by D. J. Butler
The Ammon passed under the flat, copper-plated belly of the circling craft. Poe shot a glance up at its hull to confirm that it wasn’t the Teancum, but all he saw was the pseudo-alphabet the Mormons called Deseret, and he spared no more thought for it.
Twelve … thirteen … fourteen …
He’d only get one shot before he had to pull away, so he needed to make it good. Poe sighted at his target craft, smack in the center of the hull, so the sun in his eyes wouldn’t make him fail. It started to move, but slowly, and Poe easily kept his sight fixed on the middle of the huge target. He wouldn’t be able to miss.
Sixteen … seventeen …
Then the Ammon dipped into the shadow of one of the Wasatch Mountains, and Poe saw his target for the first time free of the sun’s glare. There was no one at the helm.
“Wrong ship!” he shouted.
Zottt!
It was a smaller sound, but the unmistakable noise of a phlogiston gun being fired. Not one of the huge cannons, maybe, but the little one, the one Pratt had nicknamed Parley.
From above and behind him, Poe saw the phlogiston-igniting beam of ruby-red light bite into the gun barrel in front of him, slicing through the brass, igniting it, dissolving the barrel and leaving behind a charred ruin.
“Evade!” he shouted. “Evade!” He scratched at his safety harness with trembling, weak fingers, and managed to free himself barely in time to avoid a second swipe of the ray gun that incinerated the gunner’s seat.
He scampered down along the deck in Roxie’s direction, patting down his pockets in search of any kind of weapon. Roxie stared over her own shoulder at the ship that fired on them, and now, with the sun at their backs, Poe saw the Madman Pratt at the rail of his airship, dark goggles on his face to shield his eyes from the sun, firing his Enkindler at them.
“No!” Roxie howled.
Great god of heaven, Poe thought, she’s not watching where she’s going—
—CRASH!!
The Ammon collided with the—whatever the name of the remaining ship was, Poe had lost track—ramming it amidships with its copper-sheathed prow. Like battling triremes, Poe thought abstractly, we’re fighting like the Ancient Greeks, though thousands of feet above the ground.
The blow threw him back along the deck, and he smashed into the control panel and wheel of the Ammon. Roxie was securely belted in, struggling with the wheel with one hand and trying to draw a bead on Orson Pratt with a pistol in the other. Poe had to catch himself, grabbing the wheel with one hand and jamming his fist in the slot where the monkey-headed canopic jar had been.
Surely, he thought, we’ll fall.
But the Ammon ground her sister-ship under her flat keel, snapping its mast into splinters and then gliding almost majestically between the two shattered halves, which fell apart like a cracked egg and then dropped before Poe’s eyes to the valley floor.
“I’d say you womaned that airship pretty thoroughly,” Poe gasped. His breath came in sucking gusts that rattled his chest, and he spat tendrils of ropy blood and phlegm. The wind snatched them away before they reached the deck.
“Oh?” she asked, and pointedly cocked her pistol. “And how would it have looked had I manned it, Edgar?”
Poe got his feet under him and looked down, across the slanting deck of the airship. Buildings of the Great Salt Lake City carpeted the valley floor below them now and the broken airship fell into two ragged pieces down onto unsuspecting sleepers, or shopkeepers opening their stores at the crack of dawn. There was some sort of commotion in the center of the city, around the Tabernacle—Bang! Bang!
Roxie’s pistol exploded in Poe’s ear as she took pot-shots at Pratt, continuing to crank the Ammon’s wheel and bringing the airship around to charge it at the Teancum.
Poe focused on the action around him. He patted his pockets again and found what he was looking for.
“We’ve got to get closer!” he cried, and started to cough.
Pratt raised his Enkindler to fire again.
***
Chapter Twenty
Poe staggered to the railing, the balled-up cloth in one hand and the other fist thumping his own chest. He shook, he trembled, cold sweat poured down his body. He felt like he was breathing through water.
The Ammon closed on the Teancum and Orson Pratt raised his Parley again. Poe saw the swept-up hair, the matted beard, the black glass disks for eyes and the mad, piratical grin, but what he watched closely was the inventor’s hands.
