Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 7: March 2014 (15 page)

A hot wind dried the sweat on his face beneath the scruff of a three-day beard as his own bay gelding fidgeted. Doc settled it with a touch of his leg. The gelding’s sweat soaked the inseam of his trousers b
e
tween saddle-skirt and boot-top.

Doc let the silence drag, contemplating the great plates and icicles of rust armoring the surface of the whatever-it-was.
Its broken spine zig-zagged off into the heat shimmer.
A long furrowed scrape marred the desert behind the hulk. That impact—or just the desert—had gnawed several holes in its flanks, revealing buckled decks, dangling pipe and wiring, stretched and twisted structural members.

Here and there in its shadowed depths, blue-white lights still burned, as they had when Doc first saw it.

The other five came up alongside Doc, their horses indolent in the heat. In all honesty, he hadn’t been sanguine about bringing four ladies into the trackless desert—even the kind of ladies that wore trousers and went heeled and rode astride like men—but they had been determined on riding out with him or without. He figured “without” was a hell of a lot less safe than “with,” and in the end chivalry had won.
Chivalry,
and the need for some ready cash to settle at the faro table, where he owed a debt to that damned John Ringo.

Ringo—and not just the debt—was another reason.
Because if Doc hadn’t taken the job as a ladies’ touring guide, Ringo in his yellow-and-black check shirt sure as hell would have.
And then Doc might as well have these tenderfoots’ deaths on his conscience as if he had shot them with his own gun. Ringo would have no qualms about relieving them of their horses and cash by any means possible … shy of earning it fairly.

The horses drifted to a stop again, scuffing and shuffling in a ragged arc: one chestnut, one gray, one dun, and three assorted browns and bays. For now, Doc’s charges—he wasn’t sure yet if you could call them companions—were content to stare up at the wreck in silence and awe.
Which suited Doc just fine.
The dust was making his chest ache, and he didn’t feel like talking.

He reached into his pocket for a stick of horehound, peeled the waxed paper back, and bit off a chip to suck on. The last thing he needed now was a goddamned coughing fit.

On Doc’s left, the lone other man lifted his hat off a grizzled head. He mopped the sweat from his bald spot with a once-red kerchief that had faded to the color of the dull yellow earth. His name was Bill. He was quiet and needed a shave. Doc hadn’t learned too much else about him.

Bill said, “I reckon we should ride around it first?”

“Before we dismount?” The woman who gave him a sideways nod was tall, skinny. Doc thought she might be his wife, but he and all the others called her Missus Shutt. She had long wrists and long hands, and her steel-colored hair was clipped shorter at her nape than most men’s. Her gray eyes snapped with ch
a
risma and intelligence. She would have been beautiful, Doc thought, but her nose was too small.

The little blonde on
her
left almost got lost under a wavy, ill-contained billow of caramel-colored hair—the kind of hair that belonged spread out on a man’s pillow. Pigeon-breasted, with a rump like a punching pony poured into her shiny-seated trousers, she sat on her red gelding with the erect spine and lifted chin of one of Doc’s girl cousins back home, as if she was not accustomed to the relaxed Western seat. Her name was Missus Jorgensen.

Beyond her was Miss Lil, the big one who looked to have some Mexican in her.
Or maybe some Indian.
Or maybe both.
It wasn’t so different. Miss Lil wasn’t just big for a woman—she was broad-shouldered and had about a half foot on Doc’s five-ten. Her hair twisted in a black braid that snaked out from under her chapeau fat as a well-fed rattler.

The sixth person—and fourth woman—in their little group of adventurers was a beautiful quadroon with a long, elegant jaw and crooked teeth. The Negress’s name was Flora. Despite the heat, she wore a fringed suede jacket. It matched the sheath on the saddle by her knee that held the coach gun she seemed to prefer to the pistols all the others carried.

Doc—no fool—was heeled with both.

