Magnificent Devices

by Shelley Adina

  Of course, steaming past it on a downhill grade at nearly eighty miles per hour, she did not get much more than a glimpse.

  Her hopes of escape faded utterly. Even if she did manage to get off the train, where would she go? She had not seen a single airship overhead, and according to Fremont’s endless conversation on the subject, this was the only rail line running west between the Canadas and Texico City. There were more under construction, of course, Mr. Polk’s Silver Nevada line, after which their train was named, being a case in point, but Claire could not see how she could get off this train without being picked up by another of Stanford Fremont’s trains shortly thereafter.

  And finding her way in one of these wild frontier towns, alone, without money or food, and without her lightning rifle, was unthinkable.

  Every mile took her further and further from Santa Fe, which was beginning to feel like an old friend in comparison.

  She must pin her hopes of escape on San Francisco.

  “Tell me about our destination, Mr. Fremont,” she said over drinks that afternoon. “Is it a large city, there on its seven hills?”

  “Larger than Santa Fe, but not so spread out.” He was already on his second brandy, while Claire’s thimble of cordial sat nearly untouched. “The Viceroy of El Rey has his seat there, as does the Spaniard governor, so the society is quite, er, elevated. See, the Californias are divided up into these enormous ranchos, thousands and thousands of acres each. The owners are called Californios and each rancho has a market town. Everyone works for the Californio and owes their loyalty to that man’s family.”

  “It sounds very … feudal.”

  “Oh, there’s feuds, all right. Some of these rich landowners can get into a quarrel at the drop of a hat, and then they raid each other until their tempers cool. But with all the money they control, they like their good time. San Francisco has its own opera house. Did you know that Madame Louisa Tetrazzini herself sang there this spring? Thousands of people flooded the streets to see her, and she actually sang an aria from the steps of the opera house just to please ’em.” He chuckled. “With them hot Spaniard tempers, I s’pose there would’ve been a riot if she hadn’t.”

  Claire had heard Madame Tetrazzini once, in London. If ever a woman could create heaven simply by opening her mouth, it was she. No doubt her song had soothed the savage breasts of the surging crowds and she had been allowed to proceed into the building.

  The steam puffed past outside the window, and Claire could smell it again. Only, it was stronger now, since they had descended onto the dry saltpan. More … burned.

  “Mr. Fremont, I must ask you something.”

  “Sure, I can get you an audience with the Viceroy. He’s the closest you’ll probably ever come to a king.”

  “I have danced with the Prince Consort, thank you, and that is quite sufficient for me. No, what I would like to know is, by what process is the carbonated coal being used? Because I must say, the quality of the smoke and steam—the smell of it, sir—is disconcerting.”

  He chomped on the end of his cigarillo for a moment. “The steam smells?”

  “It does. And not quite right, either.”

  He gazed at her as if he didn’t understand. “James, has this girl got a bee in her bonnet? The steam smells? What is she on about?”

  “Dear, perhaps you might wish to lie down. Mrs. Short will accompany you to your compartment.”

  “I do not wish to lie down, James, I wish to know what has changed in the carbonation process to make its product smell as though something is burning.”

  “Nothing’s burning, missy, that ain’t supposed to be.”

  “It doesn’t smell right,” she repeated stubbornly. Missy, indeed. “When the carbonated coal was used in Ross Stephenson’s tender, it smelled normal. That is to say, it smelled like steam and iron and gear oil, as these things do. It did not smell like metal heating past the point of safe operation.”

  Fremont gaped at her, and then he guffawed. “Look who’s been reading my engineering treatises! James, this one’s a keeper.”

  “I am not to be kept, and I should appreciate it if you would refer to me as your ladyship, or Lady Claire, not missy.”

  In the overstuffed chair a few feet away, Claire distinctly heard Tessie draw in a breath.

  “You don’t say.” Stanford Fremont’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t take that tone with me, missy. Where I come from—”

  “Yes, I know. Children should be seen and not heard. But I am not a child.”

