Brilliant Devices

chapter 26



The men wasted a good two minutes running through alternative plans, one of which included smuggling members of the Margrethe’s crew out of that vessel to take over crewing the cargo ship. Another involved flying blind and hoping for the best—a plan that was shot down as quickly as they would have been had they tried it. el to ta/span>

Finally they addressed themselves to the problem of recreating the mechanical system that transmitted orders from the bow to the stern. They found an extensive officers’ toolbox where logic dictated it should be, and while they put their heads together to find a solution, Claire and the Mopsies stood at the window, anxiously keeping an eye on the progress of the search.

“Wot’ll we do when they get to us, Lady?” Maggie asked, gripping the brass trim of the viewing glass with fingers whose knuckles had whitened.

“We must be gone by then. Look, two of the groups are returning to Lady Lucy, I suspect to receive new orders.”

“They think that Astor cove’s ship is safe?”

“They think both are under guard, and the darkness is concealing us,” she replied. Half of her brain watched the search. The other half worried at the problem of the communication system. It was a simple one—various levers were employed to convey commands such as full steam and reverse, and direction: port, starboard, and all points of the compass in between. Wires conveyed pressure and produced a corresponding command in the engine gondola and in the tiny room on the uppermost deck where a crewman controlled the vanes.

They would have to go around it all somehow.

But how?

The ship lay silent and unresponsive despite the frantic beating of her heart and the increasingly frustrated attempts of Andrew and the count to make repairs. As silent as the automatons standing there in the loading area, waiting for a command to make them come alive.

A command.

A spoken command.

Claire’s heart nearly stopped as her mind seized this thought and ran away with it. They had used the torso of the unfortunate Four to create an engine housing after the crash. Could they not do something similar now? She had three automatons here, all of whom were useless unless activated by spoken commands.

The principles of mechanics were the same whether one referred to automatons or transport. If one could command an automaton to activity inside a bronze casing, why could not one command it to activity if its casing were … an airship?

She hardly dared to breathe as her mind expanded with the idea. She saw it all, the way she had seen the layout of the tunnels superimposed upon the landscape—the way she saw the hands of cards in cowboy poker, laid out among the various players. A glowing network of wires and switches and possibility, rerouted and commanded to perform new tasks that they had not performed before.

Just because something had never been done did not mean that it could not be done.

“Maggie. Lizzie,” she whispe”nt sired. “Tell the automatons to come here. And then fetch three screwdrivers. We must take them apart immediately.”

She had the automatons in pieces before Andrew and the count realized what had happened. “Claire, what on earth …?” Andrew clearly believed her mind had given way under the strain of losing Tigg, and their impending capture.

Quickly, she explained, her words tumbling over one another in her haste to make them understand. Andrew’s eyes widened, and the count gave an oath that made Maggie jump and fumble for Lizzie’s hand. “By Jove, young lady, you are either quite mad or a marvel,” he said.

“Well, she ent mad,” Lizzie told him, being of a very literal turn of mind.

“Then she is a marvel,” Andrew said softly.

The admiration in his eyes caused Claire’s cheeks to burn. In a moment she would blotch, and that must not happen. They did not have time for missish behavior. “We must hurry,” she said, rather breathlessly. “Meriwether-Astor’s men will be upon us at any moment.”

Working at top speed, the three of them removed the engines in the automatons’ chests that controlled their response to command. Nine, being the most sophisticated, should be installed in the navigation gondola, Seven could control the vanes, and Eight was designated for the engine gondola. They no longer needed the cables controlling the levers, so they rerouted them into the ship’s infrastructure, in effect turning the ship into an enormous, obedient mind with three nerve centers.

Claire put down the screwdriver and wiped her hands on her skirt. “Count, if you and Andrew would begin the ignition sequence, we will lift.”

“Aren’t you going to test it?” Andrew asked with a final turn of his wrench.

“How? We can ask Nine to move the rudder, but we cannot see a result until we have air flow with which to change direction.”

“Claire, we can’t just lift and hope to heaven that this works. We’ll be shot out of the sky as soon as they see us hovering here like a big brown cloud.”

“We have no choice. And we have only one chance,” she told him tersely. “If we cannot trust our own abilities, then we deserve to be shot out of the sky.”

“She is right,” the count said. “Come, Mr. Malvern. Let us put some fire in the ship’s belly and hope she listens.”

