Karen Memory (36 page)

The submersible shuddered and bucked. I realized we’d latched on to the
Daylily.
Those huge arms was thrashing, denting the steamer’s steel sides. I saw rivets pop, the plating buckle. A man fell past, arms pinwheeling, tossed from the deck. I couldn’t look. I couldn’t neither look away.

“Please God,” I said. Priya muttered something in her own language. She squeezed me so hard my fingers went white.

The
Os’minog’
s arms was ripping through the
Daylily’
s hull, burrowing inside, dragging out bundles of cargo and tossing them into the snapping metal beak. It had to be some kind of a water lock, I realized: there was piracy going on here.

The man operating the arms made it look like a dance. He had slipped his hands into metal mesh gloves, and he moved ’em like the conductor in the orchestra pit at the big green opera house downtown. Every time his hand jabbed, a tentacle jabbed, too. Every time his fish clenched, a coil latched around some fixture of the
Daylily
and ripped it from its moorings, then tossed it out to sea. It was piteously awful and piteously easy, and my cut and burned cheek scorched from the salt of the tears leaking over it.

It was over soon.

There was a moment of silence, a moment of bobbing wreckage and bodies going still in the froth and oil slick of the present battle, during which the bridge grew hushed and I almost thought that these men quietly giving and following lethal orders might regret what they had done as a military necessity. When all eyes were on that forward port.

That moment ended when the captain, who had been leaning toward the scene of the massacre, congratulated his crew and gave the order to shield the port, stow the arms, and submerge. Then he stood up, and turned to us with the glow of a man well satisfied. “What do you think of my beautiful machine?”

I champed my jaw, my whole mouth wet with nausea. I couldn’t talk. I shook my head.

Priya could. “I think you’re a monster.”

The captain smiled. “I so rarely get to share these triumphs with anyone who will appreciate them. But it doesn’t matter what you see, does it, ladies? You’ll never get the chance to tell anyone.”

I drew myself up and found my voice. “You think President Hayes won’t go to war to keep Alaska?”

“Your government has no resources with which to fight another war, currently. We can’t drive the Americans out of Alaska. But we can make it too costly for you to stay. Who’s to argue with a cholera epidemic? And once the country is vacant…” He shrugged expressively. “It’s open to settlement, isn’t it?”

“That’s horrible.”

“Ah,” he said. “But my country is only using the tactics pioneered by yours. Have you not heard of the use of blankets tainted with smallpox against the native tribes of North America by the English settlers here?”

I didn’t do much more, quite frankly, than gape at him. Which seemed to make him think the argument was won. He cocked one of those saturnine eyebrows at me and winked while my stomach writched around inside me like I’d swallowed a pint of live worms.

“I thought you’d see it my way. Good evening, ladies.” He added something in Russian to the seamen, who took us by the elbows and drew us away. I tried to think of something to shout after him, but words deserted me, and by now you’ll know that that don’t happen too much.

I was staggering when they pushed us down the corridor. I’d like to blame it on exhaustion and injury, but I think it was the pure horror of what I’d just seen dragging at my feet. So many dead. With no chance to do nothing about it. Even if they could swim, anyone who jumped into the sea and avoided the wreck and the killer arms and the thrashing would freeze to death in minutes.

At least I’ll say this for Ivan and Boris. They wasn’t any meaner than they had to be. And after Bantle and Standish and Nemo, that seemed near enough to a kindness, just then.

Chapter Twenty-three

Well, what happened next is that Priya stabbed Ivan in the jugular with half of my hairpin. It weren’t real gold—it was plate over brass—and with the swing she put behind it, it went right in. Well, maybe it weren’t his jugular. Maybe it was that big artery there under the ear, the one you slit hog slaughtering. Whatever you call it. Either way, he grabbed at his neck and went over sideways.

I felt kind of bad about Ivan taking it that way, him just being a workingman and in no ways in charge of the plan. But that didn’t stop me from punching old Boris in the jewels when he turned around to see what was happening. Men look for the knee, you understand. So it’s better to swing with a fist when you really need to nut one.

Boris doubled over with a wheeze, and Priya kicked him on the temple straight legged. He went down on top of Ivan.

