Ganymede (The Clockwork Century #3)

Ganymede (The Clockwork Century #3) Page 31

Ruthie selected a folded sheet of paper. She unfolded it and handed it to Andan Cly.

It depicted the interior workings of a ship, but not one like anything he’d ever seen before. It looked like fiction, there in his hands.

These lines showing gears, and valves, and portals; these careful engineering sketches showing bolts, and curved walls, and compartments for flooding or pumping; these enormous rooms that seated six to eight, with side and bottom holds for ammunition—and tubular sleeves for explosives and fuses.

He did not look up from the schematics when Hazel began talking again, but he listened to her as he perused the pictures with wonder.

“Then McClintock caught Watson red-handed, with telegrams and instructions from the Union army. Whether Watson was a double agent all along, or he simply wanted the bigger payday from the bigger army, no one knows. But he was all set to sell their research to the North, and McClintock wouldn’t have it. They fought, and Watson shot McClintock through the heart before trying to flee inside the vessel he’d helped create.

“But Watson was a designer, not a skipper. He understood the mechanics of the beast, but not the nuance of making it sail—even if that were a task a single man could accomplish. The ship sank halfway across Pontchartrain. Watson drowned.

“But his message had already gone back to the Union engineers, who knew the craft existed. They came to investigate—only to be caught by the Texians, who were also looking for the ship.”

“How did Texas know about it?”

Hazel nodded approvingly, as if this was a good question. “It had been made with Texian technology, and Texian machinists, so they knew it was out there somewhere. They didn’t find, it, though.”

“And your people did?”

Both of the women smiled, identically and in perfect time with each other. Hazel continued. “It took three weeks of looking, but the ship was found and lifted by a group of guerrillas in the bayou … the free men of color who fight Texas and the Confederacy from the shadows. They hauled it to a different shore and hid it there, where it remains now—waiting for the right man or men to take it all the way to the ocean, where it was always meant to go. And that, Captain Cly, is the story of the Ganymede.”

Cly finally looked up from the intricate engineering sketches. He looked each woman in the eye and said, “You want me to fly a ship underwater.”

“Once we can man-haul it to the river, yes. The Mississippi is deep enough to take it, and once you’re in the river, you’ll have slip past Fort Jackson and Fort Saint Philip. From there, it’ll be smooth sailing straight out into the Gulf of Mexico.”

“In a ship that’s drowned … how many men?”

“Ganymede? Oh, hardly any,” Hazel dismissed his concern hastily, and with a wave of her hand. “Only Mr. McClintock, so far as we know. As you can see from those plans, Ganymede is a much stronger design—a much better ship than the ones that came before. Learning how to create a ship like her … it was costly, yes. But the end result is this majestic creation. And it will end a war, Captain.”

Ruthie rose and left her chair, approaching Cly and crouching beside him. With her elegantly gloved hands, she called his attention to various highlights on the schematics that sat across his lap.

“Right here, you see? This is the steering mechanism, and the power system for the propellers. They were designed like thrusters on an airship.”

“I see that, sure. But there’s no hydrogen to keep steady. No gas to maintain, or to power the thrust.”

“But of course there is gas, monsieur! The gas is the air you breathe. It is pumped and cycled, through these vents here, by this tube. If the men breathe the same air too long, it makes them sick. They faint, and they die.”

Hazel confirmed, “That’s one of the hard lessons learned from the Bayou St. John and the Hunley. The men inside must have fresh air, drawn down regularly. The air within the cabin cannot support them forever.”

“So this—” He jabbed a finger at one long set of pipes, and drew it along the lines. “—these pipes don’t stay above water, not all the time? So you don’t have to keep this breathing tube up above the surface?” It reminded him of Seattle, of the system that likewise drew fresh breathing air down underneath an inhospitable surface. They did it the same way, essentially. Tubes bringing in the fresh air for four to eight hours a day, always keeping it moving, never giving it time to grow stale.

Ruthie nodded. “The tubes do not stay up. You can close them from within, like this.” She indicated a rubber-sealed flap that was manipulated by a hydraulic pulley. “There is one main breathing tube, with fans to draw down the air—and an emergency tube in case the one should fail. But they can both be shut so that the ship can sink and hide.”

“For how long?” he asked.

The ladies paused, but Hazel replied. “We’re not certain. Twenty or thirty minutes, at least.”

