by D. J. Butler
The road from Fort Bridger down into the Great Salt Lake City was a wide track, hammered flat by the passage of many horses, wagons, steam-trucks and, if the tales were to be believed, even handcarts, back in the old days. Some day in the not-too-distant future, the railroad would reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific. That railroad might belong to American companies or it might, if he wanted it, belong to Brigham Young and the Kingdom of Deseret. Either way, when it did connect, it would no doubt absorb a lot of the traffic to and from the Kingdom of Deseret.
That would be fine by Sam, he estimated. Less traffic meant higher speeds and faster winds and fewer people to mar the scenery. Not that he wasn’t going full speed now, with his steam valves opened all the way and O’Shaughnessy down below, swearing and shoveling coal into the furnace as fast as the old girl would take it.
Old girl, my skinny white Mississippi backside, he smiled at his own affectation. As if the Jim Smiley weren’t state of the art, built new this year by the United States Army to the specifications of its own agent, Samuel Clemens. She was reasonably fast, not as fast as the Liahona, but faster than most trucks, and her big knobbly wheels sent her flying over obstructions that would completely stymie lesser craft. That made her perfect for the whole great wide territory west of the Mississippi, or, for that matter, just about any territory in the world. Except for outright tropical forest, Sam guessed, and if it came to that, he’d fix a blade on the front of her and slice right through any jungle he came to.
And, of course, she could float, and that was Sam’s ace in the hole, should the Liahona look likely to overtake them. He glanced down at his charts and guessed that he might be within a quarter of an hour of the Bear River.
He wished no one aboard the Liahona any harm, naturally. He just wished them abject failure, confusion and ignominious defeat. Turning to look over his shoulder, he quickly scanned the wide road behind, and still saw nothing of the Welshman’s hulking land-ship with its hieroglyphic name on the bow.
“Well, mister,” he finally said to the dwarf. “I can’t say just yet. You won’t tell me who you are or what you were doing playing hide-and-go-seek in my saucers. You might be someone I ought to shoot, you might be someone I ought to trade for pemmican to the next Shoshone I meet and you might be someone who needs to pay me for a ticket, but I have no way of knowing until you explain yourself.”
The dwarf grunted again. “I might be someone that can tell you something useful.”
“Oh, yeah?” Sam asked. “Like what?”
The dwarf had a sullen, calculating look on his face. “Like who punched holes in your boiler pipes night before last.”
Sam grinned. “Now, that might have been a poor tactical move on your part, my friend. If I didn’t know better, that offer might make me suspect that you yourself were the culprit, and that would put you squarely in the malefactors needing to walk the plank category. At near ten miles an hour, I suppose you’d survive, but I don’t think you’d enjoy the experience.”
“Don’t care who done it, huh?”
“Of course I care.” Sam gestured expansively at the wheelhouse and the deck of the Jim Smiley. “I love this old girl. That’s why I had that rascal Dick Burton imprisoned by the Shoshone and then went out of my way to meet him and laugh in his face at his failure.” Sam pulled a cigar from his jacket pocket and shoved it into the corner of his mouth. Even unlit, he could taste the victory puff. “Got anything else to trade?”
The dwarf glowered and hunched down in his chair.
“His name is Coltrane,” the little boy suddenly offered around a mouthful of biscuit.
“The hell?” the dwarf snarled, taken by surprise.
“Don’t hurt him,” the boy added. “He’s nice.”
“Well, well,” Sam almost laughed. “Is he now? Do you know who Mr. Coltrane works for, John Moses?”
The little boy screwed up his eyes in concentration. “Arbishaw,” he said, and Sam saw that it was a guess or a half-recollected name at best. “Archibarch.”
The gypsy? Well, that was interesting. “Thank you, John Moses.”
Coltrane glared at Sam.
“I suppose to be on the safe side, and as a matter of policy, I should toss you overboard now,” Sam told the dwarf.
“He saved me,” John Moses objected.
Sam turned a sharp eye on the little boy, who seemed to melt beneath his gaze, shrinking to mouse-sized in the wooden chair. “Did he?”
John Moses nodded timidly.
“Stay out of this, John Moses,” Coltrane urged the little boy. There was an incongruously gentle note in his voice.
“Tell me about that,” Sam urged the boy.
“Coltrane is a scary boy, but he saved me from the Injuns,” John Moses averred. “Also the ugly skinny-faced man with the red hair.”
That would be O’Shaughnessy; Sam laughed out loud.
