The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head

by Cassandra Duffy

  “Fiona,” Carolyn said coolly, “the Ravens appreciate your continued service above and beyond your duties in the elimination of the Hawkins House despite the extreme personal risk.” It was clear from the strange cadence with which she spoke and the formal tone of the language that it was a missive handed-down from a command structure above her. “Your pay will of course continue through your convalescence that will no doubt stretch beyond the coming engagements.”

  Fiona snorted and shook her head. “Like you’d want me on that ride anyway.”

  Carolyn ignored the comment, turning her attention next to Gieo. “McAdams and his key officers are entirely too valuable to send on the current mission. Command of the air group will revert to you. Make any arrangements necessary to accommodate this change.”

  Gieo’s elation was hardly tempered by Fiona’s quickly shouted objection of a very primal, “No!”

  Again, Carolyn ignored Fiona, instead turning her attention to Veronica. “I will be taking the full army group north after we break the Slark air defense line to roll up any further antiaircraft batteries in the area. This should open a large enough gap in their defenses for the return of the air group and hopefully leave a gateway for future incursions into their territory. Once we’ve cleared some space, we will be returning to Las Vegas.”

  “I suppose you’ll be wanting the airships we’ve built too,” Veronica huffed.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Carolyn said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “McAdams and the other top officers are already on their way to Las Vegas to begin building a real air force. Your blimps will be used as reconnaissance scouts for the south.”

  “You don’t mean for me to stay here?” Veronica’s posture changed from practiced nonchalance to visible agitation in the span of her sentence.

  “You will remain in command of this southern observation post until it is deemed unnecessary by Las Vegas,” Carolyn said sternly. “There are still plenty of Slark and marauders coming out of Old Mexico and we need an early warning should a southern push begin.”

  Carolyn was so matter-of-fact, so downright flippant with everyone in the room that Gieo felt like reaching out and slapping the motherly redheaded commander. Glancing from Fiona to Veronica, Gieo assumed they were all in agreement on that position.

  “Thank you for your time, ladies.” Carolyn stood, and with the same business-like approach carried out in her entrance, she quit the room, leaving the three occupants stunned-and-poorly from the news.

  “What just happened?” Gieo asked quietly.

  “We were all just royally fucked, that’s what,” Veronica growled.

  Fiona had slumped left onto the arm of the chair, using her left hand to prop her head up as though it were too great a weight for her neck at the moment. “The war is restarted and we’re not going to be a part of it,” she muttered.

  “What are you talking about?” Gieo said, trying to insert some levity into the conversation. “I’m going to be commanding the squadron for the attack on Bakersfield’s refineries. This is the biggest operation since the cascade. Everyone keeps saying so.”

  “She thinks you’ll fail,” Veronica said. “If she thought this was going to work, if she thought you would live through it, she wouldn’t have pulled McAdams. But even if you do manage to pull it off, she’s planning on putting your dirigibles on a shelf out of the way while she develops a real air force with real pilots.”

  Gieo looked from Veronica to Fiona for confirmation of the assessment. Fiona was only shaking her head in apparent disbelief.

  “We could leave,” Gieo said, trying desperately to shift gears. “You did it before.”

  Fiona sighed. “There are no free cities left except Juarez, and we wouldn’t be welcome there. Anywhere else in Raven territory, we’d just be arrested and hanged for desertion.”

  “That’s insane!” Gieo protested.

  “The Ravens were built on the model of the Solntsevskaya syndicate,” Veronica said flatly. “Insane is their modus operandi.” Veronica returned to her desk and bent over to pull several manila envelopes from one of the bottom drawers, shunning the chair that Carolyn had so recently vacated. “Sadly, for Carolyn, so is backstabbing.” She offered the envelopes to Fiona who took them without question. “Give those to the people named on the outsides with the operation phrase, ‘listen to the wind.’ An affirmative reply will be, ‘under the fire-red sky.’”

  Fiona smirked, rising slowly to her feet with the envelopes tucked under her arm. She gave Veronica a conspiratorial salute.

  “What’s going on?” Gieo asked as if the room had just turned upside down on her.

  “Carolyn is a conniving bitch with an axe to grind against Fiona and me; your crime is keeping lousy company, I suppose.” Veronica explained. “There’s no way I wouldn’t have a plan ready on the off-chance she decided now was a good time to take revenge on the lot of us.”

  Fiona guided a very confused Gieo out of the room with new errands on the itinerary. Back outside, away from potentially prying ears, Gieo leaned in close to Fiona and asked, “What was that all about?”

