Teancum (5 page)

Annie rose up to shoot again with her rifle.

“Dot dow!” Absalom shouted, and dragged her down.

Bang!
 
Her shot whipped away in the artificial
cavern and then the Strider lurched under the low entrance—

Jackson leaped out of the gun platform and threw herself to
the bottom of the carriage—

CRUNCH!
—

and the Strider didn’t quite get low enough.
 
The carriage crashed into the top of the
doors, and smashed Absalom’s shoulder.

“Aaaagh!” he cried out.

CHANG!

Master Sergeant Jackson’s gunning platform disappeared,
ripped away by the plascrete.

The Strider lumbered up the large concourse towards the main
chamber of the Tabernacle.
 
Absalom
threw himself against the back wall of the carriage between Annie, raising her
rifle high, and Master Sergeant Jackson, now drawing and cocking her sidearm.

“Ortiz, hijo de puta que eres, me destruyiste todo!”

Ortiz only grunted in reply, intent on the twin levers with
spring-actions grips that controlled the Strider’s legs.
 
Steam and foul black smoke jetted in
tight tendrils from cracks where Jackson’s guns had been torn away.
 
Absalom smelled petroleum, and something
burning.
 
The carriage walls felt
hot to the touch, and he heard a faint strained whining from the machinery.

Clocksprung horses burst into the concourse behind and below
the Strider, and Absalom and the two ladies traded shots with them.
 
With the joggety-thump motion of the
big Mexican machine, Absalom wasn’t at all surprised that his shots missed.

“Hold on!” Ortiz shouted in English, and Absalom took the
cue.
 
Not having a railing in front
of him, or anything else to grab onto, he wrapped one arm around each of the
women, and they in turn anchored themselves to the Strider.

Ka-chunk!

The Strider took a particularly long step—

the ground fell away beneath it—

the cavalrymen reigned in their machine-beasts, stopping at
a crumpled banister overlooking a ten-foot drop—

the Strider sailed through the air, and involuntarily
Absalom began to scream, the ladies screaming with him—

“Aaaaaaagh!”—

CRASH!!!

The Strider hit the ground in an explosion of brass, steel,
wood and stuffing.
 
The machine
staggered as Ortiz lost his grip on one of the levers and the corresponding leg
went limp.
 
Then Ortiz regained
control, and the Strider righted itself, racing down into the center of the
well of the Tabernacle, claws chewing their way through the Tabernacle’s
seating like a thresher through ripe grain.

The Strider pulled away from the men of the Third Virginia
Cavalry, but now it was at a lower elevation, and everyone sitting in the
carriage was exposed.
 
The men on
the metal horses raised pistols and rifles and began to fire.

Absalom ducked between the two women.
 
Improbably, his mind began to wander,
considering which of the two he found more attractive, and just as he was
imagining them both on a picnic blanket upon a sheep-cropped green sward beside
a sluggish river in the May warmth, cutting together into a savory mince
pie—

bang!

Ortiz slumped forward at the controls.
 
Both levers pushed forward under the
weight of the man’s body and the Strider stumbled and fell, crashing to its
knees.
 
The three passengers
rattled around like balls in a roulette wheel, but none of them rolled out.

“Take the controls!” Jackson shouted.

Annie ignored her, and both women poured lead out of their
weapons up at the cavalrymen, who now streamed around the Tabernacle’s seating
and into separate stairway aisles, rushing for the downed Strider.

Absalom grabbed Ortiz and dragged him out of the way,
certain that at any second a bullet would take him in the back.
 
Each moment seemed surreal to him.
 
Nothing at Harrow, at Cambridge or in
his Foreign Office training had ever prepared him to kill men, handle dead
bodies, or operate heavy machinery.
 
The only thing distinguishing the last twenty-four hours from a
nightmare was the fact that Absalom really
was
doing all these things, as well as being shot at, stabbed, punched,
chased, and slammed into plascrete walls.

