The Native Star

by M. K. Hobson

  Stanton glared at her. “Why didn’t you?” He crunched the candy in his mouth, a peculiar emphasis. “His knife was right there. He was unconscious. It would have been the work of an instant.” He waited a long moment for an answer, his face painted with strange scorn. “Maybe, Miss Edwards, cutting throats isn’t as easy as you think.”

  “I never said it was easy,” Emily returned hotly. “But what the hell are we going to do? Sit back and enjoy the ride until a bunch of Army Warlocks swarm the train and put us in handcuffs?”

  “First, you’re going to listen for messages from Komé. She’s warned us of trouble before, and forewarned is forearmed. Second, I think it’s time to consider a change of disguise. If Caul doesn’t remember anything else, he’s certain to remember the fabric of that suit. And finally, this train must have a smoking car somewhere. I’m going to find it and see if there’s any food to be had. Care to join me … Elmer?”

  Emily wasn’t quite ready to stop being mad, but after a moment she released her annoyance in a long breath. It was nice to have him back.

  They exited the vestibule and went back through the car, past where Rose was sitting. The girl waved to them both.

  “Save our seats?” Emily gave Rose a smile. Rose blushed prettily and looked coyly down at her Jack Two-Fist book.

  “Come on,” Stanton growled, giving Emily a pointed shove.

  “You know,” Emily said quietly, as they wended their way toward the back of the train, “I don’t think I anticipated all the difficulties that this suit would present.”

  “Believe me,” Stanton said, grasping at the overhead rails to keep his balance, “I will be pleased to provide you with a proper dress at the earliest possible opportunity.”

  Emily hoped no one had heard that comment.

  They found the smoking car but they didn’t find food until the train stopped for dinner. And even then there was little more to be had than thin, mingy sandwiches. Stanton bought two dozen of them and spent the afternoon eating, ignoring Rose’s attempts to catch him up on the plots of all the dime novels in her carpetbag.

  Later, as twilight painted the sky with delicious hues of pumpkin and lemon, someone pulled a violin from his luggage and began to play old tunes that resounded through the rattling compartment. The music was plaintive and sweet. It lulled Rose into a welcome reverie, and she drowsed against the glass, her little white finger holding her place in the Jack Two-Fist book.

  The conductor strolled through the car, lighting lanterns and folding down seats. Stanton elbowed Emily.

  “Come on, Elmer,” he said. “It’s the floor for us.”

  “Huh?”

  “We shall allow Miss Hibble to sleep on the seats, of course.” Stanton looked at Emily meaningfully. “It’s the gentlemanly thing to do.”

  “Oh,” Emily said. “Right.”

  They, along with a few other single men, hurried to find places on the floor. Emily and Stanton were stuck with a place up near the coal stove. Well, at least they would be warm, but it was a small comfort when weighed against the fact that they would be sleeping right next to the gent’s saloon—near enough to smell the stench and be bothered all night by people climbing over them.

  “Mind the spittoon,” Stanton said, wadding up his coat for a pillow and tipping his hat down over his eyes. Emily stared up at the pressed-tin ceiling, the patterns shifting mysteriously in the half-light of the swinging lanterns. The fiddler was playing one last song. Emily felt a twinge when she recognized it.

  “Sweet, Sweet Spring.”

  “Beg pardon,” mumbled a man as he climbed over her.

  Even though the next couple of days were uneventful, every day was more tension-charged than the last. Whenever they stopped, Emily scrutinized the passengers getting on, anxiously scanning the platform, playing a grim game of Guess the Maelstrom. It was an odd conundrum: putting miles of distance between themselves and Captain Caul should have made them safer—but with each mile, each moment that passed, the danger grew and grew.

  Only while the train was under way could Emily relax, watch scraggy mountains dip and recede, and breathe the cool air that smelled of new-grown sage and rain.

