Fiddlehead (The Clockwork Century 5)

It horrified Maria to her very core. This object could kill millions, if the weather was right. A terrific device, indeed, intimidating on the outside, even without ever releasing its deadly power. But compared to what it was capable of … it looked deceptively small. Nothing that could fit on the back of a crawler should be able to wipe out a city.

Frankum also stood staring, without speaking, until he said what Maria was already wondering. “I don’t know if we can lift it, Captain—just us men, and her,” he said. “We haven’t the strength between us, not even if we had a team of horses!”

“You idiot, the back of this thing is on a hydraulic lift. It was built to carry and dump construction supplies,” the captain said. He gave Thomson a signal, and a different motor kicked to life—something quieter and smoother, but still wildly loud in the otherwise silent woods. With painful slowness, the back compartment rose, tilting the bomb by tiny, incremental degrees. “We won’t have to pick it up and carry it; we’ll just have to climb in and give it a push, until it starts to roll. ”

As predicted, the crawler’s bed wouldn’t go high enough to let the bomb drop of its own accord, so all the men climbed in behind it. Maria stayed on the ground at their insistence—partly for all the usual thickheaded reasons, she was sure; but partly because space was limited, and there was only room for the strongest bodies.

The men braced themselves and pressed their feet against the bomb, and while Maria crossed her fingers and prayed, they shoved with all their might, rocking the big device back and forth like Thomson had rocked the crawler itself to get it moving.

They strained, swore, sweated, and pushed. The grade of the crawler’s bed was so steep that Maria tried not to worry about what would happen if they just toppled right in after it.

Finally, Maynard wiggled.

It creaked back and forth, just moving by inches at first. Hardly noticeable at all. Then it rocked. Then it rolled, tumbled, dropped.

And fell.

Right into the cave, careening with the weight of a city’s dead, crashing through the earth and settling down somewhere below, farther than any of them could see when they scrambled after it to stare into the hole.

“Where is it?” Frankum asked, leaning over so far that Maria was tempted, for one nasty second, to give him a shove. The pirate soul she harbored within her corset objected to her decency, but now was not the time or the place. Like she’d told the captain, they had to play fair. After all, they were not alone. Soon, the world would be watching. And someone had to save it.

The captain said, “No idea. Too dark. Anyone have a light?”

“Just the lantern on the crawler, and I can’t pry that off without my tools,” Thomson told them.

Echoing up from below, the sound of failing machinery grew louder as it bounced and rose off the rocks.

Behind them they heard the telltale clomp and clatter of a horse’s hooves. Maria guessed that it was Evans with the dynamite, and it was indeed him, carrying a promising pack on his back.

“Hurry up with that!” the captain yelled, and Evans did his level best.

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bsp; He yanked the horse to a sliding stop and dropped off the saddle to his feet, tossing the pack to the captain. “Wire it up, sir! I’ve got the line and pump in the saddlebags. ”

The captain went to work immediately, with Frankum lending a useful hand—for once in his life, Maria added disparagingly in her head. But it was his life, too; his, and theirs, and everyone else’s. So he planted the sticks, threaded the wire, and ran with the rest of them back to the far side of the crawler—where Evans had already secured the horse, as far from the trouble as he could put the poor animal.

The captain paused while he checked the settings and connections on the pump, then set it on the ground.

Evans turned his nose to the air. “Sir … do you smell that?”

He did. He must be able to—Maria could smell it, even though her nose was so cold she couldn’t feel it when she wiped it with the back of her scraped-up hands.

It was a toxic smell: rotten eggs and ruin, sharp death and troubled sleep. It stank of chemicals and poison, and it grew stronger while they sat there, mulling it over and wondering what could possibly smell that way?

The captain shook it off first, that numbing, stupefying creep of confusion and curiosity.

He shoved the plunger. A jolt went down the wire, along the ground, and into the hole.

And the earth exploded.

Twenty-one

The night ticked by in seconds, in minutes. In bullets, fired one-two-three from the woods and answered one-two-three from inside the house. It was not a stalemate, not exactly. From a second-floor window—the window almost directly above Abraham Lincoln in his library—Gideon watched the other men amass, and he knew that this relative peace could not hope to last the night. More men had joined the siege crew outside, and now they numbered fifteen by the scientist’s count … though, given the gloom outside, it was always possible that he’d missed a couple.

He always built some wiggle room into all his assessments and plans—not because he didn’t value precision, but because the universe was sometimes imprecise, and prone to hiding things.

He released the edge of the curtain and retreated to the hallway, pausing to duck into the Lincolns’ bedroom and peer out through the window beside a tall wardrobe. Outside it was nearly as dark as inside. He thought he saw motion, maybe a flash of a man running quickly from cover to cover, or maybe only a shift of moonlight on something smaller below. The night was full of raccoons and rabbits, after all.