Fiddlehead (The Clockwork Century) (39 page)

“Thomson, get the back of this thing as close to that hole as you can manage!”

“Yes, sir! You get out and guide me. I’ll do my best!” he vowed.

MacGruder flung himself over the side and went to the rear, hollering instructions and giving whatever guidance he could—and finally the crawler was positioned with its back deck beneath the overhang, almost immediately above the open hole below.

“That’s as close as you’re going to get!” the captain called, and made a throat-cutting gesture that told Thomson to stop the motor.

When he did, the crawler fell silent, except for the pops and pings of the engine cooling almost immediately in the bitter air. But the forest wasn’t perfectly quiet, even without its raucous growling. The crisp afternoon was interrupted by the slow hiss, sizzle, and creak of the Maynard bomb shifting in its housing.

“Captain…” begged Frankum. “You have to let us go!”

“And I
will,
” MacGruder told them. He reached into his boot and pulled out a knife, then leaned into the compartment and cut the ropes that bound Frankum and his men. “Get out now. You’re going to help us shove
this
goddamn thing into
that
goddamn hole.”

The Baldwin-Felts men agreed to this immediately. They might as well. There was no time to run.

They climbed out of the rear and rubbed at the sore spots on their wrists as Sanders untied the ropes that held the tarp over the awful device.

When he was finished with the knots, he whipped the sheet away, revealing the monstrous creation: a smooth, elongated box with round edges, banded with steel and rivets. Its nose was fixed with gleaming copper plate, and in its tail lurked a vast tangle of tubes, coils, and wires. Three tanks were mounted atop it, side by side like pig iron from the smelter. These tanks were the source of the hissing, the creaking, and other ominous sounds of something tight beginning to split under pressure.

It horrified Maria to her very core. This object could kill millions, if the weather was right. A terrific device, indeed, intimidating on the outside, even without ever releasing its deadly power. But compared to what it was capable of … it looked deceptively small. Nothing that could fit on the back of a crawler should be able to wipe out a city.

Frankum also stood staring, without speaking, until he said what Maria was already wondering. “I don’t know if we can lift it, Captain—just us men, and
her,
” he said. “We haven’t the strength between us, not even if we had a team of horses!”

“You idiot, the back of this thing is on a hydraulic lift. It was built to carry and dump construction supplies,” the captain said. He gave Thomson a signal, and a different motor kicked to life—something quieter and smoother, but still wildly loud in the otherwise silent woods. With painful slowness, the back compartment rose, tilting the bomb by tiny, incremental degrees. “We won’t have to pick it up and carry it; we’ll just have to climb in and give it a push, until it starts to roll.”

As predicted, the crawler’s bed wouldn’t go high enough to let the bomb drop of its own accord, so all the men climbed in behind it. Maria stayed on the ground at their insistence—partly for all the usual thickheaded reasons, she was sure; but partly because space was limited, and there was only room for the strongest bodies.

The men braced themselves and pressed their feet against the bomb, and while Maria crossed her fingers and prayed, they shoved with all their might, rocking the big device back and forth like Thomson had rocked the crawler itself to get it moving.

They strained, swore, sweated, and pushed. The grade of the crawler’s bed was so steep that Maria tried not to worry about what would happen if they just toppled right in after it.

Finally, Maynard wiggled.

It creaked back and forth, just moving by inches at first. Hardly noticeable at all. Then it rocked. Then it rolled, tumbled, dropped.

And fell.

Right into the cave, careening with the weight of a city’s dead, crashing through the earth and settling down somewhere below, farther than any of them could see when they scrambled after it to stare into the hole.

“Where is it?” Frankum asked, leaning over so far that Maria was tempted, for one nasty second, to give him a shove. The pirate soul she harbored within her corset objected to her decency, but now was not the time or the place. Like she’d told the captain, they had to play fair. After all, they were not alone. Soon, the world would be watching. And someone had to save it.

The captain said, “No idea. Too dark. Anyone have a light?”

“Just the lantern on the crawler, and I can’t pry that off without my tools,” Thomson told them.

