The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head Read online

  The Gunfighter and the Gear-head

  Cassandra Duffy

  Day Moon Press

  2011

  Other Sapphic Pixie Tales From Cassandra Duffy:

  The Last Best Tip

  Astral Liaisons: Lesbians in Space!

  Demons of Paradise

  Fabled Fang Girls

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any matter whatsoever without the written permission, except in the cases of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, locations, and events are meant to be fictitious. Any similarity between any persons living, dead, or undead is completely coincidental. The events are fictional, although you should feel free to try to re-create anything you think you’re limber enough for, especially if you have a willing partner in crime.

  Day Moon Press – Smashwords Edition

  ©2011 Cassandra Duffy

  Cover Design and Interior Artwork by Katiie Kissglosse

  Edited by Nichole Mauer

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: Short flights cut shorter.

  Chapter 2: Taciturn retrieval.

  Chapter 3: Thanks a truckload.

  Chapter 4: Unreasonable aspirations.

  Chapter 5: A spiritual education.

  Chapter 6: Aggravated mischief.

  Chapter 7: Collared and collected-on.

  Chapter 8: Cultists gone wild.

  Chapter 9: With a little help from blackmail and lies.

  Chapter 10: The Ravens have landed!

  Chapter 11: Money? Oh, right, THAT stuff.

  Chapter 12: Feverish, famished, and frustrated.

  Chapter 13: The history of Vegas chess.

  Chapter 14: Mistakes of identity.

  Chapter 15: Dust-up disrupted.

  Chapter 16: Trust in honor and a lack of options.

  Chapter 17: The squeaky wheel gets greased.

  Chapter 18: Riding out for the territories.

  Chapter 19: Uncomfortable memories and departures.

  Chapter 20: Yahweh sightings and things to come.

  Chapter 21: It’s all uphill from here.

  Chapter 22: Dreams of a melancholy past.

  Chapter 23: Homecomings are a mixed bag.

  Chapter 24: The first flight of length with a landing.

  Chapter 25: Learned domesticity and advanced military tactics.

  Chapter 26: No times like old times.

  Chapter 27: Oil!

  Chapter 28: A final betrayal before the storm.

  Chapter 29: A new old life.

  Chapter 1: Short flights cut shorter.

  “Coming up on the teeth of the line now,” Ramen’s voice buzzed through the static-riddled intercom.

  The dirigible thrummed and breathed like a living thing through the hot air being pumped constantly from the boiler into the zeppelin cylinder and beating with the thumping of turbines of the engines providing the forward thrust; both created an unimaginable din, preventing direct communication without the intercom between her and the automaton running the major systems. Along the underside, between the ribs of the armor plates, ran a walkway the entire length of the airship from the boiler in the back to the primary weapon in the front. Gieo scampered down the narrow walkway, using the handrails to keep upright as the airship swayed and jolted in its flight path.

  Tamping her leather top hat down on the four, purple braids at the four corners of her head, she lowered her green-tinted goggles over her eyes. The hat didn’t fit right, leaving her with three options as she saw it: find a new hat, fix a chinstrap, or wear her hair in the four thick braids. It was an easy decision as far as she was concerned. Sliding down the ladder into the ball-turret on the nose of the great, sturgeon-shaped airship, her riding boots hissed against the copper piping.

  “Go serpentine, Ramen,” she shouted into the intercom cup next to the base of the ladder.

  “Aye, aye, ma’am,” the automaton’s voice crackled back.

  The immense gears of the airship’s bat-like wings engaged with a squeaking, rumbling cacophony. Gieo strapped herself into the reclined seat of the ball-turret, affixing the leather belts across her chest, clipped into the metal tongs on the lapels of her tailed tuxedo jacket, holding tight against the brown, leather corset she wore beneath. As the chair lowered down into the Plexiglas turret, she hooked the rubber hose from the air-hydraulic feed into the leather and chain choker she wore, pumping fresh air up around her head to cool her and aid in breathing.

  With the wings flapping in machinated patterns, the great airship took on a wide swing to its flight, shooting back and forth in as athletic of zigzags as a fifty-meter long blimp could manage. Gieo spun the handles on the weapon system’s hydraulic feeds, sending steam power into the four guns positioned in a box around her. The desert floor, thousands of feet below, rolled back and forth beneath her, held at bay only by the glass ball she sat in.

  “Leveling the outcropping at the precise center of our undulations,” Ramen’s voice crackled through the com speaker in the ball-turret.

  “Have the smoke-screen loaded and ready.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am.”

  “Disengaging now.” Gieo pulled the pins on the ball-turret’s gyroscope arm. The entire turret, with her inside, dropped down off the bottom of the armored airship, dangling by a ten meter, articulated metal arm and a dozen hydraulic tubes and hoses. She slipped her feet into the leather straps of the turret and took control of the swaying arm. All around her the hisses of steam and clanking of gears let her know the gyroscopes were functioning as intended.

