Clementine

Simeon swelled up in his seat, inflating and simmering with things he knew better than to say out loud to his captain, so he said, “Yes sir,” through tight lips. “You steer us down. I’ll hold us level.”

“Let’s hope she has the good sense to get on board,” Hainey said. “I’m going to take us back a few feet, and we can come up behind her. Position, set?”

“Position set,” Simeon confirmed. “Thrusters primed. You’d better run down to the bay and help her up, because Christ knows I’m not going to do it.”

“Nobody asked you to, Sim,” Hainey said, and he unbuckled himself from the seat. “Take us down, and drag us low and slow,” he ordered as he left the bridge.

By the time Hainey reached the open bay, it was gathering leaves off trees as if it were harvesting them as the craft’s belly was dragged down, low and slow, just like he’d ordered. The whipping breaks and whistles of the incoming shrubbery snapped against the bay edges and flipped into the captain’s face, but he brushed them away and hollered down, “Belle Boyd? You hear me?”

He received no answer so he dropped to the floor and hung his head down, narrowly missing a pine branch to the teeth; but the glimpse told him her position-twenty yards ahead. The captain stood up and flung himself back to the bridge door, where he said, “There’s a clearing up ahead. She’ll breach it first. Drop us there, I’ll grab her,” and then he bolted back to the bay.

The ship dipped abruptly, and the bay was clear-no more trees accidentally sending their detritus aboard-but beneath it there was a woman ru

Hainey called out to her, “Belle Boyd!”

And she looked up, saw him, and replied, “Captain!”

He braced himself, locking his feet together around a support beam and letting his torso swing free. His arms extended down to reach her, but she didn’t take them.

She threw him her carpetbag, and he caught it.

He set it inside with a hearty sigh of exasperation and then reached down once more. “Take my hands!” he commanded.

“You’re going too fast!” she said, but she put her hands up anyway, and although she couldn’t nab his hands, his enormous grip clapped around her nearest wrist.

When he was certain that his hold was secure, he said as loudly as he could to the men in the bridge, “I’ve got her! Take us up!”

Up went the ship in a sweeping lift, pulling Maria off her feet and into the air. Beneath her the ground grew smaller, and her feet swung in circles.

She said, “Captain, we’ve got to quit meeting like this! Tongues will begin to wag!” But she was smiling when she said it, and he didn’t scowl back.

He heaved her onboard and deposited her beside her luggage.

While she caught her breath she asked in jolting syllables, “What…happened…to the bay doors…?”

To which he replied, “I shot them off. Come on. Get up, and get onto the bridge. I went to the trouble of getting you on board, and I won’t have you falling back out again.”

“Yes sir. But, oh-did you understand me? The Valkyrie-someone’s trying to take off with it. I sent the red-haired pirate outside before I dealt with Steen; did you catch him?”

“No,” he said as he retreated back onto the deck. “So I appreciate the tip. That’s him on board, you can bet your sweet…you can bet your mother’s life. But that’s fine. We’ll just knock him out of the sky.”

She entered the bridge behind him and nodded politely to Lamar and Simeon, neither one of whom saw her do it. “But the Valkyrie…can you do that? With this ship? It’s so heavily armored, I thought…”

Lamar turned around then, and he said with a full-toothed grin, “We made some modifications before we left it. Hold onto your hat,” he said, and then seeing that she’d lost hers somewhere along the way, “Or, hold onto your knickers. Or whatever you’re still wearing. We’re going to make a very big bang.”

“There it is!” she said, indicating a black shape out the western side of the windshield.

“I see it,” Simeon said. “And look at that. Well, credit where it’s due-I would’ve bet that he’d never get it off the ground, not alone.”

“Where’s the rest of his crew?” Maria asked, but no one answered her.

“Stay away from the dashboard,” the captain said. “Don’t touch anything, and just stand back. I can’t offer you another seat up here; this ain’t a big bird like that one, and we’ve only got sitting space for the three of us.”

“All right. But look, he did get it off the ground. Not very far,” she observed. “He’s rising, though. He’s nearly crested the next hill over.”

“He’s a sitting duck,” Hainey crowed.

“In that warship?” Maria asked, still dubious.

“Oh yes,” the captain told her. “Like Lamar said. Modifications. Sim, swing us west and around. Lamar, hold us tight and ready that right front gun.”

“The left one has more ammo,” the engineer said. “We sprayed most of the rest covering her,” he bounced a thumb at the spy.

Maria said, “And for what it’s worth, thank you-from the bottom of my heart.”

“You’re welcome,” Hainey said. “Fine, Lamar. Take the right gun and send us into position, but back us up.”

“How far, sir?”

“How far away do you think I can aim it from?” he asked.

Lamar didn’t give him a number or a measurement, but he said, “All right. I’ll take us back that far.”

The Free Crow retreated on a slick, easy path, holding the Valkyrie in its sights. As the ship withdrew, the bright-haired figure on the bridge grew tinier and tinier, and its frantic struggles with the controls grew harder and harder to see.

Hainey said, “Swing us back; bring us point forward with the Valkyrie’s tail.”

And Simeon made it happen.

“Lamar, let me have your seat for a minute.”

The engineer rose and let the captain sit. He pulled the trigger for the front right gun into his lap and flexed his fingers around the molded grip. And, taking his time, he said to Maria, “You see that back armor panel, over the hydrogen tanks?”

Puzzled, she said, “No.”

And he replied, “That’s because we pulled it off.”

He squeezed the trigger and the ship jumped as the big guns fired, squirting shells across the sky in a deadly arc that pitted the side of the Valkyrie…and then stabbed into the hydrogen tanks.

In the span of two seconds, the Valkyrie shook, shimmered, and exploded into a nova of fire that seemed to stretch across the entire windscreen of the Free Crow.

A shockwave rocked the ship and everyone within it, and for a moment it swayed and fought against its own engines. But soon with the help of its expert crew, it steadied and rose once more, sliding back across the sky and away from the flaming, falling wreckage of the Union warbird.

Over the sanatorium the Free Crow flew, and as it rose Maria ignored the earlier admonition to stay away from the controls-because the windshield was on the other side of the controls and she couldn’t see the world outside unless she stood in front of them. As Captain Hainey returned to his proper seat and Lamar reclaimed his own, the captain asked, “What are you looking at?”

She said, “There, do you see? The sanatorium.”

“What about it?”

“Look, down there. Those windows at the building’s very bottom-they let light into the basement. They’re open, do you see?” she said, her eyes bright and still, perhaps, a little wet.

Hainey did see, though he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. “Someone’s emptying the basement then, it looks like to me. They’re throwing things out onto the lawn.”

“It’s the weapon,” she told him. “The boy, Edwin-he and Doctor Smeeks are destroying it. They never wanted to build it in the first place, and now they’re disassembling it.”

As the ship hovered, the captain, Maria, and the crew watched as the boy collected the weapon’s parts into a pile on the front yard; and then they observed as an elderly man came to toss a match onto the pile.