The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (5 page)

“Let’s say that’s an accurate assessment, and
I’m not conceding it is, won’t the Slark be developing their own
aircraft?”

“Exactly! Our technologies flip-flopped,
which gives them the advantage,” Gieo said. “They have the oil
fields of California. They’re running internal combustion while
we’re plunking along with repurposed Slark tech. Eventually we’re
going to run out of their fuel, since we have no idea how they made
it, and they’ll still have all the fossil fuels they need to crush
us. Slark fuel and engines are better, but finite, and we don’t
have the infrastructure to return to the fossil fuels we used to
use. When all our cars grind to a halt, it won’t matter that the
Slark crawlers get four miles to the gallon, they’ll be the only
thing running.”

“So we’re screwed?”

“Hardly,” Gieo said. “We can’t figure out how
to make more Slark fuel, but we can switch to solar, bio-diesel,
and steam, which is exactly what I plan on doing to Mitch’s truck.
I’m going to tear out the Slark engine and replace it with the
boiler from my dirigible. It’s been running on used fryer oil at an
incredibly inefficient pace. I think I can fix that.”

“Is Mitch aware you’re planning on doing
this?”

“Aware? He volunteered his truck for the
experiment!”

“Zeke won’t like it; you’re chipping away at
his stranglehold on the town.”

“Maybe Zeke doesn’t need to keep his
stranglehold much longer.”

A second, colder realization followed, and
Fiona knew, with dread certainty, she would have to kill people to
keep Gieo alive. The inevitability didn’t actually sound all that
bad; she hoped the pilot would ultimately be worth it though.

The sun was beginning to set when they
arrived at the crash site. Fiona was a little disappointed the
Slark hadn’t sent a second recon team. She could always use the
easy heads as she’d fully decided to reject Zeke’s proposition.
Tracking down the boiler, which Gieo explained jettisoned from the
aircraft on impact, as it was designed to, rather than explode and
blow up the entire crash site, took close to an hour, but
eventually they found the hulking black tank. Mitch’s truck, which
apparently had served as a classic car hauler in a former life,
easily winched the boiler up onto the flatbed where it was secured
with heavy chains. Back at the primary crash site, Fiona kicked her
way through the discarded piles of tech in the sand, unsure of what
might be valuable and what was junk.

A clanking of metallic legs, not unlike a
Slark crawler, drew her attention to the large boulder the crashed
dirigible was listing against. Her gun was instantly in her hand
with the hammer thumbed back. She couldn’t smell anything out of
place, but the sound of Slark crawler legs was unmistakable. She
nearly fired out of simply being startled when an upside down
crescent, not unlike an overturned wok, peeked around the edge of
the boulder, inspecting her with glowing green eyes.

“What the hell is that?” Fiona muttered to
herself.

“Ramen,” the little mechanical chirped. He
emerged entirely from behind the boulder, walking his mostly spring
and solar panel body on two little Slark crawler legs, very similar
to a crab’s, flitting twin helicopter props on his back to keep
himself upright.

“Like the noodles?”

“More like Range Activated
Mechanical…um…something…fuck it, yes, like the noodles.”

Gieo, overhearing the conversation, came
running from her duties of securing the main gun pod of the airship
to the back of Mitch’s truck. “Ramen, why aren’t you at the
lab?”

“I lost primary coordinates and tried to
recalibrate from the…”

“…bullshit?” Gieo finished for him.

“I was worried about you,” he admitted.

“Wait, he lies?” Fiona asked. “Why would you
teach a robot how to lie?”

“The challenge, of course,” Gieo said. “Do
you have any idea how difficult and complex it was to create
subterfuge and nuance in an artificial intelligence program? Some
of my earliest attempts lied all the time or lied indiscriminately,
but Ramen knows exactly how and when a lie should be used. He’s
better than many people in that regard.”

“I can also fly,” Ramen added with a little
buzz of his propellers.

Mitch came thundering over, shotgun in hand,
stopping short when he saw Gieo hugging what looked like a
mechanical dragonfly. “What the hell is that thing?”

“Ramen,” Fiona explained.

“Like the soup?” Mitch asked.

“Can we not go over this again?” Ramen asked.
“My batteries are low and I’d just like a quiet place to rest and
recharge.”

“We’ve got what we came for,” Gieo said,
hugging her arms around herself to fight the encroaching cold of
the desert twilight.

Fiona fought the urge to put her arm around
the pilot. Instead, she agreed they were done, and guided the lot
back to the vehicles.

Back in Tombstone, with Mitch’s truck hidden
away again along with the incredible haul of tech, they placed
Ramen on the roof of the saloon to await the morning sun, before
retiring to their respective rooms. Fiona pulled the paper-thin
curtains closed over the windows while Gieo set about lighting the
candles and lamps. The domesticity of the shared chores carried a
familiarity, warm and comfortable, that Fiona found strange, but
inviting, considering she’d only met Gieo earlier that morning.

Fiona slung her lengthy form down the middle
of the bed, letting the metal, rail headboard push her hat down
over her eyes. She wasn’t particularly tired, but always took rest
when and where she could get it, much like any other predatory
cat.

“Have you thought any about what I said
earlier?” Gieo asked.

“Nope,” Fiona lied.

“Maybe I can convince Zeke to change
course.”

“He doesn’t like risk, doesn’t care for tech,
and he’s more interested in making the Slark suffer than actually
getting rid of them,” Fiona said.

“Maybe Tombstone needs a new potentate.” Gieo
slid across Fiona’s lap, straddling her waist. “This is our world.
It’s time we took it back and became what we were before.”

