Lizzie did not buy that for a moment. “That were if the gas bags burst, Lady. Wivout an engine? We’ll just stay up ’ere floatin’ about till we starve to death.”
“Naw, we won’t.” Jake grasped the controls for the elevator vanes with both hands. “One stiff breeze and we’ll run into one o’ them rocks first. Mr. Andrew, I could use you on the tiller if yer done gawkin’ at that chart.”
“Quite so.” Andrew took the wheel and turned it a few degrees east. “If these charts are up to date, there should be a wide river valley in six or eight miles. Vanes full vertical, Jake, and release some air from the
forward gas bags.”
Spaniard charts up to date? Claire could only hope. Her brief experience with the Royal Kingdom of Spain in Reno had left her with no very good opinion of their skills at engineering. How could it be otherwise, when they outlawed airships because—of all things—they contravened the intentions of the Almighty? The
Lass
had been allowed to land in Reno only because Alice was a Texican citizen, and only then just long enough to take on food and water and make a visit to the nearest bank and telegraph office before they were chivvied on their way as though they carried the plague.
No wonder James and Stanford Fremont were to have been received by the Viceroy himself when they and the Carbonator arrived in San Francisco.
To the Spaniards, rail technology was the very pinnacle of human achievement. Anything else was practically suspected of witchcraft.
Her stomach lifted
in a momentary feeling of weightlessness.
“We’re goin’ down,” Lizzie whimpered, hiding her face in Maggie’s shoulder. “I hate airships. It ent gonna be a long, slow glide. We’re gonna fall and die and—”
“Shut up, Liz,” Jake said through his teeth. “Yer makin’ me nervous.”
Andrew glanced over his shoulder
, in the direction of the stern. “What’s happening back there? Claire, perhaps you should check on Alice.”
She did not want to check on Alice. She wanted to remain fixed at the window, as if sheer strength of will could bring the ship in for a safe landing.
But that was selfish and pointless. So instead, she ran back to the engine, where an alarming plume of black smoke now trailed in their wake.
“Lady!” Tears were whipped from Tigg’s eyes
through the open hatch. “I can’t hold ’er—She’s gonna burn up!”
The ancient engine, which had suffered so many lives, had finalspas, had ly come to its last.
“Claire! The kill switch!” Alice shrieked. “Get her stopped!”
Claire reached past Nine, who was standing silently by as if he’d been deactivated, and jerked the engine’s
emergency ignition lever down. The engine juddered and shuddered, steam hissing out from among the gears and every possible aperture. The smell of burning intensified.
Even the kill switch had died.
She whirled, scanning the engine room for anything she could use.
There!
She snatched up an iron crowbar that had been flung to the floor. There was no hope for the engine, so this would not hurt any more than the utter destruction it was destined for. “Alice, get out of there!” Alice scrambled up onto the gangway and Claire rammed the crowbar into the seam of the red-hot boiler door and pried it open. With a whoosh of surprise, the door blew off, the contents spilled out into the sky—and the engine gasped and gave up the ghost.
The wind whistled through the sudden silence.
And then the earth, spiny and sharp with trees, leaped up to meet them.
Claire pulled herself upright with the help of Nine’s metal leg. Having magnetic feet, he had merely stuck fast to a structural support during the long slide of their landing and its abrupt halt in a copse of quivering aspens, golden in their autumn foliage. But other than that, he did not appear much damaged. She hoped that was the case for the other members of the crew.
“Mopsies?” she called anxiously, staggering forward into the gondola.
“’Ere.” The voice was muffled, and a heap of arms and legs and petticoats resolved itself into two girls. “I fink I’m broken.”
Lizzie patted Maggie down, her keen green eyes clouded with worry. “Where does it hurt?”
“In my stomach, where your knee is. Gerroff.”
Andrew groaned. He appeared to have gone right over the tiller headfirst, much in the manner of a horseman on an unbroken mount, and had been bent in half with his feet dangling in midair. Claire assisted h
im to slide off the wheel to the vertical once again.
“Remind me to get some lessons in steering one of these things the next time we meet your friend Captain Hollys,” he said. “That was a bruiser of a landing.”
“We are bruised, but not dead,” Claire pointed out. “Look on the bright side.” She adjusted his tawny brocade waistcoat so that it sat upon his shoulders again, more as an excuse to touch him and reassure herself that he was whole and undamaged than because she cared tuppence about how he looked.
“Everyone all right?” Alice came in on wobbly legs, Tigg at her heels. She took in the two of them in one glance and Claire stepped away.
Or tried to. The deck was canted several degrees and her graceful, subtle movement turned into a drunken stumble that fetched her up against the bulkhead. “Yes,” she said, trying to recover h> er dignity. “I feared for us all for a moment.”
“You still can,” Alice said grimly. Her curly blond hair had been torn from under her airman’s cap by the wind, and stuck out in a hundred different directions. “Come on. We need to
suss out how bad the gondola and fuselages are damaged.”
Getting out of the hatch was not easy—in fact, it was more like climbing out of a window
that was tilted toward you. In the end, Andrew and Alice went down on a rope and caught the other four as they slid down one by one.
“It’ll right itself once we fill the
starboard fuselage again,” Tigg said in tones that asked for confirmation. “Port fuselage is topmost. Looks spiff to me.”
