Karen Memory

Chapter Twenty-three

Well, what happened next is that Priya stabbed Ivan in the jugular with half of my hairpin. It weren’t real gold — it was plate over brass — and with the swing she put behind it, it went right in. Well, maybe it weren’t his jugular. Maybe it was that big artery there under the ear, the one you slit hog slaughtering. Whatever you call it. Either way, he grabbed at his neck and went over sideways.

I felt kind of bad about Ivan taking it that way, him just being a workingman and in no ways in charge of the plan. But that didn’t stop me from punching old Boris in the jewels when he turned around to see what was happening. Men look for the knee, you understand. So it’s better to swing with a fist when you really need to nut one.

Boris doubled over with a wheeze, and Priya kicked him on the temple straight legged. He went down on top of Ivan.

We left ’em there and ran.

Where we was running to was anybody’s guess, quite honestly, but I was thinking there had to be a hatch and it had to be up, and freezing and drowning in the ice-cold Sound was miserably preferential to being flogged to death, if you take my meaning, and hell if we popped that hatch underwater we might founder the whole evil octopus and sink it to the sea’s bottom. It could join its victims there for all I cared, and that Russian Nemo with his perfect manners could go down with it.

And then I had my greatest stroke of genius since that ham sandwich with pickles that time.

There was a fire ax behind glass in the corridor — or gangway, or whatever the hell you call it on a submersible. With a sign next to it that I’m pretty sure read: BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY in Cossack.

I took one look at that thing and put my elbow through the glass. It shattered really satisfactorily, and I don’t know if it was sugar glass or I was just that tired of everything’s fucking shit. I turned around to see Priya holding up a pipefitter’s wrench as long as your arm. There was a panel open on the bulkhead behind her and some other tools were racked inside it, but none looked as fit for mayhem as that wrench.

“Next time, spare your elbow,” she suggested.

Then I had an ax in my hand, Hallelujah, and somewhere not too far away a fire alarm started to shrill.

Submersibles must have some kind of strict regulations about fires on board, because the next thing I knew my ears were popping something fierce, and I felt like the floor — the deck, I guess — was shoving at my boot soles.

I looked at Priya and Priya looked at me. I said, “We’re surfacing!” and she punched the air. Then she looked dubious. “We need to find a hatch. An outside hatch.”

“Do you think this thing has a lifeboat?”

“I think we’re going to find out.” Grimly, Priya brandished the pipefitter’s wrench. “I’ll freeze and drown before I stay in here. Follow me!”

Men was boiling out into the corridors, but they wasn’t expecting a couple of crazy Maenads swinging Christ knows what at ’em, and we left a trail of shouts and broken wrists behind us. Amazing how nearly any man will back down if you brandish an ax in his face.

I didn’t feel none too bad about it, neither.

I was just fending one off behind us, and when I turned around Priya was gone. Panic stabbed me, but then her hand closed on my arm and pulled me into a side corridor. I was pretty proud of myself that I didn’t even swing the ax at her when she startled me.

She dogged the hatch behind us and then took her wrench and shoved it through the wheel that locked the door. “That should hold ’em for a bit. Come this way.”

“Do you know where we’re going?”

She pointed at some writing on the wall. It looked like letters, sort of. But only some of them was the same as English letters. “Exit this way,” she said.

I kissed her. And then stepped back suddenly. “I mean—”

“Oh, good,” she said. “I wondered if you were just putting up with me.”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Because that seems likely.”

She grinned, all full to bubbling over with the mania of adventure. “Come on!”

She led me up a ladder through a tube so narrow it made my breath come quick and shallow — and I wondered how the Ivans and Borises had even managed to squeeze their shoulders down it. Maybe they’d been lowered into the submersible young and fed up inside it, like when you grow a pear inside a bottle to make pear brandy on.

Then we was at the top. Priya spun the hatch and threw it open—

— and I realized just how fucking cold it was out there. Savage air poured down on my head as Priya climbed out, and I gritted my teeth and followed her.

We stood on a tiny deck, drenched in seaweed. Priya grabbed a pipe railing with one hand and crouched down to scoop a tiny, flopping fish back into the sea. When she stood again, she snatched her fingers back and blew on ’em. The wind whipped our hair and plastered what passed for our clothes to our shoulders. The submersible rolled in the valleys between waves. No lifeboats in sight. It was so cold I wanted to scream.

“What if they submerge?”

“With the hatch open?” She smiled bitterly. “At least we won’t go alone.”

I put an arm around her. She was the only warm thing in the world. “If they come up, we jump,” I said.

She nodded. We didn’t need to say it — that a clean, quick death by freezing was better than whatever Standish had in mind. And that as soon as we hit that water — well, there wasn’t any ice in it. But any child in Rapid could tell you how fast cold water could kill.

There was drifts of rain and curls of mist all over, and would you believe it that my damned hair was freezing up again? Maybe Merry Lee had the right idea in cropping it all off. Christ, I hoped she and Marshal Reeves had made it clean away.

I hefted my hatchet. Giving up felt like … well, like giving up. In a situation like this, you’d think there would be something I could chop. Pity I didn’t think I could get through the Os’minog’s hull. That’d be a moral victory worth dying for.

Below, a steady clanging started to echo up the hatchway. Somebody throwing their weight against the dogged and jammed hatch below. It’d probably give eventually.

I decided that I wanted to kiss Priya again, and she seemed happy enough to kiss me back — happy being a sort of a relative, under the circumstances. But when I pulled my face out of her hair, I saw something that made me smile and say, “We ain’t finished yet!”