Echoing up from below, the sound of failing machinery grew louder as it bounced and rose off the rocks.

Behind them they heard the telltale clomp and clatter of a horse’s hooves. Maria guessed that it was Evans with the dynamite, and it was indeed him, carrying a promising pack on his back.

“Hurry up with that!” the captain yelled, and Evans did his level best.

He yanked the horse to a sliding stop and dropped off the saddle to his feet, tossing the pack to the captain. “Wire it up, sir! I’ve got the line and pump in the saddlebags.”

The captain went to work immediately, with Frankum lending a useful hand—for once in his life, Maria added disparagingly in her head. But it was his life, too; his, and theirs, and everyone else’s. So he planted the sticks, threaded the wire, and ran with the rest of them back to the far side of the crawler—where Evans had already secured the horse, as far from the trouble as he could put the poor animal.

The captain paused while he checked the settings and connections on the pump, then set it on the ground.

Evans turned his nose to the air. “Sir … do you smell that?”

He did. He must be able to—Maria could smell it, even though her nose was so cold she couldn’t feel it when she wiped it with the back of her scraped-up hands.

It was a toxic smell: rotten eggs and ruin, sharp death and troubled sleep. It stank of chemicals and poison, and it grew stronger while they sat there, mulling it over and wondering what could possibly smell that way?

The captain shook it off first, that numbing, stupefying creep of confusion and curiosity.

He shoved the plunger. A jolt went down the wire, along the ground, and into the hole.

And the earth exploded.

Twenty-one

The night ticked by in seconds, in minutes. In bullets, fired
one-two-three
from the woods and answered
one-two-three
from inside the house. It was not a stalemate, not exactly. From a second-floor window—the window almost directly above Abraham Lincoln in his library—Gideon watched the other men amass, and he knew that this relative peace could not hope to last the night. More men had joined the siege crew outside, and now they numbered fifteen by the scientist’s count … though, given the gloom outside, it was always possible that he’d missed a couple.

He always built some wiggle room into all his assessments and plans—not because he didn’t value precision, but because the universe was sometimes imprecise, and prone to hiding things.

He released the edge of the curtain and retreated to the hallway, pausing to duck into the Lincolns’ bedroom and peer out through the window beside a tall wardrobe. Outside it was nearly as dark as inside. He thought he saw motion, maybe a flash of a man running quickly from cover to cover, or maybe only a shift of moonlight on something smaller below. The night was full of raccoons and rabbits, after all.

Knowing this did not prevent him from assuming the worst.

Leaving the window, he carefully walked back to the hallway, where there was almost no light to give him guidance. He worked from memory, from the map in his head of a house he’d visited dozens of times before, though he’d rarely seen these private chambers upstairs, where the aging couple spent their quieter days.

At the end of the hall was an oversized dumbwaiter—or that’s what Gideon had jokingly called the thing when he and Wellers had installed it together last June. It was a closet with a floor built on a lift, an elevator large enough to hold Lincoln and his chair, and perhaps one other person. The structure of the house would permit nothing larger, unless Mary could have been persuaded to give up part of the kitchen pantry. And as it turned out, she could
not.

The last room on the left before the elevator was the guest room. Gideon peered through the narrow slit in the curtains, but saw nothing he didn’t already know. Men in the woods. Shadowed figures, distinguished mostly by their movement—and occasionally by a glimmer of brass buttons, the hardware on a gun, or the glint of a spyglass lens.

The hints of spyglass worried him.

He could not tell if the glass was only for observation, or if it was affixed to the barrel of a weapon. Gideon fervently hoped that none of the new recruits were sharpshooters, but he couldn’t count on it; he couldn’t count on
anything,
not tonight. So he remained wary of any seams in the cloak of darkness they’d forced upon the house. He’d turned off all the gaslights and electric lights, and forbidden any torches—electric or otherwise. Any light within would tell the men without where they were, and offer up a target. It might be a vague target, but it’d be a direction in which to shoot.

