Teancum (11 page)

Bang!

Lee shot Welker in the forehead, blowing him to the floor
before the other man shot the Danite chieftain, and then turned his attention
grimly to the rest of the room.

Orrin Porter Rockwell got his feet under him again.
 
The wild man hurled a table onto its
side with a titanic grunt and then tackled Brigham Young and Sam Clemens both
simultaneously, knocking them towards the upended table and shelter.
 
Sam resisted out of reflex, but the
back of his knees struck a horizontal table leg and he sat down, hard, slamming
prone onto his back.
 
He spat his
Cohiba straight up into the air as he hit, like the explosion of a tobacco
landmine.

Crash!

Another window exploded inward, showering Sam with glass
again.
 
His face felt like it had
been shaved by a drunk with farm implements and he coughed out the last wisps
of cigar smoke from his lungs and cheeks with a sense of disappointment.
 
A figure wrapped head to toe in leather
crashed into the room in the cloud of shards, a pistol in each hand—

Rockwell pulled a knife—

the figure fired, both guns blazing and throwing lead at
John Lee, George Cannon and their cohorts.

“Surround them!” Lee yelled to someone in the hall behind
him, and he backed into the message room doorway, leaving Lindemuth behind, who
collapsed under the withering fire of the leather-clad figure.
 
Staring up at the specter of death, Sam
found himself uniquely situated to appreciate the voluptuousness of this angel
of punishment, and then he recognized it—
her
—as the Mexican Striderman, Master Sergeant
Jackson.

Sam struggled to sit up, wishing he still had the brace of
pistols in his hands.

Another spear hurtled in through the window over the
shoulder of the dwarf Coltrane, who rolled in with a humming Colt vibro-blade
in his hand.
 
The spear struck John
Lee in the shoulder and knocked him spinning out into the hall, but Sam noticed
that there was no blood.
 
A spear
that size should have taken off the man’s arm entirely, but there wasn’t a
drop.

Then he saw the spear that had knocked George Cannon
down.
 
It was long, light and
forged of steel, and it ended in a rubber cup.
 
Sam laughed.
 
“Where did you find a weapon like that?” he asked no one in particular,
shaking his head.
 
“A squadron of
militant plumbers?”

Coltrane slammed the door shut and jumped aside to avoid
bullets that snapped through the wood immediately, punching holes and sending
in shafts of yellow gas light.
 

“Anyway, it did the job,” he answered his own question,
reminding himself of his electrified steam-truck deck.
 

Absalom Fearnley-Standish backed into the room through one
of the broken windows, frock coat skirt first and pistols last, firing out
after himself.
 
Cute little Annie
Webb, who had so entranced Sam in Bridger’s Saloon, came in the same moment by
the other window.

“They’re behide us!” Absalom cried.
 
He had acquired a distinctly more manly
ring to his voice despite the broken nose.

“They’re on every side!” Annie added.
 
She kicked at a man following close on
her heels, sending him flying away into the darkness.

Only it wasn’t darkness.
 
Behind Annie Webb, Sam realized that he now saw the grayish
light of early morning.
 
In that
half-light he saw the Third Virginia, and Danites, taking up positions in the
street and at the Z.C.M.I., facing the Lion House.
 
A glance out the other side’s windows showed him more men
taking up positions in the Tabernacle’s gardens.

“So much for the poor performance of the Virginians!” he
shouted.
 
“Quick, before they
settle in!
 
Where’s your Strider,
Sergeant?”

“The one, she is destroyed,” Jackson said simply, and
grabbed another table, knocking it over in front of the windows facing South
Tabernacle and the Z.C.M.I.
 
“The
other, joo tell me, but tengo miedo que she is lost.”

Rockwell tossed a third table on its side, creating a
sheltered area walled in on three sides by heavy wood.
 
Sam hoped it was heavy enough.

“The
Jim Smiley
,
then,” Sam suggested.
 
“We can
run—”

“Burned up,” Jed Coltrane grunted.
 
The dwarf shoved his vibro-blade straight through the
plaster wall into the hallway, cutting a long horizontal slash at
knee-level.
 
A man’s voice outside
screamed and cursed, and Jed somersaulted away, throwing himself behind a chair
and then scooting around a table end into the sheltered space.
 
“If it’s any comfort to you, she did a
lot of damage before she went.”

“Burned up?” Sam demanded, disgruntled.
 
“How in mercy do you burn up that many
tons of steel and India rubber?
 
Was she hit by a
meteorite?
”

“Near enough,” Coltrane agreed.
 
Absalom Fearnley-Standish crouched beside him, sharing the
cover of the tables, and handed the dwarf a long pistol.
 
Both men began pouring powder and
reloading.
 
Up close, Sam could now
see that the little man bled from a belly wound and breathed through flared
nostrils.

“You hit, Jed?” he asked, stupidly.

“We can’t go, anyway,” Rockwell said, and his voice was
profoundly sad.

“What are you talking about?” Sam asked, and Rockwell
pointed at Brigham Young.
 
Only
then did Sam realize that the President of Deseret hadn’t moved since the
shootout began, and he looked at the man, half-expecting to find him dead.
 

Young wasn’t dead, but he looked bad.
 
He lay on his back, a thick shard of
glass lodged in his neck and blood streaming down his chest from what looked
like a bullet wound in his shoulder.

“No bullet or blade,” Rockwell said, even sadder.
 
“Brother Joseph made his promise to the
wrong man.”

*
  
*
  
*

Poe scrambled up the rope ladder in as seamanlike a fashion
as he could manage, though the effort nearly killed him, and twice he spit
blood into the void below.
 
Despite
her flounced skirts, Roxie was more nimble.
 
