Cultwick: The Sweeper Bot Plague (20 page)

“What about the memory study?” Erynn asked looking up from the gauntlet.

“Frankly that was the least interesting one,” he said. “The scientists involved suggested it might improve both long-term and short-term memory retention, but their findings were somewhat ambiguous.”

“Are you saying it doesn’t work?” she asked.

“Mmm, I would not say that, my dear,” he replied. “I just do not think it will become the miracle drug they wish it to be.”

“Oh, I see,” she said dolefully, as she returned to work.

He shifted his head to the side and thought for a moment before saying, “Though I imagine with the right mixture, something could be created to do just that.”

“Really?” Erynn asked, as she again looked up from the gauntlet.

“Anything is possible, my dear,” he assured her. “If you want I can look into it.”

“That’d be great, Max,” she said.

A few more minutes passed, while Erynn pieced components together in the contraption. She had taken out several blackened and worn cogs, replacing them with shiny, new pieces. Once she finished, Rowland rolled his fingers back and forth across his hand, ensuring he still had full functionality.

“Good as new?” she asked him.

“As always,” he told her.

“You head on back to the Arcadia,” she instructed. “I want to pick out a few more things, so I can repair Tern.”

Rowland acknowledged her, nodding his head. He continued to play with his gauntlet, moving his fingers around and squeezing his hand into a fist. He exited the shop, intending to go back to the saloon, but he felt coldness in his arm where the gauntlet began. He concluded that it was time to counteract the sensation with the biojunk he always kept on his person.

Reaching into a
pocket, he pulled out a syringe of the solution and jammed it into his arm. Creeping warmth spread throughout his arm and into the rest of his body, as he walked back to the saloon. By the time he arrived there, the cold was gone, and the professor was feeling fantastic.

Chapter 21. Ryn the Abducted

Erynn was seated at a table in the corner of the hotel room that they purchased for the week. Strewn out on the table were the various pieces of Tern in disarray. His head was mostly intact, but the framework that made up his chest was nearly in complete disrepair.

Next door in the adjoining room, Pearl and Vincent were passing the time by playing dice. The night before Vincent got the idea in his head that Pearl
wouldn’t be a very good bluffer. It turned out he had been wrong. Ever since then, he had been trying to win his money back. Based on the periodic curses Erynn heard, it couldn’t be described as going well for him.

The three of them had made their way to Willow Switch and
spent most of their time there in the hotel rooms. Willow Switch’s point of notoriety was that it was the primary hub for the railway system. This connected them directly to Cultwick City, which meant there was a higher level of empire presence throughout the town. They planned to wait, out of sight, in the hotel room until the following day, when the train with the medical supplies would be coming through town.

With so much time spent in the room, Erynn had focused it on creating and augmenting
her chromesmith wares. Her first task was to create a powerful shotgun from pieces she had acquired from Emma in Chrome City. It had turned out quite well, because the original parts were mostly in working order. After the bank robbery, Erynn worried for Pearl’s safety, so the shotgun was intended to alleviate some of those concerns.

Following the shotgun came several ideas to help with the train heist. She made a contraption that would handle any sealed train car doors by bypassing the locking mechanisms. It was roughly the size of a coin, but its inner workings were quite complicated, and she was quite impressed with
the elegance of her design.

Erynn’s third creation was a large, bronze
, pyramid-shaped device. The weapon design was based partially on the technology she had built in Rowland’s gauntlet. The intention was that it would explode in a burst of electricity similar to the kind the gauntlet was capable of discharging. She only had enough components to build the one device and couldn’t test it beyond the theoretical application.

One of her more cunning crea
tions was a modified child’s toy. She had found several spherical, bomb-shaped, wind-up walking toys in Emma’s shop and combined them with a smoke version of Vincent’s knockout poison. She wasn’t sure how they would use such a device, but she decided to construct half a dozen of the walking paralyzers.

On that day, however, s
he was focusing her efforts on repairing her automaton, Tern. Erynn had managed to get one of his arms back into working order, yet she knew she was going to have to acquire some new parts if she wanted to get him back into a functioning state. She wasn’t very familiar with the town, but the chromesmith was hopeful they might have some of the parts she needed.

Erynn made her way next door where Pearl was wearing Vincent’s hat and had acquired several pieces of his gear. The bounty hunter looked to have lost all of his money and was bartering with anything of value he still had.

