Of Soldiers and Scientists, P2

He frowned at her over his beer. “Well I did promise not to walk away.”

She nodded. “Good, good! Now we’ll need to outfit your ornithopter with conductive glass—I’ve enough for a standard Type Six chassis—and fly under the electromagnition factory. It won’t take longer than ten minutes! It’ll be the easiest four thousand you ever made!”

Reece hadn’t changed expression during the whole explanation. He put his beer on the counter and swiveled to face her full-on. “One,” he began to hold up fingers. “Flying under an electromag factory is suicide. That’s directly in the storm!”

“Yes, but—“

“Two,” he shoved two fingers in front of her face so that she had to jerk back. “The factory is government-owned and patrolled by military gunboats. It’s a no-fly zone for fifty miles from the border of the storm. Unless you’ve obtained some kind of University permit, it’s illegal to violate that zone, and you can be legally shot down without warning.” While this was true, he knew it rarely ever happened. Most of the crackpots and thrill-seekers that flew craft near the border storms were harmless.

She pondered that for a microsecond, then said, “I know—

“Three,” he said, jamming three fingers in the air between them, “the sky under the storm is a great hiding place for scum like Jesus Zombies, flying mutants, mobsters, brood slavers, and worse.

“So what you’re proposing is that we avoid robbery, brainwashing, rape, and cannibalism—not necessarily in that order—and then dodge military patrols with the goal of getting ourselves fried to a crisp in a lightning storm. You need four million for a pilot to do that, kid. Four thousand is for sane people.”

He turned his hips back to the bar and reached for the fresh beer that Mike had put there, but she grabbed it away before he could pick it up.

“One,” she said, gesturing with the bottle. “The glass rig I invented will protect us from lightning and I can prove it. I mean, I’ve already proven it or the University wouldn’t have funded my project. I just have to prove it to you—which is good, because a scientist should prove her theory many times before—“ she broke off when he reached for the beer. “Two and three,” she paused, as if for dramatic effect. “I can make us invisible.”

She waited for that revelation to take effect and nonchalantly took a long swig from his beer, then made the most comical whiskey face he had ever seen. “Mmguahh!” she swore, eyes watering. “That’s beer?”

He scowled and took the bottle from her unresisting hand. “It’s an acquired taste, Doctor. Looks like you never had any wild drinking parties in school, eh?”

“We had—I mean, um, we did fun, uh… stuff…”

He rolled his eyes at her and guzzled a third of his beer. The kid trailed off into silence and fidgeted while he regarded their reflections in the bar’s wall-mirror. After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, she asked, “Well?”

He sucked his teeth and frowned at her. “Invisible. And immune to lightning.”

She nodded, wide-eyed and hopeful. “Uh huh.”

“Four thousand.”

“Yes.”

He sighed heavily. “Alright kid, prove it to me and you gotta deal.”

*****

The Flying Monkey had a standard Stinger-class chassis: two main turbo-prop engines on the wings and a half dozen “steering props” throughout the nose and tail. (Reece knew the mechanics and tech types had a real name for them, but pilots called them “steering props.”) The turbo-props were held in wing-mounted gyroscopes that allowed them to swivel fore and aft, enabling vertical takeoff. The gyros also connected to a Hearsten’s Type II Self-Adjusting (self-adjusting, my ass! I have to adjust that fecker every day!) Perpetual Motion Drive. Reece’s six-foot one-inch frame fit comfortably in the cockpit, while the aft-facing double gunner seat behind him swallowed up the kid—kinda like a great white shark swallowing up a guppy. Her feet just barely reached the push-pedals—

“What are these for?” she had asked while he was strapping her in.

“Backup drive.”

Her mouth had dropped open, part of a comical look of disbelief. Between snorts of laughter he had explained the Kinetic Motion Battery that backed up the PM drive. “If ya go up without a backup to your PM, you might as well butter yourself and crash-land in a mutant barbecue.”

Right now, though, they were invisible.

Guilt started to creep into his thoughts again. The kid’s invisibility gizmo had kicked in as soon as they hit the outer edges of the never-ending lightning storm that brewed a hundred miles east of Detroit airspace. “It reacts to the Aetherhydromagnetic fluxuations that permeate the air here!” the kid had beamed, waving a tangle of clockwork gears and glass tubes under his nose. He had zero comprehension about her explanation but he believed his eyes, which told him he was suspended in mid-flight without a thopter around him. The experience was eerie but thrilling once he got used to it. What he could have done, back in the Wars, with an invisible fighter-ship!

