“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.”
“What about her?” Simeon asked, aiming an eyebrow in Maria’s direction.
“What about her? She needs a ride to Louisville, and we’re going to give her one. She’ll behave herself, I bet. It turns out, we have more in common than we thought. Our goals…overlap,” he used that word again. “We want the Free Crow, she wants what it’s carrying, even if it costs her the shiny new job she’s landed.”
“That’s true,” she said from her seat. “And I’ll be damned if I even know what the cargo is.”
Hainey’s bright white grin spread so far that the scar on his cheek crinkled up to his ear. “It’s a diamond.”
“A diamond?” Maria exclaimed. “All this trouble for a diamond?”
The captain said, “Not just any diamond. An orange diamond the size of a plum. The man who cut the thing called it the ‘clementine,’ so I guess the boys who stole our ship thought they were being funny when they renamed her.”
“I’ve never even heard of a diamond that big. And why do you know this?”
“I’ve got a friend back west, a fellow captain and a man of fine character. When the Free Crow was first boosted out from under us, this friend helped us try to retrieve her.”
“That’s a good friend indeed,” Maria said.
Hainey agreed. “I owe him one. Or two, or ten. And now I owe him double. Down in Tacoma he found a fellow to tell him what my ship is carrying. He sent a telegram to fill me in. That’s how I know about the diamond. And now I know why my ship was stolen.”
“To transport a diamond?”
“To transport a diamond and a two-thousand-pound corpse. There’s an old story that floated around for years, and everyone always thought it was a tall tale-even though every man who ever repeated it swore it was the truth.” As he spoke, Hainey gave the throttle a deeper nudge, urging the ship faster, farther, towards the transient docks.
He continued, “There was a certain lady of…leisure. Her name was Conklin, but everyone called her ‘Damnable.’ She was the richest woman west of the Mississippi and maybe east of it too, for all anybody knows. She had plenty of money, at any rate, and she spent a great wad of it on a diamond found a hundred years ago in India. She wore it set in a necklace, almost all the time.”
Lamar piped up. “I heard she shot a dozen men who tried to steal it from her, and one woman too.”
The captain said, “It’s possible. She was a real piece of work, and when she died, she took the diamond with her. The funeral man dressed her in her finest, hung the diamond around her neck, and filled her coffin with every drop of cement it would hold-just like she asked him to. Then the gravedigger made a hole twice as big as he needed, and once the coffin was lowered down inside, they filled up the hole with cement too, in order to keep out anybody who wanted what she was wearing.”
“And no one ever bothered her body?”
“Not until my Free Crow was stolen. Not another ship west of the river could’ve lifted her up, carried her over the mountains, and gotten her into bluegrass country-”
Maria said, “No ship except for yours? She must be nearly as powerful as this one, then.”
“Nearly,” he said. “But not quite, and this one wasn’t anywhere handy-so some bastard Union man paid a bastard pirate named Felton Brink to steal my Free Crow, dig up old Madam Damnable, and tote her to Kentucky.”
“But I still don’t understand,” Maria insisted, “what a scientist needs with a diamond.”
Hainey held up one finger. “I have a theory about it, and I’ll explain it to you just as soon as we address what’s…” he sagged. “What’s not right over there, at those transient docks. Do you see them?”
She craned her neck to see out the windshield, and then said, “Yes, I see them. I’ve never seen a set of transient docks before.”
“Don’t know nothing about dirigibles, don’t know nothing about docks. Where you been all your life?” Simeon asked.
“East, mostly. The docks there are all pretty permanent, and the war doesn’t allow for much passenger activity. Mostly I’ve been moving around by train, coach, and carriage. But it’s quite a crash course I’ve gotten lately.”
Lamar said, “And she knew about the ball turret gun; she knew how to use it.”
The captain explained before Maria could do so. “It’s just a modified land model. I expect she’s seen them in combat.”
“You are correct,” she told him. “And I could become accustomed to this flying business. It’s all rather exciting.”
“It’d be more exciting if the Free Crow was still docked there,” Hainey very nearly sulked.
Maria asked, “Are there any other transient docks, anywhere around the city? I’m sorry, I wish I could’ve been more specific. But I didn’t know the information would prove valuable, and I didn’t press for details.”
Simeon answered. “This is the only one I ever heard of. They break it down sometimes if there’s trouble, but they usually put it right back up again, right here. If this isn’t it, then we could spend another day or two flying around, looking for another one, but I don’t think we’d have much luck.”
Lamar asked, “So what do we do, then?”
The captain took a deep sigh and straightened his shoulders. He turned his head to give Maria a look that was half promise, and half a nod of conspiracy. “Top speed, as fast as this thing will carry us. We make for Louisville.”
The trip was long and the terrain below was an uninspiring rollick of river and hills, and trees peeled bare by the season. Maria gazed out the window and sometimes wondered why no one was following them; and then she’d remember the flaming dirigibles sweeping in their spinning, pendulum-swinging arcs down to make craters in the grasslands of Kansas, and she didn’t wonder anymore.
