“I… I’ve been shot!” he said, more aghast that such an injustice could have occurred than in pain from the result.
A second shot rang out. Sprinting as he was, Coop wasn’t able to strike his target or anything near it, but the sound was enough to convince Alabaster to take cover as well. He leaped from the stage and scurried off after the crowd. A second later, Coop reached the stage and bounded up the steps.
“What is wrong with you? Are you a maniac?” Lester growled.
“He said he was fixing to kill me and the rest of the crew. I reckon that’s reason enough to take a shot at him. Gunner was right though, I think I mucked up my sights again. This is the lady we’re after, right?”
“The lady you are after… You do know this man!” Dr. Prist said, backing away slowly. “You, Mr. Clear, are a monster. And you’ve seen fit to feed me to your equally monstrous cohorts!”
“You folk sure do talk fancy in these parts,” Coop said, scratching his head with one of his guns. “I hate to rush a lady, but if this fella had two hours to convince you and didn’t make much headway, I don’t imagine I’ll have much more luck. So I’m going to have to ask you to come along so we can talk you into it along the way, Doctor.”
Dr. Prist crossed her arms and turned away. “I shan’t go anywhere with enemies of our people, and nothing you can do will convince me otherwise.”
“Fair enough,” Coop said.
He ducked down and wrapped an arm around her legs, tipping her over his shoulder and then standing again.
“Is that your plan? You’re simply going to grab her like a sack of potatoes and run off with her?” Lester said, raising his voice over her wails of dismay.
“You had your chance to do something more clever and it didn’t work,” Coop said, hefting her once as she released a startled squeal. “Now we’re doing it the easy way. Follow me.”
Bounding down the steps, carrying his struggling load with a practiced ease, Coop commented, “Fug ladies are a tall drink of water. But there ain’t much to ’em. The doctor ain’t much heavier than Lil.”
“Do you make it a habit of carrying women about?” Lester called, rushing to catch up with Coop as they ran for the main gate.
“Just Lil. When she’s been drinking she gets ornery. Every so often I have to tote her out of a saloon before she starts slugging folk.”
Despite his heavy load, Coop remained a step faster than Lester as they closed the distance between the stage and the main gate. Alabaster’s presence had disrupted the normal operation of the academy sufficiently that only a single guard remained at his post. The man hastily pushed the gate shut. He fumbled with a large lock and key. Coop fired a warning shot that quite effectively discouraged that activity and sent the guard running for cover, but not before the first of two locks had been secured. The running deckhand turned the shoulder not burdened with a screaming woman toward the gate and clashed with it, but the gate barely budged.
He and Clear turned to see a handful of guards approaching, pistols in hand.
“Just what do you expect to do now?” Lester said.
“I reckon it’ll sort itself out,” Coop said, attempting to aim while Dr. Prist struggled.
“Sort itself out? Sort itself out?!” Lester raved.
Three small shots rang out from far beyond the fence. One by one the pistols jerked from the hands of the guards. Then came a much louder report and the corner of the fence to their left exploded into shards.
“Things sort themselves out when you got a crew keeping an eye on you,” Coop said.
They dashed for the ruins the Wind Breaker’s cannon blast had made of the fence. A short distance beyond, and directly between the escaping men and their freedom, was Alabaster’s personal ship. Mallow had finally managed to wrangle and moor it. His distraction with that task made him the only person in a two-mile radius who didn’t notice the chaos in the academy from the cannon fire. He was only now folding up the retractable steps and shutting the door. When he turned to head toward the gate and aid his employer, he instead came face to face with a winded deckhand with a woman over his shoulder and a gun in his hand.
Coop shoved the barrel of his weapon into Mallow’s chest. “Anything tricky I ought to know about how to start this thing?” he asked, gesturing with his head for Lester to pull open the door.
“Who are you? What’s going on here?”
The deckhand answered by cocking the pistol with his thumb. Mallow wisely raised his hands and backed away from the door. “The throttle sticks on the low end, and you’ll want to keep the temperature gauge on the high side or the turbines are very sluggish!” he advised hastily.
