“Ent got a hat,” hollered Tigg from the back. “Alice, come ’ere!”
“Or a miracle.” Andrew turned from the tiller and ran a finger down the chart on the table, moving the newspaper they’d picked up in Reno to one side. “If we don’t get some lift in the next couple of hours, we’re going to run smack into the side of a mountain. Some of these are thousands of feet high.”
Claire, whose idea of mountains had been formed while on holiday in the Lake District, could hardly imagine it. “Can we not go around them?”
Andrew shook his head. “Not unless we want to return to Reno, sail east, and turn north on the other side.”
“Alice!” shouted Tigg. “We got trouble!”
Alice turned and ran astern, Andrew and Claire hot on her heels. “What’s the matter? The ship was flightworthy when we left Reno,” Claire said to Andrew’s back.
But that had been two days ago. As she now knew, anything could happen to an airship in two days.
“She may have been, but whatever old wreck of an engine she put in here, it wasn’t meant to go much farther.”
“It saved your hide, if you recall,” Alice snapped, popping into view from behind the engine cowling. “Don’t go calling my girl names.” Tears flooded her eyes and she blinked them back.
“I apologize,” Andrew said at once. “And I hadn’t forgotten. I never will, you may be sure of that.”
“And mine, too,” Claire put in. “Twice. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful as the Stalwart Lass coming through the sky, both times.”
“She’ll be fallin’ out o’ the sky if we don’t do summat,” Tigg put in tersely. His round, coffee-colored cheek had a smear of grease across it from chin to temple, and he held a wrench in either hand.
The words were no sooner out of his mouth than something deep in the engine hitched and coughed.
“That’s done it.” Alice grabbed a safety line and clipped it to a metal loop on her leather belt. “Don’t fail me now, girl.” She grabbed one of the wrenches and leaped down onto the propeller housing. The wind slapped her pants flat against her legs, and she pulled her goggles over her eyes. One look at the great shafts that powered the propeller must have told its own story. “Who’s on the tiller?” she shouted above the sound of both engine and wind. “We’re going to go down!”
“Jake!” Claire ran forward. “Alice says we’re going down!”
Maggie gasped and clutched her twin, Lizzie, who th Lizzie burst into tears. “I knew it! I knew I should ’ave stayed home and not mucked about in airships.”
Claire grasped both their hands and drew them over to the glass, controlling her own panic with a herculean effort. “Look. We’re not in the mountains yet.” Though they loomed in the near distance, tall and blue and forbidding, rimed with old snow. “Remember what Captain Hollys told us on Lady Lucy? Airships don’t crash. It’s a long, slow glide to a soft landing.”
Lizzie did not buy that for a moment. “That were if the gas bags burst, Lady. Wivout an engine? We’ll just stay up ’ere floatin’ about till we starve to death.”
“Naw, we won’t.” Jake grasped the controls for the elevator vanes with both hands. “One stiff breeze and we’ll run into one o’ them rocks first. Mr. Andrew, I could use you on the tiller if yer done gawkin’ at that chart.”
“Quite so.” Andrew took the wheel and turned it a few degrees east. “If these charts are up to date, there should be a wide river valley in six or eight miles. Vanes full vertical, Jake, and release some air from the forward gas bags.”
Spaniard charts up to date? Claire could only hope. Her brief experience with the Royal Kingdom of Spain in Reno had left her with no very good opinion of their skills at engineering. How could it be otherwise, when they outlawed airships because—of all things—they contravened the intentions of the Almighty? The Lass had been allowed to land in Reno only because Alice was a Texican citizen, and only then just long enough to take on food and water and make a visit to the nearest bank and telegraph office before they were chivvied on their way as though they carried the plague.
No wonder James and Stanford Fremont were to have been received by the Viceroy himself when they and the Carbonator arrived in San Francisco. To the Spaniards, rail technology was the very