Steam Ch. 02

"I...suppose so ma'am," he said quietly. She moved closer, licking her lips. The fingers of her left hand curled lightly against his collarbone, trailing down his chest. His eyes closed, and he lifted his chin to close the distance. Leather squeaked around his wrists. The binds prevented him from getting closer.

"Well then," she said, backing away from his face and grinning. "You might be able to help me." Betty turned to sit on him like he was an actual chair, setting her feet just outside of his. "You see... Oh, hold on, gotta stretch." She placed her hands on his knees and arched her back, popping it while pushing her butt hard against his lap.

"Oh dear," he whispered, leaning his head back. His hips pushed up against her reflexively. She grinned, even though he couldn't see, and took a drag of the nearly dead cigarette and through it away into the corner of the room.

"You see," she continued, "it says on this list, which I came into possession of through very strange means, that there are only three people who know the combination to that very large metal door in the back there." She pointed at the names as she ran down the list. "A miss Beverly Tanner, president of your fine company, mister Buck Buckley, your boorishly named district manager, and one mister Jeffery Speakeasy." Betty slapped the page. "Well that's you isn't it?" He gulped.

"Yes ma'am," Jeffery said.

"Hmm," she said, rocking her hips slowly back and forth on top of him. He groaned, and she could feel how hard he was even through the cloth between them. Betty turned and knelt in front of him, rested her elbow his thighs and met his eyes. He was breathing heavily, mouth slightly open. "Well, dandy boy, it seems we may have just created a state of mutual beneficence." She pushed her hand down his thigh, and let her thumb ride up the shaft of his cock when she got to it.

"My lord," he gasped, shaking his head. "Ma'am, please, I'm not... in possession of the... oh dear god," he said as she pushed the full weigh of her palm against him, wrapping her fingers around him through his silk trousers. "No matter... oh my...I can't tell you." Deft fingers quickly unhinged his belt, slid it loose and let it fall to the floor. A wicked grin slid across her teeth.

"Oh, you want me to stop dandy boy?" Betty asked, ripping her hand down and sending the buttons of his fly scattering across the floor. He said nothing. "I didn't think so." Betty backed off him and stood, unbuttoning her embroidered leather vest and setting it on the back of one of the unused chairs her posse had pushed to side earlier, and then unhooked her pistol belt and hung it from the same chair. Slowly, she unbuttoned the top three buttons of her shirt and rolled up the sleeves. Jeffery's eyes rested on the exposed tops of her breast, achingly rolling from freckle to freckle.

"I'm going to let you in on a little fact, dandy boy," she said, green eyes half lidded and locked on his. Every step she took toward him thudded in his heart. The thin silk of her rumpled shirt did little to hide the size and outline of her breasts. They sashayed as she walked, her nipples tracing little circles back and forth against the fabric. She sat on him, straddled him, and pushed back his forehead to force his eyes up to hers. "Nobody can keep a secret from Brass Buckle Betty."

Buttons popped and clattered across the floor as she ripped open the front of his dress shirt, rolling on the floorboards and getting lost in the gaps. She pulled out a silver tube of lipstick from her back pocket, and twisted it in front of him so that he could see the color. Fresh, deep brown, just like the smattering of freckles at the top of her chest. Soft blue eyes enviously traced the line of her lip as the lipstick colored it. Betty smacked her lips and grinned.

"Do you want to know why?" She asked, using the lipstick to draw a pentagon on the front of his chest. With a few quick gestures, she added glyphs and a circle to the inside of the pentagon. His face was a mask of confusion. Betty winked. "Cause I'm magic baby." She pressed her hand on the sigil on his chest and kissed him. He moaned and kissed her back, their tongues meeting just past his lips.

Betty's hands snaked down his flanks, grabbed hold of the side of his trousers and pulled down, freeing his cock. Her fingers encircled him and he gasped and pushed his mouth against her harder. She broke the kiss and leaned back, sneering arrogantly. His dick was rock in her hand. She began pumping up and down slowly and he arched his back in return.

"Now what were you saying about that combination, dandy boy?"

"That. I. Can't..." His body shuddered as she picked up pace. She clucked her tongue at him.

"You... can't?" She asked, slowing down to rub the tip of his cock with her thumb in long, slow circles. Leather bindings screeched as his stomach flexed in response. Such a slender little man, thought Betty, this dandy boy. "Well I don't think that's true." Fingers squeezed and stroked. Jeffrey hissed and bit his lip. "Should I stop?"

"No," he groaned, "please, god no."

"Then you need to do something for me," she said.

"I can't ma'am." His breaths came quick and ragged. His ass flexed and his head rolled back, eyes focused on nothing. "Please. Understand."

