Teancum (12 page)

“As in the Egyptian god?” Poe was amused.
 
“Identified with the sun and with
Ra?
 
You Mormons love your Egyptian
things, I must say.
 
Robert was
wise to suggest that I disguise myself as an Egyptianeer.”

“Mostly we identify Ammon with chopping off arms,” Roxie
said.
 
Poe didn’t know what she
meant.
 
Still, he was happy to be
with her and he felt like she forgave him and he forgave her too.
 
Besides, she smiled at him, so even
though he was dying and he didn’t understand the joke he threw back his head
and laughed.

Zottt!

A bright flash of blue light snapped behind them—

and the
Ammon
hurtled
directly upward, into the morning sky.

They both staggered.
 
Poe grabbed the wheel for support and Roxie threw her arms around Poe’s
waist.
 
Together they contrived not
to fall as cool air whistled through their hair and then suddenly they were
several hundred feet higher than they had been, and the
Ammon
slowed its ascent and started to drift.

Roxie started to the edge of the ship, but Poe caught her
arm.

“What’s happening?” she shouted.

“It doesn’t matter!”
 
He pointed at Pratt’s other three ships, disappearing down around a gray
cliff below and to the north of them.
 
“Burton can fend for himself—we have to stop the Madman!”

“His name is Orson!” she cried.
 
“He’s no madman!”

Poe dragged Roxie to the wheel, though the effort made him
cough up half a lung.
 
“Since you
feel that way about it, I propose that you man the wheel and I man the
gun!”
 
He grabbed the monkey,
ripped the canopic jar from the socket in which it was nestled and tossed it
overboard.
 
“Just in case,” he
said.

Then he lurched across the deck, back to the gun.

“If I am to
man
the
wheel,” she shouted after him, “then I insist you
woman
the gun!”

Poe laughed until he bled, then dragged himself into the
seat.
 
“We must endeavor to take
Brother Orson by surprise!” he called over his shoulder.
 
“I shall not fire until we are close,
or until we are fired upon!”

Roxie waved an acknowledgement and grabbed the
controls.
 

The
Ammon
slid
forward, and Poe looked to the craft’s sail.
 
It billowed forward as if puffed by a following wind, but
whatever made it move wasn’t the night air over Timpanogos Mountain, because it
billowed
into
the wind.
 
As it billowed, it lit up, and sparks
crackled up and down its gossamer surface.
 
As Roxie turned the air-ship’s wheel, the mast and sail
turned, turning the ship with them.

“Extraordinary,” Poe murmured.
 
If only men of genius such as Pratt and Hunley could
collaborate away from the terrors and pressure of war, he thought.
 
What marvels might they accomplish?

Of course, it could be suggested that the terrors and
pressures of war were the very things that pushed such innovators to their most
spectacular results.
 
Poe sighed,
and then he coughed.
 
He grabbed
the phlogiston cannon’s gunner’s seat for stability and let the world around
him swoon.
 
Hold on to yourself,
man, he thought.
 
At least long
enough to stop this atrocity.

The
Ammon
suddenly
pitched to its right, which was at Poe’s shoulders.
 
Poe lost his grip on the back of the gunner’s seat and
tumbled hard to the deck.
 
He slid
across the wood, terrifying images of himself catapulting into the void filling
his mind’s eye—

but then the ship righted itself.

Poe rolled onto his hands and knees and saw a gray cliff
wall, passing within arm’s reach of the left side of the ship.
 
Ahead of the
Ammon
, the last of Orson Pratt’s automaton fleet turned
left and disappeared from view around the peak they were all skirting.

They hadn’t come far in the night, Poe thought.
 
The Great Salt Lake City must be just
around that bend.

“Sorry!” Roxie shouted.
 
“This
manning
business is surprisingly difficult!”

“I heard those same words from my step-father once!” Poe
yelled back, and climbed into the seat again.
 
“He was caning me at the time!”

Poe saw now that the gunner’s seat had a leather belt, and
he strapped himself in, his fingers aching and trembling and the effort making
him sweat.
 
Roxie moved the
Ammon
forward, accelerating as her confidence
increased.
 
The cliff brow to his
left dropped, and Poe began to see blue sky and brown valley floor beyond the
end of the rock.
 
He examined the
gun more closely; it was exceedingly simple.
 
There was a lever labeled
LEFT
and
RIGHT
,
a lever labeled
UP
and
DOWN
, and a bolt labeled
FIRE
.

Orson Pratt’s inventions were spectacular but his genius had
a pedantic, talking-down-to-children quality to it.
 
After all of Horace Hunley’s mysterious devices, manipulated
by unlabeled buttons or long sequences of whistled notes that were inaudible to
human hearing, Poe found it more than a little refreshing.

He rehearsed looking down the barrel, raising and lowering
and rotating his seat with the whirring and clicking of gears to take aim at
spots along the cliff wall.
 
He
wished he could take practice shots, but he needed as much surprise as he could
possibly arrange.
 
Preferably, they’d
slide up behind Pratt utterly unnoticed, either because he’d be focused on his
target on the ground or because he’d assume the
Ammon
was malfunctioning but attempting to respond to its
remote ether-wave instructions, simply lagging behind the rest of the fleet.

“Try to stay low!” he hollered to Roxie.
 
She acknowledged with a wave, then hunched
down slightly behind the ship’s wheel.

The
Ammon
rounded the
cliff and drifted through a notch between two peaks.

The view took Poe’s breath away.
 
Gigantic rock shoulders to either side could have shattered
the little air-ship with a shrug, or by shaking free the boulders that clung
precariously to their heights and dropping them right through the plank floor
and copper bottom sheathing of the
Ammon
.
 