“Much obliged. Don’t go running off, I got one last thing for you,” Coop said.
Lester got the door open and the stairs deployed. Coop dumped Dr. Prist inside and climbed in after her.
“I trust you know how to fly a contraption like this,” Lester said.
“I can usually get one going roughly where I want it to go. Never one this fancy, though.”
Coop climbed into the pilot’s compartment and stuck his head out a moment later. “That fella still out there?” he asked.
“If you mean the man you threatened, he appears to be backing slowly away with his hands raised.”
“Good,” he said, disappearing for a moment, then reappearing with an aye-aye held by the scruff of its neck. “Toss this critter to him, would you? I don’t like flying with these buggers on board no more.”
He handed off the ship’s inspector to Lester, who immediately lost control of it. The creature scrambled up his arm and latched on to his head, terrified of the sudden intrusion. Lester gibbered incomprehensibly, then tore it free and hurled it out the door. It struck Mallow square in the face and swiftly made its displeasure known.
Mallow’s cries of surprise and confusion as the furry tornado of claws and teeth enveloped his head were soon swallowed by the roar of the turbines as Coop plopped into the seat and boosted the throttle. A long, low creak filled the gondola of the airship. It was straining against the freshly secured mooring ropes.
“You can’t believe you shall get away with this!” Dr. Prist said, her wits slowly returning as she sat shakily on the floor of the opulent cabin, just in front of Alabaster’s easy chair. “The guards are already taking up their weapons. You’ll never get this ship untied before they arrive.”
“I ain’t planning on untying anything, Doctor,” Coop said.
He left the pilot’s compartment with the throttle at full, then leaned out the open door with a gun. Three quick shots later the ropes snapped and the airship lurched forward.
Coop turned back to the others.
“We’ll meet up with the Wind Breaker in a bit. Cap’n’ll want to make sure there ain’t any scout ships or gunships lurking about to take any shots at us,” he explained. “Oh, and thank you kindly, Doc, for not trying to kick me out the door just then.”
“I… I assure you I failed to do so only because my mind is not so thoroughly adjusted to violence as yours.”
“Still, much obliged.”
“Just get to the controls! As horrid as I’m sure your plans for me are, I just as soon survive this flight.”
“Will do, Doc.”
Chapter 7
The Thicket had painted an entirely new picture of the fug for Lil and Nita. First and foremost among their observations was the utter darkness of it. The fug was dim on the brightest days and black at most other times, but at least there was a sky overhead. The first half of the day, their journey had been through an endless graveyard of skeletal trees, but when they found their way to the stretch of land that earned the region its name, things changed markedly. Something wholly different from anything either Lil or Nita had ever seen took the place of the husks of oak and elm. They had the same overall shape of oak trees, but the leaves were sharp, jagged things. They looked like their leaves, tired of being eaten by woodland creatures, had grown claws to defend themselve
s. The bark of the trees was smooth and silvery, with an odd oily sheen. They grew thick and stout, gnarled roots running near the surface and making the ground treacherous, while the branches arched high and interwove overhead into a dense canopy. Thorny vines wrapped around and wove between every stretch of tree sturdy enough to support them. Not a whisper of the weak glow of day filtered through the canopy of leaf and vine. The darkness was so complete that the glow from within the firebox—barely visible in the seams between the door—was comparatively glaring.
Each of the fug folk had told stories of near misses with the wildlife, and few were nothing less than chilling. Thus far their three days of travel had turned up no direct encounters, but Nita didn’t need to be convinced that this was a living place. Distant rumbles, certainly the warning calls of beasts, rolled through the forest. That she could hear them at all over the rhythmic hiss of the steam engine and the cacophonous rattle of the rigid carts traversing the uneven ground suggested the creatures responsible were either very large or very loud. Smaller things chittered unseen among the branches overhead, and seldom did they travel more than a few minutes without a set of large, vigilant eyes catching the glow of their phlo-lights in the distance.
