Uncrashable Dakota

by Marino, Andy

  A noise like a tin can hitting the floor—clinkclankTHUD—made Delia’s heart leap. Thanks to the arrangement of goods, there was only one way to go: down another aisle, toward the noise. If she retreated, she’d be trapped against the wall, faced with a blind descent down the cent comm shaft. She took a left and stopped—this section of the vista deck was in shambles. All of the neat, orderly rows that separated the storage space into dry goods, machine parts, perishables, and clothing had been destroyed. Her first thought was that an army of raccoons had run roughshod over everything, gnawing open sacks of wheat and barley, tearing into slabs of salted beef, slurping up candies until the air was cloudy with powdered sugar.

  From the piles, a voice muttered, “Aww, sassafras.” It sounded like a boy. Ahead and to the right, flimsy boxes marked MASHED POTATO FLAKES had been left mostly untouched, so that they formed a little nook. Delia held the hijacker’s fearsome knife out in front of her and slid her feet quietly until she was able to peek around the corner.

  The boy was about ten. His overcoat had seen better days, but the crewman’s cap nested in his hair was spotless. He was perched on a stool, pawing through a box. Thin potato flakes covered the floor like snow on a toy train set. Delia revised her theory: the vista deck had definitely been picked clean by looters, but they had walked on two legs rather than four.

  “You have to add water to those,” Delia said. The boy froze with his hand in the box. His eyes darted to her, and he relaxed when he saw that he’d been caught by a girl. He tensed up again when he realized that girl was brandishing an eight-inch blade. Slowly, he removed his hand from the box and sat on his stool. Behind him, Delia noticed a rifle leaning against a garishly striped box labeled PEPPERMINT STICKS.

  “I ain’t got no water,” the boy said cautiously.

  “Too bad,” Delia said, wondering what she would do if the boy reached for his gun. “Where’d you get the hat?”

  The boy reached up as if to remind himself that he was wearing one. “My pa.”

  “Your pa work for Mr. Castor?”

  The boy shifted on his stool. “He’s a lieutenant in the New Army of Northern Virginia,” he said proudly.

  “So what’s he doing on an airship?”

  The boy looked at her skeptically. “I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about it.”

  “It’ll be our little secret.” She stepped forward into the nook.

  He eyed the blade. “I ain’t never seen no girl with no big knife before.”

  Delia saw herself as the boy saw her, a girl with dirty hands, a smudged dress, and a sweat-smeared face, looking pinched and desperate with her heavy blade. She almost gave in to the urge to touch her headband and display her homemade magnifying glass. I made this—I’m not what you think! It had worked with that startled personnel clerk in the Fourteenth Street Dakota Aeronautics office—he’d introduced her to Big Benny Owens, and now, two years later, here she was.

  Instead, Delia tightened her grip on the knife and leveled her steeliest gaze at the boy. There were times when growing up with Maggie paid off.

  “The New Army of Northern Virginia is known for its bravery and self-sacrifice in defending the Confederate homeland,” the boy said quickly. He was clearly parroting someone, or a recruiting leaflet. “Which is why we been asked to join this glorious battle against the servants of Lincoln.”

  “Uh-huh. What else?”

  “Ain’t nothing else. We get paid and then we go home to fight the second War of Northern Aggression.”

  “When’s that supposed to happen?”

  “Could be next week. Could be next year. We’ll be ready.”

  Delia’s mind was connecting threads. In order to maintain control over an airship the size of the Wendell Dakota, Castor would have to command a considerable force. It made sense that he would use a ready-made militia for muscle—offer a sweet enough chunk of the ransom, and he’d have a temporary army at his disposal. If he could play to their sympathies, all the better for him. He probably got this crew at a discount rate.

  “How big is the New Army of Northern Virginia?”

  “Eight squads, I reckon. Something like that.”

  “So if you had to guess a number…”

  The boy’s knee began to bounce up and down. “Numbers ain’t my thing.”

