Clementine (11 page)

“Coming sir!”

“And woman, you can hear me all right?”

“If you yell, I can hear you!” But when she turned the crank and turned the switch to start the gun revving, she wasn’t sure she’d continue to communicate so easily. Inside the glass bubble, suspended over the earth, Maria tried not to gaze down too long or too hard at the shrinking service yard docks, or the tiny blocks of Kansas City that were dropping away underneath her. It made her dizzy and almost nauseous, though she wouldn’t have confessed it if her life had depended on it.

She stuffed her hands into the gloves and they were far too big, but they’d keep the gun from burning her. The bottom of the glass ball vibrated with the gun’s power as it cranked, rolled, and hummed in its slot.

She took a deep breath, pointed the gun as best she could, and opened fire.

The kick thrust her hands back, jerking at her elbows and shoulders and beating them in her joints; but she held the thing steady and pushed her weight against it—holding its aim true and correct, and splitting the gas dome of the second security detail ship.

The craft exploded into a fireball so fast and hot that it flashed like a magician’s trick, no sooner burning than falling, and no sooner alight than dropping in a gyre’s course, like a soap bubble circling the drain.

But that was the easy one.

The second ship, the Union cruiser, was gaining ground fast from the other direction, not quite meeting the
Valkyrie
’s altitude but matching its pace—and soon, it would be out of her gun’s range. The gun’s cylindrical barrel purred as it spun, waiting for the directive to shoot; but Maria didn’t know how much ammunition she had, and she didn’t want to waste it so she waited until the cruiser was right in her crosshairs before squeezing off another brutal spray.

The cruiser wouldn’t go down, not like the little security craft. Its armor plating wasn’t as dense and reliable as the
Valkyrie
’s outer hull; but the cruiser was lighter and more maneuverable, and it could take a bigger beating than anything else anywhere near them. It rocked under the assault of Maria’s firepower but it didn’t crack, split or fall out of the sky.

She scanned the thing for a weak point, but as she’d already confessed, she didn’t know anything about dirigibles so she shouted over the whirring rumble of the churning barrels, “Captain!”

“What?”

“What do I aim for?”

He yelled back, “Aim for the goddamned ship!”

“Be more specific! Does it have a weak spot?”

There was a pause. Then he yelled, “You won’t take their tanks; they’re covered up good. Crack for the engines, down underneath!”

“Got it!” she said, and she used her body’s weight to crank the gun around, back at the cruiser, which was winding itself up for a direct assault.

“Good! Now hang on—we’re going to have to ram that last little bastard! Keep shooting for the cruiser! Keep it off our tail so we can clear the other one out of the sky! It’s staying up too high for you to hit it from down there!”

She didn’t respond but she felt the surge of the ship taking some new path, coiling itself up again, building the inertia to crash the smaller craft down to earth, and back behind them. The underside ball turret teetered up, giving her a few seconds of a breathtaking stomach drop and a clear shot at the cruiser, so she took it—she shifted her weight and kicked the gun crossways with her knees, changing the aim to shoot for the cruiser’s protruding engines. They were mounted on its underside, thrusters that steered and powered the forward motion of the machine; and in front of those powerful machines, automatic guns were mounted on pivoting arms.

The cruiser’s guns cranked, twisted, and fired at the
Valkyrie
, and the
Valkyrie
shook off the shots with a grumpy spin and a dip, but then recovered. The pursuing ship unleashed another set of rapid-fire rounds, determined to force the bird back down to earth.

One of the birdshot rounds punched hard against the reinforced glass of the ball turret, striking to Maria’s left with a concussion that made her ears ring and her head pound. When her vision had cleared she wiggled the gun back and forth, making sure it was still solidly affixed; and then she spied the long chip and fine line of a split that was creaking its way along the glass. The round hadn’t penetrated, but it had broken the small dome and God only knew how much longer it’d hold.

But Maria had another good shot, and she took it.

She rocked the active switch and crushed her hands around the oversized triggers, throwing another dozen slugs at the cruiser—this time aiming lower. Though the gun was almost impossible to guide with any finesse, she did her damnedest and the gun responded better than she had any right to expect. The arc of the bullets dipped and cut a punctured line along the lower hull of the cruiser, and one of the last slugs clipped the bottom left thruster—lodging inside it, perhaps, or maybe only blasting through it.

