Once again he shuddered. Were the airships really this vulnerable? They’d seemed impervious to gunfire earlier. He supposed they must have some protective armor, or maybe it was the canvas itself that was so dense it could resist a bullet’s penetration, especially one fired from a weapon aimed straight up, thus fighting gravity all the way. But fire—if you could get fire to stick to the sides and bottom of a dirigible, then the son of a whore would burn.
How many rebels were dying in the streets tonight in order to get Hamilton’s insane launching contraptions to fling fire into the sky? How many Brit crewmen had already died aboard those crippled aircraft?
Jonny looked at Hamilton and thought he sensed the special weight of this night on him. His heart ached for Hamilton.
“Let’s take the car,” Hamilton said, suddenly crossing into the littered street. An electricar, its green finish scorched black and gray along one side, sat idling. The driver’s door was open, and the driver himself lay on the pavement. Irregular sheaves of metal were lodged in his skull and shoulder.
Hamilton climbed in behind the wheel. Jonny numbly went around to the side for the passenger, telling himself that if a corpse already occupied the seat he wouldn’t get in. But the seat was empty, and he took it, and Hamilton, without another glance at the dead motorist, piloted them off down the street.
In the car, they made a tour of the eerie battlefield overhead.
The streets were hushed, it seemed to Jonny, although the crackle of flames was ever-present and the cries of the injured faded in and out like the restless voices of ghosts. But no shells at all fell from above. No shots were fired from the ground. Evidently everyone had figured out such attacks did no good.
Occasionally a large caliber repeater chattered to life on the underside of one of the airships, but targets must be scarce below. The rebels had likely learned to use the city as cover. Here and there a volley of flaming debris hurled untidily into the sky. Several of the ships were now climbing to higher altitudes.
Hamilton guided them in a zigzagging pattern through the grid of streets, proceeding where they could, turning back when the way was blocked with rubble. They seemed to be heading generally toward where Jonny understood the river to be. Here the buildings were imposingly tall. Here also the bombardment had been fierce.
The charred green electricar halted. Hamilton leaned forward, hands on the steering wheel, face set into intent lines. He looked neither remorseful nor guilty now, Jonny thought. He was watching, anticipating something specific. Jonny sat and waited as well, noting those of the towers that were burning a few city blocks ahead. He wondered if firemen were fighting the blazes, what with the river so close at hand. Maybe no crews were operating at all. Maybe they were all dead or wounded or they’d abandoned their posts. Jonny had seen almost no one in the streets, neither the revolutionaries nor the so-called loyalists Hamilton had mentioned. It might be that the unexpected explosions of the aircraft had sent the latter scurrying.
Hamilton suddenly sat up sharply and thrust a finger into the air. “There,” he said, no undue emotion in his voice now, yet it was triumphant all the same. A man pointing out the realization of a prediction he had made and feeling righteously satisfied for it.
Jonny dutifully followed the line of his finger. He went to rub his eye and bumped one of his bandages. Remotely he understood how lucky he was to have both eyes still intact. He looked up at one of the towers, one not afire. Something—a series of somethings—had detached itself from the highest point of the structure. They were billowy objects, gliding things. They slipped off into the air and didn’t immediately plunge toward the ground. They… flew? Were they giant birds?
As they swooped, one after the next, toward a nearby Brit airship, Hamilton said, “Personal canopies. Or as close as they could fashion. I admit I’m surprised how maneuverable they seem.”
Jonny only slowly understood that these were what he and Hamilton had used when they’d leapt out of the fatally wounded Indomitable. He tracked the bird shapes as they reached the hovering ship. They had to be rebels, of course. They landed on the ship’s skin, on the walkways of its exterior. They were like sea pirates of old, boarding an enemy boat. They were too far away for him to see in detail what mischief or mayhem they were up to now that they were aboard.