  “You are not an adult yet, either,” James reminded her silkily. “Do remember your manners, Claire. Mr. Fremont is a kind and generous host. Here, let me refill your drink.”

  “No, thank you.” Claire rose and shook out her skirts. “I believe I shall take your suggestion, James, and retire for an hour.”

  Head high, she glided from the lounge car, Tessie scrambling in her wake. The car was immediately behind the tender, and as she passed from it to the dining car beyond, the burning smell—hot metal and acid and something that triggered a memory of a house fire she had witnessed in Cornwall—was nearly overpowering.

  How could they think that was normal? If she were the engineer, she would be stopping the train this instant to investigate.

  Hurrying now, she gained the sleeping compartment, and then changed her mind. With Tessie still making her way through the sleeping car, Claire stepped into the caboose, past the Carbonator in its tied-down crate, and out onto the viewing platform at the back.

  The hot wind snatched at her skirts and whipped them out in front of her, and she pressed a hand to her chignon to keep it in place. The railroad track scrolled into the endless distance until the mountains swallowed it up. On either side of the track, the salt pan stretched for miles in all directions, the sun beating down upon it, bouncing up off it, and baking every living thing at temperatures that must be well over one hundred.

  The heat was devastating. But she could not go back in.

  If she did, she would weep with frustrated rage, and much as she liked Tessie Short, she did not want to do so in front of her in case the woman was obliged to report upon it.

  “Claire?” Tessie called from the doorway of the sleeping car. “I don’t think Lord James will want you out th—”

  The train jerked and knocked Tessie off her feet.

  Claire was flung back into the doorway of the viewing platform, and before she could catch her breath, an explosion concussed her eardrums.

  A fireball blossomed into the sky as under it, the train leaped the tracks, flinging cars this way and that as though a fractious giant had swatted them.

  The doorway disappeared as earth and sky cartwheeled past.

  Plowing up earth and salt and broken rail ties, the caboose scraped to a halt with a groan of dying metal.

  The only thing that moved was the thick column of black smoke, rising into the burning sky.

  Chapter 28

  Andrew Malvern’s knees buckled under him. Jake wedged a shoulder under his armpit, passed an arm about his waist, and heaved him up, and together, they staggered into the navigation gondola. Maggie and Lizzie followed, in case at any moment Mr. Malvern should tip over and collapse.

  “Good show,” he gasped. “I’m all right. Thank you. Dear God in heaven, thank you.”

  He tottered to the navigator’s chair and clutched the map rack to hold himself upright, then gazed about at them.

  Alice Chalmers looked as though the Angel Gabriel had come to give her a personal escort to heaven. “That was a close one,” she said, almost shyly, from her post at the wheel—though why she stayed there Maggie could not imagine. She was not looking at their course at all. “I’m glad we were able to help.”

  Good grief, a daring rescue and a near brush with death, and she sounded like she was at a church jumble sale, presiding over the teapot. What was wrong with her?

  He glanced from one to another. “Where is Tigg? And Claire? Are they with the engine?”

&n
bsp; At the mention of the Lady’s name, some of the brightness in Alice’s face dimmed. “We think Tigg is aboard Lady Lucy, but we don’t know for sure. And Claire left on Fremont’s train this morning. At least, the girls believe she did. She never came back with them last night.”

  “Why not?” Mr. Malvern tried to stand, but his knees wobbled and he sat rather suddenly. “What happened?”

  “Lord James took ’er to an ’otel,” Maggie said. “’E wouldn’t let us go wiv ’er—told us we could shove off and cross the desert in a pram for all he cared!”

  “Nasty old boot,” Lizzie put in. “Said ’e would lock ’er in a room with no windows and they’d be off to San Francisco this morning.”

  “San Francisco!” The color drained from his face. “We must pursue them!”

  Alice left the wheel with a leap. “Mr. Malvern, you aren’t recovered from your ordeal. Jake, take him to the crew’s quarters in the starboard fuselage and find a bed for him. He’ll need some—Lizzie, what’s the matter?”

