Fiddlehead

Four shots volleyed fast, fired by a man in an earflap hat and a very large coat.

Two of them didn’t land anywhere important, so far as Maria could tell, but one winged a thruster, and a hard sound hissed against the motor. The last shot plunked into the bag at Maria’s feet. She felt the shove of it, and for a moment assumed the worst—but no, something had stopped it. Hopefully not her extra stockings. She didn’t own a third pair.

She aimed the gun his way, but he ducked inside, and then the Black Dove ducked, too. With a hard, belly-bombing lurch it lost so much altitude that Maria thought something else had been hit, something more important than the fizzling thruster. “Henry!” she shouted.

“Hold on!”

“What are you doing?!”

“Getting away from them!”

“Let’s not get away all the way to the ground, please?” she squeaked.

“Not to the ground…” he said, but whatever else he would’ve added was lost when his full attention was called for at the controls. He pulled up out of the dive in a veering sweep that brought them up again, higher than they’d flown before, to an altitude where breathing the air felt like chewing on ice.

“Oh God.” Maria coughed, but she held the gun tight and pointed it back at the unmarked ship. She gauged the distance between them and hoped it was near enough to hit, but far enough to escape any fireball that might ensue.

She emptied the last of her chambers and hit the windscreen again, this time puncturing it with a short round of finger-sized holes. But the pilot was unharmed, and she’d come nowhere close to hitting the hydrogen.

Whoever that pilot was, he was good. As good as Henry. Maria could only pray he wasn’t better.

The two ships soared around each other, circling and feinting in a deadly game of chicken, both sides aware that they were careening through portentous weather while strapped to tanks full of a gas so flammable they’d leave a second sun blazing in the sky if one of them lost the match.

Henry wrenched the steering column and kicked a lever by his foot. The ship zoomed upward again, so steeply that Maria’s throat clenched shut and her eyes followed close behind. She couldn’t look. “Henry, what are you doing!” she demanded, not really wanting to know, but needing to know—clutching the gun, but unable to reload it because then she’d have to take her other hand off the Black Dove’s frame. If she did, nothing would be holding her inside but the ridiculous hemp strap, which now struck her as so fragile as to be laughably useless. “They’re right behind us! You can’t outmaneuver them this way!”

“Not trying to! You have to reload!” he cried, leveling out and letting her catch her breath for a bit.

Her hands were shaking and she could scarcely feel them to guide the bullets. She picked them out of her pocket one by one like seeds from an apron. “What are you doing?” she asked again, fumbling and dropping one, losing sight of it as it tumbled downward.

“Are you loaded?”

“Only … only three!” She tried to keep the panic from her voice.

“Those tanks are pretty big. Can you hit them in three shots?”

“I think so, but…”

“From underneath?”

She paused. “I think so.”

He gri

Maria laughed the unhinged cackle of a lunatic when she realized her hat was long gone, so all she had to clutch was her gun and this ship. So she didn’t fall out as she leaned, squinted through her goggles, and aimed.

The unmarked ship loomed above her, its tanks dangling low and inviting on the sides. She only needed to hit one, but she had to hit it square, and she was falling, falling, falling … and had the engine cut out? She couldn’t tell. There was nothing in her ears but the rush of the drop. The sky was huge above her, and the other ship was coming after them, but it was coming too slow as it turned to dive in their wake. Five more seconds and the angle would be wrong.

She fired.

The first shot missed, but the second hit home.

The craft did not shake or stutter, it simply exploded—the punctured tank first, and the other one an instant later. A ball of fire flared mightily above them and shot higher yet, and a warm wave of searing air snapped back against the Black Dove.

“Pull up, pull up!” Maria shrieked at Henry. He was already trying to level the craft, but the drag and the wind and the new push of heat were working hard to stop him. “Get us steady!” she added. She felt stupid for it immediately, but the ground was right there, and they were flinging themselves toward it, and the thruster—was it even working? It spit like a snake, and a thin, diluted jet of black smoke went streaming out behind it.

“Hang on,” Henry told her. Maria hoped he felt as stupid about saying that as she’d felt about giving him orders.

She jammed the gun into her coat. No way she could get it in the satchel, which had only remained in the craft this long by virtue of being slung across her chest and smushed between her and Henry. Even through the wool of her pocket she could feel the gun’s freshly fired warmth. It might singe the fabric, but what other option did she have? It was that or throw it away, and it was worth more than the coat and dress together.

Not that her clothing should be her biggest concern at such a time. Then again, what thoughts should she be having, in a moment like this? She wondered, faster than the speed of light, about what was appropriate to consider in one’s last moments. A prayer? A wish? A bargain with whatever gods, saints, or angels might wait on the other side of the dark?

“Oh, God,” she said. It meant nothing, but it was all she had.

The engine surged—so no, it hadn’t stopped after all—and though a hard southwestern current shoved them into a lilting curve, the Black Dove righted itself. Maria’s stomach dropped back into its usual position, and Henry’s arms did not relax, but they quit fighting so hard.

The sky fell quiet, and Maria’s ears popped from the shifting pressure of it all. But the thruster was definitely damaged, and the road stretched many miles before them. The CSA dirigible was nowhere in sight.

“Do you think,” she began. It came out too hoarse and quiet, so she tried again—louder this time, and once more near Henry’s ear. “Do you think we can still make Atlanta in this thing?”

He eyed the smoke dribbling from the thruster, and took a moment to listen to the ominous hiss. “I don’t know. But we shouldn’t have to make it all the way there, should we? We’re bound to catch up to them sooner than that.”

“Right.” She nodded.

“If not, we … we set it down beside the road and hunt for a couple of very fast horses.”

“You think we’ll get the chance? To land, rather than crash?”

“Oh, yes.” He nodded back at her. “Absolutely. It’s a steering problem, not a propulsion problem. Might land us in a field, or on top of somebody’s house, but I’ll land us.”

“Good to know.” She patted his arm, breathing hard and trying to calm herself, with limited success. She scowled out across the skyline. “Now, where’s the other damn dirigible?”

Seventeen

“A plan?” Grant snorted. “She’s already pla

Gideon put his hands to his forehead as if it ached. “You’re right,” he admitted grudgingly. “But you’re also wrong. She has orchestrated this, and orchestrated it well—but we’re not so helpless as all that. After all, we’ve forced her to improvise.”