Uncrashable Dakota

by Marino, Andy

  In front of him, the room was sectioned off like a chessboard with a walkway down the middle. Blond squares of polished floorboards alternated with dark, fenced-off holes that provided access to the engine room below. Steam escaped from the holes and drifted lazily along the floor like poured molasses. Rob watched as six technicians were ordered down into one by a spry old man with a rifle. The technician in front opened a gate in the fence with a trembling hand and began climbing down a metal ladder. The man watched with fierce concentration until all six had vanished, then he walked over to Rob and his escort.

  “Who’s the kid?” he asked from the left side of his mouth while the right side clamped down on an unlit cigar.

  “He’s goin’ on about bein’ Mr. Castor’s son.”

  “Well, Mr. Castor’s lookin’ for his son.”

  “This ain’t him, is it?”

  The old man shrugged. “You wanna bother Castor about it, be my guest.”

  As the men talked it over, Rob stepped aside to give himself a clear line of sight. At the far end of the command post, a long oval window appeared to be painted a single shade of drab institutional gray. Beneath the window, a row of dials set into thick pipes poking up from the engine room displayed the ship’s airspeed, the primary concern of any prop tower crew. To the right and left of the speed gauges, crewmen spoke into telephones while others routed calls, trading cords between two switchboards with practiced ease.

  A sharp crack, barely audible above the rumbling, brought all activity to an abrupt halt. As the guards turned to look toward the window, Rob thought of how Brice Blank was always getting a “sense of foreboding” before massive life-changing events started to pile up around the middle of every issue. In his own drawings, he made sure that Atticus Hunter was blindsided by the twists in the story. Rob had always considered that to be the more realistic approach. How much foreboding could one person possibly handle? And what was that “sense” supposed to feel like, exactly?

  But now Rob felt it acutely: the dread of something inevitable and out of his control that was going to send him reeling. Each freight-train blade swinging past the command post was suddenly loud and distracting.

  SHWOOMP. SHWOOMP. SHWOOMP.

  The second crack brought everything speeding back into focus. The guards herded Rob up the walkway as they ran to investigate, their footsteps displacing steam in puffs of clarity. The men at the machines turned back to their work as if nothing had happened. Rob began to feel ill. He wondered what Hollis and Delia were doing.

  Closer to the oval window, what had looked like a solid sheet of gray became a roiling storm cloud with several shades of darkness blossoming within. From this vantage point, high above the main deck, Rob should have been able to see the bow of the ship. But the whole sky was the sightless void of the cloud.

  “Everything okay, sir?”

  Rob turned toward the voice and felt a simultaneous flood of relief and terror. The “sir” was his father. He was holstering a pistol.

  “It is now,” his father said. Then his eyes found Rob, and he froze like he had on the catwalk of the lift chamber. The body of a large man was sprawled facedown at his feet. One arm extended straight out toward Rob. On the man’s hairy-knuckled finger was a gold ring in the shape of a puffed-up, gaseous beetle.

  Chief Owens.

  Rob’s mouth was too dry to speak. He swallowed gummy saliva-paste and managed a whispered “Dad?”

  His father thought for a moment. “How’d you like to see the bridge?”

  17

  KICKING AND FLAILING, Delia forced her attacker to press his back against the wall to leverage his chokehold, and he narrowly sidestepped a neck-breaking tumble down the stairs. The uneven wooden slats of the floor creaked in protest, and Hollis had a horrible split-second vision of the center shaft popping out of the ship like a cork, spilling the three of them into the empty sky. A backhanded fist glanced across his forehead; that swinging anvil of a hand was keeping Hollis at bay, and his loafers offered little traction. Changing tactics, he darted forward, staying low, and reached into the bag pulled tight across Delia’s chest. When his fingers closed around the immobilizer, he yanked it free. Delia’s body drooped as she gasped for air. Hollis pulled the trigger and slammed the jagged lightning-burst into the man’s exposed forearm, right next to a tattoo of the name Beatrice scribbled inside a heart.

