Fields of Iron: A steampunk adventure novel

by Adina, Shelley

  “And you know that cannon?” Barney said. “Can you fire it?”

  “Of course. But since I will be in the behemoth, the point is moot.”

  “But you could tell me, and I could fire it.”

  “Certainly.”

  Barney let out a sigh and the tension left his body. “Well, of all things, to be locked in a gaol halfway across the world with the one person who has ever got their hands on a pressure cannon…” He glanced up. “It was destroyed, you know. Somehow in that lightning storm that killed de Maupassant. Melted past all recognition—and past all scientific ability to reverse engineer it.”

  Now it was Evan’s turn to straighten and feel his muscles pulling tight with tension. “How do you know that?” he whispered. “There are not six people in the world who know that.”

  “He is dead?” Dutch demanded. “De Maupassant? Are you sure?”

  “Of course I am sure. I saw the body … afterward. Between the lightning bolt and the fall from the castle roof … most definitely dead.”

  “We are talking about the same Charles de Maupassant—business leader, investor?” Dutch said.

  “Also known as Seacombe. The very one,” Barney told him. “Were you acquainted with him, too?”

  Dutch passed a shaking hand over his forehead. “Why cannot I remember? Only a flash of recognition of his name—and revulsion—and elation at the news that he is dead. I knew him, but I cannot tell you where we met, or even what he looked like. It is like knowing someone about whom you’ve read in a novel. Oh, it is maddening.” Now he pressed both hands to his face.

  “If you’re finished catching up on old friends,” Joe put in harshly, “can we get back to el Gigante?”

  “I would rather get back to Barney, here, and what he said about de Maupassant’s cannon,” Evan said. “Tell me how you knew it was destroyed.”

  Barney sighed. “It was my business to know.” He paused, and seemed to make up his mind to something. “The business of espionage. Gentlemen, we have become friends, and since we are all in the same boat, with greater things ahead, I find that now more than ever we must trust one another. My name is not Barney.”

  “I bet you’re glad about that,” Joe said to no one in particular.

  “I am an agent in the service of Her Majesty, attached to the Walsingham Office in London.”

  Evan eyed him. “That is a grand title for a man locked in a Californio gaol.”

  “You know what they say … the best laid plans and all that. I was foolish for less than a minute—and that was all it took to be captured. But if we manage to escape, what I have learned here will be invaluable. Priceless.”

  “That is a big if,” Dutch pointed out.

  “What is your name, then?” Joe wanted to know.

  Seated on his noisome pallet, Barney gave a little bow from the waist. “Captain Barnaby Hayes, of Her Majesty’s Secret Service Bureau. Gentlemen, I am a spy, and I am very tired of being locked up.”

  “Aren’t we all.” Evan had had just about enough surprises for today. “And what is the Walsingham Office going to do for us now, pray?”

  “It is what we are going to do for it.” He gave Joe a nudge. “We are going to carry out Joe’s plan to the letter—though if we can find a way to get the workmen and prisoners out from under the dam before we blow it up, that would be my preference.”

  “My plan?” Joe squeaked. “That wasn’t a plan. That was a joke.”

  Barney—Barnaby—whatever his name was—grinned in a way that Evan was very glad was not directed at him. “When we are finished, my clever friends, the joke will definitely be on them.”

  Chapter 8

  Alice had gone down with white knuckles on the helm a number of times in her life, but never like this. Bullet holes in the gondola, yes. A dead or dying engine (especially in the case of the Stalwart Lass, poor cobbled-together old girl), certainly. But not like this. Not a bloody great billowing hole in her fuselage and no idea if the remaining gas would get them to the ground or simply spindle up and let them plummet out of the sky.

  “Vanes full horizontal, propellers heading due north,” she ordered tersely.

  “Aye,” Jake said, white to the lips, already hauling on the wheels. “Captain Hollys, don’t shut down the engines until the last moment. We need every ounce of propulsion we can coax out of her.”

