by D. J. Butler
The front stateroom door opened and the woman Jed was waiting for slipped in, dark hair, red dress, on the plain-looking side. He let no expression cross his face, but felt a satisfying mixture of pride in the success of their distraction and anticipation of the crimes he was about to commit. He discreetly patted the bulges in his jacket to reassure himself that he was appropriately armed.
The woman sat by the diplomat, as Poe had suggested she likely would, and Jed continued to wait. He’d give her a minute to settle in before he exited the show, just in case.
The pale Englishman looked disappointed at her arrival—or maybe he was disappointed that he was still holding an empty seat.
Poe bowed in mock deference. “I’m sure we would all be eager to hear a proper scientific explanation of the hypocephalus, sir,” he said in a wheedling, groveling way that again almost made Jed laugh.
“There is none!” Burton barked loudly, his fists clenched and punching at the air. “We don’t know what they’re for!”
Poe affected a look of pitying disappointment. “No?” he said.
“No,” Burton growled. He punched his forehead and jaw forward, like a bull glaring at a matador. “They’ve been found under the heads of a few mummies, priestly mummies, and there is no scientific explanation for them.”
Poe let his spectacles wander out over the breathless crowd in the stateroom. “They lay under the heads of priestly mummies,” he repeated, “and science cannot explain what they were for!”
He smiled puckishly.
The audience laughed.
“Yet!” Burton roared. “Science has no explanation yet, but it will have!” He looked like he might bite the heads off the two ladies in the front row; they shook their heads disappointedly and clucked at him.
The audience laughed louder, and Jed let himself out the door. Just as he shut it behind him, the quiet semi-darkness of the blue-lit iron hallway erupted into explosive racket.
“Shoshone! Shoshone! Beat to quarters!” A crewman of the Liahona burst past the dwarf, shouting at the top of his lungs, and banged at the door of the stateroom he had just left behind.
A bugle squealed out its tantara-tantara-ta! into the night.
Jed didn’t know what beat to quarters meant, but it didn’t sound good. He picked up his pace to a trot, heading for the first of the cabins.
He heard the soft hum behind him of a Brunel gun’s engine warming up, and he threw himself around a corner just in time. With a sharp whine the rifle fired and he felt the rush of air on his shoulder blades as its projectile whizzed past him and heard the foomp! of the bullet punching a hole in the iron wall where it struck.
“Dammit,” grumbled Jed as he tucked himself low against the wall, ready to surprise his pursuer. “You can’t go three steps in this country without rubbing eyeballs with crazy people.”
He heard a new whine, louder and sharper, and the pounding of booted feet, and he coiled his body into a tight, tensed spring. When the Shoshone brave ripped around the corner at full tilt he was majestic, iron plates and finger bones rattling about his chest, streaked paint turning his face into a terrifying apparition. In his hand he waved a vibro-blade cutlass, two-edged, a nasty piece of work that Sam Colt’s factories had started turning out alongside their revolver, trying to compete with the steam- and magnet-powered guns that everyone wanted these days, not to mention the Maxims coming out of Maine. The vibro-blade ran on electricks and, for the fifteen or twenty minutes that its charge lasted, the razor-sharp serrated weapon hummed back and forth with an intensity that let it cut through metal plate like butter.
The Indian warrior ran proud and furious and, most of all, he ran tall. He never saw the dwarf squatting low in the shadow, had no warning, and when Jed cannonballed into his knees he tumbled to the ground, sinking his humming sword straight down into the floor.
Jed rolled right past the hollering Shoshone and kept running. He hated to leave a dangerous man at his back, but he had a job to do.
***
Chapter Four
This was the lady’s cabin, Jed reflected as he eased the tumblers into place with his steel picks. He was still breathing hard from his tussle with the Shoshone.
A double cabin, though Poe had said he thought the lady was traveling alone. Or was that what Poe had said, after all? Jed wasn’t always one hundred percent sure he understood what Poe said. Shame to have to kill a woman, anyway, but life was hard and she’d be dead sooner or later of something, whatever Jed did. Hell, it’s not like she’d be his first, and why should he care more about killing a woman than a man?
