by D. J. Butler
Annie pressed herself against the edge of the carriage and raised a rifle she’d taken from one of the Danites at Heber Kimball’s farm.
The cavalrymen in gray fired back. Bullets whizzanged off the outside of the Strider’s carriage, and Absalom hoped they had succeeded in drawing enough soldiers away from Brigham Young’s office so that the man could get in and send the message he needed.
“Ortiz!” Jackson yelled, waving her fist as the mustached Mexican pilot looked over his shoulder. “Allá!”
Absalom looked where she had gestured and saw familiar doors. This was the entrance by which he’d come into the Tabernacle, a million years ago, yesterday. Ortiz dropped the carriage lower, the Strider running with knees bent low to the ground and its great claws gouging at the plascrete floor. Bullets whizzed by the Strider’s carriage, sparking on the walls and ceiling.
Annie rose up to shoot again with her rifle.
“Dot dow!” Absalom shouted, and dragged her down.
Bang! Her shot whipped away in the artificial cavern and then the Strider lurched under the low entrance—
Jackson leaped out of the gun platform and threw herself to the bottom of the carriage—
—CRUNCH!—
—and the Strider didn’t quite get low enough. The carriage crashed into the top of the doors and smashed Absalom’s shoulder.
“Aaaagh!” he cried out.
CHANG!
Master Sergeant Jackson’s gunning platform disappeared, ripped away by the plascrete.
The Strider lumbered up the large concourse toward the main chamber of the Tabernacle. Absalom threw himself against the back wall of the carriage between Annie, raising her rifle high, and Master Sergeant Jackson, now drawing and cocking her sidearm.
“Ortiz, hijo de puta que eres, me destruyiste todo!”
Ortiz only grunted in reply, intent on the twin levers with spring-actions grips that controlled the Strider’s legs. Steam and foul black smoke jetted in tight tendrils from cracks where Jackson’s guns had been torn away. Absalom smelled petroleum, and something burning. The carriage walls felt hot to the touch and he heard a faint, strained whining from the machinery.
Clocksprung horses burst into the concourse behind and below the Strider, and Absalom and the two ladies traded shots with them. With the joggety-thump motion of the big Mexican machine, Absalom wasn’t at all surprised that his shots missed.
“Hold on!” Ortiz shouted in English, and Absalom took the cue. Not having a railing in front of him, or anything else to grab onto, he wrapped one arm around each of the women and they in turn anchored themselves to the Strider.
Ka-chunk!
The Strider took a particularly long step—
—the ground fell away beneath it—
—the cavalrymen reigned in their machine-beasts, stopping at a crumpled banister overlooking a ten-foot drop—
—the Strider sailed through the air and involuntarily Absalom began to scream, the ladies screaming with him, “Aaaaaaagh!”
CRASH!!!
The Strider hit the ground in an explosion of brass, steel, wood, and stuffing. The machine staggered as Ortiz lost his grip on one of the levers and the corresponding leg went limp. Then Ortiz regained control and the Strider righted itself, racing down into the center of the well of the Tabernacle, claws chewing their way through the Tabernacle’s seating like a thresher through ripe grain.
The Strider pulled away from the men of the Third Virginia Cavalry, but now it was at a lower elevation, and everyone sitting in the carriage was exposed. The men on the metal horses raised pistols and rifles and began to fire.
Absalom ducked between the two women. Improbably, his mind began to wander, considering which of the two he found more attractive, and just as he was imagining them both on a picnic blanket upon a sheep-cropped green sward beside a sluggish river in the May warmth, cutting together into a savory mince pie—
—Bang!
Ortiz slumped forward at the controls. Both levers pushed forward under the weight of the man’s body and the Strider stumbled and fell, crashing to its knees. The three passengers rattled around like balls in a roulette wheel but none of them rolled out.
“Take the controls!” Jackson shouted.
Annie ignored her and both women poured lead out of their weapons up at the cavalrymen, who now streamed around the Tabernacle’s seating and into separate stairway aisles, rushing for the downed Strider.
