Ganymede (Clockwork Century)

by Cherie Priest

  So it might’ve been just that simple; Cly didn’t know, and he didn’t ask. All he cared about was having an ally against Josephine, who could be harder to move than an old stone church.

  Josephine’s hands were closing into fists and releasing again, in time with her breathing. She was hovering between agreeing and disagreeing—knowing she was outnumbered and could be overpowered. She would’ve fought Cly alone, absolutely. She would’ve fought her brother alone, without a second thought. She might even have taken on the pair of them if she were truly confident that she was correct.

  But it wasn’t just them.

  It was them, and Wallace Mumler—who’d been suspiciously silent this whole time; and Rucker Little up above, who’d broached the subject first; and here came Ruthie Doniker, all but leaping down the hatch in a swishing, rustling tornado of skirts and hairpins and fury.

  In her way, Ruthie was the final straw.

  Breathless, she came to Josephine and said, “Ma’am, you should see it outside!”

  “I did see it, Ruthie.”

  “The rockets, the antiaircraft! Texas wants to wipe the bay off the maps! Wash it into the ocean!”

  “I’ve seen it, Ruthie.”

  “Well?” The younger woman stood, nearly panting with rage, excitement, and something else. Anticipation? “Are you going to let them? When you have these men, and this machine, right here? So close, you could practically shoot them from where we’re docked? You’re going to let Texas keep the bay?”

  Josephine opened her hands and used them to smooth the pockets on her skirts. She sighed and said, “It sounds like you’ve made up your mind, too. You’ve already decided how you want to see this go.”

  As if she’d only now noticed Josephine’s ambivalence, Ruthie’s jaw dropped. In French this time, she asked, “And you haven’t? You would let the pirates burn, though they saved your brother, when you could help? My God, what would Lafitte say?”

  “From his grave? Not much,” Josephine replied. Then, in English, to everyone present, “So the decision has been made. There’s nothing I can say to change anyone’s mind, is there? I want to get to the Gulf. You want to rescue the pirates.”

  Deaderick said, “No, we want to rescue the bay, if we can.”

  “We’ll still need someone up top. Someone to help us squeeze past the islands at the mouth of the bay, when it’s time to leave it,” Mumler told them. “We can’t have the whole caravan accompanying us, not into the middle of a battle. But two or three of the small motored boats … Houjin, you said those were keeping up the best, isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right, sir.” Houjin nodded vigorously. “But they’ll be wide open. Exposed. They might get shot.”

  Mumler shifted his shoulders and said, “Any one of us might get shot at any time. Rick, if you stay down here with these folks, I’ll join Rucker or Chester up topside. We can take the two lightest of the diesel motors and guide you around. Ruthie? Can you take my place here? Between me and Rick, we’ve showed you the ropes enough so you can fire and reload all the charges.”

  “Oui, my dear. I will stay.”

  Kirby Troost sniffed. “Used to be, folks considered it bad luck to have a lady on board a boat.”

  “To hell with what used to be,” Ruthie spit. “Josephine and I will ride with you, and I will show you what luck we’ll turn out to be, you hear me?”

  “Everybody stop fighting, all right?” Cly demanded. “How’s that air circulation going?”

  Houjin responded. “Ready to retract and seal up. We can go again as soon as we spool the hose back inside.”

  Cly took a deep breath. “You heard the kid. Rucker, you hear me up there?”

  “Sure do, Captain.”

  “Mumler’s coming up. He’ll explain the situation.”

  “Are we headed for the bay or the Gulf?”

  “Both,” Cly told him, and turned to reclaim the captain’s seat without looking at Josephine. “We’re going to do both.”

  Rucker said, “All right, then. Listen, if for some reason you lose us: Once you get to the bay, head due south and you’ll hit the bottleneck between Grande Terre and Grande Isle. We’ll catch up to you there if we lose you in the fray—or if we have to run for cover.”

  “Got it.”

  “I don’t like this,” Josephine murmured.

