Ganymede (The Clockwork Century #3)

Ganymede (The Clockwork Century #3) Page 42

Eleven men worked as a unit, setting up an enormous cagelike contraption—a custom-made crane bracing a winch with the power to do what a thousand men would be hard-pressed to accomplish.

Lights flared to life throughout the bayou, dimmed by shades and covered with blue or red glass. They burned in lanterns, on poles, marking the pier’s edges as the hoist began to crank. The craft began to rise.

On the lake’s banks, just at the spot where it could be described as land instead of muddy water, a set of braced reinforcements had been sunk into the soggy earth to shore it up against the Ganymede’s unseemly weight. Backed up to these reinforcements, the two rolling-crawlers were hitched to the largest wheeled platform Cly had ever seen. The pilfered Texian machines were set up like a pair of draft horses, ready to pull.

Houjin whispered the captain’s own concerns. “Will those machines be able to tow it? And will they fit through the road leading out of the bayou?”

Before Cly could tell him that he didn’t know, Anderson Worth replied, “Those things can pull it, no problem. But they can’t cut through the bayou, not the same way you folks came inside it. There’s a secondary road—one we’ve been building up for the last few months. We’ve cut it as wide as we can, given it all the beams, braces, and support possible, and we’ve covered it up with the nettings, like the ones we use in the camp.”

“An entire road?” Houjin gaped.

Worth patted him on the shoulder. “Not a very long one. Less than a mile of it, even. It only has to reach from the swamp to the streets outside Metairie. From Metairie, we’ll have to haul tail to make it to New Sarpy without anyone seeing us.”

“How do you plan to do that?” Troost asked, watching as the winch worked hard against the dead, dangling bulk of the Ganymede’s hull. It was halfway out of the water, and still rising—and the pier was sagging where one leg of the enormous hoist contraption was braced. One of the other legs was pushing a clump of railroad ties deeper into the mud with every clicking rotation.

Mr. Worth smiled without any mirth. “We’ve got lots of friends between here and New Sarpy, and we’ll have to rely on them to look the other way while we’re working. There’s a warehouse on Clement Street where we’ve made room to dry-dock Ganymede over the next day. And then, tomorrow night, we throw her into the river and you boys will take her out to sea.”

“Easy as that,” Troost observed, but whether or not he was being funny, it was hard to say.

Cly said, “Simple as that, anyway. I think we’ll be all right. She handles like a big, drunk salmon—but she does handle, and that’s something. With your boats topside, guiding us with the poles … it should be fine. We’ll be counting on you, though,” he said, bobbing his head at Wallace Mumler and Honeyfolk Rathburn, who had done most of the poling so far. “I don’t like moving blind. You’ll have to keep us out of trouble.”

“And we will,” vowed Mumler, who’d come to stand beside them as the big ship rose.

There were only so many positions where a man could observe and still stay out of the way. The winching contraption was a marvel of pulleys, foldable spiderlike legs, and a diesel engine determinedly chugging against the series of cranks that hauled Ganymede not merely to the surface, but up out of the water entirely.

The craft was watertight, and there was no longer any immediate risk of drowning within it—not so far as Cly could tell during his earlier inspections. If there were structural problems left undiscovered, well, they’d have to deal with that when the moment came. Two escape hatches were built into the thing, after all. He tried not to worry about the fact that Houjin could not swim.

After a full twenty minutes of too-loud jangle from the slowly spinning winch, Ganymede rose fully from the swamp. It emerged covered in mud, roots, plants, and primordial slime, dripping like something newly born, yet somehow ancient. Its hull shimmered in the red lights, giving the whole craft an unearthly appearance, as if it’d landed from some other planet—or been fired out of a volcano, and now hung suspended, dripping with cooling lava.

From the structurally buttressed bank, Rucker Little used the whole of his body to draw down a lever. The timbre of the ratcheting changed as a new set of gears engaged, and with a slowness that was painful to watch, Ganymede swung in a semicircle toward the wheeled flatbeds that awaited her.

The crane groaned and the gears strained, their teeth clacking in agonized chomps; the legs of the makeshift device quivered and sank into the still-unstable turf, shuddering with every bite. But the structure held, and when Rucker leaned on another lever, the craft dropped, an inch or two at a time. It settled with a creak and a bong, with the scrape of a dozen seams and a hundred rivets grinding against the waiting pair of mated flatbeds.

The wheels compressed and the crawlers sank on their axles, but nothing broke.

Not a single cheer went up. There’d been too much noise already.