From her seat by the right glass ball turret, Maria Boyd declared, “Captain, you said you had a theory about why a scientist would need a diamond, but you haven’t yet explained yourself.”
“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” he said, and he didn’t completely sound like he was poking fun at her when he called her “ma’am.” “There’s this fellow back west, name of Minnericht-or, come to think of it, there used to be a fellow named Minnericht. I understand he’s dead now, but that’s a recent development, so you’ll have to pardon me if I misspeak. This Minnericht was an inventor, and he liked to play with weapons. Not long before he shuffled off this mortal coil, he’d been working on a weapon that…it’s hard to describe. It cuts things, or burns them, but it uses light.”
Maria considered this, nodded, and asked, “Like the way a magnifying glass can start a fire?”
“Like that. Only imagine using something much, much stronger than a little piece of curved glass to focus the sunlight.”
“I see what you’re getting at,” she said. “And if you can use a much more concentrated light, with a much stronger focus than glass, you might…well. You might make something terrible.”
Simeon said, “And if it was terrible, you could bet old Minnericht had his fingers in it.”
Lamar murmured, “Truer words were never spoken,” and he fiddled with a lever that would adjust the hydrogen flow to the compression engine. “But he wasn’t a dummy.”
“Hell no, he wasn’t,” the captain agreed. “He was a damn-ed smart son of a gun, but meaner than the good Lord ought to make them. But I tell you that to tell you this: He made a weapon called a
solar cannon, and like I heard it, he sold a patent on it to somebody back east. And that was the last I heard of it, except he had a couple early models hanging around inside Seattle. He used to like to sit on the roof of the train station, up in the clock tower, and use it to burn up the rotters like ants on a hill when the weather was clear enough to make it happen.”
“Now I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” Maria said.
Hainey looked like he was trying to figure out how best to tell her something else, or something bigger; but in the end he cocked his head quickly, like he was shooing a fly, and said, “It’s a longer story that you’d care to hear, I bet. Anyway, the one big drawback to his solar cannon was that it needed the sun, and it needed a lot of it-and up in the northwest, there’s not much sun to go around.”
“Especially not where the doctor lived,” Simeon said, and there was a cryptic note to it that Maria couldn’t decipher.
The captain continued, “But back east, where there’s more light, maybe his machine would work better, or be more popular with folks who could use it in a bigger way.”
“Folks like the Union army,” Maria finished for him. “Folks like a man called Ossian Steen.”
Hainey looked over his shoulder and asked, “You know about Steen?”
“Not much.”
“Us either,” Lamar said. “But I wouldn’t mind having a word with him. I’m sure he’s a bastard, but he must be one devil of a scientist.”
“When we get to Louisville, if we can find him, you can ask him anything you want,” Hainey said. “If I don’t feel the need to kill him first.”
Maria asked, “You have a gripe with this Steen?”
“I assume he’s the man who paid Felton Brink to steal my ship,” Hainey said grimly, and with a stormy grumble of intent. “But I might give him a minute to explain himself, just in case I’m wrong.”
“That’s big of you,” Maria said dryly.
“I’m glad you approve,” he responded with equal lack of humidity. “Now if we can only find this place, perhaps we can ask him in person.”
But no one knew which sanatorium was being used for the nefarious Ossian Steen’s frightening plans, and no one even knew where to begin looking-until Maria proposed they stop by the city hospital and ask about another facility. Perhaps they shared doctors, nurses, or other staff. But this plan was whittled into impracticality by inconvenient facts.
The Valkyrie was too notorious to park at the service yard docks down by the river, and it was too large to simply hide behind a warehouse. Furthermore, it was too dangerous-looking by design for the crew to simply strip off a few guns, dab a new name on the side, and call it something innocuous.
The plating, the weaponry, and the overall size of the tremendous craft made these things impractical. There was nowhere to simply “stop” the ship unless they wanted to abandon it outside of town and then walk.
“We could try that,” she said. “But I don’t know if it’s wise.”
Simeon tilted his heavily dreadlocked head back and forth, weighing the options as if his skull was the axis on a set of scales. “I’d hate to toss her,” he said. “She’s a sweet set of wings, and not much in the air would dare try to stick us.”
“You suggesting we keep her, and bail on the Crow?” Hainey asked with warning, but also curiosity.
“No, I ain’t suggesting that. I’m suggesting we might not want to cut this angel loose until we’re good and certain we’re done with her. We land on the other side of the river, maybe-we start in Indiana and walk our way over-and then what? Maybe we find the Free Crow, and maybe we don’t. Maybe Brink sets our girl on fire and kicks her into the Ohio. Maybe we need to make a getaway fast, and then come back to try again. Maybe a whole lot of things could happen, and we’d need a ship as big and fast as this one to see us safe back west. If we’d taken anything smaller or lighter than this warbird, we’d have never made it out of Missouri, and you know it same as I do.”
“I know it,” Hainey griped. “Nobody’s arguing with you. And it’s a quandary, I know. But Louisville is east, it ain’t west. And I can’t…” he looked at Maria and then frowned in a way that said something she didn’t understand, not at first. “There are places in Kentucky I couldn’t go even if the law wasn’t looking for me.”