Alice did not give it. She was already inspecting the double fuselages that contain
ed the gas bags. They hung in the crushed aspens that had stopped their slide, but the trees had bent rather than broken.
“Tigg, Andrew, Lizzie, run round to starboard. Listen for a whistle—that’ll be a leak. Claire, Maggie, you’re with me on the port side.”
Just below the bow on the starboard side, the canvas had been gashed, and air was leaking out with a continuous sigh of hopelessness. If Alice had been brisk before, now she really swung into action. She sent Tigg up into a tree with a bucket and brush and, from the ground, instructed him how to patch it, and when the awful hissing had stopped, she let out a breath as if she’d been holding it the whole time.
“The fuselage is my biggest worry,” she confessed to Claire as Andrew and Tigg cleared
saplings, aiming to use one of the taller trees as a mooring mast. “The
Lass
can lose a lot and still fly, but she ain’t going anywhere without lift.”
“We
should like to go anywhere as soon as possible,” Claire agreed.
“Say, where’s the girls?”
Claire looked around her. Aspens, poplars—chunks of tumbled granite—gently blowing grass—and a hundred feet away, the silvery glint of the river that had cut this swath broadly enough for them to land beside it. On a pile of rocks that caused the river to eddy and swing in a new direction, she spotted two little figures, hands shading their eyes as they looked into the distance and turned to cover the points of the compass.
“There. Scouting.” She pointed, rather proudly.
“They ought to let us know before they disappear.”
“You may certainly suggest it. But they know their duty and it would seem strange to them to warn me they’re going to do it.”
Alice shook her head and returned to her inspection of the partially buried gondola. “Not like any little girls I ever met. I bet they wouldn’t know what to do with a doll if you gave ’em one.”
Claire remembered her own nursery and the row of abandoned dolls on the top shelf of the bookcase. “Papa used to give me a doll every year for Christmas.” She knelt to inspect a brass plate in the hull, bent nearly double with the force of the landing, but salvageable. “He gave upot“He gp when I was eight and my nurse reported to Mama that I was disassembling them and making notes on their anatomy. Which, I discovered, bore no resemblance to actual human babies’ anatomy at all.”
Alice’s brow lightened a little and she almost smiled through her worry. “I ain’t never had a doll. I wouldn’t know what to do with one, either.”
“You have the automatons. Theirs
may only bear a nodding resemblance to human anatomy, but at least they’re useful. Dolls, I’m afraid, are not.”
By the time the Mopsies ran up, panting, to report, Alice had finished inspecting as much of the hull as she could see. The rest would have to wait until the
gas bags had been inflated once again, and the hull lifted to its normal resting altitude of a few feet.
“You sure picked a good place to crash,” Maggie informed Jake and Andrew. “Ent a soul or an
’ouse or so much as an eyelash to be seen for miles an’ miles.”
“There is a bunch of mucky great creatures on t’other side of t’river, though,” Lizzie put in. “Horns on
’em as big as Tigg.”
“I suspect those might be elk,” Andrew said. “They possess antlers, which are solid. Cows have horns, which are hollow.”
Lizzie did not look impressed by the distinction. “Solid—hollow—they’re pointy, is what I’m sayin’. Big and pointy.”
“Duly noted,” Claire said. “And no sign of any source of help. Well, on the positive side, neither is there any danger … of the human sort, at least. We shall only have to worry about bears.”
“Bears?” Lizzie’s eyes widened. “There’s bears ’ere?”
“There was a bear due east of where you found me in the Texican Territory. I have no doubt there are similar creatures here
in the Idaho Territory.”
“If you folks are done with the nature lesson,” Alice put in with barely concealed impatience, “can we get the pump going and get some
gas into the bags? That patch oughta be dry enough to hold now.”
The pump turned out to be an a
utomaton named Eight, who had hose concealed in his appendages and a small engine as well. Claire watched, hands nervously clasped, as the bags filled, the twin fuselages leveled out, and the Lass slowly freed herself from her untidy nest. The trees brushed the lower surfaces of the fuselages as they rose, until finally the airship stalled.
“Gondola’s stuck,” reported Tigg from the far side. “C’mon, everyone, it’ll be like pushin’ that barge off into the Thames once we got all t
he chickens into the garden at ’ome.”
Home. The warmth of affection flooded Claire at the thought of the shabby cottage in Vauxhall Gardens—the first place in Tigg’s memory where he had an actual pallet to himself and
“three squares” a day.
If she had accomplished nothing more on this earth, she had at least done that—given these children their first home.
Maybe some day they whise day tould even see it again.
Heaving, pushing, and commanding Nine to help, they dislodged the
Lass
from her clinging prison. With a sucking sound, she lifted a few inches, like a char who remembered better days shaking mud off her shoes. Rosie the chicken, who had been hunting in the fallen leaves as they worked, immediately jumped into the gash in the earth and yanked a fat worm out of it.
“That’s it,” Alice muttered
to the old ship. “Come on, girl. Eight, keep pumping on the starboard side.”
The fuselage fattened until it curved like the breast of a healthy hen,
lifting the gondola until it bobbed a couple of feet off the ground.
“There.” Alice patted
a ripped piece of brass, whereupon a number of rivets hit the stones with a
tinktinktink
. “Eight, that’ll do.” The automaton fell silent and she disconnected the hose.