Ernie’s head popped back out, splitting the curtains. His shoulders and torso followed, and his right hand appeared toting a cluster of strangely shaped lanterns that glowed like lightning bugs. Their gleam cast a yellow green glow around the cabin, not so bright that it could be seen from the ground, surely.
The old woman said crossly, “Those things don’t have near enough light. They’ll never reveal our sign from the field.”
But Ernie said, “Ma’am, they’re turned down low, on purpose. For now. I’ll spark them up when I get outside-and they’ll stay real bright for four or five minutes. They run on an electrical charge, and a static liquid on a set of filaments,” he explained, as if anyone present had the faintest clue what it meant. “When I flip the switch, it’ll light up the whole damn sky, plenty enough for the Rebs to spy us and let us down. Captain,” he said as he changed direction, “get us as far behind our own lines as you can, sir.”
Mercy fidgeted with the seat back in front of her. “Is there anything we can do to help?” she finally asked.
She could hardly see Ernie’s face, even in the ambient ooze of the lanterns.
He said, “No ma’am. Just hold on tight, I’ll take care of this. Or I’ll do the best I can, anyhow.”
“Ernest,” the captain said, making some token attempt to stop him or sway him. But he had nothing else to add, so he turned his attention forward. The dirigible swayed again, making Mercy wonder if he could see some of the threat as it fired up at them through the sky. “Ernest,” he finally finished. “Be careful out there. What are you wearing?”
“Sir?”
“Wearing-,” he said again, and looked very fast over his shoulder. “I see. You’re sporting your grays. Throw on something darker. Robert, give him your jacket. Yours is black, isn’t it?”
“Yes sir,” said the other crewman. He pulled it off and tossed it to Ernie, who set the lamps down only long enough to don it.
Ernie nodded his thanks and retrieved the lamps, then mounted a ladder that Mercy hadn’t seen until just that moment. He leaped up it like a small boy scaling an oak. She’d never seen a man climb like that before, as if he were born in a tree.
He was gone, his feet disappearing up a hatch.
Another strip of rounds banged against the ship’s underside, casting a horrible noise into the otherwise stone-silent cabin. Mercy leaned against the window and tried to keep from looking out at the blackness and height that horrified her whether she admitted it or not. Consumed by feelings of uselessness and doubt, she clung to the edge of the seat in front of her.
Above and beyond, she could hear Ernie climbing, scuttling out some portal in the hull and balancing-she could hear it, or imagine it, the way he stood and gripped and held his breath to keep his angles upright-then half-slipping, half-crawling along the exterior. She could hear the way his hands and feet found handholds and footholds, and the stomp of the toe of his boots hitting horizontally against the hull. She tracked it.
Around. Sideways. Down. Over. Down some more.
Soon he was underneath them, holding on to God knew what.
Under her feet she could feel him, swinging like a monkey from hook to hook, or metallic outcropping to outcropping. The ship ticked, ever so slightly, left to right and forward and back. Ernie wasn’t a heavy man-Mercy thought maybe he was 150 pounds, soaking wet with rocks in his pockets-but his gravity was enough to change the flow of the dirigible’s progress, and the passengers could feel the faint jerk to the flow through the floor at their feet. It was the tapping pull of his body, slinging from point to point.
Every once in a while, despite the dimming of the lights and the silence of the folks within, a stray antiaircraft bullet dazzled the darkness with a shattering spray of sparks and sound. It was only by luck, all of them knew, that nothing hit harder, or penetrated the hull underneath.
All it would take, Mercy anxiously believed, was one round that entered the cabin and proceeded farther, up into the hydrogen tanks above. One round, and it was over; all of them were burning, and the ship was falling. One round would change everything with its precision, or its blind chance.
Underneath them, Ernie was swinging above the earth, hanging from his hands and firing up lanterns to show the Confederacy that this transport was not intended for target practice, but at the same time drawing the attention and fire of anyone within range.