We left ’em there and ran.

Where we was running to was anybody’s guess, quite honestly, but I was thinking there had to be a hatch and it had to be
up,
and freezing and drowning in the ice-cold Sound was miserably preferential to being flogged to death, if you take my meaning, and hell if we popped that hatch underwater we might founder the whole evil octopus and sink it to the sea’s bottom. It could join its victims there for all I cared, and that Russian Nemo with his perfect manners could go down with it.

And then I had my greatest stroke of genius since that ham sandwich with pickles that time.

There was a fire ax behind glass in the corridor—or gangway, or whatever the hell you call it on a submersible. With a sign next to it that I’m pretty sure read: BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY in Cossack.

I took one look at that thing and put my elbow through the glass. It shattered really satisfactorily, and I don’t know if it was sugar glass or I was just that tired of everything’s fucking shit. I turned around to see Priya holding up a pipefitter’s wrench as long as your arm. There was a panel open on the bulkhead behind her and some other tools were racked inside it, but none looked as fit for mayhem as that wrench.

“Next time, spare your elbow,” she suggested.

Then I had an ax in my hand, Hallelujah, and somewhere not too far away a fire alarm started to shrill.

Submersibles must have some kind of strict regulations about fires on board, because the next thing I knew my ears were popping something fierce, and I felt like the floor—the deck, I guess—was shoving at my boot soles.

I looked at Priya and Priya looked at me. I said, “We’re surfacing!” and she punched the air. Then she looked dubious. “We need to find a hatch. An outside hatch.”

“Do you think this thing has a lifeboat?”

“I think we’re going to find out.” Grimly, Priya brandished the pipefitter’s wrench. “I’ll freeze and drown before I stay in here. Follow me!”

Men was boiling out into the corridors, but they wasn’t expecting a couple of crazy Maenads swinging Christ knows what at ’em, and we left a trail of shouts and broken wrists behind us. Amazing how nearly any man will back down if you brandish an ax in his face.

I didn’t feel none too bad about it, neither.

I was just fending one off behind us, and when I turned around Priya was gone. Panic stabbed me, but then her hand closed on my arm and pulled me into a side corridor. I was pretty proud of myself that I didn’t even swing the ax at her when she startled me.

She dogged the hatch behind us and then took her wrench and shoved it through the wheel that locked the door. “That should hold ’em for a bit. Come this way.”

“Do you know where we’re going?”

She pointed at some writing on the wall. It looked like letters, sort of. But only some of them was the same as English letters. “Exit this way,” she said.

I kissed her. And then stepped back suddenly. “I mean—”

“Oh, good,” she said. “I wondered if you were just putting up with me.”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Because that seems likely.”

She grinned, all full to bubbling over with the mania of adventure. “Come on!”

She led me up a ladder through a tube so narrow it made my breath come quick and shallow—and I wondered how the Ivans and Borises had even managed to squeeze their shoulders down it. Maybe they’d been lowered into the submersible young and fed up inside it, like when you grow a pear inside a bottle to make pear brandy on.

Then we was at the top. Priya spun the hatch and threw it open—

—and I realized just how fucking cold it was out there. Savage air poured down on my head as Priya climbed out, and I gritted my teeth and followed her.

We stood on a tiny deck, drenched in seaweed. Priya grabbed a pipe railing with one hand and crouched down to scoop a tiny, flopping fish back into the sea. When she stood again, she snatched her fingers back and blew on ’em. The wind whipped our hair and plastered what passed for our clothes to our shoulders. The submersible rolled in the valleys between waves. No lifeboats in sight. It was so cold I wanted to scream.

“What if they submerge?”

“With the hatch open?” She smiled bitterly. “At least we won’t go alone.”

I put an arm around her. She was the only warm thing in the world. “If they come up, we jump,” I said.

She nodded. We didn’t need to say it—that a clean, quick death by freezing was better than whatever Standish had in mind. And that as soon as we hit that water—well, there wasn’t any ice in it. But any child in Rapid could tell you how fast cold water could kill.

