Free Peacemaker by Lindsay Buroker Page A

honest
working folk these men have robbed, but I didn’t see any heads with
bounties on them when I was skirmishing on the ship. We’ll just let
the Mounties know where to find these men. Maybe they can arrest
the pirates before they fix their ship.”
    Though the prisoner was busy gasping for
air, he still managed to pale at this statement. Kali chewed on her
lip. If the Mounties took care of the pirates, she wasn’t going to
have much of a claim on the ship.
    “ Get some rope out of my
pack, will you?” Cedar asked. “We don’t want this one scurrying
back to warn the others.”
    Kali retrieved the rope, but she was mulling
over alternatives to relying on the Mounties. If she and Cedar took
care of the pirates, they’d be able to legally claim the ship for
themselves. That wasn’t foremost on his mind though. She’d have to
talk him around to her way of thinking. “What if they get their
ship fixed before the Mounties come?”
    “ That’d be a shame, but
catching that murderer is my priority.” Cedar held out his hand for
the rope.

    “ Maybe we could take care
of both somehow.”
    “ How would we get in there
to incapacitate everyone without being noticed? There are close to
twenty men over there.” Cedar waved toward the ship. “At night,
when everyone’s sleeping, we might be able to get the jump on them,
but that’s hours off, and I want to get back to Dawson before this
Sparwood strikes again.”
    “ We got one out.” Kali
pointed to the man as Cedar bent to tie him. “Maybe it wouldn’t be
so impossible to subdue the others.”
    “ Unless you know someway
to knock them all out at once, I don’t see how it could be done
without a passel of unneeded danger for ourselves.”
    Kali could think of chemicals that could
make that happen, but she didn’t have anything like that. They
could start a fire and drive them out of the area, but burning the
airship wasn’t what she had in mind. Ideally, she’d take it without
doing any more damage to it than was already there. “No,” she
admitted.
    “ Best to go back to
Dawson,” Cedar said, “catch this murderer, and let the Mounties
deal with the pirates.”
    “ They could be gone by the
time the Mounties get here,” Kali said again, though she sensed she
needed to come up with a stronger argument to sway him. “Think of
all the people they might kill, going after folks along the
river.”
    Cedar had finished tying the pirate to a
tree and had torn the man’s shirt to create a gag to keep him
silent. He propped his hands on his waist and eyed Kali. “What’re
you angling for exactly?”
    “ Me?” Kali shrugged.
“Nothing.”
    “ Really.”
    Kali shifted from foot to
foot and avoided his knowing gaze for a long moment before saying,
“All right, I was thinking that if the pirates were all captured or
arrested or otherwise incapacitated, we could relieve them of the airship. That
would destroy their ability to thieve from the air.” Yes, make it
noble, Kali, she told herself. Make it about helping the miners.
She stifled a snort of derision for herself.
    “ You want to steal their
ship?” Cedar asked.
    “ If they stole it first,
then it’d hardly be called stealing, right? We’d just be liberating
it for a nobler purpose.”
    “ Such as?”
    “ Taking us around the
world. Or hunting slimy villains from the sky. It’d be easy to keep
up with Cudgel if we had our own transportation, something that can
go right over mountains and inaccessible terrain. And I wouldn’t
have to booby trap all of my working and sleeping areas to
tarnation and back because I’m so paranoid that someone’ll sneak up
on me and try to tote me off to Soapy Smith or the Scar of Skagway.
Sure, the ship would need a lot of modifications, and it’d likely
be fall before we could take off, but we could get out of Dawson
this year. It’d be—” she clenched a fist, almost tasting the
triumph, “—heavenly.”
    Cedar, eyebrows raised, seemed bemused by
her