Faster Gun Read online

  Faster Gun

  Elizabeth Bear

  It’s hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, and a hundred times too big to be a ship. It looks like nothing anyone ever saw. And it’s crashed just outside Tombstone with something alive inside.

  Elizabeth Bear

  FASTER GUN

  Online Version

  2.

  Doc Holliday leaned his head way back, tilting his hat to shade his eyes from the glare of the November sun and said, “Well, that still looks like some Jules Verne shit to me.”

  The hulk that loomed over, curving gently outward to a stalklike prow, could have been the rust-laceworked, rust-orange hulk of any derelict ironclad. Except it was a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, and a hundred times too big to be a ship. It was too big, in fact, to be an opera hall, and that was where Doc’s imagination failed him.

  Behind him, four women and a man shifted in their saddles, leather creaking. None of them spoke. Doc figured they were just as awed as he was. More, maybe: he’d stopped here once before, when he rode into Tombstone the previous year. None of them had ever seen it.

  One of the horses whuffed, stamping baked caliche. A puff of dust must have risen from the impact. Doc could smell it, iron and salt and grit. His own mount picked its way between crumbling chunks of metal and some melted, scorched substance with the look of resin or tortoiseshell.

  One of the women said something pleased and indistinct to her companions. Doc didn’t strain too hard to overhear.

  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 between 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 charisma 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 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 sunlight off a gun barrel, or the flicker of motion as someone raised and sighted within that cham
bered darkness.

  “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 towards 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 experiences.”

  “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 companions 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 passages—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 professional—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 between 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.

  “Shhh,” he hissed—but you couldn’t shush a horse, and he was the second one to hiss for quiet, behind Missus Shutt, who was turned at the waist, wrist cocked and one bony hand on her iron like she could have it skinned as fast as any man.

  “What?” Bill asked from the outside of the group, real soft—but his voice still echoed and sloshed around the crumpled, cavernous room.

  “Company,” Doc said gently. He let the coach gun slide into his hand now; he’d seen a man die once because he waited to try to get to a rifle on his saddle until the shooting started and the horse was spooked.

  Flora ducked under the gelding’s belly and flattened herself against its saddle behind Doc. “What’d you hear?” she asked, more breath than sound.

  Doc let his lips shape the words. “Footstep.” He thought about the sound, something about the way it rustled rather than crunched. “Moccasins or barefoot. Not boots.”

  Flora frowned, but as if she was annoyed or disappointed, not as if she were scared. “Oh, I hope they didn’t go there. That’d make me sad.”

  The corners of Doc’s mouth curved up at her irritation in the face of danger. But there was an intriguing clue in her words, and—well, he’d proven his unhealthy curiosity already today. “Who were you hoping not to have come here?”

  Her eyes had been straining into the shadows beyond the shadowy bulk of the horses. She looked at Doc, now, startled. “I beg your pardon. Just a turn of phra—”

  Another rustle silenced her. Louder this time, closer. Doc let the coach gun rest beside his leg. He didn’t want to fire a scattergun over the horses that hemmed them on both sides, though he could use the big brown for cover and a shooting rest if he had
to. Once. And then it would be hooves and half-ton panic everywhere, in a crowded chamber with uncertain footing.

  Better for everyone if they could get out of this without gunfire.

  Flora must have thought so too. “Bill,” she said, low and conversational this time so it would carry. “How’s that ward line coming?”

  “Faster now,” Bill answered, over a scraping sound. Doc caught a scent of burning orrisroot. A ward line wouldn’t stop a bullet—lead just didn’t answer to magic—but it would keep a person out.

  “Hey,” Miss Lil said, forgetting to whisper—and as Doc turned his head toward her, she suddenly pointed back over his shoulder.

  He whipped round, the coach gun to his eye, up on tiptoe to get line of sight over the back of the brown mare. Trying to remember not to hold his breath, because if he held his breath, he would start coughing. And if he started coughing, there was no guarantee that he would ever stop.

  Over the iron sights of the gun, Doc glimpsed something that nearly made him drop it.

  The figure half-silhouetted against the blue glow at the back of one of the above-ground-level tunnels could have been a naked child just on the verge of puberty—slender, fine-limbed, large-headed for the delicate lines of an elongated neck. Except he—or she, or possibly even it—hung upside down by its toes in the mouth of the tunnel like one of the slick mud-green tree frogs of Doc’s Georgia boyhood. The long fat-tipped fingers on its splayed hands did nothing to disabuse him of the comparison.

  The hands—

  Its hands were empty.

  Incrementally, Doc let the coach gun drift down, aware that beside him Flora was doing the same. The harsh breaths of his companions echoed to every side, layering over one another in an atonal fugue.

  Doc pointed the shotgun in a safe position and uncocked it. He lowered the butt to the ground, letting the barrel lean against his knee. He raised his hands again, fingers spread wide like the frog-thing’s, showing them to be empty.