Cherie Priest - Dreadnought

To Jerry and Donna Priest

I used to joke that they could come home and find a bus full of first-graders crashed on the front lawn, caught in the cross fire of a bank robbery, in the midst of an alien invasion . . . and they’d have the situation under control in under a minute. But for the record, I was only kind of joking.

This is a work of fiction, featuring impossible politics, unlikely zombies, and some ludicrously incorrect Civil War action. I hope you enjoy it! And I’d like to thank you in advance for not sending me e-mail to tell me how bad my history is. I think we all know I’ve fudged the facts rather significantly.

(Except the zombie parts.)

At the risk of sounding redundant, my first paragraph of thanks and warm kudos goes to the usual suspects: my husband, Aric Annear, for not yet admitting that he’s sick to death of hearing about these stories, bless his heart; my editor, Liz Gorinsky, for saving me from many a prose misstep and being my in-house champion over at Tor; my agent, Jennifer Jackson, for making all the hard phone calls and letting me periodically stomp around like a tiny Godzilla; and to my publicity team at Tor-Patty Garcia and Amber Hopkins-for meeting me in strange cities and booking my travel so I don’t have to.

And I can’t have a thanks page without a nod to my day-job chief, Bill Schafer. Thanks for helping me keep the lights on without crowding out the writing work, dude; and thanks to Yanni Kuznia, because she seriously does manage to do it all, and I don’t know how -but I sure am glad for it.

Thanks also to Andrea Jones, she of the copious Civil War knowledge-for always answering dumb questions with intelligent, interesting, sometimes wacky (but always cool-as-hell) speculation. She and her usual suspects at the Manor of Mixed Blessings have become my go-to crowd for obscure trivia and strange guesses. Thanks be likewise to Christina Smith at the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum for her input on “Ranger” usage and treatment. Because honestly, I just didn’t know.

Likewise, thanks to Louisa May Alcott for writing letters home when she was working at a Washington, D.C., hospital during the Civil War. Her collection of “Hospital Sketches” was immensely helpful in imagining and re-creating a fictional version of the Robertson facility in Richmond.

Epic gratitude and much love go to everyone in the secret clubhouse that serves the world; and to Warren Ellis for being Warren Ellis; and to Wil Wheaton for being Wil Wheaton. Also I send it out to Team Seattle-Mark Henry, Caitlin Kittredge (even though she’s leaving us for Massachusetts), Richelle Mead, and Kat Richardson-for giving me a posse of writer peeps with which to hang; to Duane Wilkins for helping manage the signed cargo at the University Book Store; and to the crew at Third Place Books (hi Steve and Vlad!) for their continuing support as well.

More hearty thanks go to Greg Wild-Smith, my original and forever webmaster (unless I eventually drive him off with my crazy); to Ellen Milne and Suezie Hagy for the brunches, company, the organizational skills, and the cat-sitting services.

And finally, thanks to my dad and stepmom-Jerry and Donna Priest, both of them retired from the U.S. Army. Dad was a medic in Vietnam who went on to become a nurse, then a CRNA; Donna was an ER nurse for decades, and now she teaches. Back in the day, she went around the world a time or two on the hospital ship USNS Mercy -which may or may not be a coincidence regarding any characters appearing in this book.

Anyway, Dad, thanks for everything. Donna, thanks for everything . . . and the boots.

Then bring me here a breastplate,

And a helm before ye fly,

And I will gird my woman’s form,

And on the ramparts die!

– FELICIA HEMANS, from the poem “Marguerite of France”

I want something to do.

– LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, upon announcing her intention to serve as a nurse at the Washington Hospital during the Civil War. To be filed under, “Be careful what you wish for.”

Down in the laundry room with the bloody-wet floors and the ceiling-high stacks of sheets, wraps, and blankets, Vinita Lynch was elbows-deep in a vat full of dirty pillowcases because she’d promised-she’d sworn on her mother’s life-that she’d find a certain windup pocket watch belonging to Private Hugh Morton before the device was plunged into a tub of simmering soapy water and surely destroyed for good.

Why the private had stashed it in a pillowcase wasn’t much of a mystery: even in an upstanding place like the Robertson Hospital, small and shiny valuables went missing from personal stashes with unsettling regularity. And him forgetting about it was no great leap either: the shot he took in the forehead had been a lucky one because he’d survived it, but it left him addled at times-and this morning at breakfast had been one of those times. At the first bell announcing morning food, against the strict orders of Captain Sally he’d sat up and bolted into the mess hall, which existed only in that bullet-buffeted brain of his. In the time it took for him to be captured and redirected to his cot, where the meal would come to him, thank you very kindly, if only he’d be patient enough to receive it, the junior nursing staff had come through and stripped the bedding of all and sundry.

None of them had noticed the watch, but it would’ve been easy to miss.

So Nurse Lynch was down in the blistering hot hospital basement, dutifully fishing through laundry soiled by injured and greasy heads, running noses, and rheumy eyes in hopes that Private Hugh Morton would either be reunited with the absent treasure, or would be separated from it long enough to forget all about it.

Upstairs, someone cried out, “Mercy!”

And downstairs, in the hospital basement, Vinita Lynch took a very deep breath and let it out slowly, between her teeth.

“Mercy! Mercy, come up here, please!”

Because that’s what they’d taken to calling her, through some error of hearing or paperwork, or because it was easier for a room full of bed-bound men to remember a common word than call her by her given name.

“Mercy!”

It was louder this time, and insistent, and bellowed by Captain Sally herself somewhere up on the first floor. Captain Sally sounded like she meant business; but then again, Captain Sally always meant business, and that was why she was the captain.

The nurse angled her head to cast her voice up the stairs and shouted, “Coming!” though she continued to rifle through the laundry, because something sharp had tapped against the nail of her thumb. And if she could just snare one long finger around the smooth metal plate of the watch’s back-yes, that had to be it-then she’d be only a moment longer. “I’m coming!” she said even more loudly, to stall for those extra seconds, even though the summons hadn’t come again.

She had it. Her fist closed around it and wrested the palm-sized device, ticking and intact, up through the folds of cotton bedding and out of the vat. The watch was cool in her hand, and heavier than it appeared-not an expensive piece, but one with thumb-spots worn into its finish from a lifetime of use and appreciation.