2015 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide Read online

  The Wreck of the Airship Octavia

  Amy Griswold

  Amy Griswold has written two gaslamp fantasy/mystery novels with Melissa Scott, Death by Silver and A Death at the Dionysus Club (Lethe Press) and has short stories forthcoming in several anthologies. She also writes Stargate Atlantis tie-in novels for Fandemonium Books. She lives in North Carolina with her partner and daughter, and works as an educational testing content specialist. Find her online at amygriswold.livejournal.com or follow her on Twitter at @amygris

  “Get down from there, you tomfool,” I snapped at Della as she balanced on the airship’s railing, stretching on her toes to crane her neck over the side. Her skirts were flying up like she was about to set sail, and I didn’t want to watch her go overboard.

  “I want to see better,” she said, clinging to the rail one-handed as she turned to frown at me. “I won’t let go.”

  “If the wind comes up, it won’t matter if you let go. You’ll be over the side and gone.” I clipped my own safety harness to the railing and then to her dress’s sash, ignoring the way she stiffened and pulled away from my grimy hands.

  “I’m not afraid of heights,” she said, but she did climb down before she unfastened the harness. I wiped my hands on my trousers, thinking there was no reason to be afraid of a little dirt. I wasn’t afraid of heights either, but I had a healthy respect for the length of the drop to the green prairie racing by far below us.

  “Then maybe you won’t mind blowing away, but I’ll be in trouble for letting you,” I said. “My ma said I was to keep you out of trouble.”

  My mother was the captain of the Octavia, which had the distinction of being the fastest passenger airship running between Boston and San Francisco. I have worked on the ship since I could toddle around clipped to the rail to keep me from tumbling off. Most trips I spent happily up to the elbows in grease in the engine room. I could fix a slipped gear or a stuck valve as well as any engineer, and I wasn’t afraid of the steam.

  This trip, I’d been saddled with Miss Della Oglethorpe, our passenger’s daughter, on the grounds that being both girls and the same age I would keep her entertained. She may have been eleven by the calendar, but it seemed to me she had all the common sense of a child of three. That didn’t seem to register with my mother. Neither did the fact that the only girls I knew were other airship rats, children of captains whose playrooms were a mile in the air.

  Her father, Mr. Archibald Oglethorpe, was someone important with the railroads, going out to San Francisco to work on the new line being built from west to east. Della wore dresses that seemed to be made out of nothing but lace and had a bot as a governess to teach her sums and manners, a luxury I hoped my ma didn’t get any ideas about me needing. But the bot was turned off and packed away in the hold. Della’s father was apparently far too important to keep an eye on his daughter for himself, which left me as her grudging host.

  “There’s nothing to do,” Della said.

  “You’ve got books, haven’t you?” I’d heard the stokers complaining about having to help lug them aboard.

  “I’ve read them,” she said. “And I’ve been charting our course using a sextant, but it hasn’t changed for hours.” I saw what I assumed to be the sextant in its box lying by her feet, perfectly placed if the deck tipped to go flying and brain some poor chump who didn’t expect the air to be full of heavy brass objects.

  “Pick that up and stow it away,” I said. “We’ve got proper instruments on the bridge, anyways. No one uses sextants anymore.”

  “I expect you’ve got all kinds of books aboard somewhere,” she began, like a wheedling kid hoping for penny candy.

  “Oh, who has time for books?” I said. We didn’t have any aboard except manuals on engineering and navigation, and I’d looked into those enough times to conclude I’d rather learn how the engine works by taking parts of it apart myself. “Now go on below. Can’t you see there’s a storm coming up?”

  The clouds were lowering black on the horizon. Della clung to the rail in apparent fascination. “Can’t we stay and watch a minute?”

  I was supposed to entertain her, I reasoned. All right, if letting her see what happened when the wind picked up scared her enough to keep her below decks in future, I wouldn’t be sorry for it. I was just doing what she wanted.

