“I think a military-grade airship will make a dadburned big difference. Now you take Perry and Melvin here, and pull up ropes pronto. If that train’s coming, the boys will go down in the basket and throw the switch. If it’s an ordinary freight, let it go. Either way, I want a report in an hour.”
It was three against eighteen, and Alice was no fool.
“All right, Pa. Jake, Evan, Perry, Melvin, come along.”
“Your passenger stays here.”
“What?” she and Jake said together. Evan’s face was covered in dust, but if it was anything like hers, the color was already draining out of it.
“Call it insurance,” Ned said smugly as two men took Evan by the arms and culled him from the group. “We can have a cup of tea and talk about engine repair—and you won’t be tempted to toss my boys out the hatch and run for the clouds.”
“Let go of me, sirs!” Evan snapped, dodging and kicking with no effect whatsoever. He was outweighed by a good two hundred pounds, and in a moment, he was facedown in the dirt with somebody’s knee in his back.
“Get a move on, missy,” Ned told her. “We’ll take good care of your friend until you get back.”
“What happens then?”
“If we don’t see that pretty blue fuselage on the horizon by then, we shoot him. I don’t want no lollygagging.”
She had no doubt he’d do it. Hatred of this man welled up inside her like the huge waves she’d seen off the coast of the Canadas, in the country where the Na’nuk carved their spirit poles in the mist and where legend lived a little too close to the surface for comfort. If she could have commanded an eagle to stoop from the sky and rip his guts out, she would have done it without hesitation.
He must have seen it in her eyes, for his organic one narrowed. “I said, get a move on. You know I’m a man of my word.”
“I know,” she spat. “When it suits you.”
Here was an almighty conundrum, and as they tramped back along the dry riverbed to Swan, Alice tried to tamp down her rage and fear long enough to work it out. She could only pray that Gloria would have the sense to hide when she saw out the viewing ports that the wrong crew was returning with Alice. On the other hand, they needed Gloria to identify the train. It would do them no good if the next thing along the railroad was some unsuspecting freight out of the Louisiana Territory. She was not about to let Perry and Melvin throw that switch and doom the innocent.
But revealing to Ned Mose that a millionaire heiress was aboard would be fatal. But who else would know one train from another? Certainly not Miss Meredith Aster, passenger of no particular family or consequence.
When the party boarded Swan, she found her lone crewman armed to the teeth and standing on the gangway. His feet apart in classic shooting stance, he held the lightning pistol steady with both small hands, sighting down its flared barrel past Alice’s ear.
“Say the word, Captain.”
She would promote him if she hadn’t just done so. If Evan’s life did not hang in the balance.
“Stand down, Gunner,” she said wearily. “We’re going to spy out that train, and Ned is holding Evan as insurance that we come back with a report.”
“We can come back with two less,” he said, and her heart was pierced with grief at this evidence that her young middy had left childhood behind him forever.
Perry and Melvin exchanged amused glances, and she saw that they had already drawn. If Benny moved, they would cut him down with less effort than swatting a fly.
“Stand down, all of you,” she snapped, and jerked her arm out of Perry’s grip. “We have less than an hour, and a few miles to put under the hull. Mr. Stringfellow, Mr. McTavish, prepare the ship to lift.”
“Aye, Captain.” Jake sounded grim, but she did not miss the brief squeeze of Benny’s shoulder as he passed him on the gangway. It had been bravely done.
Futile, but brave.
“Nice boat,” Perry said with admiration as he followed her to the helm, trailing red dust on the polished floors. “Ned needs to see this.”
“He’s seen as much as he’s going to,” Alice said shortly. “Now go man the ropes. Mr. Stringfellow, are the boilers hot?”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Ignite engines, please. Swan, vanes full vertical.” The familiar vibration hummed in the soles of her boots, and she felt the moment when her ship was ready to take to the air. “Cast off, Perry, Melvin.”
They did so, scrambling back up the gangway as though they thought she’d lift before they were aboard.
