The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head

by Cassandra Duffy

  Fiona stood by, holding Shrimp Ramen idly against her chest, watching her lover go off to war, hating herself as much as anything for all the times she put Gieo through what she was experiencing in that moment.

  Gieo had heard pilots were a cocky breed, and the handful of gunners and pilots she was taking with her on the Big Daddy certainly fit that description. Some were the Colorado military men and some were Raven trainees—regardless, they all saw themselves as a breed apart, one meant to rain fire from the sky onto lesser beings. Seeing the dust of Carolyn’s column nearing where Gieo knew the Slark line to be, she figured they were about to find out what kind of pilots they truly were. It was the same antiaircraft battery position she’d assaulted in the spring when Fiona had come to her rescue after being shot down. There was symmetry to the whole thing that felt fated.

  The dirigible formation slowed to wait for the ground force to make their assault. It wasn’t a sneak attack as the dust cloud from the marching column could be seen for miles and the blimps, though difficult to spot when backlit could clearly be heard, but rather it was an overwhelming force with air support. Even from the great height and distance, Gieo could make out the streaking trails of rocket propelled grenades being launched by Carolyn’s two battalions. The fight was over quickly. The soldiers fanned out, rolling back the Slark defenses, and then just as easily detonating the antiaircraft weapons with loud popping explosions. The radio crackled with a soldier’s voice, letting Gieo know the gates were open.

  She kept her formation tight, dove low, and pushed the three dirigibles to their top speeds as she shot through the opening created so easily by 2,000 human soldiers obliterating fifty or so Slark spread over half-a-dozen emplacements they believed were well-kept secrets. The support force, the overwhelming majority that was to push back the 2,000 humans would take awhile to muster, but was undoubtedly on the way. This was the reason for the low approach, and Gieo, once on the other side of the battery she had once assaulted alone, spotted a second column of dust and exhaust on the horizon of the counterattack to be made by the Slark. She turned her formation on an intercept course.

  The Slark, who had long forgotten what human air power might be capable of, and who had never seen the likes of the Slark technology laden airships, stopped in their tracks to gawk at the encroaching blimps rather than scatter for cover. Gieo cranked the alarm handle above her head and to the right, letting her gunners know they were up. She grasped the silver skull knob gifted by Fiona, and pulled it down, dropping the main weapon systems into place along the sides of the dirigible’s carriage. The Big Daddy had its big hammer out to do some big smashing, Gieo thought with no small trill of joy running through her stomach.

  Fire from the various weapon pods along the flanks of the airships rippled through the hull as all gunners found target and range on the unsuspecting Slark column. Explosions from high-impact shells set off a cascade of secondary explosions as the minor crawlers took several direct hits. The high-pitched whine of Gatling guns followed, peppering the desert floor with tens of thousands of rounds, obliterating the Slark foot soldiers where they stood. Gieo sighted in along the center of the column, bringing the Big Daddy in low, and released the payload of cluster bombs specifically intended for the purpose. The grape-bunch bomblings dropped from the belly of the great airship in a slow hale, suddenly breaking up by shaped charges in the center of the bundles to spread the baseball-sized phosphorus bombs out to cut a white, fiery swath of destruction. What remained on the periphery was easily mopped up by the Little Monster and the Hard-Paw flanking the larger airship.

  “The board is clear, Red Rovers,” Gieo said into the cone of the radio receiver by her head. “We’re on route to target.”

  “Good luck, Big Daddy,” the ground forces replied.

  It would be close to nightfall by the time they reached Bakersfield and they would have no such ground support or advantage of the sun at their back when they attacked the refineries that fueled the Slark war machine. Regardless, Gieo felt confident the element of surprise would remain theirs, and the fields would be ripe for the picking. She recalculated her fuel consumption, gained altitude, and returned to the proscribed course she’d laid out that would weave around any possible population centers.

  “If you want to catch some sleep, I can wake you if needs be, boss,” Ramen’s voice crackled down the wire. He was in a far more protected encasement in the nose cone than he’d ever been with far more control over the systems on the ship than ever before. As unique advantages went, Gieo was glad she’d spent the years to develop such a friend and partner in crime.

  “I think I’ll do just that,” Gieo said, fairly certain she wouldn’t be able to sleep even if she wanted to despite not having slept in more than twenty hours. Pulling herself up into the cocoon, a similar mummy-style sleeping compartment to the ones on space stations, which was added to the design by McAdams and his crew, she found herself lulled into a gentle slumber by the thrumming of the airship as it winged its way toward the final target. If all went according to plan, the trip including the turnaround, would only take two days, but it was made abundantly clear to her by the military men that 24 hours of sleep deprivation significantly impaired a pilot’s capabilities. Ramen dissembled the order through the tiny air formation to put the pilots to bed.