With two very attractive women at his side.

Absalom rolled Ortiz’s corpse out of the way, shoved his
long pistol into his waistband and squeezed into the pilot’s seat.

He grabbed the two levers.
 
Experimentally, he moved the right one forward, and the
carriage shuddered as the battered Strider shifted its right leg forward.
 
Absalom squeezed the spring-triggered
handgrip and the Strider’s chicken-claw clenched, gouging up plascrete and
squeezing three seats into sawdust and metal shavings.

Bang!
 
Bang!

“Hurry!” Annie shouted in Absalom’s ear.

Absalom played with the levers some more, feeling intensely
the sweat under his arms and on the back of his neck.
 
He could move the legs forward and back, side to side, but
the Strider stayed kneeling, lurching from one side to another with loud
metallic grating sounds like a man having an epileptic seizure.
 
He needed to be able to flex the knees.
 
He needed another control…

He looked down, and found it.
 
Two pedals, cupped to grip the pilot’s toes nicely, between
the two levers.
 
He stuck his feet
into them—

lead sliced the air to ribbons around his head—

“Ahorita!” shouted Master Sergeant Jackson—

rat-a-tat-tat-a-tat-tat
galloped the clocksprung horses—

Absalom pulled the pedals back, strained at the levers, and
made the Strider stand up.
 
The
carriage automatically leveled out with the motion, staying upright rather than
tipping and dislodging its riders.
 
It must be weighted, he thought, to automatically adjust to changes in
gradient.
 
Absalom could hear the
metal horses, and didn’t risk a look back.
 
Toes and elbows and hands operating in as close a harmony as
he could manage, he started jogging forward.

“Yee ha!” whooped Annie, and crouched down in the carriage
to reload.

“Más rápido!”

Absalom knew enough Spanish to realize that meant
faster
.
 
He
went as
más rápido
as he dared,
much faster than he would have thought prudent.
 
He launched the Strider’s legs out in front of him like
missiles, clutching clawsful of plascrete and floor and dragging the vehicle
forward as if by the strength of his own arms.

He hit the floor at the bottom of the Tabernacle, lurched in
two steps across it and then bent the Strider’s knee sharply to get up on top
of the Tabernacle’s stage.
 
The
enormous wooden podium exploded into sawdust as the Strider’s claw punched
through it.

“They’re still coming!” Annie shouted, and fired over the
side.

Bang!
 
Bang!

Absalom risked a quick glance back and saw that she was
right.
 
The cavalrymen weren’t
gaining on him anymore, but he wasn’t leaving them behind, either.
 
Their horses coursed around the
wreckage he was making of the Tabernacle like a pack of wolves running down a
moose.
 
He turned back around and
worked his arms faster.

Ka-RANG!

He slammed the shoulder of the Strider into one of the
enormous Franklin Poles lighting the dais.
 
It flew backward, uprooted like a tree in a hurricane and
hurled into the bottom rows of the Tabernacle’s seating.
 
As the Franklin Pole detached from the stage,
there was a bright blue flash of light—

FITZZ!

all the light in the bottom half of the Tabernacle
died—

and where the tossed Franklin Pole slammed into a row of
seats, smoke wisped into the air.

Egad, Absalom thought.
 
Now you’ve lit their Tabernacle on fire.

Distracted by this realization, Absalom almost missed the
end of the stage in the sudden darkness, but he just managed to plant his claw
right on the lip of the platform and jump.
 
He took the space between the stage and the slope on the
other side in a single bound, smashing through seats and railings and very
nearly losing his grip on the edge of the plascrete well.
 
The horses, because they had to turn
and find stairways in the gloom, fell behind twenty feet.

Absalom fixed his eye on a doorway halfway up the
Tabernacle, a well of darkness in the artificial gloaming.
 
“I’m headigg for that exit!” he
shouted, barely hearing his own voice over the whine of the machine and the
splintering sounds of the chairs he trampled.
 