The thruster sparked and smoked, but didn’t fail altogether…and she couldn’t tell if any real damage had been done because at that moment, the
Valkyrie
collided head-on with the second smaller vessel, and the sound of an explosion shook the bird hard from the far side, relative to Maria’s captive position in the ball turret.

She clung to the gun though the heat of it warmed her too much through her clothes and through the big gloves that flopped around on her fingers. The split on the glass stretched—she watched it widen like a smile, and she held her breath.

The weight of the automatic gun and the weight of the glass itself, not to mention the weight of Maria’s body suspended there, thighs clenched around a narrow seat meant for a man…how much would the wounded bubble hold? She closed her eyes and waited for the
Valkyrie
to settle, and as the ship rolled she saw the other small ship toppling down to earth in a widening ball of fire that drew a comet’s tail of soot and sparks down through the sky.

Had there been another ship? She couldn’t remember.

Too many things to keep track of at once.

But the cruiser was still there, hovering—she could see it again when the
Valkyrie
swung itself around, pulling out of the spin and righting itself. The cruiser was blowing smoke, but not very much of it. She’d nicked something important but it wasn’t enough to slow their pursuer so she rounded the gun again and, praying she had enough ammunition to keep the threat coming, she clamped down on the triggers and blew more air-to-air birdshot slugs into the clouds.

The cruiser fired back, but it leaned backwards and the shots went too high to do more than graze the edge of the
Valkyrie
’s hull.

Along the glass the crack’s smile stretched all the longer, and now it was accompanied by the sickening, deep tinkle of ice that won’t hold for more than another few minutes.

“Captain!” she shouted.

“What now?”

“I have to…” The ball shifted and Maria’s seat dropped half an inch that nearly stopped her heart. She released her grip on the gun and scrambled backward, off the seat and in hurried retreat until she had one leather-booted foot on the edge.

A whistling hiss joined the slow shatter; air was entering from somewhere, and it was colder than ordinary winter. It smelled like water.

“Oh Jesus,” she swore as she got one hand up over the edge, but the gloves she wore were meant for a man more than twice her size and she lost her grip; she relaxed her fingers, swung her hand, and the gloves flew off, then she grabbed again at the edge and found it. She was suspended that way, using the width and breath of her reach to hoist herself above the glass ball with the rocking gun, and the glass ball was breaking beneath her. Hinges were stretching with unfamiliar unevenness and the pressure of the craft’s motion was tugging the turret apart.

The cruiser reared into view, once more, and much closer. It was coming in fast and high—its underbelly exposed, its lower engines and thrusters a target almost too sweet to resist. But the glass was splitting and the gun, which was mounted on a set of tracks, was drooping as the structure failed.

She braced her feet, pinning them against the curved rim of the glass bowl; she released one hand’s worth of grip, and when she put her fingertips on the back end of the gun’s firing mechanism, it was so frigid that she nearly stuck to it. The air that seeped and squirted into the ball and up against Maria’s face was bitterly cold but she worked against it, straining to feel her way up to the trigger paddle even from her precarious position.

The cruiser wouldn’t hold its position long, but she couldn’t hold her position long either and it was a war of time between her muscles, the glass ball turret, and the cruiser’s path.

With the cold air came cold water, condensing and freezing, and Maria’s buttressing hand slid. She grappled for her handhold and lost it, and was an instant shy of toppling down onto the increasingly fragile surface below her when an enormous black hand seized her scrambling fingers.

She whipped her head around to see Croggon Hainey, feet planted apart, and shortly with both hands wrapped around her wrist.

“Woman, are you mad?” he demanded.

She said, “Yes! Or no! Or look—” and she pointed at the cruiser with its upturned belly. “I can take it down!”

“That ball turret is going to go, any second!”

“No!” she shouted at him, and struggled to dip herself down, letting him hold most of her weight. “This is my life at stake here too, you’ve made it more than clear you bastard, so let me help us survive!”

The length of his arms gave her a few precious extra inches to lean, and when she touched the trigger paddle she jerked herself forward to seize it, and squeeze with all her might.

A spray of half a dozen bullets went soaring through a low-flying cloud, into the underside of the Yankee cruiser and straight through its already-wounded thruster. Three new sets of smoke and sparks burst to life and she cheered, “See! I told you!”