  Gieo dreamed deeply of flying among the clouds free of an airship or wings, dancing atop the moonlit mountains of the sky, unable to see the ground through the cloud cover below her feet, and an ocean of stars above her. The serenity of the dream was shattered before she could even truly process the splendor created by her subconscious.

  “…2% theory applies to both sides!” Ramen was screaming to her.

  She was already dropped back out of the armored core of the ship into her pilot’s sling, given precious little time to hook back into the necessary apparatuses. Her hands were slowed by the lingering remnants of sleep. It took her a moment to realize what Ramen was saying. She’d had a theory that the cascade only boasted a 98% effective rate, leaving 2% of the world’s technology reset, turned off, visually no different from that which was destroyed, but still functional with a new power source. Size and complexity appeared to amplify the cascade’s effect, as was probably the intention, but she didn’t know for certain until that moment that the Slark had found ways around this hypothesis just as she had.

  Well before the target zone, lumbering out of the ruins of Edwards Air Force Base in defense of the Bakersfield oil fields and refineries, was one of the colossal crawlers favored by the Slark for city obliteration. There was something profoundly off about the fifty-story tall weapon platform. It was belching diesel smog and lacked the sprightly quickness she remembered them having.

  “We have to launch the fighters, sky-captain,” the commander of the Little Monster said across the short-wave radio.

  “If we launch them too early, we won’t have them for the oil fields,” Gieo replied.

  “If we don’t launch them, we won’t make it to the oil fields,” the Hard-Paw captain replied.

  “Both of you launch yours,” Gieo said. “I’ll hold mine in reserve until we need them. We may not find a landing zone between here and Bakersfield to re-mount them though, so they should make for the rally point at Red Rock Canyon once they’ve spent their payloads.”

  The green lights on the copper-plated dashboard let Gieo know the captains were both in an understanding of the changed plan. The tell-tale hum of airplane engines filled the air as the four fighters descended from their holds on the escort dirigibles.

  “Look how slow it is. We can go around, boss,” Ramen said. “We don’t have to fight this thing.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Gieo asked with a triumphant tone. “Let’s show this thing the teeth of our new airship and send a real message to the Slark.” She ran the wings out, diverted power to the main thrusters, and rolled the airship into attack formation, eyes set on the target of the crawler’s forelegs. She’d seen how some
one had taken down the smaller crawler their salvage came from, and had a good feeling it would work even better on one of the biggest in their arsenal.

  Gieo painted the shoulder joints on the arachnid legs along the front with a laser sight. The gunners let fly with everything they had, putting the full weight of their fire on the tiny red dot of light beamed down from the nose of the Big Daddy. The fighters made their first pass along the top of the crawler, striking at a dive, and releasing their payloads into what was widely agreed to be the weakest part of the crawlers. There appeared to be no appreciable effect, although the retaliation fire from the crawler was far too slow to catch up to even the slowest of the four modified crop dusters. Without Slark fuel to run, it appeared the goliath crawler was a shadow of its former self, but Gieo figured that left them about even considering modified crop dusters were hardly F-22 Raptors.

  Targeting lasers, which required a completed circuit to fire, painted all three airships on the first pass. Gieo could only imagine the shock and dismay of the Slark crawler captain when the lasers refused to fire. The Slark armor plating prevented closing of the firing circuit, which made friendly fire incidents between Slark technology impossible; apparently the U.S. military had worked tirelessly before the cascade to try to unlock a way to armor human machines in a similar way, but could never work out what element the Slark used. Gieo rightly figured out Slark armor contained metal not present on Earth, likely by design. Putting together what she knew with what McAdams knew, and it was an easy jump for her to hypothesize that the Slark beam weapons, the most feared among the Air Force pilots as they required no traditional lock-on, no flight of a missile, hit with unerring accuracy even when fired at supersonic jets, and had near infinite range, would not work on the thunderously slow dirigibles if armored with Slark salvage.

  The first pass crippled the front leg, but failed to break it free. Gieo knew they wouldn’t make the mistake on the second pass of trying the beam weapons again. The fighters covered their long turnaround for a return trip, still unable to do any real damage to the crawler, but more than capable of drawing clumsy fire away from the drifting airships.

  On the second pass, Gieo lit up the target again, directing all fire from all three dirigibles onto the already damaged leg. The crawler had ground to a halt, no longer able to pull the wounded limb up despite obvious attempts to. Gieo knew the salvaged diesel engines they were using, likely robbed from trains, couldn’t boast anywhere near the torque of a Slark engine; what might have been a minor setback before the cascade was apparently a debilitating wound with the inferior human technology powering the crawler. Their fire found its mark, but so too did the Slark retaliation. Rockets, provincial and not too dissimilar from human designs, which were hardly used by the Slark in the first contact war, struck home on the Hard-Paw. The airship floundered, listed to the starboard side away from the formation, caught fire, and descended to the quickly darkening eastern desert.

  “Fighter formations alpha and beta, forget the cover for us,” Gieo shouted into the microphone cone, “go cover the crash site against recon crawlers.”