  Ruthie took her arm. In French, she said, “Like it, don’t like it. This is the right thing, madame. We will be in the Gulf within an hour or two, but first, we will save this one piece of New Orleans. We will save it, and the men who saved your brother. He owes them a debt, and so he wishes to lend them aid. And you owe them a debt, because you love Deaderick.”

  “And what of you, then, darling?” Josephine asked, allowing herself to be led back to the spot where she’d waited out the trip so far, beneath the great windows and holding on to a seam that served as a handrail. “What do you owe them, that you’re so eager to rush into trouble?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  “Nothing may ever come of it,” she said sadly. “I am not his kind, but that makes my debt to the pirates no less true.”

  Cly was giving orders, and the men were buckling down where they could, and settling in where they couldn’t. Deaderick came to sit beside his sister, at least for this beginning part—the moments when the air hose was retracted and the craft was sealed, when the propulsion screws churned to life and the craft shoved itself into the canal. Those first seconds had been the worst so far, and they were bad again this time, too—worse, perhaps, due to a brief and violent clip against a sunken stone piling that marked the old entrance to the canal.

  Ganymede scraped against it and squeaked around it, pivoting and righting itself. Cly followed the frantic taps from Rucker and Wally above, though the men had not been able to warn the captain in time to let him avoid the obstacle altogether.

  “It’s mostly sunken,” Cly griped. “They ought to clean out this damn canal once in a while.”

  “Left over from some other construction project, I’m sure,” Deaderick observed, his voice only slightly shaky. The impact and the unexpected turn had unnerved him as much as anyone, and the truth was that no one knew for certain how much damage Ganymede could take before springing a leak or becoming stuck.

  “We’ll have to be more careful on the way down this ridiculous creek, won’t we, Houjin?”

  “I couldn’t see whatever we hit, captain!”

  “I know you couldn’t, and I’m not accusing you of messing up. I’m just saying, keep your eyes open. Let us know what you’re spying up on the banks. Help me keep us moving in a straight line.”

  “This canal … I don’t even know if it’s wide enough to take us,” Josephine breathed.

  “It’s wide enough, all right,” her brother said. “It’ll take us, but it’s like Cly said. Got to be careful.”

  Everyone fell silent as the captain and first mate navigated the dark, warm waters of the narrow canal; and in the midst of this silence, when all the conversation had dried up out of anxiousness or concentration, all the other small sounds were amplified. The pinging of sticks, rocks, and the shoving feet of canal creatures sounded like stomping soldiers. The twist and squeak of the mirrorscope under Houjin’s direction seemed to scream, and the pops of levers at Cly’s feet were as hearty as gunshots in the confined space, with its rounded walls and nervous passengers.

  The water wasn’t so rough, there in the sheltered space between the two man-made walls that kept the waters moving but kept them contained as well. The ride was smoother going—and the darkness beyond the windows was even more complete, now that the shadows of the canal conspired with the late-night sky to shroud the whole scene in terrible blindness.

  The tiny lights that lit the front windows like a weak little smile did virtually nothing to show the way. They showed only sediment and trash, wagon wheels and the bones of dead things tossed into the canal and forgot
ten. Some of the bones were large, and Cly thought maybe they’d once belonged to horses. But some of the carcasses looked more like fish—with spiny, needly ribs and flattened skulls that jutted out from the canal bed like tombstones.

  “Like tombstones.” The words slipped out of his mouth.

  “Those bones?” Kirby asked. “They do look it, don’t they? It feels like swimming through a graveyard. What the hell once had a head like that, anyway?”

  Deaderick answered, “Catfish. They grow as long as they eat, and they eat until they die. Sometimes they get bigger than you’d believe.”

  Cly breathed, “Jesus,” and steered them up a few feet more, so that the bottom was not quite so near, but they were still below the surface.

  Houjin adjusted the height of the scope and called out directions whenever they were appropriate. “You’re veering left, sir.” Or sometimes, “You’re veering right, too close to the sides. Keep us in the middle.”