"Oh, you don't have to darling," Betty said, leaning in. Her lips brushed his ear. Hot breath grazed his cheek, cooling the beads of sweat along his jawline. She whispered: "I just want you to say that you would give anything to cum right now." Her tongue flicked at his ear lobe. "Say it, and mean it."

"Anything," he whispered, then louder: "Anything. Oh fucking god anything."

"Deal," she whispered, wrenching his mouth to hers by his hair. He moaned into her mouth as she finished him off, his come speckling his pants and the back of her wrist.

"Oh, dear lord," he gasped as she broke the kiss. She let him rest his head on her shoulder as she finished the last few breathless strokes, pushing what was left out of him with her thumb. "Why did you... finish... when you knew I couldn't tell you what you needed to know?" Betty chuckled.

"Oh darling," she said, wiping herself clean with his shirt, "you just did." He met her eyes, confused. "108, right 236, left 614." His face fell.

"No. No, I didn't say," he protested, shaking his head in disbelief.

"You didn't have to darling," Betty said, slapping him squarely on his chest. "That there's a trade spell."

"Oh no," he said, leaning back to get a better look at his chest. Tears began welling up in his eyes. "Oh god what've I done. Oh shit."

"Sold the farm," Betty laughed, "least by the looks of it." Her attention moved to the back of the room. "Ya'll get that?"

"Yes ma'am," said Lucy Smalls from her position beside the door. Betty's second in command leaned her head out the door. "Buckle's done, get in here with the trolleys."

"Who is that?" Jeffrey asked, trying to twist his head around to see behind him. Fear had slit his throat, his face was bloodless. "Was...was there someone in here while we..."

"Hm?" Betty dropped a tobacco pouch and some rolling papers on the teller's window. "Was there somebody in here while I jerked you off?" She nodded nonchalantly. "Oh yeah. Well, for most of the time toward the end at least, not that that was very long by any stretch." Betty shrugged and rolled a cigarette with a quick, one-handed motion. Jeffery shook his head in slow disbelief, his eyes wide and staring. She popped the cigarette into her mouth.

"Fastest hands in the west," Betty added with a chuckle, fake shooting Jeffery in the chest with a finger gun. She jerked a thumb at the pouch of tobacco. "Want one? I'm always a fan of smoking afterwards." Her gaze dropped the flaccid remnants of his once-proud boner. "Er, um, regardless of whether or not afterwards constitutes a whole hell of a lot." Lucy sniggered from the door, raising a dark skinned hand to cover her mouth. Jeffery's blood found its way back into his face.

"You... you play as though this is some sort of... of fucking game woman?" He hissed rather than asked. "You... you have slain me! I am a dead man!"

"Your bosses are actually going to kill you over getting robbed?" Betty asked, snapping her fingers to light her cigarette. She held the spell a second too long and it burned her. She cursed under her breath and rubbed her thumb on her chaps.

"Worse! They will fucking fire me!" Betty took a drag off her cigarette and blew the smoke up into the rafters. The clatter of trolleys across the cobblestones outside began to echo through the building.

"You know," she said, "Lucy back there, well she killed about a dozen of your employees today. Far as I see it, you got off a might bit luckier than you're giving yourself credit for." He stamped his foot against the ground.

"Fuck you," he squawked, "you fucking two bit hand jobber. Go fuck yourself, you whore, what do you think of that?"

"Hmm," said Betty, nodding her head and raising an eyebrow. "I think I'll actually let my associate field that one. Ms. Smalls?" Lucy stomped up to Jeffrey from her position by the door, stood in front of him and leaned in. Lucy Smalls was a heavily built, dark skinned woman from the Ruined Isles. Lucy Smalls had once thrown a jane out of a three-story window for trying to short her after a trick. Lucy Smalls was not to be trifled with. She backhanded Jeffrey cold, slapping some sense into his head and some blood out of his face. She jabbed a finger into his face.

"No doing speaking like that to a fine lady like Buckle, yeah?" She asked. He shook his head. "Pretty little boys like you should keep their language soft like their hands, less they lose their tongues for not knowing how to use them. We have each other, little dandy?" He nodded and focused on his lap. Betty shook her head and motioned for Lucy to follow her outside. Lucy nodded, handing a slip of paper with the safe's combination to one of their company on the way out. She grabbed the boy's arm.

"Let our blood know," she said to him, "we only have eyes for metal and jewels. Send the magi in first, have them sniff out the ambuscades before we pack. We have each other?" He nodded and smiled.

"Ay, mom, to have and to hold," he responded with a snigger. Lucy chuckled and smacked him on the back of the head. He pushed the rumbling trolley inside. Lucy followed Betty out into the sun, across the twisted main street cobbles to the water pump in the town square. The flat, rusted flange of the handle was cold against her hand. Betty lipped her cigarette and began pumping to no avail. After a few fruitless seconds, she backed up away from it, plucking out her cigarette and looking up at the colorless sky. Her short fingernails scratched at her palm.