“Just for that, John Moses,” he told the boy, “I won’t throw Coltrane overboard.”
He was still laughing when he looked again behind and saw, dark and small against the yellow grasses of the horizon, a blocky smudge. It was coming his direction, and it was big enough that it could only be one thing.
The Liahona was overtaking them.
Sam pulled the funnel-tipped speaking tube from the dashboard and held it to his mouth. “Pack her as tight as she’ll take it and get up here, O’Shaughnessy!” he barked. “We have company, and they won’t be happy to see us!”
He slammed the tube back into its slot, pawed at his charts and stared at the road ahead. Where, oh where, was that Bear River?
* * *
The Welshman Jones was angry and Burton didn’t blame him. Roxie seemed perturbed, too.
Not only had Sam Clemens stolen all the Liahona’s coal, he had apparently kidnapped its mascot, a little boy named John Moses. The Shoshone, at least, denied any knowledge of the boy’s whereabouts, and there was no sign of him on the truck, which had been turned inside out twice.
As long as he thought the little boy might be in the Shoshone camp, Jones had been impossible to pry away from the place, no matter how much Burton and others had cajoled. The passengers and crew had bought Pocatello’s coal and reloaded the bins of the boiler room without their Captain. The moment Chief Pocatello persuaded him that John Moses must be with Sam Clemens, however, like some capricious storm god, he performed a complete volte face and was impossible to restrain. Within minutes, the Liahona was underway and Jones in his wheelhouse, shouting into speaking tubes. As soon as they’d reached the main track and turned south-west, Jones left the big spoked wheel in the hands of one of his men and attached himself by the eye to a roving spyglass.
The steam-truck roared through the high mountain country at a shockingly fast clip, and Burton realized that Jones had been sparing the engines earlier. “Rama’s teeth, we must be going twenty miles an hour!” he exclaimed to Roxie, who stood at his side at the railing, her hair snapping like a banner in the breeze.
“Out the way, pal!” shouted a burly crewman as he pushed them both aside. He and two mates dragged a length of reinforced pipe of some kind, complete with bolt-fittings, and, with hex-wrenches the size of Burton’s arm, began fastening it to the deck. Burton stepped back, keeping Roxie on his arm, where he could keep an eye on her, and stared in awe.
The thing was clearly a gun, and a railgun at that. He’d seen similar weapons on ships many times and years before; they were the large-scale prototype of which the Brunel rifle was the small-scale second generation.
He’d never seen one mounted on a steam-truck, though.
“What is it?” he asked Roxie, and watched her face from the corner of his eye as she answered.
“Mr. Clemens is about to find out that in the Rocky Mountains we know how to play the game,” she said darkly, her eyes glued to the road ahead. “And we play for keeps.” Her guard was down, Burton thought, she was emotional. He considered confronting her right then and there, demanding to know who she was a
nd what was her scheme, but decided against it. She was too wound up; who knew what she might be capable of when this angry?
“There he is!” Jones roared, and Burton felt Roxie’s grip on his arm tighten. He looked ahead and saw, across an open stretch of yellow grass, a silver-blue ribbon of water cutting across the far end of a long meadow. A flat, wide, heavy wood bridge with a staunch toll-gate in the middle carried the trail over the river, and, just this side of the bridge, Burton spotted the Jim Smiley. He saw it first by the plume of dirt that it kicked up, but once he’d noticed it, there was no mistaking it for any other steam-truck on the road, not with all that black India rubber wrapped around it and the big riverboat-like paddlewheel on the back.
There seemed to be a light on the small truck, the orange light of a fire, and it wasn’t making for the bridge—it had turned off to the side, and was rolling directly at the river.
“What’s he doing?” Burton wondered.
“Gun ready, sir!” shouted one of the crew.
“Load!” came the Captain’s answer. Jones pried himself away from the telescope to rush out and check the lay of the long gun, squinting along its barrel and then scuttling back and forth between it and the wheelhouse to compare lines of sight.
The Jim Smiley hit the river and, amazingly, kept going. Burton snatched the Captain’s telescope, momentarily forgotten in his enthusiasm for the gun, and took a closer look. The big rear paddlewheel of Clemens’s truck churned up a white foam, pushing it through the river water like a steam ship. Through the spyglass he saw that the orange light was fire, the fire of a brazier of some sort, on the deck of the Jim Smiley, and a man stood beside it to tend it. He was holding something in the fire—
something that suddenly burst into flame itself—
and the man hurled it at the bridge, where a gout of flame burst up at the point of contact.
