Fields of Iron: A steampunk adventure novel

by Adina, Shelley

  “How would you pull that off?” Alice rolled over in the dust to stare at the sky, empty except for the massive carrion birds that always seemed to be circling lazily, waiting with infinite patience for some earthbound creature to make a mistake.

  “I leave that to my brilliant wife and her friend Gretchen.” Ian leaned over to kiss her, dust and all.

  “None of that, sir,” she said with mock sternness. “We are reconnoitering.”

  “I do not know how many chances I may have left to kiss you,” he said mildly. “I must take them when I can.”

  There was a degree of truth in that, though Alice didn’t like to think in such terms. But she had learned long ago that every day was a gift, and a day spent with Ian and the people she loved was twice as valuable to her as any day she had passed in old times, flying alone.

  Gravel pattered down upon them and Alice searched the rocks for the source of the disturbance. A small blue and gray bird scratched briefly among the roots of a pine growing out of a cleft, then flew away in a flurry of startled wings.

  “Something’s coming,” she breathed to Ian, pulling the lightning pistol from her leather jacket.

  “Impossible,” he whispered. “We are at the highest point above the dam, and the cliff above us is impassable.”

  A shadow floated along the walls of the canyon below them—too large for a bird, too small for a cloud. With a gasp, Alice scrambled to her knees and craned to look upward, past the rocks, past the sheer cliff that loomed at their backs.

  An airship bearing the star and swords of the Texican Rangers banked over the mesa and prepared to make another pass. “It’s the Rangers!” Alice fell flat to the ground, though heaven only knew if she’d been spotted already. “What are they doing here, so close to the border?”

  “The same thing we are?” Ian suggested, his voice low.

  They could hear the drone of the ship’s engines now—old ones, with the peculiar clank on the upstroke of the piston that every aeronaut could recognize.

  “Crocketts,” Ian said contemptuously. “Swan could outfly her even disabled. My touring balloon could outfly her.”

  “I’d give a lot for your touring balloon and Claire’s Helios Membrane right now,” Alice said, shading her eyes. But it had been rescued from the field in which it had gone down, and was in Andrew Malvern’s laboratory in London, the repairs no doubt long finished.

  The ship cruised down the vast canyon that had been carved into the earth by the river. They had to have spotted Swan. The only question was what they would do about it.

  “You don’t suppose they’ll come back and offer a rescue, do you?” Ian suggested as the gleaming blue fuselage faded into the distant haze. “I would much rather drop a pressure bomb on that dam from a safe vertical distance than to spend days building a submersible.”

  “Ian, you know the facts as well as I do. Not only would I be instantly recognized, but if you tried to drop a bomb, you would be just as instantly accused of committing an act of war on Her Majesty’s behalf,” Alice reminded him.

  “Yes, I know,” Ian admitted. He got up, dusted himself off, and held out a hand to her. “Come. Let us find Gretchen and her team at the meeting point, and compare notes. I know you have that missile built in your mind, but her expertise seems to be explosive loads and displacement. In this business the two go hand in hand.”

  “What business? Clandestine acts of sabotage?”

  “If you must be so distressingly blunt.” Ian scrambled down a chute of rock and waited for her to land beside him. “I am of two minds whether or not to include our submersible in my report to Her Majesty.”

  “You are such a Corps man,” she chided him, taking the lead along a shelf of rock that they had negotiated earlier and trying to ignore the fact that a hundred feet of empty air lay between her and the deep arroyo with its feathery ironwood trees that provided shade for the meeting place. “Always thinking about the paperwork.”

  “It is a failing in my character,” he admitted, sliding along beside her, his back to the rock and both hands pressed to it. “I can think of nothing I would like better at this moment than to be in my office at Hollys Park, filling out the forms from the seed catalogues, a cup of tea at my elbow and my wife puttering among her plans and drawings across the corridor.”

  It did sound heavenly. So heavenly that she lost her concentration in the contemplation of it, and a stone turned under her boot.

  Alice shrieked in sudden terror, her arms windmilling as she fought to keep her balance on the narrow ledge.