  Stanton spent most of his time in the smoking car, away from Rose’s nonstop chatter. Emily was worried about him. He’d woken up from Caul’s spell, but it didn’t seem that he had entirely recovered. He was tense, constantly frowning, and the small muscles of his face jumped and spasmed at odd intervals. And while he wasn’t the sweetest-tempered individual in the best of times, he was now positively snappish. She wondered if the attack hadn’t done more damage than he wanted to admit. He wouldn’t discuss it, of course. He just assured her curtly that everything was fine.

  Insufferable.

  But still, he didn’t deserve any of this misery, just as Dag didn’t deserve to have his heart broken, just as Pap didn’t deserve to have to huddle in hiding from blood sorcerors tearing up Lost Pine to find her.

  Three times what thou givest returns to thee …

  Emily sighed, understanding for the first time the true seriousness of the rede.

  It doesn’t just return to you, she thought. It returns to the people you care about. The people you love …

  “… And his guns had pearl handles. Have you ever heard of such a thing, Mr. Elmer?”

  Rose’s words scattered Emily’s thoughts. Emily shook herself.

  “Pearl handles?” she said vaguely. She’d long since stopped listening to Rose’s recap of some fictitious outlaw’s exploits.

  “Hand-carved mother-of-pearl handles on his revolvers, and with ’em he could shoot any walnut out of any walnut tree, just for the pointing! Can you imagine?”

  “Whoever he is, I bet he doesn’t carry those revolvers around to shoot walnuts with,” Emily muttered. At the words, Rose’s face became a picture of sweet pleading.

  “Oh, but the Brushfork Bandito doesn’t hurt people! When he held up that bank in Austin, he just tied everybody up. He even gave the doll back to the little girl who was crying! He’s not mean, he’s just … tormented.”

  “Tormented by not having enough of other people’s money, I guess.”

  This made the girl smile, a pink blush creeping over her cheeks. She ducked her head and lowered her eyes.

  “You seem tormented sometimes, too,” Rose ventured, looking at Emily from under her eyelashes.

  Emily couldn’t help giving a loud laugh—a laugh that was entirely too high-pitched. She pressed her lips together quickly. From ruthless to tormented. It really was too amusing.

  After a moment, Rose’s smile faded. Her face clouded slightly. She chewed her lip.

  “Your friend doesn’t like me much,” she said.

  “Oh, don’t mind him,” Emily said. “He’s got a lot on his mind.”

  Rose was silent for a long time. Lifting her heavy, lumpy carpetbag onto her lap, she wrapped her arms around it, hugging it to her chest.

  “I don’t like mean people,” Rose said, finally. And then, surprisingly, she did not speak again for a long time.

  It was later that day that they encountered the Aberrancy hunters.

  Emily had wended her way to the back of the train, to the observation deck, and was watching the plains roll out behind them. She’d never seen anything as big and flat and queer. The plains were like looking at a huge body of water; it was hard to tell if the sky was being reflected by the land, or the land by the sky. The emptiness seemed to go on forever, bisected into two infinite halves by the scar of black track. The new green mist of the plains was dotted with blooming wildflowers; the air was thick with the smell of them.

  The train gave a lurch, slowed, then stopped. Emily was seized with a sudden, inexplicable nervousness. What if they were trapped in the middle of all that emptiness? Who could ever find them? How could they ever find themselves? She went to look for Stanton, who was in the smoking car reading the papers.

  Stanton was puffing contemplatively amid a sea of gentlemen.
But while Stanton was casually perusing a copy of the North Platte Sentinel, the other men in the car were clustered around the windows on the right side, talking in excited tones.

  “Do you see them?”

  “Aberrancies, sure as shooting!”

  Emily gave Stanton a questioning glance as she pushed her way through for a better look.

  In the distance, three black, misshapen figures the size of oxcarts galloped over the plains. They had once been jackrabbits. How three of them had encountered a black bolus at once, Emily couldn’t guess.

  They were being chased by a cavalry squadron; the soldiers were firing on them. Puffs of smoke issued from their rifles, and a second later came the sound of echoing pops.

  Some of the men in the car dug into their pockets and brought out charms of protection and hung them around their necks, as if having them visible made them more effective. One man in a bright purple and yellow waistcoat saw this general action and laughed.

