controlled the vanes.
They would have to go around it all somehow.
But how?
The ship lay silent and unresponsive despite the frantic beating of her heart and the increasingly frustrated attempts of Andrew and the count to make repairs. As silent as the automatons standing there in the loading area, waiting for a command to make them come alive.
A command.
A spoken command.
Claire’s heart nearly stopped as her mind seized this thought and ran away with it. They had used the torso of the unfortunate Four to create an engine housing after the crash. Could they not do something similar now? She had three automatons here, all of whom were useless unless activated by spoken commands.
The principles of mechanics were the same whether one referred to automatons or transport. If one could command an automaton to activity inside a bronze casing, why could not one command it to activity if its casing were … an airship?
She hardly dared to breathe as her mind expanded with the idea. She saw it all, the way she had seen the layout of the tunnels superimposed upon the landscape—the way she saw the hands of cards in cowboy poker, laid out among the various players. A glowing network of wires and switches and possibility, rerouted and commanded to perform new tasks that they had not performed before.
Just because something had never been done did not mean that it could not be done.
“Maggie. Lizzie,” she whispe”nt sired. “Tell the automatons to come here. And then fetch three screwdrivers. We must take them apart immediately.”
She had the automatons in pieces before Andrew and the count realized what had happened. “Claire, what on earth …?” Andrew clearly believed her mind had given way under the strain of losing Tigg, and their impending capture.
Quickly, she explained, her words tumbling over one another in her haste to make them understand. Andrew’s eyes widened, and the count gave an oath that made Maggie jump and fumble for Lizzie’s hand. “By Jove, young lady, you are either quite mad or a marvel,” he said.
“Well, she ent mad,” Lizzie told him, being of a very literal turn of mind.
“Then she is a marvel,” Andrew said softly.
The admiration in his eyes caused Claire’s cheeks to burn. In a moment she would blotch, and that must not happen. They did not have time for missish behavior. “We must hurry,” she said, rather breathlessly. “Meriwether-Astor’s men will be upon us at any moment.”
Working at top speed, the three of them removed the engines in the automatons’ chests that controlled their response to command. Nine, being the most sophisticated, should be installed in the navigation gondola, Seven could control the vanes, and Eight was designated for the engine gondola. They no longer needed the cables controlling the levers, so they rerouted them into the ship’s infrastructure, in effect turning the ship into an enormous, obedient mind with three nerve centers.
Claire put down the screwdriver and wiped her hands on her skirt. “Count, if you and Andrew would begin the ignition sequence, we will lift.”
“Aren’t you going to test it?” Andrew asked with a final turn of his wrench.
“How? We can ask Nine to move the rudder, but we cannot see a result until we have air flow with which to change direction.”
“Claire, we can’t just lift and hope to heaven that this works. We’ll be shot out of the sky as soon as they see us hovering here like a big brown cloud.”
“We have no choice. And we have only one chance,” she told him tersely. “If we cannot trust our own abilities, then we deserve to be shot out of the sky.”
“She is right,” the count said. “Come, Mr. Malvern. Let us put some fire in the ship’s belly and hope she listens.”
“She is the cat’s grandmother,” Maggie said to no one in particular as the men ran down the coaxial catwalk to the stern. “Can’t just call ’er ‘cargo ship’ all the time, poor old thing.”
“An excellent point,” Claire said. Across the airfield, a second contingent of men poured out of Lady Lucy and began to run, lamps bobbing, toward Meriwether-Astor’s ship not thirty feet away. “Athena was the goddess of mathematics, and if it were not for adding together Seven, Eight, and Nine, we would not have our chance to escape.”
She hoped d+0"andesperately they would have a chance to escape.
“Athena.” Lizzie tried out the syllables on her tongue. “I like it. Could she fly?”
“Of course she could, silly,” Maggie told her. “She were a goddess, innit?”
“Even