  “Alice!” Ian shouted. He grabbed for her hand and caught the back of her shirt instead. Inside a single second, he had rammed the other hand inside her leather corselet and hauled her in. Her head smacked smartly on the rock as he pinned her against it, breathing in gasps that sounded almost like sobs.

  “Darling, are you all right? Did I hurt you?”

  Alice’s head spun and she blinked away the stars that crowded the edges of her vision. “The alternative … was worse. Thank heavens … you have quick reflexes. You saved my life.”

  Still breathing hard, he pressed her against the sheer sandstone, his boots planted between hers as though he thought she might pitch forward again. “Then we are even, my dearest, for you saved mine weeks ago.”

  Trembling, the sore spot on her skull making itself felt with a vengeance, Alice held him tightly and wondered, not for the first time, how out of all the skies she had flown in the world, she had managed to be so lucky as to cross flight paths with this man.

  When they reached the meeting point a half hour of heavy scrambling later, Gretchen had already completed her calculations of how much explosive they would need in order to decimate the dam.

  She lifted an imperious eyebrow in Alice’s direction. “I do not think that your plan for a submersible will work. We can never pack that much in one of the kettle buoys from the riverboat. We would need three at least, and there are only two.”

  Alice was reminded a little too forcibly of the man at the Admiralty in London, explaining to her why she could not captain her own ship in the Royal Aeronautic Corps when it was perfectly clear she was more capable than he.

  Perhaps this was why she was a little testier than was wise. Perhaps it was the result of her brush with death on the cliff. In any case, she found Gretchen’s tone insupportable. “I have no intention of using the kettle buoys. I intend to use the ship’s boiler, of course. Anyone could see it’s the only iron receptacle large enough to be turned into a missile without too much trouble.”

  “The boiler?”

  Alice amused herself by imagining Gretchen in a monocle, and it falling out of her protuberant blue eye in her slack astonishment.

  “You must be mad. That will cripple the riverboat, and Captain Stan’s fleet will be down to two. How will we get supplies up and down the river?”

  “If we don’t act quickly,” Ian put in, “the question will be moot. You will have to be displaced for miles upriver, every man and woman in your villages moved halfway to Denver.”

  “If you can only repeat what we already know, be silent,” she spat. “Las brujas do not need the obvious pointed out to them by men.” Clearly she resented Ian’s tone, which Alice found to be merely businesslike, as much as Alice herself resented Gretchen’s.

  They were in a difficult spot all around, and snapping at each other was not going to help. Alice tried to catch Ian’s eye, but he was looking toward the cliffs, affronted and trying not to show it.

  Stella stepped up and laid a hand on Gretchen’s arm. “Peace,” she said. “We all know the danger, and we are running out of time.”

  “Then we will take the boiler out of their airship.” Gretchen tossed a tight smile of triumph in Alice’s direction. “They are not using it at the moment.”

  “I’d buy a ticket to see you get it down the side of the mesa,” Alice said with her best attempt at cheer. If anyone laid a hand on Swan, it would be the last thing they did.
“The steamboat’s boiler is right there to hand, and with a few adjustments to your cliff-crawling engine, we can have it out and on the dock inside of a day.”

  “What are you doing to my ascending spider?” A woman with glossy blue-black hair pushed to the front of the little group standing in the shade. “No one touches it without my say-so.”

  “It would make an excellent crane,” Alice suggested, “unless you can think of another way to get the boiler out of the hull? You are May Lin, aren’t you? The daughter of the woman who developed the ascender, and the underwater weir-and-chain system?”

  The woman looked at her in some surprise. “How do you know my name?”

  Alice grinned, her tension easing. “Betsy told me. When Mother Mary asked me who I needed for this reconnoiter, she recommended you. She said yours, Stella’s, and Gretchen’s are the best engineering minds she has.”

  May Lin’s face softened into a grin, too, though Gretchen merely crossed her arms and looked impatient, as though all this chitchat were holding her back from doing something more important.

