Fiddlehead (The Clockwork Century)

by Priest, Cherie

  The ship fell back, and then pulled around closer to Maria—who saw that, yes, the men within were heavily armed and did not look very happy to see them. She beamed at them regardless, and waved like she had for the military ship—which was now well ahead of them, keeping its course along the southbound road below.

  No one waved back, but one man cranked open a side window, which jutted out from the craft like a fragile glass wing. He held a megaphone up to his mouth, and leaned out into the clouds.

  “You there!” he shouted. “Land your craft immediately!”

  Maria pretended she hadn’t heard, or hadn’t understood. “I’m sorry?” she mouthed, and pointed at her ears. “Too loud! So much wind!”

  “Land this craft immediately!” he tried again.

  “They want us to land,” Henry said, staring straight ahead.

  “Thank you, dear, I heard them,” she muttered. Then to the craft, as loudly as she could, “I’m very sorry, we can’t hear you!” She trusted they’d get the gist.

  They did, and it made them angry.

  “Land the craft immediately! Right now!” And this time, he brandished a gun in a threatening fashion.

  “I’ve seen bigger!” she yelled.

  “Now you’re just antagonizing them!” Henry complained.

  “Oh, they can’t hear a word I’m saying. Can we outrun them?”

  He said, “I’m not sure. Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Well, we can’t just land. They’ll kill us both, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “I thought you liked pirates.”

  “They aren’t pirates,” she said with more confidence than before. “They’re mercenaries.”

  While the man at the window gestured with his megaphone and firearm, Maria lifted the spyglass again, to get a better look. Not at the man, but at the crates on the floor behind him. Something was stenciled thereon, and she could just discern the logo. “Baldwin-Felts.” She said it like a curse.

  “The detective agency? Something like the Pinks?”

  “Nothing like the Pinks.” She snapped the spyglass shut and stuffed it into her satchel, since that one was the closest. “Oh, all right, something like the Pinks—like a Southern version of the Pinks, with fewer morals, leaner pockets, and no problem with assassinating innocent bystanders.”

  “But people do say similar things about—”

  She growled, “When the Pinkertons misbehave, they reflect badly on Chicago. The Baldwin-Felts reflect badly on Virginia.”

  “I see.”

  “How much ammunition do you have on you?”

  “Look, there’s a megaphone in the back. If you can reach it, maybe I can talk some sense into them. I’m a U.S. Marshal, after all. They may think twice about—”

  “They won’t.” She held up one finger to the man in the other dirigible, asking him for just a moment while she rifled through her luggage in search of her gun. “They’ll just bury you deeper, and figure no one’ll find you ’til it doesn’t matter anymore. They’ve threatened us, they’re giving us orders, and they will shoot us down if we don’t land ourselves. That’s what the man’s gun means, Henry. When he waves it around like that, he’s telling us he’s willing to use it.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Henry said, jaw locked tight. “I’m clear on that. I just wonder if we shouldn’t have some kind of plan, apart from shooting first.”

  “I’m a pretty good shot. Better with a ball turret. Pity we seem to be missing one.” Using her shoulders to shield the other ship from what she was doing, she checked her chambers, grabbed a fistful of bullets for future use, and took a deep breath.

  “I can’t believe they’re just … waiting on you. To see what you’re doing.”

  “Men are trained from birth to wait on the whims of women. Even murderers expect it.” She adjusted her goggles, looked back at the unnamed ship, and then at Henry. She leaned in close, so close that her breath warmed his ear. “All right, here’s what I’m doing: Our ship is smaller than theirs, we’re possibly slower than they are, and we’re outnumbered. Our only advantage is surprise, and I intend to cash in that advantage before it’s wasted. If you can fly as well as I can shoot, we might make it to our destination—and so far, you’re doing a hell of a job. So don’t stop now.”

  Before Henry could respond, she looked back over her shoulder. She saw that the man was getting impatient, but the window was still open, and he still hung halfway out of it—anchored by his feet somewhere beyond her view. She slipped her hand around the gun, put her finger on the trigger, and felt its gentle resistance against her glove.