“Hey there, kitten,” Pearl greeted Erynn as she walked into the room.

“Pearl,” she nodded and smiled, “I see you’re still taking advantage of Vincent here.”

“I’m just tryin’ to let him make his money back,” she explained slyly.

“Cheating me is what she’s doing, Clover,” Vincent said.

“It’s not my fault yer an awful gambler,” Pearl suggested. “And I have, after all, spent a lot of time in saloons, Mr. Rourke. I’ve picked a few things up over the years.”

“Well, try to get his duster if you can, Pearl,” Erynn said. “I think you’d look good in that.”

Pearl smiled, while Vincent grimaced at that comment.

“Anyway,” she continued. “I need some parts for Tern. You know this town fairly well, Vincent, right? Know where I might pick some things up?”

“Uh, yeah,” he answered, rolling his dice again and evoking a miserable expression. “There’s a smith shop on the western edge of town. Might find something there.”

“I’ll give that a try.” Erynn began, “I’d wish you good luck with your game, but I have a feeling it won’t help.”

“Be careful out there,” Pearl said, as she walked to the door.

Erynn left Pearl and Vincent gambling in the hotel room and headed out to find the shop.
Roaming around Willow Switch were a plethora of citizens that appeared to have close ties to the empire, so she was forced to stay off the main roads lest she be seen by a corpsman.

Ducking through a narrow alleyway, she found a stray black cat roaming toward
the opposite end of the walkway. When it saw her, it stopped and sat down, staring at her intently. She was slightly unnerved by the intensity of the creature and decided to veer off through another alleyway to get to the store.

She
left the side streets and soon arrived at the shop Vincent had indicated to her. There were several bins of assorted mechanical parts and equipment pinned to the walls. A man sat behind the counter, flipping through a newspaper, ignorant to the goings on of his shop. In the corner, a woman worked her way through the parts of one of the bins, trying to match up specific parts.

Erynn began looking for a new input screen, keyboard interface, and a punch card slot. Those were the major components of Tern
that had been destroyed in the bank vault.

Before she was able to find what she needed, however, the woman approached Erynn and asked, “Do you know anything about rebuilding a pistol?”

In a way, the woman reminded her of Vincent. She wore mostly tan and brown leathers with a bandanna hanging around her neck. Her tan shirt was hidden beneath a brown jacket and her pants were very tight and consisted of vertical black and brown stripes.

Her hair was dusty brown and hung down to her shoulders underneath a short, musty, old top hat. She had a gunslinger belt slung low around her waist with one pistol on her
right and an empty holster on her left. The woman held a broken gun in her hand, and overall, Erynn thought, she looked to be quite used to life in the west.

“Hi, I’m Lucy,” she said. “I’m decent with a gun, but I’ve never been one for putting ‘em back together for shit.”

“Um, Ryn, and yeah,” the chromesmith began. “I can put a gun back together. What’s the problem with it?”

“I managed to rupture the damn cylinder,” she explained. “Luckily it happened only after I’d fired the last shot of the day.” Lucy held out the revolver for Erynn to examine.

“Yeah, that’s pretty well destroyed,” she noted looking at the firearm. “You probably just need a better quality of metal. Surely there’s something in here to replace it.”

Erynn started digging through one of the bins until she found a cylindrical tube of metal. She then proceeded to tap the metal
tube against the metal of the bin and listen to the sound.

“Mmm, not great,” she said and threw the tube back into the mix of parts.

She again started digging through the bin and eventually found a longer and thicker piece of metal. Again, she tapped the metal against the bin and listened to the sound it made.

“This oughta do,” Erynn said, handing the piece to Lucy.

“I don’t suppose I could get you to put this fucking thing back together for me?” Lucy asked. “I’d be willing to pay you for your services.”

“Yeah, if you’d like, I can do that,” Erynn answered.

“I’ll go pay for the part, if you could get started,” Lucy said handing the gun to Erynn before walking over to the counter with the replacement part.

The chromesmith was quickly able to remove the old cylinder from the revolver and then waited for Lucy to
come back with the part.

Lucy soon returned with the new tube and handed it to Erynn for assembly, saying, “Here you are.”

Erynn slid the component into place with ease and twisted the cylinder into a snug position. She then handed the pistol to Lucy and added, “Nothing to it.”

“You certainly make it look fucking easy,” she said. “How much do I owe you
, kid?”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Erynn told her. “Like I said, there was nothing to it.”

