The Argonaut Society

The Gamut, Part 2

Amelia's legs felt strange in trousers and the boots engulfed her feet, making a clumpfing sound when she walked. Her dead assailant's shirt and coat also reeked in ways she dared not identify as she hid her long hair under the battered cap. Ignoring the nausea from her throbbing head, she slung the rifle on her back, fit the pistol in the holster and slipped the knife in the boot's side pocket.

Pilfering a corpse wasn't how she envisioned the first week of her honeymoon. She smiled. It was much better.

Near death experience aside, or perhaps because of it, she felt more alive than ever. And grateful to whomever it was who dispatched the rutty revolutionary. Guerrero, most likely. She would need to thank him for watching over her so closely.

The attack had reopened the knife wound across her palm, and the pain had crept up to her elbow. Bleed together, fly together, die together, Monty had said on the ship. In precisely that order? Amelia wondered, trying to resecure the bandage around her hand. She crept along the rocky face toward the jumble of boulders obscuring the cave opening. Men clamored and crouched behind boulders trying to stay out of sight. They must have returned from chasing Pell and Gavin while she stripped the body and donned her new wardrobe, she thought. The guard that had ducked behind the cart when the attack began received a ghastly bullet hole in the forehead for his pains.

She followed the steep but stable path between the boulders down into the dim cave. She hadn't progressed more than six feet when a crack of gunshot inside the cave left her ears ringing. She dove behind a rock outcropping for protection. Hearing furious shouts, she peeked around the side of the rock to see the hostage kicking and stomping on her immobile captor's head.

"Good for you," Amelia mumbled, impressed. An angry hostage with a gun changed the equation in their favor. She stepped from behind the rock.

The woman whipped the rifle up, ready to fire.

"Oh, no, no! I'm on your side!" Amelia implored with empty hands, then pulled off the hat and let her hair fall. It wouldn't do to be shot by the person she'd risked her life to save. "I'm here to, er, rescue you? But you're doing a splendid job on your own. Bravo. Can you even understand me?"

The woman eyed her with a mixture of wariness and skepticism, but lowered the gun. "I don't need your help," she said.

"Evidently not," Amelia said, taking in the guard's bloody and mangled visage and holding down the urge to wretch. "But I'm here nonetheless, and I have an airship ready to take you home. That is, if you've finished here."

Muttering in derision, the woman landed one last solid crack to the man's head with the butt of the rifle before scrambling up the ramp. The man groaned.

"Wait," Amelia hissed after her, following as quickly as her clompfy boots would allow. She found the woman crouched behind a boulder. Rebels shouted and scattered as cannon fire bombarded the perimeter, splintering trees and blasting boulders into projectile shards. Above it all, the chopping drone of an airship.

"That is yours?" the woman asked.

Amelia cringed. To say the Gamut looked like a floating wreckage would underestimate the impression. It looked like a floating patchwork of several wreckages held together with creative riveting and dumb luck. "That explains the blindfolds," Amelia murmured.

A hand gripped Amelia's arm and she froze. Astonished by the sight of the FrankenGamut, she hadn't paid attention to her surroundings, allowing one of the miscreants to sneak up on her. Again. Did she learn anything from the attack in the woods?

Refusing to become a defenseless victim for the second time in one hour, Amelia jerked her elbow back into the man's face. He released her arm and bellowed.