Then a bolt of lightning had struck the Monkey full on her nose—and harmlessly fanned into the glasswork lattice that the kid had installed over the chassis. “Haha, I told you!” the kid had crowed. “Glass blown from volcanic sand with entellium bombardment that—“ he tuned her out after that, and decided not to ask her for explanations about anything, ever again.

So the kid had been as good as she advertised, and this was turning into a milk run. They were near the edge of the storm and the invisibility was starting to flicker on and off. He let his hands do the piloting and watched in fascination. The Monkey, covered in the kid’s Aether-glass, backlit by flashes of lightning and flickering in and out of sight like some giant mythical dragonfly. It was a sight he would take to his grave.

He was pondering the merits of giving the kid back two thousand when the gunfire started.

He felt the kid shift her weight and guessed she had popped her head up from her science gear. “What was that?”

He snapped out of the reverie and scanned his airspace. Nothing on visual, but there went the crack of small weapons fire again.

“Gunfire, kid! Stow your gear and make yourself small!” He felt her frantically shifting about as he opened the throttle on the repellium panel and angled the props to gain altitude. As the Monkey shot upward he caught sight of muzzle flashes below. “Pistol fire, low starboard!” he called out.

The kid paused. “What?”

Inwardly, he cursed himself for an idiot. The kid was his client, not his gunner! “There are three fools in a civvie scooter below us on the right, shooting at us with their little pistols.”

“Shouldn’t we be worried?”

He shrugged, even though he knew she couldn’t see the gesture while strapped into the aft-facing gunnery station. “They gotta be Lotto-lucky to hit us with handguns, and even if they do, they gotta be double Lotto-lucky to hit anything important. We’ll just keep above ‘em and dodge a lot.”

“But we’ve installed Wilson’s Aetherglass Volcanic—“

“Allah-Christ, kid! Just call it ‘glass!’”

“But we’ve installed glass on the bottom of your ornithopter!”

He swung the Monkey to port as more gunfire cracked from below. “Yeah but it’s all separate panels, right? You don’t need them all to prove your thingy.”

“Reece, the glass is charged with lightning! We’re flying with approximately one thousand bolts of lightning strapped to your hull! If one is broken it will release the transelectrical—we’ll explode! In a thermoelectric—uh, like we’ve been struck by a hundred lightning bolts!”

He was silent as he swung them starboard side to avoid the suddenly ominous pistol fire. The guilt about charging four thousand for this job was a very small thing, dimly remembered, as if from a past life.

The reason there was a floating factory in a lightning storm was for the military to harvest the electricity to make lightning grenades—glass globes half the size of his fist, with living lightning in the middle. Big ships and cities had mesh screens and seeker clockworks to defend against them, but smaller ships like the Flying Monkey could only dodge. Just one was enough to kill both him and the kid if it hit amidships, and here he was, flying with a lightning superbomb attached to his fuselage.

“We have to get away from them! We can’t—“

“I know, kid! But we ain’t got teeth, so there aint much to do but juke and jive!” They had both agreed that leaving behind the Monkey’s Gatling guns—and their highly explosive ammunition—was the best idea when going out to harvest lightning.

But wait… didn’t they have teeth? “Hey kid, I have a crazy idea.”

“You have?”

“Yeah, you’re a bad influence. How big would the explosion be from one of these panels?”

“Um.” She was silent for a moment. Crack, cra-crack, went the distant guns.

He juked to starboard and gunned the throttle. Wind whistled through the sinister lightning glass. “Well?”

“Hush, I’m doing calculations.”

Crack! WHANG! One of the support struts over his cockpit took a bullet. He suffered an eternal half-second of mind-numbing terror as one of the straps holding a glass panel came loose and the panel started to shake and rattle against the hull. With practice born of combat necessity, he held the joystick in his knees while he reached out and removed a glass panel the size of a dinner plate from the strut.

“Take your time, kid. Only getting shot at here.”

“FECK!” she swore. “I estimate the blast radius would be one hundred feet!”

“Feck,” he echoed. This would be close. “Hang on kid! And uh, make sure you got that barf bag handy.”

A horrified groan was her only reply.

Not allowing himself to consider the merits of sitting on a lighting bomb, he made sure the glass panel was secure under his thigh, then angled the props to kill forward motion and gain more altitude. In his mirrors, he could see their pursuers inexpertly bank and start a slow spiral upward. Crack, went their pistols. Crack, crack.

He savagely thrust the joystick forward and released the safety catches on the aft steering props. The Monkey began a screaming power dive in a tight spiral toward the civilian craft.

