The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (37 page)

Rearmed, she steeled herself for the
monumental pain awaiting her when she tried to regain her feet. As
prepared as she thought she’d made herself, getting up onto her
good leg nearly threw her back to the ground. Standing on her
remaining shaky leg, she felt like throwing up from the pain.
Without the aid of adrenaline and endorphins, she knew she would
have ended up right back on the ground; even still, her stance was
a tenuous position.

The cultists pressed their advantage, rushing
to the edge of the gap when they had regrouped enough for another
charge. Fiona felled the first, winged the second only to have him
finished off by a blast from the ridge. The third managed to get
off a few wild shots before being taken down by a hale of bullets
from Fiona and the snipers. Bullets bounced around inside the
narrow metal alcove, nipping twice at the free edges of Fiona’s
denim jacket, but never finding her flesh. No answer she’d managed
to pull from Hawkins was worth the shit-storm she’d managed to kick
up in the aftermath; regretting her impetuous stupidity was
something she’d once excelled at, but increasingly loathed.

She hobbled for the entrance knowing
full-well she was a dead woman if she remained trapped in the
single-entrance alcove. She burst, or at least as much of a burst
as she could manage on her gimpy leg, from the alcove with her gun
blazing. Adrenaline shot through her with the first bullets biting
at the sand around her feet. She found targets, fired, missed some,
hit others, and continued limping on throughout. She was almost
back to the buried crawler leg when she felt something wet, hard,
and hot thump her on the left shoulder. She spun under the impact
and went down on her right side. Her gun tumbled from her hand,
lost in the effort to catch herself. It took a moment to realize
from the tatters of her jacket and shirt what had happened. She’d
taken a reasonably close blast of birdshot on her left side. If the
fool had bothered to load his shotgun with any grade higher, he
likely would have dissolved her from the waist up. As it was, the
pellets meant to fell small game birds hurt like hell, but were all
likely reasonably close to the surface.

Fiona crawled to cover using her right arm
and left leg, leaving her wounded right leg to drag behind her
while clutching her numb left arm against her chest. Sniper fire
continued from the ridge, but accompanying it was the sound of hoof
beats thundering across the shale with the clatter of carbines. The
remaining cultists, of which there were very few, scattered only to
be cut down by the three riders.

The world began to go fuzzy around the edges.
She was fairly certain Cork had taken up her defense. She heard him
say her name. She felt the empty shells from his MP-5 falling on
her like rain. The world refused to come back into focus and she
fell into darkness against her will.

Gieo passed through Albuquerque with only a
pause for lunch and a short meeting with Alondra. Knowing the roads
she would travel and the capacity of the bike, she had little doubt
she could make the trip in one day if she kept her speed up. She
asked Alondra to show the pilots from Colorado every courtesy as
pilots of the Ravens and military men when they passed through.
Alondra assured her it would be done. As a parting comment, Gieo
mentioned the possibility of moving the fledgling air force to
Albuquerque in the not too distant future, but Alondra said it was
far likelier they would find themselves in Las Vegas. The cryptic
statement, spoken without leaving the door open for further
inquiry, left Gieo with questions Veronica likely wouldn’t answer,
but Fiona might if they were on speaking terms upon her return.

Passing Truth and Consequences took
everything in her not to turn off to drive down to the reservoir.
She wanted to know if the body was still there, reasoned she might
have enough time to bury him properly, or at the very least
investigate further to find out who the man might have been. Her
handlebars never wavered as she rocketed past the ruins of the
town. The scavengers would have had their way with him by then and
even if they hadn’t she had no tools to dig with nor did she think
it truly mattered who he was. Knowing and burying wouldn’t bring
anyone peace and so she rode.

The day wore on and her body rebelled against
the riding. She stopped but once to refill the tanks from the jugs
she brought with her and only when the bike was already at its
coolest, cutting the rest time down. The desert sunset painted the
sky pink and gold as the day slipped away into dusk. Bats, eager to
feed on the nightly insects, took flight even before the red orb of
the sun had fully passed beneath the horizon in the west. Gieo
pulled into Tombstone with the lone goal of lying down for several
hours with none of her limbs anywhere near each other.

The town was a kicked hornet’s nest with none
of the hoopla intended for her return. The scout from one of
Fiona’s rides—Gieo recognized her as Claudia—spoke animatedly to
Veronica, who looked like the spigot for her blood had been left to
drain. Gieo lowered the pod on her bike in the middle of the street
near the makeshift airfield in the park, and nudged her way through
the crowd to where Veronica was standing. From the murmurs among
the gathered Ravens, Gieo pieced together that Fiona had found the
remains of the Hawkins House along with a newly discovered giant
Slark crawler. As Gieo pushed her way into the inner circles, the
stories about Fiona’s condition became graver.

“Cork says she’s as stable as he can make her
but that she shouldn’t be moved by horse,” Claudia was finishing
her report to Veronica when Gieo came within earshot. “If she’d
just told us what she was planning we could have…”

“You couldn’t have done anything differently
and she couldn’t have told you what she herself didn’t know,”
Veronica cut her off. “She probably didn’t even know what she was
going to do until after she’d done it.”

