Ganymede tcc-4

by Cherie Priest

  She descended from the rattling, shuddering transport vehicle and thanked Swinton with a few coins from her bag. He made a polite show of refusal, and she made a polite show of insistence. In the end, he took the money and left her there, standing beside an unpaved road at the edge of a collection of squat, square buildings.

  Narrow lines of dirt and mud ran between them, not roads, but walkways and driveways. The grass grew up tall among the spaces where wheels and feet came and went. New Sarpy wasn’t an abandoned place. It simply wasn’t much used.

  The coughing of an engine announced the impending appearance of a rolling-crawler, giving Josephine plenty of time to get off the street.

  She stepped out of the way and stood, watching as yet more Texians made their leisurely retreat from New Orleans. Not many of them this time, only a few dozen, with the rolling-crawler slowly rolling and crawling to keep their pace — its metal accompaniment serving to tote supplies and offer general marching encouragement, since the machines weren’t big enough to hold more than a handful of men.

  Texas had larger devices for transporting personnel and equipment, but Josephine didn’t see any of them on the road. She assumed they were being used elsewhere, or perhaps whoever had recalled these forces figured that they were so tough, they could walk awhile. She didn’t know, and cared only because the swiftness and completeness of their departure would mean the difference between success and a miserable near-miss when it came to her plans for Ganymede.

  When they were gone, leaving a cloud of dust and the last echoes of their accompanying machine behind them, she was more alone than not. A pair of ancient colored men with fishing poles chatted on their way to the river. Two dark-skinned children chased a puppy across the road and into a ditch, then ran into the field and toward the forest on the other side. One woman sat reading a newspaper on the stoop of a laundry, while behind her the wet, swishing clank of the clothes-washing devices rumbled and roared indoors.

  Josephine knew where the warehouse was, the one where Ganymede would be parked and stored. But it felt ill-advised to go stampeding toward it, so she didn’t. She opened her parasol and held it up, covering herself in a thin black shadow as she strolled in the general direction of the river.

  It wasn’t far, barely two blocks before she could smell it in earnest when the breeze kicked air across the wide, muddy expanse of the thing, bringing it up to rattle her parasol and infiltrate her nose. Another block, and she could see the corner of the building in question.

  She hesitated.

  Should she simply approach it and knock? If the men were inside, they’d surely look first and not merely open fire on anyone who dared give a tap at the door. Anything else would topple past caution into counterproductive paranoia. But what if someone saw her? Most of the bayou knew about the mystery ship, if not its precise location or purpose. Almost everyone was aware that this was an operation against Texas, and therefore, almost everyone agreed to cooperate in a display of blanket ignorance.

  Almost.

  She made up her mind and assumed her best, most confident posture. Avoiding the huge double doors, she instead approached a person-sized door and gave it a series of raps that said in no uncertain terms that she was here on business, and she had every right to be.

  From inside came the sound of absolutely nothing.

  She listened, leaning her right ear toward the door. Maybe she caught the distant susurrus whistle of muffled whispers. Maybe she noted the scrape of a boot heel as someone tiptoed carefully. Or maybe she heard only rats and seagulls bickering within. Maybe there was nothing to hear.

  No.

  With a pop, the door unstuck itself from its humidity-swollen frame, revealing only a narrow slot of the darkened interior, and a fraction of a white man’s face.

  Only one eye greeted her, a hazel-colored orb offset by a darkly arched awning of an eyebrow. The eye showed neither surprise nor recognition. But it did not show concern or alarm either, and momentarily the door opened a few inches farther to reveal Cly’s engineer.

  He was wearing a floppy brown hat and chewing on the wooden end of a matchstick. He was half a head shorter than Josephine, and he looked at her with his chin angled slightly upward — still fixing her in that cool, dead gaze that told her nothing.

  He said, “Hello, there, Miss Josephine.”

  “Hello, there, Mr.…” She wanted to say Trout, but she knew it wasn’t correct. Troost, she remembered.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes, everything’s fine. I was hoping I could speak to Captain Cly.”

