Fiddlehead

Eighteen

“Can you see it anywhere?” Maria asked, scanning the horizon for the other dirigible.

“Along the road ahead of us, I think. We’ll catch up to it soon; we’re flying faster than that big old cargo cruiser, even with the thruster working funny.” Henry adjusted his grip on the controls, his fingers moving stiffly with the chill and repetition. They should’ve been halfway to Atlanta by now, but the flight felt like it was just beginning.

They were both cold and uncomfortable, and still shaky from the firefight they’d left behind them and weather that simply wouldn’t cut them a break. But the clock was ticking, and a weapon of unparalleled, poorly understood destruction was crawling toward the Confederacy’s biggest metropolitan area.

Though Maria desperately wanted to beg Henry to land, for God’s sake, and let her walk around for a minute—to get the feeling back into her feet, if nothing else—she said nothing except, “Then let’s see how fast this poor little dove feels like flying.”

He upped the pressure and changed a gear setting, and the craft lurched forward, listing to the left but keeping a straight course along the road that dragged out below them.

Traffic down there had dwindled to almost nothing. They were now a ways out of Chattanooga, and not close enough to Atlanta for anyone to be bustling along, save for a few farmers moving supplies to and from markets. As her eyes examined the path through the spyglass, she said, “If they’re anywhere in front of us, they’ll stick out like a sore thumb. There’s nothing down there at all. Nothing interesting, anyway.”

She turned her attention to the sky, scanning it until she spotted a dark pinprick several miles ahead. “That military craft, on the other hand…”

“What do you think it was up to?”

“Could be anything.”

“Even Union agents with a Southern ship, looking out for their own,” Henry suggested, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

“Yes, a decoy ship, like we discussed. I wonder if that would do them any good.”

“Having a cargo ship along for the mission? I can’t imagine it’d hurt.”

“No,” she agreed. She removed the spyglass from her face, then jammed it down her scarf, into her bosom. She shuddered with the shock of cold metal against her naked skin. “In fact, if the gas bomb covers as much range as we’ve been told, they’d need a ship to take them far away, and fast. A cargo cruiser might cut it.”

“I don’t know. Maybe, but … what are you doing to my spyglass?”

“Warming it up. It’s practically sticking to my eyebrow.” She shivered at the press of the metal. “The simplest, most obvious answer might be the right one: It could be a CSA ship heading for Atlanta. There’s a big military base there, yes?”

“Dobbins, yes. Specializing in aircraft.”

“Well”—she retrieved the glass, rubbed the eyepiece shiny, and stuck it back up to her face—“if the simplest answer is the correct one, then we may have found ourselves a fantastic new ally.”

“If we can get them to talk to us. Or listen to us. Hey, do you think Troost got through to the base?”

“If he did, the cargo ship’s not evidence of it. That cruiser’s going toward Atlanta, not flying out of it at top speed searching for a doomsday weapon.”

“Good point.”

“Thank you. I want to believe in your friend Troost, I really do; I find shady men to be the most effective, as often as not. But he’s right about the wires. The lines between North and South are feeble enough when the weather is good and the troops are clear. We don’t dare assume that Haymes’s agents haven’t performed some deliberate act of sabotage to keep the information out of military hands until it’s too late. Besides, the taps are only as reliable as the people who man them. No”—she shook her head—“we have to assume that reinforcements aren’t coming. If they do, we can be pleasantly surprised. By the way, I think the ship has stopped—we seem to be catching up to it.”

Henry squinted hard against the sky, and against the wind that warped around the glass screen meant to keep it out. “Yes, you’re right. Have they landed or dropped anchor yet? I can’t tell if they’re moving.”

Past the spyglass, she observed, “No, but they’re settling down now.”

“Right on the road?”

“Get us closer and I’ll be able to tell you.”

She eyed the damaged thruster and wondered if they’d move faster if it worked better, but as far as she could tell, it mostly just caused the craft to pull to the left. Her impatience was matched only by the chill she felt—or could no longer feel, depending on which extremity she considered. If she had toes, she couldn’t prove it by wiggling them, and it was a good thing that the shooting had happened before her fingers had lost all sensation through her gloves. Bending and unbending them was a Herculean exercise in the cold weather, and she had to be quite careful indeed with the spyglass, for the bare metal burned against her skin, even after her bosomly attempts to warm it.