  “If everybody who came aboard with you and your pa to help Mr. Castor was all standing in one big room, and you counted all the heads, how many heads do you think there would be?”

  “Us and them other folks too?”

  “Them other folks, they’re another militia?”

  The boy scowled. “Yanks. My pa hates ’em. He says as soon as we get off the ship, he ain’t never so much as lookin’ at one again, ’less it’s down the barrel of his gun.”

  Delia lowered her knife. The boy was getting fidgety—saying the word gun seemed to remind him that he had one within reach. She smiled. “Yanks really are the worst. I’m from Savannah, myself. Too bad your pa has to work with them.”

  “Buncha Yanks and a buncha heathens, too.”

  “I can’t stand heathens. Did your pa happen to mention the kind of heathens that are aboard?”

  The boy’s entire face wrinkled in disgust. “Beetle worshippers.”

  For the first time since she’d found the map and the passenger list, Delia’s heart began to race with the excitement of discovery. The problem was, there were more than a dozen active beetle cults, each with its own agenda and rituals. The broadsheet Rob had discovered on her bookshelf only hinted at the cult-related materials—books, pamphlets, the odd totem—she had been collecting under Chief Owens’s supervision. Rob’s voice echoed inside her head: Delia, tell us the truth—are you in a cult? She wasn’t, of course, although one of them had tried to recruit a few Dakota Aeronautics employees; she still had the business card given to her by an earnest young man with thick glasses and a cheap suit.

  Delia slipped the knife back into the bag—See? We’re just having a friendly chat—and made her question as offhand as possible. “Do these beetle worshippers happen to have a name? Any strange tattoos or jewelry you can remember? Funny words they like to say over and over again?”

  “You don’t sound like you’re from Savannah.”

  A dull book called Beetle Deification: A Survey catalogued the groups, and Delia tried to remember the names she’d skimmed in her reading. “Sons of Solomon? Order of the First Beetle? Insect Liberation Front?”

  “I ain’t sayin’ another word.”

  Delia sensed that she was reaching the limits of this boy’s secondhand knowledge, anyway. “Remember what I said about our talk.”

  “What was it again?”

  “Our little secret. You didn’t see anybody in here.”

  “I didn’t see anybody in here,” he repeated dutifully. As she backed away, his eyes flicked almost imperceptibly to check the location of his rifle. Without another word, she took off sprinting, past wheels of Wisconsin cheese and bottles of California wine. She didn’t waste a second looking over her shoulder; the son of a militiaman was probably a crack shot. She hurdled a pyramid of animal cracker boxes and zigzagged past bundles of patchwork quilts.

  The possibility of gunfire seemed to add an urgent dimension to everything the boy had said. Her mind raced. The beetle cults were breeding grounds for conspiracy theorists, disgraced scientists, and aimless loners in search of a home. What could a group of crackpots possibly have to offer a man like Jefferson Castor? They didn’t do anything except preach outlandish “facts” about the holy origins of the beetles and perpetuate wild rumors about Hollis’s grandfather. She doubted if most people at Dakota Aeronautics had ever given them a second thought. Yet Jefferson Castor, the man least likely to tolerate their brand of insanity, had taken them aboard the ship. Why?

  Behind her, the boy hadn’t fired a shot. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to draw a bead on a fleeing girl. She almost convinced herself it was okay to go back and ask him a few more questio
ns. Without knowing specifics about the “heathens,” she had little to go on, but at least now she could look beyond a ransom scheme—Castor seemed to have more on his mind than just getting rich.

  The ship lurched violently. Delia kept her footing by bracing herself against a pile of olive-drab coats. Straight ahead, directly opposite the place where she’d emerged from the shaft, was a door. She quickened her pace, but the door didn’t get any closer. It was a nightmare hallway.

  No: she was running uphill. The ship was tilting. Behind her, the boy’s shouts were drowned out by splintering wood and breaking glass. She thought of the boy’s spilled mashed potato flakes—now the least of his problems—as an avalanche of quilts tumbled toward her. The ones that had torn free of their packaging floated past her head like jellyfish.

