Gunfight at the O. D. Corral

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The inhabitants of Old Dodge arrived in disorganized waves under the ghostly light of the few security LEDs. They carried antique rifles or pistols from the Red Uprising, and even some dusty relics sleeping in attics and closets for years.

Helped by a dozen handling androids from the worm pools, they erected a semicircular barricade around the elevators in a single evening. The base was made up of concrete blocks taken from the silo that had collapsed after the droidodrone crash. Stuck between the rubble or riveted to the reinforcements, sharpened steel beams as tall as two Blue drums left a gap wide enough to slot a weapon’s muzzle between them. Every six feet or so, a crab-like farming robot anchored high halogen spotlights directed towards the four airlocks facing the makeshift Walls of Jericho.

Shortly before three p.m. Cronian Time, Lady Aïssata Carnegie III gathered the protein farmers around her while the androids tested the projectors one by one. Standing on a reinforced scaffolding further back from the barricade, she made a speech to reassure her worried-looking residents six times her age: “Citizens of Old Dodge! My friends! Our fathers and mothers came to Saturn after the Great Reset. Here, they dreamed of a better life far from the Martians and the Technos. They dreamed of freedom! And prosperity!” These first words were met with cheers and a few playful whistles. “Like them, we worked hard. Very hard! Against solar winds, shortages and isolation, we suffered to build this Eden!” A new wave of applause accompanied her prose. She climbed on a sandbag, waving a pair of thermic binoculars towards the airlocks. “But our success. And the values that sustain our freedom, have attracted jealousy. Treachery. Those marauders from Kuiper… should we let them have the medicines that are rightfully ours? Our hard-earned proteins? This community we have built?”

“What kind of child speaks like this?” Fate commented, leaning against the concrete wall between the two main elevators, far behind the captivated crowd. “Little Carnegie gained confidence. Don’t you agree, Miles? Miles?”

Sitting against a purring generator reeking of gasoline, her pilot was listening to music, eyes closed and his hands stuck beneath his yellow sweater. The volume pushed to the max, Fats Domino warbled through the headphones’ foam.

“Unbelievable…” she mumbled. Crossing her arms, she kicked him in the calves.

Aïssata Carnegie suddenly imposed silence as a huge squealing sound was heard above. Deprived of the air traffic control instruments, they have let Calamity Grace force open the defenseless doors of the corral.

“Found some ammo?” Miles yawned, getting up and stretching his arms.

“I only snatched a couple of clips that would fit… and a side gun from a granny heading back to the city below. Just in case…” she answered as she started walking towards the fatidic barricade. “Didn’t you pick up an old rifle from the farmers?”

“No.”

“Are you going to use the weapon you have been hiding under your unsightly sweater all along?” Fate teased him. “You are constantly reaching for something in there. I would bet my organic heart it is a gun.”

Miles chuckled as they arrived at the foot of Aïssata’s scaffolding. “I’m a white-collar geek. My skills are limited to efficiently use a terminal. And even then, I have trouble with the latest Macintosh computers. Can’t get around this ‘innovative’ mouse-thing. Doesn’t make sense.”

“You are impossible...”

“Quack!” responded the duck perched on the projector overlooking them.

“Napoléon’s worried,” Miles said. As they reached the metallic wall, he sat down on a rickety chair before rocking back and forth. “We’d better focus on what’s comin’. The minute the bullets fly, our proud defenders will go down like a fat kid on a seesaw.”

“Mean. But it is true.”

“Hope you have superpowers worthy of a robot-mutant with chrome plating.”

“I am not a—is coping with you and your pet considered a superpower?”

“No. Just pure insanity.”

“What are you going to do during our possible last stand? Snooze?”

His headphone back on his head, Miles looked at the ceiling. “I’ll do like your friend the yak: take a quick bullet, and end this misery.”

Fate grabbed his worn collar. “What is wrong with you?”

An explosion shook the first airlock on the left, near Andrew’s workshop. No depressurization could be heard, indicating the presence of well-prepared assault monopods behind the armored shutter in the dark.

