Sky Pirates of the Rio Grande - Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Eden woke up with Zenobia shaking her and a terrible stiffness in her arms and legs.  She sat up and discovered the stiffness was just as bad in her neck.  The sun was just starting to burn the horizon and the sky was paling from gray to pink in the east.  The train was slowing down and she could smell the sea.

"We are close, I think," Zenobia said.

"Yes, yes we are."  Eden rubbed her neck, faintly surprised that her companion was still here.  She pushed herself up and looked ahead, squinting.  "That must be the naval shipyard there, I can see the masts."  She calculated and swung her gaze thirty degrees southward, saw the tall assemblages of scaffolding and the half-hidden shapes of airships against the dawn sky.  "And there's the old air-harbor."

Zenobia stood, keeping her balance easily despite the rocking of the train.  The wind whipped her hair back and pressed her shift against the contours of her magnificent body.  "There are men ahead.  We have to get off this now."

Eden nodded.  "All right, yes.  Let's go."  She was horribly hungry and cursed herself for not thinking to bring food.  She had simply let her anger propel her into this course without adequate planning.  Now she was exhausted and hungry with only more running and hiding ahead.  For just a moment she considered telling Zenobia to just go and giving up.  Then she pictured Gray's disparaging smirk and she ground her teeth together and got up.

They climbed down the ladder and crouched between the cars, Eden watching the ground to judge speed.  Around them was a trainyard, with tracks crisscrossing and other trains standing silent or sliding slowly past.

"Now, we go now!"  Zenobia said, and jumped.

"Wait!  It's still too fast--"  Eden fumed, fretted, and jumped after her.  She hit the ground and the speed clipped her legs from under her, flipped her over and slammed her painfully down on the gravel.  She bit her lip and tasted blood, groaned.

"What the hell?"  The voice was surprised and very male.  Eden looked up and saw a heavily bearded man with thick, corded arms looking down at her.  She tried to get up and the man grabbed her arm and hauled her up none too gently.  "We gots us a Maeve flippin' the hot shot, and we don't have to that in this yard!"  He seemed unaccountably angry.

"Well I--"  Eden tried to think of something to say, but he wasn't even listening.

"Blame girl, I'll hold to your back and trot you out the--"  And that was all he got out.  Zenobia hooked her arm around his neck from behind and hoisted him clear off his feet, squeezing until his eyes bulged out and his face turned purple.  He let go of Eden and clawed at the arm crushing his neck, legs kicking helplessly until he went limp.

Zenobia threw him down contemptuously and rolled him aside with her foot.  "Mouse, you don't know the first damn thing do you?"

"Er--" Eden tried not to stare at the still form.  "Is he--"

"No, he's not.  But I may kill you if you don't stop gawking."  She grabbed Eden by the lapels of her dress and hauled her forward.  "Come, they'll find him soon enough and then we'll have a wasp nest stirred up."

They hurried across the trainyard as dawn brightened the sky.  Eden thought the quality of light was wrong and looked West, saw clouds gathered there and realized rain was coming.  She tried to calculate time and gave up -- it was impossible to accurately estimate the distance of the clouds without another point of reference.

The two of the jogged between motionless train cars, ducked down to avoid people when they saw them, and finally crossed the yard to reach the decrepit palisade that walled off the airship yards.  Built during the war, it was intended to serve as a line of defense, made out of upright logs lashed together like a frontier fort.  Now time and neglect left it leaning and cracked, gaps left where some logs had fallen completely, salt air curing the wood a dull grey.

Zenobia stopped and sniffed the air, eyed the barrier suspiciously.  "I smell men here.  There are guards."

Eden winced.  "How many?"

"I can't smell that, I just know there are men in there."  She drew her stolen pistol, checked the caps and nodded.  "If shooting starts, stay down."

"Are you good with a gun?" Eden asked.

"Mmm.  Yes, but I have only five shots."  Zenobia moved to a gap in the wall and looked through.

"Six."

"Mmm?"

"You have six shots," Eden said.

"No, one of these is not loaded.  You leave the one under the hammer empty so it cannot go off on an accident."  She slipped through the gap and looked back.  "Are you coming with me?"