“She calls them chaos tics,” Gieo said,
adding the only piece of information she had to the conversation.
“What happened?”

“She’s been shot,” Veronica said. “We’re
preparing a truck to go get her with the Slark fuel we have left.
Hopefully they can refuel at the crawler when they…”

“Forget that.” Gieo was already past Veronica
and on her way into the makeshift airfield. The smallest of the
dirigibles was functional for flight but still unarmed. “Ramen!”
she shouted. The mechanical fluttered off the saloon roof and
whirred down to her side. “Get the
Little Monster
ready to
fly.”

“You don’t even know where she is,” Veronica
said, following to protest.

“That’s why I’m taking her with me.” Gieo
jerked her thumb in Claudia’s direction. “We can be there and back
before you even get a truck to her.”

“How many can you take with you?” Veronica
asked.

“What? I don’t know, ten maybe, but we need
the room to carry her back.” Gieo walked briskly around the airship
stoking the furnace while Ramen filled the water and fuel
ports.

“You’re not bringing them back,” Veronica
said. “They’ll stay behind to secure the wreck site for our use
until we can get a salvage team out to it.”

“Sure, whatever,” Gieo said. “Petites only
and no heavy weapons or machinery though. We need to save on weight
for fuel and speed.”

Veronica turned to organize her team as
quickly as possible. Gieo nearly collided with Claudia when she
made to remove several of the armor plates from the starboard
side.

“I am sorry,” Claudia said. “I tried to
protect her.”

It seemed a strange concept to Gieo that
Fiona might need protection, yet not strange in the slightest that
Fiona would make it obscenely difficult for someone to do so; the
incongruity was at once comfortingly familiar and rather
depressing.

“Veronica is probably right,” Gieo said. “If
she wanted to be protected, she wouldn’t have gone out of her way
to make it difficult. Apologize by helping me get her back.”

“Then we will fly to her like avenging
angels!” Claudia said with infectious glee.

Gieo replied with a weak smile before
returning to the armor plating. She couldn’t be sure if she’d need
it or not. She vaguely knew where the antiaircraft defenses were,
but didn’t know where she was going yet. Regardless of the
destination, the cargo was worth the attempt and she wouldn’t
bother slowing enough to offer a good target until she was safely
back in Tombstone with Fiona.

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

Hooked into the
Little Monster
as it steamed across the twilight of the
desert sky, Gieo couldn’t bring herself to tell the eleven
passengers that she hadn’t really ever landed an airship after a
lengthy flight. If there was good news in that dire track-record,
it was the fact that she had walked away from every crash landing
thus far.

Claudia’s directions were toward the south,
which was another mixed bag. Gieo didn’t really know if the Slark
had antiaircraft batteries in Old Mexico, but she also didn’t think
they would after comparing her own map to the one Veronica was
using. It made sense that the defensive line was to the west as it
appeared to be the direction of the border between humanity and
Slark.

Without weapons or armor, the
Little
Monster
made good time. Pre-invasion blimps had a top speed of
around fifty miles per-hour; Gieo’s dirigibles didn’t have to bow
to the FFA and ran on steam powered engines burning Slark fuel. Her
sleeker, smaller airships cranked across the sky with more alacrity
than anything Goodyear or MetLife could manage. At a top speed of
close to seventy, the
Little Monster
zipped through the
encroaching darkness followed by a thrumming whirr and a vapor
trail from the steam engines.

“Your ships breathe like living things,”
Claudia shouted to be heard over the engine bellows.

“Ramen thinks so too, which I always thought
was weird since it’s actually a lot closer to a flying train.” Gieo
shifted forward in the harnesses holding her in the glass ball at
the front of the cockpit to keep her field of vision clear on the
ground below her. A smart antiaircraft battery would wait until she
was past to fire on her knowing evasive maneuvers wouldn’t be able
to begin until after the first shell was fired if they did.

“What do you keep looking for?” Claudia
asked. “We are still a ways from the target zone.”

“Don’t tell the others, but I tend to get
shot down a lot,” Gieo said.

“How much is a lot?”

“I think the last time I had a flight that
didn’t end in a crash was on Jet Blue.”

“What do we do if we are shot down?”

“Learn to fly by flapping your arms, I
suppose,” Gieo said. “The safety measures for this ship haven’t
even been built yet, let alone installed.”

“You are my kind of crazy,” Claudia said.
“Cork said he would set fires so we will know him in the dark.
Watch for those.”

No sooner had Claudia said the words than
Ramen’s voice buzzed through from his perch atop the front nose of
the dirigible. His words came through the ship’s telecom with a
crackle. “I can see a ring of fire burning a few miles ahead,
boss.”

“Let’s bring her in,” Gieo yelled into the
cone microphone above her head. She downshifted the great gears of
the propeller engines resulting in a rumble and shudder running
down the length of the ship. Adjusting the angle of the wings, the
drag along the top guided the narrow vessel down toward the ground
in a shallow dive. Their airspeed dipped to match a landing
approach in the vicinity of the technical specs of what Gieo
thought would be a good landing speed for a ship she’d designed but
had never landed.