Pratt squeezed the firing lever on the Enkindler—
Poe let his body fall—
—Zottt!
The beam of hot light scorched the air above Poe but Poe ignored it. He hit the deck rolling, and as he came to his feet he snapped open the hypnotic hypocephalus, fixing it directly in Pratt’s gaze across the closing gap like a shield and running his fingers across it in the simple but peculiar pattern that Hunley’s mesmerist had drilled into him.
Pratt fell like a sack of potatoes.
The gap shrank at an alarming rate.
“Turn!” Poe shouted.
“I can’t!” Roxie yelled back.
Poe looked over his shoulder just long enough to see that Orson Pratt’s last shot had entirely dismasted the Ammon. Then he flung his body to the rail and wrapped his arms around it to brace for the impact.
CRUNCH!!!
Poe rolled over the side. His toes scrabbled against copper sheathing and for a mad second he thought he was going to fall—
—below him he saw the Third Virginia Cavalry, firing on one of the buildings beside the Tabernacle, one of Brigham Young’s own houses, he thought he remembered from Robert’s briefings—he was going to fall to his death through Brigham Young’s own roof and nearly laughed at the thought—but then Roxie was there and dragging him up the side. He hacked and coughed and fell onto his own blood and phlegm on the deck.
“You weigh nothing, Ed,” Roxie told him.
“Corpses generally don’t,” he said, affecting a gallant grin that was ruined by the wet, bloody coughing fit it provoked.
“Orson!” she shouted, and leaped to the rail.
Poe shook his head clear and followed her. The Ammon, dismasted, hovered still in the air a thousand feet above Salt Lake City. Below, the Virginians advanced on Young’s residence, guns blazing. Not only his residence, Poe remembered, that was the Lion House, where Young lived and worked. That was where Young and Clemens and the others had gone to send a message out to Young’s people to end the coup.
The Virginians must have Young holed up inside.
Below the Ammon and above the Great Salt Lake City floated the Teancum. Orson Pratt’s flagship had had the worst of the collision with its sister; Poe could see that two of the cup- or foot-like protrusions of the Teancum hung shattered at its flank, and the airship drifted slowly down, pitching over onto one side as it did so. It was ten feet beneath the Ammon, sinking and drifting laterally.
Poe grabbed the rope ladder and hurled it over the side.
“Save Orson!” Roxie cried, following him over the railing. “He may be able to cure you!”
“To hell with Orson Pratt!” Poe coughed, hitting the tilted deck of the Teancum hard and staggering forward. “And to hell with me!”
“What are you doing, then?” Roxie clattered after him to the phlogiston cannon mounted at the front of the ship.
“I’m saving your President!” Poe shouted. The Teancum sagged to one side even further as he spoke. “Take the controls! Try to correct the pitch!”
He and Roxie both turned to look at the control panel as he said the words, and Poe saw Orson Pratt, conscious. The old man clung to the bottom of the Ammon’s rope ladder, now seven or eight feet off the Teancum’s deck and rising as the Teancum sank. He held his Enkindler in one hand and fumbled, trying to get his other hand to the firing lever while hanging on the rope ladder by his elbow.
The old man saw that he was noticed. “Too late!” he cried shrilly, and aimed the Parley—
Bang!
Roxie shot Pratt in the chest. The Madman shrieked and dropped his ray gun, which fell past the Teancum and disappeared. He slumped and his blood flowed down the ropes, but he held on to the ladder as Poe and Roxie descended.
“Fools!” he shouted, and then Poe ignored him.
“You’re a hell of a woman, Roxie!” Poe shouted across the angled deck of the Teancum. “There isn’t room in this world for the both of us!” He climbed into the gunner’s seat and saw Roxie similarly strap herself to the helm.
“You’re wrong again, Edgar!” she called back. “There isn’t room enough in this world for either of us!”
Poe chuckled and cranked the gun around to aim at the siege below. “Give me as steady a platform as you can!” Smoke billowed out of the Tabernacle, threatening his visibility.
“Give them hell!” she yelled back.
“Hell!” Jed shouted and ducked.