  Puffs of white smoke from the ground erupted out of an underbrush canopy nestled between the furthest most rocks of the outcropping. Shells whistled up toward the zeppelin, followed by explosions, and the clanking of flack bouncing off the airship’s armor.

  Gieo leveled the gyroscopes to steady her gun platform even as the airship swayed in evasive maneuvers. She brought the targeting reticule of a large, copper hoop with four smaller hoops arranged in the center to indicate the four guns, on the outcropping, and pushed the two trigger handles forward.

  “I see your teeth,” she growled, “now take a look at mine!”

  The four guns around her erupted in steam-powered blasts, sending shells of explosive material down onto the antiaircraft battery four at a time. The shells exploded across the rocky surface in showers of white, magnesium fire. She saw a few of the scattering Slark trying to escape the kill zone, and she zeroed in on them to put the fire right across their path. She got some, more than some, several even, before a direct hit caught her dirigible on the port side, knocking free one of the wings with a shriek of metal and a resounding thump.

  “Son-of-a…” Gieo kicked free the emergency hold on the main spring of the arm’s gyroscope, pulling the entire swinging arm of the ball-turret back into the body of the blimp. The swaying of the ship was replaced by a long, descending spiral, as the wounded blimp fluttered toward the ground with a torn cylinder and only one functional wing. Gieo unhooked herself from the ball-turret and scrambled back up the ladder into the main body of the ship. “Launch the smoke-screen,” she shouted into the intercom.

  “On the way,” Ramen replied.

  Four quick pops were followed by four loud explosions as the outer plates on the boilers blew off and the water content dumped onto the stoking fires. White steam and smoke poured from the dirigible, obscuring even the vaguest outline of the ship as it began its slow, spiraling descent toward the ground. Gieo scrambled back down the walkway to the radio room, cranked the hand-wheel to extend the antenna, and tapped out the distress code for a languishing a
ircraft.

  “This is Dirigible Purple Six, going down,” Gieo shouted into the mouthpiece. “Do you copy, air-defense network?”

  After a few minutes of trying and retrying the distress call, an old, familiar voice crackled back over the shortwave. “This is air-defense Tempe-2,” the dithering old man said. “There hasn’t been anything flying in years. My radio was buried under laundry.”

  “There has too,” Gieo protested. “We went through this not six months ago.”

  A long stretch of radio silence followed.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t years ago?” Tempe-2 asked.

  “Positive!” Gieo shrieked.

  “Oh, well, I guess if you’re positive,” the old man said. “What’s your situation and location?”

  “Situation is stable, but crashing,” Gieo said, “and location is sector 7-G.”

  “That’s the Tombstone Three-Three-O,” Tempe-2 said. “I’ll see if I can get someone over there on the horn for a retrieval team, but don’t expect much luxury. Those Tombstoners are hardscrabble from tip to toe.”

  “Whatever, it beats walking home,” Gieo said. “Dirigible Purple 6, over and out.”

  This was her sixth crash in the last three years and the story was always the same. Tempe-2 was the only air defense network radioman left in the world as far as she knew, and he was half-gone most of the time. She suspected he was a methanol drinker, peyote user, or ether huffer. Every time she got shot down, it was like the first time for him. She was glad for his existence, as he always managed to get someone out from one of the free cities to pick her up, but he never remembered having done it.

  “We’re at 750 feet,” Ramen’s voice came through the com.

  “Get back to the shop,” Gieo replied. “Hopefully I’ll see you in a couple days.”

  She heard her automaton’s escape tube fire and the telltale thumping of his helicopter blades as he flitted away, too small and well below the notice of the antiaircraft batteries. She climbed up the ladder into the spider room. The spherical room, dead center in the zeppelin cylinder, composed of a network of rubber tubing with a harness in the middle. She shimmied into the harness, hooked herself in, including the neck brace, and waited for the ship to hit the desert floor.

  Crashing was becoming routine. She was more curious about who she was going to meet from Tombstone than she was afraid of the impending impact. She’d never met anyone from the Tombstone hunting camp, although their reputation for being hardcore, psycho Slark-killers was well-traveled.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by four concussive explosions slamming into the underside of the airship—shoulder-fired rockets. One must have snuck through a chink in the ship’s defenses as the dirigible’s descent took a violent shove from soft flutter into chaotic tumble.

  “Oh, you guys are dickheads,” Gieo growled. She reached into her pocket, thrust the mouth guard over her teeth, and braced herself for impact. The ship hit with an explosive crash as the blimp portion ruptured. The boiler launched itself away from the wreckage, and the pilot whipped around inside the spider room like whirling dervish.

  Chapter 2: Taciturn retrieval.

