The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (41 page)

“Thank you for your time, ladies.” Carolyn
stood, and with the same business-like approach carried out in her
entrance, she quit the room, leaving the three occupants
stunned-and-poorly from the news.

“What just happened?” Gieo asked quietly.

“We were all just royally fucked, that’s
what,” Veronica growled.

Fiona had slumped left onto the arm of the
chair, using her left hand to prop her head up as though it were
too great a weight for her neck at the moment. “The war is
restarted and we’re not going to be a part of it,” she
muttered.

“What are you talking about?” Gieo said,
trying to insert some levity into the conversation. “I’m going to
be commanding the squadron for the attack on Bakersfield’s
refineries. This is the biggest operation since the cascade.
Everyone keeps saying so.”

“She thinks you’ll fail,” Veronica said. “If
she thought this was going to work, if she thought you would live
through it, she wouldn’t have pulled McAdams. But even if you do
manage to pull it off, she’s planning on putting your dirigibles on
a shelf out of the way while she develops a real air force with
real pilots.”

Gieo looked from Veronica to Fiona for
confirmation of the assessment. Fiona was only shaking her head in
apparent disbelief.

“We could leave,” Gieo said, trying
desperately to shift gears. “You did it before.”

Fiona sighed. “There are no free cities left
except Juarez, and we wouldn’t be welcome there. Anywhere else in
Raven territory, we’d just be arrested and hanged for
desertion.”

“That’s insane!” Gieo protested.

“The Ravens were built on the model of the
Solntsevskaya syndicate,” Veronica said flatly. “Insane is their
modus operandi.” Veronica returned to her desk and bent over to
pull several manila envelopes from one of the bottom drawers,
shunning the chair that Carolyn had so recently vacated. “Sadly,
for Carolyn, so is backstabbing.” She offered the envelopes to
Fiona who took them without question. “Give those to the people
named on the outsides with the operation phrase, ‘listen to the
wind.’ An affirmative reply will be, ‘under the fire-red sky.’”

Fiona smirked, rising slowly to her feet with
the envelopes tucked under her arm. She gave Veronica a
conspiratorial salute.

“What’s going on?” Gieo asked as if the room
had just turned upside down on her.

“Carolyn is a conniving bitch with an axe to
grind against Fiona and me; your crime is keeping lousy company, I
suppose.” Veronica explained. “There’s no way I wouldn’t have a
plan ready on the off-chance she decided now was a good time to
take revenge on the lot of us.”

Fiona guided a very confused Gieo out of the
room with new errands on the itinerary. Back outside, away from
potentially prying ears, Gieo leaned in close to Fiona and asked,
“What was that all about?”

“My relationship with Veronica started a
little before hers ended with Carolyn,” Fiona explained. With a
deep breath, she continued with the part she’d never admitted to
anyone. “My relationship with Carolyn ended at almost exactly the
same time.” She hoped Gieo wouldn’t view the whole tangled mess as
something distasteful or overtly despicable, which, of course, it
was both. “Veronica and I were able to watch each others backs
fairly effectively afterwards…”

“Until you left,” Gieo interrupted.

Another realization Fiona hadn’t even spent
time in the same county of—when she’d left Veronica she’d also left
her alone with Carolyn’s retribution. “Yes,” Fiona said, the old
feelings of being the traitor rebounded onto her. “Regardless, I
wouldn’t want to try to match nefarious plans with Veronica. She
thinks in terms of years and branching eventualities. Whatever she
has in these envelopes was being set up before Carolyn ever boarded
a train.”

“Can we trust Veronica?” Gieo asked.

“We can trust Veronica to look out for
Veronica,” Fiona said. “As luck would have it, we’re directly tied
to her in this.”

“Do you have any other evil ex-girlfriends I
should know about?” Gieo asked.

“These two aren’t enough for you?”

Gieo laughed and nudged Fiona with her
shoulder. “At least I understand now what Veronica meant when she
always said she thought you were into breasts,” Gieo said. “Carolyn
must have terrible back problems after lugging those melons around
her whole life.”

“Melons,” Fiona rolled the word around her
mind and mouth. “Yeah, that’s the word for them. But I’m just as
much about personality and yours is definitely the biggest and best
I’ve seen.”

“Flatterer,” Gieo said. “You finish up with
the envelopes; I’m going to go get a puppy for Ramen.”

They kissed briefly and parted company with a
promise to meet back at the saloon when their individual errands
were completed. Gieo glanced back over her shoulder to the
gunfighter as they walked in opposite directions only to find Fiona
glancing back to her.

The reciprocity felt nice.

Fiona had kept her cool to the best of her
ability in the office, but after she exchanged a final glance with
Gieo and disappeared around the corner, she was fuming mad and
entertaining the notion of burning down the whole operation to keep
her lover from the poorly supported mission. It took all the
self-control she had to turn left at the end of the street to head
for the makeshift airfield rather than go right over to Carolyn’s
office and do whatever felt natural, which almost certainly would
involve treasonous violence. As sides to be on went though, being
on Veronica’s was a good place to be, and Fiona had to trust in her
former lover and friend’s cunning as she had so many times in the
past.

