by Unknown
Jack shook his head.
“We are stronger if we stay together,” reasoned Kate.
“Only I can kill it,” answered Jack stoically, handing his carbine to her and drawing his ancient hunting knife. “The spirits of my ancestors will be my guides, and my weapons. You can help me only by returning to the airship as quickly as you can.”
Kate opened her mouth to protest further, but the Cree was already walking out. She knew orders or arguments would both be useless, but followed him anyway. Leading Grant, she picked her way past the bodies and went out the open door to the front, but Jack had already disappeared.
“Damn him!” Kate cursed through gritted teeth.
“I’ve never been able to figure out how he can manage to simply vanish in a matter of seconds,” grumbled Grant, scanning the empty fort.
“I’ll kick his backside when he comes back,” she said with a sigh, turning in the direction of the airship.
* * *
The Forward-class was the smallest dirigible in the Army Air Corps, designed primarily to transport essential supplies to troops in the field. As such, it consisted simply of a cramped wheelhouse, a small engine room with a combined boiler/coal house, and a storage area. Since it was not designed for long voyages, crew accommodation was limited to two cushioned benches at the rear of the wheelhouse and the relatively comfortable Captain’s chair, usually occupied by whoever was manning the helm.
Sleeping on-board was not ideal, but was also not uncommon. Securing the airship was relatively easy, given the only access was through the wheelhouse door or the coal hatch, but it also meant escape was difficult.
Kate and Grant made a thorough check of the vessel before bolting both doors. Both had been spooked by stumbling over another corpse behind the old latrines as they returned to the ship.
It appeared to be the remains of a Cheyenne warrior, probably dead around six months. Like all the others, it was missing both feet. Curiously, for a body left in the open, it had not been ravaged by critters. Even the eyes, though shriveled and dried, had been left by the birds.
“I should have never let him leave,” Kate muttered, as she angrily paced the cramped wheelhouse.
Grant looked up from the bench where he sat whittling. “He would have gone anyway, but don’t worry. No one’s going to take Jack by surprise. He’s still the best damn scout in the army, and this is his backyard. I’ve no idea what he was talking about back there, but my money is on Jack rather than some sorry-ass spirit.”
Kate blew into her hands to warm them up. Grant was right. She had worked with Jack for nearly five years, and—through every campaign and incident—the Cree Scout had proved to be the most capable fighter and tracker she knew.
“I’ll take the first watch,” offered Kate, walking to the front of the wheelhouse. “I’ll shake you at midnight.”
Grant nodded, moving through into the larger engine room where he cleared a corner. Within minutes, she could hear him snoring soundly, despite the door being closed.
She always marveled at the man’s ability to sleep almost immediately, irrespective of the situation, but also knew that—like most people who possessed this trait—Grant would wake at the slightest untoward sound, loaded gun in hand.
She dimmed the wheelhouse lamps—the better to see out the viewport—and sat in the captain’s chair with her pipe between her teeth to clean her weapons. She was an expert, and did not need the light to strip, clean, oil, and reassemble her Colt. The Smith & Wesson taken from the dead trapper was unfamiliar to her, but, by ten, she was as quick with the Model 2 as she was with her own gun.
The watch passed slowly. She restocked the central brazier every thirty minutes or so, sitting silently with her smoldering pipe and loaded guns waiting for Jack to return.
She felt sick with worry. Although Jack took frequent trips alone in the wilderness, he always returned when he said he would. In the darkness, she and Grant would have no hope of finding him.
With a sigh, she checked her pocket watch and saw it was time to finally wake the engineer. After a last look through the grimy window at the darkness beyond, she turned and walked into the engine room.
She felt the warmth of the boiler immediately after the chill of the wheelhouse. The fire burned well in the furnace, illuminating the machinery space and the reclining Grant.
Then she stopped dead. Something was wrong.
At the bottom of Grant’s bed-roll, a large dark pool glistened in the firelight. She knew instinctively it was blood, and drew her Colt, standing stock still, all senses straining.
