Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl (29 page)

A crack of starlight appeared at the door to the cabin, and the small form of Fanshawe slipped into the small space. Gideon said nothing and feigned sleep, and she padded over to him and stood by his bunk, breathing shallowly. “Gideon,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”

“Miss Fanshawe . . . Rowena. Yes. Is everything all right?”

Wordlessly, she took his hand and placed it upon her breast. Her white shirt was unbuttoned to the navel, and he touched her bare flesh, feeling the hard, hot nub of her nipple. He tried to withdraw his hand but she held it fast, her breathing coming quicker and quicker, and then she slid her own hand under the blanket and trailed her fingers across his inner thigh.

“Rowena . . . ,” he whispered.

“It’s all right,” she said. “We can be quiet. Let me get out of these trousers.”

She released his hand and he snatched it away as though he’d been burned. He could sense the raising of a quizzical eyebrow.

“Rowena . . . I cannot.”

He gasped as she gripped him with a firm hand. “Your mouth says no, but your body says otherwise,” she said. He felt her hot tongue on his. She brought his hands to her breasts again, and he moaned, then shook his head.

“I’m sorry.”

With a sigh, she released her hold on him, and he heard her buttoning up her shirt. She said, “It is Maria, isn’t it? You are in love with her.”

“In love with her? No, Rowena, you’ve got it wrong. She’s made of clockwork and . . . and . . .”

Fanshawe put a finger on his lips and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Hush. It is all right. Don’t tie yourself in knots over it. The workings of the heart are beyond all of us, Gideon. This never happened. See you at dawn.”

With that she stole back into the cabin and quietly closed the door behind her.

Gideon lay silently for a long time, listening to the creaking and settling of the ’stat, until Bent said, “Good God, Gideon, you really are an effing lunatic, ain’t you?”

True to her word, Fanshawe acted as though nothing had happened when Gideon woke, stiff and aching from his cramped night’s sleep, and he might have been tempted to consider it all a dream but for Bent’s volley of knowing winks and nudges over breakfast. Fanshawe had directed the
Skylady II
on a more southerly bearing, and they hugged a rocky coastline that plunged into azure seas, the bright sun above casting the perfect shadow of the ’stat on the millpond-calm waters far below.

While Fanshawe slept in the bunk Gideon had vacated, he sat in the cockpit, monitoring the gauges with an overeager eye. But she had set the ’stat on a course and he had instructions to meddle with the controls only if there was impending doom of some kind, and then only if he was unable to wake Fanshawe because she had mysteriously died in her sleep.

When she returned, Gideon went to help Trigger and Bathory put together a lunch, and in the afternoon they pored over their maps and books, trying to discern from John Reed’s journals whether he had made any regular contacts on previous sojourns to Alexandria.

“We’re hitting a bank of cloud,” called Fanshawe from the cockpit. “If it gets dark, you might want to light the oil lamps.”

“Is cloud bad?” asked Bent.

“It is if we hit another ’stat,” said Fanshawe.

“Does that happen often?”

She shrugged. “Generally only once.”

The cloud clung stubbornly to the
Skylady II
and after some hours brought with it a premature dusk, which Fanshawe suggested they alleviate with rum and cards.

“Are we making good time?” asked Trigger as she poured and Bent dealt.

“Not bad. This cloud is slowing us down. I’ve tried to rise above it but it’s a pretty deep bank. I still think we’ll get to Alexandria before midnight.”

They passed the time with rum and cards, which, Gideon had to admit, did engender a convivial atmosphere. When Bent had lost too much and had to dole out IOUs to most of the assembly, he began to sing in a cracked, throaty voice: “Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies, Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain; For we’ve received orders for to sail for old England, But we hope in a short time to see you again.”

Bent lapsed into a prolonged, heaving cackle, and his mood proved infectious. Even Countess Bathory smiled and glanced at Stoker, who held up his hands for quiet. As the rum had taken hold, his cultivated tones had begun to lapse back into his thick Irish brogue, and he stood unsteadily, laid his hand on his chest, and sang in a rumbling baritone, “In Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty, I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone, As she wheeled her wheelbarrow, Through streets broad and narrow, Crying, ‘Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o!’ ”

They all joined in a chorus of
alive, alive-o!
s until Bent, obviously determined not to be outdone, downed his rum and stood also, patting Stoker on the shoulder and bidding him to sit. “I heard this one in the music hall in Clerkenwell just three nights ago. You won’t know it, but you’ll pick it up. A bouncy little ditty.” He cleared his throat. “Show me the way to go home, I’m tired and I want to go to bed, I had a little drink about an hour ago and it’s gone right to my head. Wherever I may roam, On land or sea or foam, You will always hear me singing this song, Show me the way to go home.”

Bent banged his tin cup sharply three times on the table, then launched into the same verse again, beckoning Gideon to join in. Trigger laughed and did so as well, as did Stoker and Fanshawe. By the third repetition they were all singing and banging their cups on the table and repeating the verse faster and faster. Gideon laughed delightedly. Then Fanshawe frowned and held up her hand.

“What was that?”

They fell silent, and in a moment there was a distinct thud, as though something had struck the gondola further down its length.

“Trouble with the engine?” asked Gideon. Fanshawe shook her head, stood, and made to pass through the oval door, Gideon behind her, when there was another smack, much closer, accompanied by the sound of splintering wood. Bent yelled as the hull of the ’stat bulged in near his head and a sharp metal point protruded an inch or so into the cabin.