  “Mother Mary never lies, unless it’s to a man. So yes, I suppose I might make a few adjustments to my spider and turn her into a crane, just this once.”

  Alice dusted off her hands on her pants. “Excellent. Let’s get moving, then. If we’re lucky, we’ll make it back to the village by dark.”

  “Not so fast,” Gretchen said, and all the witches came to a halt, telling Alice a little more than she wanted to know about the esteem in which the other woman was held. “Perhaps Mother Mary forgot to remind you who was in charge here.”

  Ian’s hand jerked, as though he had barely stopped himself from reaching for the lightning pistol at his hip, and now it was Alice’s turn to put a hand on his arm. “I never said it was. But we should hurry—the sun will be down behind the mesa soon.”

  Oops. Telling her what she already knew again. What was it about this woman that rubbed Alice’s fur the wrong way?

  “Mother Mary assigned this reconnoiter to me. We go when I say so and not before.”

  “Nonsense.” Alice’s temper, not in the best of shape since her own foolishness had brought them to this pretty pass, finally slipped its reins. “You’re not my captain.” She stomped off down the trail, pushing the branches of the tree out of her face with such force that she snapped one.

  “Hold it right there!”

  “Oh, for the love of—” Alice whirled to see the dadburned fool woman sighting down a rifle barrel like she meant business. “Is this your idea of a joke?”

  “Put that down at once!” Ian commanded, drawing his pistol, only to have the rifle slowly swing and sight in on him.

  “What did I just say about who’s in command here?”

  “I’ll give you that command when you show me some evidence you are a competent commander,” Ian said in the tone he used when instructing the middies.

  Alice just had time to raise a placating hand when three things happened simultaneously.

  The rifle went off.

  Ian shouted, spun around, and was flung to the ground, bright blood blossoming on his shirt.

  And the Ranger ship floated back over the mesa and settled into a hovering pattern directly overhead.

  Chapter 16

  The royal train puffed into the station at San Luis Obispo de Tolosa at noon, belching so much steam into the clear sky that it obscured its sleek blue body. It was a moment before Evan recognized the great locomotive pulling the ornate red-and-gold carriages.

  “Well, knock me down and call me a bollard—Joe, that’s Silver Wind!”

  “That magical train you were chasing?”

  “The very one. What is it doing here?”

  “Seems obvious.” Joe joined him at the window, where both of them had a center-balcony view of the station below. A band struck up a tune that was so ponderously earnest it could only be the Royal Kingdom’s version of “God Save the King,” and the enormous crowd that had gathered burst into song.

  “I wish we could see him.” Crane as he might, Evan could not tell which of the several hundred tiny figures might be the royal personage. “But there’s no mistaking that train—there can’t be another like it in all the world. It must have taken the Ambassador on to the capital when I was clapped in gaol with you.”

  “To tattle to the Viceroy about what you and this Gloria girl had done with his mechanicals?”

  “Presumably. Which doesn’t bode well for me if he returned with His Serene Highness … or if the latter dislikes my interpretation of his dreams.”

  “Nothing about this bodes well for either of us, amigo.” Joe gripped his shoulder briefly.

  Evan accepted the moment of wry comfort for what it was, and pointed to the crowd below. “Poor people, looks as though they have to listen to a royal address.”

  “I didn’t think he was well enough for that.”

  “I don’t think he is the speaker.”

  Sure enough, a large, enclosed horse-drawn carriage shouldered its way through the crowd while most of the welcoming citizens listened to the address from the station platform. It looked as though the young prince was being escorted up the hill, if the mounted troops surrounding his carriage with the flashing metal epaulets and waving plumes upon bucket-shaped helmets were any indication.

  “Come,” he said to Joe. “Let’s watch from the colonnade.”

  “What’s the matter, never seen a prince before?” Joe complained, but he came along anyway.

  No one stopped them as they left their room and made their way along the cool, shady colonnade. No guard stood at the door, and it was soon clear why, for every member of the household was ranged in order of rank—from the majordomo to the lowliest kitchen maid—out in the courtyard where tonight’s fiesta was even now being prepared.