Nita and Lil had found their way to the controls of the rearmost cart in the caravan. It was something of the runt of the litter. When modifying and improving the carts for the journey, there hadn’t been enough worthwhile parts to make all of them fully functional, so the one they now piloted had been stripped down a bit. That reduced its power, but to offset this shortfall they’d not attached any trailers to tow. Aside from allowing it to keep pace with the others, the lack of a train of unpowered platforms behind it meant they could keep a watch on the very rear of the group and target anything approaching from behind. To further decrease the load, Nita and Lil were the cart’s only passengers. At the moment, Nita drove and Lil sat beside her on lookout.
“This here is just about as far from the open air as I think I’ve ever been,” Lil observed with a shiver. “I don’t like having this much between me and the sky. Feels awful.”
“That’s funny,” Nita said. “It was making me rather homesick.”
Lil shot her a doubtful look. “I ain’t seen much of Caldera up close, but every inch of it was prettier than this. If nothing else, you’ve got loads of sun and color.”
“Ah, but you’ve never been in the steamworks. For the last few years I’ve spent my days working in claustrophobic tunnels carved out of an active volcano. It’s close, it’s dark. The air is heavy with strong smells. Every moment of every day you’re assaulted by the sound of rattling machinery… Really, the only thing missing right now is oppressive heat.”
“And you’re missing that, are you?” Lil said, an eyebrow raised.
“Well you miss the sky right now, don’t you? Biting cold, howling wind. Churning your stomach with constant rocking and swinging?”
“Aw, that stuff ain’t so bad. At least it’s got a great view.”
A voice called out from farther ahead in the convoy, drawing their attention.
“Eyes to the left! Weapons hot!” barked the forward lookout.
Lil and Nita turned and scanned the ground. The darkness was nearly complete on that side, and if there was a threat, it wasn’t obvious.
“You see anything?” Lil asked, climbing into the gunner’s seat.
“Nothing. In fact… I don’t even see any eye-shine out there. … Something scared off the nearby creatures…”
“That suits me.” Lil twisted the knobs to feed steam to the gun and adjusted her goggles. “I always like having one big thing to shoot at instead of a bunch of small ones. Big things are slower and easier to hit.”
“I suppose that’s one way to look at it… I suppose that’s the sort of lesson you learn from stories like ‘The Boastful Bullfrog.’”
Lil looked to Nita, her eyes lighting up. “‘The Boastful Bullfrog’! That’s from the book I got you! You have been reading it. I forgot to ask.”
“Of course. It’s a nice little book, and with some very interesting woodcuts.”
“I’m glad you like it. I ain’t sure we read the same story, though. How’d you get that out of that story?”
“The bullfrog puffs itself up more and more until it’s so big that the eagle gets him instead of the little frogs. Sometimes it’s better to be little and fast than big and strong. A useful moral.”
“… Me and Coop got a different moral out of that story.”
“What?”
“Bullfrogs is funny lookin’, mostly.”
The caravan crept forward, those ahead picking up the pace as much as the uneven ground would allow. Now that their attentions were heightened, they began to notice other worrying changes in their surroundings. The subtle but constant sound of local wildlife had silenced. The only sound beyond the rattle of the carts was the creaking of branches in the wind. It felt like the whole forest was bracing itself for whatever was to come next.
Something snapped in the trees, and all eyes shot to the source. Nita leaned quickly aside to grasp the grip of the phlo-light and shift it upward. Her light converged with the others from farther ahead, focusing on a tree a hundred yards away, barely visible in the dim night and through the low branches of the trees between. A form was hidden among the thorny branches. The details weren’t clear, but two eyes the size of fists caught the light and shone like emeralds. The eyes squinted and a chilling noise rolled through the forest. It was a deep resonant chatter, like something echoing up out of a cave or out of a nightmare.