“Hold your boomsticks, people,” Andrew said from his elevated nest alongside Aïssata. “Once we perceive footsteps, we turn on the searchlights to blind them!”

“It will be like hunting squirrels in a pecan orchard!” concluded a female voice from the right wing before several battle cries arose.

“Hush! Get ready!” the ten years old moon owner cut.

A sawing sound betrayed the advance of Calamity Grace’s troops, until it suddenly stopped. The hangar was plunged into silence for a minute. From where the base of the Plexiglass doors stood, whizzling white flares lit up the room before crashing to the ceiling, just above the defenders, revealing their barricade and the heads of the most curious.

“This is not good…” Fate reacted, straightening.

The clanking of the safeties echoed, and almost immediately a second explosion shook the hangar. The Plexiglas gates and railings slammed to the ground. A cloud of grit, lifted hats and scarves. Armored assailants could be heard scattering across the hangar.

Only light in the defenders’ ranks, the screen of Aïssata’s wrist-terminal flashed when she ignited the projectors. Alas, a haze of dust blocked their dazzling halos. Shadows could still be seen through the grit dynamics.

“Fire at will!” Andrew ordered, lifting his straw hat.

In total confusion, the people of Old Dodge unleashed hell.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

As the cloud billowed, sucked up by the single but powerful vent, a dozen men in black combat suits materialized. All equipped with the latest Techno-Marine weapons, they responded together. Bullet holes pierced the barricade’s steel fangs, and studded with lead the wall around the elevators. The loud burst forced most of the frightened defenders to duck behind the concrete base while destroying most of the floodlights.

Fate was one of the only brave ones still standing. She gingerly emptied her first clip, firing in short bursts at new enemies stepping across the Plexiglas doors. The odd P-90’s maneuverability appeared to be unparalleled between her surgeon hands.

“A righteous bodyguard…” Miles joked as she crouched, looking for her second clip in her overalls’ back pocket.

“Could you be more useful?”

“Should I?”

“Most definitely!”

“I ain’t no Quick Draw McGraw so always remember it was your idea…”

Waking up from his usual lethargy, Miles stood up before sticking his eye against a fuming bullet hole. Waving his fingers, he asked Fate for her secondary weapon which she gave to him with wariness.

“Wanna learn something chucklesome about the Baltimore-VII engine?” the Alliance man snickered, taking aim between two rusty spikes.

The woman quickly made the connection with Andrew’s shoddy workmanship; and especially the hazardous nuclear core still humming in his garage. “Miles, no!” she yelled after he cocked the hammer with two thumbs.

Before she could grab the barrel, he fired towards the workshop where most of the assailants had taken refuge under the disparate heavy fire. The pellet flew between two enemies cowering behind a collapsed pile of rubber landing monowheels, then loudly ricocheted against a starfighter’s shock absorbed on the wall. Despite hitting the magnetic hull of the Baltimore by pure luck, no catastrophic explosion shook the moon.

“Stop shooting!” Andrew yelled. “They’re hiding in my garage. There is a nuclear reactor running in there! You might hit it.”

Confiscating Miles’ weapon, Fate gave him a look which sparkled with both furor and fear. Her darkened red iris looked like a glittering magma chamber. “We are so lucky you cannot aim!”

“What’s the beef?” Miles complained in bad faith.

While she made the tremendous effort not to struggle her suicidal pilot on the spot, Aïssata ordered the worker robots to aim the remaining spotlights to the maintenance area below the control tower. There, confused members of Grace’s assault crew hid among the destroyed equipment.

Silence fell.

“Who’s the irresponsible son of a whore firing at a half-stripped Baltimore?” asked a woman through a croaky megaphone.

“We are talking about you, goofball…” Fate grunted as the coughing Forlorn pilot casted a glance at the maintenance hub.

“It’s Calamity Grace!” this one uttered.

