Lawless Lands: Tales from the Weird Frontier Read online

  Gravitydancer!

  The caravan needed help. The scavengers, usually a baseship and smaller raiders, were no longer interested in finding suitable planets after generations of failing to do so. Instead, they stalked the caravans and usurped the spoils of their labor. Scavengers struck hard; scavengers struck fast. If main fleet reinforcements were sent at all, they would be too late. The distance between the caravans and the rest of humanity was simply too large.

  Waves crashed into him/them. The herd was growing restless. The rays were aware of humanity closing in and wanted to move on.

  But they need our help!

  Quietspring tried to convey the intimacy of the caravan, the bond between its members.

  They, too, are a herd.

  They, too, seek to live in peace.

  The ray, his ray, remembered it. Felt it. Understood it.

  Ripples in spacetime moved back and forth. Waves interfered. Constructively. Neutrally. Destructively. Arguments flowed. Discussion reverberated.

  Quietspring was amazed at the complexity of the interactions. The rays were so much more than the caravans could have ever guessed. His sadness at the senseless killing crept out.

  We never knew.

  I’m so sorry.

  The dance of waves subsided.

  The rays circled each other slowly, wings flapping in synchrony. Quietspring/ray was in the middle. Pulsations bounced through his/their body. It was the most beautiful thing his mind had ever perceived.

  The circling ended.

  As one, the herd moved.

  Quietspring swam in the nothingness.

  The void of space had become his turf. He/ray marched through space, riding unseen waves. Its/their brethren were with them.

  A pinprick just moments ago, the caravan became more detailed with every flap of their wings.

  Wave echoes painted a picture of strife and struggle.

  Some caravan craft had been punctured and vomited materials. Small agile scavenger raiders—all hooks and edges—harassed the lumbering collection of ships. The hunters did their best to mount a counter-initiative. A red spacebike dove into the fray with reckless abandon, the pilot’s skill so great the scavengers couldn’t lock their weapons onto the small ship.

  Spaceripper!

  The herd was skittish. The waves from the turmoil were frantic, aggressive.

  Occupied by the struggle, none of the combatants had noticed the rays yet.

  Quietspring/ray felt the reluctance of the other rays.

  Scavenger beams ripped into the caravan. Connector tubes were severed. People poured out. Death swung its scythe. The caravan’s segments moved as someone on the bridge began to shuffle the connected ships’ configuration in order to minimize damage and casualties.

  A flash. A short-lived spherical explosion.

  An engine room blew.

  Father!

  The herd fought its own instincts to do something it had never done before.

  Engage.

  As the massive beasts barreled onto the battlefield, the fighters finally took note. For a moment, both sides of the conflict froze.

  A moment was all Quietspring/ray/herd needed.

  Scavengers were slapped through space by the rays' giant wings. Concentrated bursts of spacetime waves ripped apart the peskier flies of the bunch. The scavenger baseship turned and tried to flee, but was torn asunder by a marvelously synchronized move from a ray trio.

  The caravan’s remaining hunters regrouped and established a spacesword attack formation. At the tip of the sword, a scuffed spacebike with red streaks. The spacesword did not strike.

  Spaceripper held off his hunters.

  Quietspring/ray moved closer cautiously. Eagerness met trepidation in an uneasy truce.

  When the ray’s front tip almost touched Spaceripper’s spacebike, it curled upwards.

  Quietspring knew how to draw the attention of a warrior. Just show him his target.

  The ray's body rolled back while Quietspring swam through it, toward the pulsating red dot that would hopefully hypnotize Spaceripper long enough to draw his attention.

  Don't shoot, Spaceripper, don't shoot. Steady your hunter's heart.

  The spacebike held on to its harpoons.

  Quietspring looked at Spaceripper and waved. He had to smile at the big man's open mouth. Finally, he saw Spaceripper grab hold of the radio.

  A small ship detached from the caravan’s vehicle carrier. You can let go. Quietspring detached from his ray. The sensorsuit, despite the goo’s incursion, shielded him from space long enough to be picked up.