  “She won’t fail us,” came Ian’s beloved voice through the speaking horn, sounding every bit as confident as though he were simply on review. As he’d been trained to be in a crisis. “Not Swan.”

  “If I have to fall out of the sky, I’m glad it’s with you,” Alice said recklessly into the horn.

  “Likewise,” came the cheerful reply, while Jake rolled his eyes and blushed at his captain’s flagrant lack of decorum in the last ten minutes she had in this life.

  If it came to that, she’d abandon the helm to spend her final minute in Ian’s arms, and die happy. But she still had nine minutes in which to try to get them all out of this, for Benny’s and Jake’s life stories should not have a period put to them on her watch if she could possibly help it.

  If they could stay out of the canyon, they had a chance to survive. But once they came within the grip of those sheer cliffs, the downdraft from the cooling air would push them into a free fall, and without the loft from the gasbags, there was no hope.

  Swan floated to earth rather faster than Alice was used to. Far faster. The enormous half-mile-wide gash carved in the sere landscape by the river far below appeared to widen like a mouth getting ready to ingest them, and she flung her body on the helm hard alee. Jake leaped from one propeller wheel to the other, spinning them in the same direction as the helm, his skinny arms working like a pump gone mad.

  “Alice?” came her husband’s voice, still cheerful, but filled with an underlying tension that told her the enormity of the gift she was receiving at his hands—hands that were not at this moment tearing the helm from her. This was her command, and he had not forgotten it even in this moment of extremity.

  “Six degrees,” she gasped, hugging the wheel, its spokes digging into her stomach and prodding her ribs. “Five. We must have three to make it. Four. Shut down engines.”

  A moment of breathless silence as Ian cut the engines and they heard nothing but the whistle of wind in the ropes … and the yawning, bottomless drop below was replaced with a grand sweep of mesa top, not twenty feet beneath the keel.

  “We made it!” she screeched, releasing the helm and leaping clear as it spun with killing force and the ship wobbled back into a semblance of level flight. “Prepare to run aground!”

  There was no need to steer now—nor any ability to do so. She and Jake tightened up their safety lines and her feet left the deck. “Benny!” she screamed.

  “I’ve got him,” Ian called. “Secure for landing.”

  With a scrape like a giant’s moan of pain, the keel of the gondola grounded, leaving a long gouge in the earth but also putting such a drag on the ship that it bounced once, twice, and then settled with a jerk, nose down in a shallow arroyo.

  The fuselage, which she expected to blow overhead and spread across the mesa top for a thousand feet, settled ungracefully across the stern. Alice felt as though she had been punched, though to her knowledge the lines had kept her from hitting anything. She loosened the clips on the lines in the rings on her corselet and settled slowly to the deck.

  Where her knees failed to hold her up.

  She sat there, breathing hard, as Jake lowered himself beside her. His knees were clearly made of sterner stuff, but his face was as pale as milk, and his staring eyes looked as though panic were only seconds away. He gave her a hand up. “Are we alive, Captain?” he croaked.

  “We are, thank God, and what’s more, the forward gas bags are, too. That missile, whatever it was, must have gone straight through the stern as we heeled over, and out the other side.”

  “I’m glad their aim wasn’t any better.”

  �
��So am I. Come on.” She jogged along the corridor to the engine room, where Ian met her at the door, stained with steam, his perfectly cut uniform jacket torn at the shoulder, and his eyes—

  Alice flung herself into his arms and burst into tears.

  When, minutes later, she finally regained control of herself, it was to look up and see a telltale track through the dust and sweat on Ian’s face. He smoothed the curls back from her forehead. “Well done, darling,” he said softly. “I could not have done better myself—nor could any man flying in the Royal Aeronautic Corps today.”

  “I had very good help from my brave crew.” She laid her cheek on his chest and could not prevent a glimmer of satisfaction. It was one thing to know she had brought the people she cared about to earth safely, but another thing entirely to know that one of the finest captains in the skies had acknowledged it, too.

  “Pity Her Majesty wasn’t here to see it,” Jake said. “She might have another think about women captaining their own ships in the Corps.”