  “At least clip onto the rail,” I said, digging a spare harness out of one of the deck lockers and tossing it to her.

  She barely caught it and held it like it was slimy. It might have been a bit dirty, but there were more things to do aboard the Octavia than scrub every bit of harness until it shone.

  “Put your arms through and then wrap it round your middle,” I told her. I ended up having to put it on her, although I wasn’t sure how to fasten some of it with her wearing skirts instead of trousers. It would do well enough until someone told us to get away from the rail, I figured.

  The storm came up fast, and rain began spitting at us. Thunder cracked, the dark cloud brightening with flashes of lightning, and I waited for Della to turn tail and flee. Instead she seemed entranced, although she let out an exclamation of dismay when a gust of wind threw rain in her face, soaking her dress and hair.

  I wanted to ask her if she’d expected rain wouldn’t be wet when the world abruptly went white. There was a noise like stone crashing on stone that seemed to come from inside my head. Then it was dark, and my head was ringing, and for some reason everything smelled like smoke.

  Even muddled as I was, I realized we’d been struck by lightning. The deck was aflame. If the gas bag above was aflame as well, there wasn’t any hope for Octavia. I looked up but couldn’t see anything through the smoke and leaping flames.

  The heat was beating against my face, and sparks were sizzling against my shirt sleeves. I scrambled back against the rail and realized something was hanging over it. I still felt stupid and stunned, and it took me a minute to realize that it was a person.

  Della was dangling from the straps of her harness, her arms caught in it and twisted above her head. She opened her mouth as if shrieking, but I couldn’t hear her over the screaming of the wind and the ringing in my ears.

  I started to pull her up then looked back. The fire was racing across the deck, fast enough that I guessed the lightning bolt had hit an oil tank or punctured one of the reserves of lifting gas. Pulling her up would be pulling her into the flames.

  I dropped down over the side instead, my own harness keeping me hanging upright. I looked down, craning my neck. I’d hoped one of the escape balloons was stowed below us. It was more or less below Della and somewhat less below me.

  Before I could think better of it, I worked my way along the rail to Della. She clung to me with the kind of grip that pulls swimmers underwater.

  I reached up and unhooked her harness from the rail. For a moment her weight pulled me down, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to reach mine. We swung dizzyingly, and my fingernails scrabbled at leather. Then they closed on the clasp, I unfastened it, and we fell.

  We tumbled into the basket of the balloon. I fell on something hard that I wasn’t expecting and said a bunch of words my ma liked to believe I didn’t know. I shoved the hard thing out of the way and clipped my harness to the balloon’s frame, hoping Della had enough sense to do the same.

  I turned the crank to start filling the balloon with gas from the pipe that led into the airship’s structure, hoping that sparks weren’t raining down from above and that the pipe itself wasn’t hot enough to set the gas afire. And that the fire wasn’t spreading across the deck to the canopy, and that my ma wasn’t trapped behind a wall of flame.

  There wasn’t anything I could do about any of that, I told myself grimly. I kept turning the crank, yanking it around until my arm ached.

  Finally, the balloon seemed full. Sparks showered down and caught in Della’s skirts. She beat at them with her hands as I reached for the release catch. One more yank, and we were drifting free, whipped away from the airship by t
he gusting wind.

  Neither of us moved for a while. I knew I ought to steer, but my hands were shaking too hard to grip the ropes, which made me furious. Only silly passengers were afraid, I told myself, but it didn’t make the shaking stop.

  “I can’t see the Octavia,” Della said after a while. She shook my shoulder when I didn’t answer. “Peggy, I can’t see the ship.”

  When I looked, I couldn’t either. “They’ll come back for us,” I said.

  “If they can.”

  “If they can’t, they’ll land,” I said. “And then they’ll come back for us.” If one of the gas bags was punctured, and they couldn’t make San Francisco, they’d land somewhere near the rail line. They could take the railroad to San Francisco, and take another airship back to look for us. That was what they’d do.

