Clockwork Century Omnibus by Cherie Priest

Author:Cherie Priest
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, Steampunk, Horror, Alternate History, General, Science Fiction, Historical, clockwork century, Fiction, cherie priest
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Six

North Texas was as good a place to stop as any, and on the edge of Oneida was a temporary hydrogen dock—the kind that was scarcely temporary anymore, and had become a small town of its own, hanging on to the settlement’s edge like a barnacle … a barnacle that might explode and take half the desert with it, given just the right sort of accident. Bigger cities had bigger, better regulated docks; but on the unincorporated frontier, these mobile constructions squatted wherever they found a place to do so. Dangerous, dirty, and marginally managed by whoever was richest and had the biggest guns, the docks were not popular with travelers or merchants, but they were necessary. And heaven knew the air pirates were happy to make use of them.

All across the Panhandle, the flat, brown earth was speckled with tufts of dark grass, cactus nubs, and tumbleweeds being kicked about by the occasional dust devil. It was a dry, dull, featureless place in Cly’s opinion, but he didn’t have to live there, so he didn’t feel moved to complain about it.

As the Naamah Darling arrived, the whole settlement—hydrogen barnacle and all—was digging out from underneath a windstorm that had knocked down horses, sent water troughs rolling through the streets, and picked roofs off buildings only to fling them miles out into the empty, prickly nothing beyond the town’s grid.

Pale yellow sand the color of sun-bleached leather drifted into piles in the corners of fences and up against the warped wood walls of the church, bar, saddle company, law office, laundry, jail, dry goods store, and clapboard train station with its lonely pair of tracks. Men were already setting upon the tracks and sweeping them, and from the drifts of bone-dry dirt, the occasional flap of canvas would disturb the seamless layer of brown.

Dirigibles large and small were tangled together on the dock’s eastern edge, implying a western zephyr that had moved with the might of a bored god’s fist. Riggers and engineers swarmed around these docks, shouting to cooperate and untangle the lobster claws and lines, and to dig out the pipes themselves to determine what had been uprooted, and what had only been bent out of place.

But the western line of the dock was nearly unoccupied, save for two small mail express dirigibles that had been battened down with better rigging. Cly set his own bird down beside them, and ten minutes later he was on his way to town.

Fang and Kirby Troost remained with the ship to see if the sulfuric acid vats were stable and could be hooked up to the hydrogen hoses, and if not, to assist with repairs. But Houjin accompanied the captain, ostensibly to get a gander at Oneida. Houjin was seventeen, and nothing short of brilliant. But he’d spent most of his life sheltered under the Seattle streets. Any chance to get out of the city was a chance for him to learn, observe, and drive people crazy.

“This place is a wreck!” the kid declared.

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