Mountains to the east aligned perfectly
at the same moment, letting through a rush of bright yellow sunshine, and the
air-ship rode the light forward like it was sailing a river of pure honey, the
morning warmth tickling Poe’s cheek and ear and then the back of his neck as
the
Ammon
turned.
 
Below passed a saddle, thousands of
feet above sea level in elevation but below the timberline, and furred with
evergreen trees that looked black in the first light of the day.
 
Poe saw a cluster of big-horned
mountain sheep winding their way up out of the pines and onto the
shattered-rock slope at the base of the cliff to his right.

Then the saddle fell away, Roxie turned them to the right
again, and below and before the
Ammon
stretched out the Salt Lake Valley.
 
The lake itself looked like a sheet of hammered steel, great inland salt
sea that it was.
 
It covered the distant
half of the valley.
 
The nearer
side was a grayish brown shade of desert summer, fields mostly heavy with
crops, trees sparse and dusty even at their greenest.
 
The natural grasses of the Wasatch Mountains were tall and
yellow in color, and they disappeared with the fields and ditches into a
general colorless smudge, cut by roads and irrigation ditches into a great,
man-made grid.
 
Ahead, against the
eastern wall of the valley, shone the Great Salt Lake City, sparkling like
steel and china as the sunshine hit it.
 
It wasn’t all that big, Poe thought, not from the air and from this many
miles away.

ZOTTT!

A hot beam flashed past the
Ammon
and carved into the side of the nearest cliff.
 
Rock exploded out from the cliff face,
improbably bursting into flame and smoking as it fell.

“Roxie!” Poe shouted, but she was already reacting.
 
The
Ammon
leaped forward like a racehorse given its head, and yawed down,
plummeting at a sharp angle to the ground.

“Are we hit?” Poe bellowed, and yanked at the lever to swivel
his aim at Pratt’s ships, which seemed to come level and then rise above the
Ammon
, as they stayed in their plane and the
Ammon
rocketed downward.

ZOTTT!
 
The next phlogiston-consuming bolt
passed harmlessly overhead, narrowly missing the top of the mast.

“Aim high!” she yelled back, and raced straight at Pratt’s
trio of craft.

And then Poe saw the genius of her maneuver.
 
The other ships fired again, several
times, but the
Ammon
was too low for
them to hit it without changing their pitch or yaw.
 
Pratt adjusted as the
Ammon
raced forward, and one of his ships turned and began
to tilt in Poe’s direction, but he was managing three vessels, not one, and the
guns as well as the steering, so there was only so much he could do at once.

Poe took aim at the ship that was turning and tilting and
fired.

ZOTTT!

A miss, and a wave of heat emanated from the barrel of the
phlogiston gun.
 
The firing lever
stayed depressed, and though Poe banged at it with the heel of his hand, it
inched its way back into ready position at its own leisurely pace.

It might be an automatic delay designed to give the barrel
time to cool before firing again, Poe thought.
 
He started counting.

“Evasive action!” he shouted to Roxie.
 
She must have had the same thought, for
as he shouted the
Ammon
was already
banking to one side and slowing, then banking again and speeding up, the angles
irregular and the speed constantly shifting.

ZOTTT!

Another miss from one of Pratt’s craft and a field below Poe
burst into fire, dirt and rock exploding upward and leaving a crater where once
a plank bridge had crossed a broad irrigation ditch.

The firing lever of Poe’s gun
snicked
back into ready position.
 
A slow count of twenty.
 
“Give me a good shot!” he yelled.

In response, Roxie pulled up the prow of the
Ammon
and launched the ship straight forward like an
arrow, at the copper-shining underside of the nearest of the three.

It was less than ideal, Poe thought.
 
He had no idea whether Pratt was aboard
his target ship or not.
 
But it was
a clear shot, and he couldn’t let it pass.
 
He sighted carefully and depressed the firing lever.

ZOTTT!

BOOM!

The back half of the targeted ship hit burst into flame and
the vessel pitched wildly to one side.
 
Poe stared, hoping to see some sign of a single wild-haired old man falling
overboard, but Roxie was already moving evasively again and Poe saw nothing
that gave him any hope.

“That’s the
Stripling Warrior!
” Roxie shouted.

“So?”

ZOTTT!
 

The beam lanced by close enough to the
Ammon
that Poe felt its heat crackling in his false
beard.
 
Nervously, he yanked off
the beard and then the eyebrows, too, picking at the spirit gum with his
fingers and keeping one eye on the slowly-resetting firing lever of his
phlogiston gun.

“So,” she shouted again, “it’s one of the older ones.
 
Pratt will be on the
Teancum!
”

“Now you tell me!” Poe threw a wad of spirit gum and hair
overboard as the
Ammon
pitched to one
side.
 
Roxie must have strapped
herself in too, he thought.
 
Good
girl.
 
But what in hell were these
queer names?
 
“Which one is the
Teancum?
”

Roxie laughed and pointed ahead.
 
“One of those two!” she shouted.

Poe squinted; they had come out west above the valley and
were now turning back eastward and angling up again, so the morning sun shone
bright into his face.
 
He could
make out two ships, but the glare of the sun kept him from making out any
detail.

He could tell, though, that one of the two ships hung back
and hovered in place, and one circled to get around the
Ammon
, tilting to maneuver its gun into position.

“That one!” he shouted, and pointed at the further, hovering
air-ship.
 
Roxie nodded and
accelerated towards it, slipping side to side to present a difficult target to
the nearer ship as it tried to fire at them.