“By the time we get around this thing the shade will have shifted,” Doc said. “We can tether the horses in it.”

Bill asked, “Is it safe to leave them so close to the wreck?”

Doc rattled that bit of horehound against the backs of his top teeth with the tip of his tongue. “It’s what we’ve got for shelter.”

The big woman leaned out of her saddle, making her horse sidle and fret. “
There’s no tracks
around it,” she said, after a moment’s inspection. “Nothing to show anything might have crawled out, anyway. Or dragged anything back in again.”

Heads swiveled. Doc might be the guide, the local—laughably speaking—expert. But it didn’t take much to see the quadroon woman was the leader of the group that had hired him. And none of them seemed to find anything strange about it.

Doc washed the lingering bitterness of the horehound down with a swig from his canteen. None of his concern how people ran their lives. His job was getting them all into the wreck, and all out safe again with whatever it was they thought so worth risking money, bullets, and their lives to find.

***

Their slow circuit took the better part of an hour, and while it did reveal some tracks, they were those of coyote, lizard, javelina, and hare. Condensation formed inside the rusting hulk when the temperature dropped at night—a resource no desert creature would ignore.

Doc, with Miss Lil, was riding slightly ahead of the others—both of them leaning down silent and intent as they surveyed the scarred earth—when she cleared her throat, reined in the heavy-boned, bald-faced brown mare that bore up under her weight with ease, and murmured, “Doc?”

He turned, followed the gesture of her large, graceful hand, and frowned down at some rows of wavering, parallel scratches in the dust. When he looked up again, Miss Lil was regarding him levelly out of eyes brown and intelligent as her
mare’s
. Her eyebrows rose in a question.

“Somebody brushed out tracks.” A familiar cold pressure grew between Doc’s shoulder blades, under the protection of his duster. Aware of how much he was giving away, but unable to stop
himself
, he let his gaze run over the ragged remains of the whatever-it-was. He might get lucky. He might catch the glint of su
n
light off a gun barrel, or the flicker of motion as someone raised and sighted within that chambered dar
k
ness.

“Yes.” Her voice was high and musical, charmingly out of place in her frame. “But coming or going?”

The others had scuffed to a halt five feet or so back, waiting out the trackers’ verdict. At Miss Lil’s question, the voluptuous little blonde—Missus Jorgensen—shifted her hands from where they rested on her pommel and rubbed the left one with the right.

“As it appears,” she quoted, “in the true course of
all the
question.”

Doc snorted and quoted in return,
“ Well
, I am glad that all things sort so well.”

Her smile lit up her square-jawed face quite wickedly. “I had heard you were an educated man. It appears I was not misinformed.”

“Ma’am,” he answered, and touched the brim of his cap. He looked at Flora, reminding himself who he was working for. “Whatever you came for—do you want to keep looking if you’re not the only ones?”

“We’re looking for her logs,” Flora said.

“Logs?”

Her hair moved over her shoulders in a pair of squaw plaits thick as her wrists when she nodded. “That thing was a ship, Doctor Holliday.
A ship that sailed between the stars.”

“Huh,” Doc said, looking back at it. Still no sign of a carbine barrel, or any motion, or any life
except
the still burn of those blue lights in its depths. It had no wings, nor any sign of a balloon canopy, nor even the conical mouth of a giant Hale rocket on what he took to be its stern—the end toward the skid-marks, which was less damaged overall.

He shrugged. “I’ll feel better when we’re under cover.”

“Agreed,” Flora said. “Since we might be following someone in, what do you think of picketing the horses inside one of the damaged areas? At least they’ll be hidden from casual view.”

“If someone’s going to steal ’em,” Bill said, “they can steal ’em from a picket line outside as easily as one in. And if we have to run for ’em, well, I’d rather not cross open ground under fire on foot.
Or at all, for that matter.”

He glanced at Doc, as if weighing his next words. “I can drop a ward line around ’em either way.
Inside or out.”

