The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (42 page)

The airships, which had once looked flimsy
and ill-conceived, blossomed into full-blown weapons of war with
the addition of the Slark armor, armaments, and structural support.
Turning their former technical superiority back against them seemed
like lovely poetic justice to Gieo as she surveyed the complete sky
armada of three airships and seven planes. Each of the smaller
dirigibles could launch two modified crop dusters while the biggest
monster, the one she would pilot, boasted three biplanes in
accompaniment.

“I’m not one for worrying about others,”
Fiona said, stepping beside Gieo on the scaffolding around the
airship field with its now open top.

“No, you seem to like making people worry far
more,” Gieo replied. She leaned against Fiona’s shoulder with her
arms still crossed over her chest. “Ramen would like you to take
care of his puppy while we’re away.”

“What did he end up naming it?” Fiona
asked.

“Shrimp Ramen,” Gieo said. “To be honest I’m
surprised he even managed to come up with that. Programming
creativity into an AI is nearly impossible.”

“You seem to excel at impossible,” Fiona
replied, wrapping her arms around the diminutive pilot. “If you
don’t come back, I will come looking for you.”

“That’ll show me,” Gieo said.

The rest of the afternoon and evening
continued with preparations. Gieo angled for Fiona to take her home
for a little going away fun, but Fiona flatly refused, demanding
they wait until after Gieo came back.

As Gieo was set to board the largest of the
dirigibles for their departure, Fiona gifted her with the shifting
knob from her car, promising it had luck in it. Gieo barely managed
to hold back tears when she leaned down from the access ladder to
kiss the lanky gunfighter goodbye.

Once inside the cockpit of the
Big
Daddy
as it had come to be known, Gieo hooked herself into the
various pulleys and gyroscopes necessary to fly the dirigible
effectively. The knob to lower the weapon systems into place was a
thread match for the knob Fiona had given her. She replaced the
blank black ball with the silver skull from Fiona’s old car.

The airships lifted off into the inky night
sky atop the cheers of the collected throng of Tombstone residents.
Their proscribed course and pace would put them at the Slark line
the following morning, 10 AM if all went well, when the sun would
be at their backs and their ships difficult to find in the light.
Gieo turned the three dirigible squadron to the northwest in a
slow, droning arc.

Fiona stood by, holding Shrimp Ramen idly
against her chest, watching her lover go off to war, hating herself
as much as anything for all the times she put Gieo through what she
was experiencing in that moment.

Gieo had heard pilots were a cocky breed, and
the handful of gunners and pilots she was taking with her on the
Big Daddy
certainly fit that description. Some were the
Colorado military men and some were Raven trainees—regardless, they
all saw themselves as a breed apart, one meant to rain fire from
the sky onto lesser beings. Seeing the dust of Carolyn’s column
nearing where Gieo knew the Slark line to be, she figured they were
about to find out what kind of pilots they truly were. It was the
same antiaircraft battery position she’d assaulted in the spring
when Fiona had come to her rescue after being shot down. There was
symmetry to the whole thing that felt fated.

The dirigible formation slowed to wait for
the ground force to make their assault. It wasn’t a sneak attack as
the dust cloud from the marching column could be seen for miles and
the blimps, though difficult to spot when backlit could clearly be
heard, but rather it was an overwhelming force with air support.
Even from the great height and distance, Gieo could make out the
streaking trails of rocket propelled grenades being launched by
Carolyn’s two battalions. The fight was over quickly. The soldiers
fanned out, rolling back the Slark defenses, and then just as
easily detonating the antiaircraft weapons with loud popping
explosions. The radio crackled with a soldier’s voice, letting Gieo
know the gates were open.

She kept her formation tight, dove low, and
pushed the three dirigibles to their top speeds as she shot through
the opening created so easily by 2,000 human soldiers obliterating
fifty or so Slark spread over half-a-dozen emplacements they
believed were well-kept secrets. The support force, the
overwhelming majority that was to push back the 2,000 humans would
take awhile to muster, but was undoubtedly on the way. This was the
reason for the low approach, and Gieo, once on the other side of
the battery she had once assaulted alone, spotted a second column
of dust and exhaust on the horizon of the counterattack to be made
by the Slark. She turned her formation on an intercept course.

The Slark, who had long forgotten what human
air power might be capable of, and who had never seen the likes of
the Slark technology laden airships, stopped in their tracks to
gawk at the encroaching blimps rather than scatter for cover. Gieo
cranked the alarm handle above her head and to the right, letting
her gunners know they were up. She grasped the silver skull knob
gifted by Fiona, and pulled it down, dropping the main weapon
systems into place along the sides of the dirigible’s carriage. The
Big Daddy
had its big hammer out to do some big smashing,
Gieo thought with no small trill of joy running through her
stomach.

Fire from the various weapon pods along the
flanks of the airships rippled through the hull as all gunners
found target and range on the unsuspecting Slark column. Explosions
from high-impact shells set off a cascade of secondary explosions
as the minor crawlers took several direct hits. The high-pitched
whine of Gatling guns followed, peppering the desert floor with
tens of thousands of rounds, obliterating the Slark foot soldiers
where they stood. Gieo sighted in along the center of the column,
bringing the
Big Daddy
in low, and released the payload of
cluster bombs specifically intended for the purpose. The
grape-bunch bomblings dropped from the belly of the great airship
in a slow hale, suddenly breaking up by shaped charges in the
center of the bundles to spread the baseball-sized phosphorus bombs
out to cut a white, fiery swath of destruction. What remained on
the periphery was easily mopped up by the
Little Monster
and
the
Hard-Paw
flanking the larger airship.

