The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (27 page)

“That’s not fair.” Fiona hopped up and made
to put an end to Gieo’s hurried re-clothing efforts. “When you told
me to pick, in front of everyone, I picked you.” Fiona reached out
to take Gieo’s shoulder. In a blur she was spun around by her arm,
her legs kicked out from under her, landing face first on the bed
with a little bounce and squeak. Gieo was immediately on top of
her, pinning Fiona’s arm behind her back.

“When did I forget how to fight?” Fiona
muttered.

“Veronica has been teaching me judo,” Gieo
explained calmly.

“And this is how you chose to tell me?”

“This is how I’m getting the point across
that you need to treat me better no matter how tired you are.”

Fiona couldn’t decide which was wounded worse
in the exchange: her pride at being so easily flipped by her much
smaller, formerly-helpless girlfriend or her relationship prowess
in that Gieo not only thought Fiona hadn’t been treating her well,
but that she also kind of agreed. Fiona didn’t want the apology to
sound coerced, although she wasn’t sure how she would manage that
considering Gieo pretty much had her helpless. “I’m sorry,” Fiona
muttered into the blanket. “I will try not to let my work make me
distant, I’ll stop calling Veronica by her real name, and I’ll only
call you Stacy in the sweetest and loving ways.”

“And I get to try anal with you.”

“Giving or receiving?”

“Giving!”

“You’re going to have to go ahead and break
my arm then.”

Gieo released Fiona and sighed. “Fine, I
accept your apology without the last condition.”

Fiona sat up, rubbing her sore wrist,
shoulder, and elbow in various alternating orders. “Why is that
even in your head?”

“My natural and insatiable curiosity, I
suppose. Hell, I made a robot who knows how to lie just to see if I
could,” Gieo said with a little snort. “I get curious and have to
know if I can do something.”

“Then wouldn’t it make more sense for you to
be on the receiving end?”

“Forget that,” Gieo said. “It sounds
unpleasant and embarrassing.”

They parted on friendlier terms than Gieo
might have expected from the steep decline the conversation had
taken. Fiona went off to the corral to see to the evening patrols,
and Gieo headed up to the roof to sort the last few boxes she had
of traded valuables, which she was eager to disperse and be rid of.
Ramen, who was the only one Gieo could trust with the overseer
position, guided the work on the three dirigibles being built in
the old park. The park apparently had never had much grass, and the
community buildings ringing it in on the one side had long since
stood empty. As with most things nobody else saw value in, the
Ravens repurposed it all and had the open expanse functioning as an
airship dry-dock in short order.

Gieo sifted through the dusty milk crates
with no real aim in mind. She was still a little sexually
frustrated from the fight that derailed her thrice daily getting
laid, and none of her projects had the intrigue to distract her.
Cowboy boots on the roof drew her eager attention, only to dash it
when they belonged to Veronica.

“The ships are coming along,” Veronica said.
She was dressed in skin-tight black ropers, black cowboy boots with
the jeans tucked in, a white tank-top, and a black Stetson. Her
blond curls bouncing around her slender shoulders remained the only
trapping that had once been her Madame Façade.

Gieo gave a non-committal shrug and returned
to her sorting. She’d begun to figure out Veronica awhile back. Her
colonization routine wrested power from whatever male hierarchy
existed through the guise of sexual meekness and availability,
which was why the Ravens had been so tarted-up in the first place,
and then pulled the rug out as soon as they found their control.
More than that, the fields of drugs were only partially grown for
medicinal purposes. The remainder was spread among the handful of
Tombstone men who had been vocal about the change in leadership.
With the endless search for a dragon or Mary-Jane as their new goal
and the Ravens as their only access, the vocal objections turned
into hazy support. When the drugs could no longer be purchased
through goods or coin, the five or six dozen men who had formerly
despised the Ravens came willingly to know indentured servitude to
pay for their fix. Gieo rightly suspected it would be a lifetime
sentence, albeit one shortened by drug use and overwork.

“We still need pilots,” Veronica said,
strolling toward Gieo in a meandering path.

“We’ll need to train them then,” Gieo said.
“Start scouring your ranks for spatial awareness and math skills,
and I’ll start writing the curriculum.”

“Fiona will find us a target long before we
have trained pilots.” Veronica’s shadow, long in the lateness of
the hour, cast over Gieo, stretching all the way to the edge of the
roof.

“Since I can only fly one at a time, I’m not
really sure what you want me to do about that.” Gieo stood up and
turned to find herself only inches from Veronica. She smelled
strongly of strawberry candy or lip gloss or shampoo or all of the
above. Her wicked smirk, dazzling hazel eyes, and intimate
proximity set Gieo’s head spinning a little.

“I was thinking of a recruitment flight,”
Veronica whispered. “Juarez survived Mexico’s bout with disease to
become a free city state. Of course, it could be brought into the
Raven fold with a little show of military might.”

“Why not just run your prostitution and
drug-ring scam on them?”

Veronica laughed and ran the backs of her
fingertips down Gieo’s cheek. “There is no universal tool to work
every problem,” she said. “If you can believe it, Juarez is even
less civilized than Tombstone. They’ll bend, but not from manners
or charm.”

“There are no pilots in Juarez,” Gieo said.
“You’re only after the slave labor.”

“I’m after soldiers,” Veronica corrected her.
“Vegas is stretched thin right now trying to repel attacks on Reno
and Bullhead City. There are five thousand Mexican regulars and
former drug cartel foot-soldiers in Juarez. They could easily be
turned to shock troops to help us break the line at Old Yuma.”

