Clementine

She clung to the gun though the heat of it warmed her too much through her clothes and through the big gloves that flopped around on her fingers. The split on the glass stretched—she watched it widen like a smile, and she held her breath.



The weight of the automatic gun and the weight of the glass itself, not to mention the weight of Maria’s body suspended there, thighs clenched around a narrow seat meant for a man…how much would the wounded bubble hold? She closed her eyes and waited for the Valkyrie to settle, and as the ship rolled she saw the other small ship toppling down to earth in a widening ball of fire that drew a comet’s tail of soot and sparks down through the sky.



Had there been another ship? She couldn’t remember.



Too many things to keep track of at once.



But the cruiser was still there, hovering—she could see it again when the Valkyrie swung itself around, pulling out of the spin and righting itself. The cruiser was blowing smoke, but not very much of it. She’d nicked something important but it wasn’t enough to slow their pursuer so she rounded the gun again and, praying she had enough ammunition to keep the threat coming, she clamped down on the triggers and blew more air-to-air birdshot slugs into the clouds.



The cruiser fired back, but it leaned backwards and the shots went too high to do more than graze the edge of the Valkyrie’s hull.



Along the glass the crack’s smile stretched all the longer, and now it was accompanied by the sickening, deep tinkle of ice that won’t hold for more than another few minutes.



“Captain!” she shouted.



“What now?”



“I have to…” The ball shifted and Maria’s seat dropped half an inch that nearly stopped her heart. She released her grip on the gun and scrambled backward, off the seat and in hurried retreat until she had one leather-booted foot on the edge.



A whistling hiss joined the slow shatter; air was entering from somewhere, and it was colder than ordinary winter. It smelled like water.



“Oh Jesus,” she swore as she got one hand up over the edge, but the gloves she wore were meant for a man more than twice her size and she lost her grip; she relaxed her fingers, swung her hand, and the gloves flew off, then she grabbed again at the edge and found it. She was suspended that way, using the width and breath of her reach to hoist herself above the glass ball with the rocking gun, and the glass ball was breaking beneath her. Hinges were stretching with unfamiliar unevenness and the pressure of the craft’s motion was tugging the turret apart.



The cruiser reared into view, once more, and much closer. It was coming in fast and high—its underbelly exposed, its lower engines and thrusters a target almost too sweet to resist. But the glass was splitting and the gun, which was mounted on a set of tracks, was drooping as the structure failed.



She braced her feet, pinning them against the curved rim of the glass bowl; she released one hand’s worth of grip, and when she put her fingertips on the back end of the gun’s firing mechanism, it was so frigid that she nearly stuck to it. The air that seeped and squirted into the ball and up against Maria’s face was bitterly cold but she worked against it, straining to feel her way up to the trigger paddle even from her precarious position.



The cruiser wouldn’t hold its position long, but she couldn’t hold her position long either and it was a war of time between her muscles, the glass ball turret, and the cruiser’s path.



With the cold air came cold water, condensing and freezing, and Maria’s buttressing hand slid. She grappled for her handhold and lost it, and was an instant shy of toppling down onto the increasingly fragile surface below her when an enormous black hand seized her scrambling fingers.



She whipped her head around to see Croggon Hainey, feet planted apart, and shortly with both hands wrapped around her wrist.



“Woman, are you mad?” he demanded.



She said, “Yes! Or no! Or look—” and she pointed at the cruiser with its upturned belly. “I can take it down!”



“That ball turret is going to go, any second!”



“No!” she shouted at him, and struggled to dip herself down, letting him hold most of her weight. “This is my life at stake here too, you’ve made it more than clear you bastard, so let me help us survive!”



The length of his arms gave her a few precious extra inches to lean, and when she touched the trigger paddle she jerked herself forward to seize it, and squeeze with all her might.



A spray of half a dozen bullets went soaring through a low-flying cloud, into the underside of the Yankee cruiser and straight through its already-wounded thruster. Three new sets of smoke and sparks burst to life and she cheered, “See! I told you!”



But the pressure of the gun’s kickback was too much for the glass, and it split.



And it fell, out from underneath her.



