Ganymede (The Clockwork Century 3)

“Ma’am, we don’t know that,” Gifford cautioned.

She turned around on her hard wood seat, and only then realized that half her behind had fallen asleep, and her ribs felt bruised from all the paddling in her unforgiving undergarments. “What else could they be looking for?”

“Pirates?” Ruthie offered.

“They already know the pirates are here—it’s the worst-kept secret in Louisiana. But Colonel Betters and Lieutenant Cardiff had the wrong idea. They thought we were smuggling the ship out in pieces, moving it down to the Gulf with pirate help. ”

Ruthie asked, “Moving it through Barataria?”

“It’s a secluded spot with good docks, crawling with men who will do anything for a dollar—men who have been sneaking products in and out of the city for a hundred years. Goddamn,” she swore. “Clear out the viper’s nest with the government’s blessing, and scrounge up the Ganymede while you’re at it. Even if you fail at one, with money and planning, you’ve got a good chance of succeeding at the other. ”

Crooks shook his head. “Are even the Texians that arrogant? To think they could uproot the bay in one strike?”

Josephine returned her gaze to the gliding lights of the searching ships in the water and in the sky, and fixed it there as she said. “They’ve done it, haven’t they? Temporarily, I’d wager. But they’ve beaten down the Lafittes in the short term, that’s for damn sure. ”

“I wouldn’t write them off yet,” Gifford argued as another streak of antiaircraft fire broke the velvet blackness of the marshland midnight. “They were caught off guard, that’s all. Texas will get bored. They’ll eventually figure out Ganymede isn’t there and wander off—or the Lafittes will safely abandon the place and restore it later. ”

Josephine said, “Probably. Pirates are lone wolves, as often as not. But if you call a number of lone wolves to your aid, you wind up with quite a pack. ”

And then Gifford asked, “Do you think they’d come? For the Lafittes? For Barataria?”

“They’ll come from all over the world,” she said softly. “This bay is the closest thing they have to a homeland—it is their nation, in a way—and I do not think they will let the insult stand. Not for long. Give them time. ”

“Deaderick doesn’t have time,” Ruthie reminded them.

“Then we won’t wait for them. No cavalry coming but us, isn’t that right, Mr. Crooks?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said without even the faintest note of enthusiasm.

“Then let’s get paddling, shall we?” Her next questions came close on one another’s heels, as if she might get answers she wouldn’t like if she quit asking them. “He’ll be fine there, won’t he? He was fine when you left, wasn’t he?”

She began to stroke with the oar, and Gifford followed her lead. He answered so far as he was able. “Yes, ma’am, he was hanging in there. I don’t think—” He grunted as his oar stuck, and he pulled it out again. “—I don’t think the shots he took were so bad. ”

Ruthie sneered. “Two bullets, not so bad. ”

“There’s differ

ent kinds of being shot. Rick took his lumps, and they missed his heart. Missed his lungs, as far as we could tell. His worst trouble will be festering, if the wounds take a fever. And there’s only so much we could do about that, under circumstances like these. ”

“We’ll need a doctor. A nurse. Somebody. ” Josephine paddled grimly.

“We will find one. We will find somebody. ” Ruthie patted Josephine’s shoulder, then wrapped her arms around herself as if the night were cold.

For two hours more they paddled, coasted, and hid between the tall clusters of waving fronds and bubbling holes where alligators hid and small fish slept. Eventually they’d circled the largest island and sneaked around to the far side where the fort was hunkered low near the narrow coastline, such as it was.

Even from the blower, with its fan long silenced, the three occupants could see that the fort’s walls were worn down, their corners rubbed into softness by the years. It looked like nothing so much as an assortment of pale stone walls, and from so far away, those walls appeared so short, a woman could step across with a lifted skirt and a tippy toe. Their height was shortened from age, yes. They were dwarfed by the latticework of pipe docks and oversized ships drifting close, and drifting away again. But they were not as short as they seemed, and they were not so fragile that they hadn’t stood a hundred years already.

“Not much of a fort,” Ruthie complained, having never seen it from the inside. Her words were muttered as low as a bullfrog’s hum.

Josephine replied in kind, keeping everything muted, lest they be discovered. “There’s more to it than you’d think. Let’s go around to the fort’s southwest corner. There’s a canal going under the wall, but you can’t see it from here. For that matter, you can barely see it when you’re right on top of it. ”

“Will there be a guard? A lookout?”

“I assume,” Josephine acknowledged. “But leave him to me. ”

A Texian search ship eclipsed the moon, the clouds, and the faint sparkles of stars shining through them. It moved slowly, like an oversized balloon, or that was the impression it gave on the ground. Untrue, of course. The big thing’s graceful sway belied a terrible speed, and it swung a brilliant yellow searchlight. Josephine, Ruthie, and Gifford could hear it all the way from down in the marsh—the sizzling pop and fizz of the electric filaments simmering against the mirrors that reflected and focused them.

“Hurry,” Josephine gasped, leaning harder against her oar. She was exhausted. They were all exhausted. But the big white beam was sauntering nearer, sweeping and scanning, and they were pinned on most sides by the oversized grass.