A moment later two of the personal canopies rebillowed as a pair of the rebels leapt away from the ship. They glided through the air once again, sweeping away from the aircraft. A third canopy apparently tangled, and the thrashing shape strapped to it dropped like a stone to the street. The fourth of the flying intruders didn’t get off the ship at all.
The explosion thumped the sky and burst the windows of the tower from which the explosives-planting party had leapt. The skeletal frame of the burning ship hung only an instant in the air, then dropped with a thunderous clatter to the ground.
So it was that the American Revolution fought off the implacable technological airborne might of the Brit Fleet. At least, that was how it went in Chicago. The outcomes were different in Trenton and in Pittsburgh, though in Charleston, South Carolina, the rebel chapter there also put up some very clever resistance to the aircraft sent in to annihilate the city, civilians and all. When the dust had settled, the Southern city still stood, and the red-handed flag was raised on every pole.
But Jonny and Hamilton wouldn’t find out about that for days and weeks. By then they would be heading west, leaving behind everything they had known.
Jonny turned to look at Hamilton. Just a few scant days ago, he hadn’t known this person existed. Now they were bonded in a way Jonny had never experienced in his life. They had been witness to history. Hell, they’d participated in history, Hamilton especially. Then again, Jonny had been instrumental in bringing him to Chicago. So, without him the rebels wouldn’t have been able to fight back against the Brits and—
It got too abstract. Jonny’s instincts for self-preservation were still intact. It didn’t do to get too far away from the personal. He had his own hide to worry about. Hamilton’s too. Neither of them was going to join up as full-fledged members of this revolution. But what about Hamilton? Would he go back to the Brits, to his Fleet? Christ, could he go back…?
Hamilton, evidently feeling Jonny’s stare, finally turned with the same calm expression he’d been wearing before, tinged now with a slow warmth that showed itself in a tired sincere smile.
“Well,” Hamilton said, “where should we go from here?”
“Where?” Jonny didn’t know the scale of the question. But he couldn’t help but smile back at Hamilton, at his sooty stubbly face and strong jaw and features that felt seared into Jonny’s being.
“My old life,” Hamilton said, “is done.” He didn’t sound entirely desolate about it. “So, common sense dictates that I shall need a new one. And that, I think, calls for a shift in venue. So I ask again, my friend: Where should we go?”
Jonny had seen history tonight. But this was history too—personal history. The life and times of Jonny Callahan and Hamilton Arkwright, or J.C. and Archer, or whatever aliases, if any, they settled on as they unfolded the further chapters of their private chronicle.
His smile becoming a grin, Jonny said, “This is America. We always go west.”
“West it is,” answered Hamilton.
Another ship boomed in the sky, and fire rained down on some distant section of the city. They both still sat in the commandeered electricar. Hamilton put it into drive and set off through the smoking streets.
SEVENTEEN.
THE SUN broke through the seemingly perpetual cloud cover, and Hamilton halted on the busy wharf to put back his head, to raise his face to the sky, to bask a moment in the welcome rays. The ripe smells of the bay washed over him, infused with all the vast livingness of the Pacific Ocean. He was also engulfed in waves of Spanish, the rapid words breaking over him, most of which he couldn’t yet understand, though his grasp of the language was improving. Jonny had taken to it as if it w
ere nothing more than a lingo, a mild variation of a familiar tongue.
Hamilton had been to England. But he had never traveled to Spanish California and had never thought to visit the exotic port of San Francisco. It was a vibrant town, he’d found. Exotic indeed, but he wasn’t just a visitor here. He and Jonny were residents, and as such he had needed to find work, and so he had.
“Vámanos, Arc’er!” The foreman clapped his meaty hands.
Hamilton pushed himself into motion once more. Work on the piers was physically strenuous and the hours rather punishing, but he had survived military training. More than survived it—he had excelled, besting a few of the record times for drills. It wasn’t so difficult to find that deep drive again, the profound motivation to perform and succeed and outshine.
