by D. J. Butler
Poe scrambled up the rope ladder in as seamanlike a fashion as he could manage, though the effort nearly killed him and twice he spit blood into the void below. Despite her flounced skirts, Roxie was more nimble. He thought he might die of shame, only, of course, the consumption was going to kill him first.
The consumption was going to kill him no matter what he did. That knowledge gave Poe a certain freedom. Somehow, it also helped him shrug off the lingering pain of the beating the Pinkertons had given him an hour or so earlier.
He dragged himself over the railing and managed not to fall to the deck. A few deep breaths—as deep as he could manage, anyway—and his swirling vision recovered, and then Roxie was beside him, pistols in her hands. Behind and below them, gunfire and yelling continued on the mooring platform.
There was no one on the deck of the ship. The craft curled up and inward fore and aft, like a Viking vessel but with no dragon’s head. It had a brass mast, from which hung a sail of no fabric that Poe recognized. It shimmered slightly in the thinning darkness, as if electrified, and it looked thinner than any ordinary cloth. On the near—aft—side of the mast was a small stand that looked like the control panel of a steam-truck, with a wheel and binnacle. In the prow of the boat, mounted just inside the great inward curve, was some sort of cannon. At their feet was an open hatch.
“What does the sail catch?” he wondered, dragging the rope ladder up behind them to prevent unwanted pursuit. “It can’t be wind, can it?”
“Look at the controls!” Roxie shouted, ignoring him, and jumped feet-first down through the hatch and into the hold below.
“Ether waves?” he speculated, and chuckled at himself.
Poe shuffled across the deck to the gun. He was no mechanick, but he’d spent enough time with Hunley and his devices that he knew what details to look for. The cannon was large and built of shiny brass, with a seat directly behind the barrel and a sighting guide over the top of the cannon. Halfway along the length of the barrel, Poe saw a glass panel and within it, gleaming dully by the crackling light of the sail, the vermillion glint of rubies. Below the gunner’s seat, large, crisp-toothed gears appeared to give the gun the ability to turn three hundred sixty degrees horizontally and at least some amount out of the plane of the ship’s deck. Levers by the side of the seat clearly connected to the gears to control movement and another lever on the side of the weapon’s barrel, like the bolt of a rifle, must control fire. A clear glass tube rose up from the deck of the ship within the gear works, and blue light snapped and crackled inside it. India rubber cables ran across the deck to the control panel like snakes, dormant but ready to strike if stepped on.
So the phlogiston cannon was probably fire-ready.
He turned and scanned the horizon, easily spotting Pratt’s other three airships. They moved away from the mooring tower, out of the high valley in which Pratt’s facility was nestled, and out into the broader Wasatch Mountains. He squinted, making the best use he could of the first pale cracks of dawn, but saw no one on board the ships other than Pratt himself.
How were the other two flying, then?
Poe coughed, spat on the deck, and limped back to the control panel. He arrived just as Roxie emerged from the hatch, shaking her head.
“There’s no one aboard,” she confirmed.
“I can detect no one aboard the other two, either,” Poe said. “How on earth is Pratt controlling them?”
They looked together at the control panel, and Poe immediately knew the answer to his own question.
“Hunley,” he gasped.
The controls looked simple enough. There was a wheel like on any terrestrial ship, and beside it a binnacle, glowing blue around its rim and containing a simple compass whose needle was a stylized brass bumblebee. There was a broad, wool-padded belt-and-shoulder-straps harness that bolted into the center of the wheel for the pilot. Beside the wheel was a small knob-headed lever marked PITCH AND YAW that appeared capable of moving in all directions; next to it was another level like a steam-truck’s throttle, currently at the lowest position in its range; buttons marked WEIGH and DROP; and from a solid block of brass beside the ship’s wheel protruded a monkey’s head that Poe knew all too well.
“What do you think this does?” Roxie asked, touching the PITCH AND YAW lever without moving it.
“Controls pitch and yaw, is my guess,” Poe suggested dryly. “That would let you alter your elevation, as well. And there you have acceleration. But the monkey is the interesting thing.”
