Uncrashable Dakota (6 page)

“That reminds me,” Hollis said, waving a hand dismissively at his stepbrother. “You’re fired.”

“I rehire myself.”

“You don’t have the authority.”

Delia sighed as a tin of biscuits rose unsteadily off her table and bumped gently against the bookshelf.

5

“
MIGHT WANT TO
hold your noses,” Delia suggested as they lowered themselves down the ladder.

“Some kind of scented handkerchief would be good,” Hollis said. The dizzying odor of millions of inflated beetles had begun to assault his nostrils. He thought of his grandfather’s famous description of the stench.

“You say that every time, HD.”

“And you always tell us that we can’t come down to the lift chambers, not a chance, and then every time we do.”

“That just proves you should be more prepared.”

Hollis buried his face in the crook of his elbow. Rob struggled to pinch his nose without losing his grip on the smooth metal rungs. “How you beetle keepers stand this is beyond me.”

Delia took a deep breath and let it out with a contented sigh—she always seemed to take perverse pride in her ability to withstand the smell.

The ladder deposited them with three echoing clanks onto a steel catwalk that stretched high above the floor of the lift chamber, a cavernous hollow at the very bottom of the airship, where the pelican’s beak scooped down from the bow, leveled off, then scooped up toward the stern. A sign at the base of the ladder was imprinted with the company insignia, the number 2 painted in red on the beetle’s back. This was the secondary chamber—not a bad place for some incognito tourism, as Big Benny Owens supervised his crew from the primary.

There were sixteen chambers in all. The next-largest airship in the Dakota fleet, the
Windy City
, had twelve. While the abundance of chambers kept the
Wendell Dakota
aloft, they didn’t make it uncrashable. (That single word, so bound up with his father, always gave Hollis a melancholy shiver.) What made it that way—what they had come here to see—was the revolutionary new system of automation. In the past, beetle keepers obeyed a set of basic, well-worn procedures. They fed whiskey-sap to the insects and applied them to the hull under the guidance of Benny and his officers. But the mechanical chambers on the
Wendell Dakota
offered a more efficient way to harness the beetles’ abilities, compensate for the natural tilts of an airship in flight, and cut down on the most stubborn of problems—human error.

Hollis went to the rail of the catwalk and peered down through the gloomy space. He caught the vaguest sense of rhythmic, nonhuman movement. “I can’t see anything.”

Rob elbowed up alongside him. “We’re too high.”

The view afforded them nothing but glimpses of the lower catwalks, crisscrossed in such a way that they blocked the floor. Every so often, a pair of keepers or technicians would scurry along one of the walkways, sending a hint of conversation up to their perch at the top of the chamber.

“Listen,” Delia said.

Hollis cupped his hands behind his ears and closed his eyes. Even down here, with miles of oak and carpet between them, Hollis felt the spin of the great propeller in his chest like a heartbeat. But there was another sound, very faint, unique to the chamber: a thousand wooden drawers sliding open and closed in precise time, the cataloging of some infernal librarian. Hollis couldn’t help but picture a giant armor-plated squid wearing thick glasses sorting through a mazelike cabinet, tentacles clanking, steam issuing from its beak. (He’d just seen the cover of
Brice Blank and the Aluminum Kraken
on Rob’s dresser.)

The look on Rob’s face told Hollis that he’d also heard it. As if to tantalize them further, there was a network of pipes creeping up the side of the chamber, silver vines on a three-story trellis, delivering exhaust to the main funnels. Hollis remembered that five hundred extra tons of coal had been earmarked to produce electricity for the chambers—never before had an airship needed such a resource.

“Absolutely not,” Delia said, reading the look that passed between them. “This is as far as we go.”

Rob seemed poised to leap over the railing and hop his way from catwalk to catwalk until he reached the Sorter/Picker/Dispenser machine—“spider” for short—that sprawled along the floor, disseminating beetles. Hollis felt like a little boy being denied some coveted plaything he’d seen in a friend’s stateroom.

“You there!” A sudden shout reached them from across the platform. A crewman hailed them with a wave. “Don’t move!”

Delia turned to head back to the ladder, muttering curses, but Hollis stopped her.

“He already saw us—just say your shift is about to start.”