  “My relationship with Veronica started a little before hers ended with Carolyn,” Fiona explained. With a deep breath, she continued with the part she’d never admitted to anyone. “My relationship with Carolyn ended at almost exactly the same time.” She hoped Gieo wouldn’t view the whole tangled mess as something distasteful or overtly despicable, which, of course, it was both. “Veronica and I were able to watch each others backs fairly effectively afterwards…”

  “Until you left,” Gieo interrupted.

  Another realization Fiona hadn’t even spent time in the same county of—when she’d left Veronica she’d also left her alone with Carolyn’s retribution. “Yes,” Fiona said, the old feelings of being the traitor rebounded onto her. “Regardless, I wouldn’t want to try to match nefarious plans with Veronica. She thinks in terms of years and branching eventualities. Whatever she has in these envelopes was being set up before Carolyn ever boarded a train.”

  “Can we trust Veronica?” Gieo asked.

  “We can trust Veronica to look out for Veronica,” Fiona said. “As luck would have it, we’re directly tied to her in this.”

  “Do you have any other evil ex-girlfriends I should know about?” Gieo asked.

  “These two aren’t enough for you?”

  Gieo laughed and nudged Fiona with her shoulder. “At least I understand now what Veronica meant when she always said she thought you were into breasts,” Gieo said. “Carolyn must have terrible back problems after lugging those melons around her whole life.”

  “Melons,” Fiona rolled the word around her mind and mouth. “Yeah, that’s the word for them. But I’m just as much about personality and yours is definitely the biggest and best I’ve seen.”

  “Flatterer,” Gieo said. “You finish up with the envelopes; I’m going to go get a puppy for Ramen.”

  They kissed briefly and parted company with a promise to meet back at the saloon when their individual errands were completed. Gieo glanced back over her shoulder to the gunfighter as they walked in opposite directions only to find Fiona glancing back to her.

  The reciprocity felt nice.

  Fiona had kept her cool to the best of her ability in the office, but after she exchanged a final glance with Gieo and disappeared around the corner, she was fuming mad and entertaining the notion of burning down the whole operation to keep her lover from the poorly supported mission. It took all the self-control she had to turn left at the end of the street to head for the makeshift airfield rather than go right over to Carolyn’s office and do whatever felt natural, which almost certainly would involve treasonous violence. As sides to be on went though, being on Veronica’s was a good place to be, and Fiona had to trust in her former lover and friend’s cunning as she had so many times in the past.

  When she reached the airfield with the dirigibles and planes about ready to fly, Stephanie came out to greet her. I
t was a true greeting, one of genuine interest and warmth. Fiona produced the envelope with Stephanie’s name on it and all the warmth drained from her.

  “Listen to the wind,” Fiona said.

  “Under a fire-red sky,” Stephanie replied as she took the delivered message. “That’ll be it then.”

  “Are you allowed to tell me what’s in it?” Fiona asked.

  “I don’t see why not. If Veronica thought you’d stab her in the back, she wouldn’t have had you deliver it, and even if someone forces the news from you it’ll be too late.” Stephanie tore the flap from the envelope and dumped a collection of dirigible schematics into her free hand. “We’ve been skimming the salvage from the Slark crawler wreck. It’s supposed to be crated to head back to Las Vegas for Carolyn’s use, but we’ve been warehousing sealed crates full of rocks instead. She’ll see the train off before she heads out on the mission thinking all the salvage was claimed by her to be used by her and McAdams later on when in fact she’ll just be in possession of the world’s largest rock collection.”

  “How could she not know?” Fiona asked.

  “All her people are soldiers. They don’t know anything from salvaging,” Stephanie explained. “All the techs and engineers are loyal to Veronica. Once Carolyn’s soldiers oversaw the protection detail back to the warehouse, our people switched out the goods for rocks and took the real Slark salvage out the back.”

  “Not that I can’t appreciate the joke at Carolyn’s expense, but what does that have to do with the envelopes?”

  “Months ago, when we first started building the dirigibles, Veronica asked Gieo what she would do if she had Slark tech to repurpose. These are the schematics Gieo drew. That’s what our patrols have really been looking for—another big Slark score to build the airships Veronica really wants and Gieo could make nearly invincible.” Stephanie turned the schematics to show Fiona. The drawings and diagrams didn’t mean a thing to her, but they looked sufficiently convoluted and definitely in Gieo’s hand to prove their legitimacy. “Nobody dared hope we’d find a score as rich as the crawler you and Claudia took. When we started pulling pieces, Veronica kept prompting Gieo to update her wish-list.”

  “How did she know Carolyn hadn’t intended to use the Slark salvage for the airships all along?”

  “We didn’t, at first,” Stephanie said, “but when they wanted to start crating it, Veronica had a fairly good idea what was about to happen.”

  “And now…?” Fiona asked, less and less surprised by the foresight in Veronica’s plan.