  She whipped out the gun.

  Aimed in a fraction of a second.

  And fired three times in a row, knowing that her shots might spin wild, given the motion of the ship and the air alike; and that she was a good shot, but not a great one, as she might have implied to Henry.

  One bullet shattered the window, one bounced harmlessly off the metal casing, and one caught the man in the upper chest, just below his throat. He snapped backwards, clapped his head on the broken window edge, and flipped forward into the aether.

  No time to savor the victory. She fired again, this time at their windscreen—hitting it and fracturing it, but not smashing it outright. The front glass was thicker; it had to be, to face the elements.

  “Aim for their tanks!” Henry screeched, his elbows shaking with the effort of holding the craft in line.

  “Not yet! We’re too close! Any explosion will take us with it.”

  One of the other men leaned out the broken window while the captain kept flying—the grim set of his face implying that yes, they, too, were having a struggle of it. The wind was high and wet, and now he was flying with a broken window that snagged the currents and yanked the ship. She hadn’t sent them down, but she’d given him more to fight, and that was good. It meant one less person shooting at them.

  Four shots volleyed fast, fired by a man in an earflap hat and a very large coat.

  Two of them didn’t land anywhere important, so far as Maria could tell, but one winged a thruster, and a hard sound hissed against the motor. The last shot plunked into the bag at Maria’s feet. She felt the shove of it, and for a moment assumed the worst—but no, something had stopped it. Hopefully not her extra stockings. She didn’t own a third pair.

  She aimed the gun his way, but he ducked inside, and then the Black Dove ducked, too. With a hard, belly-bombing lurch it lost so much altitude that Maria thought something else had been hit, something more important than the fizzling thruster. “Henry!” she shouted.

  “Hold on!”

  “What are you doing?!”

  “Getting away from them!”

  “Let’s not get away all the way to the ground, please?” she squeaked.

  “Not to the ground…” he said, but whatever else he would’ve added was lost when his full attention was called for at the controls. He pulled up out of the dive in a veering sweep that brought them up again, higher than they’d flown before, to an altitude where breathing the air felt like chewing on ice.

  “Oh God.” Maria coughed, but she held the gun tight and pointed it back at the unmarked ship. She gauged the distance between them and hoped it was near enough to hit, but far enough to escape any fireball that might ensue.

  She emptied the last of her chambers and hit the windscreen again, this time puncturing it with a short round of finger-sized holes. But the pilot was unharmed, and she’d come nowhere close to hitting the hydrogen.

  Whoever that pilot was, he was good. As good as Henry. Maria could only pray he wasn’t better.

  The two ships soared around each other, circling and feinting in a deadly game of chicken, both sides aware that they were careening through portentous weather while strapped to tanks full of a gas so flammable they’d leave a second sun blazing in the sky if one of them lost the match.

  Henry wrenched the steering column and kicked a lever by his foot. The ship zoomed upward again, so steep
ly that Maria’s throat clenched shut and her eyes followed close behind. She couldn’t look. “Henry, what are you doing!” she demanded, not really wanting to know, but needing to know—clutching the gun, but unable to reload it because then she’d have to take her other hand off the Black Dove’s frame. If she did, nothing would be holding her inside but the ridiculous hemp strap, which now struck her as so fragile as to be laughably useless. “They’re right behind us! You can’t outmaneuver them this way!”

  “Not trying to! You have to reload!” he cried, leveling out and letting her catch her breath for a bit.

  Her hands were shaking and she could scarcely feel them to guide the bullets. She picked them out of her pocket one by one like seeds from an apron. “What are you doing?” she asked again, fumbling and dropping one, losing sight of it as it tumbled downward.

  “Are you loaded?”

  “Only … only three!” She tried to keep the panic from her voice.

  “Those tanks are pretty big. Can you hit them in three shots?”

  “I think so, but…”

  “From underneath?”

  She paused. “I think so.”