“She is the cat’s grandmother,” Maggie said to no one in particular as the men ran down the coaxial catwalk to the stern. “Can’t just call ’er ‘cargo ship’ all the time, poor old thing.”

“An excellent point,” Claire said. Across the airfield, a second contingent of men poured out of Lady Lucy and began to run, lamps bobbing, toward Meriwether-Astor’s ship not thirty feet away. “Athena was the goddess of mathematics, and if it were not for adding together Seven, Eight, and Nine, we would not have our chance to escape.”

She hoped d+0"andesperately they would have a chance to escape.

“Athena.” Lizzie tried out the syllables on her tongue. “I like it. Could she fly?”

“Of course she could, silly,” Maggie told her. “She were a goddess, innit?”

“Even the goddess whales could fly, if you remember the story Malina told you,” Claire reminded them. “And so can we.” She tilted her head as she felt the thrumming of the engine through the soles of her boots. “Seven, Eight, Nine, prepare for lift. Seven, vanes full vertical. Nine, stand by for course. Eight, engine full ahead.”

But nothing happened.

Or rather, the stern rose obediently, pressing up against their feet and causing their knees to bend to compensate, but the bow remained stubbornly attached—

“Lady, the mooring mast!” Lizzie shouted. “We’re still tied down!”

And now the teeming mass of men had seen the ship do its odd bobble in the air, and had swerved in their direction.

“Seven, lift!” Claire shouted, and plunged down the gangway.

She leaped for the ladder of the mooring mast, scrabbling up the rungs like a frantic spider. The seething crowd of men, angry at being denied their quarry, set up a roar as they caught sight of her. Her fingers had turned to rubber as she worked the knot. Finally she bit it with her teeth and gave a mighty pull, and the rope loosened. She felt the strain on her arms as the airship lifted ten feet off the ground.

I won’t get aboard—they won’t wait—the count must be saved—

The first of their pursuers leaped for the mooring mast and it shook with the fury of his ascent.

Not a prisoner! No, never again—

Claire flung herself off the mast, clinging like a monkey to the mooring rope, just as the man screamed in fury and lunged for her.

He grabbed, and caught only empty air as Athena fell straight up into the stars.


Cold.

The wind howled and snatched with icy fury, blowing her skirts up around her waist and her hair into her face, while freezing her hands to the rope. Claire had managed to twist a foot in it to give her arms a tiny bit of relief, but there was no way she would manage to hang on for more than a few minutes.

Had anyone seen her? Did Andrew and the girls even know she was out here, freezing to death and likely to plunge a thousand feet through the air at any moment?

A sound like the cry of a bird needled through the howl of the wind, and she managed to turn her head enough to see thoug/fonat she was nearly on a level with the navigation gondola, swinging like a pendulum about ten feet in front of it.

Three people crowded the gangway port. One of them—Andrew—held something long and gleaming.

“—end—rope!”

What?

“Claire, slide to the end of the rope!” the count’s much louder voice boomed upon the wind.

Oh, no, she didn’t dare do that. What if she slipped right off the end of it and fell to earth like Icarus, doomed to death because she chose to fly?

“Claire, you must give us some slack in the rope! Slide to the end!”

Something tugged at the holster on her back in which the lightning rifle was secured.

Suddenly terrified, Claire threw a glance over her shoulder. Her hands were freezing. Had some giant creature landed? She could not use her hands—

Tug. Tug.

The rifle. The rifle was being drawn backward, back toward the gondola, as if under a magnetic compulsion.

Something bronze flashed in the running lamps.

Nine’s leg, with its magnetic foot.

With a gasp, Claire loosened her death grip on the rope by the smallest margin and clutched it between her legs, inching like a caterpillar toward the end. With every foot, the rifle on her back was drawn closer to the gondola by the power of Nine’s feet, both of which were now being employed to bring her in.

Thank God she had not removed the rifle.

Thank God she had not left the automatons behind.

Thank you, God, for watching over us. Oh, please, protect Tigg and Willie and Alice and all of us who love them—

“I’ve got you!” Andrew grabbed her, and while the count used Nine’s legs to draw her further into the port, the Mopsies pulled on the tails of his dinner jacket to make sure he did not lose his footing.

Andrew rolled her into the loading area, Lizzie and Maggie sprang to close the port, and Claire curled herself into Andrew’s warm, blessed arms and burst into tears.