Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars

by Nisi Shawl

  Hawk was standing apart from the crowd, watching as a couple smaller monkeys scrambled over Wakinyan’s rigging to make sure all the knots held.

  “There was a kid posting these around,” she announced, handing me a piece of newsprint featuring a decent likeness of our ship soaring above a mass of bold printed text.

  LUCY RUNNING HAWK

  - and -

  CASSIUS WEST

  Flying WAKINYAN,

  The RED THUNDER!

  Fastest airship in America!

  San Francisco to Omaha in FOUR DAYS!

  NEW YORK IN TEN!

  - Sponsored by E.W. Sweeney & Co. -

  “Sweeney doesn’t waste time,” I said. The language aside, it was some impressive advertising. Our own likenesses weren’t nearly as accurate as Wakinyan’s, and Hawk had so many feathers drawn in her hair that she seemed to be wearing a peacock. But I suppose there weren’t any other airships with an Indian captain and a Negro engineer for folks to confuse us with.

  “Fifteen hundred miles in four days,” Hawk said. She stood a full head shorter than I did, but somehow she never had to look up at me. “This was our year, Cassius.”

  “Something always happens,” I said, with a shake of my head. “And the next time you go insult the Federals to their face, I wouldn’t mind a bit of warning. We’re lucky they don’t just take the ship and try flying it themselves.”

  Hawk shrugged. “I’d be surprised if any of those uniforms knew the first thing about piloting. They need an ape just to carry their papers.” She handed the Navy’s requisition letter back to me. “You got them around to payment?”

  That was when I started to realize where her head had really been. “He said the word. But they didn’t mention a number.”

  “Perfect.” She smiled, a tight one that only used half her mouth. “Well, since running off on their mission means forfeiting the race, I’d say the Navy owes us for the purse we gave up. At least half, I’d say.”

  “You want me to ask the Navy for five hundred dollars?” I shook my head, to stop myself smiling.

  Hawk shrugged. “I’d ask for the full thousand, but go on and be the reasonable one. We’ll let Sweeney worry out the details.”

  And with that, she was off to converse with one of the dockhands. I was less convinced her approach would get us a higher compensation rather than have the Navy impound our ship, but experience told me not to argue. Deranged as her ideas usually sound, Hawk always finds a way to be right.

  ∫

  Navy airships are giant, lumbering monsters, so finding the Dayton wasn’t much trouble. She was headed north along the Missouri under full sail, her engines idle. An airship under sail is a curious sight, like a pair of double-masters flipped on their sides and welded keel to keel; and the Dayton had more galleon about her than any other ship I’d seen.

  “Sure is something, isn’t she?” asked Lieutenant Baines, the eagleman, as we watched her through the engine house windows. He had to shout to be heard over the engine, which was chugging like mad about six feet behind us. “She lifts three times as much weight as the cruisers Farragut had at the Battle of Montgomery. I’m a little surprised we caught her so quick.”

  “There’s no smoke,” I replied. “She’s not running her engines.” The wind was gusting up from the south at better than forty knots, and Wakinyan had no sails worth mentioning, so we would have had a much rougher time if the Dayton had been under power.

  Baines, though, seemed more concerned about Montgomery. He was the youngest of the Navy men by about a decade, so he had the recruit’s sense of adventure along with a fondness for chatter. “You know, I did some service in the rebel states.”

  I just looked at him. The kid would have barely been born when Montgomery fell.

  “Missed the real war, of course, but I got a bit of action tracking Forrest’s militias.” He paused, as though he were waiting for my comment. “It’s a funny place, the South.”

  I am always impressed by the Northern white boys who assume I must have a slave story I’m dying to tell. “Wouldn’t know,” I said. “I grew up in Chicago, myself.”

  “Really?” He looked honestly surprised. “I mean, it’s just I knew some folks from Chicago. You don’t sound like them.”

  I just shook my head. “And where would you be from?”

  “Iowa City.” Baines seemed to know to change the subject, at least. “Serving in the frontier is a real dream for me. That’s why I learned beast-talking to start with. Not a lot of settlers bother, so the Navy’s always looking.”