“Well, I’m appreciative regardless,” Lucy said, sliding the gun into the empty holster at her waist. “You have yourself a good damn day, Ryn.”

Lucy left the shop, while Erynn returned to her task of finding parts to fix Tern. She eventually found a screen and keyboard, but the punch card slot was nowhere to be seen. She
wasn’t too surprised though, as that technology was considered out of date. It could practically be considered an antique at this point, she thought.

Erynn took her items over to the counter where the man asked her, “You get everything you need?”

“Not quite, but I think it’ll do for now,” she answered.

She paid the man what she owed him and made her way outside with the new parts in a small, brown bag. Erynn had only made it a few steps when she heard the click of a pistol and felt the end of a barrel in her back.

“Erynn Clover,” a woman’s voice said. “Put your hands up.”

Erynn complied reluctantly, dropping the bag
to the dusty ground, while two additional men with shotguns approached her from the front. One of the men took the pistol from her waist and handed it to the woman behind Erynn, while the other picked up her bag of parts she had just bought. The woman stepped around where Erynn could see her, revealing herself as Lucy, the woman she just helped.

“Oh, come on,” Erynn began. “You’ve got to be freaking kidding me! I just helped you fix that gun and first thing you do with it is shove it in my back?”

Lucy smiled and looked down at her gun before saying, “Much as I appreciate you fixing my pistol, honey, this is just business. You’ve got one hell of a reward out for your capture. Now I’m no friend of the empire, but I’ll certainly take easy money when it presents itself.”

“
Never thought of myself as easy money,” Erynn dryly stated. “Can I put my hands down now? You took my only weapon.”

“I suppose that’s fine, sweetheart,” Lucy told her. “Now all that’s left is to take you over to the sheriff’s office and collect my
enormous fucking reward.”

Erynn lowered her arms, and Lucy continued,
“Sheriff’s jailhouse is just down the street, so move that pretty ass of yours, eh?”

She walked forward with the three bounty hunters trailing along behind her. They each still held their guns firmly pointed toward her back.

“You bounty hunters have been more trouble than the corpsmen, you know,” Erynn said.

“
That’s not too surprising,” Lucy replied. “Have you seen your bounty? That damn thing is higher than any the empire has ever had posted. It’s pretty fucking impressive. You must’ve pissed off the wrong damn people.”

“I guess you could say that
,” Erynn said. “Though, I didn’t realize that I was the biggest threat the empire had.”

“
Must be,” Lucy said. “They updated your bounty a few days back. They say you helped rob the Ash Cloud bank. Say that you’re connected to that fucking rebellion nonsense. Hell of a thing, kid.”

“News travels fast,” Erynn said.

“Looks like we’re here, honey,” Lucy said, stopping in front of the sheriff’s jailhouse. “I’m real sorry to do this to you. You seem like a nice enough kid, but like I said, it’s just business. Now head on inside, if you would.”

Erynn walked up the steps to the jailhouse with Lucy and her lackeys following behind. The sheriff was seated at a desk and two deputies were playing cards at a table.

“Howdy, sheriff,” Lucy said as they walked in. “I’ve found ‘heretic,’ Erynn Clover for you, and I’ve come for the bounty.”

“Well, goddamn,” the sheriff said. “I never expected the famous Ms. Clover would
actually show up on our doorstep.”

“Must be your lucky day,” Erynn said.

The sheriff continued, “Rufus, show her to her new quarters and then run and tell that operative woman that she was right about her being here.”

One of the deputies stood up, grabbing a ring of keys, and he escorted her to a cell, locking it behind her. He then tossed the keys back onto the sheriff’s desk and headed outside past Lucy and her men.

“I’ll go ahead and take my money now if that’s alright with you sheriff,” Lucy said.

“Well, we can manage that,” he said. The sheriff then walked over to a tall safe in the corner. He spun the dial on the safe back and forth several times before eventually swinging
the door open. He counted out several bags of coins and handed them to Lucy’s men.

“That looks a little light, lawman,” Lucy said as he closed the safe.

“Oh?” the sheriff asked. “You weren’t thinking you would get the whole bounty did you? That was for her accomplices too. This is what you get for just her.”

“The posting clearly stated--” she started to say.

“You’ll take what you get and be happy with it, bounty hunter,” a voice said from behind her.