Ganymede (The Clockwork Century #3)

Ganymede (The Clockwork Century #3) Page 54

“That’s right, sir.” Houjin nodded vigorously. “But they’ll be wide open. Exposed. They might get shot.”

Mumler shifted his shoulders and said, “Any one of us might get shot at any time. Rick, if you stay down here with these folks, I’ll join Rucker or Chester up topside. We can take the two lightest of the diesel motors and guide you around. Ruthie? Can you take my place here? Between me and Rick, we’ve showed you the ropes enough so you can fire and reload all the charges.”

“Oui, my dear. I will stay.”

Kirby Troost sniffed. “Used to be, folks considered it bad luck to have a lady on board a boat.”

“To hell with what used to be,” Ruthie spit. “Josephine and I will ride with you, and I will show you what luck we’ll turn out to be, you hear me?”

“Everybody stop fighting, all right?” Cly demanded. “How’s that air circulation going?”

Houjin responded. “Ready to retract and seal up. We can go again as soon as we spool the hose back inside.”

Cly took a deep breath. “You heard the kid. Rucker, you hear me up there?”

“Sure do, Captain.”

“Mumler’s coming up. He’ll explain the situation.”

“Are we headed for the bay or the Gulf?”

“Both,” Cly told him, and turned to reclaim the captain’s seat without looking at Josephine. “We’re going to do both.”

Rucker said, “All right, then. Listen, if for some reason you lose us: Once you get to the bay, head due south and you’ll hit the bottleneck between Grande Terre and Grande Isle. We’ll catch up to you there if we lose you in the fray—or if we have to run for cover.”

“Got it.”

“I don’t like this,” Josephine murmured.

Ruthie took her arm. In French, she said, “Like it, don’t like it. This is the right thing, madame. We will be in the Gulf within an hour or two, but first, we will save this one piece of New Orleans. We will save it, and the men who saved your brother. He owes them a debt, and so he wishes to lend them aid. And you owe them a debt, because you love Deaderick.”

“And what of you, then, darling?” Josephine asked, allowing herself to be led back to the spot where she’d waited out the trip so far, beneath the great windows and holding on to a seam that served as a handrail. “What do you owe them, that you’re so eager to rush into trouble?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

“Nothing may ever come of it,” she said sadly. “I am not his kind, but that makes my debt to the pirates no less true.”

Cly was giving orders, and the men were buckling down where they could, and settling in where they couldn’t. Deaderick came to sit beside his sister, at least for this beginning part—the moments when the air hose was retracted and the craft was sealed, when the propulsion screws churned to life and the craft shoved itself into the canal. Those first seconds had been the worst so far, and they were bad again this time, too—worse, perhaps, due to a brief and violent clip against a sunken stone piling that marked the old entrance to the canal.

Ganymede scraped against it and squeaked around it, pivoting and righting itself. Cly followed the frantic taps from Rucker and Wally above, though the men had not been able to warn the captain in time to let him avoid the obstacle altogether.

“It’s mostly sunken,” Cly griped. “They ought to clean out this damn canal once in a while.”

“Left over from some other construction project, I’m sure,” Deaderick observed, his voice only slightly shaky. The impact and the unexpected turn had unnerved him as much as anyone, and the truth was that no one knew for certain how much damage Ganymede could take before springing a leak or becoming stuck.

“We’ll have to be more careful on the way down this ridiculous creek, won’t we, Houjin?”

“I couldn’t see whatever we hit, captain!”

“I know you couldn’t, and I’m not accusing you of messing up. I’m just saying, keep your eyes open. Let us know what you’re spying up on the banks. Help me keep us moving in a straight line.”

“This canal … I don’t even know if it’s wide enough to take us,” Josephine breathed.

“It’s wide enough, all right,” her brother said. “It’ll take us, but it’s like Cly said. Got to be careful.”

Everyone fell silent as the captain and first mate navigated the dark, warm waters of the narrow canal; and in the midst of this silence, when all the conversation had dried up out of anxiousness or concentration, all the other small sounds were amplified. The pinging of sticks, rocks, and the shoving feet of canal creatures sounded like stomping soldiers. The twist and squeak of the mirrorscope under Houjin’s direction seemed to scream, and the pops of levers at Cly’s feet were as hearty as gunshots in the confined space, with its rounded walls and nervous passengers.