Through the howling wind and the roaring turbines, he caught the kid moaning, “Buuuuuuuuudhaaaaaa Aaaaaaaaaaaalllaaaaahhhhhh Chriiiiiiiiiiiiisst…” in a pitch and volume that rose and fell as they dived. The civvy flier zoomed larger and larger into view. He could see three crewmen scrambling around the deck—did they think he was going to ram them? All good to him, then. If they were having an old-school freakout, then they weren’t shooting at him.

“Only one shot at this,” he muttered, digging the glass plate out. He waited until the Monkey was fifty feet away and flung the glass sideways across the empty space. With a shock, he realized their pursuers were the three rats from the Brass Nail. It was bright and sunny this far out from the storm, and he could see the whites of their eyes, even through goggles. He locked gazes with Louis the pickpocket. Louis brought up his revolver—

And the Monkey was hurtling past the three criminals, and he could only see them in his rear views. Louis continued to raise his pistol—shouldn’t he be aiming down? Reece’s mouth went dry as he realized Louis was aiming at the glass lightning-plate—

Bang! Went the pickpocket’s gun.

In his rearview Reece could see the sparkle of the glass turn into an angry maelstrom of thunder and electricity that completely engulfed the rats and their airship. The kid screamed then; a good honest shriek that abruptly cut off. He was sure she had jammed her fist in her mouth.

“Ruh—ruh—Reece! We’re out of lightning range!”

He continued the dive. “Ain’t lightning I worry about, kid! We’re covered in your glass, remember?”

“Then why—“

“Shrapnel!” As if to prove his point, he fought the stick hard a-port to dodge a still-rotating propeller flung from the criminal airship. “Come on, ya filthy son of a whore!” he cursed as he fought the stick, which seemed bound and determined to kiss the ground. It seemed a lot closer than it was when he finally won the battle and leveled their descent. He engaged the safety catches on the aft steering props and began a normal ascent to Detroit airspace.

*****

“Hey Mike! A round for the house on me!” he called.

A ragged cheer went up from the dozen or so shady types clustered in twos and threes around the Brass Nail. A free drink or two never hurt when you were trying to create contacts and connections… even if it did mean it was more likely someone tried to mug him on the way out.

“Eh,” he muttered under his breath, “wouldn’t be the first time.” He looked across the table at the kid. She looked pretty down for someone that had just proven her thesis or theory or hypotenuse or whatever it was. She was absently fiddling with her soda bottle and muttering calculations.

“Hey kid. Whassamatta?”

She didn’t hear him. She continued to mutter “Hearsten’s Laws of Perpetual Motion as applied to practical use in Repellium craft…”

“Hey.” He leaned across the table into her field of vision. “Doctor Pony-house. What’s up?”

She blinked and straightened. “Oh! Sorry… just… uh, just thinking.”

“No sheeyeh,” he said. “Bout what?”

“Those men.”

Ah. Of course. She had probably never even been in a fistfight, let alone seen someone buy the farm. “The rat-men? Don’t worry bout them , kid. They got what they deserved.”

Face twisted with emotion, she looked him directly in the eyes. “I saw them, you know. I had a considerably better view than you did. Plus you were busy. I saw my electroglass shatter and the lightning release. It… it… devoured them. It made a lightning bolt for each man, and each man was shot through his solar plexus with a lightning bolt. Three more bolts hit their ornithopter and that made it explode and—and—and I was relieved that I didn’t have to watch them die and I thought—“

She balled her hand into a fist and pressed it against her mouth. He nodded slighty. “Let it out, Doctor.”

She shoved her hands flat onto the table and regarded them for a moment, then looked back into his eyes. “I thought: ‘I did that.’”

He frowned. “Kid—Emily, you can’t—“

She waved him silent and brushed a tear away from her cheek. “I know, I know, don’t think I don’t know. If I hadn’t hired you, if you hadn’t been here, if I hadn’t been a genius, if they hadn’t been so stupid and mean... if, if, if. Can’t second-guess any of it.” She poked an ink-stained finger on her temple. “Up here I know it.” He expected her to point to her heart next, but she tapped the back of her head. “Back here, in the reptile brain… that’s the part that thinks ‘I did that.’ And you know what, Captain Reece? That part of me liked it. ‘Ha, that’s what you get,’ it says.” She clutched her soda bottle with shaking hands. “And that is what’s scary.”

“Buddha-Christ, kid. You are a genius.”

She blinked back tears and looked up in surprise. “Wh… what?”

