“There are rifles here?” Calvin perked up. “I’ve only ever heard of those.”
“Please, we have rotating guns and even cannons. If the Brit mages ever got it in their heads to storm this place, we’d cut down thousands of them. My Mom was a dead shot back in her day.” When Calvin frowned at the expression, she explained, “She hardly ever missed.”
“So your mother was a TechMan, but your father won’t let you be one?”
Amelia nodded and looked away. “She died. In battle.”
“I’m really sorry.”
Amelia traced a finger down the bars of the brig and shrugged one shoulder, trying to hide the hurt. “She rode on a gryphon mimic, that’s one of the two-man flying machines. They carry a pilot and a gunner, and she was the gunner. Her pilot was even Jack Badgett, can you believe that?”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Calvin admitted.
“Oh, that’s right. Guess that’s the point, though. Badgett, he’s a legend. He’s taken out fifty mages in flight, another fifty on the ground, he’s never been shot down, and he’s never lost a gunner. Well, he hadn’t anyway, until Mom went down a few years ago. A mage on a broomstick hit her in the neck with a curse, and it landed on a gap in her armor. She fell right off the gryphon. Badgett found her body in a swamp down the coast.” Amelia sniffed. “Dad says it was a one-in-a-million shot. We never caught the mage who cast the curse.”
“That’s really awful.” Calvin knew a pain in his chest, stirring up something deep inside him. He wanted to comfort her, though he had no idea what else to say.
Amelia shrugged again. “Dad made sure Badgett got demoted after that. He doesn’t fly gryphons anymore, just little dragonling mimics. One-man machines, those.” As if clearing her head, she blinked a few times and looked him in the eye. “Sorry, lost in thought there. I really should get going, I have other chores. Are you finished?”
Calvin looked down at the food tray. He’d eaten every scrap of it.
“Yeah. Thank you, again.”
“Don’t mention it—seriously, I’ll get in trouble. You were only supposed to have bread and water. The extra food was for standing up to Peter,” Amelia said, retrieving the canteen.
“My lips are sealed.”
“It was nice to meet you, Calvin.”
“And you, Amelia.”
She gave him a gentle smile and retreated up the steps. A shiver ran down the back of his neck, and Calvin suddenly felt ten pounds lighter.
Maybe he wouldn’t abandon Mount Vernon just yet.
*
Commodore McCracken was good for his word: Calvin had to make up the physical training that he’d missed while in the brig, all while still wearing the same filthy clothes from the day before. While Peter ran the main body of recruits, Brian cracked a whip on Calvin and pushed him ahead, making him run faster and swim farther than the others. Calvin noticed that the broken-legged man was gone. Stitch said the McCracken brothers had sent him to “another facility” for treatment. Calvin hoped that the man was okay.
After the running, the lumber-moving (where he carried logs by himself), and the swimming, he had another stint in the swine run. Calvin fixed Peter with a withering glare, but said nothing when Brian shoved him into the stampede and barked at him to run it four, five, six times. Calvin made it, staggering through the muck at the end of the sixth run, winded like he had never been before. All of this done before lunch, and he finished in good time. The McCrackens walked him back to the stables where he cleaned up in a horse trough, then joined the other recruits in the dormitory for a quick lunch of bread, milk and jerky.
That afternoon they started learning firearms. Brian and Peter explained the basic principles of a handgun, including the parts, how to clean them and how to load “rounds” into the revolving “cylinder.” Once they got that down, they learned how to load extra cylinders and clip them to their belts so that they could quickly replace a spent cylinder in combat. Calvin’s nimble fingers moved across the bits and pieces quickly, as he was used to fishing out small burrs and other debris from sheep’s wool. Stitch, Avery and Edsel were also pretty good at it. In fact, Edsel seemed to be good at pretty much everything.
When it came time for target practice, Calvin’s accuracy was lacking. Edsel hit the target three-quarters of the time, and out of those shots he got pretty close to the center. Calvin only hit it half the time, putting him in the lower quarter of the rankings. Even Rusty was better at it than he was.