“Up ship!”
Swan lifted with silent ease and fell up into the cold sky. Oh, if only Evan were with them! If he were, she could give Perry and Melvin one chance to change their ways, and if they didn’t, she’d tip them into the lake.
But there was no point in daydreaming. Evan was in peril, and goodness only knew where Gloria was, and she absolutely hated feeling like a prisoner again after so many years flying as free as a gull. Because even if they succeeded in stopping the train and Ned looted it right down to its bolts, she knew in her bones he wouldn’t let Swan out of his clutches. The depth of his greed had no bottom, and Swan was too new, too beautiful, too powerful for him to resist.
Alice was going to have to make some hard choices in the hour before sundown. The kind that meant bloodshed. And betrayal.
* * *
GLORIA LAID a hand over her heart, which was pounding half out of her chest with fright. At the sight of the pirates marching Alice and Jake along the riverbed at gunpoint, she had fled to her cabin and locked herself in, and now she had to decide what to do.
For it had finally been borne in upon her that this was no lark, no adventure. Through the speaking horns, she’d heard what Alice had said, about Evan being held as insurance against their return. Because Alice had not allowed Benny to shoot the varmints, it was clear that her concern for their friend was as great as Gloria’s. And she could not be the only one looking ahead to the coming battle, when every man would be needed.
Gloria had gone to her room like a good girl, but someone had to identify the train. Surely Alice must have concluded that as well. But how could Gloria do that without revealing her identity and plunging them into even greater danger? She’d never seen Ned Mose, but his gang’s casual disregard for life was terrifying. What was to stop them from taking Swan, holding Gloria for ransom, and shooting everybody else?
She must not reveal herself.
She crossed to the porthole and gazed down. They were passing over a small lake, and in the distance the sun glinted off the steel rails of the track. The arms and mechanicals were on cars hauled by a shiny new steam locomotive with curving brass trim and an aerodynamic, bullet-shaped front capable of speeds of up to ninety miles per hour. Silver something, its name was. She had seen Jake’s charts, had calculated the time and distance. The train would pass through here soon—twelve cargo cars, two passenger sleeping coaches, and a luxury lounge car given to the Ambassador as a courtesy acknowledging his rank and the amount of money he had spent.
It would be easy to identify from the ground, where one could see the M.A.M.W. badge on the sides, and the silver numbers and sheer style of the front of the locomotive. But from the air? She was probably the only one aboard who could do that, having seen the cars from above in the railroad offices, on the flying bridge over the cargo yards.
She must think.
Swan sailed gently eastward, following the ribbon of track far below. And then Gloria’s stomach clutched as she saw a smudge in the sky, rising from behind a mesa.
“Gentlemen,” Alice voice came through the speaking tube, sounding slightly tinny. “I see a plume. Stand by.”
In moments, the train wound from between two mesas and chugged smoothly onto the flat.
“Swan, decrease altitude three hundred feet.”
The ship, by some miraculous means Gloria didn’t quite understand, obeyed her captain’s command. She felt herself rise onto her toes a little as the de
ck dropped out from under her. Nose pressed against the isinglass of her porthole, Gloria stared anxiously at the train as they approached it from above.
Blast it all, she couldn’t see! There was nothing for it. She was going to have to find a salon with a proper viewing port, not one of these tiny windows only good enough for checking the weather.
Quietly, she unlocked her door and slipped into the corridor. With any luck, the pirates would be with Alice and no one would notice her heading astern, to the engine room.
“Miss!” Benny exclaimed when she stepped over the threshold. “Get back in your room! Do you want them to see you?”
“I am the only one who can identify that train, and I can’t see out of the porthole,” she told him crisply. But at the viewing port, she realized they were still too far up for her to make the identification properly. “We have to go lower. Swan,” she said to the room in general, “decrease altitude by two hundred feet.”
“Oh, the captain’s not going to like that,” Benny said, his eyes wide as the decks obediently dropped once more. “Not one bit. Your voices are too alike.”
