“I done this once before, to show Ned when we brought it in.”
“You mean you’ve never fired it?”
“I’m firing it now—and you’ll be my practice shot if you don’t get your sorry behind up here to hold this!”
On the great brass central cap of the carousel were engraved the initials M.A.M.W. Dust and scratches marred them, but there was no mistaking the manufacturer. The whole world, it seemed, had been armed by Gloria’s father. No wonder she wanted nothing to do with it. What kind of legacy was that to leave one’s children?
Evan heard a scream as, directly below, a pirate was knocked out of the pilot’s chair of his vehicle. It careened on its iron wheels straight into another one, and both overturned, flinging men to the ground. A mercenary crouched in the door of one of the cargo cars picked them off like a chicken picks spiders off a wall, with ruthless efficiency, before being shot himself and tumbling in slow motion out onto the track.
Evan focused his mind and redoubled his efforts to assemble the gearworks that turned the carousel of the mighty gun. Should he be glad the pirate numbers were down by four? Or should the fear he was barely keeping under control be all in anticipation of capture and execution by the Californio forces? At least if the pirates proved victorious, they were a devil he knew. If the Californios won, what would they do, with a disabled train and no track to run it on, stranded out here in outlaw country with no means of finding help?
No means … except for Swan.
* * *
TRAPPED in the navigation gondola with Benny, Gloria pressed her nose to the isinglass to watch the battle as best she could. They could not make out faces, but they could see the vehicles clearly, snarling and feinting as the pirates attempted to get close enough to some part of the train to board it.
She didn’t even see the wagon with the big Gatling carousel until Benny grabbed her sleeve and exclaimed, “Miss! Look at the size of it!” She followed his shaking finger up to the promontory not a quarter of a mile away, where four men wrestled the gun into position.
“Why, that looks like one of—”
A puff of smoke issued from it, and one of the men was thrown backward, off the wagon, cartwheeling over the pilot’s brace to the ground.
He did not get up.
Benny gasped. “It shot him! What are they doing?”
She snatched up the telescoping spyglass and focused on the gun. Yes, it was one of theirs—a Model CG-36, which meant it had three tiers of twelve cartridges each in the carousel. Each cartridge contained a dozen lethal projectiles that would detonate in secondary explosions on contact with the target, increasing the destruction for a distance of—
She cried out in horror as a familiar figure became clear in her field of view. “Benny, it’s Evan! They’re dragging him back into the wagon. If they make him operate that gun—and they haven’t assembled it correctly—no, they mustn’t—” She flung the spy glass at him and fled down the corridor to the crew’s quarters.
A jacket—leather, sturdy—would offer her some protection while it obscured her form. She tore off her skirt and yanked on the first pair of canvas pants that came to hand—Jake’s. She hoped he wouldn’t begrudge them. She stuffed her lightning pistols into the pockets.
She bundled her hair up into an aeronaut’s cap and pulled the goggles down over her eyes. They were so big they rested on her cheekbones, but that was all to the good. Her corset was already concealing her identity papers and several gold coins, and a gold locket with her mother’s likeness inside lay under the shirt she buttoned with hasty fingers. There wasn’t time to leave any of it—she had to save Evan from his companion’s fate.
“Miss, no, come back!” Benny shouted as she dashed for the gangway.
“Evan’s going to be killed if I don’t fix that gun!”
She plunged down the boarding ramp and remembered too late that Swan hung some ten feet off the ground, so that Benny could maneuver the underbelly guns. At the last second she grabbed the rope handrail and her own momentum swung her feet out into space.
When she swung back to the vertical, she let go and dropped ungracefully to the ground, landing flat on her posterior. She scrambled up and took off at a dead run for the gun in the distance, where she could already see Evan’s unwilling form being pushed into the gunner’s brace.
