Chapter Twenty-Seven

It was a relief to leave the town behind them, especially as the continuing obligato of gunfire and explosions made it seem likely their reception would be too warm for comfort if they were seen again. Fortunately, the driver and his horses had made this drive so often that the snow and the darkness made absolutely no difference to their progress—the sleighbells jingled merrily, the runners sang against the snow, and all four of the passengers finally managed to draw a peaceful breath.

“We’ve had so much fun I hate to see you go,” said Custer with a laugh.

“At least you’ll have the shiner to remember us by,” Liam said, “where are you two bound for from here?”

“Like you we’ve really found out all we could from being in New Petersburg,” Crazy Horse said, deciding to stick to Russian since the others understood it better than his English. “Now we’re going back to join the rest of the Oglala. We need to begin our Ghost Dance, and Georgie and I need to plan a grand strategy for driving the Russians out once and for all.”

“What about the other whites?” Becky asked, genuinely curious. “Is there any chance of peace between you and the U.S.?”

“I expect you know the answer as well as I do,” Crazy Horse answered. “If they deal with us honestly and respect our sovereignty we will welcome peace with them.”

Everybody fell silent, thinking about that. Then Custer spoke up:

“How about you two? Where are you bound for from here?”

Becky and Liam exchanged a surprised look, realizing that the question had caught them in a suspended moment, the two of them levitating on a cloud of buoyant emotions between one moment of severely practical decisions and the next. Becky smiled pensively.

“Well, I know what I am obliged to do, which is report to Mr. Clemens and the other leaders of the Freedom Party and take counsel about how we should proceed with the information we discovered here. And I’m eager to discover what they have arrived at with President Lincoln—surely his situation has been kept in the darkness for far too long, but the question will be just how to put it before the American public.” She looked towards Liam with an unspoken question in her eyes.

Glad of the darkness, Liam smiled back at her and took her hand between both of his. “I can tell you fellows this much—I’ve barely known Miss Fox a couple of weeks, but they’ve been pretty busy ones and I’ve learned a thing or two. One of them for sure is that we’d all better put our thinking caps on and figure out how to put an end to the mess we’re in before it puts an end to us.”

“By the Lord Harry I’ll drink to that!” said Custer.

For a few minutes they were all busy with their own thoughts, though Liam didn’t let go of Becky’s hand. Then at last the driver’s voice broke into their reveries:

“You asked me to let you know when we were five minutes away, Your Honors,” he said. He gestured towards the horizon with his whip: “You see that line of light along there? That’ll be the aerodrome, on the other side of that stand of woods. There’s a road through the woods and we can get pretty close that way. But then you’re going to have to decide what you want to do.”

Liam turned to Becky and Custer. “Do you think maybe we can steal one of those barrage balloons?”

Custer nodded. “If we stage a diversion on this side of the field it’s bound to draw all the aeronauts and security troops. Then you can make your move.”

“The real question,” Becky said dubiously, “is whether or not we’ll be better off once we go up in the thing.”

Custer smiled wryly. “Supposedly these are a big improvement on the ones we used in the War. Those pretty much just tugged at the end of their guide ropes, but these have tail fins of a sort, and some rudimentary steering for flying untethered. Anyway,” he added, spreading his hands, “once you’re up there you won’t be on Russian soil any longer.”

They all fell silent again as the sleigh headed down the narrow road among the trees. It suddenly seemed terribly dark and lonely after the intermittent flashes of moonlight that broke through the clouds; here, they were enclosed in a dense tunnel and Liam involuntarily found himself thinking of that huge wolf again. He looked towards Becky and saw the flash of her teeth as she smiled:

“Mmm hm. Me too. Only this time we’ve got Laughing Wolf with us!”

The driver gave a low whistle and held his whip up to signal his passengers as the sleigh glided to a stop.

“Here we are, Your Honors. I’ll stay with you until you decide you don’t need me any more, but it wouldn’t be wise to take the sleigh out into the open beyond these trees.”

They all got out and crept up to the edge of the tree-line, Custer taking a pocket spyglass out of his overcoat and scanning the aerodrome.

“Well, I’ll be switched!” he muttered.

“What is it?” Becky asked.

Custer pointed towards the airfield. “That wasn’t there this morning when they took us away. And they weren’t either.”

He handed her the glass to forestall more questions and as she looked the others heard her draw her breath sharply. Liam could barely stand the suspense:

“Hey, Miss, no hogging the glass!”