  “Speaking of beasts, isn’t that your eagle?” I pointed to a silhouette swooping in at us.

  Baines took the bait, and squinted at the bird for a moment until it became a bit more obvious. “That’s a good eye, Mr. West! Excuse me a minute.”

  His exit more than doubled the free room I had in the engine house, which was crammed full of Navy gear and munitions. Expecting I wouldn’t have another chance to stretch my legs for a while, I followed him outside.

  Aft of our pilothouse, a pair of gangways ran under the length of Wakinyan’s hull, framed by some rigging and the open sky. The Navy had lashed even more crates between them, along with a big iron-banded cage holding the half-dozen chimpanzees that made up their strike team. Their uniforms were tiny versions of the black-threaded jerseys and blue caps worn by Marines, and dangerous-looking iron batons were strapped to their backs.

  Rodgers, the Master Chief, was barking orders at them in that odd sort of speech folks use when they haven’t quite learned beast-speak, where you take half a sentence and say it twice: “You board and capture. Board and capture! Detain all on board. Detain all!”

  I had been making it a point to ignore this monkey business on the voyage so far, and so I tried to continue. I watched as the eagle swooped in to land on the perch the Navy had secured to our rigging and screeched out its report to Baines, and then as Baines disappeared into the pilothouse to relay it. But eventually I couldn’t help myself.

  “Why the hats?” I called.

  Rodgers grunted. “They’re uniforms. Apes need authority, just like men do.” He pointed at one ape in particular, with a gold trim on his hat. “That one’s the Beast-Sergeant. The hat tells the others to follow him.”

  I couldn’t think of any reply, and Rodgers didn’t look intent on hearing one either. Baines, though, was talking almost the second he came out of the pilothouse. “We’ll come right alongside!” he exclaimed. “They haven’t run out the guns, and there’s no movement on deck. It’s like there’s no defense at all.”

  “‘Course not,” said Rodgers. “Miracle they can even fly her.”

  I wasn’t sure what any of that meant, except that I should be getting back to the engine. I arrived just in time to catch Hawk calling through the voicepipe: “Spin us down. Match their speed.”

  That was the first I’d heard from her since we’d run up the engine on our way out from Lancaster, which was about usual: Hawk wasn’t much for talking, in the air or on the ground. I didn’t bother to answer, just opened one of the relief valves to ease down our speed by two or three knots as we fell in alongside the Dayton.

  Hawk maneuvered us just outside the Dayton’s port mainsail, which left us staring right into their bridge—an ironclad cabin attached to the bottom of her hull. I couldn’t quite see Rodgers out on our gangway, but I saw the grapple he threw to snare the Dayton’s rail. Then I saw the apes, shimmying across the line one after the other as if we weren’t a thousand feet up in the air.

  A minute later, once the apes had disappeared up into the hull, Rodgers himself appeared on the line, secured with a harness and dragging himself across hand over hand. His progress was a good deal clumsier, and the wind was picking up: One gust snatched the cap right off his head, sent it flopping into the Dayton’s sail, then falling toward the plains below.

  I was so caught up in the drama of it all that at first I didn’t notice how slack the rope was getting, or how the D
ayton’s end was rising. Either we were losing altitude, or they were gaining it—and either way, we were drifting closer.

  “More steam,” Hawk’s voice instructed, just as all this was dawning on me. I stoked the boiler as she turned us a few degrees away, aiming to keep us clear of the rough air behind the Dayton’s sails.

  A moment later, I caught what looked like a puff of upside-down smoke underneath the other ship. A second after that, two more. I must have gotten used to the idea of the ship being abandoned, because it took me a second to realize she was dropping ballast.

  That was about when all hell broke loose.

  My first warning was a couple muffled shouts through the voicepipe: I couldn’t make out the words, but it was Kendrick’s voice, and he sounded worked up about something. A second later, something thudded against the side of the engine house, and I turned to see a monkey staring at me through the porthole.