  The big man shuddered as his body closed the electrical circuit. When Hollis pulled the weapon away, the man’s eyes rolled back in his head and he slid limply down the wall to the floor.

  “’Night, Beatrice,” Hollis said, so that when Delia told the story of how he’d saved her life, it would have a jazzy ending. The immobilizer felt tiny and feather-light in his triumphant grip. Then he wondered with a kind of dull horror if the man was dead. The weapon seemed to gain weight as his adrenaline retreated.

  “Delia?”

  She wasn’t moving. He knelt and rolled her over until she was faceup. Her breathing was shallow. Hollis rummaged through her bag, past Castor’s map of the sky and the packet of pork jerky, until he found the bottle of smelling salts. He heard Rob’s voice in his head: Strong stuff. Trust me.

  “Shut up,” Hollis muttered, twisting off the tiny cap and holding it under Delia’s nose. The sharp smell of ammonia filled the air. She began to cough and sputter. Hollis helped her sit up.

  She opened her eyes and stared dumbly at Hollis before recognition seeped into her face. She glared at Hollis’s hand, which was still clutching the immobilizer.

  “Next time,” Delia said, snatching it away from him, “remember that if two people’s bodies are touching, they’re both going to conduct the current.”

  “Right,” Hollis said, pretending he’d known that all along. “Sorry.”

  “You really should start going to school. But thanks. That arm smelled like boiled ham.” Delia let herself be pulled to her feet, where she wobbled and steadied herself against the wall. She nodded at the cent comm door. “I’m okay. I’m ready.”

  Hollis eyed the man slumped against the wall. “Is he … I mean, did I just…”

  Delia shook her head. “He’ll wake up soon. Same as the two downstairs.”

  “Oh, good,” Hollis said, at the same time realizing how absurd that sounded. “Not good. You know what I mean.”

  Together they stepped into a room about the size of Hollis’s bedroom closet, with endless dark space above their heads instead of a ceiling. And instead of shirts and trousers, telephone lines dangled and branched off into neat holes drilled into the paneling. Next to each hole were pencil markings indicating the terminus of each line: GALLEY 3, AUTOMAT, PROM DECK STBD, and so on.

  “What’s the difference between these directions and those signs?” Hollis asked, indicating more formal squares tacked up next to sets of telephone lines bundled into groups and secured with thick twists of wire.

  But she was already deep within the Republic of Delia. With a quick touch, her magnifying glass deployed from her headband.

  “Transmitter,” Delia said, gesturing toward Hollis’s satchel. Hollis handed it over and watched, transfixed, as she used her bracelet’s charm to unscrew a bracket and disconnect the two wires that joined the receiver to the telegraph sounder.

  “Knife,” Delia said, holding out her hand. Hollis dug though the bag and came up with the salted pork, but no knife. He popped a piece of jerky into his mouth and slipped back out into the hall. Their attacker was slumped against the wall, eyes closed, a string of drool connecting his half-open mouth to his left shoulder. Around the man’s waist was a leather tool belt. Hollis unsnapped each little compartment until he found the handle of a long switchblade, more miniature sword than knife.

  “Some blade this guy’s got,” he said, handing it to Delia. She clicked it open and set to work, carefully slicing away a strip of the black rubber casing that covered one of the telephone wires. She had chosen one from the bundle labeled PROP TOWER that branched off into a hole mar
ked FURNACE 3. Hollis figured it out: areas vital to the ship’s operation required the bundles—the thick arteries on the blueprint. Places of lesser importance got one or two lines—the veins and capillaries. It made sense. While the bridge had to function as the nerve center, there was little need for Nico’s Café to maintain a ready line of communication with the squash courts or the lift chambers. When lines absolutely had to be connected, the switchboard operators performed the handoff.

  “Okay,” she said. “Cross your toes.”

  Using fabric from her dress to shield her hands, Delia touched the thin, exposed strands from the spark-gap transmitter to the unprotected telephone wire. Hollis felt his body tense up, anticipating some kind of explosion. Instead, the sounder began to squawk gibberish.