The wind was unrelenting, and so was the spitting, driving rain that came from every direction at once as they tracked the cargo craft through the lowest clouds. “We’ll overtake them in a few minutes,” she said, through chattering teeth. “But what happens then? Do you think they saw us fight with the other craft?”

He was silent. “I don’t know.”

Maria mulled over the possibilities. “If they’re Confederate soldiers, I must believe they would’ve turned around to assist us. We were a legally marked civilian craft, menaced by an unmarked crew that could’ve been piratical, as far as anyone knew. They would’ve turned around,” she said again, more confidently this time.

“Because you waved at them? And they waved back?”

“Because it’s their job to guard the skies over the South, and protect its travelers from harm during wartime,” she protested—though privately she believed that, yes, good Southern boys would’ve hightailed it back to prove their chivalry, given half a chance to do so. “But they didn’t. They didn’t even stick around to watch. They just kept flying.”

“So perhaps they didn’t give a damn what became of us and went on their merry way, leaving the other ship behind to deal with a couple of maniacs out for a flight. You said they weren’t armed.”

“Didn’t appear to be, no. But,” she added quickly, “I might’ve been wrong. Do you think they’d gone far enough to miss the fireball?”

He shrugged. “Far enough that they wouldn’t have heard it inside the cabin. If they weren’t looking behind them, they might not’ve seen it. I don’t know, and I still don’t know what side they’re on. But we’re coming up on them fast, so tell me what you see.”

“I see…” She held the spyglass a fraction away from her cheek. “There’s something in the road. A … a caravan of some sort! Henry, this might be them!”

“If the cargo ship is hanging around it, then that’s probably a good sign. Or a bad one,” he said. If his lips weren’t turning blue, they might’ve been set in a grim, uncertain line.

Under her breath she asked, “But are they stopping the caravan to investigate it, or help it?” Through the spyglass, she couldn’t quite tell.

“Another five minutes and we’ll be on top of them.” Henry said it like a warning.

“Or…”

“Or what?”

The big ship stopped its slow descent and began to rise again. It pivoted to face them.

It was Maria’s turn to issue a warning: “Or maybe they’ll be on top of us.”

“Shit.”

While she still had a spare moment to do so, she turned the spyglass to the ground and did a hasty estimation of the caravan. As fast as she could count, she called it out. “Eight horses drawing four carts. Maybe thirty men, all uniformed. One rolling-crawler, the Texian kind, but bigger than the ones you usually see. They’ve stopped. They’re hailing the cargo runner, like they aren’t sure why it’s rising again. The ship is there as friend, not foe. Henry, set us down.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere, but set us down now. Set us down!” she hollered at him, her throat too frozen to manage the shriek she would’ve liked to deliver.

“I’m … I’ll try! What do you see?”

She saw a hatch ratcheting down from the ship’s underside, a bulbous protrusion descending from the hull. She’d never seen a turret that could be retracted inside the belly of a ship before; only the ones that were affixed and unmoving, that would leave anyone who sat inside them exposed to enemy fire.

“A ball turret,” she breathed. “With one of the biggest guns I’ve ever—”

The cargo vessel’s gun fired, kicking out a round of such power that the ship rocked gently as it sent the shell careening through the sky, covering the space between them in one, two, three seconds.

In one, two, three seconds Henry managed to swerve to the right. It was only a tiny, insufficient angle out of the way, except it meant that when the shell struck them head-on it didn’t go straight through their windscreen and kill them both. Instead it crashed beneath their feet, cutting through the engine and out the top of the chassis.

The Black Dove balked violently, shaking almost in a full circle, sending them closer to upside down than Maria had ever been in her life. If she’d eaten anything at all that day she would’ve lost it in the clouds. But the hemp belt held her inside the small cabin, if not in the seat—she hovered above it, and then her backside slammed down again, jarring her whole body. Her head knocked against Henry’s shoulder, and his knees crashed against the underside of the controls.