Once he’d been spotted somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, Hollis had found that it was best to be cursory and polite, and keep his lies within the bounds of reason. The same tension he felt with crewmen like Marius, who didn’t know whether to treat him like a friend or a boss-in-training, could also work to his advantage.

“Ahoy!” Rob lifted his cap in a jaunty greeting.

“Don’t move!” the man yelled, striding fiercely to intercept them as if they were fleeing madly instead of holding still. Right away, Hollis noticed the man’s unkempt hair shoved hastily beneath a uniform cap. His features floated within a doughy, indistinct face. And he was dressed like a porter, without even a single gold bar on his shoulder to identify him as the type of petty officer assigned to patrol the lift chambers. But the strangest thing by far was the holstered pistol slung across his hip.

Since when did porters walk around
armed
?

“Afternoon,” Hollis said.

The man stared at him uncomprehendingly. “You kids can’t be here,” he said. “Clear the air.”

“We were just leaving.” Hollis flashed Delia a quick smile.
See how easy it is?

Then Rob stepped forward, toe-to-toe with the armed porter, and Hollis sensed that something about the man had provoked his stepbrother into going off script.

“I’m not sure you understand. We have security clearance from up top, for every corner of the ship from bow to stern.”

That was hardly true, but Hollis kept his mouth shut. What was Rob trying to prove?

The porter thwacked Rob hard on the chest with a single finger. “I said clear the air, boy.”

“Hey!” Delia bristled. “You can’t talk to him like that.”

The porter’s hand hovered above his holster. “Who says I can’t, cupcake? You’re not allowed here, and that’s the high and low of it.”

For a moment, Hollis had the sickening notion that they were about to be shot by some rogue psychotic porter. Then he dismissed the thought and tried to sound like his father at his most serious and puffed up.

“What’s your name and position with this company?”

The man looked genuinely taken aback by the question. His hand drifted down to rest on the pistol’s ivory grip. “That’s none of your business, kid.”

Hollis was about to inform the man that, as he was Lucy Dakota’s only son, it was the definition of his business, when Rob began to yell and wave.

“Hey! Dad!”

Jefferson Castor emerged from a small office at the far end of the catwalk. He looked up at the little group, startled.

Hollis waved too, relieved that this misunderstanding was about to be peacefully resolved. Whatever severe and unpleasant discipline his stepfather was about to impose was preferable to being riddled with bullets by some high-strung new recruit of a porter. But instead of hurrying over to take charge, Jefferson Castor stayed frozen in place. The funny way he stood, motionless and trapped, long arms caught midswing, reminded Hollis of the time Miss Betzengraf caught Rob stealing the answers to a history test. It seemed like his stepfather was going to duck back into the office, but then he unfroze and walked toward them, regaining his usual confidence with each step.

“Sir,” Hollis said.

“Dad.” Rob jerked his thumb toward the porter. “Tell this rookie where to stick it.”

Jefferson Castor walked right past the man and took Rob roughly by the shoulder.

“Why aren’t you in class?” he asked. The porter snickered.

“The Pea—Miss Betzengraf’s sick,” Rob said quickly.

Hollis cleared his throat, desperate to shift attention from Rob’s lie. “Is something wrong with the stabilizer?”

“What?” Castor said sharply, taking his hand off his son. “Oh.” His tone softened. “That was nothing, Hollis. Routine turbulence. And you should be in class, too.”

Hollis bowed his head, thinking of his mother’s threat to have the Pea tutor him personally. Getting caught skipping on the first day was pathetic. Castor fixed his stony gaze on the porter. His lip twitched once, then he flicked his chin toward the office and the man slunk away.

“I’ll deal with him. You get to class.” He smiled warmly, an entirely different person from the angry father he’d been a moment ago.

“Yessir,” Rob said.

“I’ll be working late tonight, boys. But I’ll be receiving a full report about your behavior, and you’ve already dug yourselves a hole.” He paused to scowl at Delia, who lowered her eyes. “So do your best to fly straight.” Even this threat had a softened edge. It sounded like a casual suggestion.

