Teancum (13 page)

ZOTTT!

It missed, but narrowly.
 

ZOTTT!
 
The air-ship hovering still fired as
well, and very nearly hit the
Ammon
.
 
Poe blessed Roxie again, a thousand
blessings in his heart for each of the thousand times he had cursed her name
over the years.

Pratt must have practiced his gunnery a lot, to be such a
deadly shot when firing from a remote platform.
 
Or did the canopic jars contain a targeting system of some
sort, as well?
 
Poe shook off the
introspection; with both targets’ gun just fired, now was the moment.

“Charge!” he yelled, and Roxie opened the throttle.

Poe held his fire, sighting along the barrel.
 
He knew he had a slow count of twenty
from when the first of the two enemy guns fired, and he jumped into his count
at five… six…. seven… eight…

The
Ammon
passed
under the flat, copper-plated belly of the circling craft.
 
Poe shot a glance up at its hull to
confirm that it wasn’t the
Teancum
,
but all he saw was the pseudo-alphabet the Mormons called
Deseret
, and he spared no more thought for it.

Twelve… thirteen… fourteen…

He’d only get one shot before he had to pull away, so he
needed to make it good.
 
Poe
sighted at his target craft, smack in the center of the hull, so the sun in his
eyes wouldn’t make him fail.
 
It
started to move, but slowly, and Poe easily kept his sight fixed on the middle
of the huge target.
 
He wouldn’t be
able to miss.

Sixteen… seventeen…

Then the
Ammon
dipped
into the shadow of one of the Wasatch Mountains, and Poe saw his target for the
first time free of the sun’s glare.
 
There was no one at the helm.

“Wrong ship!” he shouted.

Zottt!

It was a smaller sound, but the unmistakable noise of a
phlogiston gun being fired.
 
Not
one of the huge cannons, maybe, but the little one, the one Pratt had nicknamed
Parley.

From above and behind him, Poe saw the phlogiston-igniting
beam of ruby-red light bite into the gun barrel in front of him, slicing
through the brass, igniting it, dissolving the barrel and leaving behind
charred ruin.

“Evade!” he shouted.
 
“Evade!”
 
He scratched at
his safety harness with trembling, weak fingers, and managed to free himself
barely in time to avoid a second swipe of the ray gun that incinerated the
gunner’s seat.

He scampered down along the deck in Roxie’s direction,
patting down his pockets in search of any kind of weapon.
 
Roxie stared over her own shoulder at
the ship that fired on them, and now, with the sun at their backs, Poe saw the
Madman Pratt at the rail of his air-ship, dark goggles on his face to shield
his eyes from the sun, firing his Enkindler at them.

“No!” Roxie howled.

Great god of heaven, Poe thought, she’s not watching where
she’s going—

CRASH!!

The
Ammon
collided
with the—whatever the name of the remaining ship was, Poe had lost
track—ramming it amidships with its copper-sheathed prow.
 
Like battling triremes, Poe thought
abstractly, we’re fighting like the Ancient Greeks, though thousands of feet
above the ground.

The blow threw him back along the deck, and he smashed into
the control panel and wheel of the
Ammon
.
 
Roxie was securely belted in,
struggling with the wheel with one hand and trying to draw a bead on Orson
Pratt with a pistol in the other.
 
Poe had to catch himself, grabbing the wheel with one hand and jamming
his fist in the slot where the monkey-headed canopic jar had been.

Surely, he thought, we’ll fall.

But the
Ammon
ground
her sister-ship under her flat keel, snapping its mast into splinters and then
gliding almost majestically between the two shattered halves, which fell apart
like a cracked egg and then dropped before Poe’s eyes to the valley floor.

“I’d say you
womaned
that air-ship pretty thoroughly,” Poe gasped.
 
His breath came in sucking gusts that rattled his chest, and
he spat tendrils of ropy blood and phlegm.
 
The wind snatched them away before they reached the deck.

“Oh?” she asked, and pointedly cocked her pistol.
 
“And how would it have looked had I
manned
it, Edgar?”

Poe got his feet under him and looked down, across the
slanting deck of the air-ship.
 