It had never occurred to her before to attempt to command the ship. It was Alice’s, and it was clear even her crew believed that its automaton brain would respond only to her. Or possibly to Claire, who had been its co-inventor. Gloria didn’t know whether to be elated or terrified.
“Everything all right astern, Gunner?” came Alice’s inquiry, its tinny quality now augmented with a touch of iron. A loss of altitude like that was not normal, automaton intelligence system notwithstanding.
“All right, Captain,” Benny said, with a glance at Gloria. “We’re just getting a closer view, is all.”
“We, Gunner?”
“Aye. Seem to have picked up a sparrow here, Captain. I’ll set it free as soon as I catch it.”
“Carry on, then, Gunner.”
“She knows it’s you,” Benny said urgently, shoveling coal into the boiler. “She’ll be here in a minute, and them pirates will come too. Have a gander at the train and scoot, Miss, if you value your life.”
Distinctly shaped locomotive, lounge, sleepers, and—yes, twelve cargo cars. And a scarlet caboose, smoke cheerfully issuing from its stovepipe, which had been added somewhere along the line.
“It’s our train,” she said to Benny. And she picked up her skirts in both hands and fled back to her cabin, expecting at every moment to be grabbed from behind.
CHAPTER 9
T heir efforts to clear the spur had turned the windless desert air red—dust, cliffs, scrub pines all glowed as though it were sunset, and dust hung over man and machine, impossible to escape. Evan stood with his captors in an open patch of ground, while Ned Mose watched both horizons, one with each eye. Evan caught his breath so hard he choked on dust, and pointed voicelessly toward the southeast.
“Right on time,” Ned said, with what Evan was sure was disappointment at not having the excuse to shoot him.
Swan was moving at a good clip, and within five minutes she hovered over the rise in the ground where they had first moored her, out beyond the edge of town, and settled onto her ropes.
“Durn fool woman—why didn’t she moor here on the airfield?” Ned hollered, as though she might hear him.
But Evan couldn’t help but think Alice was merely being prudent. The ship was neither out of sight nor out of mind … but she was certainly out of easy reach, and at the moment, that was good enough.
And then Evan saw something that pushed the ship out of his mind altogether. “Look!” he shouted at Ned, and shook himself loose of the hands that held him to point to the south. “Train’s coming!”
The plume of steam from a locomotive rolling down the spur line followed Swan’s arrival so closely that Evan wondered if the two pirates who were to have thrown the switch had even had a chance to fling themselves back in the basket and be winched up again. But no, in the distant dry riverbed came four figures at a dead run—the same four who had left an hour before.
Evan hardly dared hope that Gloria was still safe, still hidden aboard, and that no pirate could get close enough to sully her pristine sleeve by so much as a grain of red dust.
“Get the bomb on that tower and get it moving!” Ned shouted. “Arm yourselves for a fight, boys!”
For a single moment, Evan hesitated. Could he run to Alice and Jake, and the three of them overpower Perry and Melvin? Could they make it to Swan and lift before the train ran off the end of the spur and derailed—and unholy hell broke loose?
In the next, he realized that the calculations he had unconsciously been making as to the train’s imminent arrival were wrong.
No locomotive burst over the rise to crash at full speed into the riverbed, where the last ties of the spur terminated—presumably the rest had washed away in a flood. Instead, the plume rose into the sky at about a tenth of its previous speed, and in a moment it stopped altogether, ascending at the vertical and colored faintly pink with the dust.
“They’ve figured it out!” he shouted to the crowd of men leaping on their cobbled-together machines. He could barely hear himself above the roar of steam engines and the shriek of tortured metal. “They’re going to reverse up the track!”
He did not know whether anyone had heard, but at least one or two had eyes in their heads, Ned Mose first among them. At the top of his lungs, Ned yelled, “Cut them off! Blow up the spur before they reach the main line!”
