Dreadnought

The captain told her it was a trick of the water, and how swiftly it worked against them. She forced herself to be patient.

If the sun was out, she’d sit on the benches on the deck and watch the water, the distant shore, and the other vessels that moved along beside them, coming and going in each direction, up and down the river. Bigger, heavier cargo fleets swam along at a snail’s crawl, paddling and sometimes towing barges packed with cotton bales, shipping crates, and timber. Lighter, prettier steamers from the Anchor Line piped up and down, playing their organs alongside the whistles to a

The warships made her think of Te

As she read, sca

On the second day of the journey, he sat beside her on the deck bench and struck a match. He stuck it down into the bowl of his pipe and sucked the tobacco alight with a series of quick puffs that made his cheeks snap.

“Is any of the news fit to read?” he asked, biting the end of the pipe between his teeth so that it cocked out of his mouth at an angle, underneath the fringe of his dark brown mustache and just to the right of his chin, where a red streak bisected his beard.

“Some of it, I guess,” she replied. “It’s a couple days old now, but I don’t have anything else to read.”

“No paperbacks? No novels, or assortments of poetry?”

She said, “Nope. I don’t read much. Just newspapers, sometimes, when I can get my hands on ’em. I’d rather know what’s happening than listen to someone tell me a story they made up.”

“That’s a reasonable attitude to take, though it’s a shame. Many wonderful stories have been made up and written down.”

“I guess.” She pointed at the article about the Dreadnought’s movement out of southern Te

“The Dreadnought?”

“That’s right. I was taking an airship from Richmond to Chattanooga, and we crashed down right in the middle of the lines, just about. That engine was there, and everyone acted like they was scared to death of it.”

He took another puff, filling the air with a dim, sweet cloud of grayish blue smoke. “It’s a frightful machine, and I mean that in more ways than one.” He lifted the brim of his hat and scratched a spot on his hairline while staring out into the distance, over the water.

“How so?”

“On the one hand, it’s a machine built to be as mighty and dangerous as possible. It’s armored to the teeth, or from the cowcatcher to the hitch, however you’d like to look at it. It’s a dual-fuel creature like this ship-part diesel and part coal for steam-and it can generate more power than any other engine I ever heard of. It’s plenty fast for something as heavy as it is, too.” He added softly, “Faster than any other engine the Union’s got, that’s for damn sure, armored or not.”

“But not faster than ours?” She didn’t bother to differentiate between the Confederacy and the Republic. She’d learned already that aboard this ship the distinction was merely semantic.

“No, not faster than ours. Course, none of ours are half so deadly. We could catch the Dreadnought, no problem at all. But God knows what we’d do with it, once we caught it.”

Mercy looked back down at the sheet, spread across her lap. “What about the other hand?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“You said ‘on the one hand.’ What’s on the other one?”

“Oh. That’s right. On the one hand, the engine is frightful because it’s an instrument of war. On the other hand, it was designed quite deliberately to make people afraid. You said you were there, in Te

“No sir, I didn’t. I only heard the whistle, back on the battlefield. I heard it brought a Union mechanized walker to the fight.”

He said, “I reckon it did. Those walkers weigh so much, there’s no other way to move ’em around the map. All powered up, even our petroleum-powered walkers can’t run more than an hour or two. The Yanks have those shitty steam-powered jobs. They can hit like the dickens-don’t misunderstand me-but no one can stand to drive ’em for more than thirty minutes. But now, you said you didn’t see the Dreadnought.”

“No sir. You ever see it?”

He nodded. “I saw it once, up in Chicago when I was passing through on my way to Canada to nab a load of pelts. I saw it in the train yard, and I don’t mind telling you, it made me look twice. It’s a devil of a thing. It’s got so much plating that it looks like it’s wearing a mask, and they’ve welded so many guns and light ca

He sucked at the pipe for a few seconds. Mercy didn’t say anything until he pulled the pipe out of his mouth and used it to point at the bottom right of the page. “Now, what’s that say? Down there? Can you tell me?”

“Something about Mexico, and the emperor there being up to no good.”

Farragut Cu

“ ‘Emperor Maximilian the Third accuses Texian vigilantes, rangers, and residents in the mysterious disappearance of Mexican humanitarian legion.’ ”

The Texian sniffed. “I just bet he does.”

She went on. “ ‘The emperor insists that the troops were merely a peacekeeping force sent north in order to assist the emigration of Mexican nationals back into undisputed Mexican territory-’ ”

“Let ’em go. Let ’em all go, we don’t want ’em.”

“ ‘Texians have disputed that claim, and insisted that the military presence amounted to an act of invasion.’ ”

“More or less, damn straight that’s what it is. Should’ve never sent those uniforms over the Rio Grande like that-they sure as hell know that’s their boundary, agreed upon by their own people, and years ago now.”

Mercy looked up from the paper. “All right, I’m confused. Does this mean there are Mexicans in north Texas?”

Her bench-mate fidgeted as if this was an irritating subject, and stuffed the pipe back in his mouth. “Oh, you know how it is. They done lost their war, and now the nation’s ours. But they like to dicker with us about where the northwest lines are.”

“That seems . . . imprecise.”

“Maybe it is, a little. Problem is, even when we can agree with ol’ Max on where the northwest boundaries are, the people who live there sometimes don’t. I ain’t going to lie to you-it’s the middle of godforsaken nowhere, and the homesteaders and settlers and the like, some of them are pretty sure they’re citizens of Mexico. But when the lines got redrawn-” He hesitated and clarified. “-when the lines got redrawn this most recent time, a bunch of citizens got right peeved about paying taxes to the Republic, when they thought they were Mexicans.”