He leaned back in his chair and took a drink of his beer. “I joined the Corps when I was your age. Signed up for a five year tour. Minimum’s three year, but you get a way bigger bonus if you sign for five. In my five years, we had three wars and a dozen ‘incidents.’” Still holding his beer, he used his fingers to air-quote the word. “I killed a lotta men. The first one is the roughest—not the actual kill, but dealing with it after. I still remember like it happened five minutes ago; that Jesus Zombie look in his eye, how he was weak with his right side guard, how easy it was to shove my shortsword right up under his ribcage into his heart.” He looked down at a ring of condensation from his beer bottle and stuck his finger in the middle of it. “’Praise Jesus,’ he said, like I was doin’ him a favor.” He wiped his finger through the moisture on the table to make a line off the edge and let his hand drop to his thigh. “Praise Jesus.”

He looked up at her face. She had a sober look on, and the tears were gone. “For all the photographic memory I have, the one thing that sticks with me is the thought I had, right after he died. Do you know what that thought was?” She shook her head slightly. He leaned forward and said, “I thought, ‘huh, that was easy.’”

He leaned back and repeated, “’Huh, that was easy.’” He gestured with his bottle to the kid. “’I did that.’ What makes you a genius, Emily, is that you figured out in your head what was wrong right when it happened.” He downed half of his beer while she mulled that over. “It took me two years to figure out why I woke up every night with the sweats, scared to death.”

“Did it stop then? The night terrors?”

“Not that day. But I saw a Corps psychist and they got better.” He paused. “Not gonna piss down your back and tell you it’s rainin’ Emily. It’s scary, how easy it is. People die so easy. All you can do is live like your momma taught you—or Allah Christ or Buddha Christ or whatever. You know where your moral compass is and how it swings. Let it guide you.”

She pondered that for a moment. A sly look came over her face. “That’s it? You’re supposed to tell me a story that makes me feel better and wraps it all up, like on teevee. Where’s the wisdom imparted to the ingénue from the grizzled veteran?”

He was shocked for just a moment. He had seen men grow up in a matter of minutes and this kid had done it like a pro. He laughed. “Whatevs, Doctor. You are a horrible little girl.”

She straightened her spine and jutted her jaw out. “No, I’m not. I’m a scientist.”

He nodded and clinked bottles with her. “Best one I ever met.”

William David Reece

This is pretty close to how I picture Reece. Take away the scars and make his hair a bit longer, and give him a Roman-style shortsword:

Sometime in The Future...

This story takes place a few months after the first. Emily and Reece are partners by now, and know each other well.
Of Soldiers and Scientists isn't finished, either. Part 2 and maybe Part 3 are forthcoming.

Sometime in the future…

Emily finished the last connector on her Refractor Array and glanced at the ground far below. “Done,” she called.

Reece pulled a lever in the cockpit of the Toreador, causing the Refractor to drift away. She knew the Refractor was staying in place and it was their airship that was moving, but the illusion was quite convincing.

Reece nudged the Toreador—a six-prop Screamer Class fighter—to a hover-stop five hundred feet away, allowing both of them to view their handiwork. “The Eponymous Refractor Array,” Emily whispered to herself, feeling a tingle of pride. It was a beautiful latticework of alumisteel and golden translucent panels, hovering high above the ground by virtue of a Repellium spray and her hand-crafted gyroscope. Maybe she could call it an Eponyscope? Someone had already made one, no doubt. It was how her luck ran. Besides, “Eponyscope” suggested some kind of visual enhancement. She watched it slowly spin in the predawn light, then turned to one of the ammo cabinets where her kit was stowed.

She fished her notebook out of her kit and scrawled “EPONYSCOPE” across the last page. As she stuffed it back into one of the many zippered pockets, she happened to glance at the ground just as the cloud cover broke.

“Reece,” she said, eyes glued to the greenery below, “have you ever touched ground?”

He had leaned back in the pilot seat with his cap partly covering his eyes. “Mm?” he grunted, sitting up. He pushed the cap back and rubbed his eyes. “Yah. Few times.”

“What’s it like?”

He looked over the bow a moment, remembering. “Full of life.” He looked down at the green vista under the breaking clouds. “It’s green like that everywhere. Dark green trees, yellow-green grasses, green so dark it’s almost purple. All kindsa jungle everywhere. You never woulda thought there was so much green. That’s only the first thing you notice though.”

She tore her gaze away from his face and peered at the ground again. “Then what?”

