Peacemaker (The Flash Gold Chronicles, #3) (15 page)

“
Why would
that
be a requirement
for distracting them?” Cedar looked over his shoulder. “Oh, you
mean her.”

“
You’re welcome to strip,
too,” Kali said. “I’m still waiting to see if you have
hammertoes.”

“
I do not. My toes are
handsome. Like the rest of me.”

Cedar set his weapons aside while he removed
his shirt. He handed it to Kéitlyudee and reclaimed his gear. She
regarded the shirt briefly before pulling it over her head. It
dangled to her knees like a dress.

“
Looks like we’re ready,”
Kali said.

A metal tin clinked down the stairs and
rolled to a stop near their door. Blue smoke hissed into the
corridor. Cedar looked like he might lean out and kick the thing
back the way it had come, but a gunshot rang out, and a bullet
smashed into the door frame, inches from his head.

Cedar drew back, flinging an arm over his
nose and mouth, and grumbled, “Smoke grenade.”

“
That’s not a smoke
grenade.” Kali pointed to the smoke nut in Cedar’s hand.
“
That’s
a smoke
grenade.”

“
Yes, right. I’ll put it
to good use.” Cedar nodded to himself. “You two ladies, go take
care of bringing the ship down. I’ll give you the time you
need.”

“
Be careful,” Kali said.
“If we land—” she decided to be optimistic and not use the word
crash, “—Lockhart could be there waiting. And Cudgel
too.”

Cedar had been readying the smoke nut to
throw, but he froze in the middle of arming it. Slowly, very
slowly, he lifted his eyes to meet Kali’s through the haze wafting
into the cabin. “Cudgel is here?”

“
I assume it was him. They
called him Mister Conrad, and even the captain was deferential. He
wanted me and was interested in the flash gold, but he said he was
going off to set things up, so the Pinkerton detective would be
sure to find you.”

Cedar was statue-still. If not for the
subtle rise and fall of his chest, Kali might not have known he was
alive.

“
He wore a white suit,”
she went on, “and had green-blue eyes. Seemed more like the slick,
gentlemanly type than a ‘Cudgel,’ but I reckon you can’t go by
looks.”

It was smoke billowing into the room and a
round of coughing from Kéitlyudee that finally bestirred Cedar.
“No, you can’t. That’s him.” He offered Kali a quick smile, though
it did not reach his eyes. “I better survive these pirates, so I
can get him. I’m not going to fail when I’m this close.”

“
Be careful,” Kali urged
again. She was thinking that she ought to give him a kiss for luck
or elicit a promise that he’d return to her, or one of those other
things women always did when men they cared about went into battle,
but she was too slow, and Cedar opened the door and slipped into
the smoky corridor. The haze swallowed him.

“
What’s that?” a pirate
blurted from above.

“
He threw our grenade
back—no, wait, it’s—” The speaker broke off with a cry of
pain.

“
Time for us to go,” Kali
whispered to Kéitlyudee.

She trusted Cedar to give her the time she
needed; now she had to make use of it. She tied a kerchief around
her nose and mouth, then slipped out of the cabin, heading toward
the door at the end of the corridor.

Though the pirate smoke grenade was spewing
its last gray puffs, the acrid air stung her eyes, so Kali hustled.
Behind her, gunshots fired. This time, they weren’t near the
stairway, and she knew Cedar was on deck with the pirates.

When Kali opened the door, she almost
tripped over a man sitting on the floor inside a closet full of
pipes and levers. He stared up at her with bleary eyes and a bottle
clenched in one meaty paw. Almost as surprised by his presence as
he clearly was by hers, Kali scrabbled for her revolver.

For a man in a drunken stupor, the pirate
reacted quickly. He hurled his bottle at Kali before she could tug
the gun out of her overalls. She ducked, and it skimmed past her
head and crashed against a wall of vertical pipes. Cheap alcohol
and shards of glass flew. The man lunged to his feet, reaching for
a gun of his own, but Kali kicked him in the knee to buy herself a
second. She jumped back into the corridor, finally yanking her
six-shooter free.

Kali aimed it at his chest. “Drop your
gun.”