  “What is that?” Hollis asked, leaning close to listen to what sounded like a broadcast of irritated water fowl.

  “Dunno,” Delia said. “Lemme patch into another one.”

  “Go for the bridge.”

  Delia transferred the wires to another dangling line. This time the sounder emitted a human voice. Distant and fuzzy, Hollis thought, but definitely human. Now if only they could learn something useful before the three unconscious hijackers woke up. They held their breath and listened. The static faded, and a melody emerged.

  “What’s the one thing you can’t find in the sky? It’s worry! It’s worry!”

  Hollis grabbed Delia’s arm. That was Wendell Dakota’s voice coming from the sounder, singing Elmer Berman’s hit tune, “Airship to Paradise.” Hollis reached out to touch the wire as if it were his father, alive and in the flesh. Delia pulled his hand away.

  “What’s never darkening an eagle’s mind? It’s trouble! It’s trouble!”

  He’s here, thought Hollis, pressing his ear almost flush against the transmitter, eager to absorb the vibrations. He’s on the ship. Everything that had happened since the launch faded away, became the hazy background for this new development. It seemed completely plausible. His world had realigned. It had been thrown wildly off course but had somehow righted itself.

  “So-oh-oh pack those bags and stamp those tickets—”

  “Cute, Marius.” A woman’s voice that Hollis didn’t recognize cut in, silencing the song. “Very cute. It’s a good impersonation. I’m just sorry it was wasted on all those pointless telephone calls. Lucy Dakota might be a lot of things, but easily frightened isn’t one of them.”

  Wendell Dakota’s voice changed abruptly into that of the young crewman.

  “Can you feel it? They can. They know their mother is near.”

  “Have you been drinking?” The woman sighed. “Of course you have. Stay at your post and make some coffee. Jefferson and I are in the middle of something up here, and we don’t have time to—”

  Click. The connection went quiet, along with Hollis’s mind. He was unable to think about anything at all. His shock was a blank, out-of-time space that enveloped him completely. It was almost blissful, until it resolved into a state of panic. “What was that?”

  “Hollis.” He felt Delia’s arms around him.

  “What was that? What was that?” Saying these three words over and over again was all he could do.

  “Shhh,” she said. “It’s me. It’s Delia.”

  “What. Was. That.”

  “It’s okay, Hollis. It’s okay.”

  Eventually he became aware that they had been going back and forth like this for some time. Delia watched as he returned to himself, practically holding him upright until he could stand on his own.

  “That wasn’t my father,” he said.

  “No.”

  “It was Marius.”

  “That’s right.”

  Hollis saw his mother’s stricken face, just before the launch, and a lump formed in his throat. “The stoker.”

  “What stoker?”

  “Remember when I told you about that telephone call my mother got on the bridge, right before the launch? It’s happened before. She said so, right before they took her, she asked one of the kidnappers if it was him … and all this time it’s been Marius, pretending to be my father.” His eyes met Delia’s. “Why?”

  She thought for a moment. “It’s the long game, HD. You don’t just wake up and decide to hijack the airship carrying the richest passengers in the world. You have to approach it like a scientist would, figuring out all the different parts. For years you’d have to plan it, in order to control the variables. And your mother’s a pretty big variable. Maybe Castor’s been trying different things to keep her off balance.”

  “But Marius was saying something else about my mother, too.” Hollis tried to extract a thin strand of hope from what he’d just heard. “We’re near. We’re close to her. Something like that.”

  “He said they, Hollis. They know their mother is near.”

  “But—okay, then who was he talking about?”

  “I don’t know. I think we need to examine this from all the angles.” Delia was treating him gently, as if an argument in his fragile state would send him right back over the edge. “Who does the other voice belong to?”

  Hollis thought back to his frantic dash away from the hijackers and his escape up to the promenade deck. “There was only one woman on the bridge when I was there. She looked like … I don’t know, a schoolteacher or something. She had a table full of books. And maps.”

  “Maps like this?” Delia pulled the rolled-up paper from her bag.