“The air. It’s thick, and it smells like… hell, I dunno what-all it smells like. Alla that green, and the dirt, with animals and mutants and dead cities. But you can feel the air pass in and out of your lungs, so thick with all that smell. It makes you a little drunk.”

They fell silent, both staring over the bow. The wind was still and the props of the Toreador were quiet as they floated on Repellium force alone. She imagined herself on the ground, staring up at clouds and wading through vibrant plant life. “Why?” she asked. “Why did you touch ground?”

Leather creaked as he shrugged. “In the service. Anybody that survives the Corps is gotta hit the ground sooner or later. Ya fight in the air, someone hits ground.”

He rubbed his jaw. It was so quiet Emily could hear the sound of his hand against the stubble on his cheek. “I remember the first time I landed.” His eyes unfocused, watching memories. “I was nose gunner on the Spirit, just a corporal at the time. Some Atlantan fart-floater had dropped out of a cloud and zinged us pretty good before we put her down. Our PM was shot—you know how it’ll give ya five or six whump-whump sounds and then it’s done?”

Emily didn’t have any idea what that was like but she nodded. She could scarcely imagine being on a large airship when the perpetual motion drive was that badly damaged. “Well lucky for us,” he continued, “we had a sheeyeh-hot mechanic named Lorris—Lorry, we called him. Lorry climbed through a hole in the deck out onto the belly—just hangin’ there in space off his one safety line as we glided further and further down. I can remember like it was yesterday, when he stuck his head through the hole in the deck and said ‘it’s well and truly fooked, Sarge!’”

He paused and looked her in the eye. “He hadda report to Sarge cause Capn Hollis took a round in the eye and tumbled over the deck in the fight with the Atlantan.” His eyes dropped. “Good guy, Capn Hollis.”

Emily shuddered. Since she met Bill Reece they had both come close to death a few times, but she had never lost anyone she cared about.

“Anyway,” he continued, “Lorry tells Sarge he can fix it but we gotta touch down. Sarge cusses a blue streak and tells the pilot—damned if I can remember his name—to find a patch of flat dirt. On the way down there’s nothing much for me to do but stay away from Sarge and gawk. All that green and brown, and the air gettin’ thicker and thicker, and then pilot says there’s a spot there, next to that ruin.”

Reece looked up from his memories. “The thing about ruins is; they’re like holy ground to the mutants. I heard some guys say they touched ground at a ruin and found all kind of knick-knacks and offerings and such in a little altar. Bunch of half-men worshipping a broken building in the middle of nowhere. Dunno if it’s true. Never saw for myself.

“But anyway, pilot says ‘ruins’ and we all get kinda excited and nervous so Sarge has ta give us work, so I didn’t see much of the landing. I remember steppin’ off the boat onto the dirt though. The ground was all springy and kinda tacky at the same time. Only took a few minutes for Lorry to set up, and he told Sarge it was gonna take an hour at least, so Sarge has me set up a perimeter.”

He snapped out of his reverie again. “A perimeter is setting up defensive positions in case of attack. The problem with a nice flat landing spot in the middle of a jungle is that it’s also a good ambush spot for the natives. We were sure we didn’t have too long before mutants or savages showed up.

“So I’m assigning guys to defensive spots around the Spirit, and Jackson finds a door.”

Emily blinked. “A door? In the dirt?”

He nodded. “Pretty much. When you looked at it from the landing site, it was just a grassy mound. But when Jackson walked down and around to the other side he found it. ‘Reecey,’ he says. ‘It’s military!’”

Emily gasped. “An ancient military site?”

He nodded again, grinning. “An armory. I found out later that the ancients stockpiled a lot of guns near the beginning of the Double-A, mostly near big cities. You can even find some revolvers that still work, but you can’t trust the ammo.

“Now, the first thing we should do is go get Sarge. But I figure he’s busy, what with landing on the ground an’ all, and the padlock on this door is damn near rusted through. So me and Jackson give it a couple whacks with our rifle butts and the door just kinda falls open.”

He wrinkled his nose. “First thing: the air was stank. We were all for elbowing each other outta the way to be the first one in, but the stank made us wait. And then we’re thinkin’ that Sarge doesn’t need to be bothered with this until we’ve had ourselves a loot—I mean, look. I’m sure Sarge will just tell us to mark it and get back to our perimeter, and I also think: to hell with that.

“So I radio the other guys on the perimeter and they’re all goosey-gassey. While I’m doing this, Jackson sneaks into that hole in the ground and starts digging around. I can hear the poor bastard whooping and hollering and thumping around in there, but I can’t go in because someone needs to man this damn perimeter that I set up!