  It scurried away almost as quick as it appeared, but I could tell this wasn’t one of Rodgers’ apes: The head was smaller, the fur lighter, and it had the long, spindly arms of a spider monkey. It had a Navy tunic and cap, but they were white, making it a sailor instead of a commando.

  The Navy hadn’t brought any sailor monkeys along, and we were a thousand feet up in the air, so there wasn’t much question about where it had come from.

  “Hey!” I shouted, picking my way out of the engine house. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I didn’t like the thought of any intruders from a ship full of mutineers crawling around our rigging. Sure enough, three of them were up monkeying with the canvas that streamlined our hull. And they were making quick work: We already had corners flapping free and billowing up in the wind. I might have been impressed, if the sight wasn’t so irritating.

  Standing out there and yelling “Hey! Git!” didn’t seem to do much good, but there wasn’t much more I could manage without climbing up in the rigging myself, so I went ahead and kept at it. I was wondering if I should go back in, fetch my poker from the engine, and try shaking that at them, when the hatch to our pilothouse opened and Commander Kendrick charged out, pistol drawn, with Baines following quick on his heels.

  “Goddamn traitor monkeys!” he roared, taking aim at the nearest of them. I managed to shout out a protest just as he pulled the trigger. Thankfully the shot missed our hull, but it missed the monkey too, and they all scurried out of sight.

  “Watch out!” I called. “You hit our gasbag and we’re done for!”

  “I know what I’m doing!” he shouted back, holding on to our rigging with one hand and waving the pistol with another, looking for the monkeys to come back.

  None of us had been watching the Dayton during all this. Else, the cannon blast might not have been such a surprise.

  When we’d pulled alongside, the Dayton’s gun ports were all closed. But sometime after the monkeys came over, two guns had been rolled out. Hawk must have seen it, and she pitched our nose upward to clear their line of fire, but she didn’t quite have enough time.

  The storm we flew through on the way from Cheyenne had given me a healthy appreciation for how thunder sounds close up, so a four-inch cannon twenty yards off was really a bit underwhelming. When the scattershot hit us, though, that was something new. One of our gangways exploded in a mess of splintered wood, and half a dozen lines snapped along the hull. Baines lost his balance and fell into the rigging, while that monkey cage dropped out the bottom of our ship until it caught on a tangle of half-broken rope.

  I recovered enough to make a dive back into the engine house, around the time the second cannon’s blast shredded the front of our pilothouse and the bottom of Wakinyan’s nose.

  Looking back, it’s a miracle that neither shot opened our gasbags; some of those pellets couldn’t have missed by more than a few inches. But what happened was nearly as bad.

  To balance all the extra weight the Navy had loaded into our engine house, we’d left behind all of the ballast we normally loaded on Wakinyan’s aft. That left a dozen full sandbags lined up under the nose—and judging by the way we pitched upward after that second shot, it must have torn through them all. Reflex and a nearby safety line saved me from being pitched right into the boiler, and all those Navy crates started groaning against the ropes that held them in place.

  A jolt ran through the ship, I could feel the deck spinning under me. The line Rodgers and the apes had used to board the Dayton was still tethering our ships together, and now it was like to either tear us apart or force us into ramming them.

  I finally managed to reach the emergency valve and close off the engine, sending all the steam straight into the hot-air chamber in the center of our hull. I hoped that would help balance out the ship, which was now pitched up at a good forty-five degrees, and it would definitely mean a smaller chance of colliding with the Dayton. But to stop Wakinyan from groaning herself apart, that tether needed to go.

  Climbing back out of the engine house was no easy task, with the ship twisting and listing and shuddering at every gust of air. Those Navy crates were doing their best to shake themselves free of their ropes, and I had to crawl between them on my hands and knees if I had any chance of reaching open air. That was where I found myself when the ship made its wildest lurch yet and the crates nearly jumped off the deck, coming down to pin my legs between them.