She reluctantly handed him the little telescope and the minute he looked into it he saw what the others had been reacting to: just beyond the edge of the pool of illumination cast by one of the scattered calcium arc lights there hunched an enormous, baleful triangular wedge, painted a flat black that seemed to eat the light:

“Holy Hannah!” Liam muttered. “That’s the biggest Black Delta I ever saw in my life.”

Becky looked apprehensive. “There was a rumor Stanton had commissioned a battleship Delta,” she said, “but we all thought it was the usual Department of Public Safety propaganda. And take a closer look at the men at the gate, Liam.”

Liam swung the scope across the field towards the gate and gasped as he saw what she had meant: there, unconcernedly chatting about something or other, was “Boyo” Boylan—on a crutch, thanks to Liam’s work in the gas company tunnel—and a couple of his lads.

“I don’t believe it,” he said, and handed the glass to Crazy Horse, who looked at the men first.

“You know them?” he asked Liam and Becky.

“Oh, yes,” they chorused.

“In fact it was me that put that bird there on a crutch,” Liam said to Crazy Horse, “and I’m just wondering whether it was actually your friend Plekhanov who blew up the Palace or if it was those lads there.”

“And if Boylan and his people are the ones who dynamited the Palace,” Becky added, “that means the mysterious Lukas will be somewhere in the wings waiting for his cue. Though just how he’ll receive it with only Government wires between here and the U.S., I don’t know—I suppose they’re planning some sort of insurrection and they’ll signal him once they succeed and take over the telegraph.”

Crazy Horse looked startled. “Lukas?” he said. “From what I’ve heard here and among my old comrades in Land and Freedom, ‘Lukas’ is simply a nom de guerre for the Tsar’s morganatic son Nikolai Aleksandrovich. Those who know him say he hates our beloved Viceroy beyond all the ordinary bounds of virulence.”

They chewed on that for a minute before Liam broke in: “I’ll tell you this much—if Lukas is aiming to come to Little Petersburg and head up a new Government there’s no guessing how bad things can get. I’ve gone up against him and I’m not in a hurry to do it again. In fact, I’m not sure he thinks of any of us as being more interesting than the mice a scientist studies in his lab. We’d better get to New York as fast as we can and stop him before he goes any farther.” He paused for a moment, then hit the punch line: “How fast do you think that monster over there will fly?”

“You’re crazy, McCool,” Custer blurted out. “You press the wrong button on a contraption like that and you’re going to end up on the moon!”

But Becky was already thinking: “Hmmm,” she said. “Any reason why our diversionary action shouldn’t work just as well with that Delta as it would with a barrage balloon?”

There was a pause as Crazy Horse and Custer looked at each other and then shrugged. Crazy Horse turned to Becky:

“We’ll give you five minutes to get as close to the gate as you can, crawling on your stomachs. Then when you’re in position we’ll throw the first bundle of dynamite, and from there on …” he spread his hands and smiled thinly. “It will be in the hands of the Great Spirit.”

Custer was peering through his spyglass again. “By Jupiter,” he said, “I think that big building over there by the barracks is what they were calling the hydrogen reservoir.”

“That ought to ginger them up,” Liam said with a grin. He took Custer’s hand and then Crazy Horse’s. “It’s been an honor,” he said, “not to mention a lot of good clean fun.”

They all embraced and then Liam gave Becky a jocular half-bow: “After you, Miss.” She nodded and headed out of the tree line into the snow, trying to blend in with the bushes as long as she could. When there was nothing left but open snow Liam pulled Becky close and held her for a long moment. Then, blessedly, the clouds closed up again and Liam whispered: “Let’s get moving while it’s dark. This time I’m going first.” Becky didn’t argue and they flopped onto the snow and started crawling as fast as they could, pulling themselves forward with their elbows and trying to keep their faces down.

It seemed to Liam that this process was lasting pretty close to forever, his knees and elbows first getting colder than he’d ever felt them, then hurting furiously, then going totally numb. Just as he started wondering if they were going to end up like those woolly mammoths, there was a shattering double explosion followed by a brilliant fireball that climbed high into the sky, lighting everything up like the sun before it winked out abruptly and gave way to a raging fire spreading among the aerodrome’s buildings.

“That’s our signal,” Becky said excitedly.

“And there go Boylan and his playmates,” Liam announced, jumping to his feet and helping Becky to hers. “If you aren’t frozen solid we need to make our run for it now!”

Becky nodded solemnly, then leaned forward on an impulse and kissed him on the lips. He returned the kiss hard, then shook off the moment of foreboding:

“Come on,” he said, “we aren’t going to let those bums beat us.”