But the pressure of the gun’s kickback was too much for the glass, and it split.

And it fell, out from underneath her.

Just like that, the sky was a sucking thing, blowing ice up her skirt and against her skin, and beneath her the ground was amazingly far away. She held her breath because she could not breathe, and she swung her legs because she lacked the strength to do anything else. Wisps of cloud billowed past her, screamed between her legs, and lashed at her arms, but she did not fall.

She spun like a ballerina in a music box, suspended from the vise of the captain’s hands.

OUR PLAYERS COME TO AN AGREEMENT

9

Hainey hoisted Maria with a jerk and a backwards stumble that drew her up out of the hole left by the former glass ball turret; and although the sucking vortex left by the circular absence roared with broken, swirling wind, they were safely away from its reach. For a few seconds, Maria lay panting on the metal floor—and then she sat up, letting the wild, intruding air flay her hair to pieces.

She said, “Oh no. My underthings.”

“Your what?”

“My…never mind.” She leaned forward just enough to see over the edge just a little bit, and she spied the undergarments floating happily down to Missouri. “Are we safe? Did we get them all?”

The captain stood up, swung his head slowly back and forth, and backed away—urging her to do likewise. He said, “You got the last of them. Goddamn, woman. You almost got yourself killed.”

“Well, I didn’t. And…well, I think it’s only clear and honest to point out, I owe that to you.” She rubbed at her wrists, where the red marks of his grasp were flushing into a pattern of hands. “Why did you do that? You could’ve let me fall. Maybe you should have. It might’ve been more convenient for you to do so.”

He stared down into the hole and told her, “Just reflex, I guess. It’s not every day I see a half-dressed woman falling out of a ball turret.” He turned to climb the three or four steps up into the bridge, and she rose to follow behind him. Over his shoulder he added, “And anyway, you took down the cruiser.”

Once they were away from the whistling void, Maria didn’t have to shout when she said, “I didn’t have much choice. I thought we’d worked that out.”

Again, without looking at her, he said, “Maybe. But I don’t know too many men who’d have reached for that last shot.”

On the bridge, he pointed at her previous seat and said, “Buckle yourself in.”

Lamar had been closest to the cargo hold, so he was the one who asked, “Sir, what happened back there? What’s that noise?”

“We lost the left ball turret,” he answered, but didn’t tell him more. “I don’t know what kind of disturbance it’ll make in the steering, but if you find this bird pulling or bucking, it’s a big hole and we don’t have any good way to cover it right this moment, so we’re going to live with it.”

“It’s tugging back and down a little, but not too bad. We can live with it, sure. Maybe when we stop we can shove a crate over it or something,” Simeon proposed, trying very hard not to watch Maria with one eye.

“If we can find one big enough,” Hainey said. “But for now, we’ve got to…” he rubbed wearily at his forehead. “God Almighty.”

Simeon asked, “Captain?”

And Lamar gazed up expectantly.

“We’ve got to…” he tried again. “Christ knows how far ahead of us they are. We’ve given them a devil of a head start, but at least we know where they’re headed. So here’s what I want to do—I want to head north a bit, out over godforsaken noplace; we’ll check through the cargo and see if there’s anything we want; and if there’s anything we don’t want, we’re going to pitch it. We need to lighten this thing, because we can maybe catch up to them before they reach Louisville.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Maria was out of her seat again.

Without any malice or even impatience, Hainey said, “
You
wait a minute, woman. Simeon, take us north a few miles and maybe even lean us west since they think we’ve been going east; get us outside Kansas City’s airspace, and if you can find a low cloud to hide us in, so much the better.”

“The sky’s clear as a bell; I wouldn’t give us good odds on that one.”

“Then keep your eyes open for anything big enough to cover this thing for half an hour. We won’t have any longer than that to get ourselves together before we have to make a run for it. And of course, we’ve got a lady passenger to debark. You can walk a couple of miles back to town, can’t you?”

“Captain,” Maria was standing beside him, and when he turn-ed, she was right under his nose. Then she asked with some doubt, “This ship was going to Louisville before you commandeered it. Wasn’t it?”