“OK, so I’m staring out at the jungle and hollerin’ back and forth at Jackson for, I dunno, twenty minutes.” He stopped and looked up at the stars. “Really, it was prolly more like 10 minutes, but I wanted to see that stuff for myself, ya know? And then Jackson finally comes outta that hole, covered with ancient guns and belts of ammo. The jackhole had even tied a bandana around his head.”

Reece leaned forward and stood up from the pilot seat, leathers creaking and joints popping as he stretched. His Standard-brown features lost in thought. He was silent long enough for Emily to prompt, “then what?”

He didn’t move from his position; hands on the deck above the joysticks, looking out towards the spinning Refractor. He spoke again, voice quieter than before. “I was about to give him a dressing-down for covering himself with unstable explosives. Who knows when those ancient grenades and bullets are gonna go off? And when you pull the trigger on those ‘automatic’ weapons…”

“But automatic weapons don’t work,” she interjected.

“They work enough to make you stupid,” he replied. “So I was about to give him hells for shankin’ around, and his eyes got wide just about the time I hear the brush rattle behind me, and we’re gears-to-gears with a dozen mutants.”

He turned away from the sky and asked her directly, “what do you think happens when someone fires an ancient automatic weapon?”

“It explodes?” She had seen ancient vids and even a few documentaries with automatic weapons fire. The chemical reaction required didn’t hold true to form and became volatile. Scientifically speaking, this always leads to an explosion. “Since you asked I would guess that it’s not that simple.”

“They don’t call you ‘genius’ for nothing,” he said with a small smile. She suppressed a glow of pride. She loved it when he called her “genius.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t explode until you’re halfway through the magazine. It never explodes like a normal misfire.

“So before I can even think to say ‘don’t use that ancient piece of shee-yeh,’ Jackson pulls the trigger on that stupid oversized rifle.” He sat back in the pilot’s seat and began slowly rubbing his hands together, as if they were cold. He looked down to the deck as he spoke. “For a few seconds, it was like the old movies. I can even remember it in slow-motion. Jackson fighting the recoil, mutants chargin’ us all wavin’ their extra arms and tentacles, jerking and falling as the bullets tore their green and gray flesh. Then the gun made a carrump sound and twisted like licorice in his hands.” He stopped rubbing his hands and made a pin wheeling motion. “The gun came apart in bits of molten metal and wood… it was… it was a box of puzzle pieces dumped in the wake of a turbine. They flew in a huge arc in front of poor Jackson, shredding every damn thing they touched.

“It killed half the mutants and sent the rest of them running, but Jackson got the worst of it. The gun shredded itself in his hands, it… it turned into a whirly meatgrinder before it shot out to hit mutants. It turned his arms and most of his chest into a bloody mist, but it took long enough that Jackson had time to belt out one long, gargling scream.”

Emily jammed her fist against her mouth to avoid making a sound.

He didn’t move his head but his eyes came up to meet hers. “I don’t like to tell you things like that, Em. Way I see it, though… better you hear a horrible story than ever picking up an auto weapon.”

She didn’t trust herself to speak, so she just nodded with her knuckles still pressed to her teeth. Before she met Reece, she would have said the only possibility of her ever seeing an ancient auto weapon was in a museum. These days, though…

His eyes dropped to the deck again. “I found out later that I was lucky. Sometimes the explosion fans out in a complete circle, or launches large bits of the gun in one direction. I—hey, lookit that! Goggles, Em.”

The dawn seemed to strike the Toreador with an audible snap. They slid their goggles over their eyes and stood to watch her Refractor. The translucent panels tinkled musically as they sensed the sunlight and turned to take it in. The power indicator in the central ring began to light up.

Emily watched it for a few moments and said, “it’ll be ready in less than ten minutes.”

He looked down at her with eyes squinting behind his goggles. “You sure this will work?” he teased.

She pulled a frown and feigned deep thought. “You’re right. We should test it at least twice more.”

He groaned. They had tested it twice already and he was already impatient to fight the brood slavers that had kidnapped their client’s daughter—a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl much like Emily herself. “You are a rotten, rotten little girl.”

She suppressed a giggle. “No, I’m not,” she said primly with her nose in the air. “I am a scientist!”

Representative Picture

I've been digging through a lot of steampunk images and I came across one that perfectly represents the sub-genre I'm going for; steampunk with the emphasis on Punk:

Of Soldiers and Scientists, Part 1

Reece spun his punchout in circles and surveyed the bar with some sense of nervousness. He had his thopter and a nice pile of bonus dollars, but no idea what to do with either. He had a vague notion of starting some kind of secure courier service but had no head for business. He was taking his time with combing through his contacts in the Force, looking for someone that might have a job lead, but so far everything had come up empty.

