Clementine - By Cherie Priest

1

For six days, Croggon Hainey watched the Rockies scroll beneath the borrowed, nameless dirigible, until finally the last of the jagged ridges and snow-dusted plateaus slipped behind the ship on the far side of Denver. He’d made this run a dozen times before, in fair weather and foul, with contraband cargo and passengers alike; and on this particular trip a tailwind gently urged the ship forward.

But the speed that took him from the Pacific Northwest, over the mountains and down to the flatlands, did not improve the captain’s mood.

With his hands balled into fists and jammed atop his knees, he groused, “We should’ve caught them by now. We ought to be right on top of them.”

“The breeze moves us both,” the first mate said, and he shrugged. He adjusted his goggles to guard against the glare of the sun on the clouds and added, “But we’ll catch them. Any minute now.”

Hainey shifted in the captain’s seat, which had been built with a smaller man in mind. He removed his hat and squeezed at his forehead as if he could massage it into greater wakefulness or concentration. “They’ll have to dock soon. They didn’t even get a full tank of hydrogen back in Grand Junction. Simeon?” he asked the first mate, who was likewise crammed into a seat beside him.

“Yessir?”

“They have to set down in Topeka, don’t they? There’s no place else you know that’ll take them…or us?”

“No place I know of. But I ain’t been through this way in awhile. Brink may know something I don’t,” he said, but he didn’t sound very worried. Over his shoulder he asked, “What’s our fuel situation look like?”

Lamar adjusted a lip full of tobacco and said, “Doing all right. We’ll make it past Topeka, if that’s what you want to hear.” The engineer glanced at the doorway to the engine room, though he couldn’t quite see the tanks from where he was sitting. “Maybe even into Missouri.”

The captain didn’t precisely brighten, but for a moment he sounded less unhappy. “We might make Kansas City?”

“We might, but I wouldn’t bet the boat on it.” Lamar squeezed his lip to adjust his chew.

Simeon reached for a thruster lever and knocked his elbow on a big glass knob. He said, “Well, I might bet this boat.” But he didn’t push his complaint. Everybody already knew that the nameless craft, fitted for small men and light cargo, was not anyone’s preferred vessel; and no one wanted to imply, even in jest, that everything was not being done to retrieve the captain’s ship of choice.

Hainey unfurled himself from the captain’s chair. His knees popped when he stood and he crouched to keep from hitting his head on the glass shield that separated him from the sky. He put one hand out against it and leaned that way, staring as far into the distance, and as far along the ground, and as far up into the heavens as his eyes could reach, but the view told him nothing he did not already know.

His ship—his true ship, the one he’d stolen fair and square eight years before—was nowhere to be seen.

He asked everyone, and no one in particular, “Where do you think they’re taking her?” But since he’d asked that question a dozen times a day for the last week, he already knew he could expect no useful answer. He could speculate easily enough, but none of his speculation warmed him with hope.

The red-haired thief Felton Brink had taken Hainey’s ship, the Free Crow, and he was flying east with it. That much was apparent.

The chase had brought Croggon Hainey from the Pacific port city of Seattle down through Idaho, past Twin Falls and into Wyoming where he’d almost nabbed Brink in Rock Springs. Then the course had shifted south and a bit west, to Salt Lake City and then east, through Colorado and now the trail was taking them both through Kansas.

East. Except for that one brief detour, always east.

And it didn’t much matter whether the Free Crow would veer to the north or south on the far side of the Mississippi River. Either way, the captain was in for trouble and he knew it.

The Mason-Dixon meant only a little to him. Either side meant capture and probably a firing squad or a noose, though all things being equal, he would’ve preferred to take his lumps from the Union. The southern states in general (and Georgia in particular) had given him plenty already. The raised, pink stripes on his back