There was drifts of rain and curls of mist all over, and would you believe it that my damned hair was freezing up again? Maybe Merry Lee had the right idea in cropping it all off. Christ, I hoped she and Marshal Reeves had made it clean away.

I hefted my hatchet. Giving up felt like … well, like giving up. In a situation like this, you’d think there would be something I could chop. Pity I didn’t think I could get through the
Os’minog’
s hull. That’d be a moral victory worth dying for.

Below, a steady clanging started to echo up the hatchway. Somebody throwing their weight against the dogged and jammed hatch below. It’d probably give eventually.

I decided that I wanted to kiss Priya again, and she seemed happy enough to kiss me back—happy being a sort of a relative, under the circumstances. But when I pulled my face out of her hair, I saw something that made me smile and say, “We ain’t finished yet!”

She turned to see and laughed. There, out of all them dark clouds, burst the emerald-and-carnelian belly of Minneapolis Colony’s vaudevillian dirigible, swinging down low and toward us. A dark shape dangled from a rope ladder fifty feet under the gondola, the familiar duster flapping like an eagle’s ragged wings.

The only way I could be gladder to see something would be if it were my sainted da come down from Heaven to wrap me in his angel wings. A duster would do, though. A duster would do.

“Be ready,” Priya said. The Marshal came on, wave tops licking at his boots as the dirigible plunged below the clouds. The roar of its engines rose over the wind, shattering the illusion that it moved in silence. I ripped my trousers off—ripped ’em nearly in half—and twisted them into a loop. We each stuck an arm through one end; there was no way one of us was leaving that deck without the other.

I hurled the ax out to sea, because it felt damned good to do it.

We climbed up on the railing and waited there, arms outstretched, balanced with our shins against the top rail. The wind blew through my cotton bloomers like I was naked. Below, metal rent. The hinges on the hatch giving way. Well, they
really
couldn’t submerge now. But the Marshal was only going to get one pass.

I could see there was a tangle of net on the ladder around him and that he himself was roped in good. There would be things for us to catch on to, then, and we wouldn’t pull him off. That pleased me. I’d hate to be the cause of the widowing of Mrs. Jennie Reeves and the orphaning of all the little Reeveslings.

I looked at Priya and felt a strange exaltation. Whatever happened now, there weren’t no question what either of us wanted. I guessed I could die knowing that.

Then the Marshal was there, howling something that might have been instructions and might have been an animal cry purely formed of one half excitement and two halves being terrified. His hands grabbed at me and my hands grabbed the net. I felt a savage jerk as Priya missed, half-fell, was swept off the railing and then used the twist of flannel binding us together to right herself and grab again. Cord cut my burned palms. I screamed. My feet kicked free; then one toe caught in the netting. Priya swung beside me, a little lower. Marshal Reeves threw his arm around the small of her back. The relict Ivan surged out of the hatchway—guess he did fit after all!—and grabbed at my still-swinging sock-clad foot. I felt his hand on my ankle, felt the pull, screamed some more as he dragged at me, feet skidding on the decking. He fetched up against the pipe railing, took it right across the kidney, and let go.

We sailed on, under the beautiful green-and-orange belly of Captain Colony’s delivering airship, with the gray waves hissing and tossing their forelocks below.

Some of that might be out of order. It’s all a jumble in my memory. But I do remember that the last thing I saw before the wind twisted me away was Horaz Standish and Captain Nemo, standing on the tiny deck of their submersible, Ivan crumpled at their feet, staring after the three of us like a couple of cats that bumped heads over a blue jay and had to watch it sai-i-i-il away.

*   *   *

One or more of ’em might have shot after us, but if they did it was only with handguns and nothing came close enough to notice. We had other problems commanding our attention, anyway.

Somehow we made it up the ladder, me cursing my hands and my cold-numbed legs with every lurch. The Marshal was trying to help me without actually putting his hands on my fundament and hoisting, and Priya was shouting advice. We would have made us a regular slapstick, if anybody had been there to see us.

I think we only lived to the top because Captain Colony had the ladder on a winch, and the distance up kept getting smaller. Then Merry Lee was hugging and hauling and pulling me into the airship, and I’m not sure which one of us was crying harder.