  Kirby Troost’s teeth worked around the fraying match. “Well, then. I guess you’d better come inside.” He opened the door to admit her, then shut it fast behind her.

  Inside, the warehouse was not as large as she’d remembered it, from the one time she’d been there a few months previously. Then again, last time she saw it, the place hadn’t been stuffed with two large flatbeds and the Ganymede—which had been covered with an assortment of tarps roped down over the sides and concealing most of its details.

  The interior was shadowed. Most of the light came from a row of small windows up near the ceiling. The rest came from two strands of electric lanterns, hanging from the ropes somebody had strung from two sets of rafters, fizzing and popping.

  “You covered it up,” she observed.

  “They did.” Kirby cocked his head toward a back door, leading to an alley near the river. Then he said, “I mean, your bayou fellas did it. I didn’t much see the point, myself. Anybody who looks in here will get a gander at that thing, wonder what the hell it is, and take a look underneath the wrappings, regardless.”

  She peered up at the loosely swaddled craft, wondering where they’d found so many big scraps of tarp. “Still, I suppose it feels safer this way, rather than leaving it exposed.”

  “It’s not exposed. It’s got a whole building over it.”

  “At any rate, Mr. Troost, could you tell me where the captain has run off to? I don’t see him.” For that matter, she didn’t see anyone. Troost was the only warm body present. That didn’t precisely worry her, but she wasn’t particularly comfortable with his presence, either. Something about the little man bothered her. He reminded her of someone or something unpleasant, or perhaps it was only the impertinent way he spoke and moved. He was entirely too comfortable everywhere. No one should feel so immediately at home at the drop of a hat.

  “Could I tell you where he’s at for certain? No. I could make a guess or two, or you could wait until he gets back. I believe he’s gone down the road to that little bar, the one three or four blocks east. We’ve been coming and going in shifts, and hanging around the one hotel New Sarpy sees fit to maintain. It wouldn’t do anybody any good to see a bunch of men coming and going from this warehouse. I don’t care if your brother says everyone in town is a friend of ours.”

  “Almost everyone,” she murmured.

  “Yeah. Almost. Almost means room for error, and I don’t like it. So we’re taking turns, just hanging around. One or two of us at a time. But Cly isn’t much of a drinker, and he’s keeping an eye on Houjin, so I predict he’ll get bored and swing this way within the hour.”

  Josephine said, “Hm,” surveying the scenery with a critical eye. Then she asked, “Are you from Seattle?”

  “Seattle?” he repeated, neither confirming nor denying anything.

  “You heard me. Seattle. What can you tell me about it?”

  He shrugged and leaned against Ganymede’s shrouded bulk, pulling a tobacco pouch out of his vest pocket. As he delivered a pinch into a white square of rolling paper, he told her, “Not sure what you’re looking to hear. It’s an old port town, up in the Washington Territory. Not much to it anymore.”

  “That’s not what I’ve heard.”

  “What have you heard?”

  She crossed her arms. “There’s gas in Seattle, isn’t there? Turns men into the walking dead, isn’t that right?”

  He d
idn’t bother to deny it. “Something like that.” He scrunched the paper into a cigarette and pulled the match out of his mouth. Lifting a corner of the cloth that covered Ganymede, he struck the match on the craft’s rough-edged side. It sparked to life, and he used it to light the cigarette.

  “How does anyone live there, if it’s full of this poisonous gas?”

  “So this is what you want with Cly.”

  “He’s been living there in Seattle, hasn’t he?”

  Troost’s eyes did not exactly narrow, since they had never been open all the way, but now Josephine felt as if she were being squinted at. “No. He’s got a flat in Tacoma, about thirty miles to the south.”

  “But he comes and goes from Seattle a lot, doesn’t he?”

  “You’ll have to ask him. I haven’t been with his crew terribly long.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not.”

