“Well, fancy that,” Alice said, smiling in spite of herself—though it was a little trembly. “He did me a good turn, you know, when I was up that way a few years ago. He was an old flame of hers, and when I could, I gave him her direction. I sort of hoped something like this might come of it.” She paused. “How did Ned take it?”
Lorraine snorted. “How did the rest of Resolution take Ned taking it, you mean? He ain’t over it yet. A more cranky, rage-ridden, howling wilderness of a man I never seen before. We’ve forbidden him to set foot in here, you know. What few ladies remain in this town need a place to go when he’s out shooting up their flowerbeds, and we got enough arms in here to protect Santa Fe itself if need be.”
Alice let out a long breath and glanced at Evan, who had not said a word but had taken in every one with wide eyes. “Well, there goes my plan.”
“What, to come at him through the back door?” Lorraine’s eyes held shrewdness. “Don’t think I’m going to take your mama’s place, girl. I think the world of you, but it’s not worth the risk.”
“I wouldn’t ask that of any woman,” Alice said with complete truth. “Looks like I’m going to have to beard him in his den myself. Does he still live in the same place?”
“Same place. More holes in the walls. Terrible mildew problem when the water gets in.”
All the houses in Resolution had that problem, despite the dryness of the air, because of the flash floods. Alice shook away the thought. “I need to get a message to him, at least, to prepare the way. Can you help me with that?”
“For a silver coin.”
Alice fished one out of the pocket that didn’t have bullets in it. “Tell him I have a deal for him. I need him to rob a train.”
Lorraine’s mouth dropped open. “And here I thought your mama had raised a girl with some decency. Keep your money. I don’t hold with criminal ways.”
Criminal ways had been feeding everyone in Resolution since it had been founded fifty years ago, but Alice judged it best not to bring that up.
“Lorraine, girls, all of you listen,” she pleaded. “This train is destined for the Royal Kingdom of Spain and the Californias. I need you to get the word out to everyone in town—and farther. If that train reaches the Californias, there are certain men who plan to use its cargo to invade the Texican Territory—to go to war on us. If Ned can stop it, he can keep as much of what’s in those cars as he wants. It just can’t get to its destination, or everyone in the territory may die.”
Lorraine’s face froze. “How do you know all this, girl?”
Alice had come up with a story on the way in. “I fly under contract now, and the outfit I’m flying for got double-crossed. That shipment is stolen goods, so Ned stealing it himself will be its own kind of justice.”
“Your outfit might disagree. Who’s to say we won’t have the Texican Rangers down on us for it?”
“The Rangers aren’t going to solve a Fifteen Colonies problem. Besides, once they hear the word war, nothing else is going to matter.” Alice knelt by the sofa and touched the woman’s knee. She’d been her mother’s closest friend—or as close as friends could be in a place like this, where the preferences of men were the coin the girls lived on. “Please, Lorraine. We don’t have much time and there’s a lot at stake. Will you help me, as much as you’re able?”
She saw the moment when Lorraine made up her mind. “I don’t hold with train robbery, but I hold even less with war. Give me that pen and paper, girl, and I’ll send over a note. There might be some shooting, but with any luck, it’ll be over by the time you get there.”
Evan’s eyes widened again, but to his credit, he kept mum. One of the girls took away the note, and in a few minutes they heard the sound of gunshots—a whole fusillade of them.
“I swear by all I hold holy, if he’s killed Amarinda, I’ll put a hole in him myself,” Lorraine said grimly, straightening on the sofa and swinging her feet to the ground.
The shots faded, much the way the popping of corn slows down in the pan. Except for the odd report, there was a long silence. Footsteps ran up the path, and then Amarinda fell through the door.
“He’s in a temper,” she gasped, holding her side. “But I gave it to him.”
“Are you shot?” Lorraine demanded, gazing in horror at the hand pressed to her corset.
“No. I’ve got a stitch. I ran all the way.” She collapsed onto a fainting couch and one of the other girls poured her a tot of something out of the cabinet.