  “Out come the charms!” he guffawed. “What a bunch of old women.”

  “What are you laughing at, mister?” someone replied hotly. “I been wearing this charm for thirty years, and I ain’t ever been eaten by an Aberrancy yet.”

  This remark elicited approving chuckles. But the man in purple and yellow snorted dismissively as he leaned against the doorjamb, thumbs tucked into the armholes of his waistcoat.

  “Aberrancies are nothing more than freaks of nature. Scientific explanations for them are easy to find. A gentleman by the name of Charles Darwin, in his book Origin of the Species, says that we all evolve. Aberrancies are just evolution gone haywire.”

  “Rubbish.” Stanton did not look up from his paper.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Rubbish,” Stanton repeated. “First of all, the correct title of the book you’re referring to is On the Origin of Species. Second, Aberrancies are the result of toxic residuals exuded by the Mantic Anastamosis. That is the accepted understanding.”

  “That’s what the Warlocks say, friend.” The man laughed. “Either you been listening to Warlocks, or you are one!”

  Stanton tapped ash from his cigar.

  “No,” he said. “Just a hobby of mine.”

  “Well, those Warlocks … they want you to believe that everything is bad magic. Part of the way they convince people into buying their services. But science can explain most things.”

  “Yes, science.” Stanton’s icily dismissive tone suggested the man in the purple and yellow waistcoat was the most dimwitted cretin it had ever been his misfortune to meet. “I fail to see why men who espouse the benefits of science so often advance their cause by dismissing the great natural power of magic.”

  “Oh, I ain’t dismissing nothing, Mr….”

  “… Smith,” Stanton said.

  “Mr. Smith. Science and magic can work together, I guess. Come from the same roots, some say.”

  “Precisely so,” Stanton said. “Thus, it is foolish to scoff at men who take the perfectly sane and sensible precaution of wearing protective charms. I’m sure all these men have families, duties, responsibilities … I’m sure Mr. Darwin could offer little assistance if any one of them ever came face-to-face with a slavering, rampaging Aberrancy.” Stanton fixed the man with a gimlet glare. “Could he?”

  This comment brought sounds of loud agreement from around the compartment.

  “As you say, sir, as you say …” The man in purple and yellow lifted his hands, stepped back. His face was flushed red to the ears. “I didn’t mean nothing.”

  It was almost as if Emily could feel the mood in the car shift. The men who wore charms stood up a little straighter. They looked firmer, more resolute, and certainly happier. Stanton had defended them and made the man in purple and yellow seem a blowhard and bumbler. But the dissection had been unsettling to watch.

  “Did you have to be so harsh?” she said under her breath.

  “Uneducated idiots like that can wreak havoc with a credomancer’s power unless they’re brought up good and short.” He sniffed distastefully. “Scientists.”

  At that moment, the conductor came into the car.

  “Well, gents, they say it’s a gusher,” he announced, with a rueful glance at his watch. “They’ve sent Aberrancy hunters down the tracks to deal with the mess, but it could be hours before they let us pass.”

  “A gusher!” the words passed excitedly between the men in the car. Even the fellow in the purple and yellow waistcoat seemed awed by the announcement, but Emily had no idea what it meant.

  “Let’s have a look!” someone suggested.

  “The train’s not going anywhere!” came an answering voice. “I want to see the Aberrancy hunters at work!”

  The young men were the first off, obviously glad for the opportunity to stretch their legs. They whooped their way toward the front of the train. Older men followed; even the man in purple and yellow went to have a look. Soon, the only ones left in the car were Emily, Stanton, and two elderly men whose faces were set in expressions that indicated they were far too old for such nonsense.

  “A gusher?” Emily said to Stanton.

  He looked at her tiredly, his eyes red rimmed.

  “Must we? I have a headache.”

  “Fine.” Emily threw up a hand. “I’ll go alone. You stay here.”

  Stanton ground out his cigar.

  “Oh, certainly not,” he sighed. “Sit comfortably when I could be doing something dangerous instead? Perish the thought.”