“So really, it’s a ship that can hold its breath for half an hour at a time.”

“Yes!” Ruthie rose to her feet and clapped. “You see? Josephine said he would understand. She said we needed an airman, and she was right!”

“But what about the original crew? You said it’s been tested, out on the lake. Where are the guys who know how to pilot this thing already?”

Hazel handed him another sheet with a different angle on the Ganymede’s inner workings and said, “Most of them were captured. Two men were sent off to a prisoner-of-war camp in Georgia, and three were sent to the barracks here, but escaped and went back to New England. And the man in charge was shot for treason.”

“Treason?”

“He was from Baton Rouge—a Confederate deserter who’d come to work with the bayou boys. Name was Roger Lisk, may he rest in peace.” Hazel leaned forward, restlessly arranging and rearranging the remaining documents. “Without the crew, and without the men who created it, the Ganymede is a big hunk of metal full of potential … but precious little more than that. The bayou boys have all the information—all these schematics, and instructions. But they’re soldiers and sailors by trade, and sailors haven’t performed well so far, when it comes to keeping the ship afloat and running. And the Union is not so convinced of its value that it’ll risk its own engineers and officers on the project—not unless we can get it to the admiral.”

But Ruthie appeared more hopeful, now that the ball was rolling. “Josephine said no one could work the Ganymede because only the sailors were willing to try. But Ganymede is not built like a boat. She is built like an airship, one made to fly in the water, not in the clouds. Josephine said we needed a crew of airmen. Airmen would know how to make her go.”

“Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Andan Cly cautioned. “I can see that you’re right—partway right, at any rate. Whoever built this bird,” he said, then corrected himself. “Whoever built this fish drew a lot of inspiration from an airship, that’s true. The controls are similar, or so I gather from looking at this. And the shape is more or less the same, with fins instead of small steering sails, and the propeller screws instead of the left and right thrusters. Hmm.”

“Hmm?” Hazel prompted.

“Hmm,” he repeated. “I don’t know anything on earth about sailing, but I understand it’s pretty different from flying. The principle is easy to sort out, but the principle and the practice are two different things.”

Ruthie leaned on the edge of the desk, halfway sitting upon it and halfway resting her bustle there. “It’s true. It’s all true—and we know you are an airman, and not a sailor. But can you make it swim?”

“I … I don’t know what to say.”

“You told Josephine you’d take the job,” Hazel reminded him.

“I didn’t know I was agreeing to a job that might get me and my crew drowned at the bottom of a river, and that’s part of my trouble. If it were just me, that’d be one thing. But a boat like this … it’d take at least two or three men to control her. Maybe more. I’d have to ask my crew members how they felt about it. We’d need to see it in person.”

“That can be arranged!” Ruthie exclaimed. It was clear she’d made up her mind already: this was going to work, all would go smoothly, and the problem was all but resolved.

Hazel was not so confident, but she was willing to risk a shred of hope. She told Cly, “We can take you to it, tonight if you like. Josephine is there, out at the lake with her brother.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Hold your horses, ma’am. Let me go back to my rooms and have a chat with my men, all right? I’ll tell them what you’ve told me, and they can decide whether or not they want to take the chance.”

“But, Captain!” Hazel objected. “You can’t go running around willy-nilly, spreading the story around the Quarter!”

“And I won’t. But I won’t ask my men to risk their lives spying and smuggling against two governments at once, not without knowing what they’re risking. For what it’s worth, I expect they’ll be willing to help. Two of my crewmen are Chinamen, without any more political allegiance than I’ve got, and the other is Kirby Troost, who you met downstairs, He’s always game for anything—the more unlikely and dangerous, the better—and if the prospect of friendly women is involved, you may as well call him sold. So they can make up their own minds, and even if they decide they don’t want in, you can sleep well knowing they won’t have any interest in handing you over to Texas, either.”

Hazel chewed at her lip and tapped Josephine’s silver letter opener up and down on the desk’s edge. “We were hoping for a definite commitment.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s the best you’re going to get right now.” He glanced out the window. “It’s almost sundown, and the curfew will be settling soon. I know you’re not too worried about it—and honestly, neither am I—but if we want to hang around without drawing extra Texian attention, we need to follow the rules. Until we break the ever-living hell out of them, anyway.”