Ganymede tcc-4

by Cherie Priest

  Gaudy, she’d called it once. But she’d never replaced it.

  Behind this desk sat an attractive colored woman with a curvy body and kind eyes. She wore a beautiful blue dress in some high style that hadn’t yet made it to the West Coast, and when she gracefully rose to meet Andan Cly, the tiny bells sewn into her sleeves made a delicate tinkling sound. Ruthie introduced them by declaring, “Captain Cly, Hazel Bushrod.” And in French she said, “Hazel, this is the airman Josephine sent for.”

  Hazel ducked her head in a discreet bow, and said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir. I’m sorry Miss Early isn’t here right now, but I hope I can help you all the same.”

  “Miss … Bushrod? Is that right?”

  “Yes, and no, I didn’t make it up or acquire it on the job,” she said, the kindness in her eyes hardening briefly into something else. “It was my father’s name, and now it’s mine. And if you have anything further you’d like to say—”

  “No, no, ma’am. It’s an unusual name, that’s all. I’ve never heard it before.”

  “Well, now you have. And if we’re finished with the subject, I’d like to invite you to pull up a seat.” She sat back down, her skirts and those tiny silver bells conspiring to make music. She crossed her legs beneath the desk, unleashing a new round of rustling, and the rubbing together of fabrics and thighs.

  Ruthie pulled up one of the striped chairs and offered it to Cly, who sat gingerly upon it. Then she drew up the second one and positioned it beside Hazel’s, so that the captain could not escape the feeling he was about to be interrogated, quizzed, or possibly sentenced.

  He didn’t recognize either of these women. They hadn’t been with Josephine back in the old days, which stood to reason, given that neither of them appeared to be older than her mid-twenties. A decade before, they would’ve been young for such a life, by Josephine’s business standards.

  Cly shifted in his seat, attempting to get comfortable without damaging the furniture, which looked delicate on the surface but bore his weight without creaking. “I suppose Josephine told you, she called me here about a job.”

  Hazel said, “How much did she tell you about it?”

  “Almost nothing. She wants me to fly something from the lake to the Gulf.”

  “Did she say what she wanted you to fly?”

  “No.”

  “And did you think it was strange?” she asked, reaching into a drawer and withdrawing a collection of papers without taking her eyes off the captain.

  “I did,” he admitted. “But I needed to make a big supply run for my town anyway. And say what you will about Texians — I’m sure they’re none too popular in this house — but they know their way around a machine shop. And I need one, because I’m having some work done on my own bird.”

  Ruthie and Hazel considered this response and exchanged the kind of gaze that old friends can sometimes share — squeezing a whole conversation into an instant’s worth of facial tics, blinks, and small frowns. When the moment had passed, Ruthie rose from her seat and went to shut the door. Then she returned to her position beside Hazel, and the pair of them turned their full and absolute attention upon Cly, who could scarcely recall having felt so uncomfortable in his life.

  “I get the feeling this is trickier than I thought. Stranger than I thought.”

  Hazel said, “Miss Early told us you weren’t stupid, and so far, so good. Yes, what we have to tell you — what we have to ask you — is tricky and strange, and I want you to understand how much danger you could put us in, simply with one wrong word.”

  “Danger? For you?”

  “For us,” Ruthie said. “For the Garden Court. For Josephine.”

  Hazel folded her hands on the desk and said, “Dangerous for you, too, once we tell you everything. So first I must ask, and I expect you to answer me truthfully: Have you now, or have you ever, owed any loyalty to the Republic of Texas or to the Confederate States of America?”

  Easily, he responded, “No. Nor the Union, either, if you want to get precise about it. I was born on the Oregon Trail, somewhere east of Portland. I’ve been a merchant by trade most of my life, and it’s been worth my time to keep from making enemies.”

  Ruthie snorted, and Hazel said, “A merchant? Josephine said you were a pirate.”