Buildings of the Great Salt Lake City carpeted the valley floor below
them now, and the broken air-ship fell into two ragged pieces down onto
unsuspecting sleepers, or shopkeepers opening their stores at the crack of
dawn.
 
There was some sort of
commotion in the center of the city, around the Tabernacle—

Bang!
 
Bang!

Roxie’s pistol exploded in Poe’s ear as she took pot-shots
at Pratt, continuing to crank the
Ammon’s
wheel and bringing the air-ship around to charge it at the
Teancum
.

Poe focused on the action around him.
 
He patted his pockets again and found
what he was looking for.

“We’ve got to get closer!” he cried, and started to cough.

Pratt raised his Enkindler to fire again.

Chapter Twenty

Poe staggered to the railing, the balled-up cloth in one
hand and the other fist thumping his own chest.
 
He shook, he trembled, cold sweat poured down his body.
 
He felt like he was breathing through
water.

The
Ammon
closed on
the
Teancum
, and Orson Pratt
raised his Parley again.
 
Poe saw
the swept-up hair, the matted beard, the black glass disks for eyes and the
mad, piratical grin, but what he watched closely was the inventor’s hands.

Pratt squeezed the firing lever on the Enkindler—

Poe let his body fall—

Zottt!

The beam of hot light scorched the air above Poe, but Poe
ignored it.
 
He hit the deck
rolling, and as he came to his feet he snapped open the hypnotic hypocephalus,
fixing it directly in Pratt’s gaze across the closing gap like a shield and
running his fingers across it in the simple, but peculiar, pattern that
Hunley’s mesmerist had drilled into him.

Pratt fell like a sack of potatoes.

The gap shrank at an alarming rate—

“Turn!” Poe shouted.

“I can’t!” Roxie yelled back.

Poe looked over his shoulder just long enough to see that
Orson Pratt’s last shot had entirely dismasted the
Ammon
.
 
Then
he flung his body to the rail and wrapped his arms around it to brace for the
impact.

CRUNCH!!!

Poe rolled over the side.
 
His toes scrabbled against copper sheathing and for a mad
second he thought he was going to fall—

below him he saw the Third Virginia Cavalry, firing on one
of the buildings beside the Tabernacle, one of Brigham Young’s own houses, he
thought he remembered from Robert’s briefings—

he was going to fall to his death through Brigham Young’s
own roof, and nearly laughed at the thought—

but then Roxie was there, and dragging him up the side.
 
He hacked and coughed and fell onto his
own blood and phlegm on the deck.

“You weigh nothing, Ed,” Roxie told him.

“Corpses generally don’t,” he said, affecting a gallant grin
that was ruined by the wet, bloody coughing fit it provoked.

“Orson!” she shouted, and leaped to the rail.

Poe shook his head clear and followed her.
 
The
Ammon
, dismasted, hovered still in the air a thousand feet above Salt Lake
City.
 
Below, the Virginians
advanced on Young’s residence, guns blazing.
 
Not only his residence, Poe remembered, that was the Lion
House, where Young lived and worked.
 
That was where Young and Clemens and the others had gone to send a
message out to Young’s people to end the coup.

The Virginians must have Young holed up inside.

Below the
Ammon
and
above the Great Salt Lake City floated the
Teancum
.
 
Orson
Pratt’s flagship had had the worst of the collision with its sister; Poe could
see that two of the cup- or foot-like protrusions of the
Teancum
hung shattered at its flank, and the air-ship
drifted slowly down, pitching over onto one side as it did so.
 
It was ten feet beneath the
Ammon
, sinking and drifting laterally.

Poe grabbed the rope ladder and hurled it over the side.

“Save Orson!” Roxie cried, following him over the
railing.
 
“He may be able to cure
you!”

“To hell with Orson Pratt!” Poe coughed, hitting the tilted
deck of the
Teancum
hard, and staggering
forward.
 
“And to hell with me!”

“What are you doing, then?” Roxie clattered after him to the
phlogiston cannon mounted at the front of the ship.

“I’m saving your President!” Poe shouted.
 