He took off running at full speed and Becky, getting the most out of her costume’s flat boots, kept right up with him. As they approached the gate, one of Boylan’s men appeared around the corner of a shed and jumped back in alarm, fumbling for a gun in his belt.

“Hey! What’s the big idea?”

Liam put on his thickest brogue: “Sure, it’s a message I have for yez from Boyo himself!”

“Go on with yez,” cried the other, approaching them suspiciously. “What is it?”

“This,” Liam said with a grin, striking like a cobra and knocking the man cold with one punch. “Come on,” he shouted to Becky, “we’re almost there!”

There was another huge explosion—probably two bundles of dynamite at once, Liam guessed, then they were across the last patch of snow and up the little flight of metal stairs into the belly of the giant aircraft, pulling up the stairs instantly and slamming the hatch shut after them.

The inside of the giant airship was breathtaking, like the illustrations to Liam’s beloved first edition of Verne’s Vingt Mille Lieues sous Les Mers brought improbably to life. The interior of Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus was no more luxuriously paneled in oak nor ornately trimmed with curlicues of brass or impressively packed with mysterious machinery than this nameless behemoth of Stanton’s, softly lit by rows of tiny electric bulbs concealed within frosted glass globes.

On the far side of the main cabin, spread in a semicircle beneath a sort of bay window with three thick panes of glass, was a curved panel studded with dials and switches beneath which a hanging jungle growth of wires and cables could be seen. Liam and Becky headed towards it hastily, listening to the gunfire outside and watching the scurrying figures of armed men through the thick glass windows.

“We have to find a way to get this thing off the ground fast,” Liam muttered.

Becky leaned forward to read the brass labels with their embossed and painted lettering. “At least it seems to have been laid out with a care for ordinary people’s engineering skills,” she said. “I suppose the rank-and-file aeronaut needs to be able to run it if all the officers are down.”

“Thank Heaven for that,” Liam said, “my engineering skills never got beyond the study of lock mechanisms.” He examined the panel for a moment, then pointed to a dial labeled “Power Resources” which was divided into three arcs—the first black, the second green and the third red. “Looks like we’ve got plenty of power,” he said. The needle of the gauge pointed straight up and down through the green arc, which was labeled “Steam Up.”

“There,” said Becky sharply, “throw that switch!”

In a neighboring quadrant of the panel were various knobs and knife switches, including the big one that Becky was pointing to. Above it, in large red-enamel letters, were the words “Engage Engines.”

“Sounds reasonable to me,” said Liam in a bemused tone.

The minute he pulled the switch down the lights dimmed momentarily, then flared as the entire enormous vessel began to quiver like a hunting dog on point and a deep, sonorous thrum of steam turbines sounded beneath their feet.

At almost the same instant they heard a furious pounding and shouting at the hatch they had slammed shut earlier, followed by a series of shots that pinged! off whatever the ship was armored with.

“Bloody hell!” exclaimed Liam, then: “Sorry, Becky!”

“No, no,” she said, “bloody hell indeed! If one shot gets to the hydrogen in these cells we’ll know just how the cockroaches in the hydrogen reservoir felt!” She looked around urgently. “There must be guns on this thing!”

In the quadrant of the panel to Liam’s left there was a series of small knife switches with red handles, all in the up position and labeled “Rapid Fire.” Without a second thought Liam reached across and slammed them all down, and abruptly the ship was filled with the overwhelming racket of an unknown number of Gatling guns firing on all sides of them, with a tinkling obligatto of empty brass flying into collecting bins.

“Dear Heaven!” murmured Becky. As Liam turned towards her and followed her gaze he could see everything visible outside the windows shredding and falling to pieces in the way he remembered too well from Gettysburg. “Enough!” Becky added in an appalled voice. Then her glance caught something on the next quadrant of the panel and she leaned towards it curiously.

At the same moment, Liam reached across to the left and slapped the gun switches back into the up position, then lost his balance for a moment as the ship shuddered and lurched. Becky laughed helplessly and pointed to a large brass wheel with a rosewood handle fixed to it at right angles. At the left of the wheel were two-inch-high green letters spelling “ASCEND” and a green arrow sweeping around the circumference of the wheel to the right, where the rosewood handle now rested against a stop peg.

“Going up?” she quipped a little shakily.

It was a queer and overwhelming feeling: as if they really were standing in one of the new Otis steam elevators heading upwards at full speed with no top floor to stop them. Outside, the snow flurried thicker and thicker around the windows, illuminated by the lights from the cabin and the occasional shaft of moonlight. Becky turned back towards Liam and gave him a quizzical smile.

“Now what?” she said.

In the Air July 1—July 2, 1877