That changed the next day when Peter and Brian upgraded the recruits from pistols to rifles. The rifles took the same preloaded cylinders as the pistols, and while they could fire handgun rounds, they were especially effective with rifle rounds. Cleaning the longer weapons took more time, and they also took longer to line up and fire, but there could be no mistaking the advantage of a rifle over a pistol: a bullet flew straighter from the barrel of a rifle, over a greater distance.
Edsel may have been better with the handguns but Calvin topped him and sixteen other cadets with the rifles, practicing on dummies wrapped in red cloaks and mounted three hundred paces away. Calvin enjoyed the incredulous look on Edsel’s face when he put five bullets through the target in a space no larger than a gold crown. Peter and Brian graded his performance, taking notes on sheets of paper that they kept hidden from the cadets. Calvin wondered what they said about him.
On the third day of firearms training, they upgraded to the heaviest gun of all: the blunderbuss. The tactics behind it were different from the handgun or the rifle. A blunderbuss was a weapon of sheer chaos. As Brian handed out cotton swabs for the recruits to plug their ears, Peter explained the new weapon to them.
“Flip this switch here. A hinge will expose the back of the barrel. Pack in a charge, a fiber cloth and a handful of pellets. Tighten this clamp here, close the hinge, set the hammer and flip the safety off.” Peter kept the barrel pointed skyward the whole time. Once everyone had their ears stopped with cotton, he turned the weapon on a wooden dummy and fired from the hip.
Flame and smoke spewed from the wide open mouth of the thick-looking shotgun. Instantly the dummy exploded in countless places, sending wooden splinters in all directions as multiple bean-sized pellets ripped into it with lethal force. Calvin’s jaw hit the ground.
“Whoever survives a shot from the blunderbuss will wish he hadn’t,” Peter said flatly.
Calvin tried to imagine using the different guns in different scenarios. The rifle would be ideal for picking off mages at a distance, perhaps even from a concealed position. The handgun would be quicker, better at close quarters, though he needed to improve his accuracy. As for the blunderbuss . . . that was less about shooting someone and more about making a statement. He couldn’t even imagine a mage’s shield spell repelling that much hot, fast-moving metal.
He and Stitch took turns loading, firing and cleaning the blunderbuss. By day’s end the cadets had ruined better than ten wooden dummies, their bodies pumped full of lead and steel.
Night fell. The cadets had dinner, chatted quietly in the dormitory, and drifted off to sleep to recover some of the strength they’d given up during the day’s exercises. Already it felt routine to Calvin, though a mere four days had passed since training began. He slept, and dreamed of many things.
Fighting mages.
Mother and Father.
Amelia.
*
The bucket of cold water didn’t shock him as badly on the fifth day. Like the others, Calvin had taken to sleeping in the fatigues that the McCrackens had issued, all the way down to his socks and boots. He rolled out of bed and darted outside to start running with the others. Six miles later they stopped, moved some heavy materials, took a mile swim and negotiated the swine run. Lathered in grime and sweating like a crook in court, Calvin dragged himself with his fellows to the stables, where Brian showed them how to handle and load clay-pot explosives
There was little technique to handheld grenades, even less than with the blunderbuss
: pack it, light the fuse, and throw it away like a poisonous snake before it could take your hand off. Calvin learned that the biggest problem was throwing it at the right time; chuck it too early and the pot might hit the ground before it exploded, scattering its contents and wasting their potency.
“Each of you, pack four grenades. Load your pistols, divide up the rifles and the blunderbusses, and take three hours of R&R,” Peter said. Calvin and Rusty, who had been packing grenades together, exchanged a confused look.
“We get the afternoon off?” asked Cohen, still sticking a fuse in his grenade.
“No, you’re getting your evening hours ahead of schedule. Tonight we will raid an Imperial supply farm,” Peter said. “Father told you that you would be doing so in a week, and this is that week.”
Calvin instinctively looked to Stitch, who had already met his gaze, and he could tell they had the same question.
“A full-on, armed raid?” Stitch asked.
“Is there a problem, cadet?” Brian said.