Unimaginable tonnages of goods came to and departed this port. Merchandise and raw materials steamed into the San Francisco Bay nonstop. In addition to Spanish, one heard Chinese, Japanese, Russian. Seafaring sailors from a bewildering array of nations came and went, taking their shore leave, sampling all the wicked wares of the city, of which there was no shortage. This last fact had certainly made Jonny happy, though he could rarely find himself a drop of his beloved Green Fairy. However, he was now the occasional dabbler in opium, though Hamilton made sure he didn’t get carried away with this new indulgence. Jonny too had to work, after all.
Hamilton moved the cargo on and off the boats. It was like the movements of the tides. The crowded wharf area reeked of salt and sweat and the pitch that coated the pilings. He worked among other men and had discovered the rough camaraderie of that. He was an immigrant, a refugee, a luckless americano fleeing the turmoil to the east. Not all the native Spanish Californians cared for this influx of war fugitives, and more than once Hamilton had found himself backed into a corner or encircled by a belligerent group who found his fair skin and yanqui accent not to their liking.
But he was hardly helpless, and he had made friends and Jonny had made more, and they had settled into a relatively stable existence here in this town on the far edge of the continent.
So he continued to heave the goods and move along through his day’s labors. He had always had an idea of California as some sun-soaked tropical locale, but if that were the case, San Francisco didn’t share in that climate. The city, while certainly not cold in the way of, say, Boston, was nonetheless never quite warm. A chill persisted, as did a cloudiness. It made Hamilton long for the occasional glimpse of direct sunlight.
He was, on the whole, glad to be here. In a way, running away had preserved his good name. He had, after all, officially reported the loss of the Indomitable, identifying himself to the Fleet in the process and accepting the order to appear at that pickup point in Chicago. But he had never made his appearance. He had instead aided the rebels.
But Fleet Command didn’t know that. They would likely assume he had been killed on his way to the place of pickup. Thus, the death of Captain Hamilton Arkwright had no doubt been duly inscribed in the records. Those left in his family would have been informed. A tragedy, yes, but there had been so much calamity for the Royal Airborne Fleet and all the other branches of the Crown’s military. What was one more man, even an airship captain?
It was a curious thing to disappear so utterly. Jonny had helped him make the adjustment. Jonny—or J.C. as he was back to calling himself, just as Hamilton had reverted to Archer—had taken to these identities and new surroundings as if he’d put on a fresh suit of clothes and gone out to visit a neighbor. The change had seemed to upset him not at all.
Hamilton was doing his best with it. In one sense it was easier that this was so total a transformation. They had journeyed westward—by car, by train, by horse-drawn wagon, each stage of the excursion its own story, with allies and adversaries, plots and subplots. But in the end it had simply been a matter of travel, and they had managed it well enough, considering how many others were trying to make the same journey. There were also those heading north and south, they’d learned, to the Canadian Provinces, to Mexico. Not everyone was content to remain in America. The British hadn’t given up their ambition to retake what they still lawfully viewed as their Colonies. But the Colonial Underground—or the American Army, as it was now more loftily calling itself—wasn’t inclined to surrender those lands and cities it now controlled.
So, it was war. Ongoing war. With the British sending ships and troops across the Atlantic and the Americans resisting with their growing military forces. They had an air fleet of sorts now, converted commercial craft mostly, but these were surprisingly effective against the British war birds, particularly since the Americans didn’t fight conventionally, neither on the ground nor in the air.
Though news of the war reached California, the Spanish view of it colored even how Hamilton himself saw it: as a remote conflict being waged between foreign entities. It was like when Siam had invaded Sri Lanka five or six years ago. The fight had seemed too obscure to matter.
Who would win? Hamilton had no earthly idea. Americans were stubborn. He’d certainly learned that much. They had little sense of decorum. And the English had ceded the high moral ground in this combat when they had laid waste to entire cities. Word of those atrocities had spread, and many nations had cautiously condemned the British for it, though no power in the world wanted to incur the Crown’s wrath. Still, the operations had not recurred.
