The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head

The Gunfighter and the Gear-head

Cassandra Duffy

Day Moon Press

2011

Other Sapphic Pixie Tales From Cassandra
Duffy:

The Last Best Tip

Astral Liaisons: Lesbians in Space!

Demons of Paradise

Fabled Fang Girls

All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced or used in any matter whatsoever without the written
permission, except in the cases of brief quotations in critical
articles or reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
locations, and events are meant to be fictitious. Any similarity
between any persons living, dead, or undead is completely
coincidental. The events are fictional, although you should feel
free to try to re-create anything you think you’re limber enough
for, especially if you have a willing partner in crime.

Day Moon Press – Smashwords Edition

©2011 Cassandra Duffy

Cover Design and Interior Artwork by Katiie
Kissglosse

Edited by Nichole Mauer

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Short flights cut
shorter.

Chapter 2: Taciturn retrieval.

Chapter 3: Thanks a truckload.

Chapter 4: Unreasonable aspirations.

Chapter 5: A spiritual education.

Chapter 6: Aggravated mischief.

Chapter 7: Collared and collected-on.

Chapter 8: Cultists gone wild.

Chapter 9: With a little help from blackmail and
lies.

Chapter 10: The Ravens have landed!

Chapter 11: Money? Oh, right, THAT stuff.

Chapter 12: Feverish, famished, and
frustrated.

Chapter 13: The history of Vegas chess.

Chapter 14: Mistakes of identity.

Chapter 15: Dust-up disrupted.

Chapter 16: Trust in honor and a lack of
options.

Chapter 17: The squeaky wheel gets greased.

Chapter 18: Riding out for the territories.

Chapter 19: Uncomfortable memories and
departures.

Chapter 20: Yahweh sightings and things to
come.

Chapter 21: It’s all uphill from here.

Chapter 22: Dreams of a melancholy past.

Chapter 23: Homecomings are a mixed bag.

Chapter 24: The first flight of length with a
landing.

Chapter 25: Learned domesticity and advanced military
tactics.

Chapter 26: No times like old times.

Chapter 27: Oil!

Chapter 28: A final betrayal before the
storm.

Chapter 29: A new old life.

Chapter 1:
Short flights cut
shorter.

“Coming up on the
teeth of the line now,” Ramen’s voice buzzed through the
static-riddled intercom.

The dirigible thrummed and breathed like a
living thing through the hot air being pumped constantly from the
boiler into the zeppelin cylinder and beating with the thumping of
turbines of the engines providing the forward thrust; both created
an unimaginable din, preventing direct communication without the
intercom between her and the automaton running the major systems.
Along the underside, between the ribs of the armor plates, ran a
walkway the entire length of the airship from the boiler in the
back to the primary weapon in the front. Gieo scampered down the
narrow walkway, using the handrails to keep upright as the airship
swayed and jolted in its flight path.

Tamping her leather top hat down on the four,
purple braids at the four corners of her head, she lowered her
green-tinted goggles over her eyes. The hat didn’t fit right,
leaving her with three options as she saw it: find a new hat, fix a
chinstrap, or wear her hair in the four thick braids. It was an
easy decision as far as she was concerned. Sliding down the ladder
into the ball-turret on the nose of the great, sturgeon-shaped
airship, her riding boots hissed against the copper piping.

“Go serpentine, Ramen,” she shouted into the
intercom cup next to the base of the ladder.

“Aye, aye, ma’am,” the automaton’s voice
crackled back.

The immense gears of the airship’s bat-like
wings engaged with a squeaking, rumbling cacophony. Gieo strapped
herself into the reclined seat of the ball-turret, affixing the
leather belts across her chest, clipped into the metal tongs on the
lapels of her tailed tuxedo jacket, holding tight against the
brown, leather corset she wore beneath. As the chair lowered down
into the Plexiglas turret, she hooked the rubber hose from the
air-hydraulic feed into the leather and chain choker she wore,
pumping fresh air up around her head to cool her and aid in
breathing.

With the wings flapping in machinated
patterns, the great airship took on a wide swing to its flight,
shooting back and forth in as athletic of zigzags as a fifty-meter
long blimp could manage. Gieo spun the handles on the weapon
system’s hydraulic feeds, sending steam power into the four guns
positioned in a box around her. The desert floor, thousands of feet
below, rolled back and forth beneath her, held at bay only by the
glass ball she sat in.

“Leveling the outcropping at the precise
center of our undulations,” Ramen’s voice crackled through the com
speaker in the ball-turret.