Mercy lifted her head and asked the captain, “Sir, are we behind southern lines?”
“I think so,” he told her without looking at her. “It’s hard to tell down there. Very hard to tell. And if the Union has any antiaircraft power on its side, it might not matter. We might still be in range. Goddammit, Ernest,” he said with a growl.
As if in reply, three sharp raps banged against the outer hull-not shots, but knocks from a human fist.
Gordon Rand asked, “What does that mean?”
The captain answered, “That he’s done and coming back, I assume. Robert, poke your head out and see if you can help him.”
“You think he needs help?” The second crewman fidgeted over by the ladder.
“Three raps might mean help, or hurry, or go to hell, for all I know. Just check!”
Robert attempted to follow orders, scaling the ladder not quite so smoothly as Ernie. He reached the top just in time to hear another spray of fire, a wildcat’s yowl of tearing sheet metal. “What was that?” he demanded. No one answered him.
Everyone knew exactly as much as he did-that they’d been hit again, though heaven knew where or how badly. And then the captain knew, and probably the first mate also, for both of them made unhappy noises and yanked at the controls. Finally the first mate wanted to know, “What have we lost?” and the captain said back, “One of the rudders. Let’s just pray we’re over our own lines now, because there’s no way we’re doing anymore turning, unless it’s in circles.”
Above her head and to the right, Mercy heard Robert call, “Ernie! Where you at? You need a hand?”
Mercy joined the rest of the passengers in listening, perched on the very edge of their seats, breathing shallowly while waiting for a response. None came.
Robert called again: “Ernie? You out there?” His phrasing raised the possibility that he wasn’t out there, that he’d fallen or been picked off by the puncturing line of fire.
But then, to everyone’s relief, they heard the faint scrape of boots against steel, and Ernie called back, “I’m still here. Hold on.” Then they all heard more scuttling. “Getting down is easier than getting up.”
When Robert helped pull him back inside, everyone could see precisely why. His left hand was covered in blood, and the sailor-turned-dirigible-crewman was as pale as death in the unlit cabin. He announced, “One of the lanterns busted in my hand while I was trying to hang it. But the other two are up and holding. I placed ’em by the ‘civilian’ end of the sign. That’s where the CSA logo is tamped on, anyway. Hopefully they’ll see it all right.”
“It might’ve worked,” Gordon Rand posited. “No one’s shooting at us. Not right this second.”
The first mate said, “Maybe someone’s planning to make the next shot count. Or maybe they can’t see the paint job yet and they’re trying to get a good look.”
Rand added, “Or perhaps they’re slow readers.”
Mercy was out of her chair now, invigorated by the prospect of having something to do. She told Ernie, “Come sit over here, by me. And give me your hand.”
He joined her at her seat and sat patiently while she rummaged through her sack.
“Everybody hang on to something. We’re losing altitude,” the first mate announced.
The captain amended the announcement to include, “We’re going down, but we aren’t crashing. Brace yourselves as you can, but I repeat, we are not crashing. The steering’s all but gone out, that’s all, so I can raise or lower us, but not point us in any direction.”
“Are we behind southern lines?” someone other than Mercy asked, but
she didn’t see who’d raised the question again.
“Yes,” the captain’s tone of certainty was an outright lie, but he stuck to it. “We’re just setting down, but we might take a tree or two with us. Estimated time to landing, maybe two or three minutes-I’ve got to take her down swift, because we’re drifting back the other way.”
“Oh, God,” said the old lady.
“Don’t holler for him yet,” Mercy muttered. “It might not be as bad as all that. Ernie, let me see your hand.”
“We’ve only got a couple of minutes-”
“I only need a couple of minutes. Now hold still and let me look.” By then, she’d found her bandage rolls. She tore off a portion of one, and used it to wipe the area clear enough to see it better. It wasn’t all cuts, and it wasn’t all burns. In the very dim light that squeezed in through the windows, she could see it was a blending of both. Mercy would’ve bet against him ever having proper use of his mangled index finger again; but the wound wouldn’t be a killing one unless it took to festering.
