The Dragon Lantern (8 page)

“We're 'bout ready to go,” Captain Custer told Mrs. Moffett. “Just loading the last of the water and coal in now.”

Colossus
stood up against a specially built scaffold, where a small army of workers loaded him with supplies for the journey.

“You must catch that train,” Mrs. Moffett told him. To Archie she said, “Find the thief. Retrieve the lantern.”

“This lantern,” Captain Custer said. “What is it that General Lee would give you a steam man and a whole corps of aeronauts to go after it?”

General Robert E. Lee was the United Nations' war chief, the leader of all their armies. He was also secretly the man who sat in the warrior seat on the current Septemberist council. Archie had seen him, along with Philomena Moffett, John Two-Sticks, Frederick Douglass, and the other council members, when he'd gone rushing in to tell them there was a Manglespawn in the basement of the Septemberist Society's secret headquarters. General Lee was the sole reason Archie was getting a steam-man escort west.

“It's a weapon,” Mrs. Moffett said, surprising Archie.

“It is?” Archie asked.

“It can be,” Mrs. Moffett said. “You must not treat it lightly, Captain. Nor, under any circumstances, must you try to activate it once you reclaim it.”

Captain Custer was pulled away to sign requisition forms, and Archie grabbed Mrs. Moffett's arm.

“It can be a weapon? You never said that before.”

Mrs. Moffett looked at Archie's hand on her arm, and he pulled it away.

“Why won't you tell me everything you know?” he asked.

Mrs. Moffett sighed. “I'm sorry, Archie. I'm not trying to be mysterious. The fact is, we just don't know much about it. Most of the records were destroyed. But … I do know the lantern was used on you when you were a child.”

“Used on me? How? When? I don't remember that. Who did it? What does it
do
, exactly?”

Mrs. Moffett put up a hand. “I don't know. But I think it's safe to assume that if it could turn you into … what you are, it is sufficiently dangerous enough to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.”

“Like this fox girl? What do you think she's going to do with it?”

“I don't understand her motives,” Mrs. Moffett said. “Nor do I care to. All that matters is that you retrieve it from her. Find the lantern, and you will find your answers.”

Archie nodded, more resolute than ever.

The steam man gave a piercing whistle, and the soldiers working on and around it started to disappear inside.

Mr. Rivets joined Archie and Mrs. Moffett. “Sir, it's time to board.”

Custer came back and saluted Mrs. Moffett. “We'll get your lantern back, ma'am. Don't you worry none. We'll watch out for this little feller too.”

“Do not underestimate ‘this little feller,' Captain,” Mrs. Moffett said. “He is stronger than he looks.”

Custer squinted at him. “Tougher too, I reckon.”

Archie felt uncomfortable under their appraising stares.

“Mr. Magoro!” Custer called suddenly, and a boy with dark skin ran over to them. He couldn't have been much older than Archie, but he wore a UN Steam Cavalry uniform like the rest of the regiment. Unlike Custer, though, he wore his sleeves rolled up, his collar open wide around a loose red neckerchief, and kept his uniform pants up with a pair of yellow suspenders. Over his shoulder he carried a half-full canvas rucksack.

“Yessir!” the boy said, snapping to attention.

“Mr. Magoro, give Mr. Dent and his machine man here a tour of
Colossus
, then report to your post.”

“Yessir!” the boy said. He gave Custer a quick salute as the captain left to board the steam man.

“Remember, Archie,” Mrs. Moffett said, “all that matters is that you bring that lantern back to me.”

“I won't let you down,” Archie told her.

Mrs. Moffett smiled. “I know you won't. Good luck.”

“C'mon, we'd better get aboard,” said the boy.

Archie gave Mrs. Moffett a little wave good-bye and followed the young soldier.

“Name's Clyde,” he told Archie and Mr. Rivets over his shoulder. “Nobody but Captain Custer and Mrs. DeMarcus ever call me Mr. Magoro. You got a name besides Mr. Dent?”

“Um, Archie.”

Clyde turned around and shook Archie's hand while he walked backward. “Nice to make your acquaintance, Um Archie. That's a joke. I know your name is just Archie, not Um Archie. Mrs. DeMarcus says that words like ‘um' are just filler words. Three for engineering, Mr. Yellow Tree! How's the missus?”