  “I’m working on it,” the captain said. He might’ve said more, except that they all heard a wide, muffled pop that made them look up out of pure habit, despite the fact that none of them could see a thing except for the dull gray rivets that ran along the ceiling.

  Ruthie’s eyes blazed out the front windows, though she could only see a reflection of herself, and of the rest of the cabin area with its dull gold lights. “We must be getting close,” she whispered.

  “Sounds like it,” Deaderick agreed, taking her hand and squeezing it.

  She squeezed back. “I should get to the charges, to the side bays.”

  “Ruthie.” Josephine climbed to her feet and extended a hand to her friend. “I’ll come with you. Teach me whatever I don’t know, and can’t figure out.”

  “Yes, ma’am. This way. The charges must be prepared before we can fire them. I can show you how to load them.”

  Deaderick also rose, saying, “I can man the top guns, if we have to launch them.”

  Houjin frowned around the side of the scope’s visor. “We have top guns?”

  “There’s a mount behind your scope and to the left. You enter it from the room at the rear, just aft of the ballasting tanks. But we don’t want to get too trigger-happy with them, not until we’re up close and personal. Or until they’ve already seen us anyway, and there’s no more use in keeping a low profile.”

  “All right. Troost, once we get out into the bay, you might be better served to help the women hoist the charges.”

  “Josephine’s bigger than I am, sir. I doubt I can lift too much more than she can.”

  “But they’ll need to reload quickly—and a pair of extra hands will be helpful, given how heavy those damn things are.” Cly knew from his afternoon of training at Pontchartrain, because he’d helped load them onto the Ganymede in preparation for moving it out of the lake.

  Before the craft had been sealed up and dropped onto the platforms that carried it to New Sarpy, the bayou boys had packed Ganymede chock-full of every bit of ammunition that had ever been created for it. Mostly it used a modified charge stuffed inside a bullet-shaped casing about the size of a picnic basket. These casings were slotted into a chute, their powders packed and fuses lit, their back ends sealed off with a hammering slam from the chute door … and then they were closed into an exterior compartment and fired straight out of the submarine’s lower right hull. If all went as planned, one of two things would happen: either the charge would explode upon connecting with its target, or it would lodge within the target and explode shortly thereafter.

  “Sir, how do we know these charges are any good?” Troost asked. “How long have they been sitting around? And will the damn things explode underwater?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Deaderick filled him in. “We didn’t test many of them. They’re too valuable to waste.”

  Cly said, “I bet the Union won’t feel like we’re wasting them, if we’re using them to shoot down Texians.”

  “I daresay they’ll consider it ammunition well spent,” Deaderick said. “Assuming it works.”

  “Let’s go ahead and assume the best for now. If what we’ve got won’t burn or blow, we can reconsider our high-and-mighty plans to rush in and save the day,” the captain informed them.

  Another blast occurred somewhere overhead, out of the water, up in the sky. This one was particularly loud, and so bright it made Houjin cry out and yank his eyes away from the scope.

  “Sir!” he said. “Take us a lower, and do it now!”

  “You want me to swamp your scope?”

  “Now!”

  “All right, kid,” he said, and he worked his foot to change their depth until everything—including the oscillating scope—was withdrawn back under the waves. “What’s going on up there? Talk to me, Huey.”

  “Dirigible, incoming. Coming down fast, hard, and on fire,” he announced.

  “Coming down on top of us?”

  “Close enough as makes no difference!”

  Deaderick stiffened in alarm. “What about Rucker and Wally?”

  “Last I saw, they pulled a hard reverse and they’re getting out of the way. I don’t think they’ll be cut off from us, but we might have to lose them for a few minutes.”

  A splashing crash shook the liquid volume of the canal, throwing Ganymede to the right and shoving it upward. The top of the window briefly breached the surface again, before diving back below in a sudden sinking that Cly struggled to control.

  “Goddamn!” Deaderick Early cursed, pointing out the window where the wreckage of something huge was coming down in pieces, still burning and bubbling, and giving the whole canal the brilliant flickering glow of a fishbowl in front of a candle.