  “We’ve been planning for this all along,” Stephanie said with a mischievous grin. “It’ll take less than a week to retrofit the Slark tech to the dirigibles and planes. I don’t know what is in the rest of the envelopes or who they’re intended for, but if you deliver them I’m assuming all our bases will be covered.” Stephanie saluted Fiona, turned on her heels, and walked back into the giant tents covering the airship field.

  Fiona walked on with her gimpy leg growing increasingly fatigued and achy, but with four envelopes still to deliver.

  Before the sun set, before she was due to meet back up with Gieo, Fiona was exhausted, her leg was a four-alarm fire, but she had delivered the remaining orders to Claudia, Cork, a Hispanic woman at the pilot compound, and a final missive to a message rider who had clearly been waiting for the drop, riding a prepared horse to the northeast immediately after receiving the package.

  On her way back to the saloon, the pain in Fiona’s leg eased. She was working within one of Veronica’s plans—it warmed her with confidence. Gieo was in front of the building, just off the plank sidewalk, gifting a scrappy, brindle mutt to Ramen, who looked as elated as a rattling little robot could manage.

  It was a weird world, Fiona surmised, but infinitely better for her than the one it replaced. Gieo began walking toward her when Fiona was spotted, but couldn’t hold her pace and eventually jogged, throwing her arms around Fiona’s shoulders. Fiona responded by wrapping her arms around Gieo’s waist to lift her into the hug.

  “I’ll always have your back, lover,” Gieo whispered to her.

  It felt good to have someone say the words and mean them.

  Chapter 27: Oil!

  The work of the week, slow at first with Carolyn and her men still in town, sped to an efficient clip when the Red Queen and her army of military men struck out for the west with the rising sun at their backs. The march of Carolyn’s battalions, even with wagons, a brief train ride, and horses would be long, arduous, and would be taken slowly to leave them fresh for fighting when they hit the teeth of the line Gieo had mapped through her many failed flights. With the town clear of all but those loyal to Veronica or Fiona, the Slark salvage came out of its various hiding places mapped by Cork to make its way onto the makeshift fleet. The handful of pilots from Colorado, spurned by McAdams and the Raven command, quickly saw the truth of their situation and threw their lot in with Veronica’s plan as their best hope for survival. Many still believed McAdams couldn’t possibly have known about Carolyn’s treachery before his departure to Las Vegas; Gieo agreed with their assessment of the man, but she secretly wondered what he might have been offered. Regardless, her vow to Charlotte to bring her husband home safely was on his own head now.

  The airships, which had once looked flimsy and ill-conceived, blossomed into full-blown weapons of war with the addition of the Slark armor, armaments, and structural support. Turning their former technical superiority back against them seemed like lovely poetic justice to Gieo as she surveyed the complete sky armada of three airships and seven planes. Each of the smaller dirigibles could launch two modified crop dusters while the biggest monster, the one she would pilot, boasted three biplanes in accompaniment.

  “I’m not one for worrying about others,” Fiona said, stepping beside Gieo on the scaffolding around the airship field with its now open top.

  “No, you seem to like making people worry far more,” Gieo replied. She leaned against Fiona’s shoulder with her arms still crossed over her chest. “Ramen would like you to take care of his puppy while we’re away.”

  “What did he end up naming it?” Fiona asked.

  “Shrimp Ramen,” Gieo said. “To be honest I’m surprised he even managed to come up with that. Programming creativity into an AI is nearly impossible.”

  “You seem to excel at impossible,” Fiona replied, wrapping her arms around the diminutive pilot. “If you don’t come back, I will come looking for you.”

  “That’ll show me,” Gieo said.

  The rest of the afternoon and evening continued with preparations. Gieo angled for Fiona to take her home for a little going away fun, but Fiona flatly refused, demanding they wait until after Gieo came back.

  As Gieo was set to board the largest of the dirigibles for their departure, Fiona gifted her with the shifting knob from her car, promising it had luck in it. Gieo barely managed to hold back tears when she leaned down from the access ladder to kiss the lanky gunfighter goodbye.

  Once inside the cockpit of the Big Daddy as it had come to be known, Gieo hooked herself into the various pulleys and gyroscopes necessary to fly the dirigible effectively. The knob to lower the weapon systems into place was a thread match for the knob Fiona had given her. She replaced the blank black ball with the silver skull from Fiona’s old car.

  The airships lifted off into the inky night sky atop the cheers of the collected throng of Tombstone residents. Their proscribed course and pace would put them at the Slark line the following morning, 10 AM if all went well, when the sun would be at their backs and their ships difficult to find in the light. Gieo turned the three dirigible squadron to the northwest in a slow, droning arc.