  Lizzie had plastered herself against the viewing window. “Alice, we ’ave to go back to the airfield.”

  “Over my dead body. If we’re going anywhere, it’s the Canadas or San Francisco or—”

  “No! Go back! That’s Tigg down there, runnin’ like mad. Don’t you see ’im?”

  Alice leaned far over the wheel, and Maggie dove between her legs to peer out the very bottom of the viewing port. Far below, a tiny dark figure ran and dodged between the craft moored on the field, waving his arms and jumping over barrels and crates. Even as they watched, he slowed, and Maggie could see the moment when hopelessness overcame him and he realized he was going to be left behind.

  “Why in tarnation ain’t he on Lady Lucy?” Alice demanded of no one in particular. She spun the wheel and the Stalwart Lass put her hip to the wind and came about in a great gliding circle.

  With a leaping wave, Tigg took off for the eastern edge of the airfield, where the flattened, tended ground gave way to hillocks and dry watercourses and sagebrush once again.

  Lady Lucy had lifted and gone, for her great golden fuselage was nowhere to be seen. But between Tigg and the edge of the airfield lay the Rangers’ B-30, and to Maggie’s eyes, there was far too much activity on her.

  She had not been trained as a scout for nothing.

  “Alice, that Ranger ship is awake and I don’t like the look of it. I bet that lieutenant who pretended to be so nice to the Lady knows we just sprung ’is prisoner.”

  “Our engine ent gonna outrun that thing,” Jake said. He had not removed Mr. Malvern, and the latter was again struggling to his feet.

  “We must not leave Tigg.”

  “Ain’t no question about leaving him,” Alice said through stiff lips, as if he’d offended her. “Question is, how we gonna evade the Rangers when that ship lifts and comes after us? Nine, give me some reverse. Jake, get your skinny behind back to that basket. This is gonna be fast.”

  Maggie and Lizzie ran after Jake to the aft hatch. He grasped the crank and began to lower the basket, but their speed was so much faster than it had been at the pinnacle that it blew straight out behind like a wind sock. “One of you, get in!” Jake shouted. “Your weight will take it straight down.”

  Lizzie shrieked in an agony of indecision, torn between fear for Tigg and her own terror of heights. Without another thought, Maggie leaped into the basket, and before she could fairly get her feet into the bottom, Jake was winching her down so fast the crank was a blur.

  The wind snatched the basket and swung it like a pendulum, but it did not blow back. Lower and lower they circled, and below them, Tigg’s running figure disappeared beneath a garish scarlet fuselage that would look like a setting sun if it flew. He emerged on the other side, and now he only had to get past the B-30.

  Maggie could feel the Lass adjust her course to meet him, out on the far side of the B-30 in the desert. Tigg could draw a trajectory with his eyes as well as the next man, and he changed his direction to the same heading.

  Talk about touch and go.

  She was close enough to the ground—ten or twelve feet—to see him clearly, now, and waved encouragingly. His coffee-colored face split in a white grin, and then he bent all his energy to the task of getting to that point in the sagebrush where basket would meet body and they could do the Billy Bolt to end all bolts.

  Even over the roar of the wind, Maggie heard the shouts of the Rangers as they realized what the Lass was about. If before they had meant to pursue them, now it seemed that they were simply going to shoot them out of the sky, for here came a contingent of blue uniforms dragging another one of them rocket cannon—this one long and slender and no doubt possessed of the kind of aim that could take a ship out in one shot.

  “Tigg!” she screamed. “Run!”

  As if he had merely been standing there sipping a lemonade before, Tigg poured on the speed and in seconds he was running beneath the basket.

  “Jake!” she shrieked upward. “More line!”

  But he could not hear her, forty feet above, and Tigg was tiring, his hands grasping at the basket bottom fruitlessly, trying to get a grip.

  Oh, if only she had a rope!

  A rope!