Doc sucked his teeth to get some moisture into his mouth. “You’re a hex.”

Bill shrugged. “The ladies need some reason to put up with me.”

“Huh,” Doc said. It might be autumn by any sensible man’s reckoning, but that didn’t help the heat that trickled sweat down between his shoulder blades.

Since Bill had been so honest with him, he allowed, “I might have seen a trick or two like that my own self.
And more men who claimed it than could do it.
Wardings, though. That’s a bit beyond my exper
i
ences.”

“What you do with that iron,” Bill answered. “That’s beyond me.”

Doc tipped his head and let the compliment slide off.

Missus Shutt pushed her hat down over that cropped steel hair. “Warded or not, I can’t imagine the horses would be any less safe than out in the open.”

“Unless the wreck itself eats ’em,” Doc said.

They all looked at him. He had sucked up the last splinter of horehound. He stifled a cough and wiped his mouth. No blood this time, for a mercy.

“You think that’s
likely
?” Missus Jorgensen asked.

“I think it could happen,” Doc answered. “Likely? That’s a whole ’nother thing.”

***

The horses came into the dim, reflected light of the wreck as if into a stable, heads lowered and calm. Their composure was reassuring, although Doc might have found it more peculiar if it hadn’t been fifteen or so of Doctor Fahrenheit’s degrees less hot in the damp shade of the hull of the ruined “star-ship.” Although that was peculiar in its own right: You’d expect a metal shed, sweating in the sun, to be sweltering no matter how vast.

Instead, the derelict exhaled a moist breath that seemed cool, even if only by comparison. Doc’s co
m
panions reveled in it, stretching themselves taller in the shade as if the desert light had weight. They moved around the arching space they’d chosen as a temporary stable, keeping an eye on the three buckled pa
s
sages—one at ground level, two above—that led deeper into the wreck. The horses huffed into their nosebags and settled quietly, though no one did more to ease his mount than slip its bit. Girths stayed tight, in case a hasty retreat was indicated. Bill began casting around the edge of the chamber like a terrier after a rat—looking to set out his ward line, Doc imagined. He had that concentrated look of a professio
n
al—surgeon, gambler, hex, or shootist—considering a selection of inadequate options. Doc let him be.

Doc wasn’t happy about stabling the horses in this mess; it was asking for lockjaw, but he didn’t see a good alternative. As he was checking the bay’s hooves before pulling the coach gun from the saddle, he heard rust flakes crunching under the footsteps of two of the booted, uncorseted women walking up b
e
tween the mares. One of them—Missus Jorgensen, by her sharp dry tone—was saying something indistinct, and Doc strained to pick her words out of the coruscating echoes of footsteps, hoof-clops, and one of the mares pissing like a downspout running into a catch barrel before he realized what he was doing.

If your sainted momma caught you eavesdropping, John Henry Holliday, you know a frown would crease her brow.
But Doc wasn’t sure how thoroughly he believed Flora’s tale about this being an expedition to retrieve some long-lost captain’s log—and in
fairness,
it was his life on the line.
Funny how since Dallas he had no compunctions about holding a gun on a man, or gambling for a living.
But he could still balk at trying to overhear something he maybe shouldn’t.

It didn’t matter—he couldn’t make out much over the stamp of hooves and the creak of leather, except Miss Lil answering whatever Missus Jorgensen had said with, “… sense detail’s genius.”

“I’m looking forward to this one,” Missus Jorgensen answered.
“Could be our greatest run since the Spider Women of Queso Grande.”

“Hey,” Flora interrupted. “No—”

Whatever she said got lost in the background noise as well. Doc shook his head at himself and straightened up, letting the gelding’s off fore drop. A little confusion and thwarted curiosity was no more than he deserved for such rudeness.

He almost lost the rustle of something unexpected kicking through rust flakes and litter in the hollow clop of the gelding’s hoof.