Her kick had thrown the
man off balance, and he slipped in the spilled alcohol. In the
confining closet, he couldn’t fall far, but his head smacked the
wall and he dropped his gun. It hit the ground and went off. Kali
flung herself to the floor. From the
clang, clang, thunk
that followed,
she guessed the bullet never left the closet. A hiss of gas rose
over the clamor coming from the deck above.

Kali winced. “On second thought, my
suggestion to drop the gun might have been flawed.”

After hopping to her feet, she aimed her
revolver at the pirate again, but he hadn’t moved since his head
struck the wall. She grabbed the fallen gun and patted him down for
other weapons, but didn’t find anything else. She eyed his
corpulent form with a grimace. As tiny as the closet was, she’d
have to move him out in order to step inside herself.

Kali grabbed his arm. Farther back in the
corridor, Kéitlyudee was watching with her own revolver pointed
loosely in the man’s direction. Kali thought about asking for help,
but the girl barely seemed to have the wherewithal left to hold the
gun. Kali dragged the two hundred pounds of dead weight through the
doorway on her own, her legs and back trembling from the effort.
Grunting and straining, she finally managed to tug the pirate out
of the closet. Smoke lingered in the corridor, and she had to fight
not to break into a coughing fit.

A door creaked open behind her. Damn, she
had forgotten about that pirate.

He had found shoes, and he wore his weapons
belt around his waist now instead of between his teeth. He had
already extracted a six-shooter from it, and he pointed it at Kali
even as she pointed hers at him.

“
Who told you that you
could come out?” she growled, putting all the steel she could
muster into her voice, knowing that, without the flame gun, she did
not have as fearsome a weapon with which to cow him.

“
Put down your guns,
girls,” the pirate said.

Kéitlyudee dropped her weapon and pressed
her back against the wall, though she was farther down the corridor
and not the focus of the pirate’s attention.

Kali flicked her gaze toward the stairwell
and lifted a hand, as if Cedar had appeared and she was beckoning
him for help. For a split second, the pirate’s eyes shifted. Kali
fired.

Anticipating a return shot, she dropped
down, almost landing on the unconscious man. The return fire came
amidst curses, the bullet zipping over her head so close it stirred
her hair. It clanged against metal behind Kali.

Her bullet had clipped the pirate’s ear, and
blood streamed down the side of his head. It had to hurt, but he
was lowering his gun to fire again. Still on her back, Kali shot
first, this time leaving a smoking hole in his boot. The man howled
and dropped his gun. Kali kicked it down the corridor and trained
her weapon on the pirate again.

“
I
said
, who told you to come out?”
Yes, she was flat on her back, but she would shoot him again, in a
more vital spot, if he didn’t back off.

Hopping on one foot, the man gave her a wild
glare. Had he not expected a woman would actually shoot him? After
a long, considering moment, he stumbled back into his cabin.

Kali yanked his door shut and scrambled to
her feet.

“
Stand here and watch this
one,” she told Kéitlyudee, then stepped over the unconscious pirate
and returned to the mechanical room. “Shoot him if he gets
up.”

“
You’re not afraid of them
at all, are you?” Kéitlyudee asked.

Kali’s heart, still pounding after having
that gun pointed at her face, belied that notion, but all she said
was, “I’m sure I would be if I’d had your night.”

She focused on the levers, on/off wheels,
gauges, and pipes running from floor to ceiling in the cubby and
scowled. Not only were there two holes in one of the pipes, but she
couldn’t identify which gas was flowing out from them. The label
plaques were in…“Persian?” she guessed. Her father had had books
written in European languages, but he had never taught her how to
read any of them, and everything inside the machine room was
gibberish to her. “Why couldn’t these oafs steal an American or
British airship?”

She leaned close to one of the leaks and
sniffed, though she promptly rolled her eyes at herself when she
didn’t smell anything. Both oxygen and hydrogen were colorless and
odorless, so what had she expected?

“
The holes are good,
aren’t they?” Kéitlyudee had edged closer. “We wanted to sabotage
things, didn’t we?”

“
We want to bring down the
ship. If the air supply is leaking, that’s not going to happen. We
need to make sure they run low on hydrogen up there, but I’m not
sure which one is which. How’s your Persian?”