Besides, Poe had been insistent—he really wanted this woman dead.
The last pin clicked into position and the lock opened. The tramping of boots overhead and the muffled gunshots made the dwarf a little hesitant, but a moment’s reflection convinced him that all the chaos would provide further distraction for his errand. He checked the narrow hallway in both directions and then slipped into the cabin.
The room was dark. Jed groped at the wall and found the metal switch, but toggling it didn’t turn on any lights. Have the electricks gone out? he wondered. Maybe the Shoshone had damaged the truck somehow.
No matter. Jed Coltrane was nothing if not resourceful. He crept by touch around the edges of the room, guessing that the cabins were more or less standard and he ought to find a cot against either wall, a few feet from the door. When he bumped into the first cot, he stopped moving and leaned his hip against it.
Jed pulled the scarab canister from inside his coat and popped open the lid. It took an effort of will—he kept envisioning the dead Pinkerton in the squatpot stall, devoured in seconds by the beetle swarm—but he shoved his hand inside the cylinder and scooped out a clump of the brass bugs, which he scattered underneath the cot.
“Don’t be so chickenshit, Jed,” he muttered to himself, feeling the cold sweat on his forehead.
Boots pounded outside the door and he waited, hand on his knife hilt, until they had passed. For a moment, he thought he heard the hushed wheeze of another person breathing, but that was crazy; no, it must be the sound of air circulating through the truck’s vents, or metal slowly settling.
He stepped forward cautiously, in a line perpendicular to the cot behind him, feeling in front of him with his extended foot and fingers, until he found the other cot. “Here we go, you fraidy-cat,” he cursed at himself, “almost done.” He dug out another handful of insects and tossed them beneath the second bed, listening to the metallic rattle as they bounced into place.
He closed the canister, already breathing easier. He was turning to make for the door in the darkness when the thought caught him that he should really take a look, just to be sure that the bugs were reasonably hidden from view, and he hadn’t tossed them into a mousetrap, for instance.
He clambered down into a kneeling position between the two bunks and dug for a box of lucifers in his pocket. With a practiced twitch of the wrist, he snapped a match along the outside of the box and it sputtered into flame—
A hard-toed boot kicked Jed Coltrane in the face, and his vision exploded into stars.
“The hell!?” he yelled as he tried to roll away.
For his trouble, another kick crashed into his ribs and he spun through the air, slamming hard into the iron door of the cabin.
Forget the knife. Jed pulled the Pinkerton’s gun from under his arm and squeezed the trigger. Zing! Zing! The odd weapon only flared slightly in the pitch black cabin, but the bullets clanged off the room’s walls and bit their way into the furniture. They threw up sparks, enough for Jed to see a shadowy form looming up in front of him.
Damn thing didn’t seem to have legs—
—zing!—
—the boot, or maybe it wasn’t a boot after all, smashed Jed’s gun hand and his lost his grip on the pistol, which disappeared into the gloom.
“Damn you—” he shouted, and then a strong hand with long nails, almost like claws, grabbed his throat and threw him
bodily to the floor, a knee on his chest and something cold and hard against his cheek.
He smelled lavender. And soap. Some sort of cloak fell around him, covering his chest and legs.
“Hold still, shorty, or I’ll cut out your eyeball.” The voice was so incongruously sweet that it took him a few seconds to realize that it was feminine.
Coltrane, you just got beat down by a woman.
The hand—the soft, sweet-scented hand—came away from his throat and he heard a click. A blue light sprang into being a few inches above his face, a glimmering globe held in the palm of a woman who was graceful, fierce, freckle-faced, cute as a button, and kneeling on Jed’s sternum. She wore dark goggles on her eyes and held a curving, vicious-looking knife to his face.
Not a woman, dammit. A girl. Poe’s gonna kill me.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Fireless Darklantern.” The girl squinted suspiciously at Jed. “I thought you boys worked for Hunley, or doesn’t he give you the nice toys?”