  “Same thing, in a way. I’ve run plenty of goods that weren’t good for anyone. But I’m trying to leave that life behind me now. That’s one reason I’m here in the city, getting my bird refitted up in Metairie.”

  Hazel asked, “Why would you leave pirating? The only money anybody has anymore comes from working while the law isn’t looking. We know that better than anyone, don’t we, Ruthie?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Ladies,” he said, opening his hands as if to entreat them. “Josephine and me, we have birthdays only a week apart — and I want to settle down while I’ve still got the life in me to enjoy retirement. But whatever Josie wants, I’m prepared to help her out — even if it’s something that we don’t want the law looking at, since that’s what you’re implying. I told her I’d fly for her, and I will. But you have to tell me what’s really going on, and what Texas and the Rebs have to do with it. Is this a military thing? You want me to sneak something out past the forts?”

  “Yes,” Hazel said bluntly. “That’s precisely what we want. We have a craft out at Lake Pontchartrain, and we need to bring it out to the Gulf of Mexico—into it, past the edge of the delta and then some — and deliver it to Admiral Herman Partridge aboard the Union airship carrier Valiant.”

  “An airship carrier? I’ve heard of those, but never seen one. Fairly new to the war, ain’t they?”

  “Fairly new. Very big ships,” Hazel said in a rush. “But if you chose to accept Josephine’s mission, you won’t be flying an airship.”

  A hush descended on the room as Andan Cly struggled to figure out what on earth these women could possibly mean, and the women teetered on the brink of spilling everything, unsure whether they could trust him. Ruthie cracked first. She blurted to Hazel, “Just tell him! Or ask him, and then we will know whether to shoot him or pay him, eh?”

  “Shoot me?” he asked.

  Hazel took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and opened them again. “Captain, please understand — we are asking you to participate in smuggling something the likes of which you’ve never smuggled before. And the entirety of the Confederacy and the Republic of Texas will be stacked against you.”

  “Must be important.”

  “Very,” she told him gravely. “We are not talking about an airship. We are talking about a war machine with the power to enforce the broken naval blockade. A machine that can choke off the ocean supplies, and perhaps the river supplies … and in time, the whole South. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “You’re telling me you want me to spy for the Union, here inside a Southern city controlled by the South’s number one ally. You’re telling me I’ll be risking my neck to take the case, and you’re risking your own necks to describe it.”

  “Sums it up rather nicely,” Hazel agreed. “So what do you say?”

  After half a dozen seconds of silence, he told her, “I suppose the war’s got to end one day, one way or another. And all things being equal, I’d rather it gets won by the Federals. I can’t much rally for any government that’ll call a man a piece of property. So if you’re asking if I can keep my mouth shut and do the job, I’m telling you I can.”

  “Are you sure?” Ruthie asked, hope in her lovely face, but also fear.

  “Yeah, I’m sure. If Josephine thought it was important enough to bring me here, then it must be a job worth doing. But I do want to know, before we come to any formal arrangement: What do you mean, it’s a war machine, but not an airship? I’ve never flown anything but an airship. Is this some special kind of warbird? I’ve seen a few armored crafts, including a big one a buddy of mine stole from a base in Macon … but you’re going to have to be more specific.”

  Haz
el smiled. It was a worried smile, and it trembled around the edges — but it was a smile that had come to a decision and was prepared to dive on in. “Captain Cly, if it’s specifics you want, it’s specifics you’ll get.” She sorted through the loose papers on Josephine’s desk and selected a few she wanted, then pushed them toward Andan Cly — who scooted his chair closer for a better look. “These are … schematics,” he observed. “For something I’m not sure I understand.”

  Ruthie nodded, encouraged by his initial grasp of the matter, if not the depth of his knowledge. “They are old designs. For a machine.”

  Hazel picked up a newspaper clipping and turned it around so that it faced the captain right side up. “Horace Lawson Hunley,” he read from the caption beneath a line drawing of a mustachioed man striking a dashing pose.

