“Now I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” Maria said.
Hainey looked like he was trying to figure out how best to tell her something else, or something bigger; but in the end he cocked his head quickly, like he was shooing a fly, and said, “It’s a longer story that you’d care to hear, I bet. Anyway, the one big drawback to his solar cannon was that it needed the sun, and it needed a lot of it-and up in the northwest, there’s not much sun to go around.”
“Especially not where the doctor lived,” Simeon said, and there was a cryptic note to it that Maria couldn’t decipher.
The captain continued, “But back east, where there’s more light, maybe his machine would work better, or be more popular with folks who could use it in a bigger way.”
“Folks like the Union army,” Maria finished for him. “Folks like a man called Ossian Steen.”
Hainey looked over his shoulder and asked, “You know about Steen?”
“Not much.”
“Us either,” Lamar said. “But I wouldn’t mind having a word with him. I’m sure he’s a bastard, but he must be one devil of a scientist.”
“When we get to Louisville, if we can find him, you can ask him anything you want,” Hainey said. “If I don’t feel the need to kill him first.”
Maria asked, “You have a gripe with this Steen?”
“I assume he’s the man who paid Felton Brink to steal my ship,” Hainey said grimly, and with a stormy grumble of intent. “But I might give him a minute to explain himself, just in case I’m wrong.”
“That’s big of you,” Maria said dryly.
“I’m glad you approve,” he responded with equal lack of humidity. “Now if we can only find this place, perhaps we can ask him in person.”
But no one knew which sanatorium was being used for the nefarious Ossian Steen’s frightening plans, and no one even knew where to begin looking-until Maria proposed they stop by the city hospital and ask about another facility. Perhaps they shared doctors, nurses, or other staff. But this plan was whittled into impracticality by inconvenient facts.
The Valkyriewas too notorious to park at the service yard docks down by the river, and it was too large to simply hide behind a warehouse. Furthermore, it was too dangerous-looking by design for the crew to simply strip off a few guns, dab a new name on the side, and call it something innocuous.
The plating, the weaponry, and the overall size of the tremendous craft made these things impractical. There was nowhere to simply “stop” the ship unless they wanted to abandon it outside of town and then walk.
“We could try that,” she said. “But I don’t know if it’s wise.”
Simeon tilted his heavily dreadlocked head back and forth, weighing the options as if his skull was the axis on a set of scales. “I’d hate to toss her,” he said. “She’s a sweet set of wings, and not much in the air would dare try to stick us.”
“You suggesting we keep her, and bail on the Crow?” Hainey asked with warning, but also curiosity.
“No, I ain’t suggesting that. I’m suggesting we might not want to cut this angel loose until we’re good and certain we’re done with her. We land on the other side of the river, maybe-we start in Indiana and walk our way over-and then what? Maybe we find the Free Crow, and maybe we don’t. Maybe Brink sets our girl on fire and kicks her into the Ohio. Maybe we need to make a getaway fast, and then come back to try again. Maybe a whole lot of things could happen, and we’d need a ship as big and fast as this one to see us safe back west. If we’d taken anything smaller or lighter than this warbird, we’d have never made it out of Missouri, and you know it same as I do.”
“I know it,” Hainey griped. “Nobody’s arguing with you. And it’s a quandary, I know. But Louisville is east, it ain’t west. And I can’t…” he looked at Maria and then frowned in a way that said something she didn’t understand, not at first. “There are places in Kentucky I couldn’t go even if the law wasn’t looking for me.”
Then he turned to Maria and addressed her directly. “Three black men and a white woman walking into town together, that’d go over real well, don’t you think? That wouldn’t raise a lick of suspicion in anyone, anywhere.”
“You have a point.”
“I usually do.”
“But perhaps I can help.”
Hainey almost laughed, but he restrained himself enough to say, “What do you have in mind?”
She said, “Put me down on the far side of the river and wait over there, in the woods if you have to. Tether down, and I’ll catch a ride into the city. I’ll send a few telegrams, ask a few questions, and see if I can’t locate our mysterious sanatorium, which-as you and I both know-is no sanatorium at all.”
Simeon spun around in the first mate’s chair and eyed her angrily. “And then we…we what? We sit like fish in a barrel and wait for the charitable Belle Boyd to return?” He turned to the captain and said, “She’ll leave us here and finish her job, let her Yankee bosses pat her on the head, or maybe she’ll come back over the river with the law, and we’ll all be hung by morning!”
Lamar said with less venom, but more measured concern, “Once we’ve set her down and sent her off…if she finds the sanatorium she’s got no need of us.”
“But I do!” she objected. “Our goals are not so dissimilar, gentlemen,” she cajoled. “You want your ship, I want to stop your ship and destroy this weapons laboratory-by hook or crook if necessary. Perhaps I could do this alone and perhaps I couldn’t, but this ship is the best hope I have for intercepting another vessel, now isn’t it?”
“It’s surely your most obvious,” the captain said before the crew could complain.
Simeon tried to bark an objection regardless. “But Captain, she-”
“Time is of the essence, don’t you think?” he asked the first mate. “We could set the ship down, go our separate ways; and we could try through our connections to learn where the sanatorium lies, or she could try to learn it on her own, through channels that wouldn’t let us pass the front door or the back door, either. Who do you think will learn the most, the fastest?”
“ Shewould,” Simeon scowled. “But we can’t trust her.”
“Who said I trust her?” Lamar sniffed, and the captain said, “I trust her to shoot like an ace, and I trust her to fight for the country that’s turned her away. I trust her to be as sneaky a bitch as ever the South did breed, and I trust her to understand that we’re her best hope every bit as much as she’s ours, because like Minnericht, and like you, and like me, that woman isn’t an idiot and she can see where the sun’s shining today. Now woman,” he said to her, “Did I tell any lies just now?”
She was seated still, hands folded in her lap over the gun she’d drawn from her handbag. Quietly she said, “Every word the gospel truth. I have no reason to lie to you. The captain is right and I am a patriot for my country, and although I generally desire my country’s approval, that goal will be best served by preserving Danville from utter destruction. You’re fugitives, yes, but what good would it do me to hand you over…if there is no nation left to prosecute you?”
Hainey swung a hand out and pointed it at her, as if to say, “See?” but he did not say it aloud. Instead he said, “On your word then, lady. On your word as a Southerner, and a Confederate, and, and,” he searched for something else to bind her. “And a widow. On your husband’s grave, and on your-”
“That’s enough,” she snapped. “On that-all of it. On that and more, I give you my word that if you send me into the city to gather information, I’ll return to you with everything I know.”
One hour later, she was deposited without ceremony beside the road that led to the bridge that would take her into the city.