  “I don’t know, I didn’t get a good look. I was kind of in a hurry.”

  She slapped the page. “X marks the spot, just like in Brice Blank and the Sandworm’s Gold.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  Her face flushed, something he’d never seen before. “Rob let me borrow it.”

  “So what does X mark the spot of?”

  “The sandworm’s gold.”

  “How about in the map we’ve got?”

  “What if ‘they know their mother is near’ is some kind of code? Maybe it’s a rendezvous with other ships.”

  Hollis had a disturbing vision of Castor’s men at the helm of the Secret Wish and the Windy City. He shook his head, chasing it away.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Delia was taken aback. “Of course it does.”

  “Not if we make sure he never gets there.”

  Hollis had swerved dizzily from zapping a man unconscious to blank astonishment at his father’s voice and had reached what his mother would call sharpness, the moment of clarity that settled in after weathering a headache. He was being borne along by the rage he felt at Jefferson Castor, at Marius, at everyone who had been so senselessly cruel.

  He would silence them all.

  He looked up into the darkness of the shaft and pointed to where the telephone lines vanished up the wall.

  “What would you say to climbing up there and cutting the lines?”

  Delia attached the fearsome switchblade to her knapsack and eyed the lowest peg sticking out of the wall. A few feet above that, another peg bent at an awkward angle. “Which lines?”

  “All of them.”

  “I would say that knocking out the ship’s communications is an extremely dangerous thing to do. And stupid. I would say: Hollis Dakota, that’s a stupid idea.”

  “But would you do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Really?”

  She set to work detaching the two little wires from the line and twisting them back into place within the hollow dictionary. When she was done, he stuffed it into his satchel.

  “On the port side of the sun deck, there’s a slop room for parkas and boots,” he said. “If you can get up there, it should be a good enough place to hide out and wait for me.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “That line you tapped from the bridge—what was at the other end?”

  “The library.”

  “Then I guess it’s time to check out some books.” Hollis waited for a reaction. Delia raised an e
yebrow.

  “You shouldn’t go by yourself.”

  “I’m bringing friends.”

  Delia hoisted herself up onto the first peg. Hollis moved swiftly and silently out of the little room and down the stairs, ignoring Delia’s last whispered question.

  “What friends?”

  18

  THE BRIDGE of the Wendell Dakota was a hive of peculiar activity. Rob watched a crewman scrub at a dark stain that had soaked into the wooden floor. Cursing and sweating, the man splashed his rag into a bucket of suds and attacked the stain with vigor. Rob didn’t ask what had spilled.

  Sky Captain Quincy was gone. Most of the Dakota officers had been replaced with a mismatched array of people commanded by Rob’s father. He figured they must have snuck aboard as passengers and stolen uniforms, meaning that somewhere on the ship were the underwear-clad members of the real crew. At least, he hoped they were locked away onboard and not littering the ground below. He didn’t ask about that, either. The two genuine crewmen still on the bridge—navigators with specialized skills—were monitoring gauges with guns shoved between their shoulder blades.

  His father was barking into three different telephones with a voice that Rob had never heard before: shrill, demanding, hysterical. It was as if an alien were occupying his father’s body, like in Brice Blank and the Riddle of the Moon. He shuddered at the idea of his father’s arm becoming a crystal tentacle. Left alone for the moment, Rob tried to make sense of the new personnel.

  There was a large group that seemed out of place on an airship. His escorts to the prop tower were a prime example. Rob had noted their inability to shut up about the South rising again. He wondered where his father had found so many of these characters—maybe they were some sort of militia? Why would they be led by Jefferson Castor, who had left Virginia early in his life and never looked back?

  The second type was harder to pin down. They seemed quietly menacing rather than boisterous. Their pistols and rifles and knives were spotless. None of them looked like they were having half as much fun as the South-will-rise coalition, though some were just as liquored-up, sipping from flasks. Rob dubbed these characters the mercenaries. As his father’s business dragged on and Rob had more time to observe, he decided they filled the role of officers.