  I was out in the open from the waist up, so I had a fine view of how much trouble we were in. We weren’t just pitching nose up, but listing to the side, and that tether had gone completely taut. What’s more, I could hear the Dayton’s engines chugging up, which meant they were trying to leave us behind. Assuming that tether didn’t snap, which it probably would have already if it was going to, we would end up crashing right into the flying fortress’ tail if we were lucky—and her propellers if we weren’t.

  Trying to pull yourself free of a munitions crate with no good purchase on a deck slanted two different ways is not an easy thing. One crate’s corner was digging into my ankle, and I had to twist onto my side in hopes of wiggling my foot through, and then the other caught the heel of my boot. I tried to push the crates apart, and tried not to notice that one of the hooks that secured the crates on top was starting to work loose from the bulkhead, and then I noticed something else.

  One of the Dayton’s sailor monkeys was scampering over our rigging, holding a knife in its mouth. By the time I worked out what I was seeing, it had reached the bollard where the tether had been fixed and started sawing through it with the knife.

  I finally found some leverage against the crates, bracing my hands against one and my legs against the other, and pushed with all the strength I could manage. That got me a couple of inches, which was just enough to pull my legs free, and I did that just soon enough to grab hold of the rigging before the monkey cut through the line. The rope snapped, and our ship lurched again, but the deck evened out a bit and the protests from the frame of our hull died down.

  For a moment, it seemed almost quiet, although that wasn’t really so. There was still the wind flapping through the mess of our rigging and the canvas on our hull, the rattling of the monkey cage as it hung from the remnants of our gangway, and the creaking of our beams as the wind slowly spun us around. And there was the chugging of the Dayton’s engines as that ship steamed away.

  ∫

  The cannon blast that had ripped through our pilothouse had struck Hawk at least twice in her right arm, badly enough to merit a bandage that was soaked near through by now. She hadn’t bothered with a sling, and she had taken to flexing her hand almost obsessively to make sure it would still be useful.

  “Good thing we lost that wind,” she said, eyeing the rigging we had spent all afternoon trying to secure. It was near evening, and the weather had calmed to a lazy breeze, but we could still see ruffles pop up along the hull as loose canvas caught the air. “I wouldn’t trust us at better than twelve knots right now.”

  “The Dayton can make twenty in calm skies at full steam,” Commander Kendri
ck complained. We were gathered on Wakinyan’s remaining gangway: Kendrick, Hawk, Baines, and myself. Rodgers had either made it onto the Dayton, where he was probably a captive, or fallen a quarter-mile into the Missouri. “Every second takes them farther away; we can’t afford to sit here!”

  “We’re in no condition to chase them,” Hawk replied. We had fallen to within fifty feet of the ground before stabilizing the ship, and most of the Navy’s crates had gone overboard to keep us lighter than air. I’d kept the boiler lit, but Hawk and I weren’t keen to start running the propellers again. “And after what that ship did to mine, I’m not in a hurry to catch up.”

  “You listen, miss.” Kendrick leveled a finger at her. “That is my ship out there, and I’m not letting a bunch of monkeys take her away from me.”

  Hawk glared icicles back at him. “Seems you already have. And let’s talk about those monkeys.”

  Kendrick had insisted that we keep the cage that had held Rodgers’ apes, even though it weighed as much as three of the crates we’d pitched overboard, so that we could use it to lock up the three monkeys that had boarded us. After all the trouble they had caused us up until then, they had gone in with no protest at all.

  “What about them?” Kendrick asked.

  “You and your man spent all afternoon shouting at them while we tried to secure the ship,” said Hawk. “What do they know that’s so important?”

  “How they took my ship!” said Kendrick. “If these monkeys can hijack a Navy airship, Lord knows what else they’re capable of!”

  That caught my attention. “You told us the Dayton’s crew mutinied,” I said. “You don’t mean the monkeys took her by themselves?”

  Kendrick looked to be grinding his teeth. “The Dayton uses twenty monkeys to manage the rigging and the engines. They’re some of the most highly trained in the fleet.”

  “Trained enough to fly a ship with no officer?” I asked.

  “Well, they’re saying they didn’t,” Baines put in. “According to them, they were acting on orders from an officer.”