The last reliable war news Hamilton had heard was of the British withdrawal from Richmond, Virginia. The American Operations Headquarters was now evidently a free-floating affair. Did that bode the beginning of the end of British military intervention in America? Who could say? The Californian press had stopped referring to that land as the Colonies. A new name seemed to be creeping in, taking over the popular consciousness: the United American States.
Hamilton sank his bale hook into a huge sack and heaved the thing onto his shoulder. His first days of employment on the docks had nearly done him in. The strain of the labor and the speed at which he was expected to perform it had dizzied him, had stressed his every muscle. He had almost blacked out. But now he could do the job. Whatever else, it was undeniably honest work. Cargo had to be moved. He was a brute instrument of that process. His body had toughened. He could now keep up with his experienced fellows on the piers.
But he did pause between heavings and totings once again, when the sun broke through the San Franciscan fog a second time. The sky over the bustling port town was almost empty. The Spanish hadn’t yet developed dependable air technology. If they did, it would make little difference for Hamilton in his new livelihood, he supposed. Cargo, whether seaborne or airborne, would still have to be laded and unloaded.
He resumed work before the foreman yelled again. He didn’t mind the work, didn’t find it demeaning. But the best thing about his existence here in this city was that he got to share it with Jonny. They had a legitimate life together now. And he couldn’t imagine anything finer than that.
AT FIRST, Jonny had been uncomfortable with the legitimacy of his new employment. He knew theft. He knew deception and larceny. Those were his trades. But Hamilton had pled with him to take a straight job, lest he run afoul of the authorities. The Spanish police were harsh. Jonny could find himself arrested for something as petty as pickpocketing and be thrown into the barbaric City Jail, where he might languish for months or even years without a trial. “Just try to be a normal citizen,” Hamilton had begged. “Please.”
It was hard to refuse him, especially when he was making such sense. They had gotten through the border together and obtained the visas that allowed them to work in California. That had taken some doing. Jonny had had to pull a burglary job to get the money needed for the bribe those visas required. But that had been the first and last illegal act he had committed in Spanish California.
Fortunately, the respectable field he had moved into in lieu of further criminal work had turned out not to be so starchily principled after all. He had gotten a job at City Hall. He was i
n politics now.
He liked the rapid-fire sound of Spanish. It was a good language for conveying ideas and emotions quickly, he’d found. Picking it up wasn’t much of a problem. He had successfully navigated the polyglot that was the New York of his childhood, daily adding words and phrases from other cultures. Would all that come to an end? he wondered. Would immigrants never again arrive at New York Harbor? America was at war. His America, land of his birth.
City Hall employed a small army of clerks. There had been enough cash left over from fencing the jewelry he’d stolen to bribe his way into a posting here. He’d been a curiosity to start off, a blond-haired americano with no connections and no native knowledge of how local politics worked. But he was literate, intelligent, ingratiating without being servile. He had filed and run messages. He had done errands and sorted paperwork.
But in the musty depths of the imposing plaster edifice that was San Francisco’s City Hall, Jonny, once he had the routine of his tasks perfected, had turned his close attention to all the human interactions going on around him. He saw the hierarchy among the clerks. He noted who was in line for advancement and who wasn’t. As he scurried in and out of the offices of the city officials, he observed body language and overheard snatches of conversation. He made a mental and temperamental map of the place, recording in his mind all the personalities and predilections that made up the political institution.
Jonny had been in the presence of the mayor more than once. He was a fat, cigar-smoking man with disturbingly small eyes who nonetheless could appear affable and charming when the occasion called for it. But he was a minor tyrant as well, and frightfully vindictive. A great deal of resentment existed toward him within the building. Jonny took the measure of it. He took note of the officials who most wanted him ousted, and those best served by keeping him in the mayoral chair.
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