“How so?”
“Because Horace Hunley made it and three others like it, and this is the one that I smashed against my cabin door in the Liahona.”
Zottt!
Poe looked up from the controls to the phlogiston gun, but it was dormant, and he knew from the reddish light playing against its side that a phlogiston weapon must have been fired on the mooring tower.
“So what?”
“So,” Poe said, “I think this is how Pratt is flying the ships. This is what Horace Hunley did—he built four devices that communicate, somehow, with each other. Ether waves, possibly, or anyhow, that’s what Robert hinted to me once.”
“You love Robert,” Roxie said.
Poe sighed. “As much as a man can love another man,” he said, and felt broken and heavy as the words came out. “For years, he has been my only human connection, the only person to know my secret.” He looked at her, frail and diamond-hard and plain and beautiful. “I wish it had been you.”
“Go on,” she said, and rested a hand on his arm.
Poe looked at the monkey’s head to recover his train of thought. “So one of the canopic jar devices must be the master and the other three are slaves—forgive the expression—so that the person in the right ship can control the other three.”
“So Pratt can pilot the entire fleet by himself. So he doesn’t need anyone else to help him get his revenge.”
“Yes.” Poe looked at the controls again. “But I must have damaged the monkey-headed jar, so hopefully we’ll have local control of this craft, whatever it’s called.”
“It’s called the Ammon, actually.”
“As in the Egyptian god?” Poe was amused. “Identified with the sun and with Ra? You Mormons love your Egyptian things, I must say. Robert was wise to suggest that I disguise myself as an Egyptianeer.”
“Mostly we identify Ammon with chopping off arms,” Roxie said. Poe didn’t know what she meant. Still, he was happy to be with her and he felt like she forgave him, and he forgave her, too. Besides, she smiled at him, so even though he was dying and he didn’t understand the joke he threw back his head and laughed.
Zottt!
A bright flash of blue light snapped behind them—
—and the Ammon hurtled directly upward, into the morning sky.
They both staggered. Poe grabbed the wheel for support and Roxie threw her arms around Poe’s waist. Together they contrived not to fall as cool air whistled through their hair, and then suddenly they were several hundred feet higher than they had been, and the Ammon slowed its ascent and started to drift.
Roxie started to the edge of the ship, but Poe caught her arm.
“What’s happening?” she shouted.
“It doesn’t matter!” He pointed at Pratt’s other three ships, disappearing down around a gray cliff below and to the north of them. “Burton can fend for himself—we have to stop the Madman!”
“His name is Orson!” she cried. “He’s no madman!”
Poe dragged Roxie to the wheel, though the effort made him cough up half a lung. “Since you feel that way about it, I propose that you man the wheel and I man the gun!” He grabbed the monkey, ripped the canopic jar from the socket in which it was nestled and tossed it overboard. “Just in case,” he said.
Then he lurched across the deck, back to the gun.
“If I am to man the wheel,” she shouted after him, “then I insist you woman the gun!”
Poe laughed until he bled, then
dragged himself into the seat. “We must endeavor to take Brother Orson by surprise!” he called over his shoulder. “I shall not fire until we are close, or until we are fired upon!”
Roxie waved an acknowledgement and grabbed the controls.
The Ammon slid forward and Poe looked to the craft’s sail. It billowed forward as if puffed by a following wind, but whatever made it move wasn’t the night air over Mount Timpanogos, because it billowed into the wind. As it billowed, it lit up and sparks crackled up and down its gossamer surface. As Roxie turned the airship’s wheel, the mast and sail turned, turning the ship with them.
“Extraordinary,” Poe murmured. If only men of genius such as Pratt and Hunley could collaborate away from the terrors and pressure of war, he thought. What marvels might they accomplish?
Of course, it could be suggested that the terrors and pressures of war were the very things that pushed such innovators to their most spectacular results. Poe sighed, and then he coughed. He grabbed the phlogiston cannon’s gunner’s seat for stability and let the world around him swoon. Hold on to yourself, man, he thought. At least long enough to stop this atrocity.