His forehead wrinkled. “
This
ship? I don’t know where it was going. But within an hour it’s going to be headed to Louisville as fast as its hydrogen can carry it. Why did you think the
Valkyrie
was Kentucky-bound?”

She didn’t answer his question, but she asked him another one. “Why are
you
Kentucky-bound? Why the eastward course? You know as well as I do that south and east is not the safest dir-ection you could choose. So tell me, please. Why are you chasing the
Clementine
? What’s on board that you want so badly?”

“Not a goddamned thing,” he told her. “I don’t want anything that ship’s carrying. I want the ship itself, because it’s mine.”

“Yours?”

The motion of the
Valkyrie
’s new course made the floor under their feet swing slightly, and they both swayed as they spoke. “Yes,” he said. “It’s mine. I stole it fair and square, years ago, and I want it back.”

She looked frankly puzzled, and she admitted as much. “I’m not sure I understand. It’s only a ship, and as I understand it, it’s not half as nice as this one. You’ve got this one now; why not turn around, call off the chase, and call it a day?”

He nearly bellowed. “Because I don’t
want
this one!” He kept the volume up when he continued, “And now, since we’re both feeling so chatty—why did Pinkerton send you after us? Who paid them to do it, and why?”

“The Union Army,” she said. “And now you likely know more about the situation than I do. I’ll admit, I got a bit sidetracked from my initial task. Look, I had no idea you had any interest in this ship whatsoever until I heard your men aboard it. As far as I knew, it was transporting some kind of supplies to a sanatorium in Louisville, though the sanatorium is actually a front for a weapons laboratory.”

With a puzzled expression that mirrored Maria’s, Hainey said, “Then there’s been a mix-up in your telegrams. Because it’s
my
former ship that’s making the weapons run, not this shiny black bird. The
Valkyrie
was on her way to New York City—she’s going to be fitted with a new ball turret.” He quickly clarified, “They were going to stick one on top, up front I suppose. Though now, if it ever makes it that far north and east I guess they’ll have to fix the bottom left one first.”

Following another moment of mutual uncertainty, their faces both went crafty.

Hainey said, “You fellows keep her flying straight, and when you think she’s safely over nothing at all, pull us to a stop and hover. Me and Maria Boyd here are going to dig around in the cargo hold and see what we can find.”

Simeon and Lamar shrugged at each other, and Simeon’s eyebrow pointed a vigorous indication of confusion.

But the runaway slave and the ex-spy retreated to the cargo hold, where the wind from the busted ball turret nearby was loud and the air was even colder than the un-warmed bridge. Hainey rummaged around in the storage locker and turned up a pair of prybars, one of which he tossed to Maria.

He said to her, “I swear on my mother’s life, I don’t know what’s in any damn one of these boxes. So be careful with the bar. God knows what we’ll turn up.”

“The need for caution is duly noted,” she said, and then she said, “I’ll start at this end. You start at that end. We’ll work our way toward the middle.”

He grunted a general agreement and began at the far corner. The captain brought his prybar down into the cracks of the nearest crate’s lid, and Maria did likewise on her end of the hold.

One after another, they bashed and pried their way through the stacks, and when they were finished they’d unveiled a vast assortment of wonders. Their haul included four loads of boot polish, a stash of rough-woven linens, enough lye soap to fill a wagon, some dried and smoked fish and pork, an engineer’s assortment of bolts, screws, and washers, a tobacco pouch that had probably been dropped by a laborer…and two dead mice.

They also found three crates of ammunition, some of which was strung to fuel the ball turret guns. The rest looked ordinary enough, and when Maria stood over this final crate she said, “This can’t possibly be it. This is stocked like a ship that was loaded out of convenience, because it was headed the right direction. There’s nothing special or important about any of it.”

Hainey nodded. “We’ll keep the ammunition and the foodstuffs, and the rest can go overboard when we stop and hang.”

“You’re not surprised?”

“Surprised about what?”

“That we didn’t find anything significant on board?”

He said, “Nope. Because I’ve already got a real good idea of what the sanatorium’s got on order—and what Pinkerton’s been paid to protect. That’s the point, isn’t it? You’re supposed to distract us long enough to let the
Clementine
get to Louisville to make this delivery?”

“Pretty much. But in Kansas City I met an old friend, a fellow Confederate who possessed, shall we say, somewhat incorrect information. He told me about a weapon being built, something made to fire on Danville…and…and…old loyalties took precedence,” she said defensively.