  The planes broke formation, circled back on their path, and pushed hard to keep up with the already dwindling fire of the descending airship.

  Gieo pressed the attack still, coming in close enough to use knives, wishing desperately that she had included a weapon for herself, but trusting in her gunners to finish what they’d started. Relief and elation washed over her when she saw the leg pull free, broken on too many moorings, and finally dropping from the crawler like a felled tree. They pulled away with the clangs and knocks of solid fire weapons bouncing off their armor. The Big Daddy drew most of the fire along its armored underside, deflecting all attempts with a shrug and a puff from its great bellows.

  Gieo couldn’t see the crawler’s tumble. Her focus was on the sky above, gaining altitude, but she heard it, suspected people in Tombstone probably heard it. The sound was unlike anything she could even have imagined. The crawler went over face-first and sounded for all the world like a thunderstorm comprised entirely of cars loosing its fury on rocky ground. The creak and whine of metal failing compounded hundreds of times over only being broken up by the hollow drums of minor explosions.

  “Do we finish them off?” the captain of Little Monster asked.

  “Not a chance,” Gieo replied. “We’ve knocked them down and lost more than we could afford in the process. Continue to target and let them choke on their defeat.”

  The high of victory hadn’t remotely worn off the crews of either of the remaining airships. Their jubilation was tempered only by the loss of a third of their squadron and the unknown fate of the four fighter pilots who had left to ensure their possible safety. Only after the completion of their mission could they even consider searching deep behind enemy lines for survivors.

  Bakersfield had suffered greatly during the war not only for its proximity to the Air Force base, but also because of the concentration of oil refineries it boasted. Only two refineries remained intact and the Slark had apparently made good use of both. The hellish red light of dusk, tainted by the smog put out by the inefficient fuel refining process completed by the inexact hands of the Slark, guided the airships in for the attack on the major production plants of diesel fuel. Gieo could see the Slark scrambling below, but heard no air raid chirping that served as the Slark’s audible warning signal, nor did the popping of antiaircraft shells greet them. The goliath crawler had been the first, last, and only defense of their oil production and processing with the estimation it would be more than enough. They descended upon the Slark as Gieo had suspected they would—unlikely conquerors flying improbable ships to attack an impossible target once guarded by a nearly godly defender.

  Gieo launched her remaining three biplane fighters and watched the conflagration begin. The Bakersfield refineries, likely the only source of diesel available to the Slark outside of the weak Los Angeles production centers, dissolved under the withering fire put out by the streaking biplanes. Explosions rippled across the landscape, plumes of flame reached into the sky to shocking heights, and the Slark fled their barely understood fuel plants like rats from sinking ships. Gieo watched this all from a safe height, waiting in a holding pattern in a ship of her own design, satisfied that she’d finally finished what she’d labored for years to accomplish.

  “Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools,” Gieo whispered to herself, quoting another unlikely diminutive military leader who had dared, like her, to take on the world.

  Chapter 28: A final betrayal before the storm.

  Fiona’s time without Gieo was spent sick with worry until she found some consolation in the bottom of a bottle. Mitch was happy to pour for her while Bond-O was happy to keep Shrimp Ramen busy with kitchen scraps and wrestling gentle enough for a puppy.

  Trouble boasted a smell for all the initiated warriors of the world; this scent of impending turmoil came rolling in, chasing the setting sun, as the bats were taking wing for their dusk feeding. Fiona could feel it like the heavy air before a storm and it brought her senses back from the brink of tequila oblivion. She was up on her feet before she even heard the first engine. The handful of hunters and Ravens in the saloon found their feet as well, practically sniffing the air like wolves on the hunt. Engine noises rang through the encroaching darkness.

  Armed and ready, Colt in hand, Fiona made her way to the front windows in time to see the first of the motorcycles tear through the empty streets. They weren’t hunters looking for Slark heads; they were marauders in search of more complete prey. Before Fiona could stop him, Cork was out the front door of the saloon, wading into the midst of the invading bikers. Fiona moved to back his play, moved to pull him from the fire as he had pulled her in the assault on the Hawkins House, but held at the threshold of the still swinging doors. They knew him, stopped to speak with him, and let him pass unmolested, out of sight in the direction they’d come, on what were obviously important errand
s. The betrayal stung Fiona initially, followed quickly by blinding rage.

  Her anger was quickly interrupted by the sound of rifle fire as the bikers got their first taste of Raven tenacity. They had no doubt come seeking women, beautiful, supple, young, and scarce in the desert, but had found the Ravens weren’t easily captured or exploited, not when they had guns so close to defend themselves. Fiona turned to find the remaining four hunters in the saloon less focused on the boiling war in the streets but almost entirely engrossed in what she was doing.

  “Cork says not to hurt you,” one of the men said.

  “Sit it out, have another drink and we’ll all just wait for the firing to stop,” another continued.