Free Teancum by D. J. Butler Page B

yelling.   “Hold him,” Tam muttered to Burton, and
shoved Poe entirely onto the Englishman before getting a reply.   As much as anything else, Tam wanted a
breath of cold air that didn’t smell of plascrete and bodily fluids.   He shoved his head around the corner
into the cool light recklessly, though he made sure to poke out the Smith &
Wesson Model 1 at the same time.
    He saw the top of the mooring tower.   It was a great flat space, a square,
and above each of the four corners of the platform floated one of the strange,
Viking-like air-ships, tethered by a metal pole jutting up from the tower’s
corner and inserted below the prow of the ship.   They were stuck to the tower by pins through their tails, as
if they were gigantic bugs in some naturalist’s collection.   Blue bolts of lightning ran up and down
the bits, and crackling ozone mixed into the compound stink that already
blocked Tam’s nostrils.   More
electricity jolted and snapped about the edges of the platform, and Tam
remembered the lightning rods he and Burton had seen climbing up the outside of
the tower. Rope ladders dangled from the hind end of each ship down the
side.   One of the four ladders was
anchored to a big iron mooring ring at the nearest corner of the platform, but
the others dangled free.   The names
of the ships were painted on the side in that Mormon gibberish-writing, just
like the name of the Liahona was.
    Lightning flashed from the tops of all four anchor poles
towards the center of the space above the tower, like interlocked fingers or a
great bloody-damn-hell spider’s web of electricity.   Noticing it, Tam flinched and tightened his grip on the
Model 1.   You stupid bloody idjit,
he told himself.   As if you’re
going to shoot the lightning.   He
felt the hair on the back of his neck and his head both stand straight up, and
he screwed his porkpie hat on a little tighter, in a vain attempt to tamp it
back down.
    In the center of the mooring platform was a plascrete shed;
Franklin Poles at its corners cast bluish light over the platform, though the
area was lit much more by the wild electricity snapping free through the air
than by the domesticated shining of the Poles.   Seven or eight men huddled inside the little building and fought
through its doors and windows the steel-gleaming, four-legged mock-Egyptian
apparition of death that stalked them.   With sticks and knives and guns they fired at it, but it was
winning—the bodies of as many men lay torn and broken on the floor, and
as Tam looked, the Seth Beast shoved its head and forequarters through a
window, shattering iron shutters into scrap and removing the head of a
screaming Pinkerton in a single bite.   Bullets fired by the Pinkertons streaked and sparked harmlessly off its
armored flanks.
    “Fookin’ hell,” he called back to Edgar Allan Poe.   “It’s eerie how that thing of yours
doesn’t make a noise, even while it’s chewing men to pieces.”
    “You’d prefer it to say woof , I suppose?”
    “I’d prefer it to do something , is all I’m saying.   Besides generate minced Pinkerton, I mean.   Not that I object to the mincing at all.”
“Yes, well,” Poe mumbled dryly, “I promise to take your criticism to Mr. Hunley
next time I see him, though I can’t make any representations about the
likeliness or imminence of that possibility.”   He spat a quid of thick blood against the wall.
    Bang!   Bang!
    “If you’re quite finished chatting,” Roxie snapped, “we’re
about to have company by the tradesmen’s entrance.”
    “Hell and begorra!” Tam shouted, and pointed with his Model
1.   The others crowded into the
stairwell exit with him and looked.   The air-ships, all of them, were sliding up the metal antennae that
rooted them to the tower.  
    No, not all of them.   Three of them, and they gave the impression of being pushed free of the
tower and into space by the electricity itself.   The fourth, the ship nearest the