Bullets whizzed over his head and he stayed down, his hands full of knives and his loaded pistol at his side. The big tables they crouched behind caught the bullets that struck and held them fast but the air above the tables was a deadly cloud of lead hornets. Outside the Lion House was light but inside was darkness.
And pain.
Jed’s belly hurt like hell but he hadn’t had the worst of it. Brigham Young was dying. Jed felt sad enough about that, because he seemed like an ornery cuss and Jed kind of liked ornery cusses, but worse than that was Jed’s impression that Young’s death meant their defeat, and then John Lee and George Cannon would have their war. After, of course, they killed Sam Clemens and Jed Coltrane and everyone else who knew about their plot.
Sam worked over Brigham Young’s body, wrapping strips of his own shirt and jacket around the man’s bloodied neck and chest, keeping the big glass shard in place and trying to stanch the bleeding.
Steel flashed low in one of the windows and Jed threw a knife. The blade clanged off the steel harmlessly and disappeared into the bushes. Jed grabbed the pistol and cocked it.
A hat appeared behind the steel and then Jed realized what he was seeing. It was one of the Virginians’ clocksprung horses and it crouched sideways in the window like a barrier. A soldier—no, two soldiers—sheltered on the machine’s other flank and their pistols snaked over the top of the horse and began firing into the room. Their angle and position pointed their barrels into the sheltered area among the tables, and Jed scrambled with the others not to be in the line of fire.
Orrin Porter Rockwell, hair and beard wild around his face like a halo around Blackbeard the pirate’s head, jumped to his feet to get a better angle and fire down at the two soldiers. A bullet struck him, and then another, and he collapsed to the floor beside his master.
“Egad,” Absalom Fearnley-Standish said. He pressed his back against one of the tables. Jed saw over his shoulder that more brushed-metal horses advanced in the street. They shone implacable and solid in the morning sunshine blazing down South Tabernacle.
“Throw your hat!” Jed told him, and switched to the Colt vibro-blade.
“Beg pardod?”
“Your hat!” Annie Webb jerked the damaged top hat off his head and pressed it into his hand.
“At the horse!” Jed whispered, and nodded to indicate the direction he meant.
Fearnley-Standish nodded, stood, and threw the hat.
Idiot, to stand up like that. Brave, but an idiot.
Bang!
The soldiers fired at Fearnley-Standish, his hat splintering into black shreds in mid-air and the man himself ducking and tumbling backward. Jed didn’t know if he was hit or trying to dodge and didn’t wait to find out. As the Englishman stood, Jed rolled forward and jumped, taking advantage of the distraction to hurl himself high onto the wall of glass tubes and brass doors—
—glass shattered around him as men firing from the hall saw him—
—he swung like an ape, thumbing the vibro-blade on, almost dropping it with the stabbing pain in his gut—
—and landing on top of the two soldiers in the window. He piled onto them with both his feet on one man’s neck and with the humming blade he lopped off the other fellow’s hands with a single swipe.
The mutilated soldier screamed, the other man barked, and guns swiveled to point at Jed.
“Aw, hell,” he grunted, and stuck the vibro-blade into the second soldier.
Tam hurt and he could only see out one eye. He thought it was because the other was covered in blood and not because the eye had been destroyed, but he hurt so bloody-damn-much all over his body that he couldn’t be certain, and he couldn’t spare a hand to wipe away the blood and find out for sure. Besides, Mother O’Shaughnessy had taught him to always stay focused on the task at hand.
He needed his left hand for crawling; in his right he held Orson Pratt’s ray gun.
Now that he saw it up close, the thing didn’t have a trigger at all, not like an ordinary gun. It had a grip and a sort of bolt on the side, which must be how the thing was fired. Too bad he hadn’t been able to watch Higley as he worked it, but Tam had had other things on his mind at the time.
Higley. Tam chuckled to himself. Fookin’ bastard.
He was close enough to the Pinkerton and to Richard Burton now that he couldn’t miss the one, and didn’t think he’d hit the other.
“Who’s your boss?” the Pinkerton was demanding, pointing a big rifle at Burton’s chest. Burton did a good job of not looking at Tam and giving him away. The Englishman had been caught reloading the Smith & Wesson. He had some shells in the cylinder, but obviously didn’t have time to snap it into place, raise it and fire before he’d take several shots in the chest.
“Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Victoria,” Burton sneered, “is my sovereign. I don’t have a boss.”
Tam levered himself up onto his knees. He swayed a bit, but managed to wipe blood from his eye with his elbow. He was pleased to discover that he’d been right—both his eyes still worked (not that he needed more than one, not for this task, not at this range, did he?). He dropped the muzzle of the ray gun to point it at the Pinkerton’s back and examined the bolt on the side of the weapon.
“Funny you think there’s a difference,” the Pinkerton shot back. He was a thin man with no hair and big ears. “She ain’t gonna save you now, you know.”
Tam fired.
Zottt!
The big-eared Pinkerton burst into flame. His rifle went off anyway—
—Bang!—
—but the shot missed, because Burton was already jumping to the side, snapping the Model 1’s cylinder into place and aiming—
—not at Big Ears, but behind him—
“Ha!” Tam shouted—
—was Burton aiming at Tam?
Bang!
The shot didn’t come from Burton’s gun.
Bang!
That was Burton’s gun and Tam heard a heavy thud and another man’s body hit the platform in front of him.
Tam dropped the ray gun, finding that his arms suddenly didn’t work. Puzzlement. He was cold, and his limbs felt far away. Then he noticed something in his jaw, a numbness and a pressure. He opened his mouth and blood spilled out.
Tam fell over.
He saw only blackness, but he heard scuffling boots. Arms grabbed his chest and then he heard Burton’s voice. “Easy, O’Shaughnessy,” Burton said gruffly. “Good man.”
“Don’t let them have me,” Tam tried to say, but blood was spilling from his mouth and down his throat and he wasn’t sure he was getting the words out. “Don’t let the fookin’ Pinkertons have my body.”
“Get them now!” John D. Lee cried in the hall outside. “We’re running out of time!”
The shouted commands to the Danites assailing him captured Absalom’s own thoughts perfectly. Brigham Young was bleeding to death. Orrin Porter Rockwell—his own brother-in-law, he thought, begrudging the title less than he expected to—lay face-down and still. Really, that should have been a cost-free victory fo
r Absalom, allowing him to grieve with his sister and still bring her home to England, but instead he found that it made him feel sad.
The dwarf Coltrane, flinging himself out the window with a crackling vibro-blade in his hand, was the last sight Absalom had seen before he fell over backward, stumbling and knocking himself down on the outside of the tables. Then he’d heard the cacophony of gunshots outside explode into a riot, and Lee’s shouts from the hall.
This might be it, he thought.
He cocked both his pistols and stumbled to his feet, lurching toward the message room door. The wish in the top of his mind as he did so was that he could be acting out this scene without the broken nose—he felt that he was doing and saying heroic things, but with the silly voice of a man with a chronic head-cold. The wish made him feel slightly embarrassed and he ran faster.
He expected to die instantly, cut down by gunfire from all sides, but he didn’t. He could see out of the corner of his eye that Coltrane had come back over the clocksprung horse, and that the dwarf was bleeding and maybe unconscious. Still, he was drawing the fire of the soldiers outside, sparing Absalom.
And for some reason, Lee’s Danites hadn’t charged through the door yet. Throwing caution to the wind, Absalom charged them instead.
He rushed out into the south lobby of the Lion House and found himself looking at the backs of George Cannon and John Lee. Their men were pressed against the walls and behind upturned chairs, firing their pistols—
—not into the message room, but up the hall, into the Lion House.
Down that hall came a charge the sight of which made Absalom Fearnley-Standish let out an unprecedented noise. It was partly a roar of triumph, because he knew when he saw the charging party that they were allies. He didn’t know if they could turn the tide against the soldiers and Danites combined, but the arrival of any assistance at all at this crucial moment heartened him. He and his friends had held the fort, and now the day might still be theirs! The sound was also partly a laugh, because the allies were the most improbable, even impossible soldiers he had ever seen. And, finally, the sound was also partly a quizzical harrumph of animal delight, thrilling purely at the physical appearance of the saviors rushing to his aid, pistols high and firing.