  I ignored the gnawing little voice that said there wasn’t much food or water in the balloon’s little equipment locker. I certainly didn’t listen to the voice that said the Octavia might be going up like a firework with all hands aboard. I tugged at the ropes, trying to get some control over the balloon in the battering wind.

  “I’ve got to get us down,” I said.

  “Can’t you go after the Octavia?”

  “This is a balloon, not an airship,” I said. “It goes where the wind goes! Don’t you even know that?”

  She made a noise, and I realized some of the wetness on her face was tears rather than rain. “I thought you might know of some way.”

  “Well, there isn’t one,” I said. “All I can do is steer a little and try to put us down somewhere level.”

  We came down in a field of grass. The storm was passing off, the sky a lighter gray with only a spatter of rain. I clambered over the side of the balloon as soon as it slowed to a scuttering pace across the ground.

  “Hand the locker out to me,” I said.

  “What?” Della said, clinging to the sides of the balloon as it went on scuttering.

  “We can’t anchor the balloon,” I said, clinging to its outside. “So we’re going to have to jump. So hand me … the … locker.” My feet were skating across the ground, and it occurred to me that we probably should have just thrown the locker out when we were still a few yards above the ground. The balloon skipped and came down hard. A pain jarred up through my right ankle.

  Della struggled with it. “It’s too heavy!”

  “It’s still clipped in, look –” I leaned precariously over the side, pointing, and Della clawed at the clasp, finally opening it. The locker came free, and Della heaved it over the side and tossed another box out after it. She followed by tumbling out of the basket herself, and lay in a heap in the grass while the balloon skated away, rolling and tumbling and then catching the wind again, seeming to shrink as it retreated across the featureless plain.

  I started to haul Della to her feet, and yelled as I put my weight on my right leg. I sat down abruptly myself.

  “Is it broken?” she said, sitting up and looking at my ankle.

  “How should I know?” It hurt like the dickens. When I tugged my boot off, it hurt so much I saw stars.

  “Can you move your toes?”

  I moved my toes obediently. “More or less.”

  “Then it’s probably not broken,” she said, but I wasn’t sure how much she knew about it.

  We sat there for a long time, both of us just glad to be on solid ground.

  “They’re not coming back for us right away, are they?” Della asked.

  “They may not even know we’re missing,” I said. “We’re supposed to be below.”

  Della opened her mouth, like she was going to say something about the chances of the Octavia not having burned up to cinders and then shut it again. “So we’re going to have to stay here for a while,” she said.

  “There’s food and water in the locker,” I said.

  I switched the locker on, and it extended its legs. It was a sort of brainless bot, being able to walk along if you led it like a dog but not see or think for itself. It was stored with its clockwork wound up, but every few hours it would have to be wound up again.

  Investigation proved we had food for maybe a week, if we called a few bites of jerky and ship’s biscuit a meal, but only one large bottle of water.

  “Water’s heavy,” I said in defense of whoever had packed the locker.

  “They’ll probably find us before we run out of water,” Della said.

  I kept my mouth shut. I’d seen the high plains as we passed over them a hundred times, and there were green rivers, but also miles and miles of empty grass between them. If we started walking, we might find a creek or a river or nothing.

  I had no idea where we were. Somewhere in Wyoming, I figured, but I wasn’t even sure of that. I’d been paying attention to Della, not to the landmarks below or the readings of the instruments on the bridge. We might be a few miles from a railroad town or a Pawnee village, or many miles away from anyone at all.

  “They probably will,” I said.

  When it got dark, we lay down in the grass and tried to sleep. Della said she wasn’t sure she could sleep without a bed, and I wasn’t sure I could sleep without the movement of the airship under me. Neither of us wanted to think about the idea of wolves. There was a firelighter in the storage locker, but we didn’t have anything to burn but grass.

  “What happened to your father?” Della asked after a while.

  “I’m sleeping,” I said, but after a while I gave up pretending to sleep and sat up. “He died when I was little,” I said. “But he left us the Octavia. So we get by all right.” I tried not to think about the fact that if Ma and the Octavia were both gone, I’d be lucky to grow up in some charity orphanage.