“Have the smoke-screen loaded and ready.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am.”

“Disengaging now.” Gieo pulled the pins on
the ball-turret’s gyroscope arm. The entire turret, with her
inside, dropped down off the bottom of the armored airship,
dangling by a ten meter, articulated metal arm and a dozen
hydraulic tubes and hoses. She slipped her feet into the leather
straps of the turret and took control of the swaying arm. All
around her the hisses of steam and clanking of gears let her know
the gyroscopes were functioning as intended.

Puffs of white smoke from the ground erupted
out of an underbrush canopy nestled between the furthest most rocks
of the outcropping. Shells whistled up toward the zeppelin,
followed by explosions, and the clanking of flack bouncing off the
airship’s armor.

Gieo leveled the gyroscopes to steady her gun
platform even as the airship swayed in evasive maneuvers. She
brought the targeting reticule of a large, copper hoop with four
smaller hoops arranged in the center to indicate the four guns, on
the outcropping, and pushed the two trigger handles forward.

“I see your teeth,” she growled, “now take a
look at mine!”

The four guns around her erupted in
steam-powered blasts, sending shells of explosive material down
onto the antiaircraft battery four at a time. The shells exploded
across the rocky surface in showers of white, magnesium fire. She
saw a few of the scattering Slark trying to escape the kill zone,
and she zeroed in on them to put the fire right across their path.
She got some, more than some, several even, before a direct hit
caught her dirigible on the port side, knocking free one of the
wings with a shriek of metal and a resounding thump.

“Son-of-a…” Gieo kicked free the emergency
hold on the main spring of the arm’s gyroscope, pulling the entire
swinging arm of the ball-turret back into the body of the blimp.
The swaying of the ship was replaced by a long, descending spiral,
as the wounded blimp fluttered toward the ground with a torn
cylinder and only one functional wing. Gieo unhooked herself from
the ball-turret and scrambled back up the ladder into the main body
of the ship. “Launch the smoke-screen,” she shouted into the
intercom.

“On the way,” Ramen replied.

Four quick pops were followed by four loud
explosions as the outer plates on the boilers blew off and the
water content dumped onto the stoking fires. White steam and smoke
poured from the dirigible, obscuring even the vaguest outline of
the ship as it began its slow, spiraling descent toward the ground.
Gieo scrambled back down the walkway to the radio room, cranked the
hand-wheel to extend the antenna, and tapped out the distress code
for a languishing aircraft.

“This is Dirigible Purple Six, going down,”
Gieo shouted into the mouthpiece. “Do you copy, air-defense
network?”

After a few minutes of trying and retrying
the distress call, an old, familiar voice crackled back over the
shortwave. “This is air-defense Tempe-2,” the dithering old man
said. “There hasn’t been anything flying in years. My radio was
buried under laundry.”

“There has too,” Gieo protested. “We went
through this not six months ago.”

A long stretch of radio silence followed.

“Are you sure it wasn’t years ago?” Tempe-2
asked.

“Positive!” Gieo shrieked.

“Oh, well, I guess if you’re positive,” the
old man said. “What’s your situation and location?”

“Situation is stable, but crashing,” Gieo
said, “and location is sector 7-G.”

“That’s the Tombstone Three-Three-O,” Tempe-2
said. “I’ll see if I can get someone over there on the horn for a
retrieval team, but don’t expect much luxury. Those Tombstoners are
hardscrabble from tip to toe.”

“Whatever, it beats walking home,” Gieo said.
“Dirigible Purple 6, over and out.”

This was her sixth crash in the last three
years and the story was always the same. Tempe-2 was the only air
defense network radioman left in the world as far as she knew, and
he was half-gone most of the time. She suspected he was a methanol
drinker, peyote user, or ether huffer. Every time she got shot
down, it was like the first time for him. She was glad for his
existence, as he always managed to get someone out from one of the
free cities to pick her up, but he never remembered having done
it.

“We’re at 750 feet,” Ramen’s voice came
through the com.

“Get back to the shop,” Gieo replied.
“Hopefully I’ll see you in a couple days.”

She heard her automaton’s escape tube fire
and the telltale thumping of his helicopter blades as he flitted
away, too small and well below the notice of the antiaircraft
batteries. She climbed up the ladder into the spider room. The
spherical room, dead center in the zeppelin cylinder, composed of a
network of rubber tubing with a harness in the middle. She shimmied
into the harness, hooked herself in, including the neck brace, and
waited for the ship to hit the desert floor.