  He grinned wildly at her. “The explosion will go up, so we’ll go under. Hang on to your hat!” he roared, and dropped the Black Dove nose-down. The engine gurgled and fought, but didn’t fail, despite the near free fall.

  Maria laughed the unhinged cackle of a lunatic when she realized her hat was long gone, so all she had to clutch was her gun and this ship. So she didn’t fall out as she leaned, squinted through her goggles, and aimed.

  The unmarked ship loomed above her, its tanks dangling low and inviting on the sides. She only needed to hit one, but she had to hit it square, and she was falling, falling, falling … and had the engine cut out? She couldn’t tell. There was nothing in her ears but the rush of the drop. The sky was huge above her, and the other ship was coming after them, but it was coming too slow as it turned to dive in their wake. Five more seconds and the angle would be wrong.

  She fired.

  The first shot missed, but the second hit home.

  The craft did not shake or stutter, it simply exploded—the punctured tank first, and the other one an instant later. A ball of fire flared mightily above them and shot higher yet, and a warm wave of searing air snapped back against the Black Dove.

  “Pull up, pull up!” Maria shrieked at Henry. He was already trying to level the craft, but the drag and the wind and the new push of heat were working hard to stop him. “Get us steady!” she added. She felt stupid for it immediately, but the ground was right there, and they were flinging themselves toward it, and the thruster—was it even working? It spit like a snake, and a thin, diluted jet of black smoke went streaming out behind it.

  “Hang on,” Henry told her. Maria hoped he felt as stupid about saying that as she’d felt about giving him orders.

  She jammed the gun into her coat. No way she could get it in the satchel, which had only remained in the craft this long by virtue of being slung across her chest and smushed between her and Henry. Even through the wool of her pocket she could feel the gun’s freshly fired warmth. It might singe the fabric, but what other option did she have? It was that or throw it away, and it was worth more than the coat and dress together.

  Not that her clothing should be her biggest concern at such a time. Then again, what thoughts should she be having, in a moment like this? She wondered, faster than the speed of light, about what was appropriate to consider in one’s last moments. A prayer? A wish? A bargain with whatever gods, saints, or angels might wait on the other side of the dark?

  “Oh, God,” she said. It meant nothing, but it was all she had.

  The engine surged—so no, it hadn’t stopped after all—and though a hard southwestern current shoved them into a lilting curve, the Black Dove righted itself. Maria’s stomach dropped back into its usual position, and Henry’s arms did not relax, but they quit fighting so hard.

  The sky fell quiet, and Maria’s ears popped from the shifting pressure of it all. But the thruster was definitely damaged, and the road stretched many miles before them. The CSA dirigible was nowhere in sight.

  “Do you think,” she began. It came out too hoarse and quiet, so she tried again—louder this time, and once more near Henry’s ear. “Do you think we can still make Atlanta in this thing?”

  He eyed the smoke dribbling from the thruster, and took a moment to listen to the ominous hiss. “I don’t know. But we shouldn’t have to make it all the way there, should we? We’re bound to catch up to them sooner than that.”

  “Right.” She nodded.

  “If not, we … we set it down beside the road and hunt for a couple of very fast horses.”

  “You think we’ll get the chance? To land, rather than crash?”

  “Oh, yes.” He nodded back at her. “Absolutely. It’s a steering problem, not a propulsion problem. Might land us in a field, or on top of somebody’s house, but I’ll land us.”

  “Good to know.” She patted his arm, breathing hard and trying to calm herself, with limited success. She scowled out across the skyline. “Now, where’s the other damn dirigible?”

  Seventeen

  “A plan?” Grant snorted. “She’s already planned a thousand years ahead of us. She picked a fight, and we must answer it—and answer it with greater speed and power than she expects. Frankly, she expects so little in the way of return fire that it shouldn’t be that hard to surprise her.”

  Gideon put his hands to his forehead as if it ached. “You’re right,” he admitted grudgingly. “But you’re also wrong. She has orchestrated this, and orchestrated it well—but we’re not so helpless as all that. After all, we’ve forced her to improvise.”