Absalom grabbed Ortiz to drag him out of the way, certain that at any second a bullet would take him in the back. Each moment seemed surreal to him. Nothing at Harrow, at Cambridge, or in his Foreign Office training had ever prepared him to kill men, handle dead bodies, or operate heavy machinery. The only thing distinguishing the last twenty-four hours from a nightmare was the fact that Absalom really was doing all these things, as well as being shot at, stabbed, punched, chased, and slammed into plascrete walls.
With two very attractive women at his side.
Absalom rolled Ortiz’s corpse out of the way, shoved his long pistol into his waistband and squeezed into the pilot’s seat.
He grabbed the two levers. Experimentally, he moved the right one forward and the carriage shuddered as the battered Strider shifted its right leg forward. Absalom squeezed the spring-triggered handgrip and the Strider’s chicken-claw clenched, gouging up plascrete and squeezing three seats into sawdust and metal shavings.
Bang! Bang!
“Hurry!” Annie shouted in Absalom’s ear.
Absalom played with the levers some more, feeling intensely the sweat under his arms and on the back of his neck. He could move the legs forward and back, side to side, but the Strider stayed kneeling, lurching from one side to another with loud metallic grating sounds, like a man having an epileptic seizure. He needed to be able to flex the knees. He needed another control …
He looked down, and found it. Two pedals, cupped to grip the pilot’s toes nicely, between the two levers. He stuck his feet into them—
—lead sliced the air to ribbons around his head.
“Ahorita!” shouted Master Sergeant Jackson—
—rat-a-tat-tat-a-tat-tat galloped the clocksprung horses.
Absalom pulled the pedals back, strained at the levers, and made the Strider stand up. The carriage automatically leveled out with the motion, staying upright rather than tipping and dislodging its riders. It must be weighted, he thought, to automatically adjust to changes in gradient. Absalom could hear the metal horses and didn’t risk a look back. Toes and elbows and hands operating in as close a harmony as he could manage, he started jogging forward.
“Yee ha!” whooped Annie, and crouched down in the carriage to reload.
“Más rápido!”
Absalom knew enough Spanish to realize that meant faster. He went as más rápido as he dared, much faster than he would have thought prudent. He launched the Strider’s legs out in front of him like missiles, clutching clawsfuls of plascrete and floor and dragging the vehicle forward as if by the strength of his own arms.
He hit the floor at the bottom of the Tabernacle, lurched in two steps across it, and then bent the Strider’s knee sharply to get up on top of the Tabernacle’s stage. The enormous wooden podium exploded into sawdust as the Strider’s claw punched through it.
“They’re still coming!” Annie shouted, and fired over the side.
Bang! Bang!
Absalom risked a quick glance back and saw that she was right. The cavalrymen weren’t gaining on him anymore, but he wasn’t leaving them behind, either. Their horses coursed around the wreckage he was making of the Tabernacle like a pack of wolves running down a moose. He turned back around and worked his arms faster.
Ka-RANG!
He slammed the shoulder of the Strider into one of the enormous Franklin Poles lighting the dais. It flew backward, uprooted like a tree in a hurricane, and hurtled into the bottom rows of the Tabernacle’s seating. As the Franklin Pole detached from the stage, there was a bright
blue flash of light—
—FITZZ! —
—all the light in the bottom half of the Tabernacle died—
—and where the tossed Franklin Pole slammed into a row of seats, smoke wisped into the air.
Egad, Absalom thought. Now you’ve lit their Tabernacle on fire.
Distracted by this realization, Absalom almost missed the end of the stage in the sudden darkness, but he just managed to plant his claw right on the lip of the platform and jump. He took the space between the stage and the slope on the other side in a single bound, smashing through seats and railings and very nearly losing his grip on the edge of the plascrete well. The horses, because they had to turn and find stairways in the gloom, fell behind twenty feet.
Absalom fixed his eye on a doorway halfway up the Tabernacle, a well of darkness in the artificial gloaming. “I’m headigg for that exit!” he shouted, barely hearing his own voice over the whine of the machine and the splintering sounds of the chairs he trampled. “Do you have explosives od the Strider?”
“Jes, I have un poco de dynamite!”