  Hazel said, “Hunley was a Tennessean by birth, but his family brought him to New Orleans as a child, and this is where he did most of his work. He was a marine engineer, and those schematics you’re holding are engineer’s drawings for his first successful machine.”

  “If you could call it successful,” Ruthie mumbled.

  “It did drown a few people,” Hazel confirmed. “But ultimately, it worked.”

  “Worked at what?” he asked.

  “It sailed underwater.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Hazel said, “You heard me. The Pioneer was a tube designed to hold men and move them underwater, by the use of these hand-cranks and whatnot, as if they were in the belly of a shark. It was a flawed design, put together with the help of these two men — James McClintock and Baxter Watson.” She pushed forward another clipping with a pair of portraits. “The first sailors drowned, or nearly drowned, when the Pioneer sank in Mobile Bay. The folks who tried to pilot the next version of the craft, the Bayou St. John, didn’t fare too much better.”

  Ruthie spelled it out. “They drowned, too.”

  “You’d think this Hunley fellow would’ve had a hard time finding crew members after a while.”

  “He did, but there are always eager young men who want to be in a history book. Besides, the Confederacy was willing to pay big money to fellows who’d try it out. Imagine it, would you? A boat that sails underwater, loaded up with explosive charges and contact fuses, sneaking up on ships and blowing them to pieces without ever being seen … then slipping away and doing it again.”

  Cly stared down at the papers. “I can imagine it.”

  “A few years and a few more dollars later, Hunley made himself a new model — which he named for himself. The Hunley did better than his earlier boats, which is to say that it drowned only five men on its first run, and eight on its next — including Hunley himself, who was riding on board. But his old partners, McClintock and Watson, they kept on working, kept on designing. Kept on building,” she added quietly.

  Ruthie selected a folded sheet of paper. She unfolded it and handed it to Andan Cly.

  It depicted the interior workings of a ship, but not one like anything he’d ever seen before. It looked like fiction, there in his hands.

  These lines showing gears, and valves, and portals; these careful engineering sketches showing bolts, and curved walls, and compartments for flooding or pumping; these enormous rooms that seated six to eight, with side and bottom holds for ammunition — and tubular sleeves for explosives and fuses.

  He did not look up from the schematics when Hazel began talking again, but he listened to her as he perused the pictures with wonder.

  “Then McClintock caught Watson red-handed, with telegrams and instructions from the Union army. Whether Watson was a double agent all along, or he simply wanted the bigger payday from the bigger army, no one knows. But he was all set to sell their research to the North, and McClintock wouldn’t have it. They fought, and Watson shot McClintock through the heart before trying to flee inside the vessel he’d helped create.

  “But Watson was a designer, not a skipper. He understood the mechanics of the beast, but not the nuance of making it sail — even if that were a task a single man could accomplish. The ship sank halfway across Pontchartrain. Watson drowned.

  “But his message had already gone back to the Union engineers, who knew the craft existed. They came to investigate — only to be caught by the Texians, who were also looking for the ship.”

  “How did Texas know about it?”

  Hazel nodded approvingly, as if this was a good question. “It had been made with Texian technology, and Texian machinists, so they knew it was out there somewhere. They didn’t find, it, though.”

  “And your people did?”

  Both of the women smiled, identically and in perfect time with each other. Hazel continued. “It took three weeks of looking, but the ship was found and lifted by a group of guerrillas in the bayou … the free men of color who fight Texas and the Confederacy from the shadows. They hauled it to a different shore and hid it there, where it remains now — waiting for the right man or men to take it all the way to the ocean, where it was always meant to go. And that, Captain Cly, is the story of the Ganymede.”

  Cly finally looked up from the intricate engineering sketches. He looked each woman in the eye and said, “You want me to fly a ship underwater.”

  “Once we can man-haul it to the river, yes. The Mississippi is deep enough to take it, and once you’re in the river, you’ll have slip past Fort Jackson and Fort Saint Philip. From there, it’ll be smooth sailing straight out into the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “In a ship that’s drowned … how many men?”

