Peacemaker

by James Swallow

  He walked forward and made a ritual sign. Walking Crow covered a look of surprise and returned the gesture. ‘You know my Nation?’ he asked.

  ‘I do. I’m proud to say I’m a friend to all tribes. Some of them call me Rides In Night.’

  The Pawnee let out a gasp. ‘The Brother of Coyote? The man who defeated the Bad Wolf? But he’s just a legend. A story for the young braves . . .’

  ‘Every legend has a seed of truth in it.’ The Doctor gave him a steady look. ‘We need your help, Walking Crow. Darkness is moving over the land and Alvin Godlove may be the cause of it.’

  TWELVE

  AS THEY FOLLOWED Walking Crow back to Godlove’s wagon, Martha leaned closer to the Doctor and lowered her voice. ‘Do you think we can trust this guy?’

  He didn’t look at her. ‘You tell me.’

  Martha chewed her lip. ‘He had a knife on Nathan. I dunno. I’m not ready to be best friends with him just yet. Although . . .’

  ‘Although what?’ the Doctor prompted.

  ‘He didn’t seem like he meant it. To be honest, the whole threatening thing was a bit unenthusiastic and he put the knife away pretty quickly.’ She smiled. ‘I got the impression that his heart wasn’t really in it.’

  ‘The Pawnee are an honest enough bunch,’ the Doctor offered. ‘What you see is pretty much what you get with their tribe. He’s not a happy lad, is he? Less a Walking Crow, more of a Moping Crow.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d be any better, having to trail around after Godlove and be his stooge.’

  They halted by the broad box of the wagon and the Doctor ran his hands over the sides. ‘A proper travelling medicine show,’ he said.

  Martha put her hands on her hips. ‘Why were they called “snake-oil” shows, then? I can’t think why anyone would need to oil a snake.’ Her face changed as a thought occurred to her. ‘Oh, gross. They didn’t actually make oil from snakes, did they? Ugh.’

  Her line of reasoning was broken as Nathan approached at a swift jog, panting. ‘Doc,’ he called out. ‘Looks like that trail rat Alvin got himself a horse and kited outta here. Girls in the saloon say he went out the back way when those Lyle boys tried to throw down with you.’

  ‘A distraction, then,’ said the Doctor. ‘He pegged it and left you holding the bag, my old son.’ He gave Walking Crow a level look. ‘Not a very sensible thing to do. I wonder where he’s heading.’ The Pawnee said nothing, his expression impassive.

  ‘He must have been well scared of the Doctor, then,’ Martha opined. ‘Scared enough to leave his strongboxes behind.’

  Walking Crow shifted uncomfortably. ‘Godlove knew you had come for him, Marshal.’

  ‘Marshal?’ repeated the Doctor. ‘Oh, now I get it. Is it the coat? Or the hat?’ He grinned briefly. ‘I can see how he might have thought I was the law. I suppose I do look a bit Clint Eastwood in this, don’t I?’

  Martha couldn’t resist poking his ego. ‘More like the Milky Bar Kid.’

  His grin snapped into a frown. ‘Oh, thank you.’ The Doctor hopped up into the wagon. ‘Let’s see these boxes, then.’

  Inside, the Doctor found the metal containers just as Martha had described. The first, the unlocked one, had cash and coins enough to show that Godlove had probably worked his ‘miracle cure’ at a dozen other townships aside from Redwater and Ironhill. In an age before centralised medical care, there were many illnesses rife on the frontier and many people who would pay dearly if they believed they would be rid of them.

  He put the cash box aside; the moment he laid his hand on the second box, the locked one, he knew he’d found something interesting. The sonic screwdriver made short work of the fat padlock holding the latch closed and the Doctor flipped open the lid.

  ‘What’s in there?’ asked Martha warily, peering in through the door flap.

  ‘Fragments,’ said the Doctor, tipping the strongbox up so he could get a better look inside. He picked out the largest piece and turned it over in his fingers. About the size of a compact disc, it was a thick, curved section of silver-grey metal, dull and lined with shallow tracks. The tracks were inlaid with something that looked organic. He tapped his nail on it and it rang slightly. ‘Bone elements in a metal matrix,’ he announced, bringing the piece to his eye. ‘Very light, but dense too.’

  ‘And this is the part where you tell me that it’s Not of This Earth, right?’