The Ammon suddenly pitched to its right, which was at Poe’s shoulders. Poe lost his grip on the back of the gunner’s seat and tumbled hard to the deck. He slid across the wood, terrifying images of himself catapulting into the void filling his mind’s eye—
—but then the ship righted itself.
Poe rolled onto his hands and knees and saw a gray cliff wall, passing within arm’s reach of the left side of the ship. Ahead of the Ammon, the last of Orson Pratt’s automaton fleet turned left and disappeared from view around the peak they were all skirting.
They hadn’t come far in the night, Poe thought. The Great Salt Lake City must be just around that bend.
“Sorry!” Roxie shouted. “This manning business is surprisingly difficult!”
“I heard those same words from my step-father once!” Poe yelled back, and climbed into the seat again. “He was caning me at the time!”
Poe saw now that the gunner’s seat had a leather belt, and he strapped himself in, his fingers aching and trembling, and the effort making him sweat. Roxie moved the Ammon forward, accelerating as her confidence increased. The cliff brow to his left dropped and Poe began to see blue sky and brown valley floor beyond the end of the rock. He examined the gun more closely; it was exceedingly simple. There was a lever labeled LEFT and RIGHT, a lever labeled UP and DOWN, and a bolt labeled FIRE.
Orson Pratt’s inventions were spectacular but his genius had a pedantic, talking-down-to-children quality to it. After all of Horace Hunley’s mysterious devices, manipulated by unlabeled buttons or long sequences of whistled notes that were inaudible to human hearing, Poe found it more than a little refreshing.
He rehearsed looking down the barrel, raising and lowering and rotating his seat with the whirring and clicking of gears to take aim at spots along the cliff wall. He wished he could take practice shots, but he needed as much surprise as he could possibly arrange. Preferably, they’d slide up behind Pratt utterly unnoticed, either because he’d be focused on his target on the ground or because he’d assume the Ammon was malfunctioning but attempting to respond to its remote ether-wave instructions, simply lagging behind the rest of the fleet.
“Try to stay low!” he hollered to Roxie. She acknowledged with a wave, then hunched down slightly behind the ship’s wheel.
The Ammon rounded the cliff and drifted through a notch between two peaks.
The view took Poe’s breath away. Gigantic rock shoulders to either side could have shattered the little airship with a shrug, or by shaking free the boulders that clung precariously to their heights and dropping them right through the plank floor and copper bottom sheathing of the Ammon. Mountains to the east aligned perfectly at the same moment, letting through a rush of bright yellow sunshine, and the airship rode the light forward like it was sailing a river of pure honey, the morning warmth tickling Poe’s cheek and ear and then the back of his neck as the Ammon turned. Below passed a saddle, thousands of feet above sea level in elevation but below the timberline, and furred with evergreen trees that looked black in the first light of the day. Poe saw a cluster of big-horned mountain sheep winding their way up out of the pines and onto the shattered-rock slope at the base of the cliff to his right.
Then the saddle fell away, Roxie turned them to the right again, and below and before the Ammon stretched out the Salt Lake Valley. The lake itself looked like a sheet of hammered steel, great inland salt sea that it was. It covered the distant half of the valley. The nearer side was a grayish brown shade of desert summer, fields mostly heavy with crops, trees sparse and dusty even at their greenest. The natural grasses of the Wasatch Mountains were tall and yellow in color but they disappeared with the fields and ditches into a general colorless smudge, cut by roads and irrigation ditches into a great, man-made grid. Ahead, against the eastern wall of the valley, shone the Great Salt Lake City, sparkling like steel and china as the sunshine hit it. It wasn’t all that big, Poe thought, not from the air and from this many miles away.
ZOTTT!
A hot beam flashed past the Ammon and carved into the side of the nearest cliff. Rock exploded out from the cliff face, improbably bursting into flame and smoking as it fell.
“Roxie!” Poe shouted, but she was already reacting. The Ammon leaped forward like a racehorse given its head, and yawed down, plummeting at a sharp angle to the ground.
