Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon (23 page)

“What about you, Mr. Smith? Mr. Bent? What say we talk about this like adults, huh? I'm hardly going to cause harm to two agents of the Crown, am I?”

Bent murmured, “He's got a point, Gideon.”

“Yeah,” said Cockayne. “A red-hot one he nearly rammed up my ass. On my mark, back the way we came, right?”

“What's the signal?” hissed Gideon.

“This.”

Cockayne's guns spat twin explosions again and again, each bullet unerringly finding an oil lamp. Some flared and died, and some sprayed their unfortunate holders with blazing oil. As the street was plunged into darkness filled with the shouts of the men and the roar of the Steamcrawlers, Cockayne pushed Gideon and Bent back, taking the lead and winding through the narrow spaces between the stone buildings until the houses thinned out and the pit towers reared up ahead in the darkness. The rumbling of the Steamcrawlers was replaced by the clanking of the mine gear.

“There's a quarry beyond the mines,” said Cockayne, glancing behind them. “We should be able to slip down into that and leave the Steamcrawlers standing. Then we've just got to get out the other side before Pinch summons the wherewithal to get a posse around the quarry.”

“I'm effed,” said Bent. “We need to rest.”

“No time,” said Gideon. “We have to keep moving.”

Behind them, the shouts grew louder. Gideon grabbed the panting journalist by the sleeves and dragged him onward, between two tall wire fences that bordered two adjacent mines. A group of negroes sharing a bucket of water with a long-handled ladle in the dull light of one of the mines watched impassively as they ran past. Gideon wanted to stop and tell them that he would free them, somehow. Then he felt wretched and naïve. It wasn't his mission to wage war on Texas, to free its slaves. What would he tell these dull-eyed men who watched him rushing by? That he could do nothing to help them right now, but he would write a letter in the strongest possible terms to the authorities when he returned to England?

“Smith, quit daydreaming. We got a problem.”

Gideon blinked as Cockayne put out an arm and stopped his progress. He felt stones and loose earth crumble at his feet, and he realized he was on the edge of a yawning chasm, its far side in darkness and its bottom hidden by shadows far below.

“I thought you said this was an effing quarry, Cockayne, not a canyon.”

“They must've done a bit of work since the last time I was here,” said Cockayne apologetically. “Shit. I'm out of bullets as well.”

Gideon turned slowly as Pinch, sitting on top of the lead Steamcrawler, rolled inexorably toward them between the mines. His bizarre vehicle stopped, juddering and exhaling steam, the barrels of three guns fixed on Gideon from dark slits in the Steamcrawler's armor.

“Nice, huh?” said Pinch, patting the Steamcrawler. “Jim Bowie left 'em to me after he got himself iced in the desert. I said to Bowie, you got to know your limits, your boundaries. He was always off in places that didn't concern him, having adventures and getting the British and Spanish royally pissed. Me, I know my place. Steamtown.” A match flared, igniting the end of his cigar, reflecting in his dark eyes in a way that spelled pure crazy to Gideon. “And I'm the fucking King of Steamtown, gentlemen, and I will have my due tribute.”

Pinch picked up a rifle and trained it on Gideon, his deputies locking Bent and Cockayne in their sights. He said, “We've been blasting the shit out of this quarry with dynamite for a year now. It's two hundred and fifty feet to the bottom. Either you jump or you get a bullet in your heads. Don't rightly give a shit which you do, myself. But I thought I'd give you a choice.” His metal jaw wobbled, his blackened teeth bared. “I'm good like that.”

 

17

P
AYMENT
IN
K
IND

Carefully following the instructions that had been left with her, Rowena stood on the observation deck of the
Skylady III
and aimed her Lime Light Signaling Lamp in the direction of the cluster of distant lights around the black shape that crouched on the pale horizon. San Antonio. Steamtown. She was half an hour away, and they would have sighted her long ago, readying their defenses against the incoming 'stat. Only transmitting the coded message—it seemed to be a string of numbers broken up by words such as “blackbird” and “eagle,” “bugle” and “spoon,” utter nonsense—would cause Steamtown to hold its fire and allow her to land in the airfield the manifest told her was on the east side of the town. Rowena flashed the signal three times, hoping that someone at the other end had a signaling telescope trained upon her and was transcribing the message that would enable her to approach unmolested.