She walked slowly towards Grant, hardly daring to breathe. The engineer looked as if he was sleeping, eyes closed, hands folded across his chest—but peering closer, she saw he was dead. The bones in the raw stumps where his feet had been glinted in the flickering flames of the open furnace door, and dark blood drained lazily through the gaps in the decking.
Seconds ticked by. Kate continued to stand like a statue, ears and eyes alert, pistol cocked and ready to strike.
A dark shape suddenly flashed across the edge of her vision. She instinctively turned and fired, then suddenly crashed backwards onto the hard planked floor as something unseen slammed into her.
Momentarily disorientated, she swiftly scanned the room, gun following her eyes, but could see nothing. It was only then that she felt the pain, and—looking down in disbelief—saw the stumps where her feet had been. Twin geysers of steaming blood squirted from the stubs of her legs, which still held the top third of her now dissected flying boots. Fighting back a shocked scream, she shoved herself forward with all her will to get the bottom of her stumps against the glowing furnace grate, knowing her only hope was to cauterize the severed arteries. Pain spiraled through her uncontrollably, shattering her resolve, and then plunging her suddenly into the darkness of unconsciousness.
* * *
She awoke at dawn as the sun broke over the nearby ridge. Delirious, and in shock, she peered in horror at the stumps where her feet had once been. The wounds had been professionally dressed and bandaged, while an empty bottle of iodine lay discarded at her side with a used phial of morphine. She also realized she was back in the wheelhouse, and not in the engine room where her feet had been taken.
“Jack?” she called weakly, her voice hoarse and rasping.
All she could hear was the quiet ticking of the magneto compass, accompanied by the visceral throb of pain as blood pulsed in the stumps of her legs. She waited for a few minutes, but knew she was alone.
She also knew that she needed help, and forced herself to crawl to the wheelhouse controls and reach up to unlock the pneumatic drills in the landing legs. The effort resulted in a storm of pain, but she gritted her teeth and yanked down the emergency lever to dump the ballast and quick-release the mooring lines. The dirigible rose sluggishly, but she figured that if she could clear the ridge, the wind and engines would get her to Bonners Ferry. Two hours later, the settlement hove into view and she managed to crash-land on the trail into town. The next thing she remembered was waking up in the military hospital in Seattle, and finding both legs now ended at her knees.
* * *
Because of the deteriorating weather, the army did nothing until the following spring. In early April, Lieutenant Kate Dumont flew a select detachment of military engineers to the remains of Fort Cline, landing at the same place she had before.
It was her first operational mission since leaving the hospital. She now commanded one of the new Hallam-class airships—a much larger and faster vessel with a crew of twelve. She had been quick to adapt to the new dirigible, but adapting to her new brass legs had taken much longer.
They squeaked when she walked, no matter how much oil she used, and the hydraulics had a tendency to lock unexpectedly, but she was still thankful that she had lived to tell the tale and could still walk at all.
Once they landed, the pioneers recovered the corpses of the two trappers and removed all the bodies from the ceme
tery with the exception of the Indians, whom they simply covered over with soil. There were no new bodies since her last visit, and there was no trace of Jack Fiddler. She was relieved, but not surprised.
She spent another five years operating in the Northwest before being promoted to a desk job in Fort Leavenworth. In that time, she always kept a lookout for Jack, but she never saw him again. She did, however, catch enough stories in bars and taverns to suspect that he was still out there, and she felt that the mountains of Montana were perhaps a slightly safer place as a result.
Steel and Steam
Andrew Knighton
Hywel sat in the iron stairwell attached to the back of the factory, the thrum of the engines tingling his body. The rhythm of a well-tuned machine was all the more satisfying when it was his creation.
The factory towered over him, fifty feet high, not counting its chimneys, three hundred feet wide and nearly a thousand long. The principle of progress made steel, it chewed up the plains with its mechanical jaws and huge ridged wheels. Hywel had thrilled at building something on this scale, and leapt at the opportunity to be its chief engineer—to see the world roll by from its back.
