Uncrashable Dakota

by Marino, Andy

  “Absolutely not,” Delia said, reading the look that passed between them. “This is as far as we go.”

  Rob seemed poised to leap over the railing and hop his way from catwalk to catwalk until he reached the Sorter/Picker/Dispenser machine—“spider” for short—that sprawled along the floor, disseminating beetles. Hollis felt like a little boy being denied some coveted plaything he’d seen in a friend’s stateroom.

  “You there!” A sudden shout reached them from across the platform. A crewman hailed them with a wave. “Don’t move!”

  Delia turned to head back to the ladder, muttering curses, but Hollis stopped her.

  “He already saw us—just say your shift is about to start.”

  Once he’d been spotted somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, Hollis had found that it was best to be cursory and polite, and keep his lies within the bounds of reason. The same tension he felt with crewmen like Marius, who didn’t know whether to treat him like a friend or a boss-in-training, could also work to his advantage.

  “Ahoy!” Rob lifted his cap in a jaunty greeting.

  “Don’t move!” the man yelled, striding fiercely to intercept them as if they were fleeing madly instead of holding still. Right away, Hollis noticed the man’s unkempt hair shoved hastily beneath a uniform cap. His features floated within a doughy, indistinct face. And he was dressed like a porter, without even a single gold bar on his shoulder to identify him as the type of petty officer assigned to patrol the lift chambers. But the strangest thing by far was the holstered pistol slung across his hip.

  Since when did porters walk around armed?

  “Afternoon,” Hollis said.

  The man stared at him uncomprehendingly. “You kids can’t be here,” he said. “Clear the air.”

  “We were just leaving.” Hollis flashed Delia a quick smile. See how easy it is?

  Then Rob stepped forward, toe-to-toe with the armed porter, and Hollis sensed that something about the man had provoked his stepbrother into going off script.

  “I’m not sure you understand. We have security clearance from up top, for every corner of the ship from bow to stern.”

  That was hardly true, but Hollis kept his mouth shut. What was Rob trying to prove?

  The porter thwacked Rob hard on the chest with a single finger. “I said clear the air, boy.”

  “Hey!” Delia bristled. “You can’t talk to him like that.”

  The porter’s hand hovered above his holster. “Who says I can’t, cupcake? You’re not allowed here, and that’s the high and low of it.”

  For a moment, Hollis had the sickening notion that they were about to be shot by some rogue psychotic porter. Then he dismissed the thought and tried to sound like his father at his most serious and puffed up.

  “What’s your name and position with this company?”

  The man looked genuinely taken aback by the question. His hand drifted down to rest on the pistol’s ivory grip. “That’s none of your business, kid.”

  Hollis was about to inform the man that, as he was Lucy Dakota’s only son, it was the definition of his business, when Rob began to yell and wave.

  “Hey! Dad!”

  Jefferson Castor emerged from a small office at the far end of the catwalk. He looked up at the little group, startled.

  Hollis waved too, relieved that this misunderstanding was about to be peacefully resolved. Whatever severe and unpleasant discipline his stepfather was about to impose was preferable to being riddled with bullets by some high-strung new recruit of a porter. But instead of hurrying over to take charge, Jefferson Castor stayed frozen in place. The funny way he stood, motionless and trapped, long arms caught midswing, reminded Hollis of the time Miss Betzengraf caught Rob stealing the answers to a history test. It seemed like his stepfather was going to duck back into the office, but then he unfroze and walked toward them, regaining his usual confidence with each step.

  “Sir,” Hollis said.

  “Dad.” Rob jerked his thumb toward the porter. “Tell this rookie where to stick it.”

  Jefferson Castor walked right past the man and took Rob roughly by the shoulder.

  “Why aren’t you in class?” he asked. The porter snickered.

  “The Pea—Miss Betzengraf’s sick,” Rob said quickly.

  Hollis cleared his throat, desperate to shift attention from Rob’s lie. “Is something wrong with the stabilizer?”

  “What?” Castor said sharply, taking his hand off his son. “Oh.” His tone softened. “That was nothing, Hollis. Routine turbulence. And you should be in class, too.”