Jed involuntary shot a glance under one of the cots and then felt like an idiot. “Hell!” he growled.
“Don’t worry,” she reassured him with a perky grin, tapping the Darklantern against her goggles, “I saw it all. The Darklantern is for your benefit.”
Feet pounded again in the hall, but Jed hesitated to call for help—it might be that Shoshone with the vibro-blade, and he was likely happy as a cat in the crick with Jed Coltrane. Before he could decide whether to yell or make any move to try to distract his combatant, she pressed her blade tighter against his cheek, arching eyebrows at him.
He bit his tongue.
The pounding died down.
“What are the bugs?” she asked. “I mean, besides being part of the medicine show?”
Jed did his best to grimace fiercely. I probably look like an idiot, though, he realized, pinned under the skirts of a girl. “What are you, fifteen years old?” he asked her. “Your mamma know you’re doing this?”
She slammed the Darklantern down onto his face like a lightning bolt and he cried out in pain. Again and again she punched him and when the room swam in and out of view and whirled around him, she slid him across the floor, jerked the canister from inside his coat, and rolled him face down on top of a dozen scarabs. They pushed into his face, cold and metallic, like studs protruding from the metal floor, and one pressed against the soft flesh at the corner of his mouth.
He heard a soft pop. Twisting his head, he could see that the girl, keeping him pinned with her knee and one hand, had opened the canister with the other. He wondered where she had put the knife and if he could make a grab for it, but his head was spinning and he felt like he was on the verge of throwing up.
“You got more bugs in here, I see,” she said, eyeing the contents. “This some kind of weapon?”
“I ain’t talking,” Jed said doggedly.
“Right,” she said. “Well, I guess I’ll just start pushing these buttons and see what happens.”
Jed squirmed, his mind flooded with visions of himself, consumed to nothing by the scarab plague. He wasn’t dazed anymore, but he was starting to feel scared. “Don’t!” he barked through clenched teeth.
“Oh, but why ever not?” she asked. Out of the corner of his eye Jed saw her reaching with her thumb, pantomime-like, towards the buttons inside the canister’s lid.
Bang!
The cabin door crashed open and the gap was immediately filled with a man’s body. The hum of the vibro-blade came with him and the dwarf’s entire body tensed in nervous fear of being stuck with it.
The girl sighed, sounding more irritated than afraid, and she spun away—
—releasing Jed and leaving the canister sitting on the floor—
—and punched the intruder in his stomach.
The man grunted and stepped back and Jed rolled to his feet, shaking himself and slapping bugs away from his skin in a sort of chicken-like dance even as he lunged for the cylinder.
The man swung his cutlass at the girl and she stepped under the blow with amazing nonchalance, punching him once more. She lashed him again and again and he staggered back, his sword snarling as it chewed chunks out of the walls with his erratic, unaimed swings.
Jed scooped up the canister and tried to sprint around the whirling skirts of the goggled girl.
“No, you don’t!” she snapped. Her curved knife reappeared in her hand and she slashed at Jed.
His circus training and experience saved him. As the blade swooped down, he hurled himself sideways into the shadowed corner of the cabin, tumbling, then leaping up, and feeling the blade swooshing through the space at his shoulders. He bounced against the two walls of the corner, throwing himself back at his attacker—
—she turned away, batting aside the cutlass—
—Jed sprinted for the door, grateful to be small as he slipped past the whirling skirt and thrashing buckskins—
—she gripped the attacking Indian by his elbow and threw him over her hip, planting him heavily on his back and disarming him at the same time, the cutlass suddenly switching into her hand, where it loomed incongruously huge and deadly.
Jed saw the Pinkerton’s stolen gun lying just inside the door, at the fierce Valkyrie’s heel, and he scooped it up at a run.
Then he slammed his thumb down on the attack button inside the canister lid, snapped the lid shut and burst out into the hall, running as fast as his legs could carry him.
“Aaaaaagh!” A scream echoed after him down the corridor. A man’s, he thought, and he imagined the redskin being devoured by Hunley’s brass beetles. He hoped they might also get the girl, or at least slow her down, but he couldn’t wait around to find out.