“Do you have explosives od the Strider?”

“Jes, I have un poco de dynamite!”

“Get it ready dow!” he shouted.
 

He concentrated, sprinting with his arms.
 
The levers must operate the legs by
intermediaries of gears, he knew, but it was still an effort, and one his arms
weren’t used to.
 
They ached.
 

Shots from behind the Strider exploded in front of it,
spoiling the nice, ordered rows of seats even before the Strider plowed into
them and crushed them beyond recognition.
 
At least the horsemen were shooting up now, which made it virtually
impossible for them to hit anyone in the Strider’s gravity-perpendicular
carriage.

“Light the dydamite!” Absalom shouted to the two women.
 

Fitzzzzz
.

“What are you doing, Absalom?” Annie Webb called, a note of
surprise in her voice.

“Brace yourselves for a bit of a tumble,” Absalom called
back.
 
“Id three… two… wud…”

He jerked both levers and both pedals back and deliberately
tripped the Strider.

As he hoped it would, the carriage automatically rolled back
as the Strider rolled forward, staying parallel to the plane of the earth, so
when it hit the plascrete it hit it flat, like a sled—

plowed into the doors Absalom had aimed for—

POW!
—

knocking them open, sliding through in a wake of
sparks—

and grinding to a halt on the other side, with the big legs
of the Strider still choking the doorway and partly blocking it shut.
 
Partly, but not entirely.

“Throw the dydamite!” Absalom shouted, and leaped from the
carriage.
 
His legs felt like jelly
and his arms felt like sacks of flour.
 
He pressed forward by sheer will, drawing the pistol from his pants and
turning to watch for any clocksprung-mounted soldiers that might make it
through the obstruction he’d just thrown in their way.

Richard Burton couldn’t have done it better, he thought
smugly.

Master Sergeant Jackson threw the dynamite into the doors,
then grabbed several things out of the Strider that looked like rifles.
 
She and Annie came scrambling over the
top of the carriage, following Absalom.

Rat-a-tat-tat-a-tat-tat
,
horses clattered to the doors.

“In there, men!” one of the soldiers shouted.

KABOOM!!!

*
  
*
  
*

Poe blew his whistle and it made no sound at all.

Tam cringed back away from the man as he huffed and puffed
into the little sliver of metal, ready to pop his knife out if the whistle
produced anything dangerous, like, say, carnivorous beetles, or jets of fire,
or flying poisonous serpents to make even St. Patrick cry himself to sleep.

But Poe screwed up his face in concentration and wheezed in
and out and nothing happened.
 
Not
even a sound, much less anything that would actually knock down the door or
kill Pinkertons or get them out of the locked room.

“If I tell you I’m disappointed,” he grumbled, “will it hurt
your feelings?”

“Obviously the whistle is ultrasonic,” Burton snapped.
 
The others all nodded their heads and
Poe kept contorting his face around the whistle.

“Does
ultrasonic
mean
broken
?” Tam persisted.
 
“Here, I’ll show you how to fookin’
whistle!”
 
He stuck two fingers in
his mouth and blew—

hyoooooo, whup!

CRASH!

The racket came from the other side of the door, and Tam
yanked his fingers from his mouth.
 
Careful, me boy, don’t bite your own hand.

“What in Brigit’s knickers was that?”

“Apparently, your whistle just killed our guards,” Burton
said dryly.
 
“Go on, whistle some
more.
 
This time, why don’t you cut
out all the intervening steps and just sink Pratt’s air-ships?”

“Ha ha,” Tam said, and got ready to spring out his knife.

Poe coughed long and hard.
 
The gob of blood and mucus he spit on the floor was the size
of a baby’s head, and Tam retched at the sight and smell of it.
 
Clearing out his lungs seemed to have a
salutary effect on Poe, though—the man straightened up, and looked better
than he had since they’d been thrown into the cell together.