Then he turned to Maria and addressed her directly. “Three black men and a white woman walking into town together, that’d go over real well, don’t you think? That wouldn’t raise a lick of suspicion in anyone, anywhere.”
“You have a point.”
“I usually do.”
“But perhaps I can help.”
Hainey almost laughed, but he restrained himself enough to say, “What do you have in mind?”
She said, “Put me down on the far side of the river and wait over there, in the woods if you have to. Tether down, and I’ll catch a ride into the city. I’ll send a few telegrams, ask a few questions, and see if I can’t locate our mysterious sanatorium, which-as you and I both know-is no sanatorium at all.”
Simeon spun around in the first mate’s chair and eyed her angrily. “And then we…we what? We sit like fish in a barrel and wait for the charitable Belle Boyd to return?” He turned to the captain and said, “She’ll leave us here and finish her job, let her Yankee bosses pat her on the head, or maybe she’ll come back over the river with the law, and we’ll all be hung by morning!”
Lamar said with less venom, but more measured concern, “Once we’ve set her down and sent her off…if she finds the sanatorium she’s got no need of us.”
“But I do!” she objected. “Our goals are not so dissimilar, gentlemen,” she cajoled. “You want your ship, I want to stop your ship and destroy this weapons laboratory-by hook or crook if necessary. Perhaps I could do this alone and perhaps I couldn’t, but this ship is the best hope I have for intercepting another vessel, now isn’t it?”
“It’s surely your most obvious,” the captain said before the crew could complain.
Simeon tried to bark an objection regardless. “But Captain, she-”
“Time is of the essence, don’t you think?” he asked the first mate. “We could set the ship down, go our separate ways; and we could try through our connections to learn where the sanatorium lies, or she could try to learn it on her own, through channels that wouldn’t let us pass the front door or the back door, either. Who do you think will learn the most, the fastest?”
“She would,” Simeon scowled. “But we can’t trust her.”
“Who said I trust her?” Lamar sniffed, and the captain said, “I trust her to shoot like an ace, and I trust her to fight for the country that’s turned her away. I trust her to be as sneaky a bitch as ever the South did breed, and I trust her to understand that we’re her best hope every bit as much as she’s ours, because like Minnericht, and like you, and like me, that woman isn’t an idiot and she can see where the sun’s shining today. Now woman,” he said to her, “Did I tell any lies just now?”
She was seated still, hands folded in her lap over the gun she’d drawn from her handbag. Quietly she said, “Every word the gospel truth. I have no reason to lie to you. The captain is right and I am a patriot for my country, and although I generally desire my country’s approval, that goal will be best served by preserving Danville from utter destruction. You’re fugitives, yes, but what good would it do me to hand you over…if there is no nation left to prosecute you?”
Hainey swung a hand out and pointed it at her, as if to say, “See?” but he did not say it aloud. Instead he said, “On your word then, lady. On your word as a Southerner, and a Confederate, and, and,” he searched for something else to bind her. “And a widow. On your husband’s grave, and on your-”
“That’s enough,” she snapped. “On that-all of it. On that and more, I give you my word that if you send me into the city to gather information, I’ll return to you with everything I know.”
One hour later, she was deposited without ceremony beside the road that le
d to the bridge that would take her into the city.
When Maria returned-and she did return-she brought them the location of a brand new facility south of the city. And she climbed aboard, and neither she nor the captain nor any of the crew said another word until they landed their craft behind the Waverly Hills Sanatorium forty miles outside of town.
10. MARIA ISABELLA BOYD
Behind the Waverly Hills Sanatorium the forest was high and a creek rolled through the grounds, making light, pretty noises as it trailed between the trees. The sky was perfectly clear, without a cloud to hide behind; and in the end, the Valkyrie settled down in what passed for a small clearing at the edge of a fruit grove, half-concealed by the edge of a green knoll.
The folding stairs extended, and all four of the ship’s occupants disembarked. Three black men and a white woman together looked strange enough indeed, but there was no one to see them while they plotted amongst themselves.
Maria attempted to straighten her deflated skirts. She gave up and asked, “I didn’t see any other ships moored anywhere close, did you?”
The captain shook his head. He said, “I didn’t, but that’s not to say the Free Crow isn’t docked and stashed someplace nearby.”
“It must be smaller than the Valkyrie,” she guessed.
“It is,” he said. “Maybe half the size overall. Oh, she’s not so tiny that she’d be a snap to hide-don’t misunderstand me. But if the boys in blue are hiding a weapons facility, pretending it’s a hospital for the deranged, then I wouldn’t put a damn thing past them. For all we know, they have a…a secret set of docks. Maybe there’s something hiding in the trees, or maybe one of these hills isn’t what it looks like.”
Lamar looked warily from hill to hill before saying, “It’s possible, sir. But there’s no reason to make yourself crazy over it.”
Ever since stepping down the folding stairs, the first mate had been rolling himself a cigarette. He stuck one end in his mouth, lit the other end, and stared at the sky. He said, “I think we beat them.”
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