by Adam D Jones
One sandship was turned over, and on top was a man wearing her clothes, climbing up to get a better look around.
Found you.
A shot rang out.
16
A loud boom with a metallic rapport, followed by a ricochet.
Atop a wrecked sandship, the prisoner fell and flattened himself out, arms and legs spread like a fallen scarecrow.
“Go!” Dawn kicked hard.
The spooked mule brayed its loudest and tried to shake her off. Dawn gripped its neck but couldn’t stay on, and she fell with a quick shout. The jack mule ran off, kicking up a cloud of sand and taking the food and water packs with it.
Coward.
Dawn ran toward the ships. She hurried through the remains of a house, past its burned-out walls and in between the shaky wooden slats that still stood. The mule had irritated her all the way here, but now she was thankful she hadn’t had to walk the whole way.
She made it to a shaky wall that had once belonged to a barn. The wall remained, somehow standing by itself. Just past a few more buildings, the Lodi boy was sprawled out on top of an overturned sandship, afraid to move a muscle. Another shot slammed into a metal hull and the prisoner flinched.
“Prisoner!” she whispered.
He didn’t move. Either he didn’t hear, or he was too scared to acknowledge her. Pinned down on the sandship’s underbelly, he kept his limbs as flat as possible, trying to stay out of the assailant’s trajectory.
Where is he? Dawn leaned out and gazed beyond the sandship, past two others that were crashed, and saw movement in a shadow. Halfway to the other side of the broken town, was a pitiful lean-to, a tiny wooden structure that had somehow survived the assault. The crooked roof cast a thick shadow, hiding the assailant’s face, but a fire burning in front of the lean-to gave her a glimpse of a man laying on a blanket and holding a pistol in both hands.
Why does he have a fire? Dawn opened her satchel. Something in there would react with the flames, if she could get—
Wood splintered above her as the next bullet landed in the barn’s rickety wall. Dawn crouched lower and kept running through the ingredients. Three of them caught her eye. Before she could second guess herself, Dawn grabbed the vials, opened them, and poured a little of each into her palm. She rubbed the mixture together until it congealed and tingled against her skin.
When the next shot came, Dawn immediately ran for it without bothering to find out where the bullet landed, hoping to close the distance while he reloaded. Her booted feet pounded into the sand, kicking up dirt with each step, as she bolted toward the shadowed shack.
The clicking sounds grew louder as she got closer. He’s nearly reloaded. Too fast. She hustled, clenching the thin paste in her fist.
In the light of his fire, she could see their assailant reloading his weapon. His fingers, shaky but quick, finished their work and raised a wheel-lock pistol.
Dawn tossed the mixture at the fire.
She knew what was coming. Dawn crouched, turned her head away, and slammed her eyes shut just as the fire exploded with a quick boom. Sand blasted her face and body, biting her skin. The blast nearly knocked her down while sand filled the air.
When she opened her eyes, she saw the man reaching for his gun, which had been knocked just out of his reach. He still lay on the blanket while he stretched his hand toward the weapon. As his fingers raked the grip, Dawn’s boot came down on the pistol.
He clawed at the weapon a few times, then let himself fall back on to his blanket. “Almighty...”
I’ve never seen anyone so exhausted.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” said Dawn, watching him slowly look up at her.
He raised a scarred hand to shield the sunlight, and Dawn saw a face full of lines, some from laughing and some from holding back tears. The dry mouth and shaky lips, and the fact he hadn’t been able to move, told Dawn he had suffered a blow to the head that left him stunned, probably for more than a day. In shock. That explains the fire—he’s cold.
“Who are you?” he gasped.
“I’m Dawn. I’m from...well, I’m not with the Republic anymore.”
He pointed with a weak arm. “But...that man’s a...”
“He’s a Lodi.” Dawn realized that the prisoner, still wearing her clothes, looked like a Republic scientist. “That kid isn’t with the Sovereign, either.”
He fell back. “...what have I done...”