  Gravitydancer and Spaceripper were waiting on the bridge.

  She hugged him. “Oh, Quietspring.” Spaceripper put a hand on his shoulder. Quietspring looked around. “Dad?”

  Gravitydancer’s lips trembled. “I’m sorry.”

  “Chief?”

  She swallowed.

  Quietspring took her hand. “I’m sorry.”

  Their heads touched. Shared grief eased the pain.

  Spaceripper engulfed them in a massive hug. “They will be remembered.”

  A few moments later, the hunter said, “But what about those rays?”

  Quietspring told his tale, and the rays’ tale. They could unite, cooperate. It could be a new dawn. Man and ray together, cruising the stars.

  Outside, the rays grazed on spacetime.

  Gravitydancer moved to the holo-display. There were still some sparks and leaks, but it was functional enough. She watched the herd. “Could it really?”

  Quietspring nodded. “Trust me.”

  A thoughtful look crossed Gravitydancer’s face. “Okay, let’s try this.”

  Quietspring danced in the nothingness.

  His ray danced with him. Bonds formed quickly between ray and rider. Quietspring had become a pilot of a living spaceship. In fact, he was no longer the only one. A young girl, sensitive as Quietspring was, swam next to him in her own baby ray. Shared sensations, shared minds, shared space.

  The rays were magnificent. And so much more mutable than they seemed. They could engulf entire spaceships and take them along for a ride. They could even be turned into spaceships themselves. Spaceripper was leading the effort to sculpt one of the larger ray’s insides to make it suitable for large scale human populations.

  Word had reached the main fleet by now. For the first time in the exodus, the bubble of expansion came to a halt. All along its edge, contact was made. Hunter and prey turned into cooperators. There was dissent, but the sense of discovery quashed it without too much trouble.

  Quietspring could already picture it. The bubble would start growing again soon. Faster than it ever had. So fast that it might divide into many bubbles. Some would continue the search for a new home. Others might continue to explore the prairie of stars, to seek the frontier.

  Quietspring would be one of the latter.

  Being one with the ray was bliss. He felt less and less inclined to leave it and kept spending more and more time with it.

  A burst of waves came directly at him, modulated by the goo. With the help of his ray, he unscrambled them.

  “Quietspring, come home. Your daughter and I are waiting.”

  Gravitydancer and his newborn child were the only thing that could make him leave his union.

  For now.

  10

  Calliope Stark: Bone Tree Bounty Hunter

  Edmund R. Schubert

  It was half past high noon when Calliope Stark strode into the largest saloon in Blackwater, Utah, her right hand clutching a wanted poster, her left hand resting atop the weathered wooden grips of her Colt Peacemaker. On her other hip was holstered a Colt Dragoon, the other star in a lead-spewing cast of characters that featured a sawed-off shotgun slung high between her shoulder blades, an 1858 Remington six-shooter under her long skirt (strapped to the outside of her left thigh, just above her knee), and twin Derringers, one inside each of her dusty black boots.

  The abundance of guns was an insur
ance policy because when it came time to feed her bone tree, there wasn’t much margin for error. And it was well past time to feed that tree. She could feel it; her bones were as brittle as old glass, and her body ached as if she’d been thrown from a horse and landed flat on her back—fifteen or twenty times. She’d waited too long, and she was paying for it.

  So it was time for Calliope to kill someone. Quickly. Her one hard and fast rule was that if she had to kill someone, it had to be someone who deserved to die. Someone who needed to die. Hence the wanted poster.

  “Anyone know the whereabouts of this man?” She thrust the wrinkled brown poster into the air, holding it high overhead. “I’ll give ten percent of the reward to the first person who tells me where I can find Dan Hatcher. That’s a hundred dollars for nothing more than a few words.”

  A murmur spread through the room, a wounded dove of disbelief, fluttering from lip to lip, from man to man. In other words, the usual bullshit she heard every time she showed up in a new town.

  “A woman bounty hunter?”

  “A woman bounty hunter?”

