Dreadnought (The Clockwork Century 2)

He said, “It’s late. May as well wait for the next edition; it’ll come up in a few hours. ”

She looked back and forth between him and the round-?bellied man who was hefting the magazines and street literature into his cart. Then she asked, “Will you be here in a few hours? It looks like you’re leaving. ”

The kid shifted his eyes sideways, and brought them back to her, but he wore them lidded and wary. He told her, “I don’t rightly know. Things are about to get messy, I think. ”

“You think?”

“Well, that’s what I heard. ”

The fat man on the waste cart caught just enough of this to join the conversation. “Ma’am, I don’t know what you’re doing here—if you missed a train or if you’re just passing through, or whatever reason you’re lingering on the southside all by your lonesome—but wherever you’re going, you might want to head there sooner rather than later. ”

“The line,” she guessed.

He nodded. “It’s coming, one way or t’other. Our boys is gonna hole up here, set up the city for siege and response. Don’t you worry, though. They won’t take Chatty down. I think they know it, too. I don’t know what they’s trying to prove by bumping up against us like this, but it’s all right if they want to get theyselves killed. ”

“I heard they brought a walker to the fight last night,” Mercy fished.

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p; He snapped, “And we brought ours, and brought theirs down. They think they got a foothold, though, so they sneaking in around Raccoon and lining up behind Signal,” he said, meaning that the Union was creeping around from the mountains to the west and north.

“I heard they took the Dreadnought out of play,” said the boy as he went back to discarding his papers. “I heard they took it back north, or maybe east, to feed another cracker line. Maybe they won’t come no closer, not without their big old engine to beef ’em up. ”

She said, “Dreadnought. That’s the engine they used to move the walker, ain’t it?”

The magazine man said, “Yeah, they use it to tote around their biggest war toys. ” He sat on the back of the cart, dipping it lower on its axle. “You see, miss, what they done is, they built themselves the biggest, meanest engine they could imagine, and then they trussed it up with enough armor and artillery to be a real war machine. Ready to go from place to place, easy as anything else that rolls along a line. ” He made a little gesture, like a man playing with a child’s cars on a carpet railway.

“It’s a monster,” said the boy.

“It’s a fine piece of engineering,” the man countered. “But it’s only an engine—and just one engine, at that. Even if they brought it here, to Fort Chattanooga, and used it to try and rout the lot of us straight back across the Georgia state line, it wouldn’t do no good. ”

Mercy asked, “And why is that?”

He pointed a finger at her and said, “Because I don’t give two pebbles of squirrel shit how awesome the Dreadnought is. This-?here is the proper rail exchange for everything east of Houston and north of Tallahassee. We got enough engines here to run it out on a rail. ” He chuckled at his own joke. “It can’t take on all of us, not all at once. Not here. This-?here city is made of rails, miss. It’s made of steel, and coal, and sweat, and no one train is going to come here and change nothing. ’Sides,” he added. “Monster or no, it can’t run across the street, or waltz up a rock wall and bust a line into a mountain. ”

“That’s what the walkers are for,” the boy chimed in.

“Yeah, well. ” The man spit a gob of tobacco into the street. “They only got a handful of those, and after last night, they’re down one. We got half a dozen, and ours are pushed by Texas crude, not by old-?fashioned steam. It’s the way of the future!” he assured Mercy. “This city, right here. This is where the future puts its feet on the ground and starts kicking Yankee ass. Right here,” he emphasized, and waggled his rear end off the edge of the cart. He hit the ground with a whump, and reached for the last pile or two of papers. He pointed his finger back at her one more time and said, “But for now, I think ladies ought to find their way out of the city limits. Things might get worse before they line up again. ”

Then he brought the gate up on the cart with a satisfied slam, tipped his hat in salutation, and took the reins of the mule who was hitched up to it, leading the whole setup away.

Mercy wandered back toward the St. George and thanked the man at the desk when he indicated that supper was well under way. She settled for what she found there, then returned to the safety of her room.

Once there, she took inventory of what she had left, stacking her money in discrete piles. “Lord Almighty,” she said aloud. “This is going to be one hell of a mess, Daddy. ”

The word startled her. She’d never called her stepfather anything but “Father,” and she could hardly remember Jeremiah Granville Swakhammer, except from her mother’s disappointment. In the years since he’d left them both, she’d heard more about him than she’d ever personally experienced—and what she’d heard had run the gamut, depending on the speaker.

She knew he was a big man, and uncommonly strong, and not terribly well educated—but none too stupid, either. She knew he was funny sometimes. She remembered laughing. Vividly, it hijacked her. Just a flash, a tiny moment of being a child, and seeing something hilarious, coming from her father. The feeling of warmth, the knee-?high grass tickling her legs under her dress, and the primroses she’d tied together and stuck in her hair with a bobby pin. He was showing her something, and making a game of it.

But the game eluded her. The memory stayed sharp, but contained few details.

And it wasn’t enough to tell her why she was doing this. Not really.

It’d been a hard enough crawl already, just from Richmond to the bottommost side of Tennessee; and the trip had hardly begun. What on earth was she doing, crossing a whole world by herself to see a man she could barely recall?

“I don’t know,” she said to the small piles of money, and the new stockings and gloves and toiletries laid out across the bed, “I guess now that Phillip’s gone, I just don’t have anywhere to go. Or, at least,” she amended the sentiment with a catch in her throat, “I don’t have anywhere I’ve gotta be. ”

She repacked everything, rolling the cloth items tightly and arranging the rest carefully, cramming it all into the medical satchel that she hadn’t let out of her sight since leaving the hospital. Then she went downstairs and left a note asking to be roused for breakfast, and settled down for a badly needed night of sleep.