Timpanogos by D. J. Butler

invasion or oppression, but not the sort
of force that invades its neighbor.”
    “There you have it,” Hickman agreed.
    “So I think the attack will be aerial.”
    Hickman’s evasive look was confirmation enough.  
    “Perhaps an attack upon Chicago.”   Poe considered.   “Though of course, one advantage of an airborne military force would be
the ability to attack behind enemy lines.   Pittsburgh?   New York
City?   Perhaps the war will
commence with an assault upon Boston, to remind the overweening Yankees of the
celebrated Tea Party?”
    Hickman shrugged.   “I don’t know,” he mumbled.   “I ain’t never been much for tea.”
    “The delivery of a team of Danite assassins to President
Buchanan’s White House?” Poe proposed.   “I’d hate to give you any good ideas, but of course, you are clever men,
and you know your own weapon’s capabilities much better than I ever could.   All I can hope to do is second-guess
you.”
    “That ain’t my part in it,” Hickman grumped.   “I ain’t much of a planner.”
    “No…?   I suppose
not.   What about…” Poe let a little
suspense build.   “What about the
phlogiston guns?   Why rely on
assassins at all, when you could just burn the White House to the ground?”
    “What, just the one gun?” Hickman snorted.   “It ain’t all that impressive, not all
by itself.”
    “Why just one gun?” Poe asked, and then guessed at another connection.   “Why one gun, when there are four
ships?”
    Four ships, Poe thought.   He knew that Orson Pratt had built four ships because
Captain Jones had told him so.   It
didn’t seem to be uncommon knowledge.   But now the number stuck in the back of his mind like a morsel of food
he could not swallow.   What was
there about the number four that bothered him so?
    “Hell if I know.”
    “Rubies,” Roxie said.  
    Sam Clemens looked like he’d bit off and swallowed part of
his cigar.   It might have been the
result of his standing right between the blue and the yellow lanterns, but he
looked positively green.
    “What about rubies?” Poe asked her.
    She shook her head impatiently.   “I don’t know the details.   The phlogiston gun works on rubies, but Deseret doesn’t have
any.”
    Poe examined Hickman’s face.   He didn’t think the kidnapper had any idea what they were
talking about, and he had a sudden and terrible insight into why the number
four tickled his memory so.   He
started coughing, tried to stop and found that he couldn’t.   He pulled a handkerchief from his
pocket.
    “Let’s step away for a moment and discuss.”
    “Shall I kill him?” Rockwell seemed eager, and Poe wondered
if it was an act.
    “Not yet,” Poe directed, between hard, violent coughs.   “But lets leave the scarabs on his belly
as a reminder.”   He held the
handkerchief carefully in front of his face to catch the sputum.   There would be blood in it, he knew.
    Not yet, he thought.   Let me see this through first, and then take me, but just not yet.
    *    *    *
    “You didn’t have to poke fun at me,” Tam muttered to Sam
Clemens as they all moved away from Bill Hickman and huddled around the back of
the Danites’ steam-truck.   “Not
with all of them watching.”
    “Not now, O’Shaughnessy.”   Clemens didn’t look irritated, but he looked distracted and
uncomfortable.   The poor idjit had
chewed through three of his fancy cigars in as many minutes.   Jesus and Brigit, though, who wouldn’t
be uncomfortable, with all the talk of phlogiston guns and flying ships?
    Tam was uncomfortable himself.   He’d nearly been blown to bits twice in one day by something
called a machine-gun , first at the hands
of an overstuffed circus midget with an unholy affection for someone else’s
little boy, and then by the wee tyke himself.   He’d just about had enough of the Kingdom of Deseret.
    It made him think of the Molly Malones and the Pinkertons
with something approaching