Behind her, the Lodi came out of hiding and approached. He stood next to Dawn, watching the man.
“He’s not going to hurt us,” said Dawn. “I think he was afraid of you.”
The prisoner returned nothing.
Still not talking? You’re welcome, by the way.
Dawn knelt. “Who are you?”
The man coughed and sat up a little. “My name’s Marshal.” He looked around at the wreckage and then shook his head. “And I used to be a man of peace.”
◆◆◆
The man called Marshal fell asleep, and Dawn left him with the prisoner while she searched for the mule and her supplies. She asked the Lodi man not to run off, but he didn’t respond. Not even a head nod or a smile. He just stared like he always did.
From atop one of the derelict ships she scanned the desert in every direction but saw no sign of her mount. When she trudged back to the place where it had fled, the wind had covered up any hoofprints that could tell her where it ran to.
She walked back in the heat, feeling the suns bearing down on her shoulders and remembering that working in a lab hadn’t prepared her for a life on the frontier. When she re-entered the wrecked town, Dawn stopped to rest against a leaning door jamb in a shaky house frame to catch her breath before joining the men.
Marshal was sitting up in the same spot, his head drooping. The Lodi approached him with water in his palms.
Where did he get that?
Dawn followed his footprints, which led back to a barrel of Dae water.
“No!” Dawn ran and shoved his hands. The water spilled and darkened the sand at their feet.
The prisoner looked at her sternly.
“That’s not safe!” she said.
“Looked like water to me.” Marshal coughed.
“Dae water from a Republic lab,” corrected Dawn. “It’s toxic once they get done refining it.”
Marshal raised his eyebrows and looked at the prisoner. “You tryin’ to kill me, son?”
The Lodi shrugged.
“I don’t think he knew,” said Dawn. “He probably wouldn’t recognize the labeling the Republic uses. We may have to boil some water from the river.”
Marshal nodded and let his head droop again. “If you find any water that won’t kill me, I’d be much obliged.”
Dawn began searching the storage of each ship again and the Lodi, seeing her, did the same. After moving navigating the tunnels of an upside-down sandship and finding nothing useful, she emerged to see him snapping his fingers to get her attention. In the wooden wreck of the riverboat he’d found canteens, more than ten of them.
“Marshal. Are you awake?” she asked, opening a canteen.
“No choice,” he rasped. “Hard to sleep with all the noise you kids make.”
Cheeky guy.
Dawn lifted the canteen to his lips and he drank. After a few sips he took it from her and greedily poured more of it in his mouth and over his face, gasping in between swallows.
“I think it’s been more than a day,” he said. “Feels like a week.”
“The battle of Third Bend was three days ago,” said Dawn.
He smiled. “The battle of—” A few coughs overtook him. “Got a name for it already, and we’re not even all dead, yet!” He looked into the canteen.
“There’s plenty more where that came from. Drink up.”
Dawn and the Lodi sat near him in the shade, bringing the food and water they had found and gathering it between them.
“Thank you, both.” Marshal opened his third canteen. “
I beg your pardon for shootin’ at you. Good thing I wasn’t feeling good, because otherwise I wouldn’t have missed. Course, then I wouldn’t have known to feel bad about it.”
“Marshal, how did these ships all and up in a heap?”
He shrugged. “I crashed ‘em.”
◆◆◆
“Once we’d lined up our ship to crash in theirs,” Marshal continued, “we leaped, leaped for our lives. Zoe and I landed outside of trouble, but the other fella got hit by a flying beam right away. Most of the Republic’s men got stuck in between the ships and didn’t make it. Zoe collapsed after breathing in some kind of fumes that came out of one of the engines. I started to help her when something, I don’t know what, knocked me over.
“When I woke, Zoe was breathing but not awake, and two men from the Republic were crawling around on the sand. I shouted for them to throw down their weapons, but they pointed their guns at me. I was lucky I had my pistol still. I was weak, and my head spun, but I got the better of ‘em.”