He slammed the lid of the cylinder shut just as the beetles within it began to swarm and shoved the gun back into its shoulder holster. He needed to find a place to hide, somewhere sheltered from the fray. He ducked under two men wrestling on a staircase, one a Liahona crewman and the other an Indian, and rattled up toward the hatch.
Jed popped out into the chaos on the deck to find it brightly lit, all electricks blazing blue. Men struggled hand to hand with sticks, knives, axes, and improvised clubs made by swinging rifles, grunting and cursing each other as each man tried to throw his opponent to the deck or, better still, to the ground. The breeze told him that the steam-truck was still rolling, but a knot of armed men thrashed each other back and forth at the wheelhouse and he feared it would shortly stop. Stopping meant capture and the dwarf knew he couldn’t let Hunley’s scarabs falls into the hands of a bunch of Wyoming Territory redskins. The Seth-Beast was harder to operate and the hypocephalus, hell, Jed didn’t even know if it did anything at all, but the beetles were easy to figure out and they were deadly.
He had to hide them.
Could he hide the canister in his room? No, if they were stopped, the whole point would surely be to rob the passengers, and the cabins would all be looted. He needed a place up here on deck where he could stash the cylinder, preferably a place where he could hunker down with it.
He looked around frantically, seeing no sign of Poe, nor for that matter of Burton, among the many combatants; maybe they were fighting down in the stateroom, too.
His eye fell on the wheelhouse. It was flat and low-roofed, and if he could get on top of it he could lie down and be unseen.
He ducked low as he ran, scurrying like a bug among the benches and parasols and short Franklin Poles that made an obstacle course of the Liahona’s deck. He held the canister in his hand, afraid to stop the beetle swarm just yet because he wanted to make sure that both his assailants in the cabin were devoured, and afraid to put it into his coat pocket, in case the canister opened on accident before the beetles were done swarming.
He ran past the fighting in the wheelhouse and saw that the truck’s crew was losing ground. Only the Welsh Captain Jones and one other man still resisted and surrender must now be inevitable and only moments away.
Jed ducked around the front
of the wheelhouse and saw what he was looking for; the wheelhouse was close enough to the front that the railing, together with the ridges and gaps formed by the metal-plate construction of the wheelhouse itself, gave ready footholds to any climber, even a short one, to get up the ten feet comfortably. He leaped to the railing and then scrambled up the front of the wheelhouse, hoping no one looked through its windows in the moment he passed before them, and then he set the canister upright on the rooftop—still closed, mercifully—and hauled himself up on top, kneeling at the edge of the space with his toes dangling over behind him.
To Jed’s surprise, he wasn’t alone.
The little boy with the slouch hat sat there, huddled in the shadow against some kind of speaking horn and staring at Jed with fearful eyes.
“Shoot, kid, I ain’t gonna hurt you,” Jed barked gruffly. He wondered what the boy would think at the sight of the returning beetles and then shrugged to himself; if he saw them at all, there’d be no reason to connect the scarabs to any passenger disappearances, especially during an attack by local savages. No, best just to keep the kid calm. “Here, maybe I got a chocolate bar.” He patted his jacket pocket, trying to find a Cadbury’s Cocoa Wand he thought he’d squirreled away—
—something grabbed his ankles and jerked him off the roof.
Jed Coltrane the circus midget fell, well, like the professional that he was. He kept his head, and grabbed with his hands. Both hands gripped the edge of the rooftop and he caught himself, arresting his downward plunge. He felt his body thump against the windows of the wheelhouse, but they held, and whatever it was that had grabbed him fell away.
He snatched with one hand at the canister above him—whatever happened, he couldn’t let that fall into anyone else’s hands—then looked down.
Below him, a beaded-shirt Indian jumped, grabbing for Jed’s ankle again. Hanging by just his left hand now, he skittered up the wall with his feet, dodging out of the way of the redskin’s leap. He tried to continue skittering and get up onto the roof again, but his left hand alone wasn’t strong enough for the job and he slipped down, still hanging.
