“All I need is a safety pin or two, et c’est tout,” Ruthie said through her teeth.
“Josie, do you have one?”
“Of course I do. Get back out there,” Josephine said in her normal speaking voice, not wanting to draw any further attention. Surely the men in the other room were wondering by now, why it had gone so quiet in the charge bays.
“All right, then, I will.”
Fifteen
The remainder of the trip down the canal occurred without incident. According to Houjin, both Rucker Little and Wallace Mumler were gaining ground. Neither man had been injured or otherwise dispatched when the dirigible fell from the sky—whether Texian or pirate, no one knew—and though their escorts had fallen behind, they’d signaled that they’d catch up.
Cly had fallen utterly quiet upon retaking his seat from a grateful Deaderick Early, who was finding the navigation more than he knew how to accomplish, except in a theoretical way.
The women in the charge bay resumed their work. The clanks and heavy thuds of crates and shells echoed from time to time, punctuated intermittently by swearing in French and English. Troost temporarily left his post to lend a hand, but he was told that no extra hands were needed, so he resumed his seat and kept watch on the coordinates.
Everyone listened, and everyone heard how much louder the atmosphere outside was steadily becoming. Occasional artillery booms escalated to near-constant racket and there were regular hearty bangs of airship pieces raining down from the sky. Some of them splashed and sank, drifting back and forth and downward in front of the big window; some clattered against the hull, none of them hitting very hard.
Not yet. Not while several feet of water still separated that hull from the open air above.
Houjin whistled at something only he could see, sounding impressed and antsy. “It’s a good thing we’re swimming at night,” he mused. “All those ships up there, wow. During the day, someone would be bound to see us.”
“How many ships, Huey?” Troost asked.
“Hard to say, exactly.”
“Guess,” Cly urged him.
“Guessing?” The boy chewed on his lower lip and concentrated, spinning the visor scope this way and that, adjusting its cranks for a better range of vision. “At least four big Texas ships. The real big kind, like warships up in the sky. They’re armored up good, and that’s a relief. Anything that big carries enough hydrogen to blow a bay sky-high.”
The captain said, “That’s a start. Four big Texas ships, at least. What else do you see?”
“Pirates. Lots of them. I see two Chinese fliers, and maybe a third. A couple of French ships, it looks like—maybe more than that. A few Spanish ships, or things that started out Spanish. And is that … is that…?”
“Is it what, kid?” Troost asked crossly.
“Indian ships. Three of them—two Comanche, if I read the flags right.”
“I’ll be damned,” Cly said.
Deaderick laughed, utterly unsurprised. “The Comanche beef with Texas is as fair as anybody else’s.”
“I just don’t know too many Indian pirates, that’s all,” he replied. “But I’m glad to see them. Huey, what else is up there?”
“A couple of Union cruisers, I think.” He made small, pensive noises while he adjusted the scope. “And on top of all that, maybe six or seven others I can’t place. They could be from anywhere, but they’re pretty clearly ours. Unfortunately, most of the ones in the water are, too.”
“How many are down?”
“Can’t tell, sir. But there’s fire on the water, and burning trash floating between here and there. A lot of it. I’d guess half a dozen ships still floating, and more that have sunk already. Can’t guess about those, since I can’t see them from up here.”
Cly nodded, even though Huey wasn’t looking at him. “That’s a good point. We’ll need to keep our eyes open for debris right in front of us. Won’t do anyone any good if we crash against it all the way down here. I’m not even sure how we’d get out if we got stuck,” he said. The last sentence died in his mouth, and he swallowed away the bad taste it left behind. “Deaderick, do those forward lights get any brighter?”
“Not so far as I know. And if they did, they’d only mark us for the big ships to aim at.”
“Damn. You’re right, but damn.”
“Sir?”
“Yes, Huey?”
“We’re almost out of the canal. Maybe ten or twenty yards, that’s all.”
“Thank you, Huey. Everybody hang tight. I don’t know how hard the current in the bay runs, but the canal’s kept us sheltered. The starting jolt may throw us off our feet. Won’t be as bad as the river, but it’ll be a change, all the same. Ladies?” he called out. “You hear that?”
“We heard you!” Josephine snapped back. “And we’re ready.”“Good. Because here we go—here comes the bay.”