CHAPTER 10
T he locomotive was the most beautiful Alice had ever seen. Steam curled up from its three raked stacks and leaked out from between its six pairs of wheels, and the sun glinted off its brass trim and smooth blue-gray snout. Silver Wind, it said on the side. Why had Gloria not told them? Blowing it up would be like shooting an eagle, or harpooning a goddess whale.
If Alice had known she was to be the instrument of its destruction, she’d have found another way. Dadburn it, they could have dropped Perry and Melvin out of the basket on top of one of the moving cars and had the coupling pins out and the cargo cars sitting pretty while the locomotive went safely on its way.
No matter how you sliced it, though, the mercenaries would have noticed eventually and they’d still have a fight on their hands.
Her poor old tower had been blown to bits by the pressure bomb, having been sent rumbling to its doom with the acceleration bars tied in place. The train couldn’t go back to the main line, and its engineer had been brave or foolish enough to make a run for it, not seeing the spur wasn’t finished until it was almost too late.
And here came the mercenaries out to defend it, big as life and bent on death. Perry brought the steam chariot to a skidding halt and tossed her a carbine. A Colt. Not too many years old, either. “Get behind the machine!” he shouted. “Use it for cover.”
“How are we going to fall back if they’re too much for us?” If the boiler were punctured by a bullet, the chariot would be about as useful as a rock for getting away.
“Fall back to where?” Melvin demanded, lying flat and shouldering his rifle. “There ain’t no fallback, missy, resign yourself to that.”
She’d do no such thing.
Jake flung himself down beside her. “The minute we can, we cut and run,” she told him under the blast of the guns.
“What about Evan?”
Here was the hard decision—the one that meant betrayal. “Don’t know where he is. We’ve got to get our little sparrow out of here. Our job is done. What happens to all this is none of our nevermind.”
Jake frowned as he sighted down the barrel of his gun and fired. Across the gully, a mercenary spun and fell. “That’s hard, Captain. He’s a good sort. Won’t last a day if we leave him.”
“He’s a scientist. Whichever side wins, they’ll find a use for him, which will keep him alive until we can get the sparrow to her nest and come back.”
“What’s that, missy?” Melvin hollered down from his position standing behind the bulk of the machine. “You ain’t falling back from here, I told you.”
She racked a shell, appreciating the smooth pump action of the Colt. Ned had wrecked someone who knew his guns. “I said, someone has to watch our backs in case they circle around. I ain’t got eyes in the back of my head like some people.”
“They won’t. The boys got the Gatling gun fixed up. Any minute now they’ll start mopping up these Californio fancypants.”
Any minute now.
But with every passing minute the dust got thicker, the sound of explosions more deafening, and the screams of dying men more horrible. And then a shout went up.
Alice, lying on her belly firing as fast as she could load, felt the earth tremble as though a huge rock had broken away from the mesa and plummeted to earth.
For a moment, everything went still, and the breeze blew the dust and smoke away to the east.
The earth shook again, and Jake whimpered. Jake, who to her knowledge had never been afraid of anything except disappointing Claire.
His eyes widened until the whites showed, and standing above them, Melvin croaked, “HolyMaryMotherofGodbewithusnow.�
��
Slowly, Alice turned her head to follow their line of sight.
Towering above the scattering mercenaries and the Californio Ambassador’s escort was something out of a nightmare. Even in her craziest absinthe-ridden dreams from the hard years, Alice would never have thought this up—it had to have come from the mind of someone well acquainted with hell. The massive mechanical was the size of a manor house—nearly as tall as the tower at Hollys Park. It might have been shaped like a man, if a man had been hulked over, head lowered like a bull’s and a pilot’s housing embedded in it. Thick, articulated iron legs with steam-powered pistons and feet as big as her tower’s locomotive base shook the earth with every step … and its arms were not arms at all. One appeared to be a rotating gun, and the other a cannon. Viewing ports in its chest showed glimpses of its crew, frantically busy with levers and wheels so that the thing might move forward and shoot without overbalancing.