“Thank you, Lorraine, Amarinda.” Alice led the way to the door. “I’m much obliged.”
“You be safe, you hear?” Lorraine replied. “And if you ever see your ma, you tell her hello from me.”
Alice hadn’t seen her mother since the day she’d flown out of here, but she promised all the same.
It was a short walk down the street and through a barren field to Ned’s house, but it seemed to take forever when you were expecting a bullet in your skull. It was the only building in town with three stories—the topmost of which he used to keep prisoners in. She wondered if he still did, after Lady Claire had escaped by jumping out a window into the raging waters of a providential flash flood. Alice had found her staggering around in the dark once she’d washed up on the bank downstream—and that moment had changed both their lives.
“Remind me to invent some kind of metal plating to wear inside one’s clothes,” Evan murmured into the dusty, cold silence. “Such a thing saved Maggie’s life at Colliford Castle—I ought to look into it more seriously.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” Alice agreed. “Too bad you didn’t have it three days ago.”
“Do you really think he’ll shoot you?”
“Curiosity will force him to hear me out. After that? I don’t know. Stay alert and keep eyes in the back of your head.”
A gangly figure, five years older and heavier than the last time she’d seen him, guarded the door with a rifle slung casually over his shoulder.
“Why, Perry,” she said pleasantly, as though they were meeting after church. “Are you still here?”
“Got any ideas where else I should be?” He sounded belligerent, and very different from the likeable, clumsy boy she’d had to feed every now and again when he got left behind.
“You’re where you want to be, it’s plain. Ned up for company?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Leave your weapons with me.”
He must have forgotten more than his manners if he thought she’d ever do that. “Who says I’m carrying any?”
“Alice, don’t mess me around.” For a moment, he sounded less belligerent and more like the frightened boy he’d once been, anxious for acceptance and willing to do nearly anything to attain it. “You know I can’t let you in there armed.”
“And you know I’ve always been armed in Ned’s company,” she said gently. “Neither of us is stupid.”
“I can’t.”
“Then he’d best come out.”
After Perry went in to convey this suggestion, Alice only had to wait a moment. With a roar, the windows blew out of the side of the house, scattering glass all over the road, and she was quite sure they could hear the shouting in Santa Fe. She braced herself, wrapping her fingers around the butt of a lightning pistol and thumbing it into life. Beside her, she heard a muffled hum as Evan did the same.
“Alice Chalmers!”
The door was kicked open, and when it bounced back into its frame, Ned Mose shot the hinges out of it. It toppled over flat, revealing the air pirate heaving with rage in the doorway.
“Alice Chalmers!”
He hadn’t changed one iota since she’d left—in fact, he’d been shouting her name, black beard bristling and red with rage, the very last time she’d seen him, as though five years had never passed at all. His mechanical eye wheeled as it attempted to focus on her while he was moving, and his mechanical arm ratcheted in and out as though it couldn’t wait to grab her and choke the life out of her.
“What di
d I tell you about coming back here?” he roared, and let off a shot that whistled past her head.
“Hello, Pa.”
“I ain’t yer pa!”
“All right, Ned, then.”
“Captain Mose!”
Captain of what? It would probably be best not to say anything about the two ships she’d downed on her way in, in case they had made up the entirety of his fleet. “Captain Mose,” she said calmly. “Did you read Lorraine’s note?”
“Of course I read her note, you ninny. D’you think I forgot how to read while you were gone?”
Blam! Another shot, right between her head and Evan’s. To his credit, Evan merely flinched and muffled a squeak. He was clearly made of stronger stuff that met the eye.
“So? What’s your answer?” she persisted as if the potentially fatal interruptions had not happened. “Are you up for a little train robbery?”
“What kind of a question is that after running out for five years, girl?”
“It’s a pretty reasonable question, considering that’s why I’m here. I need a hand and you’re the only man in the Territory that can give it.”
