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From her seat by the right glass ball turret, Maria Boyd declared, “Captain, you said you had a theory about why a scientist would need a diamond, but you haven’t yet explained yourself. ”
“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” he said, and he didn’t completely sound like he was poking fun at her when he called her “ma’am. ” “There’s this fellow back west, name of Minnericht—or, come to think of it, there used to be a fellow named Minnericht. I understand he’s dead now, but that’s a recent development, so you’ll have to pardon me if I misspeak. This Minnericht was an inventor, and he liked to play with weapons. Not long before he shuffled off this mortal coil, he’d been working on a weapon that…it’s hard to describe. It cuts things, or burns them, but it uses light. ”
Maria considered this, nodded, and asked, “Like the way a magnifying glass can start a fire?”
“Like that. Only imagine using something much, much stronger than a little piece of curved glass to focus the sunlight. ”
“I see what you’re getting at,” she said. “And if you can use a much more concentrated light, with a much stronger focus than glass, you might…well. You might make something terrible. ”
Simeon said, “And if it was terrible, you could bet old Minnericht had his fingers in it. ”
Lamar murmured, “Truer words were never spoken,” and he fiddled with a lever that would adjust the hydrogen flow to the compression engine. “But he wasn’t a dummy. ”
“Hell no, he wasn’t,” the captain agreed. “He was a damn-ed smart son of a gun, but meaner than the good Lord ought to make them. But I tell you that to tell you this: He made a weapon called a solar cannon, and like I heard it, he sold a patent on it to somebody back east. And that was the last I heard of it, except he had a couple early models hanging around inside Seattle. He used to like to sit on the roof of the train station, up in the clock tower, and use it to burn up the rotters like ants on a hill when the weather was clear enough to make it happen. ”
“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 Ma
ria 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 Valkyrie was 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. ”