The water wasn’t so rough, there in the sheltered space between the two man-made walls that kept the waters moving but kept them contained as well. The ride was smoother going—and the darkness beyond the windows was even more complete, now that the shadows of the canal conspired with the late-night sky to shroud the whole scene in terrible blindness.

The tiny lights that lit the front windows like a weak little smile did virtually nothing to show the way. They showed only sediment and trash, wagon wheels and the bones of dead things tossed into the canal and forgotten. Some of the bones were large, and Cly thought maybe they’d once belonged to horses. But some of the carcasses looked more like fish—with spiny, needly ribs and flattened skulls that jutted out from the canal bed like tombstones.

“Like tombstones.” The words slipped out of his mouth.

“Those bones?” Kirby asked. “They do look it, don’t they? It feels like swimming through a graveyard. What the hell once had a head like that, anyway?”

Deaderick answered, “Catfish. They grow as long as they eat, and they eat until they die. Sometimes they get bigger than you’d believe.”

Cly breathed, “Jesus,” and steered them up a few feet more, so that the bottom was not quite so near, but they were still below the surface.

Houjin adjusted the height of the scope and called out directions whenever they were appropriate. “You’re veering left, sir.” Or sometimes, “You’re veering right, too close to the sides. Keep us in the middle.”

“I’m working on it,” the captain said. He might’ve said more, except that they all heard a wide, muffled pop that made them look up out of pure habit, despite the fact that none of them could see a thing except for the dull gray rivets that ran along the ceiling.

Ruthie’s eyes blazed out the front windows, though she could only see a reflection of herself, and of the rest of the cabin area with its dull gold lights. “We must be getting close,” she whispered.

“Sounds like it,” Deaderick agreed, taking her hand and squeezing it.

She squeezed back. “I should get to the charges, to the side bays.”

“Ruthie.” Josephine climbed to her feet and extended a hand to her friend. “I’ll come with you. Teach me whatever I don’t know, and can’t figure out.”

“Yes, ma’am. This way. The charges must be prepared before we can fire them. I can show you how to load them.”

Deaderick also rose, saying, “I can man the top guns, if we have to launch them.”

Houjin frowned around the side of the scope’s visor. “We have top guns?”

“There’s a mount behind your scope and to the left. You enter it from the room at the rear, just aft of the ballasting tanks. But we don’t want to get too trigger-happy with them, not until we’re up close and personal. Or until they’ve already seen us anyway, and there’s no more use in keeping a low profile.”

“All right. Troost, once we get out into the bay, you might be better served to help the women hoist the charges.”

“Josephine’s bigger than I am, sir. I doubt I can lift too much more than she can.”

“But they’ll need to reload quickly—and a pair of extra hands will be helpful, given how heavy those damn things are.” Cly knew from his afternoon of training at Pontchartrain, because he’d helped load them onto the Ganymede in preparation for moving it out of the lake.

Before the craft had been sealed up and dropped onto the platforms that carried it to New Sarpy, the bayou boys had packed Ganymede chock-full of every bit of ammunition that had ever been created for it. Mostly it used a modified charge stuffed inside a bullet-shaped casing about the size of a picnic basket. These casings were slotted into a chute, their powders packed and fuses lit, their back ends sealed off with a hammering slam from the chute door … and then they were closed into an exterior compartment and fired straight out of the submarine’s lower right hull. If all went as planned, one of two things would happen: either the charge would explode upon connecting with its target, or it would lodge within the target and explode shortly thereafter.

“Sir, how do we know these charges are any good?” Troost asked. “How long have they been sitting around? And will the damn things explode underwater?”

“I don’t know.”

Deaderick filled him in. “We didn’t test many of them. They’re too valuable to waste.”

Cly said, “I bet the Union won’t feel like we’re wasting them, if we’re using them to shoot down Texians.”

“I daresay they’ll consider it ammunition well spent,” Deaderick said. “Assuming it works.”

“Let’s go ahead and assume the best for now. If what we’ve got won’t burn or blow, we can reconsider our high-and-mighty plans to rush in and save the day,” the captain informed them.

Another blast occurred somewhere overhead, out of the water, up in the sky. This one was particularly loud, and so bright it made Houjin cry out and yank his eyes away from the scope.