He glared at her, his finger still twitching on the trigger. “So you run out on me, spring my prisoners, steal my ship, and now you’re back for more?” His mechanical eye extruded to its full length of about two inches while the organic one bulged with affront.
“I’m not going to take the train’s cargo, Pa. You’re welcome to it. I just need it stopped and I don’t care how it’s done.”
The pa slipped out again by force of habit. She’d never been one to wheedle, or manipulate, or use her feminine wiles to get what she wanted. Ned Mose respected strength, and even though her stomach jumped and her skin was crawling in anticipation of an answering shot from any one of the houses within range behind them, she didn’t back down.
Backing down would be fatal.
“What’s on it?” The eye retracted a quarter inch, telling her that the pressure on it had eased just a fraction.
“Wonders, Pa.” She leaned in a little, as though to exclude Perry, who was watching with the rifle at the ready, just out of arm’s reach. “They’ve got mechanical horses, and parts for great iron behemoths, and panther-shaped missile launchers of some kind, for attacking a cavalry at speed.”
The organic eye widened. “Mechanical critters? Are you funning me?”
She shook her head, and with the motion, he took in the fact that her hair was braided up like that of a proper lady, not all over the place for want of a pin or a ribbon—or a brush. “They’re all for the Royal Kingdom of Spain and the Californias. There’s men in high places who plan to declare war on the Territory, Pa, and the only thing that stands between them and the deaths of everyone from here to Santa Fe is you.”
“I don’t give a dry fart about Santa Fe.”
“But you do about Resolution. This is your town. Do you want to see it ridden down by mechanical horses, and noblemen in black suits putting up their boots and silver spurs on your table?”
His good eye narrowed. “I ain’t about to allow that.”
“Then you’ve got to help me stop that train. Got any ideas?”
The mechanical eye measured her, and then swung to Perry. “Stand down, boy. You want my stepdaughter to think you ain’t got the manners God gave a goat?”
When Perry lowered the repeater, light glinted in at least three of the windows in the other buildings as the men posted there did the same. Alice wasn’t about to breathe freely, though. They weren’t out of the clouds by a long shot.
“Yeah, I’ve got a few ideas,” he answered gruffly. “But I’m going to need your handy skills to work ’em up.”
She might have known. But better that than being shot out of hand, just for turning up again. She had an idea or two herself, but from long acquaintance with Ned Mose, any plan went more smoothly when he believed it was his own.
“We don’t have much time—a day at the very most. Let’s put our heads together inside.”
CHAPTER 7
T he simplest way to rob a train, as far as Evan could imagine, would be to blow up the track—with dynamite, flash bombs of pyrophoric gunpowder, or by dropping a missile from Swan’s stores on it from the air. Ned was all in favor of the last idea, which represented the least amount of effort on his part and the greatest amount of blame on Alice’s, to Evan’s way of thinking.
But Alice shook her head. “We don’t want it to look like an attack—that’ll just give the Ambassador more reason to invade with the arms that have already been delivered.”
“It would be difficult to make it look like anything else,” Evan pointed out, screwing up his courage to the sticking point and speaking for the first time. “How can one rob a train without attacking it? And how can one stop it when it’s traveling at full speed?”
Alice nodded to acknowledge the logic of his questions, then said, “Pa, when’s the last time the switch at Lizard Arroyo was ever used?”
Ned thought for a moment. “Eighteen seventy-nine? What kind of question is that?”
Alice cocked an eyebrow at Evan in a way that told him she knew perfectly well what kind of question it was—the only doubtful part was whether Ned’s greedy brain would pick up on the course it was clear she was setting for it. “Mr. Douglas, I don’t suppose you noticed on our way in that there’s a rail spur into Resolution.”
“No, I didn’t,” Evan said slowly. He’d been too busy watching air pirates shoot at them.
