Elizabeth Bear - Karen Memory

I hefted my hatchet. Giving up felt like … well, like giving up. In a situation like this, you’d think there would be something I could chop. Pity I didn’t think I could get through the Os’minog’ s hull. That’d be a moral victory worth dying for.

Below, a steady clanging started to echo up the hatchway. Somebody throwing their weight against the dogged and jammed hatch below. It’d probably give eventually.

I decided that I wanted to kiss Priya again, and she seemed happy enough to kiss me back — happy being a sort of a relative, under the circumstances. But when I pulled my face out of her hair, I saw something that made me smile and say, “We ain’t finished yet!”

She turned to see and laughed. There, out of all them dark clouds, burst the emerald-and-carnelian belly of Minneapolis Colony’s vaudevillian dirigible, swinging down low and toward us. A dark shape dangled from a rope ladder fifty feet under the gondola, the familiar duster flapping like an eagle’s ragged wings.

The only way I could be gladder to see something would be if it were my sainted da come down from Heaven to wrap me in his angel wings. A duster would do, though. A duster would do.

“Be ready,” Priya said. The Marshal came on, wave tops licking at his boots as the dirigible plunged below the clouds. The roar of its engines rose over the wind, shattering the illusion that it moved in silence. I ripped my trousers off — ripped ’em nearly in half — and twisted them into a loop. We each stuck an arm through one end; there was no way one of us was leaving that deck without the other.

I hurled the ax out to sea, because it felt damned good to do it.

We climbed up on the railing and waited there, arms outstretched, balanced with our shins against the top rail. The wind blew through my cotton bloomers like I was naked. Below, metal rent. The hinges on the hatch giving way. Well, they really couldn’t submerge now. But the Marshal was only going to get one pass.

I could see there was a tangle of net on the ladder around him and that he himself was roped in good. There would be things for us to catch on to, then, and we wouldn’t pull him off. That pleased me. I’d hate to be the cause of the widowing of Mrs. Jennie Reeves and the orphaning of all the little Reeveslings.

I looked at Priya and felt a strange exaltation. Whatever happened now, there weren’t no question what either of us wanted. I guessed I could die knowing that.

Then the Marshal was there, howling something that might have been instructions and might have been an animal cry purely formed of one half excitement and two halves being terrified. His hands grabbed at me and my hands grabbed the net. I felt a savage jerk as Priya missed, half-fell, was swept off the railing and then used the twist of flannel binding us together to right herself and grab again. Cord cut my burned palms. I screamed. My feet kicked free; then one toe caught in the netting. Priya swung beside me, a little lower. Marshal Reeves threw his arm around the small of her back. The relict Ivan surged out of the hatchway — guess he did fit after all! — and grabbed at my still-swinging sock-clad foot. I felt his hand on my ankle, felt the pull, screamed some more as he dragged at me, feet skidding on the decking. He fetched up against the pipe railing, took it right across the kidney, and let go.

We sailed on, under the beautiful green-and-orange belly of Captain Colony’s delivering airship, with the gray waves hissing and tossing their forelocks below.

Some of that might be out of order. It’s all a jumble in my memory. But I do remember that the last thing I saw before the wind twisted me away was Horaz Standish and Captain Nemo, standing on the tiny deck of their submersible, Ivan crumpled at their feet, staring after the three of us like a couple of cats that bumped heads over a blue jay and had to watch it sai-i-i-il away.

* * *

One or more of ’em might have shot after us, but if they did it was only with handguns and nothing came close enough to notice. We had other problems commanding our attention, anyway.

Somehow we made it up the ladder, me cursing my hands and my cold-numbed legs with every lurch. The Marshal was trying to help me without actually putting his hands on my fundament and hoisting, and Priya was shouting advice. We would have made us a regular slapstick, if anybody had been there to see us.

I think we only lived to the top because Captain Colony had the ladder on a winch, and the distance up kept getting smaller. Then Merry Lee was hugging and hauling and pulling me into the airship, and I’m not sure which one of us was crying harder.

The next thing I knew she had checked me over and sat me down and I was clutching a mug of sweet, milky tea between hands now wrapped in fresh (and freshly blood-spotted) bandages, trying to figure out how to work it past my chattering teeth. It was still damned cold inside the gondola from the hatches being open to effect our rescue, but just being out of the wind made all the difference and I figured if I could stop shivering long enough to get some of that tea inside me while it was still hot I might just be able to manage not to die.

Hugging the tea — and Priya leaning against my arm, sharing the same wool blanket — helped enough that I eventually managed to sip some. That done, I had enough control of my voice to ask, “How’d you find us?”

The Marshal slurped his own tea. “We tracked his exhaust pipe. We were trying to figure out how to force him to surface when you girls did that for us.”

Colony, at the controls, shook his head. “I wish we could have got to him before he got to that ship.”

We was all silent for a minute, and then I said, “Yeah.”

Then I realized who I hadn’t seen on the Os’minog . “Did you get Scarlet?”

Reeves shook his head.

Priya and me filled ’em all in real quick on what had happened, and that Standish was Reeves’ man rather than Scarlet.

“Pity,” Reeves said. Then he shrugged. “Well, I done harder things than get Horatio Standish back to Oklahoma. And you ladies done thwarted their cholera plan.”

“For now,” Merry said. She looked grim.

The Marshal said, “Before they captured you, they had to have planned on some other means of getting it into the city.”

“If it were me,” Priya said, “I’d get it into the water supply on a ship headed north.”

“Or the expedition food,” Merry Lee agreed. “Get it right out into the mining camps.”

We was silent for a minute, contemplating that. It took some of the sting out of what might happen to Rapid … but it didn’t lessen the threat to Anchorage and the Yukon none.

I finished my tea. It would do me more good inside than out, no matter how turned my stomach was. I was just running a finger around the inside to get the last of the sugar when Captain Colony called from the front of the bridge.

“There’s worse news.”

We’re not cowards, none of us. But not a one of the three of us wanted to ask.

“He’s gotten that thing under way again. And it’s steaming for Rapid City.”

When I shook my head, my hair slapped wetly on my ears. “I gotta get to my sewing machine.”

We didn’t have no trouble beating the submersible back to Rapid — turns out there’s some advantages to airships — and I’d like to say it was a pleasant flight, but in all honesty I don’t remember a damned thing about it. Priya and me lay down on the couch for just a minute, watching the gray outside the window all featureless as fog. Which I guess it was, after a fashion. Or rather, fog is clouds.

And the next thing I knew, Merry was crouched down beside me and Priya, shaking us both awake. It was still daylight and the windows was still gray, but there was some texture to it now. As I watched — as we dropped lower, I guessed — the gray broke into streamers and billows across the top of the window, and then we was low enough to see the dirty cotton-wool texture of the cloud bellies up close. I wanted to reach out and touch ’em. They looked solid as ice, but I knew if I put a hand out it’d be just mist and cold between my fingers.