Marshal shook his head, a look of regret spreading over his face. He continued.
“Zoe wouldn’t wake up. I dripped some water in her mouth and tried to keep her warm. Just after the first night she stopped breathing. All I could do then is sit here and try to keep my head from spinning. Then I saw someone in a Republic uniform poking around, and that’s when I did something stupid.” He stopped his story to make a point, staring straight at the Lodi. “I’m sorry, young man.”
The prisoner watched Marshal’s face, then slowly rose and left, walking toward the dying horizon. Marshal’s story had taken enough time that the second sunset was underway.
“He doesn’t talk,” said Dawn. “He understands, but I can’t get him to speak.”
“He’s been through a lot, looks like.” Marshal reached for a piece of dried meat. “I don’t know what he went through before you met him, but he’s still reeling from it, and...”
Marshal’s eyes grew stern. He pushed against the ground and got to his knees, then his body trembled as he rose to his feet. Leaning against the frame of a fallen ship, he took a few steps and pointed. “Your friend found something.”
Dawn turned and saw the prisoner running their way, waving his arms. Behind him, she saw a shimmer on the horizon.
“You see that?” Marshal asked. “I think it’s coming our way.”
Dawn shuddered. Another one.
17
The sandship wasn’t easy to see, but Dawn’s eyes were able to pick out the glint of metal in front of the blue sky and the disruption underneath. Her eyes were getting quick to spot these things.
“How long?” asked Marshal.
“I can’t tell. I know how fast they run, but...” Dawn didn’t know how to judge a distance further than the wastebasket at the end of her lab. “I don’t know how far away that is.”
“More than a wheel away.” Marshal squinted into the distance. “Maybe one and a half. That’d be a day and a half if they were a wagon.”
“Breakfast. They’ll be here by breakfast then.”
Marshal whistled. “There’s nowhere for us to go. Not where they can’t see you and run you down. And I’ve heard being trampled by one of those things is a bad way to die.”
“It is.”
Dawn remembered seeing another scientist punished that way after being caught selling a Dae stone. Inder had thrown the older woman under one of the sandships and made the others watch while she turned on the engines. The woman was compressed into the floor. Believe me: it is as bad as you’ve heard.
Marshal hobbled back to his place in the shade and Dawn joined him. The Lodi had made his way back, panting, and sat down.
“I bet they heard the gunshots,” said Marshal. “My gunshots.”
“They’d be out here anyway. They’re...”
Marshal leaned forward. “Looking for someone?”
Dawn and the Lodi looked at one another, and Dawn saw fear in his eyes again.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Marshal. “If they want to hurt you, then I’ll help you. I say you two get across the river where it can’t follow.”
“What about you?” Dawn looked up at a broken ship, the one on its side, and examined each of the four engines.
Marshal laughed. “I’d be lucky to make it halfway across this old town right now. No, I’ll stay here. Plenty of bullets. I’ll be able to keep ‘em occupied while you two run for it.”
“Run?” Dawn turned her attention back to him. “Mr. Marshal, we’re standing in the middle of three sandships. We’re flying out of here.”
◆◆◆
“The engines are best on this one,” said Dawn, pointing to the upside-down ship, “but since we can’t turn it over, we’ll have to attach those engines to this ship that’s on its side. It’s got three cracked engine cubes, but the instrument panels appear to be in one piece.”
Marshal hobbled behind her, using a wooden plank as a crutch. “The Corsairs told me these engines require precise calibration. Can we do that?”
“Don’t have to. Your friends were right, but the engines only have to be calibrated to the frame of a sandship, and every sandship uses the same frame. It’s hard work to build these things, but not so hard as your friends thought to change out parts in the field. That’s a deliberate design.”
“Mmmhmm.”
Skepticism lurked in Marshal’s voice, but she ignored it.
“Prisoner,” said Dawn. “I need tools. Can you look around? Anything will be useful.”
The Lodi nodded and began poking through one of the rubble heaps.