  They stared each other down, him smoking carelessly and her braced for a fight that he wasn’t prepared to give her.

  Kirby Troost repeated, “I’m not lying. I don’t know how much time he spends in Seattle, but I know he visits regularly. There’s a woman there, and he’s sweet on her. I think he’d like to settle down, if she’ll have him.”

  “Inside a poisoned, abandoned city?”

  “People still live there, underground. It’s … complicated. They’ve got this wall around it, and a crazy system of air tubes and vents, and filters, and whatnot.”

  “And this woman of his, she lives there?” she asked without really meaning to. She didn’t care. She wasn’t even curious. She wasn’t sure why she’d pressed the issue.

  “Her, and her son. She’s a widow.”

  “Is she—” Josephine wasn’t sure what she wanted to ask. “—good for him?” she finished weakly.

  “I don’t know, I’ve barely met her. He sure likes her a lot, and that’s what’s important, as far as I’m concerned. He’s got this plan to set up an airyard dock inside the city wall. The people who live there are willing to pay him to maintain it.”

  “Why?” she asked. It was a why that applied to any number of questions she couldn’t yet formulate more specifically.

  “It’s hard for them to keep contact with the outside world. It’s practically a secret, them living there. They like to be left alone; to their own devices, if you know what I mean. They don’t bother nobody, and they don’t want anybody bothering them. But sometimes they need supplies. They need to send letters or messages. Things like that.”

  “And if Cly does this, if he starts a business there — he’ll live there, too, and marry this woman?”

  “Yeah, I’d say he’ll marry her if she’ll have him.” Then he turned the conversation just a notch to the right, in exactly the direction Josephine didn’t want him to go. “You and him — the captain, I mean. There’s history there, ain’t that right?”

  “He told you?”

  “He mentioned it. Didn’t say much, except that it was years ago, and it didn’t work out.”

  She only just noticed that he almost never blinked. “That’s about right.”

  Kirby Troost, still mostly unblinking, said, “I can see it.”

  “See what? Andan and me?”

  The shadow of a smile tugged at the corner of his lip. “Yeah. I can see it. Not exactly two of a kind, but I suppose — given what I’ve heard — he’s got a certain type he prefers.”

  “And you think I fit that type?”

  “Smart and tough. You’re taller, though. Taller than Miss Wilkes.”

  “I thought you said she was a widow.”

  “I did, but it’s complicated.”

  “So complicated, you call her miss?”

  “Complicated enough. We mostly call her ma’am. She’s a yitty-bitty thing. A little smaller than me, even. But I don’t know too many men who’d argue with her, push come to shove. That’s what I mean, about him having a type. Not many men argue with you, either.”

  The back door squeaked open, and before Josephine even noticed him reaching for it, Kirby Troost was holding a six-shooter primed and ready. Upon seeing Cly and Houjin, he lowered it and tucked it back into his belt.

  “Cap’n,” he said. “You’ve got a visitor.”

  “Josephine,” he greeted her with a nod. “Something I can do for you?”

  “A word in private, if you please.”

  The oriental boy’s face constricted into a sneaky grin, as if he looked forward to embarrassing the captain with this moment later on — but it would wait. He opened his mouth to say something, but Cly didn’t give him time.

  “Huey, you and Kirby stay close.”

  Kirby Troost said, “Great.”

  To which the captain said, “You can teach him to play cards if you want. Just keep each other out of trouble, will you? Josie, how about we go out back and walk along the river.”

  “That sounds fine,” she told him stiffly, and she followed him as he went back out the way he’d come in, holding the door for her and — like his engineer — shutting it firmly and quickly as soon as they were through it.

  Down along the river, there was a path built on old railroad ties and bleached-bone boards pounded into the mud. They walked slowly along this, going nowhere in particular, unwilling to look at each other.

  After a minute or two of unhurried shuffling, he finally asked, “What do you want, Josie? Or what do you need? Why’d you come all the way back out here from the Quarter?” His words were tense, like he was afraid to hear the answer.