  “If I have anything to say about it, she certainly will know,” Ian said stoutly. “I shall wax rather fulsome in my report—if we ever see England again.”

  “We will.” Alice straightened and set her shirt and pants to rights, twisting her corselet so that the rings for the lines lay once again over each hip. “And the first step in that direction is to see how badly we’re damaged and how soon we can be skyworthy again.”

  “I’ll check the gangway.” Benny Stringfellow scampered down the corridor, but not before Alice had a chance to tousle his hair with affection. Nothing seemed to faze her young Gunner Second Class—not even crashing in the middle of a desert that she knew better than anyone was as remote and inhospitable as the moon.

  Though not quite as remote and inhospitable as some places she’d been—the northern reaches of the Canadas, for one, where her real father had been a spy. Or in that foreign world behind the black iron railings of Belgravia. She supposed she ought to be grateful that, in spite of her own colossal foolishness in poking her nose into the Royal Kingdom’s air space, the land upon which her ship now lay was at least familiar.

  Dangerous and unforgiving, yes, but familiar.

  Her gunner was back in a moment with a report. “The hull is dug in and we can’t use the gangway, Captain.”

  Her body had already told her so, the cant of the deck reporting the angle at which the hull had plowed into the earth. At least it was earth, and not the red sandstone that might well have torn it out altogether. “Very well. We shall do as the Mopsies do, and go out the stern through the communications cage.”

  “And send a pigeon while we’re at it,” Jake muttered. “Can’t see us getting ourselves out of this without a hand from someone.”

  “Jake is right.” Ian followed Alice and Benny down the corridor. “We should send for the Rangers and request their assistance.”

  Alice had never in her life asked the Texican Rangers for anything—mostly because the stepdaughter of Ned Mose was not so stupid as to bring herself to their attention, and Lady Hollys was not convinced she wouldn’t be arrested on sight, title or no. “Ian, you know we can’t do that. I’d be recognized.”

  “You were not recognized in the hospital in Santa Fe.”

  “That was because none of the Rangers but one set foot in there, and you didn’t let him see me.” And before his frown became too pronounced, she held open the wire door of the communications cage and motioned him ahead of her. “Let’s take a look at the damage first. We can’t make plans until we do.”

  Stooping, he slipped through the opening in the back where the pigeons came in. A second later they heard a grunt as he landed. “Be careful, especially Mr. Stringfellow. It’s a good eight-foot drop, with the deck at this angle.”

  Benny went out next, then Alice, then Jake. When she landed once again in her husband’s arms, she smiled up at him. “We forgot one thing.”

  “And what is that?” he asked tenderly. “I have all I need right here.”

  She grinned. “We don’t have a way to get back in.”

  “If the two of you would stop spooning for one minute, you’d see that I’m the only one with the sense to hook up one of the rope ladders before I dropped.” Jake’s tone held more humor than disgust.

  “I knew I hired you for a good reason,” she told him cheerfully. “Come on, let’s see how my girl survived her landing.”

  Even at her most optimistic, Alice could not say that in a contest between Swan and the mesa, her ship had come out the winner. The gondola had sustained most of its damage to the bow, which was not surprising. But their greatest loss was the propellers at the stern, particularly to port. The blades were now a flattened, useless mess under the tilted hull.

  While Ian climbed back into the engine compartment to check that the boilers were cooling despite the odd angle at which they sat in their cowlings, Alice walked forward with Jake to have a look at the fuselage.

  The gasbag pierced by the missile lay forlornly in a thick, rubbery heap across the ventral vane, while the remaining three hung aloft, dragged earthward a few degrees by the unsupported weight of the fuselage.

  “At least they’re aloft,” Jake said, his sharp eyes scanning for obvious tears outside of the great rent in the stern quarter. “What are the chances she’ll fly with three?”

  Alice had been asking herself that very question from the moment she’d realized they’d been hit. “I’ve been doing the arithmetic, as I’m sure you have, too.”