He happened to look up when the door opened, so he caught sight of the kid when he shouldered his way in. He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall and he was weighted down with enough junk to render himself clumsy. Reece watched as he bumped into three different people and dropped half his kit. It took him damn near five minutes to achieve seated status on a bar stool, and by that time everyone in the Nail had labeled him “fresh meat.”

The Brass Nail was a dive that had decent food, watery beer, and V-set that everyone swore was possessed. It also had a reputation as a meet-and-greet for those folk with “off the grid business,” which is why Reece started drinking here. Not that he was looking to get into thievery or anything, but with his prospects dwindling, things like privateering and outer-city mutant runs were starting to look more appetizing.

By the time he gathered up his punchout and beer and sauntered over to the kid, no less than three of the locals were scamming him. Two sat on either side making some kind of sales pitch, while the third picked his pocket—

“Yeah, V-gas distilleries are a thing of the p—aahh!” The pickpocket gasped as Reece grabbed his wrist with a grip designed to incapacitate the victim’s hand. He caught the kid’s wallet before it hit floor and growled “back to the bilge, ya pack of rats.”

The rat on the kid’s right—a big dark-skinned fellow—eyed Reece up and down, taking in the service-issue revolver and shortsword. “This aint nonya. We was havin’ a chat.”

He tightened his grip on the pickpocket. “Ahh, ow! Ahh!” he whined. “That hurts! Let go!”

Reece kept his eyes locked on the big man and made sure the one that hadn’t moved yet was in his field of vision. He saw Mike the bartender reach under the bar.

“Fecking hee-ro,” the big man cursed. “Come on, Louis, Tyrell. They gotta bad smell here.”

Reece let go of Louis and made room for Tyrell to get off the stool and walk away. He watched as they slunk to a darkened corner table and muttered amongst themselves.

“Advice,” he grunted, throwing the kid’s wallet on the bar. “Put that in a front pocket. Your back and your bank account will thank you.”

“Thuh… thanks,” the kid squeaked. Reece froze in the act of taking the stool vacated by Tyrell. The kid was a girl! He sat and waved his mostly-empty beer at Mike, who had withdrawn his hands from what Reece assumed was the standard-issue bar shotgun.

He killed his beer and took at closer look at the girl. She had a backpack that was damn near big as she was, and sported an oversized toolbelt covered with instruments, tools, and gizmos. She wore an old leather pilot’s cap over her head, and had brand-new Dr. Gotraynes goggles hanging around her neck. He figured she must be some kind of student, but University Row was on the other side of the city.

She had blue, blue eyes. Her skin was pale, like what they called “white.” And was that a blonde hair sticking out from her cap? Reece mentally added “victim” and “brood-slaver target” to the “fresh meat” label she had attained already.

“What in the name of Republican Jesus are you doing here, kid?” He figured he should be blunt. Someone like this needed to be shocked into caution.

She jerked like she’d been slapped. “I… it’s a public place?” She was trying to sound tough but it came out awfully squeaky.

He chuckled and shook his head. He looked her square in her wide eyes. “This is a rough neighborhood,” he said slowly and clearly. “People get mugged and murdered in this area. Those three—“ he jerked his head to the rats in their corner—“would have stopped at just robbery if you were lucky.” He checked the bar mirror to see how many patrons were paying attention to them and saw it was just the three rats. “So what is it?” he asked, still looking in the mirror. “A dare from your schoolmates?” She looked even more pale and innocent in the mirror, sitting next to his roughened Standard self. An unnerving thought struck him, and he looked down at her face again. “You’re not a runaway, are you?”

She was fidgeting with her wallet, trying to find a pocket in the front of her kit that wasn’t already stuffed with junk. She blinked three times, openmouthed. “You--! I--! Hey! I’m not running from anything! And I’m not a student!” She opened her wallet and fished around in it. “At least, not since last Tuesday.”

“Since Tuesday? Didja get kicked out?”

“Hardly.” Talking about school seemed to put her in her own element. “I graduated,” she proclaimed, pulling a punchdoc out of her wallet and thrusting it at him.

“’University of Detroit, Full Doctorate Certificate,’” he read. He looked from the fancy embossed punchdoc to the girl and back again. “Looks official.”

She gave him the incredulous head-tilted stare that teenaged girls have been using since the beginning of indignance. “Of course it’s official, you bilge-head!”