  Delia thrust her hand forward and lunged for the door. It swung open and she climbed inside. She grabbed hold of a wooden railing with both hands, curling herself around it like a shipwreck survivor clinging to a piece of driftwood. I did this, she thought. I made this happen. What if she and Hollis managed to put a stop to Castor’s plans, but sacrificed the ship in the process? What if they never saw Rob again?

  It was a curious situation. Earlier, she had invented a new way to communicate. Then she had put the ship in grave danger by taking away that very same ability. She wasn’t sure if that was an example of irony or simply a coincidence. The difference was fuzzy. The nuts and bolts of language bored her.

  She was supposed to be a scientist.

  Panting, clutching the rail, Delia admonished herself as the ship began to level off. She knew better than to make stupid, impulsive decisions. The scientific method was there for a reason. When the ship was steady enough, she forced herself to let go of the railing. There was work to be done. They would only know if the ends justified the means when they actually reached the end.

  Reaching for her bracelet, her fingers went to the charm; besides those few old-fashioned picture cards, it was her only keepsake from St. Theresa’s. The face of St. Albert, patron saint of scientists, was imprinted into the cheap metal, but had become nearly unrecognizable since she’d been using it as a screwdriver. Delia thought about the location of the vista deck and the way she’d been moving. The ship hadn’t just listed to one side; the bow had shot upward. Even without a direct line to the bridge and the prop tower, beetle keepers should be able to keep the airship from breaching like a whale—especially with the new automated compartment system.

  Stupid! She had seen the unfamiliar faces. The chambers were full of amateurs. Her place was down there, helping them. So what if they were Castor’s people? Allegiances wouldn’t matter much if the Wendell Dakota flipped over. She hoped that Hollis would figure out she wasn’t coming and go on without her.

  At the top of the stairs, she was greeted by sounds of laughter and good cheer. She stepped into a second-class hallway decorated in a pretty floral pattern. Passengers overflowed from a bistro, clinking glasses and smoking cigars. The tables inside had overturned, so they’d simply elected to stand. They didn’t seem worried about the change of direction, the turbulence, or the armed crewmen patrolling the ship.

  “Is that all you got?” shouted a plump, red-faced man in a tweed jacket with patches at the elbows, shaking his fist at the ceiling. “It’ll take more than that to send the Wendell Dakota down to earth!”

  He was met with howls of approval. Lingering here was a waste of time, but Delia could only watch, horrified, as a young man escorted his wife to the party.

  “You’re being alarmist, Sylvia. I assure you, it’s perfectly normal for an airship to experience periodic bumps, especially since we’ve skirted the edge of that Atlantic storm.”

  “There was nothing normal about that!” Sylvia removed his arm from her shoulders. “Something’s terribly wrong, and I’m going to find out what it is.”

  “Why, my dear? What are you going to do? Let’s have a drink, and try to remember you’re on an airship that’s scientifically uncrashable.”

  21

  WENDELL DAKOTA had never been much of a singer. He was more of a tone-deaf whistler. In Marius’s impersonation, the ghostly voice of Wendell Dakota had sounded, for the very first time, on-key.

  Hollis wondered why something like this would occur to him. Did other people’s brains spring these shameful little traps? He closed his eyes and tried to recapture the fleeting confidence he’d possessed in the cent comm shaft. It was no use. At least that burst of inspiration had been for Delia’s benefit, so it hadn’t been entirely wasted.

  “I’ll tell you one thing about first class,” Chester said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You people got some good cheese.”

  Hollis took a bite of his own ragged, misshapen sandwich, hastily assembled on their journey to the private reading room in which they now found themselves. There were eight such rooms that could be entered from a single hallway, on the other side of which was the library. Each room was decorated to represent one of Wendell Dakota’s superlative qualities. The theme of this particular room was “foresight,” signified by the imposing brass telescope that seemed to look straight into the wall, providing a view of nothing.