  Hollis bowed his head, thinking of his mother’s threat to have the Pea tutor him personally. Getting caught skipping on the first day was pathetic. Castor fixed his stony gaze on the porter. His lip twitched once, then he flicked his chin toward the office and the man slunk away.

  “I’ll deal with him. You get to class.” He smiled warmly, an entirely different person from the angry father he’d been a moment ago.

  “Yessir,” Rob said.

  “I’ll be working late tonight, boys. But I’ll be receiving a full report about your behavior, and you’ve already dug yourselves a hole.” He paused to scowl at Delia, who lowered her eyes. “So do your best to fly straight.” Even this threat had a softened edge. It sounded like a casual suggestion.

  “Yessir,” Rob said again. Hollis kept quiet. He’d made up a secret rule on the very day Jefferson Castor became his mother’s new husband: his stepfather couldn’t tell him what to do or how to act until Hollis started calling him Dad. Behavioral corrections were for Rob alone. They had never discussed this rule, but for reasons that Hollis didn’t quite understand, his stepfather seemed to agree.

  Castor spun on his heel and strode back toward the office. Through the half-open door, Hollis saw the porter talking to two other men.

  “All due respect,” Delia said as Castor shut the door, “but did he seem strange to you?”

  “All the time,” Rob said.

  “Listen,” Hollis said. “There’s something else.” The incident seemed like his cue to share another peculiar moment, so as they walked back to the ladder he told them about the phone call just before the launch, how it had darkened his mother’s mood, how the captain had explained it away.

  “That settles it,” Rob said with a single clap. “This sightseeing trip has officially become an investigation. If we’re gonna get to the bottom of this, we need a plan.”

  Hollis was wary of the excitement in his stepbrother’s voice. They had already pushed their luck. His head throbbed where it had smacked the dormitory wall, and his right temple began to pulsate in time with the echoes of the chamber. The feather bed in his blessedly nonreeking stateroom loomed soft and inviting in his mind. The mere idea of crawling beneath its covers and closing his eyes seemed to bring a measure of relief.

  “Name one time you’ve ever made a plan that worked, Rob. Or done anything besides get us in trouble.”

  “Come on, Hollis, this is different,” Delia said. “This is something.”

  Hollis rubbed his temple gingerly and winced. “Everything’s something with you.”

  6

  LUCY DAKOTA called her chronic headaches tiger claws because they dug in and roared and didn’t let go for days. She had always seemed terrified of passing along this affliction to Hollis and used to warn him of “auras” so often that every innocent action in his peripheral vision—the normal interplay of light and shadow—became a harbinger of doom. Fully aware that talk of a headache would result in being surrounded by doctors, Hollis explained his early bedtime simply by saying he was tired from launch day, the vaguest excuse he could think of that wouldn’t invite a concerned examination of his pupils.

  Willing himself to sleep so early proved impossible, but curling up to watch the sky darken outside his window soothed his aching head. Voices drifted through his bedroom door: his mother was holding court in the sitting room while Jefferson Castor, true to his word, was working la
te, and Rob was hatching plots with Delia.

  Hollis heard Elizabeth Quincy, the captain’s wife, steer the conversation toward rumored cargo. The Reynolds’ dead Shetland pony had been stuffed and mounted on a pedestal, and was traveling in a private storage hold along with two automobiles and a dozen gilt-framed portraits of itself. Several first-class ladies were happy to use this tidbit as a prompt.

  “You know our maid Francine?” one asked. “Darling girl. Not from Paris, from some provincial town—country girls simply know how to clean in a way that city girls will never master, they encounter more varieties of dirt—well, anyhow. Our Francine says that Heddie—that’s Juniper’s new governess, now that the old one’s been, how shall I say this, promoted—well, Heddie swears that Edmund just bought a prehistoric fossilized man from some Canadian explorers, some beastly thing that had been frozen solid in a cave for who knows how many thousands of years, which of course he’s taken aboard with him and stashed in a hold.”

  “Left it there to thaw? I should think it would smell after a while, don’t you?”

  “Well, of course he’s not letting it thaw.”