  The scene of the commotion was about a mile up from where the train had stopped. Compared to the endless emptiness surrounding them, the group that had collected around the “gusher” seemed small and inconsequential. But as they drew closer, Emily saw that it was quite a large and active gathering.

  And as they got closer still, she saw that the scene was actually one of barely controlled chaos. The crowd from the train was watching a crew of a dozen workers who milled about a dark, steaming mass. The workers wore globe-shaped helmets of silver, their features hidden behind green smoked-glass faceplates. Indeed, the workers did not display a single inch of skin; they were dressed in heavy suits of stiff material that glittered as they moved, as if their clothes were embroidered with diamonds.

  “Are those the Aberrancy hunters?” Emily asked through a hand covering her mouth and nose; the smell was foul, like rotten eggs and decaying meat. “What’s that they’re wearing?”

  “They’re wearing protective suits of spun glass and silver,” Stanton said. “Black Exunge will wick through most organic materials.”

  Emily and Stanton pressed through the crowd. On every side Emily heard the whispered word “gusher” again.

  “What’s a ‘gusher’?” Emily asked.

  “Sometimes large pockets of Exunge will collect under the ground, building pressure. Gushers are rare, and good thing, too, for their occurrence is nothing short of a natural disaster.” Stanton looked up over the top of the crowd. “This isn’t a gusher, though. If it was, they wouldn’t be letting people push in so close to watch. Probably just a little upwell causing annoyances.”

  They finally came to a place where they could see the Aberrancy hunters at work. The men were using coal-oil flamethrowers to scorch the earth around a trickling black pool.

  “They have to completely sterilize the area around the source of the flow,” Stanton explained. “Notice that they’re keeping the flames well away from the Exunge itself. It’s indecently flammable, a property which can be either extremely dangerous or extremely useful.”

  As if to illustrate Stanton’s somewhat oblique statement, a grasshopper leaping away from the heat of the flamethrower landed directly on the tarry mass. The insect began to grow at a frightful rate, expanding like a bubble in a pan of hot molasses. There were screams from the crowd; everyone pulled back in preparation for panicked flight. But the Abberancy hunters responded with practiced efficiency. One who’d been standing off to the side jumped directly into the path of the swelling
Aberrancy, flapping a bright red handkerchief. The action drew the creature’s attention, and it took one great hop toward the handkerchief-flapper, making a slurping sound as it landed. Once the grasshopper was a safe distance from the bubbling pool of Exunge, the hunter with the flamethrower touched the edge of the creature’s wing with a thin stream of fire. It ignited in an eyeblink, exploding into a screaming, popping column of blue and gold flame. The crowd oohed and aahed like children on the Fourth of July.

  “I told you it was flammable,” Stanton said, as if Emily had stubbornly refused to believe him. He scratched the back of his head. “Had no idea they were attracted to the color red, though.”

  Emily considered reminding him about his ill-considered red poncho, the one that she’d once coveted. But it seemed so long ago. So many things had happened since then, it wouldn’t even be like teasing the same person. Instead, she watched the hunters douse the smoldering grasshopper with shovelfuls of prairie dirt. When the grasshopper excitement had passed, she pointed at a pair of hunters who were kneeling near the fountain, fitting a silver apparatus over it.

  “What are they doing?”

  “They’re capping it, just like they’d cap a well of crude oil,” Stanton said. “It will allow them to pump out the Exunge.”

  “And then what?”

  “It will be stored in steel containers, like those …” Stanton pointed to a large supply of bullet-shaped containers lined up on the ground nearby. They were marked ominously with a skull-and-crossbones insignia.

  “And what happens to the containers?”

  “They are taken to government storage facilities,” Stanton said.

  “And what does the government do with it? Is there some way to neutralize it?”

  “After a fashion,” Stanton said. “When Exunge comes in contact with living matter, its destructive qualities are fixed and thus neutralized. So you can sacrifice living things to it, like goats or chickens, and render it harmless. How many goats or chickens depends on how much Exunge needs neutralizing.”

  Emily looked at the pile of containers. There had to be at least fifty of them.

  “I’m guessing that’s a lot of goats and chickens,” she observed.