Eden nodded and started to climb through the gap.  She scraped along the water-cracked log and through into the grassy earth of the old Confederate Air-Harbor.

---

Inside the wall it was a haunted place.  The ground was thick with tall grass and weeds, the verdure overgrowing the scattered piles of scrap wood and rusted iron.  Here a row of old cannon sat thrust up from the grass, covered with clouds of yellow flowers.  Here an anchor sprouted rusting from a thornbush.

All around them rose the decaying skeletons of the docks, iron and wood gantries rising on all sides, some of them leaning, some long-collapsed into piles of rusted metal and flinders of gray wood.  Only a few still held any kind of shape, and even these were thick with vines.  The insects in the grass stirred as the sun rose, and cicadas began their daily song as fat bees meandered from flower to flower.

Zenobia looked at the wreckage of fallen ships beside their collapsed docks, the huge armored gas envelopes slumped into piles of copper sheeting and green rivets, the gondolas like sailing ships beached far from the sea, their hulls split open and rotting.  She shook her head.  "Such a place.  You think we will find a ship here that still flies?"

"There are six still up, three that are serviceable."  She checked the outlines of the ships against her perfect memory of their schematics, pointed.  "We want that one."

She grabbed up her skirts and threaded her way through the tall grass, stepping carefully to avoid the lumps of metal buried under the groundcover.  Zenobia followed her, surefooted, paying not attention to the thorns or sharp edges beneath her bare feet.

"What is that one?" she said.

"It's the Jackson," Eden said.  "A scout ship.  They had it in service until just recently as a survey ship, but now it's going to be scrapped."  She climbed carefully over a massive, rusted gear.  "It's an obsolete ship, but it will still fly."

"And they just . . . leave all this to rot away?"  Zenobia gestured around them at the wreckage.

Eden nodded, ducking under a fallen spar, almost stepping into a spiderweb.  The black and yellow inhabitant scuttled away when Zenobia absently ripped the web aside to follow her.

"This is a junk-yard," Eden said.  "All these ships were obsolete before the war was over.  The Confederate Air Corps was never able to match the Union technologically.  They were still using coal and hanging gondolas with plain wood or copper plating.  All the new ships are enclosed, with the ship built inside the envelope and steel armor.  Confederate ships sailed with muzzle-loading cannon, not modern artillery pieces.  They can't even use the ships here for parts, so they just let them fall to pieces.  Next year all of this is going to be razed for a new shipyard, I've seen the proposals."  She squeaked as Zenobia grabbed her and pulled her back.

"Shhhhhh," the tiger woman said.  "I hear someone up there." She gestured ahead.  "I hear voices."

Eden listened but didn't hear anything, just distant gulls over the shore.  She trusted that Zenobia could hear much better than she could, and didn't waste time with pointless questions.  "We have to get to that gantry, there," she spoke softly and pointed.

"They are that way I think," Zenobia said.  She held the gun ready and made to move forward.

Eden caught her arm.  "No shooting!  The sound will carry and bring them all after us."

"Mmm.  You're right mouse."  Zenobia holstered the pistol and hunted around in the grass.  She came up with a good three-foot length of rusted pipe, hefted it and grinned.  "This will do."

They crept forward carefully, Eden staying back from her companion, as she could not move anywhere nearly as stealthily as Zenobia.  Her skirts swished and snagged on the grasses, and she couldn't keep from stumbling in the knee-high vegetation and uneven footing.

Just ahead they could see the cargo lift for the dock - a long track and pulley system that used counterweights to hoist cargo up to the top for loading on board the ships.  A hulk of a wrecked ship lay ahead of them, blocking the view of the bottom, and now even Eden could hear the voices just ahead.  Whoever was there, they were right at the base of the gantry.

Zenobia crept around and peered out past the wreck.  Eden watched as her muscles began to tense and twitch and her movements became deliberate and slow.  She felt the hairs on her neck stand out as she recognized that the other woman was stalking like a tigress.

Heart thumping, she waded through the grass until she could peek around the other side of the intervening wreckage and see what was happening.  She tried to hold her breath, as her panting seemed terribly loud in her ears.