  When Los Angeles fell, Fiona was twenty-one years old. She even still had a Lakers bumper sticker on the back of her car. The modified muscle car, more precisely two different American muscle cars melded together with a repurposed engine from a Slark fighter, cut a fiery streak across the Cochise badlands at over 100 mph. The car was a straight-line bullet of raw power with a spiked cattle-catcher on the front and a trail of fire and smoke behind. Fiona, who had lost her driver’s license a full year before the Slark invaded, kept as trophies a few of her old speeding tickets on the dashboard to fade in the desert sun. Anyone trying to take away her right to drive now would have to make their case to the business end of her Colt Anaconda .44 Magnum.

  Some insane, dirt-worshiper from the ruins of Tempe claimed to see an aircraft and called it in to the Tombstone defense grid. At least, that’s what Zeke had radioed her to say. She was the closest, and he wanted to know for sure; not that he’d offered anything in return for her time or fuel.

  It was a fool’s errand. Nothing flew but birds, bugs, and bats. For awhile, after the Great Purge, both sides tried to regain the sky. Nothing stayed airborne for long as the antiaircraft guns far out-paced low-tech aircraft. Fiona suspected she wouldn’t find anything, but, nearing the coordinate estimates radioed in, she spotted a smoke spire on the horizon. If there was an airship, the Slark had long since shot it down. It served the idiot right, whoever they were, but, if Fiona hurried, she might still catch the Slark recon team in their work and take a few heads.

  The alleged aircraft, which looked to be nothing more than twisted metal, smashed wood, and billowing cloth, had crashed relatively close to the old 10 highway. The Slark recon team, four of the ugly lizards in all, was attempting to set up a perimeter around the crash site, partially on the patchy highway, covering their movements with shoulder-fired rocket tubes. Fiona yanked the emergency brake and spun the wheel to the right, sending the roaring beast of her car into a whirl. The resulting cloud of dust and exhaust smoke blew through the crash site, obscuring the direction she was coming from. Correcting her course, aided by the spinning compass on the dashboard, she gunned the engine, released the brake, and roared forward through the opaque dust cloud. Two loud clangs followed by meaty squish noises let her know her cattle-catcher had collected two of the Slark. She slammed on the brakes and came to a stop. As the cloud passed her by, she stepped from the car, jerked her Colt Anaconda from its hip holster, and scanned the area for the remaining two. Through the slowly clearing haze, she spotted them fleeing in their weird, sidling run. With her gun arm fully extended, she sighted in the first, fired, swung over to the other, sighted again, and fired. Both Slark hit the ground in quick succession with gaping bullet holes in their backs. Fiona twirled the massive, chrome-plated revolver a couple times before letting it settle back into the holster slung low on her slender hips.

  A lanky goddess, a hair under six-feet tall, she moved with the practiced grace of a career predator on dusty cowboy boots. Scarce times had carved every drop of fat from her body, leaving only lean muscle on a willowy frame. She further accentuated the hard-edged, straight lines of her body with tan, skin-tight leather pants and a tight, denim jacket two sizes too small for her long torso, leaving ample space to easily get at the bandolier belt for her pistol. A wide-brimmed, russet cowboy hat kept the desert sun off her short-cropped red hair, while wrap around Oakley sunglasses shielded her blue eyes. Her heavily tanned skin, formerly from tanning beds, was now a natural product of her time spent in the desert.

  “You may as well come out,” Fiona said to the smashed kindling of the crash site.

  A curious leather top hat, pulled tight over four purple braids and brass goggles, poked out of the wreckage. “How did you know I wasn’t another one of them?” the pilot peeped.

  “You don’t smell like fish barf,” Fiona replied. She slid the Wakizashi, a much shorter katana, from its wooden scabbard along her back, and set to the task of cleaving the heads from the bodies, starting with the mangled, four-armed, two-legged, five-foot tall lizard men tangled in the spiked framework on the front of her car.

  “Thank you, I try to practice good hygiene.” The pilot extracted herself from the remains of her airship, dusting off her tailed tuxedo jacket and tight riding britches.

  “I didn’t say you smelled good,” Fiona corrected her. “I said you didn’t smell like fish barf.” She punctuated the sentence with two quick slashes of the sword, decapitating the impaled bodies in twin sprays of green blood. It was a lucky hit, both heads were already impaled on spikes, and the severed bodies came away easily.

  “My name is Gieo,” she said. The pilot’s clothing might have looked like a traditional English horseback riding outfit if not for all the buckles, leather straps, and brass gizmos adorning it. She trundled out of the scattered remains of her ship, han
d extended, half-blind with her dusty, pilot goggles still over her eyes. She blundered past the two dead Slark on her way toward Fiona.

  “Yo?” Fiona asked, raising a curious eyebrow at the small, strange pilot.

  “Gieo,” she repeated, slower this time. “There’s a ‘G’ on the front. It’s Korean—I’m Korean, from Orange County.” When Fiona didn’t shake the offered hand, Gieo pulled it back and used it to pull the goggles onto their resting place along the front of her leather top hat. “So, how long until the rescue crew gets here to help me salvage my airship?”