Clementine - By Cherie Priest Page 0,1

and the puckered brand on his shoulder were souvenirs enough from a life spent in slavery, and he’d accept no addition to that tally.

So as much as he might’ve said aloud, “I don’t care where they’re taking my ship, I plan to take it back,” he privately prayed for a northern course. In the Union he was only a pirate and only to be shot on sight. In the Confederate states he was all that and fugitive property, too.

It wasn’t fair. He’d had no intention of coming back past the river again, not for several years…or not until the war had played itself out, anyway; and it wasn’t fair that some underhanded thief—some conniving boy nearly young enough to be his son—had absconded with his rightfully pilfered and customized ship.

Whatever Felton Brink was getting paid, Hainey hoped it was worth it. Because when Hainey caught up to him, there wouldn’t be enough left of the red-headed thief to bury.

The tailwind gusted and the nameless ship swayed in its course. A corresponding, correcting gust from the appropriate thruster kept the craft on track, and sitting on the straight, unbroken line of the prairie horizon a tiny black dot flicked at the corner of Croggon Hainey’s vision.

He stood up straight, too quickly. He rapped his bald, dark head on the underside of the cabin’s too-short roof and swore, then pointed. “Men,” he said. He never called them “boys.” “On the ground over there. You see it? That what I think it is?”

Simeon leaned forward, languid as always. He squinted through the goggles and said, “It’s a ship. It’s grounded.”

“I can see it’s a ship. What I can’t see is if it’s my ship or not. Give me the glass,” he demanded. He held out his hand to Simeon but Lamar brought the instrument forward, and stayed to stand by the window.

Hainey extended the telescoping tube and held it up to his right eye. From habit, he rested his thumb on the scar that bisected that side of his face from the corner of his mouth to his ear. He closed his left eye. He scanned and aimed, and pointed the scope at the distant dot, and he declared in his low, loud, rumbling voice, “There she is.”

Lamar held his hands over his eyes like an awning. “You sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“How far out?” Simeon asked. He adjusted his position so that he could reach the important levers and pertinent buttons, readying himself for the surge of speed that Hainey was mere moments away from ordering.

“Couple of miles?” the captain guessed. “And open sky, no weather to account for.” He snapped the scope back to its smaller size and jammed it into his front breast pocket.

Lamar shook his head, not arguing but wondering. “They’ve been moving so slow. No wonder they had to set down out here.”

Simeon removed his goggles and set them atop his head, where their strap strained against the rolled stacks of his roughly braided hair. “They’ve never gotten any speed beneath them,” he said, the island drawl stretching his words into an accusation.

Hainey knew, and it worried him, but this was his chance to gain real ground. The Free Crow, which Brink had renamed the Clementine, had once been a Confederate war dirigible and she was capable of tremendous speed when piloted properly. But she’d been flying as if she were crippled and it meant one of two things: Either she was critically damaged, or she was so heavily laden that she could barely maintain a good cruising altitude.

Her true and proper captain hoped for the latter, but he knew that her theft had been a violent event, and he didn’t have the faintest clue what she carried. It was difficult not to fear the worst.

Only a significant head start had prevented Hainey from retrieving her so far, and here she was—having dragged herself across the sky, limping more than sailing, and now she was stopped within a proverbial spitting distance.

“Simeon,” he said, and he didn’t need to finish.

The Jamaican was already pulling the fuel release valves and flipping the switches to power up the boosters. “Fifteen seconds to fire,” he said, meaning that the three men had that long to secure themselves before the jolt of the steam-driven back-up tanks would shoot the dirigible forward.

Lamar buckled his skinny brown body into a slot against the wall, within easy reach of the engine room. Hainey sat back down in the captain’s seat and pulled his harness tight across his