  “When? Where?” he asked, wracking his brain to think of a misstep the woman had made thus far.

  “The murders,” the colored man said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Maybe it was, but he didn’t need to be so insulting.

  “Well, yes. Those.” Grant felt a little silly for not having seen it, but he was still feeling the whole matter very keenly, very personally. Very guiltily, for the dead pawns—as she’d called them—had been captured on his behalf, and his fervor was fueled with an acute, painful awareness of it. He wrestled with the matter and came at it from another angle. “But maybe not: she’s tried to silence and discredit you before.”

  “She did nothing but inconvenience me. She’s very good, but she’s wrong as often as she’s right. If nothing else, her attempt to shut down my operation in the Jefferson drove me to proceed with a public undoing of her scheme.”

  Lincoln pondered this, and agreed. “She’s smart and ruthless, but she’s been sloppy with the details. She’s very dangerous, but we are dangerous too. Though we are few in number, we are capable of mustering a response. Hell,” he offered a rare curse, “we’ve done so already, as individuals. Banded together, we might successfully undo her.”

  “She’s only one woman, after all,” Nelson Wellers noted.

  But Gideon Bardsley shook his head. “She must have an army of mercenaries at her disposal. How else could she manage so many things at once? And you don’t believe for a second that she killed those people herself, do you?”

  “No, of course not. But where would she get such an army?” the doctor asked.

  Grant sighed. “Fowler could commandeer a few men for her, straight from the Union’s forces. Or some of those dratted Secret Service agents who follow me about unless I threaten to shoot them.”

  But Lincoln didn’t think so. “No, not our men. And not the Service, either. Not because they’re above such things, but because the evidence might wend its way across your desk. I think Gideon’s right: mercenaries, hired from elsewhere. Men like the Pinkertons, who’ve been accused of similar behavior—if you don’t mind me saying so, Dr. Wellers.”

  “Hard to argue with you,” he said graciously. “But these aren’t Pinks in her pocket right now; the head man would
n’t play us opposite one another.”

  “Then that other firm, the one in Virginia. What’s it called again?”

  He might’ve speculated further, but Polly knocked nervously on the doorjamb to get their attention. Grant was startled to see the windblown girl wringing her hands, her cap and clothing askew and a dead leaf stuck to her hair. She appeared on the verge of tears. “My dear, whatever is the matter?”

  “Some men are here,” she whispered with just enough volume to be heard throughout the library.

  Lincoln appeared puzzled. “I didn’t hear anyone knock…”

  “No, sir. I saw them coming up as I was outside closing the storm shutters. I asked them to wait on the stoop. I said I’d come and get you right away, but they must be patient because you’re not in your chair, so I’d have to help you.”

  “Good girl, Polly. What do they want?”

  Her eyes darted to Nelson Wellers. “Him,” she said. “They’re here to arrest him.”

  “Not me?” Gideon asked.

  The girl said, “They’ve already been here looking for you. They did ask again, but I told them you still hadn’t come back, and I didn’t know if you ever would. They said that was all right, and that they were here to arrest Dr. Wellers, since they believed he was present at the killings.”

  “What did you say to that?” Lincoln asked.

  “I said I couldn’t say for sure if he was hanging about, because I’d been doing laundry, then closing up the barn and the shutters. I said that if he was here, I hadn’t seen him.”

  “And these are police officers?” Grant asked, doubting it strongly.

  She hesitated, and said, “They said they’re officers, but … but I don’t think I believe them, sir. Something’s not right about them, and why would they want to arrest Dr. Wellers?”

  “They don’t,” he said. He clenched his jaw so tight that his cheeks looked hollow. “They want to kill me.”

  Her eyes widened. She looked to Lincoln for a denial, rebuttal, or explanation, but none was forthcoming. Gently, he told her, “You’ve done very well, Polly. Don’t worry about Dr. Wellers. I’ll see to these men momentarily. Wellers? Please help me into my chair. I founded that force, and it will answer to me.”