  The Doctor nodded slowly, and ran the soft blue glow of the sonic over the edges of the fragment. ‘Go to the top of the class, Martha Jones,’ he said carefully. ‘This is very interesting stuff. It shows signs of hyperspatial vortex fractures. And forced gravitational alignment in the molecular structure.’ With a burst of motion, he tossed it back into the box and grabbed at a handful of chemical bottles with peeling paper labels. He poured measures from each into a ceramic dish and selected a small bit of the metal, then tossed it into the fluid.

  Martha blinked as a puff of purple flame coughed out of the dish. ‘What did that tell you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ quipped the Doctor, ‘I just did that for fun.’ He poked at the residue and went back to the boxes of fragments. ‘OK. A picture is forming. Would you like to know what it is a picture of?’

  ‘Something nice?’ Martha said lamely.

  The Doctor gave a dry chuckle. ‘With our track record, do you really think so? ‘Course not!’ He gestured with two pieces of the grey metal. ‘This is very definitely an artificially manufactured material, probably spun from an atomic lattice loom in a zero-gravity environment—’

  Behind Martha, Nathan and Walking Crow listened to him speak, clearly nonplussed.

  The Doctor went on, without pausing for breath: ‘—and there’s a bio-organic component, cultured metastatic cellular membranes for electro-chemical data transfer and energy flux regulation. I’ve seen a similar kind of structure on Gagrant Necro-Harvesters and Earth Empire bio-colony transporters.’ He blew out his cheeks. ‘The thing is, I think I’ve seen this exact fractal construction before. I just can’t place it.’

  ‘You’re talking about spaceships,’ said Martha. ‘That metal’s from a spaceship?’

  ‘Another gold star,’ he nodded. ‘A-plus-plus-plus, like they say on eBay.’ He rapped his knuckles on the metal. ‘This is, without a doubt, part of the hull plating from a vessel capable of transgalactic hyperspace travel. A bit of an anachronism on a planet where people have only just started using steam engines.’ The Doctor scrambled forward and leapt out of the wagon to land next to the Pawnee.

  Walking Crow backed off a step, a flicker of nervousness in his eyes.

  ‘I tell you, this planet, there’s enough non-terrestrial junk scattered around on its surface that you could start your own alien scrap yard.’ The Doctor advanced on the man. ‘Dalek pods in Utah, saucers under the Arctic, the mess left over from that UFO fender-bender in Roswell . . . Some species are like lazy picnickers, leaving their rubbish instead of taking it home with them.’ He halted and held up the fragment. ‘And this. I wonder where it came from.’ Walking Crow wilted under his hard gaze. ‘Care to tell us?’

  At first, Walking Crow wouldn’t speak of it. The Doctor pressed and cajoled, finally dispatching Martha and the boy Nathan on an errand to find them some food. The Doctor seemed to understand his reticence. What he had encountered, what he had witnessed out there all those months ago . . . it was not something he could simply talk about openly, even now.

  They had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time; or, as Godlove had later retorted, in the right place at the right time. Their luck was waning, and after several poorly paying attempts to make money off the settlements along the line of the Smoky Hill Trail from Kansas, Godlove had first argued with the Pawnee, and then blamed him for their predicament. Godlove then decided that they should strike out for new territories and fresh opportunities, perhaps heading toward Dakota and the Black Hills, or else down south where the weather was more balmy.

  They were low on food and water, an
d game was sparse. Matters were made worse when the dappled mare pulling the wagon put a foot in a gopher hole and took an injury. The wagon tipped and righted itself, but not before Godlove was tossed from the driver’s seat and thrown into the dirt. He landed on his hand and Walking Crow heard the twig-like snap as he broke a pair of fingers. The man howled for a while, his hand swelling up like a balloon as he tried to bandage it, but Alvin Godlove knew little of real care for the sick and injured.

  Godlove was beside himself with rage. He wavered between putting a bullet in the animal’s head, putting the poor beast out of its misery, and the realisation that without the injured animal there was no way they would be able to get the wagon to the next frontier township. Godlove and Walking Crow argued again, and as night fell the issue had still to be resolved to Godlove’s satisfaction. That was when the burning stars came.

  From out of the East, streaking across the sky leaving fingers of smoky orange behind them, a cluster of glowing white droplets screamed over their campsite and fell to the earth a few miles away. They struck the ground with a rumble of thunder and left a bright glow hazing through the trees.