Stepping out into the open with two armed robots as escort, Calamity Grace was wearing a heavy battle-armor, a cape and a black beret adorned with long sand-dotted feathers. The scratched insignia of the Metal Rain, the elite force of the Techno-Marine, adorned her breast plate on which laid her removable visor.

“Prepare to fire,” Aïssata ordered.

“Stop this madness!” reacted her enemy, bringing again the loud hailer to her crimson plastic lips. “I’ve heard of the Ringern pride, but can we not blow up a moon for that, right? Your moon.” She paused. “Didn’t we have a deal, Lady Carnegie?”

“Technos brought nothing but ruin!” a woman shouted.

“Go back home!” a farmer added.

“Home?” Grace snapped. Throwing her megaphone to her second in command, a tall guy behind her, she started screaming: “I was born on Ganymede. I don’t have a home. But I also have no allegiance to the Martians no more. You and I are victims of Lunar moguls and liars that your little countess here, with her fancy dynastic protein corral, is trying to emulate.” She breathed, watching the defenders’ heads poking out of the wall. “Like you I chose freedom. And, like you, I must take care of my family. I can’t go back to my children empty-handed, but I don’t want to turn this world into a new Ganymede either!”

“She said ‘her children’?” noted an android in the back.

“You wanted a deal, yet you sent a killing machine!” Andrew uttered. “You killed my wife!”

“And I’m terribly sorry, my friend...” Calamity Grace then stepped forward, alone in front of her lines, one hand over her holster at her belt. “What about settling this dispute yourself, my dear heiress? Like your beloved father would do, right?”

Still at Aïssata’s side, Andrew held the pirate at gunpoint with an old Beretta. But on her toes, the moon-owner lowered his weapon before grabbing it. Whispers ran across the citizens as the little lady climbed down from her scaffolding.

“Have you lost your mind, child? You are not planning on going there, are you?” Fate asked her when the supervisor arrived at the wall.

“You have an awful opinion of me, bodyguard…” Aïssata said in a quavering voice, asking for a leg up. “And you may be right. The corral is bankrupted. My father and grandfather would be laughing at me. I’m just a wannabe.”

“You are ten years old!” Fate reacted.

“Yes. But at this instant, I can do something they think I’d never have the courage to do.”

“Bless your heart, Miss Carnegie,” Andrew declared behind Miles’ back. “You’re a true lady.”

Quiet, Aïssata jumped to the other side of the barricade, tearing apart what was left of her red and black dress after a night building a barricade. Holding her head high, she slowly walked to her death in an old second skin with padded shoulders.

“Stupidest move I’ve ever seen…” Miles said, witnessing the scene like the others. “That’s the best way to get yourself framed on a wall.”

“Quack!” the duck reacted, landing on Fate’s shoulder.

“Are you all mad? That’s how adults settle disputes in Los Arriesgados, not children—Miles!” she gasped.

Helped by a crab-robot, the Alliance envoy had also leaped out of the makeshift bastion. His hands nonchalantly hidden beneath his sweater, he started approaching Calamity Grace and her dangerous crew.

“Pinch me, I am dreaming…” Fate grunted, scratching her earlobe.

The problematic bird obeyed by biting her FID-free finger, and received an angry slap.

Meanwhile, Calamity Grace, her second in command and the two ominous robots moved towards Miles and Aïssata. Hand on the butt of her pistol still in her holster, the pirate captain enjoyed the premise of the incoming execution.

The red-feathered duck quaked again, biting the young woman’s cheek. His hard lamellae left bloody marks which quickly healed.

“Leave me alone, Napoléon! What do you want me to do? Dying foolishly is not on my agenda!” She noticed that all around her, the defenders were almost all out of combat.

The moon was doomed. She was doomed.

“Drat… I do no want to die on a moon looking like Jay Leno… I do not even know who he is…”

“Quack!” Anchored to the young woman’s collarbone with chrome-plating, the annoying copilot started pecking her on the underside of her chin. He badly wanted her to look up.

“What no—Oh!” she exclaimed.

Above the scene, a silent dark shape walked in the air.