Tartok onto her father’s back, his wrists tied together with a bit of lace to form a loop under Frederick’s chin. Then they set off down the corridor. Claire visualized the route in her mind’s eye as they traveled under the mine offices, under the parade ground, and paused at a cross-corridor with another tiny sign.
Dining was indicated to the left.
Supplies lay to the right.
“The supply warehouse is not a hundred yards from end of the airfield where the Stalwart Lass is moored,” Claire said, keeping her voice low. “That way, as fast as we can.”
It couldn’t have been more than a quarter of a mile, but to Claire it seemed endless. At any moment a door could open at the top of any of these flights of stone steps, and a horde of angry men pour through clamoring for the immediate deaths of Frederick Chalmers and the Esquimaux men—to say nothing of the girls attempting to save them. Alice reached the final stair first and darted up it, opening the hidden panel with caution as she tried not to gasp for breath.
It opened in a small storage room directly across from an exterior door. The warehouse was pitch black except for a small electrick lamp glowing over the door.
“Come on—” Alice began, when Maggie and Lizzie slipped past her. “Girls, wait—”
Claire touched her arm. “Let them do what they do better than any of us.” Then she turned to Frederick, who emerged slowly from the staircase with Tartok’s head lolling on his shoulder. “Mr. Chalmers, are you all right?”
“Fine. Alignak?”
“I am able.”
Maggie materialized out of the dark. “All clear, Lady, but we’d best be quick. We c’n ’ear voices behind this building, as if someone’s coming to get summat.”
They ran through alleys of pallets and crates filled with supplies—food, flour, spare parts. They gained the door and Claire had enough time for a frantic glance across the airfield. “Alice, do you hear that?”
An engine.
Even as they ran, peering past the light cast by the lamps on the mooring masts, the Skylark lifted, sailing straight up into the night sky and blotting out the stars.
Frederick gasped. “Isobel!”
Alignak let out a low cry of despair.
What…? But there was no time to ask questions, for someone was running across the field toward them. Two someones—one tall, o—width="2emne lanky and shorter.
Claire pulled the lightning rifle out of its holster and took aim.
“No, Lady, don’t!” Maggie cried. “It’s our Jake and Mr. Malvern!”
But they could still hear an engine, even though Skylark had passed out of sight and out of all hope of assistance.
“Someone’s fired up the Lass’s boiler,” Alice said. “Jake, you get double pay for this.”
“Here, sir, let us take him,” Andrew said to Frederick, and in a trice he and Jake had the unconscious Tartok between them, jogging across the field to the battered old airship. Alice and the men followed, tumbling up the gangway into the gondola.
Claire grabbed the Mopsies by the hand. “We must untie the ropes. I shall attend to the mooring mast. Run, fast as you can.”
“Claire!” Alice leaned out of a porthole. “I never got a proper engine in here to replace Dr. Craig’s power cell!”
“Take it!” she called, scrambling up the ladder to the rope looped through the Lass’s nose ring. “I can make another one.”
“I need to make some room and ditch some ballast on the double quick—I’m sending out Seven and Eight. Take care of ’em, will you?”
Must she? Ugh. “Fine!”
“And what about Jake?”
“I’m goin’ and that’s that!” came a stubborn shout from somewhere within.
“Feed him and teach him, and turn him into a capable man,” Claire called, “and I shall be satisfied.” She untied the rope. “Free to lift when ready, Alice. Fair winds!”
She heard a clanking crash and the scrape of gravel—the automatons, no doubt, being unceremoniously unloaded in a heap.
“To you, too! Up ship!”
The Mopsies and Andrew ran clear of the gondola as Claire climbed to the ground. The Lass fell up into the night sky, her engine running as smoothly as a sewing machine as Dr. Craig’s cell gave it more power than it had ever had before this stage of its life. And as the craft turned its bow to the south, Claire saw movement in the sky behind it.
Andrew drew in a long breath.
“Lady, what are they?” Maggie asked in awe.
A cluster of silver craft floated purposefully after the Stalwart Lass, their silver fuselages rippling with the speed of their going, for all the world like elongated