“How bad is it?” he asked her, both too nervous too look, and too nervous to look away. He blinked, holding his head away so he couldn’t be accused of watching.
“Not so bad. Must hurt like the dickens, though. I need to wash it and wrap it up.”
“We only have-”
“Hold it up, above your shoulder. It’ll bleed slower and hurt less that way,” she urged, and dived back into the bag. Seconds later, she retrieved a heavy glass bottle filled with a viscous clear liquid that glimmered in the moonlight and the feeble glow from the lanterns outside.
He said, “We’re going down. We’re really going down.”
He was looking out the window beside her head. She could see it, too-the way the clouds were spilling past. She tried to ignore them, and to ignore the throat-catching drop of the craft.
“Don’t look out there. Look at me,” she commanded. Meeting his eyes she saw his fear, and his pain, and the way he was so pallid from the injury or the stress of acquiring it. But she held his eyes anyway, until she had to take his hand and swab it off with a dampened bandage.
The Zephyr was not falling, exactly. But Mercy could not in good conscience say that it was “landing” either. Her stomach was up in her mouth, nearly in her ears, she thought; and her ears were popping every time she swallowed. If she didn’t concentrate on something else, she’d start screaming, so she focused on the bleeding, burned hand as she cleaned it, then propped Ernie’s elbow on the headrest to keep it upright while she fumbled for dry bandages.
The old man leaned forward and threw up on the floor. His wife patted at his back, then felt around for any bags or rags to contain or clean it. Finding none, and lacking anything better to do, she returned to the back-patting. Mercy couldn’t help them, so she stayed with Ernie, wrapping his still-bleeding hand and doing it swiftly, as if she’d been mummifying hands for her whole life. She did it like the world was ending at any minute, because for all she knew, it might be.
But things could be worse. No one was shooting at them.
She told Ernie, “Hold it above your heart and it won’t throb so bad. Did I tell you that already?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Well, keep doing it.” She gasped then as the ship gave a lurch and a heave as if its own stomach were sinking and rising. The captain told everyone to “Hang on to something!” but there was no something handy except for the seat.
Ernie went for chivalry, flinging his right arm over Mercy’s shoulder and pulling her under his chest; she ducked there, and wrapped her left arm around his waist. She closed her eyes so she couldn’t see the ground rearing up out the window, not even out of her peripheral vision.
The next phase was not as sudden as she’d expected. It sneaked up on her, taking her breath away as the Zephyr sliced through treetops that dragged it to a slower pace, then snagged it and pulled it down to the ground with a horrible rending of metal and rivets. The ship sagged, and dipped, and bounced softly. No one inside it moved.
“Is it-?” asked the old woman whose name Mercy still didn’t know. “Are we-?”
“No!” barked the captain. “Wait! A little-”
Mercy thought he might’ve been about to say farther, because something snapped, and the craft dropped about fifteen feet to land on the ground like a stone.
Though it jarred, and made Mercy bite her tongue and somehow twist her elbow funny, the finality of the settled craft was a relief-if only for a minute. The ship’s angle was all wrong, having landed on its belly without a tethering distance. From this position, they lacked the standard means of opening the ship to let them all go free. A moment of claustrophobic horror nearly brought tears to Mercy’s eyes.
Then she heard the voices outside, calling and knocking; and the voices rode with accents that came from close to home.
Someone was beating against the hull, and asking, “Is everybody all right in there? Hey, can anybody hear me?”
The captain shouted back, “Yes! I can hear you! And I think everyone is . . .” He unstrapped himself from his seat-the only seats with straps were in the cockpit-and looked around the cabin. “I think everyone is all right.”
“This a civvy ship?” asked another voice.
“Says so right on the bottom. Didn’t you see it coming down?”
“No, I didn’t. And I can’t read, nohow.”