The girl gave Kali a blank look.

“
That’s about what I
expected.” Kali picked up the alcohol bottle. Only the neck had
broken, and the body appeared to be intact. “Will you get me the
matches in Sparwood’s chest?”

Kéitlyudee paled, probably not wanting to
return to that foul room, but she whispered, “Very well,” and
headed down the corridor.

Kali drained the remaining liquid from the
bottle. Gunfire sounded somewhere overhead. She wondered if anyone
in navigation had noticed the pressure drop on the gas board
yet.

“
Here.” Kéitlyudee handed
her a couple of long wooden matches with bulbous phosphorous
heads.

Kali lifted her hand, but paused. “Better
not do it in here.” Her dead father would cringe with embarrassment
if she blew herself up by lighting a match in a closet full of
hydrogen. “Wait for me by the stairs. I’ll have you light one over
there.”

“
All right…”

Kali decided not to explain the dangers of
her little experiment. They would only worry the girl. She turned
the alcohol bottle sideways and pressed the jagged opening as close
to one of the holes as she could. Gas whistled past, cooling her
fingers, and she hoped enough of it got into the bottle for her
experiment.

When she judged the bottle to be as full as
it would get, Kali plopped her hand over it as tightly as she
could, given the jagged glass lip. “Light the match.”

She jogged up the corridor and placed the
bottle on a step near the exit, hoping enough cool air was swirling
down from above that they didn’t need to worry about hydrogen in
the corridor. Kéitlyudee lit the match. Kali took it and, wishing
for goggles, slid the flame over the bottle opening at the same
time as she removed her hand.

The flame was sucked into the bottle with a
pop.

“
That’s it,” Kali said and
ran back to the closet, tearing tin snips out of her pocket as she
went. As soon as she reached the leaking pipe, she went to work
broadening the holes so the gas would flow out more
quickly.

“
Uh?” Kéitlyudee said from
the corridor. “What did we just prove?”

“
This is the hydrogen
line,” Kali said. “That pop we heard was the sound of the gas
combusting really fast and the pressure equalizing inside and
outside of the container.”

“
Oh,” Kéitlyudee said, not
sounding any more enlightened than before.

Kali worked on the pipe until she’d nearly
torn it in half. “There,” she murmured. “That ought to bring this
boat down.”

A shot fired in the corridor.

“
Are they coming?” Kali
stuffed her tin snips into a pocket and stepped out.

The smell of black smoke tinged the air, and
Kéitlyudee stood, looking at her gun. “No. I mean, I thought
someone ran past the top of the stairs, and I fired. They weren’t
coming down though. I guess.”

Kali rubbed her face. The girl was as likely
to shoot an ally in the back as an enemy. “Let’s go up and see if
this hole is causing a problem for the navigator yet.”

Before they reached the stairs, the scent of
smoke came to Kali’s nose. At first, she thought it might be
lingering from her experiment or the gunshot, but it was wafting
down from the deck above. She hoped Cedar wasn’t running around,
lighting things on fire up there. She still had hopes for claiming
the ship.

Kali eased up the steps, her revolver at the
ready, and poked her head out. Darkness blanketed the stern of the
ship, but toward the bow firelight pushed back the night and
highlighted bodies—at least a dozen—littering the deck. The flames
danced around an enclosed cabin where Kali could just make out the
wheel of the ship and a bank of levers through windows reflecting
the fire. Navigation. If any pirates were still inside, she
couldn’t tell.

Her eye followed those flames upward, and
she swallowed. If the fire grew a few more feet, it would be
bathing the bottom of the balloon. If it burned through the outer
shell and ignited the hydrogen, the fiddling she’d done with the
pipe wouldn’t matter an iota.

“
Cedar,” Kali groaned.
“What have you been doing up—”

An impact jolted the ship, hurling Kali
backward, amidst cracking wood and groaning metal. She tried to
catch herself on the stairs, but her heel slipped off, and she
tumbled to the bottom, landing in a painful heap. Shudders ran
through the vessel. They must have hit something. Were they in
town? Or on a mountaintop somewhere?