  Scrabbling with numb fingers, she pulled at the knots of Alaia’s woven sash. She had left the lightning rifle in the gondola, for it was heavy, but hadn’t removed the sash. She tied one end to the winch line just above the join that spread four cables to the corners of the basket, and whipped the other out over the side.

  “Tigg! Grab hold!”

  The ground raced below her, and on the edge of her vision she saw the Rangers push the cannon into position and ram something down its throat.

  With a mighty leap like his very best dive from the Clarendon footbridge, Tigg grabbed the end of the rope.

  Immediately the basket began to rise—the Lass fell up into the sky—and the rocket launched from the cannon with an explosion that slapped Maggie’s ears.

  Tigg kicked, hanging onto the sash with both hands and trying to find purchase on the side of the basket as Maggie grabbed him around the waist to pull him in.

  The rocket struck the basket with the force of a runaway steambus, tearing the bottom and sides out of it as it blasted out the other side, trailing fire, into the sky.

  Maggie screamed, dangling by nothing more than her grip on Tigg’s waist as he hung onto her sash with both hands, his fingers piercing the knotwork.

  “Hang on, Mags!” he shouted.

  Weeping with terror and the cruel wind that needled tears from her eyes, she buried her face in the front of his dirty shirt and prayed.

  Someone must have been listening, for the next thing she knew, hands were pulling her and someone had her in a hug so hard she could barely breathe and the wind finally stopped and when her eyes opened at last, gummy with grit and streaming with tears, there was Jake on his knees on the engine-room floor, hugging her to his chest like she were his own long lost sister, sobbing as if his heart would break.

  *

  One of the children was sitting on her feet.

  How dreadfully annoying. The weight kept her from turning over, from throwing off the sheets—she could hardly breathe. What were they about, the rascals? Why, she was just going to—

  Claire opened her eyes.

  Her cheek pressed into bare dirt that was loose and crumbly, as if it had been dug up. It smelled burned. Everything smelled burned, even the air, which had a peculiar cast to it. Not the clean, sharp light she had grown used to of late, but a smoky, rotten kind of light.

  She lifted her head.

  Blinked.

  Her mouth fell open as she remembered what had happened—what had happened, but not why, or how.

  And her feet? She reared up and attempted to turn over. Ah, there was the problem. The slatted side of a heavy crate lay across her legs.

  Toes? Yes, they wiggled.

  Knees? Both bent.

  It had not broken her legs, than
k goodness. As she moved, pain stabbed into her side, as vicious as a blow from the Cudgel, back in London. She gasped and tears started into her eyes.

  Oh, dear.

  Gritting her teeth, she shoved the planking off her legs, and slowly, breathing as shallowly as possible, climbed to her feet. She had never had a broken rib before, but Papa had, having fallen from a horse in Cornwall. Now she understood his bad temper. Well, she had no choice but to hope her corset would act as a binding, in the absence of anything else.

  She stood, marveling that she could even breathe. The world had been transformed, and she could no longer see any familiar thing.

  Yes, the sun still beat down on her bare head.

  Yes, the saltpan crunched under her boots, its crystals winking and glittering.

  The twin threads of the railway still extended back into the mountains, but where she stood, it was broken and twisted, dragged into tortured bends by the train cars’ derailment. As she gazed at them, trying to get her bearings, a car groaned with the agony of twisting metal and fell on its side with an earth-shaking boom.

  Dust sifted into the sky and was carried north by the wind.

  Did any remain alive?

  Tessie! Tessie Short had been immediately behind her in the sleeping car. There was the caboose, upside down. It must have thrown her as it flipped, for it now lay on its roof, its metal wheels helpless without the track to which they were mated.

  There.

  Limping, wheezing with the pain, Claire stumbled to what had been the sleeping car. It lay on its side, which meant she had to duck through the twisted door. At any moment it might collapse upon her, but if Tessie was alive, she must get her out.

  A shoe, a stocking, a skirt. Tessie lay as though asleep on the partition, her back against the ceiling. She gazed, astonished, at something past Claire’s shoulder, her head tilted at a peculiar angle.