  “A woman bounty hunter?”

  In all her twenty-seven years on Earth, that was the one thing that rankled her most. She dropped the wanted poster, drew her Colts, and cocked them, saying, “I swear on the grave of every asshole in this room, the next man who says, ‘A woman bounty hunter,’ gets a bullet.”

  A long-haired trapper in a fringed buckskin jacket turned from the bar to face her, a shot-glass of whisky between two filthy fingers. “A lady bounty hunter?”

  Calliope wouldn’t kill someone for something as petty as being called a woman bounty hunter. It did piss her off, but being pissed off was a lousy reason to kill. Calliope did, however, need people to believe that she was not to be trifled with, that she would kill anyone who crossed her. Respect and its overgrown little brother fear were the currencies of the West. Being a woman meant working twice as hard for half the pay. So she pivoted to the whiskey-drinking trapper and shot him in the thigh. He collapsed in a cursing heap, the whiskey glass landing unbroken next to him and rolling in a slow, resonant circle.

  The bartender whipped a shotgun from beneath the mahogany bar and pointed it at her. “He didn't say ‘woman bounty hunter.’”

  “That's why I only shot him in the leg,” Calliope replied. “And if someone’s defense for being an asshole rests on semantics, I'll shoot them twice: once between the eyes and once between the legs. Not necessarily in that order.”

  Before the bartender could react, Calliope shot him, too, grazing his shoulder, drawing blood but damaging his pride more than his body. As his shotgun clattered to the floor, the red-faced man howled. “What in hell did you do that for?”

  Calliope sneered. “You said, ‘woman bounty hunter.’ I told you what would happen.”

  A fiery, piercing pain shot up her spine. Damn bone tree. When it lacked sustenance, it broadcast its hunger pangs in crippling waves.

  Calliope looked from the bartender to the long-haired trapper and back to the bartender. Both of them were bleeding, wounded, and disarmed. It would be so easy to finish either of them off. Get what she needed and be done with it.

  So easy.

  But neither of them needed to die. They were annoying, yes. But nothing more.

  Damn it. The only thing worse than having emotions was having a conscience.

  She bent over and retrieved the wanted poster from the floor, wincing at how much it hurt to straighten back up. “Let’s try this again. Anyone know where I can find Dan Hatcher? I know he recently shot up this shit-hole town. Where’d he get to next?”

  One of the saloon’s whores piped up, saying, “Where’d he get to? More like where didn’t he get to? That man is everywhere. T’ain’t natural.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Calliope asked.

  Nearly twenty men developed an intense interest in the drink in their hand or the cards on the table in front of them.

  Good Lord, Calliope thought. They’re more afraid of Dan Hatcher, who’s not even in the room, than they are of me and my guns, right here, right now. That means he’s done nasty shit to these people. Real nasty.

  Calliope preferred to get confirmation before she killed someone. Now she had it; these folk’s fear spoke volumes. The bone tree needed to be fed and watered, and Calliope needed to be the one who killed the person whose blood and bones she scattered around the tree. But that was it. The tree didn’t care whose blood and bones she brought—it wasn’t sentient or anything batshit crazy like that. But Calliope did care who she killed. She considered it her greatest weakness—her greatest vulnerability.

  She scanned the saloon for threats. You never knew when someone would try something stupid, and the odds went up exponentially if people were scared. And these folks were plenty scared.

  But no one looked twitchy—no one’s hands went underneath a table or inside of a jacket—so she holstered her Colts, turned, and exited through the swinging doors. Experience had taught her that the sooner she left after shooting someone, the better. Sling some well-placed lead and get the hell out, was her philosophy. The stories they’ll make up about you are always twice as good as the ones you’d tell about yourself.

  Calliope headed for the sheriff’s office and jailhouse. If you were new in town, the saloon was the place to go to make a memorable first impression. But the jailhouse was where you went if you wanted reliable information.

  As Calliope stepped off the saloon’s front porch, a dozen men on horseback stampeded through town, headed for the jailhouse, and it only took one glance to know they were trouble. Only two groups that size rode that hard for the jailhouse, and this wasn’t the group that wore badges.