When she reached the airfield with the
dirigibles and planes about ready to fly, Stephanie came out to
greet her. It was a true greeting, one of genuine interest and
warmth. Fiona produced the envelope with Stephanie’s name on it and
all the warmth drained from her.

“Listen to the wind,” Fiona said.

“Under a fire-red sky,” Stephanie replied as
she took the delivered message. “That’ll be it then.”

“Are you allowed to tell me what’s in it?”
Fiona asked.

“I don’t see why not. If Veronica thought
you’d stab her in the back, she wouldn’t have had you deliver it,
and even if someone forces the news from you it’ll be too late.”
Stephanie tore the flap from the envelope and dumped a collection
of dirigible schematics into her free hand. “We’ve been skimming
the salvage from the Slark crawler wreck. It’s supposed to be
crated to head back to Las Vegas for Carolyn’s use, but we’ve been
warehousing sealed crates full of rocks instead. She’ll see the
train off before she heads out on the mission thinking all the
salvage was claimed by her to be used by her and McAdams later on
when in fact she’ll just be in possession of the world’s largest
rock collection.”

“How could she not know?” Fiona asked.

“All her people are soldiers. They don’t know
anything from salvaging,” Stephanie explained. “All the techs and
engineers are loyal to Veronica. Once Carolyn’s soldiers oversaw
the protection detail back to the warehouse, our people switched
out the goods for rocks and took the real Slark salvage out the
back.”

“Not that I can’t appreciate the joke at
Carolyn’s expense, but what does that have to do with the
envelopes?”

“Months ago, when we first started building
the dirigibles, Veronica asked Gieo what she would do if she had
Slark tech to repurpose. These are the schematics Gieo drew. That’s
what our patrols have really been looking for—another big Slark
score to build the airships Veronica really wants and Gieo could
make nearly invincible.” Stephanie turned the schematics to show
Fiona. The drawings and diagrams didn’t mean a thing to her, but
they looked sufficiently convoluted and definitely in Gieo’s hand
to prove their legitimacy. “Nobody dared hope we’d find a score as
rich as the crawler you and Claudia took. When we started pulling
pieces, Veronica kept prompting Gieo to update her wish-list.”

“How did she know Carolyn hadn’t intended to
use the Slark salvage for the airships all along?”

“We didn’t, at first,” Stephanie said, “but
when they wanted to start crating it, Veronica had a fairly good
idea what was about to happen.”

“And now…?” Fiona asked, less and less
surprised by the foresight in Veronica’s plan.

“We’ve been planning for this all along,”
Stephanie said with a mischievous grin. “It’ll take less than a
week to retrofit the Slark tech to the dirigibles and planes. I
don’t know what is in the rest of the envelopes or who they’re
intended for, but if you deliver them I’m assuming all our bases
will be covered.” Stephanie saluted Fiona, turned on her heels, and
walked back into the giant tents covering the airship field.

Fiona walked on with her gimpy leg growing
increasingly fatigued and achy, but with four envelopes still to
deliver.

Before the sun set, before she was due to
meet back up with Gieo, Fiona was exhausted, her leg was a
four-alarm fire, but she had delivered the remaining orders to
Claudia, Cork, a Hispanic woman at the pilot compound, and a final
missive to a message rider who had clearly been waiting for the
drop, riding a prepared horse to the northeast immediately after
receiving the package.

On her way back to the saloon, the pain in
Fiona’s leg eased. She was working within one of Veronica’s
plans—it warmed her with confidence. Gieo was in front of the
building, just off the plank sidewalk, gifting a scrappy, brindle
mutt to Ramen, who looked as elated as a rattling little robot
could manage.

It was a weird world, Fiona surmised, but
infinitely better for her than the one it replaced. Gieo began
walking toward her when Fiona was spotted, but couldn’t hold her
pace and eventually jogged, throwing her arms around Fiona’s
shoulders. Fiona responded by wrapping her arms around Gieo’s waist
to lift her into the hug.

“I’ll always have your back, lover,” Gieo
whispered to her.

It felt good to have someone say the words
and mean them.

Chapter 27:
Oil!

The work of the
week, slow at first with Carolyn and her men still in town, sped to
an efficient clip when the Red Queen and her army of military men
struck out for the west with the rising sun at their backs. The
march of Carolyn’s battalions, even with wagons, a brief train
ride, and horses would be long, arduous, and would be taken slowly
to leave them fresh for fighting when they hit the teeth of the
line Gieo had mapped through her many failed flights. With the town
clear of all but those loyal to Veronica or Fiona, the Slark
salvage came out of its various hiding places mapped by Cork to
make its way onto the makeshift fleet. The handful of pilots from
Colorado, spurned by McAdams and the Raven command, quickly saw the
truth of their situation and threw their lot in with Veronica’s
plan as their best hope for survival. Many still believed McAdams
couldn’t possibly have known about Carolyn’s treachery before his
departure to Las Vegas; Gieo agreed with their assessment of the
man, but she secretly wondered what he might have been offered.
Regardless, her vow to Charlotte to bring her husband home safely
was on his own head now.