“Get it ready dow!” he shouted.
He concentrated, sprinting with his arms. The levers must operate the legs by intermediaries of gears, he knew, but it was still an effort, and his arms weren’t used to it. They ached.
Shots from behind the Strider exploded in front of it, spoiling the nice, ordered rows of seats even before the Strider plowed into them and crushed them beyond recognition. At least the horsemen were shooting up now, which made it virtually impossible for them to hit anyone in the Strider’s gravity-perpendicular carriage.
“Light the dydamite!” Absalom shouted to the two women.
Fitzzzzz.
“What are you doing, Absalom?” Annie Webb called, a note of surprise in her voice.
“Brace yourselves for a bit of a tumble,” Absalom called back. “Id three … two … wud …”
He jerked both levers and both pedals back and deliberately tripped the Strider.
As he hoped it would, the carriage automatically rolled back as the Strider rolled forward, staying parallel to the plane of the earth, so when it hit the plascrete it hit it flat, like a sled—
—plowed into the doors Absalom had aimed for—
—POW!—
—knocking them open, sliding through in a wake of sparks—
—and grinding to a halt on the other side, with the big legs of the Strider still choking the doorway and partly blocking it shut. Partly but not entirely.
“Throw the dydamite!” Absalom shouted, and leaped from the carriage. His legs felt like jelly and his arms felt like sacks of flour. He pressed forward by sheer will, drawing the pistol from his pants and turning to watch for any clocksprung-mounted soldiers that might make it through the obstruction he’d just thrown in their way.
Richard Burton couldn’t have done it better, he thought smugly.
Master Sergeant Jackson threw the dynamite into the doors, then grabbed several things out of the Strider that looked like rifles. She and Annie came scrambling over the top of the carriage, following Absalom.
Rat-a-tat-tat-a-tat-tat, horses clattered to the doors.
“In there, men!” one of the soldiers shouted.
KABOOM!!!
Poe blew his whistle and it made no sound at all.
Tam cringed back away from the man as he huffed and puffed into the little sliver of metal, ready to pop his knife out if the whistle produced anything dangerous, like, say, carnivorous beetles or jets of fire or flying poisonous serpents to make even St. Patrick cry himself to sleep.
But Poe screwed up his face in concentration and wheezed in and out and nothing happened. Not even a sound, much less anything that would actually knock down the door or kill Pinkertons or get them out of the locked room.
“If I tell you I’m disappointed,” he grumbled, “will it hurt your feelings?”
“Obviously the whistle is ultrasonic,” Burton snapped. The others all nodded their heads and Poe kept contorting his face around the whistle.
“Does ultrasonic mean broken?” Tam persisted. “Here, I’ll show you how to fookin’ whistle!” He stuck two fingers in his mouth and blew, hyoooooo, whup!
CRASH!
The racket came from the other side of the door and Tam yanked his fingers from his mouth. Careful, me boy, don’t bite your own hand.
“What in Brigit’s knickers was that?”
“Apparently, your whistle just killed our guards,” Burton said dryly. “Go on, whistle some more. This time, why don’t you cut out all the intervening steps and just sink Pratt’s airships?”
“Ha, ha,” Tam said, and got ready to spring out his knife.
Poe coughed long and hard. The gob of blood and mucus he spit on the floor was the size of a baby’s head, and Tam retched at the sight and smell of it. Clearing out his lungs seemed to have a salutary effect on Poe, though—the man straightened up, and looked better than he had since they’d been thrown into the cell together.
“Remove yourselves from the vicinity of the door,” Poe suggested. He leaned on both Roxie and Burton to limp across the room himself, and Tam retreated into the far corner. Whatever was happening was beyond him and sounded dangerous. Mother O’Shaughnessy had taught him not to be a coward but she’d also taught him not to be an idjit, and only an idjit ran toward the danger he didn’t need to.
Then Poe blew his silent whistle again.
CRASH!