  “You’re saying they’ve got the man encased in ice? For the duration of the crossing?”

  Hollis imagined a leather-skinned specimen stashed away among the spoils of high-class life. What if the caveman woke up and found himself in Edmund Juniper’s private storage hold? What would it be like to track a mammoth through an ice field, fall into some crevasse, and open your eyes a few thousand years later aboard an airship high above the Atlantic?

  “Perhaps he’s lodging in the meat locker at Il Bambino’s. I thought the steak tasted a bit ancient.”

  Peals of laughter barreled through Hollis’s bedroom door and reignited his headache, giving a queasy backdrop to his thoughts. Who was the armed porter? Why hadn’t his stepfather disciplined the man? Hollis couldn’t shake the guilty feeling that his failed christening had released some kind of slow-acting poison into the corridors and offices and engine rooms of the ship, changing the very nature of the voyage. It was a long time before he slipped into a shallow, disturbed sleep.

  In his dream, Hollis found himself alone on the main deck at night, surrounded by the high stone battlements of a castle. Terrible airship design, he thought. Above the castle-deck, a yellow moon dangled from two long cords like a stage prop. He climbed a narrow staircase up the side of the stone wall and studied the moon, which was only a few feet away. As he reached out to touch it—he’d always wondered what the moon felt like—he heard the unmistakable wet, raspy sound of his father clearing his throat. A gob of spit landed on the surface of the moon, and Hollis was suddenly afraid. His father had been dead for two years.

  The spit on the moon was flecked with blood. Hollis turned. His father fixed his spectacles and frowned.

  “Swear,” he said.

  Hollis backed against the stone wall. Dirt poured from his father’s ear and gathered in a pile at his feet. Hollis cupped his hands to catch the dirt so he could fling it over the side.

  “Swear,” his father said again.

  Hollis awoke with a jolt, damp sheets twisted around his legs and waist. His head felt much better, but his heart was pounding. The only light in his bedroom was a thin rectangle that outlined his door. Was his mother still entertaining? It felt like the small hours of the morning. He slid from his bed and fumbled into an old pair of pants and a long-sleeved shirt, then opened the door just enough to peek out with one eye.

  Four men in Dakota uniforms were scattered about the room—two flanking the door, two sitting in leather armchairs across from his mother, whose nightdress trailed on the floor beneath the sofa. One man was speaking in a low voice, barely above a whisper. The other man was sipping from a cup and balancing a saucer in his lap.

  “So y’see, Mrs. Dakota, the doc thinks it might’ve been the liver pâté. At least, that’s what he’s determined might be the cause of the … uh…”

  “Speak freely,” his mother said. She sounded amused.

  “The cause of the bowel, uh, troubles.”

  “Digestion issue,” said the officer with the tea.

  “And just so we’re clear, he sent for all of us?”

  The first man nodded. “He says to me, ‘Everett,’ he says, ‘Go and fetch Lucy and Hollis.’”

  The second man chimed in. “He kindly requested your presence in the infirmary, ma’am, along with your son. And Robert, too.”

  Hollis thought his mother was going to burst out laughing. “Should I wake Father Cairns for last rites? This sounds like a very serious episode of indigestion.”

  “I’m sure he’s not in that kind of mortal danger, ma’am.”

  “We’re just obeying orders.”

  “Of course you are.” Hollis’s mother slapped her hands against her knees and rose to her feet. “But I see the rest of you haven’t touched your tea. How rude, to make poor Steward Bailey cart it here for nothing.”

  It was then that Hollis noticed the tray, upon which rested three identical and untouched teas. What was going on? Why would his mother spend so much time entertaining Castor’s errand boys at such an hour?

  “Wasn’t necessary,” said one of the burly men by the door.

  The man’s barrel-chested partner rumbled in agreement. “Shouldn’t have bothered.”

  Hollis’s mother hesitated for a moment, eyes fixed upon the door as if she were waiting for another guest to arrive. Then she threw up her hands in resignation. “Well, I suppose I’ll go attempt to lift his spirits. But I’m not waking the boys for this.”

