Ganymede (The Clockwork Century 3)

“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 bo

y.

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.