One by one, the lights were snuffed until only the bare minimum remained. Norman Somers removed the dimming lens from his own light, mounted on the front of the rambling vehicle he drove that night. It was smaller than the machine he’d used to bring Cly and his crew into the bayou, but still so large, it could hold Norman in the driver’s seat and Ruthie Doniker beside him.

It was their job to lead the way out.

The rolling-crawlers revved to life, and plumes of billowing diesel smoke choked the low, dark places between the bayou canopy and the soupy ground. Wallace Mumler drove one, with Captain Cly and Fang inside it. Honeyfolk Rathburn drove the other, with Kirby Troost and Houjin as passengers. The machines were joined together by a pair of bars on floating hinges. These bars kept the vehicles from separating and causing the flatbeds to split, which would drop Ganymede into the middle of the swamp, or the middle of the road. The coordination made driving difficult, a constant fight for navigational control, but like everything else about the operation, this had been practiced. Wallace and Honeyfolk knew what they were doing.

Cly clenched his jaw. It was excruciating, all this tedious caution, but he knew as well as anyone how necessary it all was. The bayou boys had a million and one things to worry about, and this kind of care was the only surefire way to remove as many of those variables as possible. It was wise. It was important. And it was driving Cly insane, because it gave him time to think of all the horrible things that could go wrong.

They could hit a bump and open a crack in Ganymede’s hull. A fuel line could be jostled out of place. The exhaust system could be unsettled, dumping bad air and fumes into the cabin when it came time to navigate the river, poisoning everyone where they stood.

How many men had died in these things, again? Had Josephine and Deaderick even told him the truth? Would they have lied, if they thought it would get them to their goal? Cly decided that in the name of fairness, he couldn’t speculate on Deaderick’s capacity for falsehood, but once upon a time he’d known Josephine very, very well, and he wouldn’t put constructive fibbing past her for one short second.

And this time he wasn’t just risking his own neck.

He looked over at Fang, sitting impassively in the central seat, since he was the smallest of the three men. Fang caught Cly’s stare from the corner of his eye, gave it back, and then winked, but made no signs to say anything else that might have been reassuring—or discouraging, for that matter.

Cly thought of Kirby Troost, who had made enough trouble of his own for a dozen lifetimes. For Troost, this was nothing more than another adventure, one more job to augment a bizarre résumé, and he was entering it freely. But did he truly understand the stakes? Would it matter if he did?

And what of Houjin, insatiable curiosity and all, game for anything? What if something happened to him? It was a risk every airman ran, at some point. Everyone knew that the sky was not always a hospitable place, and that not every pirate or pilot came to ground of his own volition. Huey was still just a boy.

Cly was seized with uncertainty. What would he say to Houjin’s uncle if the worst should occur? For that matter, should the worst occur to the lot of them, who would tell anyone?

Back in Seattle, Yaozu would wait and wonder with increasingly sour impatience, watching the tower and Fort Decatur for a shipment that would never come. And Briar Wilkes, who’d lost so much already. Would she wait weeks? Months? How long would she hold out hope before assuming the worst?

He swallowed, or he tried. His mouth was dry. His nerves were frazzled, not that he would’ve admitted it. He’d been in tight scrapes before, hadn’t he? Plenty of them.

None of them had ever involved spying, though. None of them had ever come with two governments—the Republic and the Confederacy—willing to shoot any and all comers. He found himself longing for the companionable violence of pirates, which only led him to think of Barataria Bay, and whatever was left of it … and his mood darkened further.

In front of the rolling-crawlers, Norman Somers and Ruthie Doniker left their light on bravely, no doubt nervously, knowing that they’d draw the most immediate attention if any attention were to be drawn.

The moment when the double-wide load turned out of the bayou and onto the main street was one accomplished with white knuckles, gritted teeth, and the grinding of wheels, accompanied by the surge and struggle of the diesel engines that powered the whole operation.

And now they were out in the open. No cover, no canopy.

It was late, but not so late that they were alone on the road. The way was not crowded, and it was trafficked mostly by men in riding crafts like the one Norman Somers drove at the head of the weird caravan. Norman waved at a few of them, even called out greetings, which were called back.

The other drivers gazed curiously, or made a pointed effort to look away—as if by seeing nothing they could know nothing, and be forced to recall nothing later on. People averted their eyes and shuttered their lanterns, holding away what light they could in order to let the strange procession pass as if unseen.

Onward they rolled, every yard a dreadful grind.