It took Archie a moment to realize Clyde had shifted from talking to him to talking to the worker manning the elevator up into the scaffolding.

“Cranky as a wind-up man,” Yellow Tree joked, and Clyde laughed.

“That's a fact! You can get inside through a door in the left foot, but then you've got to climb six stories up ladders through a lot of machinery,” Clyde said as the elevator rose through the scaffolding. Belatedly, Archie realized Clyde was talking to him again. “Easier to just take the elevator up to the main door in the engine room.”

The elevator rocked to a stop, and Clyde led them out.

“Be safe out there, Chief,” Yellow Tree told Clyde.

“Will do. We're the last ones aboard, Mr. Turtle At Home,” Clyde said to a man at the hatch to the steam man. “You can close him up when we're inside.”

“You got it, Chief,” Turtle At Home said.

Archie stepped inside
Colossus
behind Clyde and found himself in a tightly packed room filled with pipes and gauges and levers. Turtle At Home closed the hatch behind them, and the heat hit Archie like a wet blanket. This was the steam man's boiler room, and it was hotter than a sweat lodge. A narrow metal gangplank led them on a mazelike path through the machinery, and Archie followed along, eager to be out of there as soon as possible. Along the way, they passed two soldiers in grimy overalls—Cheyenne, Archie guessed—both of whom shouted greetings of “Chief!” when Clyde waved at them.

“Engine room!” Clyde hollered back at Archie over the roar of fire, the clanking of gears, and the hiss of steam. “Hotter than a Cahokia summer, and believe you me, summer in Cahokia on the Plains is no picnic. That's when you go up to Cahokia in the Clouds, if you've got the money or the means. Me, I've never been up there. Like Mrs. DeMarcus says, better to keep your feet on the ground than have your head in the clouds. Guess in
Colossus
I get to do both.”

There were black people like Clyde in Philadelphia and New Rome, but not many. Mostly they lived in Haitia and Louisiana and New Spain. Archie knew they had once been from different tribes back in Afrika, but there were so few of them now in the New World they all just called themselves Afrikans. The few Afrikans in North America had been just as cut off from their old world as the Yankees had when the Darkness fell a hundred years ago.

Archie wondered if they were all as talkative as Clyde.

“You ever been inside a UNSM?” Clyde asked.

“A…?” Archie asked, trying to keep up.

“A United Nations Steam Man. UNSM.”

“Oh,” Archie said. “Just when you picked me up.”

“Only seven of these in service,” Clyde went on. “One here, two down in Choctaw territory, one up at Fort Detroit, and three up in Council of the Three Fires territory, mostly because of the Sioux.
Colossus
is the last and best, and that's a fact.”

Clyde led them up a ladder from the engine room, and Archie sighed with relief as the heat peeled away from them. The next floor up was long and thin from front to back, right about in the middle of
Colossus
's torso. All along the wall were folded-up beds intermixed with rows of oscillating rifles. Four of the gun ports were open, letting in fresh air, and at the far end of the room Archie was surprised to see four soldiers—three men and a woman—eating dinner at a foldout table. A Yankee wearing a cavalry uniform and an apron stirred something in a big pot on a stove behind them.

“Crew quarters, armory, and mess,” Clyde told them. “We eat in shifts. Early Dinner's now. You'll probably eat with the captain during Middle Dinner. All this gets cleared and becomes a gun deck whenever there's action. Two bathrooms, over there. Shower there. Shower sign-up there. Only one shower a week, Saturday nights. Mandatory. Oh, should have mentioned it—rewinding cabinet for your machine man back down in engineering, right between the central drive shaft and the left arm torque bar.”

“Thank you, sir,” Mr. Rivets said. “A most kind convenience.”

“We got all the amenities, Mr. R. What's the word, Mr. P?”

The Yankee cook frowned. “The word is ‘harebrained.'”

“Don't mind him,” Clyde said. “He's always grumpy. Mr. Inola,” he said to a Cherokee soldier at the table, “you're all cleaned up. Got a new lady friend back in Cahokia?”

The other soldiers at the table hooted and hollered, and Mr. Inola blushed through a halfhearted denial. In the hullabaloo, Clyde leaned in to one of the other soldiers at the table and passed him a small glass container from his backpack. “I got you a salve for that rash,” Clyde whispered.