  “Ganymede? Oh, hardly any,” Hazel dismissed his concern hastily, and with a wave of her hand. “Only Mr. McClintock, so far as we know. As you can see from those plans, Ganymede is a much stronger design — a much better ship than the ones that came before. Learning how to create a ship like her … it was costly, yes. But the end result is this majestic creation. And it will end a war, Captain.”

  Ruthie rose and left her chair, approaching Cly and crouching beside him. With her elegantly gloved hands, she called his attention to various highlights on the schematics that sat across his lap.

  “Right here, you see? This is the steering mechanism, and the power system for the propellers. They were designed like thrusters on an airship.”

  “I see that, sure. But there’s no hydrogen to keep steady. No gas to maintain, or to power the thrust.”

  “But of course there is gas, monsieur! The gas is the air you breathe. It is pumped and cycled, through these vents here, by this tube. If the men breathe the same air too long, it makes them sick. They faint, and they die.”

  Hazel confirmed, “That’s one of the hard lessons learned from the Bayou St. John and the Hunley. The men inside must have fresh air, drawn down regularly. The air within the cabin cannot support them forever.”

  “So this—” He jabbed a finger at one long set of pipes, and drew it along the lines. “—these pipes don’t stay above water, not all the time? So you don’t have to keep this breathing tube up above the surface?” It reminded him of Seattle, of the system that likewise drew fresh breathing air down underneath an inhospitable surface. They did it the same way, essentially. Tubes bringing in the fresh air for four to eight hours a day, always keeping it moving, never giving it time to grow stale.

  Ruthie nodded. “The tubes do not stay up. You can close them from within, like this.” She indicated a rubber-sealed flap that was manipulated by a hydraulic pulley. “There is one main breathing tube, with fans to draw down the air — and an emergency tube in case the one should fail. But they can both be shut so that the ship can sink and hide.”

  “For how long?” he asked.

  The ladies paused, but Hazel replied. “We’re not certain. Twenty or thirty minutes, at least.”

  “So really, it’s a ship that can hold its breath for half an hour at a time.”

  “Yes!” Ruthie rose to her feet and clapped. “You see? Josephine said he would understand. She said we needed an airman, and she was right!�
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  “But what about the original crew? You said it’s been tested, out on the lake. Where are the guys who know how to pilot this thing already?”

  Hazel handed him another sheet with a different angle on the Ganymede’s inner workings and said, “Most of them were captured. Two men were sent off to a prisoner-of-war camp in Georgia, and three were sent to the barracks here, but escaped and went back to New England. And the man in charge was shot for treason.”

  “Treason?”

  “He was from Baton Rouge — a Confederate deserter who’d come to work with the bayou boys. Name was Roger Lisk, may he rest in peace.” Hazel leaned forward, restlessly arranging and rearranging the remaining documents. “Without the crew, and without the men who created it, the Ganymede is a big hunk of metal full of potential … but precious little more than that. The bayou boys have all the information — all these schematics, and instructions. But they’re soldiers and sailors by trade, and sailors haven’t performed well so far, when it comes to keeping the ship afloat and running. And the Union is not so convinced of its value that it’ll risk its own engineers and officers on the project — not unless we can get it to the admiral.”

  But Ruthie appeared more hopeful, now that the ball was rolling. “Josephine said no one could work the Ganymede because only the sailors were willing to try. But Ganymede is not built like a boat. She is built like an airship, one made to fly in the water, not in the clouds. Josephine said we needed a crew of airmen. Airmen would know how to make her go.”

  “Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Andan Cly cautioned. “I can see that you’re right — partway right, at any rate. Whoever built this bird,” he said, then corrected himself. “Whoever built this fish drew a lot of inspiration from an airship, that’s true. The controls are similar, or so I gather from looking at this. And the shape is more or less the same, with fins instead of small steering sails, and the propeller screws instead of the left and right thrusters. Hmm.”