He thought he might die of shame, only, of course, the
consumption was going to kill him first.

The consumption was going to kill him no matter what he
did.
 
That knowledge gave Poe a
certain freedom.
 
Somehow, it also
helped him shrug off the lingering pain of the beating the Pinkertons had given
him an hour or so earlier.

He dragged himself over the railing and managed not to fall
to the deck.
 
A few deep
breaths—as deep as he could manage, anyway—and his swirling vision
recovered, and then Roxie was beside him, pistols in her hands.
 
Behind and below them, gunfire and
yelling continued on the mooring platform.

There was no one on the deck of the ship.
 
The craft curled up and inward fore and
aft, like a Viking vessel but with no dragon’s head.
 
It had a brass mast, from which hung a sail of no fabric
that Poe recognized.
 
It shimmered
slightly in the thinning darkness, as if electrified, and it looked thinner
than any ordinary cloth.
 
On the
near—aft—side of the mast was a small stand that looked like the
control panel of a steam-truck, with a wheel and binnacle.
 
In the prow of the boat, mounted just
inside the great inward curve, was some sort of cannon.
 
At their feet was an open hatch.

“What does the sail catch?” he wondered, dragging the rope
ladder up behind them to prevent unwanted pursuit.
 
“It can’t be
wind
,
can it?”

“Look at the controls!” Roxie shouted, ignoring him, and
jumped feet-first down through the hatch and into the hold below.

“Ether waves?” he speculated, and chuckled at himself.

Poe shuffled across the deck to the gun.
 
He was no mechanick, but he’d spent
enough time with Hunley and his devices that he knew what details to look
for.
 
The cannon was large and built
of shiny brass, with a seat directly behind the barrel and a sighting guide
over the top of the cannon.
 
Halfway along the length of the barrel, Poe saw a glass panel and within
it, gleaming dully by the crackling light of the sail, the vermillion glint of
rubies.
 
Below the gunner’s seat,
large, crisp-toothed gears appeared to give the gun the ability to turn three
hundred sixty degrees horizontally, and at least some amount out of the plane
of the ship’s deck.
 
Levers by the
side of the seat clearly connected to the gears to control movement, and
another lever on the side of the weapon’s barrel, like the bolt of a rifle,
must control fire.
 
A clear glass
tube rose up from the deck of the ship within the gearworks, and blue light
snapped and crackled inside it.
 
India rubber cables ran across the deck to the control panel like
snakes, dormant but ready to strike if stepped on.

So the phlogiston cannon was probably fire-ready.

He turned and scanned the horizon, easily spotting Pratt’s
other three air-ships.
 
They moved
away from the mooring tower, out of the high valley in which Pratt’s facility
was nestled, and out into the broader Wasatch Mountains.
 
He squinted, making the best use he
could of the first pale cracks of dawn, but saw no one on board the ships other
than Pratt himself.

How were the other two flying, then?

Poe coughed, spat on the deck, and limped back to the
control panel.
 
He arrived just as
Roxie emerged from the hatch, shaking her head.

“There’s no one aboard,” she confirmed.

“I can detect no one aboard the other two, either,” Poe
said.
 
“How on earth is Pratt
controlling them?”

They looked together at the control panel, and Poe
immediately knew the answer to his own question.
 

“Hunley,” he gasped.

The controls looked simple enough.
 
There was a wheel like on any terrestrial ship, and beside
it a binnacle, glowing blue around its rim and containing a simple compass
whose needle was a stylized brass bumblebee.
 
There was a broad, wool-padded belt-and-shoulderstraps
harness that bolted into the center of the wheel for the pilot.
 
Beside the wheel was a small
knob-headed lever marked
PITCH AND YAW
that appeared capable of moving in all directions; next to it was another level
like a steam-truck’s throttle, currently at the lowest position in its range;
buttons marked
WEIGH
and
DROP
; and from a solid block of brass beside the ship’s
wheel protruded a monkey’s head that Poe knew all too well.

“What do you think this does?” Roxie asked, touching the
PITCH
AND YAW
lever without moving it.

“Controls pitch and yaw, is my guess,” Poe suggested
dryly.
 
“That would let you alter
your elevation, as well.
 
And there
you have acceleration.
 
But the
monkey is the interesting thing.”

“How so?”

“Because Horace Hunley made it, and three others like it,
and this is the one that I smashed against my cabin door in the
Liahona
.”

Zottt!

Poe looked up from the controls to the phlogiston gun, but
it was dormant, and he knew from the reddish light playing against its side
that a phlogiston weapon must have been fired on the mooring tower.

“So what?”

“So,” Poe said, “I think this is how Pratt is flying the ships.
 
This is what Horace Hunley did—he
built four devices that communicate, somehow, with each other.
 
Ether waves, possibly, or anyhow,
that’s what Robert hinted to me once.”
 

“You love Robert,” Roxie said, surprisingly.

Poe sighed.
 
“As
much as a man can love another man,” he said, and felt broken and heavy as the
words came out.
 
“For years, he has
been my only human connection, the only person to know my secret.”
 
He looked at her, frail and
diamond-hard and plain and beautiful.
 
“I wish it had been you.”

“Go on,” she said, and rested a hand on his arm.
 

Poe looked at the monkey’s head to recover his train of
thought.
 
“So one of the canopic
jar devices must be the master and the other three are slaves—forgive the
expression—so that the person in the right ship can control the other
three.”

“So Pratt can pilot the entire fleet by himself.
 
So he doesn’t need anyone else to help
him get his revenge.”

“Yes.”
 
Poe
looked at the controls again.
 
“But
I must have damaged the monkey-headed jar, so hopefully we’ll have local
control of this craft, whatever it’s called.”

“It’s called the
Ammon
,
actually.”