He fought to find the levers, wrestled with the engine, and lost.

Black, billowing smoke coughed upward and the motor went utterly silent.

The world froze.

The sky was cold, clear, and unmoving, and the ground below was sharp and distant, miles and miles away—or so it looked. And so it felt, until the end of that moment, when the Black Dove pitched forward, dragged by the weight of its dead motor, and began to fall.

Henry cranked viciously at the controls, jerking the clutch and receiving no response. Nothing. Not a cough or a sputter. Not a spark of electricity. Not even smoke. All of it was gone. The little craft sailed, gliding only at a tiny angle, aimed for the ground.

“Henry!” Maria screamed.

He reached over his shoulder and into the tiny back cargo space and pulled out a pack. “There’s just the one!” he screamed back as he wrestled his arms into a pair of straps.

“One what?”

“Of these. Come here—I’m undoing the belt!”

“Henry!”

“Trust me or die!” he told her. With one hand he seized her by the waist. With the other he snapped the hemp belt free and stood up inside the shattered, uncovered cab, taking her with him. Dangling in the firmament, he grabbed her tightly—both arms now—and kicked free of the wreckage. And then they were still falling, but falling together … above the battered Dove, and then beside it.

Maria’s clothes billowed violently and her hair tried to tear itself off her head. She wanted to fight Henry, in order to … what? Swim in the sky? Fall by herself? Take these last seconds in silence, to pray or to reminisce, regret or wonder, and prepare for whatever came next?

His grip was a vise around her ribs. He shouted into her ear, but still she barely heard him: “Hang on to me! Now!”

She gave up her struggle and did as he commanded, because why not? Let their bones break together, and let them dig a crater to be both of their graves.

But instead, Henry ripped at a cord that dangled from the pack on his back, and the fall jerked to a shattering stop—still well above the trees below. The terrific yank sucked all the air out of Maria’s chest and nearly snapped her neck; but she thrust her face into Henry’s throat and clung to him for dear life, now that she understood. Or, if she didn’t understand, she believed, and that was close enough for now.

As long as they floated in the middle of the sky, held aloft by a great umbrella-like cloth that flapped noisily over their heads.

“Emergency harness!” he said loudly. “One’s required in all these little passenger crafts!”

“Emergency,” she muttered into his neck, refusing to open her eyes or look down. She damn well assumed it was an emergency piece, for surely no one in their right mind would don such a thing recreationally.

Her head ached, her ribs were bruised all the way around, and she could scarcely breathe. Her arms felt as if they’d been half pulled from their sockets, and her feet dangled until she wrapped them around Henry’s legs, seeking whatever slight stability she could glean from the situation.

And still they fell.

They swayed back and forth, buffeted by the wind and without any protection at all, not even the pitiful guard of the tiny craft, which crashed somewhere below them. She heard it hit and crumple, and she thanked heaven and Henry that she was not inside it. Though being in midair was only marginally better, as she was still definitely alive—but for how long?

She could feel the wind dragging them in this direction, then that direction, and on top of everything else she was dizzy. “Can you control this at all?” she begged him, nearer to tears than she’d been in a decade.

“Not at all, I’m afraid,” he replied, and he did in fact sound sorry. “Hold on tight, Maria! We’re going down. We’re going down fast.”

Not as fast as they might have otherwise, but fast enough that when they fell through the tops of two trees it was like being beaten by a mob, and when the final tree caught them in its uppermost branches it was such a horrible way to stop that she almost envied the Black Dove—for at least its awful fall had ended already.

Their fall continued, though she clung to Henry until she was knocked free of him—and then she fell alone, down branches, through dead leaves and abandoned squirrel nests. Her body stripped a line of bark bare from the tree, and her gloves were no protection at all. Her skirts did a somewhat better job of shielding her legs, and her corset may or may not have guarded her organs like armor, but none of it helped very much. When she finally landed on her back, staring up at the hole she’d left in a tree, she watched the emergency sheet snag, tear, and wave forlornly above her.

And then she wondered where Henry was.