  Evan and Joe took up a good position behind a spiral-turned post covered in the violently pink plant that seemed to be native to the area, and watched as the vehicle came to a halt before Ignatio de la Carrera y Borreaga and his family. The grandee held the carriage door himself as the young prince stepped down.

  Evan examined him curiously. He was tallish, though probably shorter than Evan himself, and weedy-looking, as though he needed to put on a little muscle to match his height. He wore a short jacket and silver-adorned pants similar to those most of the men wore, with the addition of a scarlet ribbon running diagonally across his white shirt front and a large medal in the shape of the royal sun at his throat, between the points of his collar. His hat was round and flat, like the one the grandee had swept from his own head. His hair was black and curly, his face thin, his nose aquiline.

  Evan had seen that nose before. In fact, the Viceroy’s entire person looked deuced familiar.

  But he couldn’t be. Evan had never laid eyes on the fellow in his life—even at university or during his travels, he would have remembered meeting a future king. Nor had he seen an illustration of him in a newspaper account, for until recently he had been at school. It must be a trick of the light, or the way the shade fell under the brim of his hat.

  The girls were sinking into curtseys now, all flirting and batting of eyelashes forgotten in the solemnity of the moment. The Viceroy lifted their mother to her feet with awkward gallantry, and then the girls rose to cluster together, eyes cast down and hands clasped nervously before them.

  “I don’t suppose we’ll get an introduction,” Joe whispered, trying not to look interested and failing utterly.

  “I don’t suppose so. What are we but prisoners, after all? We don’t even rank as high as the kitchen maids. What are they saying?”

  “Welcomes, the house is his, anything they can do for his comfort, that kind of thing. About what you’d expect.”

  And then the Viceroy lifted his head to look beyond his host and hostess. He asked a question and Joe drew a sharp breath.

  “What?”

  “He just asked where you were,” Joe breathed. “And here comes the majordomo. Lucky
job we put on jackets.”

  Evan tugged on his, and Joe ran a hand jerkily through his poorly cropped hair. They stepped out of the deep shade of the colonnade into the sunlight, and the majordomo caught sight of them.

  “His Serene Highness wishes to see you,” he said rapidly. “Address him as such, do not speak unless spoken to, and bow from the waist.”

  Evan had met the Prince Consort of England once, shortly after he’d graduated and the prince was attending the graduation of one of his nephews from the engineering department. And then at Lady Claire’s wedding celebration a few months ago, he’d been presented to the Queen. He supposed he could be grateful he’d had a little practice. Poor Joe had had none.

  “Your Serene Highness, may I present Senor Evan Douglas and his translator, José San Gregorio,” de la Carrera said with ceremony. “Gentlemen, make your bows before our beloved prince, Carlos Filipe, Viceroy of the Royal Kingdom of Spain and the Californias, Defender of the True Faith, and General of the Armies of Heaven.”

  Evan bent gracefully at the waist and even remembered to extend both toe and hand. From the corner of his eye, he saw Joe copy him exactly, and they straightened at the same moment. “Your Serene Highness,” he murmured. “It is an honor.”

  The majordomo shifted, and Evan remembered too late he was only to speak when spoken to.

  “You have pretty manners,” the Viceroy said.

  While Joe translated, Evan dared to look up as far as the young man’s chin, and then met his eyes. Eyes that were wretched—hollow from lack of sleep, haunted from nightmares, and most of all, desperately unhappy and awkward. Evan had seen street children in London who looked worse, but not very. His heart went out to the boy—for boy he was, hardly a year or two older than his cousins Maggie and Lizzie.

  “It is lucky I met the Prince Consort in London,” he said with a smile. “Otherwise I would not have known what to do.”

  When Joe began to translate, the Viceroy held up his hand and looked at him as though he were a person, not an automaton or even a prisoner. “Thank you,” he said in slightly accented English, “but I speak Senor Douglas’s tongue. We shall carry on all our conversations in English, then, while we are together.”