Just like that, the sky was a sucking thing, blowing ice up her skirt and against her skin, and beneath her the ground was amazingly far away. She held her breath because she could not breathe, and she swung her legs because she lacked the strength to do anything else. Wisps of cloud billowed past her, screamed between her legs, and lashed at her arms, but she did not fall.



She spun like a ballerina in a music box, suspended from the vise of the captain’s hands.



9



Hainey hoisted Maria with a jerk and a backwards stumble that drew her up out of the hole left by the former glass ball turret; and although the sucking vortex left by the circular absence roared with broken, swirling wind, they were safely away from its reach. For a few seconds, Maria lay panting on the metal floor—and then she sat up, letting the wild, intruding air flay her hair to pieces.



She said, “Oh no. My underthings.”



“Your what?”



“My…never mind.” She leaned forward just enough to see over the edge just a little bit, and she spied the undergarments floating happily down to Missouri. “Are we safe? Did we get them all?”



The captain stood up, swung his head slowly back and forth, and backed away—urging her to do likewise. He said, “You got the last of them. Goddamn, woman. You almost got yourself killed.”



“Well, I didn’t. And…well, I think it’s only clear and honest to point out, I owe that to you.” She rubbed at her wrists, where the red marks of his grasp were flushing into a pattern of hands. “Why did you do that? You could’ve let me fall. Maybe you should have. It might’ve been more convenient for you to do so.”



He stared down into the hole and told her, “Just reflex, I guess. It’s not every day I see a half-dressed woman falling out of a ball turret.” He turned to climb the three or four steps up into the bridge, and she rose to follow behind him. Over his shoulder he added, “And anyway, you took down the cruiser.”



Once they were away from the whistling void, Maria didn’t have to shout when she said, “I didn’t have much choice. I thought we’d worked that out.”



Again, without looking at her, he said, “Maybe. But I don’t know too many men who’d have reached for that last shot.”



On the bridge, he pointed at her previous seat and said, “Buckle yourself in.”



Lamar had been closest to the cargo hold, so he was the one who asked, “Sir, what happened back there? What’s that noise?”



“We lost the left ball turret,” he answered, but didn’t tell him more. “I don’t know what kind of disturbance it’ll make in the steering, but if you find this bird pulling or bucking, it’s a big hole and we don’t have any good way to cover it right this moment, so we’re going to live with it.”



“It’s tugging back and down a little, but not too bad. We can live with it, sure. Maybe when we stop we can shove a crate over it or something,” Simeon proposed, trying very hard not to watch Maria with one eye.



“If we can find one big enough,” Hainey said. “But for now, we’ve got to…” he rubbed wearily at his forehead. “God Almighty.”



Simeon asked, “Captain?”



And Lamar gazed up expectantly.



“We’ve got to…” he tried again. “Christ knows how far ahead of us they are. We’ve given them a devil of a head start, but at least we know where they’re headed. So here’s what I want to do—I want to head north a bit, out over godforsaken noplace; we’ll check through the cargo and see if there’s anything we want; and if there’s anything we don’t want, we’re going to pitch it. We need to lighten this thing, because we can maybe catch up to them before they reach Louisville.”



“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Maria was out of her seat again.



Without any malice or even impatience, Hainey said, “You wait a minute, woman. Simeon, take us north a few miles and maybe even lean us west since they think we’ve been going east; get us outside Kansas City’s airspace, and if you can find a low cloud to hide us in, so much the better.”



“The sky’s clear as a bell; I wouldn’t give us good odds on that one.”



“Then keep your eyes open for anything big enough to cover this thing for half an hour. We won’t have any longer than that to get ourselves together before we have to make a run for it. And of course, we’ve got a lady passenger to debark. You can walk a couple of miles back to town, can’t you?”



“Captain,” Maria was standing beside him, and when he turn-ed, she was right under his nose. Then she asked with some doubt, “This ship was going to Louisville before you commandeered it. Wasn’t it?”



His forehead wrinkled. “This ship? I don’t know where it was going. But within an hour it’s going to be headed to Louisville as fast as its hydrogen can carry it. Why did you think the Valkyrie was Kentucky-bound?”



She didn’t answer his question, but she asked him another one. “Why are you Kentucky-bound? Why the eastward course? You know as well as I do that south and east is not the safest dir-ection you could choose. So tell me, please. Why are you chasing the Clementine? What’s on board that you want so badly?”