Hainey said, “Old loyalties. I know what those are like.”

“Really? And to whom might you be loyal?”

“Nobody you’d know,” he said. “And nothing I care to elaborate upon. None of it matters, because right now we’ve got an interesting situation between the two of us, don’t you think?”

“I beg your pardon? A situation?”

“Yes, a situation,” he said grouchily, with a hint of false cheer. “You know about half of what’s going on, and I know about half of what’s going on, and there are spots where our information…” he hunted for a phrase. “Fails to overlap.”

“That seems to be the case, yes.” She was half a head shorter than him, and a hundred pounds smaller, but she met his gaze over the contents of the last crate, and she didn’t flinch or retreat.

He sounded almost optimistic when he said, “We could work together, you and me. I could tell you some useful things, and you have permission to go to places I’m not allowed.”

“You can take me to Louisville.”

“I’m headed that direction anyway.”

“And I can tell you where your ship is.”

He was startled, despite himself. “You can what?”

“It’s parked at a transient dock outside the city. It may be gone now, but it was there last I heard, maybe an hour or two ago. I don’t think your quarry has quite the lead you think it does.”

Hainey turned on his heels, crossed the cargo bay, and leaned himself through the doorway that led to the bridge. “Simeon! Where are the nearest transient docks?”

“Nearest…to here?”

“Nearest to Kansas City!”

The first mate thought about it, then said, “East of here, a little ways. At least, that’s where they used to park and set up. Why?”

“Because the
Free Crow
’s there—or she was quite recently. Adjust course!”

Lamar said, “But sir, we’re still riding heavy. You going to toss the cargo, or what?”

He said, “Yeah, I’ll toss it. Are we over anything or anybody important?”

Simeon said, “No, but we will be soon if we adjust course. So get to dropping sooner, rather than later.”

The captain didn’t answer except to dash back to the hold and say to Maria, “Give that lever over there a yank!”

She grabbed it with both hands and hauled it down; when it clicked at the bottom part of its track, a set of sliding doors retracted in the floor at the back of the hold. “Are we discarding the cargo now? I thought we were going to go low and hover?”

“Change of plans. We’re going east, to the only transient docks my first mate knows. On the way, you and me are going to toss this stuff out of the
Valkyrie
. Sim says we shouldn’t hit anything or anybody important for the next few minutes, so give me a hand. Except for what we talked about, grab anything you can move and kick it out, fast as you can.”

Maria pressed herself between the crate of linens and the wall, and she used her back and legs to shove it out into the middle of the room.

Hainey met her there and ushered her aside; he cast the crate over the lip of the retracted door and let it tumble out, down to the prairie below. Then he reached for the next box, which held part of the soap shipment. He swung it and dragged it over to the edge and this too went freefalling to the dry, brown ground half a mile below.

Maria took the next box of linens and worked them over the edge. She went back for a cache of polish, which was almost more than she could move, but she took it and she wiggled it, and skidded it until it was teetering—and she tipped it overboard.

“Help me with this one,” the captain said like it was an order, but Maria was getting the impression that this was simply how he talked.

“Coming,” she said, and she joined him.

Side by side, their backs pressed against the metal-stuffed crate of small tools and hardware. This one dug into the paint on the floor but it moved in jerks and inch-long shrugs until finally it too crashed heavily over the lip and into the sky.

“Back to the bridge,” the captain said when the last of the expendable boxes had been expended.

Arms aching and back throbbing, Maria tagged behind him and took up her familiar seat. She dropped herself down and reached for the straps that would fasten her into place.

Hainey took up his position with similar haste, asking for a time estimate from his first mate. “How long before the docks are in sight?”

“Five minutes. Ten, at the outside,” Simeon said. “But how do we want to approach?”

“Guns blazing,” Hainey growled. “We’ve still got a right-side ball turret and I’ll take it up myself, if you two can fly us.”

“I’m getting the hang of it, sir,” Lamar said helpfully.

The first mate added, “I’ve found everything I need to steer alone, if I have to. But do you really want to shoot the
Crow
out of the sky?”

“I don’t mind doing her a little damage if it helps us get her back. She’ll forgive us in the morning; she always
does
.”