Flashing the code left her just her enough time to get the QF three-pounder Hotchkiss from the armory out to the observation deck. According to the helpful notes, the airfield was adjacent to several warehouses containing—Rowena surmised—coal. Which meant she would need help retrieving the Hotchkiss and her collection of incendiaries. Coal burned very nicely, and the Hotchkiss would be the flame she put to the touch paper of Steamtown.

Rowena strode from the observation deck into the bridge and surveyed what she'd found when she burst the lock and chain off the hold. There were fifty-four of them, evidently payment for the cargo of coal she had been hired to take back to New York. She'd felt sick when she first opened up the hold, sick to her stomach that she'd been involved, no matter how unwittingly, in this. Then she had reconsidered. Better that it was Rowena Fanshawe who had taken the contract than someone who would have followed the orders to the letter.

“I need some help,” she announced. The fifty-four faces turned to her. “I need to bring some equipment—artillery and ammunition, mostly—from the armory up to the observation deck. I need strong arms and, more importantly, steady hands.”

There were five or six hesitant hands raised, then more, until eventually all of her passengers were volunteering. Even the children. That someone had quite happily sold children into slavery for a 'stat's hold full of coal … she didn't feel sick anymore. She felt angry.

When Rowena had first jimmied the lock off and opened the door the fifty-four pairs of eyes regarded her with a mixture of slight interest, fear, and hatred. And why not? As far as they were concerned, she was just another link in the chain that was dragging them from one wretched life to another. Half of them were black, and after she'd unchained them all and taken them up to the galley (a Frenchman with them had rustled up the most marvelous stew from ingredients Rowena, a self-confessed terrible cook, kept in the larder) she did a quick census. The blacks were mainly the descendants of slaves from the South who had moved to the British territories when the Mason-Dixon Wall was being built. In British America they had been free, true, but by no means as liberated as the whites in New York, especially when it came to finding work and places to live. Black people tended to congregate in the Harlem district, and these families reported that slaver gangs who haunted the shadows were a regular and well-known hazard. While nightsticks and knives had been used to cajole many of the people in Rowena's 'stat to the North Beach Aerodrome, the slavers also used more subtle means.

“I applied for a situation on the docks,” said a broad, shaven-headed man named Oscar, hugging in his protective arms a wife with downcast eyes and three small girls with rags tied in their hair. “The pay was good. They said they'd like to meet the family, make sure I wasn't some union plant. I brought us all down to the warehouse.” He shook his head, tears welling up in his eyes. “They took us all at gunpoint to the airfield. Told us we'd all be getting a new situation, all right, me down the mines and Catherine here…” He hugged her tighter still.

“No one's going down the mines, and no woman is working … working anywhere in that horrible place. Not while you are under my protection.”

“And who are you, if you don't mind me asking?” The accent was Scottish, from a young man who must have been one of the British citizens of little or no resources who had taken cheap passage to America to help build the Empire State. They were of the masses, the great unwashed, those unwanted, unloved, and unmissed by the upper classes. And in America they had found not the promised land, but others like them. Among the other captives Rowena had noticed down-at-the-heel Italians, a pair of German brothers, a contingent of homegrown Americans with no stable income or proper roots. The Empire had diffused many wonderful concepts and inventions around the world, reflected Rowena. Unfortunately, many not-so-great ideas had also followed the British colossus that bestrode the world, and the class system was one of them.

“Me? I'm Rowena Fanshawe of Fa—”

“Of the Captain Trigger adventures?”

She had been about to say “of Fanshawe Aeronautical Endeavors” when the young Scot interrupted her. Something in his shining eyes reminded her of Gideon, and her stomach churned unexpectedly. Was he down there, ahead of them in the gathering darkness, in that pit of vipers? Was he hurt? Was he even alive? And did she care, beyond their friendship, beyond the sense of brotherhood they shared from adventuring high in the airways and beyond?