For no one would know or care that the spur had been damaged, since it had been covered in dirt and rocks for decades. The main line would remain as pristine as ever, and the train’s disappearance just as mysterious … if the pirates could win the race.
Evan was heaved unceremoniously into the back of a wagon bearing the most enormous carousel-shaped gun. It lay in pieces for transport, but that did not make it any less ominous. He had never seen one of Mr. Gatling’s creations—and the actuality was much more frightening than the drawings in magazines could ever be. He gripped the running boards for dear life and tried to keep his balance as the great iron wheels of the conveyance jounced into and out of holes and fissures in the rocky ground. Where were Alice and Jake? In the dust and roar, he could see nothing, only squint against the barrage of small rocks and dirt thrown up by the machines ahead, and try to protect his face with a filthy sleeve.
The wagon seemed to be bringing up the rear, the lighter engines flying along the ground ahead. But Evan could not imagine that any vehicle, no matter how swift, could outrun a locomotive when its crew was motivated by their own danger.
The wagon topped the first rise, the dust cleared a little, and Evan peered into the distance. In a moment, he saw the second error in his calculations: the weight of the cargo in the cars. Slowing the train and then stopping it in order to reverse had taken enormous amounts of energy, to say nothing of time, and until this moment, it appeared that while the train’s crew might have suspected they had taken a wrong turn, they had not suspected it to be life-threatening.
They seemed to know it now.
A huge gout of steam issued from the engine’s raked stack and its dozen wheels began to turn in reverse, pushing more than that number of heavy cars behind itself.
Puff … puff … puff puff … puffpuffpuff …
Evan could just imagine the tenders shoveling coal like madmen, and as if to punctuate their distress, the whistle blew in a long, lonely scream of warning.
A flash of red light silhouetted everything for one hellish moment—train, pirate machines, even scrubby pines—and then Evan’s ears popped a second before he clapped his hands over them and flung himself into the bed of the wagon. The explosion ripped through the air, deafening him and lifting the heavy wagon clean off its wheels for a couple of inches before it thumped to the ground again and knocked the breath from his lungs.
Pressure bomb, his brain told him.
My friends, his heart cried.
As though from a great distance, he heard cheering and the cr
ashing of metal, and when he lifted his head to see the reason for the cacophony, someone hauled him to his feet.
“That’s done it,” the pirate seated in the pilot’s chair shouted with satisfaction. “Look, they’re coming back this way—they think they can make a run for it.” He threw a glance over his shoulder at Evan and his two companions. “Don’t just stand there, you dumb coyotes—assemble that gun!”
He hauled the wagon around and they rolled back down the hill, and soon Evan could see the pirates converging on the trapped locomotive like wolves on the head of a dying beast. There was nowhere for it to go, and as the train screeched to a long, unwilling halt on the last quarter mile of track, men poured from the doors of its coaches, bristling with arms.
They were not going down without a fight.
The wagon driver brought his vehicle to a rocking stop on a promontory, slewing it around so that the bed pointed toward the train. “Good enough,” he said, leaping into the back. “Hurry—they’ll be needing us to lay down cover fire. Hurry, dadblast you!”
Crouching in their pocked, rusting vehicles, the pirates rushed the train, bullets ricocheting off the iron hides. Evan had no idea if they had practiced such a maneuver before, but two men fired round after round at the Californio soldiers while a third maneuvered the vehicle. As Evan worked, fitting bolts into the gun’s legs and putting his back into it as they tilted them into their housing, and then lifted the iron carousel high enough to load, he looked frantically over his shoulder to the battlefield for any sign of Alice’s curly golden hair.
“That’s not how it goes!” His captor smacked him on the side of the head with a leather-gloved hand, and he stumbled. “This plate goes on top of that one.”
“How do you know?” The round plates were toothed, as though multiple plates locked together and caused the carousel to turn, but without a single moment to study them, his mind could not comprehend the assembly just like that.
Fields of Air: A steampunk adventure novel (Magnificent Devices Book 10) Page 9