Avery said, “Shouldn’t we practice a little more?”
“You’ve been practicing non-stop for days. We’re of the opinion that cadets hit a wall at that point, and a raid makes it a little more real. Helps you get to the next level. Plus, food doesn’t exactly fall from the sky,” Brian said.
“Check your gear, get your rest, and be ready in three hours. Dismissed,” Peter said.
*
Calvin disembarked the shark submersible this time more steadily than he had when it first delivered him at Mount Vernon. With a blunderbuss in hand, he followed Brian’s silent lead. Bringing up the rear were Avery, Stitch, Rusty, and Lyla. Peter would pilot the submersible farther down the river, depositing Edsel, Cohen, and another band of cadets, until they could spread out and hit the farm from multiple points.
There was no moon tonight. Brian said this was a twofold blessing: it would be harder for the mages to see the TechMans, and any mage or mancer with lunar magic would be at his weakest. This was especially true of faunamancers, who drew on the moon to control the moods of animals. Calvin was glad for any advantage. No matter what he’d learned in the last week, he’d never done anything like this. The closer they came, the faster his heart thudded in his chest.
He could still do this, right?
Stitch and Rusty dragged a four-wheeled handcart behind them, still dripping from the trip down the river. As the shark mimic was too limited on interior space, they had strapped it to the submersible’s roof. Peter had parked the shark in reedy shallows, and in the effort to get the handcart on solid ground, it had fallen into the river, dislodging the axle on one side. Calvin couldn’t help looking over his shoulder every time it squeaked or protested.
A British farm loomed a hundred yards away. As much as he wanted to have faith in the blunderbuss, a lifetime’s experience with the mages couldn’t be washed away after just five days of training. He wanted every angle covered.
“How many cows are we taking?” Calvin whispered to Brian.
“None; they’ll serve another purpose. Look, up ahead at the mages’ storehouse. We haven’t hit this farm in over a year, so they won’t expect us. Stitch, Rusty, take the cart over to the house. Avery and Lyla, provide cover for them. If you see a mage, shoot. Empty the cylinder—most of them wear shield spells, and it will take more than one shot,” Brian said. “Calvin, you’re with me. Move!”
They had scarcely taken five steps when a barrage of explosions perhaps a quarter-mile away lit up the pitch black night. Immediately there followed a thunder of hooves and a chorus of angry cattle.
“Damn, they’re ahead of schedule,” Brian said in a louder voice, abandoning all caution. “Rusty, Stitch, get going!” He plucked a grenade from his hip, lit the fuse with a flint switch, and hurled the bomb into the stampede. It rocked the ground and the herd steered away from the barn and ran for the sleeping quarters where the mages stayed.
Calvin kept his grip tight on the blunderbuss. His job was to protect Brian—if the cattle needed to be steered away from them, he could fire the blunderbuss faster than Brian could direct another grenade. Thirty seconds crawled by like an hour, and Calvin’s eyes never left the windows of the mages’ quarters, wondering when they would engage the technomancers.
“Hey!” Brian shouted, taking the blunderbuss and thrusting something into Calvin’s hand. “Pay attention!”
“What?” Calvin asked. Brian had given him a large, sheathed knife, and was pointing over by the barn at Lyla, who had her hands cupped around her mouth.
“The door is locked with magic!” she shouted.
Stitch, Rusty and Avery were firing at the mages, who had started pouring out of their sleeping quarters, wands in hand.
“Stab the lock with that knife. Go!” Brian hurled another grenade, took up the blunderbuss and fired it over the cattle at the mages. Voices cried out in pain over the mooing livestock.
And then Calvin was running full-out toward Lyla, squinting in what weak light was cast from the farmhouse windows. A large metal padlock glinted on the door and he reached for it, but it swung to the side, evading his grip. Twice more he tried and failed, understanding what Lyla meant by locked with magic. He simply couldn’t touch the thing. He unsheathed Brian’s knife, aimed at the padlock and stabbed. This time it held perfectly still until the blade contacted it, and then it simply disappeared, an illusion destroyed by the touch of the knife.
