Clementine (Novel of the Clockwork Century)
Cherie Priest
Language: English
Pages: 204
ISBN: 1596064951
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Maria Isabella Boyd's success as a Confederate spy has made her too famous for further espionage work, and now her employment options are slim. Exiled, widowed, and on the brink of poverty...she reluctantly goes to work for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago. Adding insult to injury, her first big assignment is commissioned by the Union Army. In short, a federally sponsored transport dirigible is being violently pursued across the Rockies and Uncle Sam isn't pleased. The Clementine is carrying a top secret load of military essentials-essentials which must be delivered to Louisville, Kentucky, without delay. Intelligence suggests that the unrelenting pursuer is a runaway slave who's been wanted by authorities on both sides of the Mason-Dixon for fifteen years. In that time, Captain Croggon Beauregard Hainey has felonied his way back and forth across the continent, leaving a trail of broken banks, stolen war machines, and illegally distributed weaponry from sea to shining sea. And now it's Maria's job to go get him. He's dangerous quarry and she's a dangerous woman, but when forces conspire against them both, they take a chance and form an alliance. She joins his crew, and he uses her connections. She follows his orders. He takes her advice. And somebody, somewhere, is going to rue the day he crossed either one of them.
with something like recognition and fear, and she didn’t know what to make of it. Many people knew who she was—she’d become accustomed to notoriety twenty years before. But this was a fretful gaze, and it made her feel fretful in response. One of the mechanics said, just within her hearing, “Well, I think you might be right. And if it works, we can have her back in the air within an hour or two.” The black man didn’t respond. He was still looking at Maria, and trying not to. He was
the oversized triggers, throwing another dozen slugs at the cruiser—this time aiming lower. Though the gun was almost impossible to guide with any finesse, she did her damnedest and the gun responded better than she had any right to expect. The arc of the bullets dipped and cut a punctured line along the lower hull of the cruiser, and one of the last slugs clipped the bottom left thruster—lodging inside it, perhaps, or maybe only blasting through it. The thruster sparked and smoked, but didn’t
thought no one would hear them…until Hainey stood up straight, Rattler primed and ready, and found himself face-to-face with one of the Indians who had only a moment before been a hundred feet away. The native man had a shape that looked like it’d been carved from a tree, and gleaming black hair that hung down almost to his hips. He was dressed like a white man, in a linen shirt tucked into a pair of denim pants. Nothing rustled and no part of him moved. He did not even blink. Simeon and Lamar
frantic whine. “You found your ship,” she whispered back. “But that thieving pirate made his delivery,” making the same point. She asked, “So what are you doing here? Take your ship and make your getaway!” “Not while that son of a pox-spreading whore is still breathing. Goddamn,” he rumbled. “I should’ve brought the Rattler.” “And why didn’t you?” He threw his hands up and said, “Because it’s heavy, woman! I can hardly carry the thing, and Brink was running with nothing but the diamond to
what you’re doing,” he growled. “Oh yes I do. You want to wipe Danville off the map—” He interrupted her, “And in doing so, yes—end this blasted war…and I just now think, I believe, I think I know…You’re Boyd, aren’t you? I’ve heard stories, but—” “Yes, that’s me,” she said, and she sounded like she wanted to spit, but she didn’t. She said, “And if you wanted the war to end so badly, you’d speak to your superiors about withdrawing, and allowing the South to go its own way. You wouldn’t create