The beast shifted among the branches, causing the whole tree to sway. A crust of purple ice crackled away and sprinkled to the ground. Even without seeing the whole creature, there was something predatory about the motion. It was preparing to pounce.
“… Oh heck…” Lil said, her eyes wide behind her goggles.
She was the first to fire, and the very moment she squeezed the trigger, chaos erupted. Lil’s assessment hadn’t been entirely sound, because while the thing was large, it was by no means slow. As spikes filled the air, issuing forth from all three steam-powered fléchette guns, the thing flashed out of the trees. It was not frightened by the guns, and despite the sheer mass of ordnance whistling through the air, not a single spike met its mark. Spikes traced lines across the ground, conjuring bursts of sparkling snow and dust where they struck. Just ahead of them, moving with terrifying speed, was the creature. It didn’t stand still long enough for Nita to get a good look at it, sprinting instead toward the center of the convoy. Whatever the thing was, it was long and lithe, moving in great bounding leaps that covered the distance between them faster than seemed possible.
Not until it was barely ten yards away did a spike finally strike. A furious chatter erupted and it turned, instantly shifting from moving toward the convoy to running along it from the center and moving toward the rear. As it drew nearer, it was all Nita could do to track the thing with the light. It was a knot of muscles wrapped in short slate-gray fur, flexing and springing with each stride. She could only make out brief glimpses as it streaked by—a short and powerful muzzle, chisel-like teeth, oddly small ears—but most out of place was the long tail trailing behind. It was fluffy and lush, like something a wealthy dowager would wear to the theater.
The monster flashed by the cart, catching two more spikes from Lil’s gun before it sprang up into the trees and vanished from sight.
“What in the world is that thing?!” Nita asked, trying to keep the cart on course after the others while still sweeping the trees with her light.
“Whatever it is, it’s a nimble little devil. Gotta reload. Keep your eyes peeled.”
“I’ll do my best. Keeping this thing under control.”
Lil vaulted from the gun seat and dug through a crate teetering atop the rest of the cargo.
“Dang it. I know they just gave us a fresh belt from the ammo cart this morning. Where is it?”
“The open-top crate, in
the corner there. Hurry! I see motion again.”
“Got it! Loading up!”
She pulled a tightly coiled canvas belt from the crate and leaped back into the seat. Three deft motions clicked the roll in place, and she pivoted the gun to the tree the monster had vanished into.
“Anybody see it?” Lil bellowed.
Six people answered back, their voices drowning each other out.
“One at a time, fellas.”
They answered again, but this time far more vigorously. Nita glanced forward to find every free hand in the group pointing in the same direction. To their left, motion rippled through the trees. Here and there a glimpse of fur revealed itself among the branches. Even moving through the treetops, the thing was easily outpacing the carts.
“I’ve got a bead on it. Here we go,” Lil announced.
She pulled the trigger and her gun began to devour the fresh belt of spikes. Years of shooting at raiders had made her better than most at tracking a moving target from atop a vehicle. Two or three spikes struck the creature, as evidenced by renewed chitters and chatters of anger and fear. The motion slowed a bit and veered away. For a brief and precious moment it seemed they might have scared the beast off.
That moment vanished with an earsplitting trill. Lil flinched and covered her ears. The sound, uncannily like a steam whistle, roared with painful intensity from her weapon. She reached for the valve to cut off the steam supply, but the damage was done. The creature stopped and turned, diving from the trees with purpose and bounding toward the shrill sound.
“Lil! Lil!” Nita screamed.
It was no use. She couldn’t even hear herself over the whistle. Lil finally cut the supply to her weapon off and raised her eyes to find the beast upon them. It struck the side of the cart hard, giving Nita her first good look at the thing as near as it had ever been to stationary. In size and overall shape, the nearest point of reference she had was a wildcat, but it wasn’t quite right. The fur seemed too long for that, the body too rounded. The head, similarly, was all wrong, too elongated, and with long, curving teeth with flat ends. Two spikes were visible sticking through its pelt in the center of dark stains.
Ichor Well Page 19