The bay didn’t take them in a surge of rushing water, not like the river had done. It was more of a lower, cooler pull. The sudden openness and size of it gave everyone within the Ganymede the peculiar sense of stepping off a cliff while underwater, only to float instead of falling.
“I didn’t think…” Early said.
“Didn’t think what?” Troost asked.
“That there’d be any current in the bay. I only expected the tide.” The captain was glad for the peaceable nature of it, since nothing else about the situation was half so quiet. He said, “Houjin, me and Fang are going to bring this thing down low. Keep your scope close to the surface; don’t let it ride too high. We don’t want to get ourselves spotted right out of the canal.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Now, tell me what you can see about the boats in the bay. Any of them belong to our side, or do they all belong to Texas and the Rebs?”
The boy frowned hard into the scope, adjusting it to comply with the captain’s command. “I see four, but there might be more. I can’t see all the way around the bay, or past the fort at the island.”
“That’s fine,” Cly told him. “Just tell me what you see, and we’ll worry about what you can’t see later on.”
“Mumler and Little are still up there. They’re taking turns sticking with us—falling back and taking cover where they can, along the edges where the grass is high. There’s a lot of firepower up there, sir.”
“Understood. But who do the boats belong to? That’s what we need to know, so we don’t go off shooting any of our own kind.”
Houjin paused, still frowning, still staring into the visor like it was a crystal ball that might be able to tell him more than his mortal eyes would allow. “Two are definitely Texian. I see the Lone Star painted on the side. I’m pretty sure the third one is, too, but I can’t say about the fourth. It’s too far out. We’ll have to get closer.”
“We’ll start with the ones we know for sure. What’s the position of the nearest Texian ship?”
“Dead ahead, sir. Maybe a hundred yards. There’s an antiaircraft mount on the deck, and it’s kicking up a storm.”
He didn’t need to add the last part. Everyone could hear it, the too-near rat-a-tat-tat of the guns shooting and recoiling against the surface. As they drew closer, they could feel it, too—the shuddering of the waves as the water was bucking against the bottom of the Texian boat. Even below the waterline as they were, the motion of the other craft made the bay feel like a bathtub full of children learning to swim.
“Josephine and … uh … Ruthie?” Cly called into the charge bay. “How are you two doing in there?”
Ruthie came to the curved doorway. The bump on her head was darkening from the red of fresh injury to the blue of impending bruise, but she looked otherwise unharmed. Her dress was pinned back into position, and though it hung oddly, it covered everything important.
She announced, “First two charges are ready to fire. We can light the fuse and shoot them whenever you tell us to do it.” She disappeared back inside.
“Deaderick? You know how to aim and guide these things?”
“I think so. I’ve never done it myself, but I know what the motions look like. The controls are there at Troost’s console.”
“Shit,” said Kirby Troost. “Maybe you’d better take my chair.”
“Fine with me,” Deaderick said. He took Troost’s spot and lowered the seat to accommodate his height.
Troost declared, “I’ll head over there and help those ladies, whether they want me or not.”
“Wait,” Cly told him. Then he asked Deaderick, “That topside gun—is it anything special?”
“Naw. It’s just a pod fitted with the same thing you’ve got on an airship. Repeating fire, bandolier bullets on a threaded stream. Troost can probably work it, no problem—but let’s leave that for later. The ball turret has to rise up to fire.”
“Not much range when you shoot it underwater, I guess.”
“Yeah, the bullets aren’t so keen when they’re swamped.”
“All right, then—Troost, do whatever you like. But keep your ears open. We’ll need you in a bit.”
“Aye, aye,” he said with a small salute, ducking back into the charge bay and immediately getting an earful from Josephine, who did not feel that she or Ruthie required any help.
“Troost makes new friends easy as pie, everywhere he goes,” Cly murmured. “He has such a God-given knack for getting on with people.”
Huey piped up. “If you could call it that.”
“I can hear you, you know,” the engineer said from the bay.
“Yeah, I know. Early, how are you doing with those weapons adjustments?”
“Doing all right. I think I’ve got it—but I’ll know better once we get one fired off. We may have to waste one for the sake of calibrating the equipment.”