Cursing, Fanshawe pushed Bent out of the way and peered through the porthole at the dark cloud. She squinted, then drew back and breathed, allowing Gideon to look out. He could just make out dark shapes in the cloud, balls or globes with something attached to the underside.

“Personal blimps,” said Fanshawe. “One-man ’stats, balloons with frames suspended underneath.”

“And what the eff is that?” asked Bent, pointing at the sharp point near his head.

“If I’m not mistaken, it’s a harpoon,” said Fanshawe.

Trigger frowned. “One-man ’stats? All the way out here?”

Fanshawe was squeezing past him to the cockpit, and Gideon followed her. “They don’t have the range to get out here. Which means they’re with a bigger . . . oh.”

Ahead of them, emerging from the dark cloud like a vast, silent whale, was a huge dirigible, as big as a passenger ’stat, with a massive pale flower painted on the hull of its balloon.

“Shit,” said Fanshawe.

“What is it?” said Gideon.

She bit her lip and looked at him. “Now we’re really in trouble. That’s the
Yellow Rose
.”

As she scrabbled for her spyglass and put it to her eye, Gideon asked, “The
Yellow Rose
? Why is that bad? Mightn’t they be rescuing us?”

“Double shit, and shit again,” said Fanshawe. “Could this get any worse? Louis Cockayne’s on the bridge.”

“Louis Cockayne?” said Gideon. “From Captain Trigger’s adventures? Then we’re saved!”

21
The Sky Pirates of the
Yellow Rose

“You really think so?” said Fanshawe.

Emerging from the black clouds, the
Yellow Rose
dwarfed the
Skylady II
as a shark might overshadow a minnow, thought Gideon. There were four of the drifting shapes loosing harpoons at the smaller ’stat, the shafts of the projectiles connected to thin steel cables that led back to the bigger dirigible. As the cables snapped taut, the
Skylady II
bucked and shuddered, sending Gideon crashing into Fanshawe.

Trigger staggered to the door of the cockpit, where Fanshawe was buckling herself into the leather seat and bidding Gideon do the same in the copilot chair. “Are we under attack?”

“Got it in one, Lucian,” said Fanshawe, hauling the wheel to the right and causing the ’stat to dip and swing. “Texan pirates. Very bad news.”

“I’ve never seen Texans in an airship before,” said Trigger, steadying himself on the doorframe. “Between them, the British, Spanish and Japanese have done their level best to keep stocks of helium away from the warlords. They have plenty of coal down there, and you’re liable to see them on steamships or engines on their slaving missions, but not many airships.”

“This is all very effing interesting,” said Bent. “But they’ve obviously got one. Maybe they saved up their stamps and bought an effing airship.”

“It’s Louis Cockayne!” said Gideon. “Captain Trigger, he’s one of your—one of John Reed’s friends, yes?”

Trigger bit his lip. “Yes, but . . . perhaps his role in the stories was somewhat . . . whitewashed compared to reality.”

“Break out the guns!” hollered Bent.

Fanshawe leaned back through the door and called, “No! No firearms! One stray shell, and we’ll be on our way to the bottom of the Med.”

The
Skylady II
lurched violently again. Fanshawe killed the clockwork motor. Gideon stared at her. “What are you doing? We need to get away from them.”

“All we’ll do is burn out the bearings,” she muttered. “They’re reeling us in.”

Gideon felt the
Skylady II
buck and begin to move sideways. The travelers gathered in the cockpit and at the port- side portholes to observe the vaster vehicle, a black mass against the clouds. It was fully five hundred feet from its nose-cone to its arrangement of aft rudders, estimated Gideon, and the gondola slung beneath it was seven or eight times larger than the
Skylady II
’s, and it appeared to have at least two levels. On the port side to which they were being hauled, he could make out an open observation deck on which were situated the winding barrels that brought them in. The smaller blimps were alighting on the deck and, through his spyglass, Gideon could make out the tall figure of a man standing with his hands on his hips, dressed in a long black coat and wearing a dark sombrero- style scout hat with a narrow brim.

“Is that Louis Cockayne? The stories paint him as a hero . . . ,” said Gideon.

Fanshawe raised an eyebrow as the
Skylady II
bumped against the rails of the observation deck, and looked out again at the smiling face of Louis Cockayne. “You’ve got a lot to learn.”

The door of the
Skylady II
was hauled open and a brisk wind whipped through the cabin, where Fanshawe had assembled them all. Through the open door Bent could make out seven figures. He said, “They’ve got guns. Why can’t we have guns?”

“The
Yellow Rose
is covered with beaten aluminum panels,” said Fanshawe. “They’ve got less to lose if a bullet hits them.”

A young man with a weather-beaten face and a shock of dirty blond hair leaped across the three-foot gap between the observation platform and the cabin. In his hand he brandished a silver pistol with a six-bullet chamber. He turned and called through the door, “Two ladies, boss, purty ones as well. Four guys, one of ’em fat and two of ’em oldsters.”

Bent raised an aggrieved eyebrow. “I’m not old.” From the platform, a more cultured voice called, “Bring them out, Bo. Tell ’em to mind the gap. It’s a long way down.”

Trigger said, “I shall go first and sort out this misunderstanding.”

Bent followed him to the lip of the door, looking down at the dark sea far below, studded with green islands, as Trigger strode across the gap. There were five other young men, similarly dressed to Bo, and Louis Cockayne, smoking a cheroot. Studded belts hung loosely at the hips of his black trousers, holding holstered revolvers, and his black shirt was crisply pressed. He regarded Trigger with piercing blue eyes, and his full, black mustache twitched.

Bent looked down with horror. “Jesus effing Christ, I’m not going out there!”