“The board is clear, Red Rovers,” Gieo said
into the cone of the radio receiver by her head. “We’re on route to
target.”

“Good luck,
Big Daddy
,” the ground
forces replied.

It would be close to nightfall by the time
they reached Bakersfield and they would have no such ground support
or advantage of the sun at their back when they attacked the
refineries that fueled the Slark war machine. Regardless, Gieo felt
confident the element of surprise would remain theirs, and the
fields would be ripe for the picking. She recalculated her fuel
consumption, gained altitude, and returned to the proscribed course
she’d laid out that would weave around any possible population
centers.

“If you want to catch some sleep, I can wake
you if needs be, boss,” Ramen’s voice crackled down the wire. He
was in a far more protected encasement in the nose cone than he’d
ever been with far more control over the systems on the ship than
ever before. As unique advantages went, Gieo was glad she’d spent
the years to develop such a friend and partner in crime.

“I think I’ll do just that,” Gieo said,
fairly certain she wouldn’t be able to sleep even if she wanted to
despite not having slept in more than twenty hours. Pulling herself
up into the cocoon, a similar mummy-style sleeping compartment to
the ones on space stations, which was added to the design by
McAdams and his crew, she found herself lulled into a gentle
slumber by the thrumming of the airship as it winged its way toward
the final target. If all went according to plan, the trip including
the turnaround, would only take two days, but it was made
abundantly clear to her by the military men that 24 hours of sleep
deprivation significantly impaired a pilot’s capabilities. Ramen
dissembled the order through the tiny air formation to put the
pilots to bed.

Gieo dreamed deeply of flying among the
clouds free of an airship or wings, dancing atop the moonlit
mountains of the sky, unable to see the ground through the cloud
cover below her feet, and an ocean of stars above her. The serenity
of the dream was shattered before she could even truly process the
splendor created by her subconscious.

“…2% theory applies to both sides!” Ramen was
screaming to her.

She was already dropped back out of the
armored core of the ship into her pilot’s sling, given precious
little time to hook back into the necessary apparatuses. Her hands
were slowed by the lingering remnants of sleep. It took her a
moment to realize what Ramen was saying. She’d had a theory that
the cascade only boasted a 98% effective rate, leaving 2% of the
world’s technology reset, turned off, visually no different from
that which was destroyed, but still functional with a new power
source. Size and complexity appeared to amplify the cascade’s
effect, as was probably the intention, but she didn’t know for
certain until that moment that the Slark had found ways around this
hypothesis just as she had.

Well before the target zone, lumbering out of
the ruins of Edwards Air Force Base in defense of the Bakersfield
oil fields and refineries, was one of the colossal crawlers favored
by the Slark for city obliteration. There was something profoundly
off about the fifty-story tall weapon platform. It was belching
diesel smog and lacked the sprightly quickness she remembered them
having.

“We have to launch the fighters,
sky-captain,” the commander of the
Little Monster
said
across the short-wave radio.

“If we launch them too early, we won’t have
them for the oil fields,” Gieo replied.

“If we don’t launch them, we won’t make it to
the oil fields,” the
Hard-Paw
captain replied.

“Both of you launch yours,” Gieo said. “I’ll
hold mine in reserve until we need them. We may not find a landing
zone between here and Bakersfield to re-mount them though, so they
should make for the rally point at Red Rock Canyon once they’ve
spent their payloads.”

The green lights on the copper-plated
dashboard let Gieo know the captains were both in an understanding
of the changed plan. The tell-tale hum of airplane engines filled
the air as the four fighters descended from their holds on the
escort dirigibles.

“Look how slow it is. We can go around,
boss,” Ramen said. “We don’t have to fight this thing.”

“Are you kidding me?” Gieo asked with a
triumphant tone. “Let’s show this thing the teeth of our new
airship and send a real message to the Slark.” She ran the wings
out, diverted power to the main thrusters, and rolled the airship
into attack formation, eyes set on the target of the crawler’s
forelegs. She’d seen how someone had taken down the smaller crawler
their salvage came from, and had a good feeling it would work even
better on one of the biggest in their arsenal.

Gieo painted the shoulder joints on the
arachnid legs along the front with a laser sight. The gunners let
fly with everything they had, putting the full weight of their fire
on the tiny red dot of light beamed down from the nose of the
Big Daddy
. The fighters made their first pass along the top
of the crawler, striking at a dive, and releasing their payloads
into what was widely agreed to be the weakest part of the crawlers.
There appeared to be no appreciable effect, although the
retaliation fire from the crawler was far too slow to catch up to
even the slowest of the four modified crop dusters. Without Slark
fuel to run, it appeared the goliath crawler was a shadow of its
former self, but Gieo figured that left them about even considering
modified crop dusters were hardly F-22 Raptors.

Targeting lasers, which required a completed
circuit to fire, painted all three airships on the first pass. Gieo
could only imagine the shock and dismay of the Slark crawler
captain when the lasers refused to fire. The Slark armor plating
prevented closing of the firing circuit, which made friendly fire
incidents between Slark technology impossible; apparently the U.S.
military had worked tirelessly before the cascade to try to unlock
a way to armor human machines in a similar way, but could never
work out what element the Slark used. Gieo rightly figured out
Slark armor contained metal not present on Earth, likely by design.
Putting together what she knew with what McAdams knew, and it was
an easy jump for her to hypothesize that the Slark beam weapons,
the most feared among the Air Force pilots as they required no
traditional lock-on, no flight of a missile, hit with unerring
accuracy even when fired at supersonic jets, and had near infinite
range, would not work on the thunderously slow dirigibles if
armored with Slark salvage.