  “My mother died when I was little,” Della said. “But at least I don’t have to work.”

  I rolled over onto my elbows. “If I didn’t work I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “Read. Learn things. Play music.”

  “I can whistle,” I said, and demonstrated, whistling a hornpipe. She smiled a little. Her face was smudged with soot, and her hair was coming down out of its coiled braid. Mine was cut boy-short. I shook my head again, wondering what the weight of braids would feel like.

  “I can sing,” she said. She looked at me sideways like I was going to laugh at her, but it was too quiet with only the noise of insects and the wind through the grass. I was used to the whirr of engines.

  “So sing,” I said.

  She sang “Silver Threads Among the Gold,” and “My Grandfather’s Bot,” and newer songs I’d never heard. When she finished she lay back in the grass, gazing at the full moon hanging high above the plain. “I’d like to go there someday.”

  “You can’t really take an airship to the moon,” I said. “You couldn’t breathe.”

  “They’ll figure out a way,” Della said. “Like the way they seal up the big steam trains so that the smoke doesn’t blow inside.”

  “You’d have to have tanks of air,” I said.

  “Some of the big trains carry air tanks now.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I admitted. I haven’t heard much about the new fast trains they’re building, except that my ma worries that they’ll make fewer people want to travel by airship. It doesn’t worry me. I can’t imagine wanting to be cooped up in a train when you could fly.

  “So we could do it.”

  “Well, not us. Somebody.”

  “Why not us? I want to go.” She looked at the moon like she could see something there that was invisible to me. Maybe having a rich father meant she wasn’t used to thinking there were things she couldn’t do. But when I thought about it I wasn’t sure why it couldn’t be us to go to the moon. They’d need engineers who knew something about flying, after all.

  We didn’t fall asleep until the sky was lightening. The sun was climbing toward the middle of the sky when I woke up, and my throat felt parched. My ankle was so swollen I couldn’t get my foot back into my boot. Della tore strips from her petticoat
without protest, and I wrapped it up tight, which made it possible to yank my boot on, although tears came to my eyes. We passed the water bottle back and forth a few times, and when we’d both drunk, it felt alarmingly light.

  “I think we’re going to have to walk,” Della said.

  I hauled myself up, trying to put as little weight on my right foot as possible. “Which way?” I asked.

  “We have to wait until mid-day,” Della said.

  I sat down heavily on the locker, which made a whir of protest and folded up on its feet. I had nursed some hope that I was light enough for it to walk with me sitting on it, but clearly I wasn’t. “And what, may I ask, happens then?”

  Della opened the other box to reveal the brass gleam of her sextant. “I can take sightings to figure out our latitude.” She withdrew a battered navigational manual and a lead pencil from the sextant’s case. “And then we’ll know whether we’re north or south of the railroad and how far away it is.”

  “What if we’re a hundred miles from the railroad?”

  “I don’t think we can be,” Della said calmly. “We were following the railroad’s path before the storm came up. I could see it from the deck. If we’re close enough to walk, we just have to make sure we’re walking the right way. And then we can follow the tracks until a train comes or we reach a station.”

  “What if we’re not close enough to walk?”

  “Will you be quiet? You’re distracting me,” she said, and raised her sextant to the sky.

  I wanted to ask who she thought she was, telling me what to do, but I didn’t really have any idea what to do myself. It seemed to me it couldn’t hurt to let her try. She scribbled notes with her pencil and sat back down to do calculations.

  “Well?” I said when I couldn’t stand it any more.

  “I’m checking my sums,” she said without looking up. When Della finally raised her head, she was smiling. “We’re twenty miles north of the railroad,” she said. “Only twenty miles!”

  It seemed like a long way to walk to me. I could climb all day, but there wasn’t very far to walk aboard an airship. Twenty miles was more trips round the Octavia’s deck than I could imagine ever wanting to make.