  At first, Godlove was afraid of what the strange sky-fall could represent; but, minute by minute, he talked to himself, almost as if his curiosity and his greed were two other voices living inside the man’s head. In short order, he convinced himself that only a weak man would not wish to venture closer, and that riches and bounty from heaven could be waiting for them both.

  Walking Crow did not believe that the Great Spirit would throw treasures at them like a petulant child tossing stones at a dog, but as always his counsel was ignored. The two of them ventured out at daybreak to see what remained of the burning stars.

  They found, among a ring of trees that had fallen in a perfect, outward-facing circle, a curious pit in the earth that was blackened and burned, steeped with a strange smell that recalled the hot metal worked in a blacksmith’s, but also the stale blood of a battlefield. The strange pieces of iron that was not iron were everywhere, and Godlove set Walking Crow to gathering them up, perhaps thinking that they could make some small coin off their scrap value in the next town.

  But it was at the very core of the burned landscape that they found the most peculiar thing. At best, Walking Crow could only describe what he saw as similar to the nest of a wasp hatchling, but made from threads of glass and not fibres of wood. It was broken open and a thick oil the colour of bile drooled out from it into the earth, making the ground wet and boggy.

  And inside, a carving that looked like bone or perhaps metal, depending on how the light struck it. The shape was odd and strangely proportioned, and yet at first sight both men knew exactly what it was. The potential for lethality seemed to leak into the air around it, a potent aura of sleepy, ready menace .

  Although Walking Crow had never seen anything like it in his life, he knew that it was a gun. He stroked it, ever so gingerly, brushing a finger over the whorled surface of the weapon. That touch brought a bitter cold to his marrow, a chill of such power that it felt like every winter the Pawnee had lived through all made into one. He recoiled.

  Godlove, predictably, snatched it out of the cracked vessel and gripped it in his injured hand, the wound forgotten. He grinned and brandished it about like a child with a toy. Grinned and laughed and grinned, all until his scream broke through.

  Walking Crow saw him fall. Alvin went to his knees on the mud and clutched the strange gun to his chest. That was when the weapon cooed and glowed a firefly green, casting a colour about Godlove’s ruined fingers.

  When he gathered his wits and got back up, Walking Crow saw that Godlove’s broken digits were whole and set again, as new. Later, back at the wagon, he repeated the miraculous process to take away the horse’s lacerations. Godlove smiled a smile then, a look of such unadulterated greed that the Pawnee was silenced to see it.

  And that was how it had begun.

  His arms folded, the Doctor drummed his fingers on his elbows, thinking. ‘A cargo capsule, then,’ he reasoned. ‘Maybe a malfunction of the hyperdrive, a photon shadow crossing the void conduit path at the wrong moment after a solar flare?’

  The Pawnee’s brow furrowed. ‘Please do not speak in that manner. It causes a pain in my head.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said the Doctor, ‘rambling. Occupational hazard.’ He stalked away, walking around in a small circle. ‘Thing is,’ he continued. ‘I’m flying blind here unless I can come up with some clue as to what this gizmo is that Godlove has. Or indeed, where it came from and who it belongs to . . .’ The sallow faces of Tangleleg and Kutter crossed his thoughts. ‘And who wants it back . . .’

  He vaulted back onto the wagon. ‘Think, Doctor! Think!’ He tapped himself on his forehead. ‘Stratified matrix construct. Bio-energy engrams. Healing fields. Weapons. Adaptive technology. Put it together, man. Think, think, thinky-think!’

  Walking Crow opened his mouth to speak again, but the Doctor suddenly stiffened, as if he had been shocked rigid. ‘Are you all right?’ the Pawnee asked carefully.

  ‘Oh, I’m better than all right.’ The Doctor ducked back into the wagon, a look of pure insight flashing in his eyes. ‘I’m positively exact, spot-on, dead-cert, no errors sure.’ He scrambled about, using his sonic and the chemicals to hand on Godlove’s makeshift workbench to cobble together a quick-and-dirty analysis fluid. ‘Oh, I should have seen this, oh yeah. If it was a snake, it would have bitten me!’ He took another piece of the metal and dipped it in the liquid, watching the reaction. ‘If I’m right – and, let’s be honest, I am so much of the time that it hardly bears talking about when I’m not – then I think I know exactly what it is we’re dealing with here. And it’s not good.’