He suppressed a smile. Bilge-head? “You’re awful young for a Doctor.”

She stiffened her back and managed to give the impression of looking down at him despite being a foot shorter. “Youngest ever,” she proclaimed. “In Detroit anyway. They had a seventeen year in Hellay.”

“You’re older than seventeen?”

She gave him a sullen teen look. “Eighteen.”

Eighteen. Holy Buddha-Christ. He was eighteen when he enlisted. What a dumb-sheeyeh farmboy he had been. His mother had wanted him to go to University but he’d known that was wishful thinking.

“What are you, some kinda girl genius?”

She grinned widely, showing rows of perfect white teeth. “According to the tests!”

He chuckled, without irony this time. The kid was infectious. He held out a calloused hand. “Bill Reece.”

“Emily Wilson,” she said, shaking his hand. He noted her hand was soft and covered with ink stains. “Or, as my cert proclaims; Doctor Eponymous.”

His brow wrinkled. “Eponymous?”

She swiveled her stool to face him completely, banging her oversized pack against the bar. “I know! Isn’t it the craziest name? It’s a complete reflection of my academic history!”

“…complete refl—“

“It’s because whatever I decided on for my doctorate, someone beat me to the punch on it! First I started a paper on Aether flux transmission but someone in Nashville had just finished one. Nashville! Can you believe? Then it was vacuum circuits and their application to propulsion but old Dwight Smith had started it a month before—like I wanted to fight Old Dwight? I tried semi-autonomy in clockwork vehicles—I mean, nobody has thought of that, right? Wrong! Harry Marvin from New Newyork was in the final stages. I really thought I had something unique there. Then it was brainwave phosphor—“

“Hey, kid.” Reece had felt his eyes glazing over after the word “paper.”

She gave a little cough. “Emily.”

“Emily. What does ‘eponymous’ mean?”

She blinked once, slowly. “Oh. Um. It’s when something references the name in a literary work… like, if someone wrote a book about you, you might say ‘the eponymous hero of “The Bill Reece Story,” in… uh, reference to you.”

He chewed on that for a moment. “So, why Doctor Eponymous?”

“Well you know how I was getting beaten to the punch by other students? People started calling whatever I worked on ‘Miss Wilson’s Aether Wilson Theory’ or ‘Wilson’s treatise on the Wilson Motion Equation.’ You know, because they wanted to differentiate from the inevitable discovery of someone else working on the idea…”

Inwardly, Reece shrugged. Maybe you had to be a genius to get it. “Sounds great, k—Emily. I never met a genius before, not to mention a kid-genius.”

She straightened her spine—no easy trick, with all that gear on her—and managed to look down her nose at him. “You’re humoring me.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “A little.”

“Hmph. What are you doing here? In this rough area? Waiting for naïve young graduates to imperil themselves?”

He frowned into his nearly-empty beer. “Looking for work.”

She cocked an eyebrow and her eyes narrowed. “What sort of work?”

“Piloting… something, I dunno. I got a thopter waitin’ to eat sky and as much as I like joyrides, they don’t punch my meal ticket, you know?”

Her eyes went wide. “You own an ornithopter? You’re a pilot?”

He looked up from his beer and saw her saucer eyes. “Yeah? What?”

“I came here looking for a pilot!” She was almost stage-whispering with excitement. “I need a flyer to help me prove a new theory!”

He scratched his head. “You need a pilot to help you with your wave-fluxing and field-motioning.”

She nodded, grinning.

“And you’ll pay.”

She nodded again. “Of course. The University provides a stipend for approved theoretical—“

“How much?”

“Oh, um… I’ve already bought all the equipment I need, so what I have left is…” She pulled out her wallet and began to fish out bills.

He put his hand on hers and pushed the wallet under the counter. “Put your wallet away, kid. Estimate how much.”

She looked up and to the right, forming calculations and searching memory. “About two thousand, I think.”

Buddha Christ! Two thousand! He could damn near buy another thopter with that. “Two thousand.” He laced his voice with disinterest and a touch of disbelief.

Her face fell. “Well there would be more, after the theory is proven. Another—uh… two thousand?”

Oh, now he was just taking advantage—unless the job was dangerous.

“Just what is this job, Doctor?”

She looked up at him from under her leather cap. “Promise you’ll hear me out. Don’t walk away.”

He leaned back and lost a lot of the potential guilt for taking advantage of a gullible mark. “I’m listening.”

She looked around furtively, then leaned in and said with a low voice, “I need to harvest some lightning.”