Then he did it again. And again.
“He’s burning the bridge!” Burton shouted. The tollhouse crew, two white-bearded men in overalls, made the realization at the same moment, and Burton saw them hurl themselves into the river to escape.
Then the Jim Smiley was across the river, its heavy wheels dragging it up the bank on the far side and towards the line of pines at the end of the meadow. Fire licked hungrily from multiple spots along the wooden bridge.
“Full speed! More coal!” Jones shouted into a speaking tube, shouldering his pilot aside and seizing the wheel. “Load and prepare to fire!” The Liahona roared straight at the flaming bridge, its Captain squinting past its bow, through the flames at his disappearing competitor. The truck rattled from side to side and the bitter taste of smoke began to stain the breeze whipping past Burton’s face. Crewmen snapped open a compartment at the base of the gun and laid in a long steel shell, pointy-tipped and the length of Burton’s forearm.
“Hold on!” he shouted, and dragged Roxie, half-resisting, to one of the deck’s benches. He whipped off his own belt and, over an inarticulate mewl of objection, strapped her to the seat. She twisted at the waist and looked ahead to see what was going on, and Burton rushed into the wheelhouse. Jones squinted through the window at the fast-approaching inferno of the bridge and Burton grabbed his shoulder.
“Don’t shoot!” he yelled. “The child may be on that truck!”
Jones shrugged him off. “Do you think I’m an idiot, boyo?” he snarled, and pushed the explorer away. He squinted again, hunching down over the wheel and scrutinizing the long meadow. “Fire!” he yelled.
With a great whoosh and a sharp humming whine, the gun fired.
Some fifty feet to the side of the Jim Smiley, a small stand of trees, the hillock of earth beneath them and the gray boulders in their midst all exploded into a mist of dust and splinters.
“Load!” Jones shouted again, and the Liahona’s nose plunged onto the burning bridge. The strained timbers groaned ominously; at the best of times, Burton thought, it must struggle to bear the weight of this monstrous Behemoth. Would it be able to do so while it burned?
The tollhouse sprinted at them, full-tilt.
Burton whipped the borrowed spyglass to his eye again and found the Jim Smiley. Clemens’s man must be steering her now, because Clemens himself stood at the back of the truck, to the side of the paddlewheel, watching the Liahona with a cigar clenched in his teeth. At this distance it had to be his imagination, but Burton would have sworn that Clemens was grinning at him.
“Fire!” Jones bellowed again, and the earth to the other side of the Jim Smiley erupted in a volcano of dirt.
The bridge sagged, fire whipping all about the fringes of the Liahona’s deck.
“Load!” Jones yelled again.
“Captain Jones, we’re not going to make it!” Burton snapped uselessly, then wedged his body into the corner of the wheelhouse, behind a chair bolted to the floor, preparing for impact. He took a last glance at the Jim Smiley just in time to see it disappear into the trees.
This river can’t be that deep, he told himself. The bridge will collapse and the steam-truck will be delayed, but we’ll be able to drive out directly. He told himself these things as persuasively as he could, but in his heart he doubted and prepared for the worst.
The prow of the Liahona shattered the wooden toll-gate like matchsticks.
“Hold on!” Burton yelled, to no one and to everyone.
Then the bridge snapped and the Liahona fell into the river below.
Here ends Liahona
Part the First of City of the Saints
Part the Second is Deseret
###
About D.J. Butler
D.J. Butler (Dave) is a novelist living in the Rocky Mountain northwest. His training is in law, and he worked as a securities lawyer at a major international firm and inhouse at two multinational semiconductor manufacturers before taking up writing fiction. He is a lover of language and languages, a guitarist and self-recorder, and a serious reader. He is married to a powerful and clever woman and together they have three devious children.
Dave has been writing fiction since 2010. He writes speculative fiction (roughly, fantasy, science fiction, space opera, steampunk, cyberpunk, superhero, alternate history, dystopian fiction, horror and related genres) for all audiences. He has written and is writing novels for middle grade, young adult and adult readers. He is working on getting published via the traditional route; in the meantime, he is entertaining readers with City of the Saints and Rock Band Fights Evil. Dave has always had a soft spot for good pulp fiction.
Follow Rock Band at http://rockbandfightsevil.com.
Hear about City of the Saints and D.J. Butler’s other writing projects at http://davidjohnbutler.com.