“Yessir,” Rob said again. Hollis kept quiet. He’d made up a secret rule on the very day Jefferson Castor became his mother’s new husband: his stepfather couldn’t tell him what to do or how to act until Hollis started calling him Dad. Behavioral corrections were for Rob alone. They had never discussed this rule, but for reasons that Hollis didn’t quite understand, his stepfather seemed to agree.

Castor spun on his heel and strode back toward the office. Through the half-open door, Hollis saw the porter talking to two other men.

“All due respect,” Delia said as Castor shut the door, “but did he seem strange to you?”

“All the time,” Rob said.

“Listen,” Hollis said. “There’s something else.” The incident seemed like his cue to share another peculiar moment, so as they walked back to the ladder he told them about the phone call just before the launch, how it had darkened his mother’s mood, how the captain had explained it away.

“That settles it,” Rob said with a single clap. “This sightseeing trip has officially become an investigation. If we’re gonna get to the bottom of this, we need a plan.”

Hollis was wary of the excitement in his stepbrother’s voice. They had already pushed their luck. His head throbbed where it had smacked the dormitory wall, and his right temple began to pulsate in time with the echoes of the chamber. The feather bed in his blessedly nonreeking stateroom loomed soft and inviting in his mind. The mere idea of crawling beneath its covers and closing his eyes seemed to bring a measure of relief.

“Name one time you’ve ever made a plan that worked, Rob. Or done anything besides get us in trouble.”

“Come on, Hollis, this is different,” Delia said. “This is something.”

Hollis rubbed his temple gingerly and winced. “Everything’s something with you.”

6

LUCY DAKOTA
called her chronic headaches
tiger claws
because they dug in and roared and didn’t let go for days. She had always seemed terrified of passing along this affliction to Hollis and used to warn him of “auras” so often that every innocent action in his peripheral vision—the normal interplay of light and shadow—became a harbinger of doom. Fully aware that talk of a headache would result in being surrounded by doctors, Hollis explained his early bedtime simply by saying he was tired from launch day, the vaguest excuse he could think of that wouldn’t invite a concerned examination of his pupils.

Willing himself to sleep so early proved impossible, but curling up to watch the sky darken outside his window soothed his aching head. Voices drifted through his bedroom door: his mother was holding court in the sitting room while Jefferson Castor, true to his word, was working late, and Rob was hatching plots with Delia.

Hollis heard Elizabeth Quincy, the captain’s wife, steer the conversation toward rumored cargo. The Reynolds’ dead Shetland pony had been stuffed and mounted on a pedestal, and was traveling in a private storage hold along with two automobiles and a dozen gilt-framed portraits of itself. Several first-class ladies were happy to use this tidbit as a prompt.

“You know our maid Francine?” one asked. “Darling girl. Not from Paris, from some provincial town—country girls simply know how to clean in a way that city girls will never master, they encounter more varieties of dirt—well, anyhow. Our Francine says that Heddie—that’s Juniper’s new governess, now that the old one’s been, how shall I say this,
promoted
—well, Heddie swears that Edmund just bought a prehistoric fossilized
man
from some Canadian explorers, some beastly thing that had been frozen solid in a cave for who knows how many thousands of years, which of course he’s taken aboard with him and stashed in a hold.”

“Left it there to thaw? I should think it would smell after a while, don’t you?”

“Well, of course he’s not letting it thaw.”

“You’re saying they’ve got the man encased in ice? For the duration of the crossing?”

Hollis imagined a leather-skinned specimen stashed away among the spoils of high-class life. What if the caveman woke up and found himself in Edmund Juniper’s private storage hold? What would it be like to track a mammoth through an ice field, fall into some crevasse, and open your eyes a few thousand years later aboard an airship high above the Atlantic?

“Perhaps he’s lodging in the meat locker at Il Bambino’s. I thought the steak tasted a bit
ancient.
”

Peals of laughter barreled through Hollis’s bedroom door and reignited his headache, giving a queasy backdrop to his thoughts. Who was the armed porter? Why hadn’t his stepfather disciplined the man? Hollis couldn’t shake the guilty feeling that his failed christening had released some kind of slow-acting poison into the corridors and offices and engine rooms of the ship, changing the very nature of the voyage. It was a long time before he slipped into a shallow, disturbed sleep.