She turned to see and laughed. There, out of all them dark clouds, burst the emerald-and-carnelian belly of Minneapolis Colony’s vaudevillian dirigible, swinging down low and toward us. A dark shape dangled from a rope ladder fifty feet under the gondola, the familiar duster flapping like an eagle’s ragged wings.

The only way I could be gladder to see something would be if it were my sainted da come down from Heaven to wrap me in his angel wings. A duster would do, though. A duster would do.

“Be ready,” Priya said. The Marshal came on, wave tops licking at his boots as the dirigible plunged below the clouds. The roar of its engines rose over the wind, shattering the illusion that it moved in silence. I ripped my trousers off — ripped ’em nearly in half — and twisted them into a loop. We each stuck an arm through one end; there was no way one of us was leaving that deck without the other.

I hurled the ax out to sea, because it felt damned good to do it.

We climbed up on the railing and waited there, arms outstretched, balanced with our shins against the top rail. The wind blew through my cotton bloomers like I was naked. Below, metal rent. The hinges on the hatch giving way. Well, they really couldn’t submerge now. But the Marshal was only going to get one pass.

I could see there was a tangle of net on the ladder around him and that he himself was roped in good. There would be things for us to catch on to, then, and we wouldn’t pull him off. That pleased me. I’d hate to be the cause of the widowing of Mrs. Jennie Reeves and the orphaning of all the little Reeveslings.

I looked at Priya and felt a strange exaltation. Whatever happened now, there weren’t no question what either of us wanted. I guessed I could die knowing that.

Then the Marshal was there, howling something that might have been instructions and might have been an animal cry purely formed of one half excitement and two halves being terrified. His hands grabbed at me and my hands grabbed the net. I felt a savage jerk as Priya missed, half-fell, was swept off the railing and then used the twist of flannel binding us together to right herself and grab again. Cord cut my burned palms. I screamed. My feet kicked free; then one toe caught in the netting. Priya swung beside me, a little lower. Marshal Reeves threw his arm around the small of her back. The relict Ivan surged out of the hatchway — guess he did fit after all! — and grabbed at my still-swinging sock-clad foot. I felt his hand on my ankle, felt the pull, screamed some more as he dragged at me, feet skidding on the decking. He fetched up against the pipe railing, took it right across the kidney, and let go.

We sailed on, under the beautiful green-and-orange belly of Captain Colony’s delivering airship, with the gray waves hissing and tossing their forelocks below.

Some of that might be out of order. It’s all a jumble in my memory. But I do remember that the last thing I saw before the wind twisted me away was Horaz Standish and Captain Nemo, standing on the tiny deck of their submersible, Ivan crumpled at their feet, staring after the three of us like a couple of cats that bumped heads over a blue jay and had to watch it sai-i-i-il away.

* * *

One or more of ’em might have shot after us, but if they did it was only with handguns and nothing came close enough to notice. We had other problems commanding our attention, anyway.

Somehow we made it up the ladder, me cursing my hands and my cold-numbed legs with every lurch. The Marshal was trying to help me without actually putting his hands on my fundament and hoisting, and Priya was shouting advice. We would have made us a regular slapstick, if anybody had been there to see us.

I think we only lived to the top because Captain Colony had the ladder on a winch, and the distance up kept getting smaller. Then Merry Lee was hugging and hauling and pulling me into the airship, and I’m not sure which one of us was crying harder.

The next thing I knew she had checked me over and sat me down and I was clutching a mug of sweet, milky tea between hands now wrapped in fresh (and freshly blood-spotted) bandages, trying to figure out how to work it past my chattering teeth. It was still damned cold inside the gondola from the hatches being open to effect our rescue, but just being out of the wind made all the difference and I figured if I could stop shivering long enough to get some of that tea inside me while it was still hot I might just be able to manage not to die.

Hugging the tea — and Priya leaning against my arm, sharing the same wool blanket — helped enough that I eventually managed to sip some. That done, I had enough control of my voice to ask, “How’d you find us?”

The Marshal slurped his own tea. “We tracked his exhaust pipe. We were trying to figure out how to force him to surface when you girls did that for us.”

Colony, at the controls, shook his head. “I wish we could have got to him before he got to that ship.”

We was all silent for a minute, and then I said, “Yeah.”

Then I realized who I hadn’t seen on the Os’minog. “Did you get Scarlet?”

Reeves shook his head.

Priya and me filled ’em all in real quick on what had happened, and that Standish was Reeves’ man rather than Scarlet.

“Pity,” Reeves said. Then he shrugged. “Well, I done harder things than get Horatio Standish back to Oklahoma. And you ladies done thwarted their cholera plan.”

“For now,” Merry said. She looked grim.

The Marshal said, “Before they captured you, they had to have planned on some other means of getting it into the city.”

“If it were me,” Priya said, “I’d get it into the water supply on a ship headed north.”

“Or the expedition food,” Merry Lee agreed. “Get it right out into the mining camps.”

We was silent for a minute, contemplating that. It took some of the sting out of what might happen to Rapid … but it didn’t lessen the threat to Anchorage and the Yukon none.

I finished my tea. It would do me more good inside than out, no matter how turned my stomach was. I was just running a finger around the inside to get the last of the sugar when Captain Colony called from the front of the bridge.

“There’s worse news.”

We’re not cowards, none of us. But not a one of the three of us wanted to ask.

“He’s gotten that thing under way again. And it’s steaming for Rapid City.”

When I shook my head, my hair slapped wetly on my ears. “I gotta get to my sewing machine.”