The
Teancum
sagged to one side even further as he spoke.
 
“Take the controls!
 
Try to correct the pitch!”

He and Roxie both turned to look at the control panel as he
said the words, and Poe saw Orson Pratt, conscious.
 
The old man clung to the bottom of the
Ammon’s
rope ladder, now seven or eight feet off the
Teancum’s
deck and rising as the
Teancum
sank.
 
He held his Enkindler in one hand and fumbled, trying to get his other
hand to the firing lever while hanging on the rope ladder by his elbow.

The old man saw that he was noticed.
 
“Too late!” he cried shrilly, and aimed
the Parley—

bang!

Roxie shot Pratt in the chest.
 
The Madman shrieked and dropped his ray gun, which fell past
the Teancum and disappeared.
 
He
slumped and his blood flowed down the ropes, but he held on to the ladder as
Poe and Roxie descended.

“Fools!” he shouted, and then Poe ignored him.

“You’re a hell of a woman, Roxie!” Poe shouted across the
angled deck of the
Teancum
.
 
“There isn’t room in this world for the
both of us!”
 
He climbed into the
gunner’s seat and saw Roxie similarly strap herself to the helm.

“You’re wrong again, Edgar!” she called back.
 
“There isn’t room enough in this world
for
either
of us!”

Poe chuckled and cranked the gun around to aim at the siege
below.
 
“Give me as steady a
platform as you can!”
 
Smoke
billowed out of the Tabernacle, threatening his visibility.
 

“Give them hell!” she yelled back.

*
  
*
  
*

“Hell!” Jed shouted, and ducked.

Bullets whizzed over his head and he stayed down, his hands
full of knives and his loaded pistol at his side.
 
The big tables they crouched behind caught the bullets that
struck in them and held them fast, but the air above the tables was a deadly
cloud of lead hornets.
 
Outside the
Lion House was light, but inside was darkness.

And pain.

Jed’s belly hurt like hell, but he hadn’t had the worst of
it.
 
Brigham Young was dying.
 
Jed felt sad enough about that, because
he seemed like an ornery cuss and Jed kind of liked ornery cusses, but worse
than that was Jed’s impression that Young’s death meant their defeat, and then
John Lee and George Cannon would have their war.
 
After, of course, they killed Sam Clemens and Jed Coltrane
and everyone else who knew about their plot.

Sam worked over Brigham Young’s body, wrapping strips of his
own shirt and jacket around the man’s bloodied neck and chest, keeping the big
glass shard in place and trying to stanch the bleeding.

Steel flashed low in one of the windows, and Jed threw a
knife.
 
The blade
clanged
off the steel harmlessly and disappeared into the
bushes.
 
Jed grabbed the pistol and
cocked it.

A hat appeared behind the steel, and then Jed realized what
he was seeing.
 
It was one of the
Virginians’ clocksprung horses, and it crouched sideways in the window like a
barrier.
 
A soldier—no, two
soldiers—sheltered on the machine’s other flank, and their pistols snaked
over the top of the horse and began firing into the room.
 
Their angle and position pointed their
barrels into the sheltered area among the tables, and Jed scrambled with the
others not to be in the line of fire.

Orrin Porter Rockwell, hair and beard wild around his face
like a halo around Blackbeard the pirate’s head, jumped to his feet to get a
better angle and fire down at the two soldiers.
 
A bullet struck him, and then another, and he collapsed to
the floor beside his master.

“Egad,” Absalom Fearnley-Standish said.
 
He pressed his back against one of the
tables.
 
Jed saw over his shoulder
that more brushed-metal horses advanced in the street.
 
They shone implacable and solid in the
morning sunshine blazing down South Tabernacle.

“Throw your hat!” Jed told him, and switched to the Colt
vibro-blade.

“Beg pardod?”

“Your hat!” Annie Webb jerked the damaged top hat off his
head and pressed it into his hand.

“At the horse!” Jed whispered, and nodded to indicate the
direction he meant.

Fearnley-Standish nodded, stood, and threw the hat.

Idiot, to stand up like that.
 
Brave, but an idiot.

Bang!