Two more rooms to check—and then he was done, and the second story was clear. Back down the stairs he traveled, announcing himself with incautious footsteps, and then calling softly, “Mr. Grant? The upstairs is as tight as I can make it.”

“Good,” came the reply by the front door. But it sounded distracted.

Gideon kept his back to the wall until he reached the president; then he slid down into a sitting position beside him. “They’re collecting more men.”

“I know. And we’re not.”

“They know.”

“It’s only a matter of time, now,” Grant said, low and quiet, “until they come inside.”

“We can hold them off a while longer, put on a show for another hour or two.”

Grant nodded, scratching his salt-and-pepper beard. “I don’t suppose that big brain of yours has come up with any plans, has it?”

Only stalling tactics, but he offered them anyway. “We need to spread out. Put Polly and Mary upstairs, at opposite ends. Let them play sharpshooter, or at least make a lot of noise. By sound alone it’s hard to tell a couple of shooters from half a dozen or more. With them taking the second story and us on the first, we can mount a satisfactory defense that may look like a much better one. And, besides, it gets the women upstairs, where they’ll be marginally safer.”

“Any thoughts how we might send a message?”

“A few. None of them good. We can’t spare a runner right now, and even if we could, we’d be sending someone on a suicide mission … which is why you wouldn’t let Polly go in the first place,” he said, giving a voice to something he’d suspected. Grant didn’t contradict him, so he continued. “Wellers is willing to make a dash for it, but he’d never make it. Mary would have the best chance; she’s a little old lady, and a well-known one at that … but I don’t suppose that’s on the table.”

“No, it isn’t,” Grant said fast. Then, after a pause, “She’d do it if we asked her, though. We’ll work around it.”

“The cellar is a fortifiable position of a kind, but it’s a dangerous one. Only two ways in or out, but, once in, we’d never be able to mount any kind of response. It should be considered, but only as a last option. Not least of all because we’d have to carry Mr. Lincoln down those steps.”

“Doesn’t he have an elevator?”

“Yes, but it only goes between the first and second floors. Structural issues prevented us from sending it any lower or higher.”

“Higher?” Grant’s eyebrow lifted.

“There’s an attic, but it won’t be of any use to us. Just another place to get ourselves stuck. And the cellar is more defensible. I think.”

“I think you’re right.” He sighed. “It’s a damn shame we don’t have that machine of yours here and handy, isn’t it? We could just ask it what to do, and it’d tell us.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“No?”

Since the president seemed genuinely curious, Gideon told him, in brief. “The Fiddlehead collects information, and sorts out the possible results into levels of probability. It can tell you what’s likely to occur, but if you prefer a different outcome, it’s your responsibility to find another path.”

“Ah. Sounds complicated.”

“Of course it’s complicated. If it wasn’t, you’d already have one in every parlor. But,” Gideon added more warmly, afraid he’d been too cold, which wasn’t called for, “it’s a useful kind of complicated. Just not useful to us, personally, right now.”

Outside, they heard men scrambling back and forth, their boots scraping the gravel or whispering through the grass. The wind that had hidden their movements before had all but died, and now the night was a quiet place, and the Lincoln house was listening.

Grant shifted his shoulders and scooted over to the other window, keeping his back to the door and his head below window level. “I think they need another good warning, don’t you?”

Gideon checked his gun. It was fully loaded. “I’ve got enough bullets to say something loud.”

“Good. On the count of three…”

They fired together, not in perfect time, and with less than perfect aim … but the scuttling noises of men coming closer retreated into a scramble of running and ducking as they went back toward the trees. Then, from the east wing, Nelson Wellers fired off a rapid series of four shots, one after the other, so fast that they must’ve been aimed at something.

Gideon stiffened and his knees locked, then he dropped down to the floor and retreated toward the stairs on hands and knees.

Two more shots, and then Nelson either had to reload or grab another gun. He’d taken a second gun—they all had—and now he was using that one, too; Gideon could hear its deafening patter from the other side of the house. It wasn’t the sound of a man giving a warning, it was the violent bass of self-defense.