Dreadnought (The Clockwork Century 2)

“He’s there. And I’m sorry; I’m real sorry?

?”

Something big fired from the Shenandoah, something more like the antiaircraft artillery they’d used to pepper the Dreadnought before.

Mrs. Butterfield cried, “They’re shooting at us again!”

But this time the captain said, “No. ” He was holding the ranger’s glass, leaning out the window. “No, Mercy’s right. Those men aren’t shooting at us. Holy Christ, what . . . what are those . . . they aren’t . . . they can’t be . . . people?”

“It’s the missing Mexicans,” the ranger said again. “Give him the glass,” he told the captain, indicating the inspector. “Let him look. He’ll tell you. ”

The captain came fully back into the car and handed the looking glass to Inspector Galeano. “They’re attacking!” he said with wonder.

Theodora Clay threw her hands in the air. “Why would Mexicans attack a southern train? And furthermore, what do we care? Let’s fire up our own boilers and get moving, the Rebels be damned!”

The conductor came bustling through the forward door in a stomping rattle of cold feet and clutched shoulders. “What’s going on up there? Can you see it? I’ve got a scope up front. ” Then he saw the inspector hanging out the window, staring through the looking glass. “Who are all those people?”

“The missing Mexicans,” the ranger said yet again.

Inspector Galeano drew himself back inside, his breath blowing white in the car’s interior, wafting about in the breeze. “They’ve been poisoned, and they . . . they look . . . it’s as if they are walking corpses!”

“There are hundreds of them,” said the captain. His hands were trembling, but Mercy did not call any attention to it. “Hundreds, maybe a thousand or more. Swarming like bees. ”

The ranger took his glass back from the inspector, and, as if it was the rule that whoever held it had to look through it, he positioned himself on the seat and put himself back out into the open air again, gazing with that long, gleaming eye at the pandemonium on the tracks ahead.

He said, “And they’re coming. ”

Theodora Clay said, “What?”

As the exclamation made the rounds, the ranger came back inside, swiftly, nicking his arm on a triangle of unloosed glass from the window frame. He snapped the looking glass shut and jammed it into his pocket. “They’re coming!” he said again. “A huge goddamned wave of them! You—” He seized the conductor by the vest. “You get this thing moving! You make it move right now!”

“Let me see the glass!” Mercy demanded.

But he said, “If we don’t get out of here, and fast, you’re not going to need it. ” And he shoved past her to the rear door, saying over his shoulder, “Get those civilians back in that car—get everyone in there who’s hurt, or who can’t shoot. Everyone else, up front! We need people who can shoot!”

The soldiers were disinclined to take orders from the ranger, but the captain gave the view from the window another steady gaze and reiterated them. “Out!” he shouted. “Everyone without a gun, get out! Get back into the forward car; you’ll be safer there,” he continued, beginning to herd them backwards the way they’d come.

The conductor was already gone, having obeyed the order to flee sooner—perhaps because he had his own glass, and was able to judge for himself that nothing good was coming his way. Mercy could not hear him or see him, but before long, she could hear the Dreadnought rising again, awakening from its temporary pause and firing up, blowing its whistle in a long, piercing, hawklike scream.

As the few remaining civilians were ushered away, Theodora Clay said, “No. No, I won’t go, not this time. Take my aunt and stuff her in that car if you must, but I’m staying. Someone give me a gun. ”

“Ma’am,” said Lieutenant Hobbes. “Ma’am, you have to leave. ”

“I don’t, and I won’t. Someone—arm me, immediately. ”

“That isn’t going to happen,” the captain told her.

But she held her ground and continued to fuss and fight as the rest were sent away. The ranger returned to check the first car’s progress. He asked, “How are we doing? Where’s that conductor? He’d damned well better be up front, lighting the damn engine or whatever it is he does. We haven’t got another minute!”

At which point, Miss Clay spotted an opening. She flung herself at the ranger, who appeared half horrified, half repulsed, and wholly suspicious of the gesture. She pressed her well-?dressed bosom up against his chest and whined, “Oh, Ranger, you wouldn’t believe it—they’re trying to send me away, up into that first car!”

He replied, “Get off me, woman. We have bigger problems to attend to!”

But she didn’t get off him; she clung to him like a barnacle and wheedled, “They say everyone without a gun has to go back up front—stuffed there, useless—and I won’t have it. ”

On the verge of seizing her wrists and flinging her away, he wanted to know, “Why’s that?”

She dropped away from him, as cold and prim as if she’d never touched him, except this time she was holding one of his Colts. “Because now I have a gun. ”