Doctor Who_ Peacemaker - James Swallow [37]
Godlove was beside himself with rage. He wavered between putting a bullet in the animal’s head, putting the poor beast out of its misery, and the realisation that without the injured animal there was no way they would be able to get the wagon to the next frontier township.
Godlove and Walking Crow argued again, and as night fell the issue had still to be resolved to Godlove’s satisfaction. That was when the burning stars came.
From out of the East, streaking across the sky leaving fingers of smoky orange behind them, a cluster of glowing white droplets screamed over their campsite and fell to the earth a few miles away.
They struck the ground with a rumble of thunder and left a bright glow hazing through the trees.
At first, Godlove was afraid of what the strange sky-fall could represent; but, minute by minute, he talked to himself, almost as if his curiosity and his greed were two other voices living inside the man’s head. In short order, he convinced himself that only a weak man would not wish to venture closer, and that riches and bounty from heaven could be waiting for them both.
Walking Crow did not believe that the Great Spirit would throw treasures at them like a petulant child tossing stones at a dog, but as always his counsel was ignored. The two of them ventured out at daybreak to see what remained of the burning stars.
They found, among a ring of trees that had fallen in a perfect, outward-facing circle, a curious pit in the earth that was blackened and burned, steeped with a strange smell that recalled the hot metal worked in a blacksmith’s, but also the stale blood of a battlefield.
The strange pieces of iron that was not iron were everywhere, and Godlove set Walking Crow to gathering them up, perhaps thinking 91
that they could make some small coin off their scrap value in the next town.
But it was at the very core of the burned landscape that they found the most peculiar thing. At best, Walking Crow could only describe what he saw as similar to the nest of a wasp hatchling, but made from threads of glass and not fibres of wood. It was broken open and a thick oil the colour of bile drooled out from it into the earth, making the ground wet and boggy.
And inside, a carving that looked like bone or perhaps metal, depending on how the light struck it. The shape was odd and strangely proportioned, and yet at first sight both men knew exactly what it was. The potential for lethality seemed to leak into the air around it, a potent aura of sleepy, ready menace.
Although Walking Crow had never seen anything like it in his life, he knew that it was a gun. He stroked it, ever so gingerly, brushing a finger over the whorled surface of the weapon. That touch brought a bitter cold to his marrow, a chill of such power that it felt like every winter the Pawnee had lived through all made into one. He recoiled.
Godlove, predictably, snatched it out of the cracked vessel and gripped it in his injured hand, the wound forgotten. He grinned and brandished it about like a child with a toy. Grinned and laughed and grinned, all until his scream broke through.
Walking Crow saw him fall. Alvin went to his knees on the mud and clutched the strange gun to his chest. That was when the weapon cooed and glowed a firefly green, casting a colour about Godlove’s ruined fingers.
When he gathered his wits and got back up, Walking Crow saw that Godlove’s broken digits were whole and set again, as new. Later, back at the wagon, he repeated the miraculous process to take away the horse’s lacerations. Godlove smiled a smile then, a look of such unadulterated greed that the Pawnee was silenced to see it.
And that was how it had begun.
His arms folded, the Doctor drummed his fingers on his elbows, thinking. ‘A cargo capsule, then,’ he reasoned. ‘Maybe a malfunction of the 92
hyperdrive, a photon shadow crossing the void conduit path at the wrong moment after a solar flare?’
The Pawnee’s brow furrowed. ‘Please do not