He smiled, and turned his attention from the over-pressure regulator valve to the savanna rolling past. The factory might be the thing moving, but, to Hywel, it was the centre of the world. The African plains, with their scattered trees and scurrying wildlife, might think themselves still, but they were always proceeding to or from the factory, with its vast iron tracks and its hungry smelting floor.
A zebra, bolder than the rest, trotted over to the dark gash the machine had torn through the mineral rich earth. It nibbled at a fragment of something white, shook its head and turned away, nostrils flaring with agitation.
Hywel turned back to the valve and tightened the last screw around its foot-wide circumference. Unlocking its aperture, he snatched his hand back as a burst of chemical steam vented. Better screws were needed next time, but replacing the ones they had every two days was better than having the valve drop off, resulting in loss of all power or jamming the pipe and backing up the boilers.
“Mr. Jones!”
Hywel peered upward at the shout. The dark face and muscled torso of Kagunda, the boiler room foreman, leaned out above him.
“Mr. Jones, Mr. Filbery calls for us.”
Hywel clattered up the stairs, pausing halfway to pull a screwdriver from his overalls and tighten a hissing valve.
The stairs emerged onto the uppermost viewing platform, what Giles Filbery referred to as the crows’ nest. Red and blue, the Filbery family’s favoured colours, decked the wide platform. Give it another decade and they’d have them on a coat of arms. Hywel despaired at the thought of the effort they’d waste painting that crest across the factory, but Filbery was decent company, and that meant something.
Filbery stood at the forward rail, fully suited, his top hat towering like an extra chimney.
“Gentlemen.” He held up an ingot of brightly gleaming metal, filling Hywel with pride. “The eight hundred and seventh titanium ingot off the belt today. Six days out of Nairobi, and we’re already in profit.” He put the metal down and passed them each a glass of champagne. “To Mr. Jones’s machine!”
They clinked their glasses, and Hywel took a good gulp. The champagne was strange, sharp stuff that tickled on its way down, but he wasn’t going to argue with the sentiment. This was what life was all about. Good machinery, good company, and—at last—a good profit to be made.
He caught Kagunda’s sheepish smile and clapped him on the back, making the foreman’s little bone talisman bounce on his chest.
“Chin up there, boyo,” he said. “We’re all going to be rich.”
Above the engine roar, a wind shrieked through the chimney stacks.
* * *
Great crushing wheels jarred against each other in the belly of the grinder. Theirs was a stuttering, broken rhythm, gears jutting at every angle like teeth in an old boxer’s mouth. Splinters of something white lay scattered among the red-brown of partially-processed ore.
“What happened?” Hywel shouted, the need to be heard giving him an excuse to vent his frustration. This would take hours to fix, days maybe. Number seven spindle was a twisted ruin.
“Wekesa was feeding the machine.” Kagunda gestured to the mountain of muscle lurking at his shoulder. “Out of nowhere, it jammed. He tried to clear it, but...”
He pointed to the twisted remains of a crowbar trapped in the grinder.
“How big were the lumps he was feeding in?” Hywel looked at dull-eyed Wekesa, his dusty hands like thick, brown shovels.
Kagunda and Wekesa exchanged a few words in the local dialect, the huge labourer looking nervously at Hywel. A man like that might be fearsome in the comfort of his own village or out hunting with his friends, but put him on the factory floor, with managers dictating his livelihood, and the spine dropped out of him.
“He says only this big.” Kagunda imitated Wekesa’s gesture. “As he was instructed.”
Hywel measured the gesture with his eyes. Exactly as instructed. Frustrated as he was, he couldn’t blame Wekesa. When some grease-stained Welsh oaf held your livelihood in his hands, you told him what he wanted to hear.
Not that he could prove anything. That was the problem with people. One look at Wekesa proved that humans weren’t complicated, but you couldn’t point straight at their broken mechanisms.
“I’ve explained this before,” he said, as slow and patient as he could manage. “No big pieces. I know it saves time, but it’s not worth it.”