“Are we hit?” Poe bellowed, and yanked at the lever to swivel his aim at Pratt’s ships, which seemed to come level and then rise above the Ammon, as they stayed in their plane and the Ammon rocketed downward.
ZOTTT!
The next phlogiston-consuming bolt passed harmlessly overhead, narrowly missing the top of the mast.
“Aim high!” she yelled back, and raced straight at Pratt’s trio of craft.
And then Poe saw the genius of her maneuver. The other ships fired again, several times, but the Ammon was too low for them to hit it without changing their pitch or yaw. Pratt adjusted as the Ammon raced forward and one of his ships turned and began to tilt in Poe’s direction, but he was managing three vessels, not one, and the guns as well as the steering, so there was only so much he could do at once.
Poe took aim at the ship that was turning and tilting and fired.
ZOTTT!
A miss, and a wave of heat emanated from the barrel of the phlogiston gun. The firing lever stayed depressed, and though Poe banged at it with the heel of his hand, it inched its way back into ready position at its own leisurely pace.
It might be an automatic delay designed to give the barrel time to cool before firing again, Poe thought. He started counting.
“Evasive action!” he shouted to Roxie. She must have had the same thought, for as he shouted the Ammon was already banking to one side and slowing, then banking again and speeding up, the angles irregular and the speed constantly shifting.
ZOTTT!
Another miss from one of Pratt’s craft and a field below Poe burst into fire, dirt and rock exploding upward and leaving a crater where once a plank bridge had crossed a broad irrigation ditch.
The firing lever of Poe’s gun snicked back into ready position. A slow count of twenty. “Give me a good shot!” he yelled.
In response, Roxie pulled up the prow of the Ammon and launched the ship straight forward like an arrow, at the copper-shining underside of the nearest of the three.
It was less than ideal, Poe thought. He had no idea whether Pratt was aboard his target ship or not. But it was a clear shot and he couldn’t let it pass. He sighted carefully and depressed the firing lever.
ZOTTT!
BOOM!
The back half of the targeted ship burst into flame and the vessel pitched wildly to one side. Poe stared, hoping to see some sign of a single wild-haired old man falling overboard, but Roxie was already moving evasively again and Poe saw nothing that gave him any hope.
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“That’s the Stripling Warrior!” Roxie shouted.
“So?”
ZOTTT!
The beam lanced by close enough to the Ammon that Poe felt its heat crackling in his false beard. Nervously, he yanked off the beard and then the eyebrows too, picking at the spirit gum with his fingers and keeping one eye on the slowly-resetting firing lever of his phlogiston gun.
“So,” she shouted again, “it’s one of the older ones. Pratt will be on the Teancum!”
“Now you tell me!” Poe threw a wad of spirit gum and hair overboard as the Ammon pitched to one side. Roxie must have strapped herself in too, he thought. Good girl. But what in hell were these queer names? “Which one is the Teancum?”
Roxie laughed and pointed ahead. “One of those two!” she shouted.
Poe squinted; they had come out west above the valley and were now turning back eastward and angling up again, so the morning sun shone bright into his face. He could make out two ships but the glare of the sun kept him from making out any detail.
He could tell, though, that one of the two ships hung back and hovered in place and one circled to get around the Ammon, tilting to maneuver its gun into position.
“That one!” he shouted, and pointed at the further, hovering airship. Roxie nodded and accelerated towards it, slipping side to side to present a difficult target to the nearer ship as it tried to fire at them.
ZOTTT!
It missed, but narrowly.
ZOTTT!
The airship hovering still fired as well and very nearly hit the Ammon. Poe blessed Roxie again, a thousand blessings in his heart for each of the thousand times he had cursed her name over the years.
Pratt must have practiced his gunnery a lot, to be such a deadly shot when firing from a remote platform. Or did the canopic jars contain a targeting system of some sort, as well? Poe shook off the introspection; with both targets’ gun just fired, now was the moment.
“Charge!” he yelled, and Roxie opened the throttle.
Poe held his fire, sighting along the barrel. He knew he had a slow count of twenty from when the first of the two enemy guns fired, and he jumped into his count at five … six … seven … eight …