  THIRTEEN

  NATHAN FOUND THEM a boarding house selling food and, with a few of the coins left over from the Doctor’s winnings at the Bluebird, Martha bought sandwiches of thick, gritty bread with slabs of corned beef inside. Nathan stayed close to her, moving from foot to foot.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, picking up on his nervousness.

  The teenager eyed her. ‘Look around,’ he said in a low voice. ‘People are watchin’ us.’

  Martha did so, doing her best not to be obvious about it. Nathan was right; a lot of Ironhill’s citizens were paying more attention to them than she might have liked. She gathered up the food quickly and paid with a cursory smile. ‘Let’s go,’

  Nathan trailed at her heels. ‘News travels fast in a small town,’ he told her. ‘Reckon just about everyone hereabouts is gonna know the Doctor chased off Godlove. If he’s already gulled these folks, they ain’t gonna be well disposed toward us.’

  She chewed her lip. ‘Let’s get back to the wagon. Best if we stick together, eh?’

  They were halfway across the dirt road of the main street when the thunder of hooves drew her attention. She turned in time to hear someone cry out in shock and her heart sank.

  The longriders were racing down the street towards them and, behind their steaming, gasping horses, Kutter and Tangleleg were dragging men through the mud on twisting lengths of rope.

  Nathan cursed under his breath. ‘It can’t be! How did they find us?’

  Martha had no answer for him. In the daylight, if anything the two outlaws looked even more ragged and sinister than they had in the dark of night.

  Townsfolk were calling out in dismay and horror and, as Martha watched, the longriders cut their victims loose and let them spin away into the sidewalk. Kutter’s horse brayed and reared up on its hind legs, forelegs slashing the air. One of the men tried to get up and the horse kicked him, knocking him into the side of a building. He did not rise again.

  Nathan threw the food parcel aside and his hands contracted into fists. He surged forward, and Martha realised that the youth was intending to confront the men who had killed his father.

  ‘Nathan, don’t!’ she cried, grabbing his shoulder. ‘You can’t stop them!’

  He spun about and glared
at her, his eyes burning with fury. ‘Then who will, Miss Martha?’ he demanded. ‘Are we gonna let them shoot up this town like they did with Redwater, or who knows how many others?’

  She saw the longriders both draw their bulky pistols in slow, lazy motions, and Martha felt a hard knot of icy fear in her chest; but there was more than that. Determination stiffened her muscles. She was scared – it would have been a lie to say otherwise – but she knew that Nathan was right, that someone had to face these killers. Lately, Martha Jones had learned a lot of lessons about the nature of courage. To be afraid and still to defy what terrified you, that was the real measure of it. She found herself stepping up, head held high, walking tall.

  ‘I’ve faced Judoon enforcers. Carrionites. Killer scarecrows. I’ve looked Daleks right in the eyestalk.’ She fought down a tremor in her voice. ‘I’m not going to back down to these creeps.’ Martha filled her lungs and shouted. ‘Oi! Leave those people alone!’

  Kutter and Tangleleg both stopped instantly and turned as one to see who had dared to interrupt them. Kutter’s eyes narrowed under his broad preacher hat. ‘You.’ He glanced at Nathan. ‘And the young one.’

  ‘How did you get here before us?’ demanded Tangleleg.

  ‘Shortcut,’ Martha spat. ‘What’s it to you?’ She came to a halt and stood before them, hands on her hips. She stood like that so they couldn’t see the trembling in her fingers.

  ‘You lied to us,’ said Kutter. ‘That was a mistake.’ The stink of his breath, like rotting meat, wafted over her. The outlaws reeked of decay.

  Tangleleg nodded at the men who had been lashed to their horses. ‘Found these two on the trail. Learned the truth from them. Came here instead.’

  ‘Tactical error on your part,’ continued Kutter. He said the words awkwardly, as if his mouth wasn’t used to saying such things. ‘Misdirection ploy failed.’ The clipped, almost mechanical words sounded strange with the outlaw’s thick Midwestern accent.

  ‘You know what we want.’ Tangleleg twisted the barrel of his gun and panned it down the length of the street, wavering over different targets as the people ran for cover. ‘Where is the—’