“HolyMaryMotherofGod—”
How had they assembled it so quickly? Or did it simply fold up, ready to be activated when needed? But there was no time to speculate. Behind it, the Californio troops regrouped, and the behemoth began to fire on the pirates’ machines as it advanced.
Somewhere off to their right, Alice heard Ned scream, “Where in tarnation is my Gatling gun? By heaven, I’ll have your heads!”
Unfortunately, heaven was a long, long way away.
* * *
THE MEN at Ned’s stolen Gatling gun had frozen in horror as their minds attempted to make sense of what they had never seen or imagined. Evan felt his insides loosen, and fought to control his body’s perfectly sensible instinct to flee. For there was nowhere to go—except up into the gunner’s brace of a machine that had already killed a man.
There was a rush of movement beside him, and a voice shouted, “You’ve got the turning plates in upside down, you idiots! You there—get down and help me!”
If he had been afraid before, it was nothing compared to the sheer cold terror that engulfed him now as he recognized the voice of the boyish figure wrenching at the clamps of the carousel assembly. Goggles covered her face, but there was no mistaking the porcelain skin or the delicate fingers that made a ludicrous contrast with the dirty iron and brass of the gun.
“Who in the Sam Hill are you?” one of the pirates snapped. “And what do you mean, upside down?”
“That’s why it’s turning backward, you stupid fool,” she shouted. “Why that poor fellow was shot. Help me!”
Two of them lifted the cartridge carousel off while Gloria wrenched at the plates, turning them over and re-ordering them. Suddenly the mechanism that had seemed so stiff and unwilling before began to turn with all the smoothness of superior engineering, and the mathematics of it clicked into place in Evan’s mind.
Of course. The bottom set of plates and cogs turned about the central shaft, with a set of transfer gears between them and the plate that moved the carousel. Three sets of moving parts comprised the head of a gun that was practically all that stood between them and imminent annihilation.
Gloria leaped into the gunner’s brace and flipped two levers forward and one back. Evan did not wish to speculate on how a young lady who belonged in a drawing room pouring tea could possibly know how to operate a killing machine of this size.
“What in the—get away from there!” The pirate who had been driving the wagon had finally found his tongue.
But Gloria ignored him. Instead, she took hold of the guidance posts and lined up the sights to accommodate her smaller form. Evan watched her mouth settle into grim concentration as though he were watching a flicker—a moving picture of someone he hardly recognized.
Whom he did not know.
Then a cartridge clicked into place and she fired.
The missile flew across the flat where the battle raged, emitting fire as it went, and exploded on contact with the behemoth’s gargantuan body. Like a Roman candle, secondary explosions went off all around the impact point, bullets pinging off the behemoth’s arms and legs. The arm containing the cannon halted in mid-aim. Dropped. Rose again, halting in the same place.
The secondary shot had got into the gears and they’d seized up.
The pirates cheered, and cut off abruptly when the second arm rose and took aim.
Gloria fired again—and again—and the Californio forces seemed to realize their danger. They heard a sound almost like a trumpet and the behemoth turned its impassive isinglass face in their direction, where they’d thought they were safe up on their promontory. Evan squinted to see a bugler—of all the antiquated things—beside an elegant man standing in the door of a luxury car directly behind the locomotive. Wearing a black suit of clothes with a short jacket and silver brooches running down the sides of his snug pants, the man clung to the brass railing of the stair, waving commands with his free arm that the bugler translated into sound. Evan had not met him during his stay in Philadelphia, but this could only be the Ambassador.
Each side was down to only a few men, but the behemoth was sure to turn the tide.
“They’re running!” screamed Ned Mose below them to his decimated gang. “After them! It can’t turn fast enough!”
Gloria hauled on the wheel to fire the gun at the behemoth and give Ned some cover. Once again, the explosions peppered the thing, but its carapace seemed even harder than iron. Even the double-acting missiles did not penetrate it. Shells fell sparkling to the ground, only doing damage when they worked their way by accident into the piston mechanisms that made the thing walk.
