Ganymede (The Clockwork Century 3)

Wallace Mumler sighed. “Just one more thing we’d like to improve in future models. We don’t need for it to be a luxury steamship in here, or anything like that. But it’d be nice to have extra sitting room for the occasional passenger. ”

Deaderick said, “Agreed, but for now, we’ll work with what we’ve got. Wally, make yourself at home by the low right port, will you?”

“Already on it, sir. ”

A series of taps on Ganymede’s dome sent the message that the folks up top were ready to serve as guides, this crew of Charon’s helpmates, paddling, pulling, tapping, and running small diesel motors that sounded awfully loud, but weren’t, in the grand scheme of the river’s mumblings. Up above, Cly could hear them starting, one by one. The low putter of the motors and the screw propellers from the two or three antique steam engines designed in miniature … these noises filtered inside, and in the submarine’s belly it all echoed, muted and muffled.

“Turn down the lights as far as you can—but not so far that they won’t do us any good,” the captain ordered. Houjin went to one concave wall and threw one set of switches; Wallace Mumler reached up and grabbed the other set. With the flickering fizz of electrics dimming, the interior dropped to a low, golden glow.

The men in their chairs were shapes and shadows, man-sized cutouts of utter black in the charcoal gray of this scene, offset against the wide, bulbous windows that gazed out into the darkness of the river’s underside. But from under

the window, the smiling lights glowed, struggling hard against the silt to provide some guide, some illumination.

Morse code taps bounced down from above.

“They can see the lights,” Deaderick said.

“Yeah, I heard it,” Cly acknowledged. “But we’re not all the way under yet. We’ll shove off and get some depth, and maybe they won’t be quite so clear. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway. ”

More taps. A quickly sent word of readiness.

Cly took his own seat and strapped himself down. “Engines up, Fang—don’t burn the bottom propeller; we’re still right up against the shore and I don’t want to screw us into the bank. Use the side thrusters above the charge bays. All we need is a nudge. ”

Fang nodded, and his fingers flew across the levers with their knobs and buttons so faintly alight that they could barely be described as such. A hum rose up, accompanied by a curtain of bubbles that brushed by the edges of the huge forward windows.

“They aren’t synched,” Cly reminded him. The side thrusters were made to steer, not propel. There was no mechanism to make them fire in time with one another.

Fang didn’t nod this time. He didn’t need to. He needed only to lean his wrists forward, perfectly in tandem, and with a tiny lurch, Ganymede pulled itself away from the bank, away from the sunken winch, and away from the improvised dock at New Sarpy.

Slowly at first, the ship crawled forward. Then, as soon as the riverbed had dropped away before them, Cly positioned his feet on the depth pump pedals and began the nerve-racking work of letting the craft drop, inch by inch, deeper into the river. At the top of the wide forward windows, a small seam of water sloshed outside, at the level where the craft’s crown hit surface. This jiggling seam of inky water crept higher and higher, until it was gone.

And at last Ganymede dropped below the waves with one gigantic slurp.

They were in the river. There was no air except what they had in the compartment, and what would be pumped down every so often to cycle what they breathed.

It made Cly’s skin crawl, and Kirby Troost’s, too—the captain could see it when he glanced over at the engineer. Troost looked queasy. One arm over his stomach. One hand over the weakly illuminated dial that showed how far down they’d come, and how much farther they could reasonably go.

Houjin, on the other hand, was vibrating with excitement. They’d stationed him at the mirrorscope he’d liked so much upon first encounter; now it was his job to stay there and report what was coming and going whenever it was safe to leave the tube up in the open air. He turned it side to side, a voyeur to adventure, and the metal tube’s joints squeaked despite their fresh greasing.

“What do you see?” Troost asked the boy.

“The other boats—the little ones, the rafts and skimmers. They’re moving into place and coming up behind us. Ooh! Norman sees me looking at him! He’s waving us forward. … He wants us to pull ahead. ”

“Is there anything or anyone in front of us?”

“No, sir, and I’ll say so, if I see something. ”

“Then here goes,” he breathed, and he engaged the back propeller screws. Slowly he toggled their controls. The hum of the engines was not quite loud in their ears, but it felt very close all the same. “Everyone hang on. We’re headed into the current. ”

He gritted his teeth, not knowing what to expect. It might be easy as a cloudless day, or it might be bad as a hailstorm.

The ensuing jolt was a little of both.

Ganymede bobbed forward and was caught very quickly in a full-surface tug as the Mississippi River got a grip on the craft and hurled it forward. The ship swayed, forcing everyone to take hold of whatever handles they could find; Houjin’s feet slid out from under him, leaving him hanging by the crook of his elbows from the scope.

But Fang’s expert handling of the thrusters soon had the ship aimed steadily downriver, resisting the left and right yanks of the underwater pathways surging beneath the surface, so that it only twitched back and forth instead of swinging out of control.

“This isn’t like the lake,” Cly complained, wrestling with the foot pedals. “And it ain’t like flying. ”