Stunned, Calvin turned the knife over. “What’s this thing made of?”
Lyla shouldered him aside and pried the doors apart. Stitch and Rusty pushed the cart inside, and they went about filling it with whatever they could grab. By the time they were pulling out, Brian had worked his way over to the barn. He tossed the spent blunderbuss to Calvin, who deftly reloaded it on the run as Brian and Avery covered their retreat. The mages were busy casting what weak spells they could conjure to keep the cows from plunging into the woods, lest they be picked off by bears or large predator cats.
Elsewhere on the grounds, red flares shot into the air, sizzling and fading after soaring to great heights. That was the retreat signal from Peter’s group.
“To the shore! Move, move!” Brian brought up the rear. He was looking the other way when a mage on a flying carpet came up behind him, wand raised, a half-uttered curse on his lips. Brian didn’t see him, but Calvin did.
All conscious thought abandoned him. He had nothing inside but the urge to protect his comrade and deter his enemy. For this, there was only one thing he could do.
“Get down!” Calvin pointed the blunderbuss at the mage. Brian obediently ducked as Calvin darted forward, leaping over Brian’s prostrate form. Squinting in anticipation of the flash, Calvin crushed the trigger.
In the split-second of muzzle flare he saw a look of fury and disbelief on the mage’s face. The force of the blast took the mage off his feet as a handful of grapeshot ripped into his robes. Calvin felt, rather than heard, the man’s heavy body hit the ground. The carpet lost all momentum and landed in a heap of stiff fibers.
All was still.
He had just taken out a mage.
Hands seized his arms, and he heard words through the sharp ringing in his ears—Brian was telling him to run, to get back to the mimic. Calvin ran, accustomed now to obeying the militant McCracken brother. The shock would catch up later.
For now, all he felt was the rush of victory, and he wondered how the first Revolution might have ended if George Washington’s men had possessed weapons like this.
~
CHAPTER 5
The weight of firing his blunderbuss directly into a mage would not leave Calvin’s conscience anytime soon. He tried to remember all of the bad things that Fitznottingham and Birtwistle had done to his friends and family, but that didn’t help. The mage Calvin shot was not Fitznottingham or Birtwistle. He was somebody Calvin did not know, and yet . . .
Back at the dormitory, the recruits were bustling with tales of triumph, comparing stories with
one another. Calvin quietly confided his concerns to Stitch, who’d already been through one traumatic plight on a farm.
“Yeah, it’s a weighty thing, to know you’ve killed a man. I don’t know what else you could have done, if he was going for Brian,” Stitch said.
“It’s not like it would have been some great loss,” Calvin grumbled.
“One less McCracken, right?” Stitch said.
“Right,” Calvin smiled. “Dime a dozen around here.”
He wondered if Amelia had thought of him today.
*
If Brian McCracken felt any gratitude toward Calvin for dropping that mage, he had a funny way of showing it.
Training for that morning had been cut short after the swim session. Peter took the other recruits back to the stables to clean the equipment, but Brian put Calvin in charge of stocking the supplies they had stolen from the British farm. Not only was Rusty and Stitch’s cart full, but two others besides, and the pantry where they stored their goods was meticulously organized.
“Keep it this way, everything straight and orderly,” Brian said, after showing Calvin around. “Hop to it, kid.”
We’re the same age, Calvin thought, fuming. He ached to be outside with his fellow cadets. Instead he had to catalog grains and beans by weight, scribble the numbers into a ledger, and pack it all into cans. How this would help him fight the British Empire, he could not see. Part of him suspected that Brian was jealous of Calvin for hurting a mage, while all he’d done was throw bombs at cows. Maybe Brian wanted the other cadets to get better at technomancy than Calvin.
“Brian, I—oh.”
Calvin nearly dropped a ten-pound can of dried corn on his toes. Amelia stood in the entryway to the pantry, her hair double-braided again, her skirt and blouse partially covered by an apron that was smudged from the day’s work.
“Um, hello, Amelia,” he said. His face felt hot.
Rebel Heart Page 5
