killed an innocent man.”

“Well, it was a
war
, Dad. I know it wasn’t pleasant, but you had to do things for the good of the Union. And you know what? That doesn’t excuse—”

Wendell cut himself off. He didn’t mean to sound so angry, but he couldn’t help it: his father had disappeared from his life because of his guilt about the war? That was what this was all about? He continued, trying to calm down.

“Why couldn’t you have told me this years ago, instead of just … hiding? I could’ve found you some help. Plenty of war veterans have nightmares and things of that nature.”

Samuel shook his head. His beard shed a sandstorm of cracker crumbs. “Living on earth is the nightmare.”

“Listen.” Wendell had regained some of his composure. “Let’s just relax. Let’s first get you into a bath. I mean, what in the blue skies have you been doing in there?”

Samuel reached up to scratch his neck, and Wendell recoiled in disgust. The old man’s fingernails were at least three inches long and had turned a sickly mustard color. Some of them had even begun to curl at the ends.

“I’m going to heaven,” Samuel explained. “I found a way to sneak past the gates. Won’t get in unless I fly there myself.”

On Wendell’s lap, Hollis squirmed and cried out. Wendell realized that he was clutching his son like he’d clutch the wheel of an airship in a storm. He tried to relax.

“Okay,” he said calmly. “Don’t do anything rash. Let’s talk about this.”

Samuel jumped out of his chair. “Nothing to talk about. Just saying good-bye.”

“Wait!”

But Samuel turned and rushed out of the office. Wendell couldn’t exactly chase him down with his newborn son in his arms. And anyway, he wasn’t sure it was necessary. The old man had clearly lost it, and come tomorrow, Wendell would break into the hangar with a team of nuthouse professionals. Maybe, with the proper guidance, they could salvage their relationship and Hollis could get to know his grandfather.

Wendell Dakota told himself this, but the truth was the encounter had deeply unsettled him. He stared at the accounting ledgers; the numbers swam together. Maybe he
should
go after him right now. What was all that talk about heaven?

He sat pondering the empty chair where his father had been sitting, half convinced he had hallucinated the whole visit. After a while, Hollis began to cry, and Wendell stood up to rock him gently. He went to the window of the office and looked out across the empty testing fields of the compound. Everyone was elsewhere, celebrating the end of another year that had promised—and delivered—so much progress to mankind. He wondered what the world would be like for Hollis.

Long after Wendell’s son fell asleep in his arms, he continued to stare out into the deepening Virginia night, his eyes coming to rest on the gloomy hangar that loomed over the field: Samuel Dakota’s self-made prison. He sighed—and almost dropped his son once again as a terrible
CRASH
shook the office. The baby’s eyes snapped open, and he resumed his shrill cry. Wendell’s first thought was:
Bomb!
But then he saw something dark growing out of the roof of his father’s hangar. He strained his eyes, staring in awe as the enormous shadow-thing clawed its way up into the sky. As it floated away in silhouette against the clouds, it
became
a cloud, camouflaging itself like a chameleon. But that was impossible. He blinked, and the shadow revealed itself to be an airship shaped like a long funnel. The claws he had seen were pieces of the roof splintering back as the ship crashed through. He strained his eyes to track its flight, but the night sky swallowed it up. He stood at the window for hours, seeing the shimmer of the vanished ship again and again in what always proved to be stars, until he was sure of one thing.

Samuel Dakota, the father of human flight, was never coming down.

26

THE SMELL DRAGGED
Hollis up out of darkness. The smoke ignited a cough that racked his body. His rib cage felt poorly assembled, bone grating against bone at odd angles. He coughed again, retching violently. All at once, he was painfully, regrettably awake and alert. He was stretched out on his side, covered in dust. He lifted a broken piece of wood off his leg and examined it. Buffed and shiny. A floorboard from the promenade.

The promenade?

Hollis pushed himself to his feet and fought a brief rush of nausea. He was on the bridge. Or what was left of it. All around him, the nerve center of the ship was reduced to splinters, broken glass, and frayed wires. Borders had been dissolved, walls shifted and crushed, so that it was difficult to tell where the bridge ended and the corridors began. He had been thrown clear of the platform and suspected he was somewhere near the back of the room, which had the bombed-out feel of a condemned building, its guts exposed and helpless.

The air was filled with poisonous smoke and drifting ash—and beetles as big as his fist. He watched in slow, dreamlike fascination as a monstrous insect floated past his head. Its pincers were the length of his thumbs, its belly round and inflated to the size of a baseball. Dozens more flitted in and out of the smoke like black balloons. The smell was worse than the lift chamber; it was as if he were buried inside a pile of spoiled vegetables.

He recoiled in horror as a mutant half-beetle appeared in front of his face, its belly and rear segment completely gone. Then the rest of it blinked forth out of thin air and the beetle became whole. Hollis rubbed his itchy eyes.

What was that?

Hollis pulled his torn shirt up to cover his nose and mouth. He was aware of other people moving through the smoke; human-shaped impressions appearing, silhouettes receding. He couldn’t make himself call out. The very idea of opening his mouth made him retch again.

There was a persistent high-pitched ringing. The volume felt connected to his stomach, and louder meant sicker. Covering his ears just made it worse: it was coming from inside his head.

Something big brushed against his back. He spun away, imagining a human-sized beetle, pincers squeezing his chest, jaws enveloping his face. There was a sharp pain in his heel, and he remembered, just before he lost his footing, about the ridiculous loafers. He tumbled blindly to the edge of a jagged hole in the floor. A credenza appeared to have been jammed down into it at an angle by some giant hand. Its glass doors were shattered except for one, which still sheltered a pair of sky-boots.

Right in front of his face, huge beetles were rising up out of the hole in grapelike bunches, flickering in and out of existence, floating up into the sky.

The sky?

The siren in his head forced him to close his eyes. The last thing he saw before the world went dark was an eye patch. It was lying on the floor next to him. He had seen it before. Somewhere.

*   *   *

MAGGIE’S HANDKERCHIEF
covered her nose and mouth. She was slapping Hollis in the face and calling his name. Once he was able to hear her voice and feel her hand on his cheek, he sat up. Some of the smoke had cleared. The wreckage wasn’t as bad near the viewing windows, but the floor was strewn with rubble. The stabilization gauge had disintegrated, leaving a web of thin metal crutches to support nothing but air.

Maggie helped him to his feet. The siren was piercing. She seemed to understand that real conversation would have to wait. Instead, she pointed to the switchboard, which was intact and serving as a rallying point. His mother was addressing a group of hijackers. For a moment, Hollis’s relief beat back the noise in his head to a distant, muted wail. He pointed himself in the general direction of the switchboard and tried to walk. The siren returned. Pain rooted him to the floor. He swayed, and Maggie tightened her grip on his arm.

“Easy there.” Her voice was trapped at the bottom of a well. “Don’t worry about her. Some of those men are on our side now. Or maybe there ain’t no sides anymore.”

Hollis watched carefully. Behind his mother, Chester was holding a blueprint of the ship. She pointed to a spot on the floor plan, and three hijackers ran off. She was giving orders, and they were obeying.

“She’s good,” Maggie said. “Course, without Castor, these guys would probably follow a cow off a cliff, but still.” She began to wave. “Hey! Lady! Found your kid over here!”

Maggie’s face began to join her voice, slipping into a distant fog. Hollis thought he might have said something about needing to lie down. His mother was okay. Castor was gone. He could take a little rest.