  “Funny place for a spyglass,” Maggie said, placing her good eye against the scope.

  “The lens actually goes all the way through the hull,” Hollis explained. “You’re looking out into the sky off the port side.”

  Flecks of crusty baguette fell to the floor. He’d only eaten a third of his snack, while Maggie and Chester were already done. He was a prim chewer, he realized, and then forbade himself to be self-conscious about his chewing when they were minutes from confronting Marius. While he waited for Maggie to tell him what he already knew—it’s stormy out there—he wondered why the decorator had taken a literal approach and painted so many eyes on the wall. It made him uncomfortable.

  Chester arranged his bulk in one of the shiny leather chairs.

  Maggie pulled away from the telescope, gesturing for Hollis to have a look. Even knowing what to expect, his heart sank: the Wendell Dakota was floating inside a fog as thick as Delmonico’s stew, meaning Jefferson Castor had lost all visibility. He hoped Captain Quincy and Chief Owens were still alive. With Jefferson in charge and the telephone lines severed, Hollis knew the ship could emerge from the storm above the clouds, overloaded with beetles, trapped in an out-of-control sprint for the heavens.

  “Okay,” Hollis said. “Status report. What I’m seeing here is that visibility’s at zero and it’s a good bet we’re too high in the sky.”

  Chester was cleaning his fingernails with his toothpick. “You can tell all that from one little peek into a cloud?” he asked, mildly interested.

  “I’ve lived aboard every airship in the fleet. I can tell when we’re rising above our cruising altitude. The air feels wrong, even inside all these walls. And the thing about low visibility is that rookie beetle keepers always pour on the juice. Nobody wants to crash, so everybody’s first instinct is to load the compartments with beetles and let them feast.”

  Hollis paused, listening to every little creak and groan of the ship, trying to anticipate the next shake-up. He imagined the bow nosing down while the stern flipped up like the sudden snap of a diver in midair. He pictured a great gash in the hull and wondered what went through people’s minds when they were plummeting toward the earth.

  In the weeks following his father’s accident, Hollis had obsessed over pictures of the D.C. Sky-dock, tracing a finger from the broken railing down to the ground, imagining what his father could have been thinking at each moment. He’d heard the old stories about life flashing before your eyes, but he had trouble imagining what that was like. Did time become so elastic that you relived every moment and felt every feeling over again? Or was it a single blinding flash, a total overload of memory and emotion? Most of all, he wondered what his father’s very last thought had been. His wife’s face? His son’s voice? Or was it just some random brain activity
, a tasty breakfast he’d enjoyed one morning in 1906?

  “So we’re still uncrashable, yeah?” Maggie asked, startling him. “I gotta admit, you’re makin’ me nervous.” She glanced around. “Maybe it’s just all these eyes, lookin’ at me.”

  Hollis considered how best to explain this. “The ship has sixteen lift chambers, which is a record number, so even if we lose a bunch of them in a freak accident, we won’t drop. It’s uncrashable because these new spider machines react to a million different things, like wind and airspeed. They make dealing with the beetles a science, so it’s not possible to fly too high or too low.”

  “So then what’s the problem?”

  Her genuine curiosity made Hollis feel like they really were working together and that she probably wasn’t going to stab him.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.

  “I’m grateful for your help. I thought you hated me.”

  “It doesn’t matter if I like you or not.”

  “I kinda like him,” Chester admitted.

  Maggie glared at him. Then she turned to Hollis. “You were talking about the machines.”

  “Right. Well, they can be turned off. Or broken. Or just messed up by people who don’t know what they’re doing. If the machines aren’t pulling us down a little bit and keeping us steady, it’s a good bet the hijackers are just working the chambers themselves. And it’s the machines that make the ship uncrashable—it’s not the ship itself.”

  “Then what the hell are we waiting for? Let’s go see what your friend knows.”