  Calliope studied them as they galloped by, assessing them. They were a peculiar sight for three reasons: first, the men did none of the usual whooping, hollering, and random gun-shooting that a gang that size normally delighted in. With the exception of the thundering of the horse’s hooves, they were virtually silent.

  Second, one of them was a black man, and black and white generally didn’t ride together.

  And third, their leader was a freckle-faced, redheaded young man who couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old. Calliope had seen gangs led by eighteen-year-olds before, and they were invariably the most undisciplined bunch imaginable. But this crew was more like an orchestra on horseback: finely-tuned and under the guidance of a young man who was in control of their every movement.

  Normally Calliope enjoyed a good orchestra, but this group set her instincts on edge.

  As soon as the gang passed by, Calliope jigged across the manure-filled street, holding up her skirt as she side-stepped the multitude of steaming brown piles. It wasn’t the fastest way to cross the street, but she’d be damned if she was going to dip her boots or skirt in shit.

  With that bit of street-dancing accomplished, she edged her way down the row of wooden storefronts, getting as close to the red-brick jailhouse as possible. This had the potential to get messy. Cattle slaughterhouse messy.

  That was lucky; it meant that if she played her cards right, bounty money aside, she might not need Dan Hatcher at all.

  As she drew closer, she calculated how best to play things: clueless brunette or frisky sex kitten. Both had advantages, but she concluded that men as disciplined as these would have no patience for cluelessness. Sex kitten it was then. She undid the top two buttons of her blouse. Discipline was no match for breasts.

  Most of the gang dismounted and filed one at a time into the jailhouse, but two of them took positions outside the door. One noticed Calliope’s approach, so she adopted a flirtatious demeanor.

  “Hello, boys,” she said with a toss of her head and her hip.

  Both men raised their rifles and aimed them at her. “Turn around and walk the other way,” ordered the taller of the two.

  Calliope noted that both men carried Spencer Repeaters, rifles favored by Union soldiers during the Recent
Unpleasantness Between the States. That explained their discipline; despite being dressed like cowboys, they were ex-military. She’d need to proceed with caution. The Spencer Repeater fired a rimfire cartridge the size of a .56 caliber musketball, combining the raw power of a musket with the speed of a lever-action rifle.

  On the other hand, she knew that soldiers, more than anyone else, were suckers for a sex kitten. She removed her silver-plated hair comb and let her hair down, slipping the comb into her skirt’s pocket with her left hand while twirling a strand of her shoulder-length auburn hair around the middle finger of her right.

  She also adopted a light Southern accent. If she were lucky, they wouldn’t notice it hadn’t been there a second ago. If these truly were ex-Union-soldiers, distracting them with sex while irritating them with Southerness ought to do the job quite nicely.

  “Now, now, fellas,” she sung, slipping deeper into her role. “I’m only here to visit my cousin. Won’t be in your way the teensiest bit.”

  The taller soldier placed his thumb on the rifle’s hammer and made a show of cocking it. He didn’t say a word.

  Calliope continued ambling toward him. She needed to get herself into position next to the jailhouse’s four-foot by four-foot paned window.

  The shorter soldier, who Calliope realized wasn’t that short at all, the other one was just that tall, lowered his rifle and said, “You got a death wish, lady? Man said walk the other way.”

  With her peripheral vision, Calliope glanced through the enormous, multi-paned window, assessing the situation inside. Within the jailhouse, the redheaded gang leader stood with his back to the window, pistol pointed at a deputy who was failing miserably in his effort to look unafraid. The redhead had three of his men with him; Calliope assumed the rest were in the back, liberating a comrade or two.

  Calliope took one more step toward the soldier pointing his Spencer at her. It was a calculated risk. The problem was, sometimes she sucked at math. The soldier fired. Half a second too late, Calliope threw herself sideways. The massive bullet tore through her left shoulder, and her already brittle bones exploded into shrapnel, shredding everything.