And it was walking inexorably toward them.
* * *
ALICE COULD SEE through a grindstone with a hole in it. “We’re outgunned,” she said to Jake, flat on her belly as the two of them fired round after round at the mercenaries from behind the lifeless hulk of their machine. “There’s no beating that thing. Ned is just too stubborn to see it.”
Jake glanced at the body of Melvin, who had been hit by one of the Gatling gun’s secondary bullets ricocheting off the behemoth’s body, and died before he’d hit the ground. The same flurry of gunfire had put paid to their steam engine. “Time to fall back.”
Three pirate machines remained of the crowd of more than a dozen snarling, jury-rigged crates that had originally roared into battle. The mercenaries hadn’t fared much better. Bodies littered the ground, but the Ambassador and his bodyguard were still holed up in the train, using its iron bulk for protection. They had the advantage, for unless someone could circle around behind the train and board it, they could sit in comfort and the behemoth’s protected crew would pick off anyone who approached.
Except it was heading for the big Gatling gun on the ridge, where its crew had finally gotten itself together and started firing the thing. Even now it hadn’t given up, clearly going for disabling the legs instead of fruitlessly bombing the giant body.
“We could try to board the train,” Alice said.
“And be shot by the men on it?” Jake shook his head. “Time to cut our losses and do as you said before Ned notices we’re gone.”
“That Gatling gun could shoot Swan out of the sky. Whoever is manning it knows what he’s doing.”
“We’ll take our chances.” Jake’s tone was bitter. “Better that than dying here in the dirt with a Californio’s boots in my face.”
“Or Ned’s.”
“Aye. Or his. Again.”
She plucked a sack of shells from the tilted floor of the chariot, and tucked the Colt carbine under her arm. “All right, then. Head for that pile of rocks, then over the bank of the arroyo to the riverbed.”
They scrambled to their feet and, heads low, began to run. Behind them, someone screamed and Alice threw a glance over her shoulder, expecting to see a man go down.
Instead, she saw Ned Mose in a cloud of dust, riding his chariot into the dirt as it died under him. “Alice!” he roared. “Git over here and cover me!”
Ducking lower, she ran for the rocks as though the hounds of hell wer
e after her. A few more yards—
“Alice, you yellow-bellied whelp of a whore! Where are you going?”
Just a few more and she’d be safely out of range—
“Alice!” he bawled, crimson with rage. He hefted his rifle—
—just a few—
The bullet slammed into her and spun her clean off her feet. She landed flat on her back, her head caught a rock, and she lay there, stunned.
“Captain!” Jake scrambled toward her on all fours—at least, she hoped it was Jake. She couldn’t seem to move her head.
“Don’t you run out on me!” Ned bellowed.
Alice couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe as the pain swamped her. But she heard Jake rack a shell into her Colt carbine. She heard the bark of the rifle.
Another scream.
Rack. Fire.
So many screams. So much death.
And then the dark closed in and took her to hell with it.
CHAPTER 11
Gloria didn’t let up on her attack on the behemoth. The carousel clicked into firing position time after time as she emptied the first layer of cartridges into it, and when she threw the next lever up to drop the second layer into place, she took out a squadron of four men in black uniforms sneaking up on a pirate chariot for good measure.
She was fed up to here with being discounted and hidden away and treated like a Dresden shepherdess when by George, she had knowledge that could help, and the skill to put it into action.
“Boy!” Evan shouted up at her. “It’s no use—we’ve got to fall back!”
“No!” she shrieked over the roar of the gun. “I can do it—just give me time!”
But they had run out of time. The behemoth raised the arm containing the cannon and for one frozen second, she looked straight into the eyes of the gunner in his isinglass chamber. He touched the brim of his black cap in acknowledgement of her ability, and then lowered it to grip the firing lever.
Fields of Air: A steampunk adventure novel (Magnificent Devices Book 10) Page 10