“What if I don’t like what we were before?”
Fiona tossed aside her hat, grasped Gieo by the shoulders and threw
her onto the bed beside her. Before Gieo could react, Fiona was on
top of her, straddling her waist. She grabbed Gieo’s hands and
pinned them above her head. “I like this world, like my place in
it. I don’t want to go back to being a pampered coke-fiend
flouncing around in my underwear.”

“Then at least rule your world.” Gieo was
smiling, clearly enjoying the rough treatment, which irritated
Fiona more than a little bit.

“Maybe I start with you,” Fiona hissed.

“Maybe I don’t believe you could.”

Fiona let go of Gieo’s hands and sat back a
little on her lap. “You don’t even know me.”

Gieo reached up, grabbed Fiona’s hands, and
replaced them in the pinning position above her head. “I do too,”
she protested. “I wrote an unofficial biography of you; sure,
nobody wanted to publish it, but I did do all the research.”

Fiona restrained herself from pointing out
how crazy Gieo sounded; the phrase, ‘takes one to know one’
prevented her. “Okay, fine, you know me, but I don’t know you.”

“I’m a Leo, I liked Korean boy bands when
they still existed, my favorite food is sushi, my favorite sushi is
yellow-tail, and I used to have a pug named Gizmo,” Gieo rattled
off quickly. “See, now you know me as well as anyone.”

Fiona slid off Gieo’s lap and sat on the edge
of the bed. The pilot was confusing, paroxysmal, and irritating—all
of which would have been fine, if she also wasn’t attractive. Fiona
couldn’t rationalize her desire for Gieo as anything other than her
being the first woman she’d seen in ages that wasn’t both a
prostitute and straight; of course, there was a great deal more to
it that Fiona didn’t want to admit to herself regardless of how
aware of it she was.

“But seriously, was being rich and famous
actually that bad?” Gieo asked.

The part of Fiona’s brain most in charge of
impulse control never functioned correctly. Things easily jumped
from being thought about to being done. She called them chaos tics,
and she had been more than a little surprised to find most people
had them; the only difference was, most people didn’t scream
“FIRE!” in a crowded movie theater, shove people off curbs, or
throw drinks in peoples’ faces just because the thought occurred to
them. Fiona, of course, did all these things. More often than not,
a chaos tic of sorts passed through her mind and her body opted to
carry it out. She grabbed Gieo’s hand, flipped the pilot over onto
her stomach and straddled her lower back from behind. She deftly
removed her belt and bound Gieo’s hands to the wrought iron
headboard piping with it. When Gieo began to voice her objection,
Fiona shoved her face into the pillow resulting in a muffled stream
of what she guessed to be Korean swear words.

Dodging Gieo’s clumsily kicked legs, Fiona
yanked down the back of the pilot’s riding pants to mid-thigh,
exposing her taut, little behind, lovely in black, cotton panties
with little cherries on them. Fiona marveled, if only for a moment,
how clean all of Gieo’s clothing was.

Fiona brought her hand down hard on Gieo’s
behind with a resounding slap. Gieo’s kicking ceased. Fiona swatted
her again and again with her left hand, still holding Gieo’s face
into the pillow with her right. All the fight immediately drained
from the little pilot. Red, angry hand prints rose on the soft
curve of her flesh around the black edges of her underwear. Fiona,
thinking she’d taught Gieo a proper lesson, released the pilot’s
purple hair.

Gieo’s head rolled far enough to the side for
her to look up at Fiona through sparkling eyes. She began to squirm
a little against the belt holding her hands, making the leather
creak. It took a few moments for Fiona to realize it wasn’t actual
struggling against bonds, but something far more sexual.

“Fuck me, please,” Gieo whispered.

Fiona glanced from Gieo’s pleading eyes to
her behind, writhing against the pants pulled partially down,
lewdly pushing up for attention. She couldn’t take her eyes off the
beautifully curved ass. She was breathing heavily, her heart
pounding, and, for some strange reason, her mouth began watering.
She brought her gun hand down hard on Gieo’s right cheek with a
loud, satisfying thwack.

“Or you can keep spanking me,” Gieo moaned.
“That works for me too.”

“Is there anything you’re not going to
enjoy?” Fiona grumbled.

“I’m not sure. Why don’t you start doing
things to me, and I’ll let you know when I don’t like one of
them?”

“You’re infuriating!”

“Look, you can keep doing what you’re doing,
alone, trying to hide your past while slipping under everyone’s
radar, or you can try something worthwhile, find someone to care
about you, and become something great,” Gieo said. “Remember what
we talked about earlier? Whoever adapts and recovers the fastest
survives.”

Fiona hated when other people started making
sense.

“I don’t like being told what to do!” Fiona
punctuated each worth with a hard slap of her open palm against
Gieo’s already red behind. As much as she intended the swats to
hurt, the pilot still seemed more aroused by them than anything
else.

“Fair enough,” Gieo moaned. “You can tell me
what to do.”

Fiona left her hand on the warm curve of
Gieo’s behind; the heat rising off the spanked portions thrilled
her far more than she expected. The possessiveness she felt
regarding the pilot was manifesting itself in some peculiar ways,
and Fiona believed, on a very instinctive level, that what was
beneath her hand was not only hers to protect, but hers to do with
as she pleased, and not just because Gieo all but said as much.

“I don’t know what I want,” Fiona
murmured.

“No kidding.” Gieo made quick work of the
belt around her wrists, undoing the bonds from the inside out,
retrieving her hands easily. She rolled across the bed away from
Fiona toward the opposite edge. Hooking the heels of her boots on
the footboard, she pulled her feet from them and inched her pants
the rest of the way down to toss them off the bed as well.