“One airship is hardly going to scare
them…you do realize you’re standing really close to me, right?”

“You stopped being a pet a long time ago.”
Veronica reached up and snatched the front of Gieo’s collar before
she could even react. “Why are you still wearing this?”

Gieo had never seen someone move so fast; she
could only imagine how deadly Veronica would be in a straight up
gunfight. Regardless of being taken by surprise, Gieo refused to
show a reaction. “It’s a sex thing,” she said with a gloating
smirk. “Fiona likes tugging on it when she fucks me.” There was no
doubt in Gieo’s mind that Veronica was a top to end all tops, but
something about the way she moved, or eyed Fiona, or a quality even
less tangible, told Gieo she liked to be on the receiving end of
fucking even if she liked dictating all the other terms of sex.

If the verbal blow landed, there wasn’t any
outward sign of it. Veronica smiled, a little crooked on the right,
and pulled Gieo closer by the collar until the pilot could feel her
breath when she spoke. “That sounds like our girl—she liked to pull
my hair.”

The circumstances were different, the
comments more overt and the threatening overtones far more obvious,
but Gieo quickly recognized the situation as the typical
back-biting girl-style fighting. Veronica wouldn’t physically
attack Gieo when she could use snarky words to cut her emotionally;
Gieo had really hoped that part of her life had ended with high
school. In the past, she’d internalized her hurt, become quiet,
sullen, and paranoid about every whisper behind her back that might
be another jibe at her expense. It hadn’t worked. Like blood in the
water, the other girls had taken her castling as weakness and
pressed forward with their stabbing her in the back. Gieo took a
page from Fiona’s operating manual and did something crazy
instead.

As quickly as she could manage, which was far
slower than Veronica’s grab, Gieo reached up, snagged a handful of
Veronica’s blond tresses, yanked her head back, down, and to the
right, and planted a wet, somewhat slobbery, kiss directly on her
strawberry flavored lips. After she was certain her point was made
with the unpleasant, almost virginally inept kiss, Gieo released
Veronica’s hair and wiped off her own lips with the back of her
hand.

“Fancy that,” Gieo said triumphantly. “I like
to pull hair too!”

Veronica had long since lost her hold on
Gieo’s collar to stagger back a step or two. She raised her hand as
if to wipe off her mouth, but stopped short, and regained an iota
of her composure. The mask was shattered though, and they both knew
Gieo had unbalanced Veronica’s position.

“That’s hardly a traditional judo move,”
Veronica said with a little laugh.

“You’re hardly a traditional teacher, I’m
hardly a traditional student, and this is hardly a traditional…”
The rest of Gieo’s tirade, which she really thought was building to
a nice crescendo, was cut short when Veronica clipped Gieo’s legs,
spun her in a three-quarters circle, slinging her almost to the
rooftop floor, bringing her to rest perfectly over a knee.

Gieo was a little surprised to find herself
bent over, but more surprised at how easily and quickly Veronica
had dropped to one knee without making so much as a thumping noise
against the roof. Veronica had her sufficiently wrangled with a
hand on the back of her collar and another resting on her lower
back. Gieo’s initial assessment of the situation as being simple
emotional attacks and girl-fighting was apparently something else
entirely, or maybe it wasn’t, maybe all the girls who had been so
horrible to her in high school had done so out of repressed,
lesbian sexuality and desire; Gieo doubted it could account for all
if it, but she began to wonder about a few cases in particular.

“If I’d met you first, I would have had you
in my bed and on a throne next to me from our first night
together,” Veronica said. “Funny how the world works to rob me of
the woman I love and give her over to someone I’m unerringly drawn
to. No, funny isn’t the word…”

“Who says I would have wanted you?” Gieo
said, somewhat forced from her entire weight being supported over a
single slender knee across her midsection.

Veronica pulled the back of her collar up and
gave Gieo a hard swat on the behind. The sting of the slap and the
tug on her collar were shockingly familiar and taboo at the same
time. Gieo hated herself for liking the differences in how Veronica
stole one of Fiona’s routines.

“Say you wouldn’t have and I’ll let you go.”
Veronica’s hand went from the spank to a gentle caress along the
backs of Gieo’s legs. Her fingers were soft, talented, and delicate
like porcelain on lace.

“I would have,” Gieo muttered. In the moment
after, she could have kicked herself for not lying were it not for
the difficulty of such an act in such a position.

“You’re so like me, yet so…” Veronica’s hand
made its way up between Gieo’s legs like a knife, thumping hard
against her at the top, rubbing meaningfully at the warm, wet,
unfinished business of earlier that afternoon. Gieo, almost as a
biological imperative, moaned in response. “…sweet. I envy this
niceness you’ve managed to retain through everything.” Veronica had
stopped rubbing on the word sweet, which made Gieo nearly scream in
frustration, but began again when she lulled in describing her
thoughts. Gieo demanded that her body stop enjoying being rubbed
through her shorts, swore she liked Fiona’s rough hands to
Veronica’s delicate ones, and prayed Veronica had no intention of
stopping again. “You are quite possibly the last nice person left
on the planet. It’s almost unimaginable that you would let me do
this to you.”

“I don’t really have a choice,” Gieo
whimpered.

Veronica’s hand stopped, holding stock-still.
“Ask me to stop.” Gieo remained silent. “Or, ask me to keep
going.”

There were parts of Gieo that said the words,
all but hurled them from her lips for Veronica to stop, but that
wasn’t what she said. In a voice she hardly recognized as her own,
Gieo heard herself say, “Please, keep going.”