Their banal chatter cheered Mercy greatly, purely because it sounded normal-like normal conversation that normal people might have following an accident. It took her a few seconds to realize that she could hear gunfire in the not-very-distant distance.
She disentangled herself from Ernie, who was panting as if he’d run all the way from the clouds to the ground. She nudged him aside and half stepped, half toppled out of her seat, bringing her bags with her. The crewman came behind, joining the rest of the passengers who were trying to stand in the canted aisle.
“There’s an access port, on top!” the captain said to his windshield.
That’s when Mercy saw the man they were speaking to outside, holding a lantern and squinting to see inside. He was blond under his smushed gray hat, and his face was covered either in shadows or gunpowder. He tapped one finger against the windshield and said, “Tell me where it is.”
The captain gestured, since he knew he was being watched. “We can open it from inside, but we’ve got a couple of women on board, and some older folks. We’re going to need some help getting everyone down to the ground.”
“I don’t need any help,” Mercy assured him, but he wasn’t listening, and no one else was, either.
Robert was already on his way up the ladder that he and Ernie had both scaled earlier, though he dangled from it strangely, so tilted was the ship’s interior. He wrapped his legs around the rungs and used one hand to crank the latch, then shoved the portal out. It flopped and clanged, and was still. Robert kept his legs cinched around the ladder and braced himself that way, so he could work his arms free.
He reached down to the passengers and said, “Let’s go. Let’s send some people up and over. You. English fella. You first.”
“Why me first?”
“Because you ain’t hurt, and you can help catch the rest. And Ernie’s got his hand all tore up.”
“Fine,” Gordon Rand relented, and began the tricky work of climbing a ladder that leaned out over his head. But he was game for it, and more nimble than the tailored foreign clothes let on. Soon he was out through the portal and standing atop the Zephyr, then sliding down its side, down to the ground.
Mercy heard him land with a plop and a curse, but he followed through by saying to someone, “That wasn’t so bad.”
That someone asked, “How many are there inside?”
“The captain, the copilot, and half a dozen passengers and crew. Not too many.”
“All right. Let’s get them down, and out.”
Someone else added, “And out of here. Bugle and tap says the line’s shifting. Every
body’s got to move-we might even be in for a retreat to Fort Chattanooga.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“I’m serious enough. That’s what the corporal told me, anyway.”
“When?”
“Just now.”
“Son of a bitch. They’re right on top of us!”
Mercy wished she could see the speakers, but she could see only the frightened faces of her fellow passengers. No one was moving yet; even Robert was listening to the gossip outside. So she took it upon herself to move things along.
“Ma’am? Sir?” she said to the older couple. “Let’s get you up out of here next.”
The woman looked like maybe she wanted to argue, but she didn’t. She nodded and said, “You’re right. We’ll be moving slowest, wherever we go, or however we get there. Come along, dear.”
Her dear said, “Where are we going?”
“Out, love.” She looked around. “I can make it up on my own, but he’ll need some assistance. Captain? Or Mr. . . . Mr. First Mate?”
“Copilot,” he corrected her as he climbed into the cabin. “I’d be happy to help.”
Together they wrested and wrangled the somewhat reluctant old man and his insistent wife up the concave ladder and out the hatch. Then went the clubfooted student; and then Ernie, with a little help from Robert; and then Mercy, who couldn’t get off the thing fast enough. Finally, the other student and the rest of the crew members extracted themselves, leaving the Zephyr an empty metal balloon lying tipped and steaming on the ground.
Five
A message had come and gone to someone, somewhere, and two more gray-uniformed men came running up to the group, leading a pair of stamping, snorting horses and a cart. The man holding the nearest horse’s lead said to the group, “Everyone on board. Line’s shifting. Everybody’s got to go while the going’s good.”
“Where are we going?” demanded Gordon Rand even as he hastened to follow instructions.
He was helping the elderly woman up the back gate and into the makeshift carriage when the second newcomer replied. “Fort Chattanooga.”
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