  The men looked at each other as if they were unsure of how to proceed. Hollis wondered if they’d forgotten whose name was on the ship. He stepped out into the sitting room.

  “It’s okay, I’ll go with you. Let Rob sleep.” He was already anticipating the look on Castor’s face, crippled by stomach pains, his orders almost—but not quite—obeyed.

  “Morning, Hollis.” His mother smiled.

  “Is it?” He locked his fingers together and stretched his arms above his head.

  “Half past four.”

  “Ungodly.”

  It occurred to him that an even more satisfying facial expression might be derived from Castor’s orders being completely ignored. He could try and talk his mother out of going altogether. But then he wouldn’t be able to see his stepfather’s face, which was the whole point. He decided to stall while he figured out how best to play his hand.

  “What’s this about liver pâté?”

  “It’s rendered your stepfather’s bowels inoperable, apparently.” She cast a quizzical eye at the man draining his teacup. “Or have they become too operable?”

  Flustered, the man placed the cup and saucer carefully on the table. “Much obliged for the refreshment.”

  A hurried knock on the door proved to be a formality, since it swung right open. Hollis recognized the dim shape of Steward Bailey, a modest crewman with whisper-smooth movements, well suited to darting about airship passageways and bustling kitchens.

  “Mr. Castor is not in the infirmary, ma’am. I checked myself, and then I confirmed with Dr. Mapplethorpe on night admittance duty.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Bailey. I thought not.” She turned to the man who’d enjoyed his tea. His face attempted an apologetic smile. “Where is my husband?” His smile didn’t waver. Her next statement was an accusation. “You’re the one who’s been phoning me.”

  He laughed nervously. “Phoning you, ma’am?”

  So the call on the bridge wasn’t the first one, Hollis thought. This was too much to process so early in the morning, when everything still had the churning, not-quite-correct feel of a dream. Hollis half expected his father to stroll into the room, ear leaking dirt.

  His mother beckoned to the steward. “Mr. Bailey, please join us while these men explain what kind of game they’re playing and who put them up to it.”

  Steward Bailey stepped forward into the room. One crewman quietly shut
the door while the other whipped the back of the steward’s skull with a leather sap. The first man caught him beneath the armpits and lowered him into the corner, chin resting senselessly against his chest.

  “See? You shouldn’t have done that,” said the man with the sap.

  Hollis yelled for his stepbrother to wake up as he lunged for his mother’s arm. The futility of the situation gave his movement a quick, desperate edge. If Rob would come bolting from his bed, they might have a fighting chance. Everyone in the sitting room seemed flung on a collision course with everyone else. His mother turned to him, arm outstretched, but was viciously bundled up by the two crewmen from the chairs. Her stockinged feet kicked heel-first at their shins. Hollis swiped nothing but air and tried, at the last second, to let his momentum slam him into the man on the left, who sidestepped him neatly and sent him sprawling against the legs of the sofa.

  “Rob!” he screamed again, twisting away from the burly man with the sap.

  “Keep him quiet,” growled the fourth man, who had remained by the stateroom door. Hollis wriggled beneath the sofa and sprang up on the other side. He was near the open set of French doors that led to the dining room. Beyond that, a kitchenette with a servants’ entrance led to the access corridor that ran behind the largest staterooms so that food could be delivered without disturbing the occupants. If it was unguarded, it would be his only escape route.

  But he wasn’t thinking of escape. The man with the sap advanced on him. Hollis’s eyes searched for a weapon—like the deadly looking poker in the wrought-iron fireplace set. He’d never reach it in time. A strange calm settled over him. He was no match for these men, but he knew how to throw a punch. Sort of. Maybe, if he got one good shot on the big guy—

  “Run,” said his mother, right before they clamped a soaking wet rag over her nose and mouth.

  Hollis willed Rob’s doorway to burst open. Why wasn’t he getting up? His mother’s eyes bored into him. Then her body drooped like a deflated balloon. The big man swung the sap, and Hollis ducked. Leather whisked his hair. In the corner, Steward Bailey groaned, head lolling from one side to the other. The crewman by the door planted a boot in his ribs, and he slumped forward.