The plascrete door snapped in half and something big and shiny and metallic and monstrostastic, the size of a small horse but with a strange head not quite like a dog’s, punched through and slammed into the room. It landed on its four claws and stopped, staring at Poe. Tam thought he could see and hear the thing breathing and he shook himself. It’s your imagination, you idjit, he told himself. The thing is obviously clocksprung, like any plantation worker or twenty-four-hour-mule.
Still, it made an impression. “Bloody-damn-hell,” he observed.
“Ha!” Burton said, and slapped Tam on the shoulder. “Well done, O’Shaughnessy.”
Tam peered around the corner and out into the hall. Two men lay on the ground, mangled beyond any ability of even their mothers to recognize them. “How did you do that, then?” he asked Poe. “You couldn’t even see them.”
“I didn’t have to see them.” Poe shook off Roxie’s efforts to help him and shuffled towards the door on his own wobbling ankles. “The machine is very sophisticated.”
Tam grunted appreciatively, remembering the little beetles. “This machine, on the other hand, is simple enough.” He bent and picked up one of the Pinkerton’s pistols. “Point and shoot.”
“An important desideratum in anything, and especially in a weapon,” Poe agreed, then burst into coughing.
“You look like hell, Poe.” Tam squinted closer at the gun as Burton picked up the other man’s firearm. “There’s something wrong with this pistol. Where do the percussion caps go?”
Burton laughed. “It’s a good thing you Irish are so amusing,” he snorted. “It goes a long way to make up for your ignorance.”
“Fine!” Tam snapped. “Then where does the percussion cap go, Mr. English Genius?”
Burton snapped open the cylinder of his pistol and shook out six brass cylinders. “This is the Smith & Wesson Model 1,” he said, and he sounded as smug and holier-than-thou as any priest. “Its bullets come in brass cartridges, with powder and percussion cap built right in. They load thus.” He demonstrated, reloading the cylinder and snapping it into place.
Tam examined his own pistol. “Bloody hell,” he marveled at it. “You can say this for the Pinkertons, they have interesting guns.”
The dog-machine clicked past him and out into the plascrete hall, Poe limping in its trail with Roxie fussing at his side. Tam and Richard Burton both ransacked the Pinkertons’ bloody pockets, coming away with handfuls of shells and a scattergun, which Burton passed to Roxie.
“Only two shots,” the E
nglishman said.
“That’ll do nicely.” She nodded, taking the scattergun on one hand and wrapping the other arm around Poe’s trembling chest.
Ahead of them, a man in a long coat turned the corner into the hall. He had just enough time to look up and reach for his gun before the dog-thing was on him, knocking him to the ground under its weight and biting for his throat.
“Aaaragh!”
Blood spattered the walls and the Pinkerton fell silent.
“How did it do that?” Tam asked, astonished. “You didn’t even touch the whistle.”
Poe spat blood on the floor and nodded shakily. “It’s a very sophisticated machine,” he agreed. “Horace Hunley is a true genius.”
“I think I’ve seen enough of true genius on this trip to conclude that it’s overrated,” Burton growled. “If every true genius were shot on diagnosis, we wouldn’t be in this pickle.”
“There’d still be a war in the offing,” Roxie reminded him.
“What do you call the thing, then?” Tam wanted to know. “I can’t keep thinking of it as a doggie.”
“Are you blind, O’Shaughnessy?” Burton barked. “It’s obviously a Seth-Beast.”
“Obviously,” Tam muttered.
“Also called the Typhonian Animal,” Poe added.
“Or the sha!” Burton finished, with a trap-like snap of his heavy jaw. He grinned a row of teeth at Poe, and the American grinned back.
Tam felt left out and a little bit disrespected, but he was still impressed. “It’s tremendous,” he said. “Have you got another?”
Crack-ckz-ckz-ckz-ckz-ckz-ckz!
The men of the Third Virginia danced spastically like puppets before they fell, blue sparks running along the metal of their belt buckles and guns and in their teeth. Triggered by sparks in their cylinders, their guns started going off.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Bullets ricocheted off the metal deck of the Jim Smiley and shattered glass windows in the streets storefronts. The show was spectacular but getting shot in the bargain was not part of Sam’s plan.
“Shut it off!” he shouted to the dwarf Coltrane, who complied.