“At one time our fair town was supposed to rival Santa Fe, but those numbskulls in Houston changed their minds when the line was only partly built, and never finished it. Mostly it’s all blown over by the floods and wind, which is a shame, because—”
Ned banged his mechanical fist on the table. “Enough of your history lesson, girl. That’s what we’ll do—we’ll throw the switch and bring that train into Resolution, where we can pick its bones clean right here at our own table.”
Alice gazed at him in admiration. “Pa! That’s brilliant.”
Evan choked down a huff of laughter. She ought to be treading the boards at Covent Garden.
“Of course it is. You take me for one of them numbskulls down south?”
“I’d never do that. Because you know what will happen? That train will seem to vanish into thin air. Who remembers there’s a switch at Lizard Arroyo? Nobody within a hundred miles except the switchman—if he’s still even there.”
“If he is, he won’t be for long,” the young man she’d called Perry put in from the door, where the other members of Ned’s gang were milling about, craning their necks to see the map spread on the filthy table. “We’ll look after him, won’t we, boys?”
Ned banged the table again. “Ain’t no call for killing, you idiots. This is a job requiring brains and stealth, none of which you got. We’re going to make that train disappear—but to do it, we gotta clear the track at least far enough that the engineer and brakemen don’t suspect they’ve gone wrong until it’s too late to reverse her.”
“And when she doesn’t arrive in Reno on schedule,” Alice went on as though thinking her way through a thicket of difficulties Evan was quite sure she’d already solved, “they’re sure to send a train of their own out this way. No matter how many inquiries they make, as long as there are no witnesses to the switch, there will be no answers for them once we switch it back and cover our trail. And no damaged track or scattered iron to tell tales.”
“That means you boys got work to do,” Ned told them. “Alice, how fast can you modify your old tower to blast the track clean?”
“Two hours,” she said promptly. “With Mr. Douglas’s help. He’s a specialist in that kind of thing.”
Which was a bald-faced lie, but with any luck it would allow them to stay together. Evan had no desire to go anywhere with this rough bunch in case he never came back. And he had no intention of allowing Swan—and its precious cargo—out of his sight for as much as an hour.
As if Ned had detected his very thoughts—now there was a course of scientific inquiry he might pursue, if he survived this voyage—he said, “You got anything on that fancy ship that might help us, girl?”
“Not much other than gasbags and enough steam to fly, Pa,” she said absently, as though it didn’t matter as much as the rail spur she was tracing on the map with her finger. “I can’t afford much more than that. Not like the kind of devices they’ll have on that train.”
“You sure?”
She raised her gaze to his. “Pa, I’m bringing you a train full of more plunder than Resolution has seen in a decade. You can build engines to your heart’s content and even sell some of those mechanicals to buyers in Santa Fe and the Idaho Territory. In fact, if you play your cards right, you might even sell some to the Texican Rangers to defend the border once they figure out there’s going to be an invasion.”
With a bark of laughter, Ned roared his appreciation of the irony.
“So I’ll thank you to not get any rash ideas about my ship. It’s plumb near empty, like I told you, and such as it is, I earned it fair and square.”
“Aw, simmer down, missy, I was only making inquiries. Come on, you lot,” he shouted at the men by the door, making Evan jump. “Perry, take someone who can tell a wrench from his own behind, and go examine that switch. Take grease and some extra bolts. I want it working as well as when it came out of the factory by sundown. The rest of you, grab picks and shovels and see how deep you have to go to dig out that spur.”
The men scattered, and Ned rolled up the map. His mechanical eye swiveled toward Alice.
“You’re being straight with me, ain’t you, missy?” he asked in a tone that made a chill tiptoe up Evan’s spine. “You ain’t got plans to loot that train yourself and leave us to the Rangers?”
Alice shook her head. “Of course not, Pa. I told you. Those men took what wasn’t theirs, and I’m simply giving you an opportunity to right a wrong and make a little profit by it.”
“Don’t seem right.”
“I didn’t think so, either.”
Fields of Air: A steampunk adventure novel (Magnificent Devices Book 10) Page 7