Dawn looked around. Of the three sandships, only one was likely fly again by the morning. The upside-down ship was in the best condition, but they would never turn it over in time. The third ship was wrecked and bent in every corner, barely resembling a ship at all. Only the one laying on its side gave them a chance, and only if they could replace three of the four engines. And turn it over.
“Marshal,” she said, “for what it’s worth, you wrecked these ships pretty good.”
“That was the idea. At least I’ll always have that to be proud of.” He straightened his collar. “No one wrecks ‘em like Marshal.”
The prisoner came back holding a pack of leather that clinked as he ran. He unrolled it in front of them, revealing a series of tightly-packed tools.
“This is enough to get started.” Dawn took the leather roll from him and tucked it under her arm. “Now I need you to help me with an engine.”
The prisoner nodded.
They clambered up the side the overturned sandship, pulling on loose pipes and climbing on broken panels, making their make their way to the top where they walked along the belly of the ship. Dawn knelt near one of the engine cubes, which fit neatly in between two beams that made a corner of the ship’s frame. “Looks good,” she said, mostly to herself. “No damage inside...should slide right out.”
“You can remove that thing?” asked Marshal from below.
“Easier than it looks.” Dawn found a small scrap of metal in the tool kit. She put it in her mouth, holding it between her teeth, and place her hands on opposite sides of the engine. “Prisoner,” she said, talking around the metal scrap, “grab the other two sides. Tight.”
He squeezed the engine cube with both hands, like she was doing.
“Now,” Dawn pressed her hands harder against the box. “Push,” she said through her teeth. “Hard as you can.”
They pressed inward until she felt a click. Quickly, Dawn grabbed the metal strip from her mouth, pushed it in between the engine and the frame, and started to pry upward. “Pull up!”
It was a tight fit, but the box slowly moved out of its place, grinding against the metal frame as it rose.
“It’s heavy,” said Dawn, as the engine came free. “Just put it down. Careful.”
They laid the metal box next to them and Dawn wiped her forehead.
“Looks so normal,” said Marshal. “If I saw it laying there I’d never k
now it was so powerful. Corsairs say they haven’t taken one apart yet to see how it works. ‘Fraid they won’t be able to put it back together.”
“Believe it or not, the engine is the simple part.” Dawn motioned for the prisoner to follow her to the next engine. “The pipes and controls that get the heat to the Dae stones are the complicated part.”
The prisoner stopped and stared. Marshal was doing the same.
“What?” asked Dawn, looking at their baffled faces.
“Did you say, Dae stone?”
“Yes.” Dawn pointed to the third ship, the one crumpled up like paper. “That one is so damaged one of the engines got torn open. You can clearly see the Dae stone sitting in there. How did you think these ships worked?”
Marshal hobbled over to the damaged ship and look up at the engine. The dying afternoon light still shone bright enough to illuminate the stone inside.
“Looks like an ordinary river stone. Long and smooth,” said Marshal. “But it’s got markings on it.”
“Cataloged by the Republic,” said Dawn. She pointed to the next engine, but the prisoner was watching Marshal, ignoring her. “What’s it look like, the marking?”
“A circle. Underneath...a series of numbers.”
“These are new, then. The circle is for stones mined in the last decade. It takes ages for a Dae stone to lose its potency, but it happens eventually. Either way, these are fresh. Assuming they all come from the same quarry.”
“I never knew Dae stones left Gamon.”
“Not often.” Dawn snapped her fingers and the prisoner finally broke his gaze from the Dae stone and turned to help her. “But sandships require too much power for Dae water to do the job. Heat is applied directly to the stone itself, along with the mixture.”
“The mixture?”
“I’ll get to that.”
◆◆◆
After removing three of the engines from the overturned sandship, Dawn and the Lodi boy used them to replace the three cracked engines in the ship that lay on its side. The work required dangling from the top of the ship and pushing the engines in sideways, and Dawn was ready to collapse when the third one slid into place. By that time, night had fallen, and Marshal had built a large fire.