Even as Kagunda translated, Wekesa was raising his voice in protest. Hywel held up a hand, fighting down his exasperation. Arguing riled people up and wasted his energy.
“Just do it,” he said.
* * *
“Mr. Jones.”
Hywel turned from the twisted spindle to see Kagunda, his face crumpled with anxiety.
“Mr. Jones, come quick.” Kagunda offered a hand to help him up. “There has been a horrible accident.”
Hywel’s gut knotted up.
He shoved the wrench through his tool belt and scrambled up the stationary grinding wheels, heaving himself onto the cold metal walkway. Following Kagunda through the factory, he passed the roar of the grinding wheels and the blazing heat of the smelting floor before reaching the furnace house. Half a dozen labourers clustered outside the door, murmuring to each other and toying with bone jewellery as they peered into the red-lit room that powered the whole great machine. Hywel pushed past, straight into a scene from hell.
Wekesa was little more than charred meat, his blackened flesh stinking like a slaughterhouse fire. If it weren’t for his huge, distinctive frame, Hywel never would have known whose remains lay steaming on the floor, a dozen yards from the half-open furnace door. It was a horrible sight, worse than anything he’d seen in the infantry. War was war, but this was sickening.
“Lord in Heaven.” He tugged off his cloth cap. “What happened?”
“A fuel flare, I think.” Filbery perched stork-like in a corner, sweat running from beneath his hat.
Hywel shook his head, heavy with sorrow. “I’ve told them before. Measured shovels, steady rhythm. This isn’t ordinary coal. You have to take care.”
“He did.” Kagunda closed the door behind them, shutting out the curious gazes of the men outside. “He listened to you. He was very careful. He has seven children; he could not afford to lose this job.”
“He can’t have been all that careful, now.” Hywel picked up a shovel, pushed the furnace door to. They’d have been losing speed the whole time this went on. “Only way this happened was too much fuel.”
Kagunda shook his head. His voice was steady. “I was with him. He did as he was told. Steady rhythm. Measured shovels. He was a very careful man.”
Filbery took a step forward, put a steadying hand on Hywel’s arm. Until then, Hywel hadn’t realised he was trembling.
“Could this have b
een one of our machines?” the manager asked.
“There’s nothing that could do this.” Hywel patted the warm body of the furnace. “She’s a good girl, safe design.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” He’d designed her. He’d built her. To doubt her was to doubt more than himself, it was to doubt the laws of engineering.
“Very well.” Filbery eased the shovel from his hand. “We’ll turn around, head back to Nairobi. That gives us another week’s worth of ore on the way back, and a chance to shake out any more issues. We’ve had a good first run; there’s no harm pausing for some fine tuning.”
“Can’t we carry on a few days first?” Even as he said it, Hywel’s conscience kicked like a steam hammer, but he couldn’t just let go of this chance to prove what the factory could do.
“One of our chaps is dead.” Filbery rested a gentle hand on Hywel’s shoulder. “Let’s show some respect.”
* * *
The flaps on the furnace vents were working fine. Hywel had tested every one half a dozen times. He’d also tested the super-saturated coal they used for fuel, the air mix in the furnace room, and the ventilation ducts it was drawn through. He’d double checked the width of the shovels, and replaced the thermometer and pressure dial, adding a backup of both for good measure. In short, he’d tested every inch of furnace equipment that wasn’t a blazing mass of flames and glowing metal, and he’d even spent a good hour peering at those parts. If there was something wrong with the machine then he couldn’t find it, and he would have done.
“We should head back out.” He stood in the crows’ nest, a warm wind blowing off the plains, one minute soothing, the next scratching at him with loose dirt. Two dark tracks cut through the plains now, ragged trenches a dozen feet deep and twice as wide, one stretching out behind them as they crawled home, the other running parallel, the remains of their outward journey. Both showed dark remnants of ore and lighter flecks of whatever else was buried out here. “There’s nothing wrong with her.”