  Jake nodded, walking slowly along the port side, furthest from the cliff and the river canyon. The sun had sunk enough to hang on the mountains to the west, burning like an accusing eye even as the remaining upright gasbags threw Alice and Jake into shadow.

  “Three might get us into Santa Fe and landbound for repairs,” he said, considering. “But never back to Philadelphia, and certainly not to England.”

  “Without a port propeller, we might not even make it to Santa Fe,” Alice said. “We have a spare, but it looks as though the housing itself might have got crushed in the landing. And I’ll tell you now, I’m not going back to Resolution to dig around in my old stash of parts to build one.”

  “That’s a relief,” was all Jake said. He pointed to the bow. “Even without a fourth gas bag, we still have to find something resembling a mooring mast. One big gust southerly and there’s a good chance she’ll wind up in the river.”

  “Don’t even say that.” Alice was too old to make the sign to ward off evil, as children might, but still, her hand twitched a little. That was the stuff nightmares were made of. “But you’re right. Let’s see if we can make do with something.”

  “Captain!” Benny’s voice came from far astern, on the starboard side.

  “Over here, Benny,” Alice called. “We’re going to try to moor her.”

  “Captain, don’t—they’ve got us—”

  “What’s got up his britches?” Jake wondered. “There’s nothing out here but burrowing creatures and vultures.”

  Alice walked around the bow, gazing upward to check for damage, and caught the dangling mooring line in one hand. “Not even a dead tree up here, or a pinnacle like the Navapai use in Alaia’s village. There’s only—”

  She stopped dead and stared.

  Ranged along the cliff edge were dozens of dead people.

  Skulls, skeletons, bony hands holding rifles, wearing thrown-together bits of castoff clothing. And embroidered blouses. And roses woven into crowns on their heads. Benny struggled in the grip of a particularly large skeleton who seemed to be quite deep in the keel for a cadaver.

  “Captain!” he shouted. “The lightning pistols!”

  “Now, now, no need for violence,” la bruja said, shaking him as though he’d been a carpet and she a housewife. “Not unless it’s us dishing it out.”

  Alice drew in a long breath to try to settle her heartbeat—and the plunging alarm in her stomach. Witches. She’d heard the legends and the stories, bu
t had never actually seen one. Never really believed they were true. And now, here they were, trapping herself and her crew as surely as though they’d been run into a box canyon.

  “Release my gunner, if you please,” she said. “He’s only doing his duty.”

  “His duty, my foot,” said a skeleton next to the large one. “He’s a little wolverine, he is.”

  Benny stomped on the witch’s foot, and when she loosened her grip with a cry, he shot across the twenty feet between them and straight into Alice’s arms.

  “They’re dead!” he gasped. “They’re dead and they almost killed me!”

  “I haven’t changed my mind about that yet, you little monster.” The witch surged forward, limping. “No one may cross our borders and live. Come, sisters. The river welcomes the Texican as well as the Californio.”

  “Stand back!”

  The surge of witches halted at the command in Ian’s voice, and skulls tilted skyward toward the viewing ports of the gondola.

  “One move out of any of you and I’ll fire,” he warned.

  Thank heavens for Ian. Alice couldn’t see him above her head, because the deck was tilted away, but she had an imagination. He had his lightning pistol trained on the large witch, she’d bet her life on it.

  In fact, she was betting her life on it.

  “We’ve been shot down by the Californios,” she said. “We mean no one any harm. All we need is to make some repairs, and we’ll be out of your territory as fast as we can pull up ropes.”

  “No one leaves our borders alive,” the second witch repeated flatly.

  “Dadburn it, we haven’t done anything wrong!” Alice exclaimed. “In fact, if you’d let us, we want to help you. Do you know what my hold is full of?”

  “Alice, no!” came from above.

  Why on earth shouldn’t she tell them? They’d set a course for the Navapai villages, hadn’t they, with the goal of getting these horses and rifles to the people living along the river. Well, here they were, and darned if they weren’t going to kill her and her friends for their courtesy.