Free Dreadnought by Cherie Priest Page A

could almost see the battle lines themselves, or imagine them, letting her mind fill in the blanks. There, along the nubs of the Smoky Mountains, she could see a strip cut across the earth; it was a fragile thing from such a height, only a dim break in the trees where a railroad ran. It snaked, but not sharply, around the prohibitive geography; and in front of this line, she saw the big guns fanning forward, away from the train tracks, and into the forests.
    She leaned out of her seat and asked the cockpit, “Captain, how far are we from Fort Chattanooga?”
    “Thirty miles or so. We’re nearly on top of Cleveland, a little town outside it,” he replied without taking his eyes off the windscreen. From inside that tiny rounded space, blinking green and yellow lights flashed against the faces and hands of the men who worked them. “Worst comes to worst, we’ll make it to Cleveland and we can set down there and wait things out.”
    Gordon Rand nearly sneered, “Worst comes to worst? We’ll crash and die, isn’t that closer to the worst end of the possibility spectrum?”
    “Shut your mouth,” Mercy ordered him. “Have a little goddamned faith, would you?”
    “Everyone stay calm!” The captain wasn’t quite breaking the veil of muffled conversation that stayed below the level of ordinary chatter, but his voice was rising. “No one even knows we’re up here.”
    “How do you know that?” Dennis asked, sounding anxious for the first time.
    “Because no one’s shooting at us yet. Now, all of you, please stay calm, and keep the chatter to a minimum. I need to concentrate.”
    Their jolly little leader had turned out to be made of sterner stuff than he looked. That was fine by Mercy, who hadn’t initially pegged him as a man who was accustomed to handling an emergency. His hands worked the controls with familiarity, and there was a set to his jaw that inspired optimism, if not outright confidence. But she heard the first mate say, “We can’t go too much higher; these cabins aren’t pressurized for that kind of altitude.”
    And the captain responded, “Yes, Richard. I know. But if we can just spin it up, we can give ourselves an arc and a boost outside their hearing.”
    “It looks hot down there. They won’t hear a damn thing. And if we don’t shoot the boosters now, we’ll—”
    “I’m doing the best I can. You see over there?” He pointed at something no one could see, but all the eavesdropping passengers craned their necks to spy at it regardless. “That’s the northern line. It’s got to be. And the southern one is back this way. Other than that, I can’t make heads or tails of what’s going on down there. But it’s either south or north for us—the fighting’s running east and west. I’ll take my chances with my own kind.”
    “Your own kind can’t read in the dark any better than the boys in blue,” Richard countered. “They won’t see that we’re private and licensed until after they shoot us down, for all the good that’ll do us.”
    “They’re
not
going to shoot us down. They don’t even know we’re here,” Gates repeated.
    This was the moment fate chose to make a liar out of him.
    Something struck them, a glancing blow that winged the outer edge of the
Zephyr
’s port side. The ship rocked and steadied, and the captain took the opportunity to gun the boosters hard—sending everyone slamming back in their seats. “Oh, God,” said one student, and the other gripped his friend’s arm as hard as he gripped the seat’s arm. Neither one of them was smiling anymore.
    Mercy grabbed her seat and took a deep breath that she sucked in slow, then let out all at once.
    “I thought you were taking us higher!” hollered Richard.
    The captain said, “No point in that now, is there? They damned well know we’re—”
    Another loud clang—like a brick hitting a cymbal, or a bullet hitting a cooking pot—pinged much louder and much closer, somewhere along the ship’s