Just beside the wide platform of the lift was a storage shed where supplies were kept for the ships.  It was about the size of a small train car and had obviously been broken into.  Six men in uniforms were busy carrying out crates of this and that and stacking them on the lift, where they were in the process of breaking them open and dumping what they wanted into a pair of wheelbarrows.  The men had their heavy wool jackets off and their sleeves rolled up.  Several of them wore pistols on their belts.

They were thieves then, out here stealing the stored goods where no one would see them, throwing them into wheelbarrows and carting them off.  They would likely panic if they were startled, and they might shoot.  She turned back to Zenobia and she was gone, just not there at all.  Eden half-panicked and tried to spot her without giving herself away.

There she was.  Eden caught the gleam of her tawny skin as she crawled through the high grass almost on her belly -- low and stealthy, her movements sinuous and deliberate.  Eden winced and chewed on her thumbnail.  How to call her back?  How could she--

"Hey!"  One of the men shouted suddenly.  "Who's that?"  Eden looked up and saw that three of them were looking right at her.  The others turned, putting down their stolen goods and reaching for prybars and hammers.  She ducked hastily, but it was too late.

"Hey!"  Came the shout, closer now.  "Hey, you can't be here!"  Footsteps swishing through the grass.  Eden gritted her teeth and stood up, waved a bit.

"Um, hello there!  So sorry," she fixed a grin on her face.

They stared at her, and she realized she must look rather frightful - dirty clothes, dirt-smeared face and hair like a nest for rodents.  She resisted the nonsensical urge to fuss at it.

"And who the blazes are you?" the nearest one said, pointing a prybar at her menacingly.  "You're not supposed to be--"

Zenobia rushed on them from out of the grass like a bronze bolt, almost faster than Eden's eye could follow.  She didn't roar or scream, just made a kind of low snarling as she erupted from cover and pounced on them.  The pipe whistled murderously as she struck with it.  One of them went down with blood gushing from his nose, the other dropped like a ragdoll after she slammed the bar into the back of his head.

The third one had time to react, turned with his prybar held out, but Zenobia just ripped it out of his hands and smashed it into his temple, knocking him clear off his feet with the force of it.

It all happened so fast, so suddenly, that Eden actually screamed in surprise.  The other three men gaped, and then two of them grabbed for their pistols and started shouting.  Zenobia threw her length of pipe and spun through the air like a cart-spoke and thudded into the third man, who just stared, open-mouthed until he was knocked flat.

Shots rang and cracked and Eden dropped, rolled down the pile of rubble and fell facefirst in the grass.  She heard more shots, a scream of pain, and then it was quiet.  She struggled up to her feet, the rough grass scraping her hands.  A bee zoomed past her head so close she could see its wings and she flinched, flinched again when Zenobia bounded over the wreck and landed beside her.  There was blood on her face and she was smiling, two more gunbelts looped over her arm.

"All right," she said.  "We go quickly, yes?"

"Err.  Yes, yes we have to go quickly."  Eden struggled to collect herself as she tried to get up.  Zenobia rolled her hot brass eyes and yanked her to her feet rather abruptly.

"Come on," she said.  "Someone heard the shots, I am certain."

Eden nodded and followed her to the cargo lift.  One of the men lay dead on it, a huge red stain spreading across the front of his shirt.  Eden turned away, feeling a bit sick.

Zenobia hooked her foot under the body and rolled it off the platform.  "How does this work?" she said.

"Th-the body?"

Zenobia shook her.  "No, the platform!  All this--" she gestured at the supplies piled haphazardly around them.  "We will need, so we take it.  How do I make it go up?"

"Oh," Eden pointed to the levers nearby on the base of the gantry.  "The left one releases it, the right one is the brake to control the speed.  But we don't have anyone to work it--"

Zenobia dropped the gunbelts, jumped off the platform and jogged over to the levers.  She grabbed the right one.  "This is the brake, yes?"

"Yes, but--"

Zenobia shoved the brake lever all the way up, and then grabbed the release and yanked it loose.  Eden screamed as the platform lurched and then began to climb, gaining speed alarmingly fast.

She lost sight of Zenobia, and then saw her fingers catch the edge of the rising lift.  She grunted as she pulled herself over the side and crouched there, grinning.  "We go up fast now!"

Continued in Chapter 6...

---