The soldiers fired at Fearnley-Standish, his hat splintering
into black shreds in mid-air and the man himself ducking and tumbling
backward.
 
Jed didn’t know if he
was hit or trying to dodge, and didn’t wait to find out.
 
As the Englishman stood, Jed rolled
forward and jumped, taking advantage of the distraction to hurl himself high
onto the wall of glass tubes and brass doors—

glass shattered around him as men firing from the hall saw
him—

he swung like an ape, thumbing the vibro-blade on, almost
dropping it with the stabbing pain in his gut—

and landing on top of the two soldiers in the window.
 
He piled onto them with both his feet
on one man’s neck and with the humming blade he lopped off the other fellow’s
hands with a single swipe.

The mutilated soldier screamed, the other man barked, and
guns swiveled to point at Jed.

“Aw, hell,” he grunted, and stuck the vibro-blade into the
second soldier.

*
  
*
  
*

Tam hurt, and he could only see out one eye.
 
He thought it was because the other was
covered in blood, and not because the eye had been destroyed, but he hurt so
bloody-damn-much all over his body that he couldn’t be certain, and he couldn’t
spare a hand to wipe away the blood and find out for sure.
 
Besides, Mother O’Shaughnessy had
taught him to always stay focused on the task at hand.

He needed his left hand for crawling; in his right he held
Orson Pratt’s ray gun.

Now that he saw it up close, the thing didn’t have a trigger
at all, not like an ordinary gun.
 
It had a grip, and a sort of bolt on the side, which must be how the
thing was fired.
 
Too bad he hadn’t
been able to watch Higley as he worked it, but Tam had had other things on his
mind at the time.

Higley.
 
Tam
chuckled to himself.
 
Fookin’
bastard.

He was close enough to the Pinkerton and to Richard Burton
now that he couldn’t miss the one, and didn’t think he’d hit the other.

“Who’s your boss?” the Pinkerton was demanding, pointing a
big rifle at Burton’s chest.
 
Burton did a good job of not looking at Tam and giving him away.
 
The Englishman had been caught
reloading the Smith & Wesson.
 
He had some shells in the cylinder, but obviously didn’t have time to
snap it into place, raise it and fire before he’d take several shots in the
chest.

“Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Victoria,” Burton sneered, “is
my
sovereign
.
 
I don’t have a
boss
.”

Tam levered himself up onto his knees.
 
He swayed a bit, but managed to wipe
blood from his eye with his elbow.
 
He was pleased to discover that he’d been right—both his eyes
still worked (not that he needed more than one, not for this task, not at this
range, did he?).
 
He dropped the
muzzle of the ray gun to point it at the Pinkerton’s back and examined the bolt
on the side of the weapon.

“Funny you think there’s a difference,” the Pinkerton shot
back.
 
He was a thin man with no
hair and big ears.
 
“She ain’t
gonna save you now, you know.”

Tam fired.

Zottt!

The big-eared Pinkerton burst into flame.
 
His rifle went off anyway—

bang!
—

but the shot missed, because Burton was already jumping to
the side, snapping the Model 1’s cylinder into place and aiming—

not at Big Ears, but behind him—

“Ha!” Tam shouted—

was Burton aiming at Tam?

Bang!

The shot didn’t come from Burton’s gun.
 

Bang!

That
was Burton’s
gun, and Tam heard a heavy thud and another man’s body hit the platform in
front of him.

Tam dropped the ray gun, finding that his arms suddenly
didn’t work.
 
Puzzlement.
 
He was cold, and his limbs felt far
away.
 
Then he noticed something in
his jaw, a numbness and a pressure.
 
He opened his mouth and blood spilled out.

Tam fell over.

He saw only blackness, but he heard scuffling boots.
 
Arms grabbed his chest and then he
heard Burton’s voice.
 
“Easy,
O’Shaughnessy,” Burton said gruffly.
 
“Good man.”

“Don’t let them have me,” Tam tried to say, but blood was
spilling from his mouth and down his throat and he wasn’t sure he was getting
the words out.
 
“Don’t let the
fookin’ Pinkertons have my body.”