  “It’s about the zombis, Andan.”

  That caught him off guard. Whatever he’d been expecting or fearing, this wasn’t it. “The what now?”

  “Zombis. That’s what we call them here, though you must have a different word for them in Seattle.”

  “In Seattle?”

  “The walking dead, Andan.”

  “Yeah.” He scratched at the back of his neck, feeling the sweat already gathering there, from the warm wet air by the river and from the company, as well. “We’ve got some of those. We call them rotters. I don’t think there’s any real word for them. They aren’t like animals, or bugs — we don’t have scientists falling all over themselves to catalog ’em.”

  “Madame Laveau calls them zombis, and she’s the only woman on earth who seems able to control them at all.”

  “Laveau? The Queen? Hot damn, is she still alive?”

  “Yes, dear,” Josephine said without thinking; the phrase simply fell out of her mouth. “She’s still alive, and she’s brought me a Texas Ranger who thinks he knows what’s making them. She wants me to work with him.” She sighed.

  “What’s the Queen got to do with the dead things? You said she controls them? Maybe they aren’t the same problem we’ve got. Ours don’t answer to anybody,” he replied, but he didn’t sound certain. Suddenly he added, “Come to think of it, I’ve seen them answer to a machine. My buddy Jerry, he has this gun he calls Daisy — and it shoots a big gong of sound. It stuns them into holding still, but only for a few minutes.”

  Josephine remembered watching Marie Laveau clang her cane against the lamppost. That was the same thing in its way, wasn’t it? A big gong of sound? She did not believe in coincidences, so she filed this information away. “I need you to tell me about them, Andan. Tell me everything you know.”

  He did.

  It came out haltingly, as he fumbled around the conversation — trying to spare her the things she already knew, and pass along only what was helpful. Much of what he told her was truly revolutionary, particularly one important point confirming what the Ranger had told her: One way or another, the zombis, or rotters, or whatever they were … they originated in the walled-up, poisoned city.

  Seattle was the source. Seattle was the problem.

  “No,” he corrected her when she said as much aloud. “People like me, we’re the problem. We moved the gas out, so the chemists could turn it into sap. We spread the poison around because we’ve been
paid well to do so, but that shouldn’t have mattered. We shouldn’t have done it.”

  “You’re being too hard on yourself. All of us, everywhere, everything we do … it hurts someone, someplace. I’m convinced of it.”

  “That’s a god-awful philosophy, Josie.”

  “It’s not a philosophy; it’s an observation.”

  But privately she could only agree. She also understood that his desire to settle down and do something else had as much to do with someone named Briar up in the Washington Territories as it did with his own guilt.

  She briefly considered bringing up this Briar person, then felt silly for the impulse. It didn’t matter. When this was over, and Ganymede was in the appropriate hands, she and Cly would go their separate ways on the same grand scale as before, and that would be the end of it.

  Sentimentality would do neither of them any good. She fought it hard, and turned it off, and walked beside him without thinking about how much she’d once enjoyed doing so.

  She did not think about how much it’d warmed her, and been an odd source of pride, to roam with the giant pirate whom no one ever stopped or bothered, or assaulted or robbed, or even questioned — no matter how softly he spoke or how friendly his words. She did not recall how she’d appreciated his strength, even seeing it used against others when he’d fight for money in the ring, and she refused to consider for even a moment how she’d lengthened the bed they’d so often shared in order to make him more comfortable.

  She worked hard to keep from considering the way things could have been, and might have been, but were not. Things had gone another way, and this other way had been best for them both. Or so she was forced to assume, not knowing what might have happened if she’d bundled up and headed north, and west … or if he’d taken off his coat and parked his dirigible in the delta.

  Before he could mention that she’d grown uncharacteristically silent, she made some excuse to be done. “Tell your engineer I said thank you, and that it was a pleasure to meet him. And it’s been … it’s been good to talk to you again. I’m glad to see you’re still doing well, and thinking of ways to do better.”