The soldier quickly tucked it away. “You're my hero, Chief,” he said, then joined back in with the jokes and the laughter.

Up above them, a steam whistle blew out a sequence of three notes that made Archie jump.

“Uh-oh. Moving out. Better wrap this up quick,” Clyde said. He stowed his pack in a compartment underneath one of the bunks just as the room lurched sideways. Archie went tumbling, but Clyde stayed on his feet and none of the soldiers at the table lost a spoon. Archie was just getting up when the room hitched and lurched the other way, knocking him on his butt again. Another soldier climbed down from above, a broad-shouldered Choctaw with a pair of bandoliers filled with aether grenades across his chest and a long black ponytail down his back, and he laughed meanly at Archie's clumsiness.

Clyde jumped to help Mr. Rivets lift Archie to his feet as the room lurched the other way again. “Sorry. Just
Colossus
walking. Hardest thing to get used to. But you'll get your walking legs in no time.”

The Choctaw soldier snickered again and brushed past them, so close that Archie staggered again on the shifting floor.

“Nice guy,” Archie said.

“Yeah. I don't know him yet,” Clyde said. “We picked up a couple of new recruits when we put in at Cahokia. He looks like a rough one, though, and that's a fact. Come on. I'll show you where you'll be sleeping.”

Archie wobbled to the ladder up to the next level and grabbed onto it like a drowning man grabbing a life preserver. He'd be lucky if he got his “walking legs” before the mission was over. Clyde scurried up the ladder and Archie followed, focusing on climbing one rung at a time.

The third and final floor inside the steam man's enormous chest had more bunks, though fewer than the crew deck. Its walls were mostly taken up with three personal balloons, like the one his rescuer had been flying when Archie woke up in his hole. You didn't ride these balloons, you
wore
them. Usually they were big, round things that tapered down to narrow openings at the bottom, but right now they were mostly deflated. Beside them, three aeronauts—all Illini—worked at testing and tending to the compressed boiler backpacks they wore when they flew.

“This is where the officers besides Captain Custer sleep and eat,” Clyde told them. “Just two of them on board: Lieutenant Pajackok, and Sergeant Two Clouds there.” He nodded to the female aeronaut. She nodded back and said, “Hello, Chief.”

“What about you?” Archie asked, hanging onto the ladder so he wouldn't fall over. “Everybody calls you Chief.”

Clyde laughed. “That's just my nickname. The soldiers gave it to me 'cause I chat up everybody on board like I'm trying to get elected chief. I don't do it on purpose. Mrs. DeMarcus says I was probably born talking. You think that's possible? To be born knowing how to talk?”

Another whistle sounded—this one less piercing and closer—followed by the canned voice of Captain Custer through a speaking tube from up top.

“Sergeant Two Clouds, please deploy two scouts,” Custer said.

Two Clouds pulled a speaking trumpet out from the wall and talked into it. “Two scouts, aye sir.” She nodded to the other two aeronauts, and they got themselves into their harnesses while she opened up big hatches in the roof. Archie saw blue sky through the holes in the steam man's shoulders. The aeronaut scouts attached the ends of their balloons to hoses coming up through the floor—hot air from the boiler room, Archie guessed. The balloons inflated quickly. Meanwhile, the aeronauts put on belts with lots of pouches and heavy sandbags hanging from them, and clipped on bugles and oscillating rifles. As the balloons filled out, Archie saw that they were red on top and blue-and-white striped on the bottom, with names written in gold in between. One was called
Chickenhawk
. The other was called
Clever Crow
.

In moments, the balloons were filled with enough hot air to pull the aeronauts off their feet. Tethers kept them inside until they did a final check of their gear. The scouts nodded to Two Clouds, and at her signal they pumped the portable bellows strapped to their chests to stoke their backpack furnaces, detached their tethers, and rose up into the air.

“That is something I just never get tired of watching.” Clyde said. “Come on—I'll show you the brains of the outfit. Sorry, Mr. R—I think you better stay down here. Not much room for you up top.”

“As you say, sir,” Mr. Rivets said.

Archie followed Clyde up a narrow ladder in the middle of the room, passing through the round, armored neck of the steam man. The head of
Colossus
was two stories tall, and the first of the two levels was a small round room with a retractable bunk, fold-up writing desk, wooden chest, and personal bathroom.