She smiled. “Yes, of the adventures.”

As the young Scot began to relate, in hushed whispers, a précis of Rowena's greatest moments (or, in the case of some of the accounts by Lucian Trigger that had appeared in
World Marvels & Wonders,
most outrageous lies) she turned her attention to what would happen when they finally reached Steamtown.

*   *   *

They were still bound for Steamtown despite Rowena's discovery. Her first thought on facing her motley and unexpected group of passengers had been
what the hell am I going to do with you lot?

“I have enough fuel for the return trip,” she'd said. “Do you want to go back to New York?”

A few hands had raised, but Oscar had snorted. “Back there? Where they sold us into slavery? Land of opportunity indeed.”

Those hesitant hands had sunk down. Rowena looked at the prairie passing below them. “I could find a cavalry garrison, let you off there…?”

The passengers looked at each other and shrugged. They had no homes to go to. They had come to America looking for a new life, and found only betrayal. Rowena drummed her fingers on her chin. “I suppose I could make for Free Florida … or even New Orleans.…”

Despite Governor Lyle's brief rundown back in New York of the geography of America, there was much more to it than the major colonies of Britain, Japan, and Spain, Rowena knew. There were any number of places she could take the freed slaves. Free Florida was a community of runaway slaves from the Confederate States and Texas, its northern border always in danger from raiding parties and vengeful lynch mobs. Between the Confederacy and Steamtown squatted Louisiana's dark, haunted swamps and wide, sluggish rivers. New Orleans was witch haunted and redolent with legend, but at least free.

These people might even find a home in the Free States of America, a growing territory north of the Wall, unrecognized as a nation-state by the British but home to those rebels who had shipped out of the East Coast after the failed revolution in 1775.

Rowena would have to stop somewhere to take on more fuel, but maybe she could even get them to Rooseville or New Jerusalem, or any one of the independent little communities springing up across the plains between British America and the Californian Meiji.

But, of course, all of those options meant abandoning what she had come down here to do in the first place.

“What do you want to do?” Oscar had asked. “Where do you think we should go?”

Rowena shook her head. “I can't make that decision for you.”

“Were you planning to go back to New York after delivering your cargo?”

Rowena bit her lip. “Not quite. I only took the job as cover.… I'm on something of a mission of my own. My friends are in Steamtown. I think they're in trouble.”

The others had gravitated toward Oscar and his easy authority. Rowena withdrew, letting them speak in hushed tones and the occasional raised voice, while she fussed over the instruments and maps.

Eventually Oscar said, “Miss Fanshawe?”

She returned to the crowd. “What's it going to be, then?”

Oscar looked around at the other expectant faces. “Miss Fanshawe, we can make a decision as to the rest of our lives later. For now, we are agreed that we have much to thank you for. Without you, we would be sold into slavery. If you have friends in trouble in Steamtown, then that is where we should go.” He swept his hands around the bridge. “But what when we get there? I hear they have terrible weapons in Steamtown.”

Rowena smiled broadly. “So do I, Oscar. You want to see 'em?”

*   *   *

In the armory Rowena put Oscar and two others on the three-pounder Hotchkiss and gave another two men each a crate of shells. She said, “Don't trip, don't slip, and for God's sake don't drop them, or we're all going up in flames.”

When the Hotchkiss was bolted to its mooring on the observation deck, she asked, “I don't suppose anyone has any experience of flying a 'stat?” Steamtown was looming closer, and she needed to put the
Skylady III
into what looked from the ground like a landing pattern.

Naturally, no one had, so she picked the two who seemed the most levelheaded—the young Scot and a dependable-looking Dutchman—and took them to the control panel. She put the
Skylady III
in a gentle descent and locked the course, giving her two new copilots the briefest of introductions to the wheel and meters so that they could at least get the 'stat up into the air and possibly even bring her down safely should something happen to Rowena out on the deck.