  “Troost?”

  “Rev it up and gun it, sir. That’s my advice!”

  “I like the way you think,” Cly said gruffly, and pushed hard on the lever that powered the propulsion screws. “I just wish we could see where the damn thing above us was crashing, exactly.”

  The engineer clutched the sides of his console as Ganymede surged and wobbled forward, quivering in its path. Eventually Fang got a handle on the new speed and could keep it steady once more.

  Troost was not quite shrill when he barked a sudden complaint, “It’s right on top of us!”

  “Settle down, Kirby. We’re almost past it, I think.”

  Something huge squashed down on top of Ganymede’s hull. The resulting ruckus threw Deaderick to the floor, cast Troost out of his seat and sent him careening into the wall, and elicited a pained shout from the bays where the charges were being prepared and loaded.

  Houjin fell off his seat and spun around, holding the scope for support, then clamored back into position.

  “Huey, get a grip on something! Hang on!”

  “Sir, we need to see outside!” he shouted, and turned the crank to raise it. “I can help, if I can see!”

  Cly’s knuckles were white and going numb from his death grip on the levers, but he hadn’t lost his seat yet. “Everyone all right?” he cried. “Everyone?” he said again when no one responded fast enough.

  “I’ll live,” Troost groused as he crawled back over to his chair. Cly gave him a quick look and saw no blood, and no broken bones.

  Houjin announced, “I’m fine, sir—and I can see it. Part of it hit us.”

  “Are we high enough for you to get that scope out of the water? How can you see a damn thing?”

  “No, sir, it’s underwater, but I can see the hull of something big—it landed halfway on us, and halfway on the canal’s edge. We scooted out from under it. We’re fine. Just get us up and moving.”

  “I’ll take you at your word, kid.”

  “I’m not saying there isn’t more debris, because there is.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement. Hey, ladies? You all right in there? I heard a scream?”

  Josephine replied, “We’ll be fine, I’m sure—you just get us to the Gulf.”

  Cly didn’t like the sound of that. Deaderick didn’t
either, but Cly barked, “Early, you know how to keep this in a straight line, for a few minutes?”

  “I can if I have to. I think—?”

  “Get over here and take my seat,” he said. As Deaderick approached, Cly cut the thrust to the screws and Ganymede’s progress slowed to the proverbial crawl. “Hold her steady, will you? We’ll give your men up top a chance to catch up.”

  “I’ll give it a shot.”

  “I have every faith…,” he said, abandoning his position to Early as soon as the other man was able to take it. “Josephine? Ruthie?” he called as he approached them, ducking low and swinging himself through the portal-shaped doorway that separated the main control deck from the side bay where the charges were kept and readied.

  “Cly, give us a minute—we’ll be fine,” Jo said with caution and control in her voice, not yet realizing that he was already there, in the room with her. She was bent over Ruthie, who was moaning unhappily on the ground, holding on to her head. “Andan! Get back to your seat! She knocked her head, that’s all. She’s not hurt bad, and she’ll be up again shortly.”

  “Thank you … for your worry, Captain,” Ruthie told him, giving him a look that dared him to come and assist her. But Cly was the sort to take a dare, so he went to her other side—the one Josephine didn’t occupy—and slipped an arm underneath her to lift her up.

  “Andan, don’t!” Josephine was firm now, commanding. “Let her be!”

  He ignored her. “Ruthie, you all right? What happened?”

  “No, don’t—,” she begged. “I’ve torn my dress. It caught on the charge launch door.…”

  Too late. He used his long arms and considerable strength to sweep her gently onto her feet and place her in a seated position on the edge of the chute.

  At this point, he realized that she was right—her dress was torn.

  The outer skirt was ripped away like an apron pulled off a doll, leaving only light cotton undergarments between her and the world. She did not quite swoon, though she was clearly in some pain from a lump rising on her forehead; nonetheless, she struggled to collect the torn fabric and cover herself.