He told her: “Ow.”

“Oh, dear—I’m … I’m sorry…”

She rolled off his arm, then kept rolling until she was on her back again, beside him. She hadn’t left him after all.

She couldn’t breathe. No, she was breathing. She put her hand to her chest and felt it rise and fall, but she was so winded that it meant very little. She could do nothing but lie there, as still as she could manage, and wait for her lungs to catch up to the rest of her.

Every inch of her body hurt. She scarcely knew where to begin to check for injuries, so instead she asked Henry, “Are you all right? Mostly? More all right than not?” The words came out in whispers, in time with her every exhalation. It was the only way she could speak at all.

“Yes,” he said in a similar gasp. “No. Wait. Mostly, I think. My arm, though.”

“The one I was lying on?”

“The one you landed on.”

“Ah. Is it…?”

He rolled over onto his side. “Broken. Not as bad as it could be,” he said with a wince.

When she turned her head, she could see that yes, his hand was lying at an unhealthy angle. “Oh, no. We need to brace it.” She wiggled a bit and frowned. No longer lying on his arm, but she was somehow still lying upon something. Ah. Her satchel. Still slung around her chest. Would wonders never cease?

“There seem to be plenty of promising sticks lying about, thanks to us. As for you,” he said, “we need to see about that pretty little head of yours.”

“What about it?” she asked. But now that he mentioned it, a spot to the left of her forehead, just above her ear, felt hot. When she touched it, it stung, and it left the tattered remnants of her glove covered in blood. “Hmm.” She wasn’t sure how much of the blood was from her head, and how much was from her hands—the gloves themselves were in shreds, and scraped skin showed through them. She was quite confident that when she warmed up enough to feel her fingers again, every single one of them would be in agony.

“Let me see it,” Henry suggested.

“First, let’s see about that arm.”

“Heads are more important than arms.”

He had a point, so she let him probe the problem, but only briefly. “You see? It’s all right. I’m fine,” she assured him. “If that’s the worst I get from the adventure, I’ll be in excellent shape. Now. I can stand. Can you?”

“You can stand? Prove it.”

“Fine, I will.” She did, and though the effort was at first unsteady, she settled the matter by arriving upright. “Your turn.”

She offered him her hand and he grasped it, clutching his broken arm to his chest and letting her pull him to his feet. “See? Me too.”

“Apart from the arm, are you intact? How do you feel?”

“Like I just fell out of an airship and crashed through a tree. How about you?”

“The same. Now, let me bind up that arm, and I suppose we’ll have to get on our way. Did I mention I used to work as a nurse?”

“Don’t believe it came up.”

“No? Well,” she said, eyeing the ground for a promising splint. “I didn’t last very long. I don’t mind blood and bones, but I have trouble with vomiting and pus. Here. This will do nicely.”

Before long, Henry was as patched up as he could expect to get, his injured arm fastened tight to a piece of wood, courtesy of the remains of the hemp belt, which had accompanied them to the ground. Maria had found it nearby and rejoiced. Henry’s scarf served as a sling, tied up in a knot behind his neck.

Maria used her own scarf to staunch the bleeding above her ear. Her options were few, and it was dark enough that the stain scarcely showed. Maybe with a good laundering, it would vanish altogether. Or perhaps she’d pester Mr. Pinkerton for hazard pay, should she escape the mission alive. He could damn well buy her a new scarf for her pains. And maybe a good winter coat, too.

“Where are we?” she asked, hoping that perhaps he’d paid closer attention on the way down that she had. “What time is it? How far away do you think we are?”

He shielded his eyes against the sun, and checked the shadows filtering down through the brittle, naked branches around them. “Well, it’s early afternoon,” he said. “I think we landed a little to the east of the road. West should be that way.”

“How certain are you, exactly?”

“Somewhat. That’s the best I can do.”

“It’ll have to suffice. We need to find that road and … and stop that caravan.”

“Single-handedly,” he added, as he lurched forward in the general direction of west and south.

“Well, you’ll be single-handed. But, between us, there are three hands.” She mustered a smile. “And I’m sure we’ll think of something.”