"'Deserts of your own creation'", she mumbled to herself. Silence lay over the town around them, leaving only the steady rush of the desert wind down Main Street and the clattering of the trolleys in the bank. Heatherton was a small, quiet frontier town in the middle north of the Imperium. The houses were shabby, pine board boxes, like coffins you could live in. Betty hated it here, because it reminded her of home.

"You've got something on your mind Buckle?" Lucy asked, resting a hand on her shoulder. Betty reached up and patted her fingers, shaking her head.

"Yes... no, you know how it is," she shrugged. "Hey, can you get this thing going? I gotta... wash my hand off."

"Yeah mom, we have each other," Lucy replied, kneeling down by the spigot. She pulled the lever down to an open position and placed her hand on the feed pipe. Water flooded out a second later, splattering dark brown dots into the dirt around them. Betty washed herself quickly.

"Thanks," Betty said, drying her hands off on her pants.

"Yeah," Lucy replied, standing and brushing the dust off her knees. A black bird cried somewhere off in the distance.

"Look," Betty said, taking a last drag off the cigarette and dropping it into the wet dirt. "I'm feeling like it's about time to call it a quits heading this thing."

"Yeah?" Lucy asked, fixing the brim of her hat. A tiny set of eyes, some small child, peered over the edge of a windowsill in nearby house. Lucy fixed the kid with a glare and the kid flopped back down out of sight. "Feeling your age then?"

"Hey," Betty said, slapping Lucy on the arm.

"Not wasting time on the lie mom, you been at this for what, a decade? Never been caught, but you been shot, stabbed and brained good a few times, albeit to no effect. That's a lot of luck to go walking around wasting if you never take time to enjoy it." Lucy shrugged. "I was you? I'd have walked years ago, took what I could and headed back down to the islands."

"Damn Smalls," Betty chuckled, "one might come to thinking you didn't want 'em around."

"Psh," Lucy scoffed, "you go, I go. The deal's the deal's the deal, we have each other?"

"Yeah, Smalls, we have each other."

"Oi, boss!" One of bandits yelled from the door of the bank. He sprinted wildly across the street to Betty. "Boss." He said breathlessly, holding up a freshly printed shipping schedule. "Our blood spied this going through the vault. It's a right stunning find."

"Show your hand," said Lucy, demanding an answer in her frustratingly southern dialect. Betty still had trouble, at times, with the winding nonsense the southerners spoke, even after a decade of getting into mischief alongside one.

"Ay, see this then," the boy started. Betty remembered his name was Primo. She had always had trouble putting names to faces, even in her own crew, but especially when it was a new guy. Lucy had drug Primo along after a rough job in the north had made him persona non grata with his old pimp, primarily because Lucy had taken the man's hand off at the wrist. The boy pointed at a mark on the schedule.

"There's cargo here and here that never made it up this way, cause it got rerouted down in Bailey," Primo said. "But, there is nowhere to reroute it to, cause no trains will be leaving that can carry a load this heavy, except this one." He pointed to a name, the Bella Faccia.

"Show your hand boy," said Lucy, "what's the game?"

"This paper has shipping information for all these boxcars, but this one is leaving at full weight without everything accounted for. See here? Paper says there's all these empty cars but that the train's at max weight. It don't click, we have each other?"

"Hmph, yeah boy, good on ya,'" said Lucy, slapping the kid on the back. "Get back with your blood, fill them trolleys so we can get to going."

"Ay mom, we have you," he said, running back into the bank.

"Hey Primo," Betty called after him. He turned. "Get that dandy cleaned up and set him with the others, no point leaving the poor bastard trussed up like that." Primo nodded and ran off.

"You got any thoughts for this train, or is the Brass Buckle still feeling too old for law breaking?" Lucy asked. Betty chuckled and kicked the dirt.

"Yeah Smalls," she said, "I got thoughts for this train. A few actually."

"Care to share them?" Lucy asked.

"Maybe," Betty said, "when they're finished cooking up there. Genius is rarely half baked." She kicked a clod of dry dirt into the wet spot beneath the spigot, and then turned to head back into the bank. "Why don't we see if we get away with this job before we start planning the next one, right?"

"Right mom, I have you," Lucy said.

They headed back to the bank, walking on their shadows.

Pram laid her face against the warm brass flank of the Bella's power plant. She listened through to the hollow space between the pipes and wires, to the off-count ticks and clicks of the metal shifting as it cooled. The engineering team had just checked her over for the last time before departure, and, soon enough, they'd be together again.

She made a gloved fist and struck the hull's reflective surface. It rang with a deep, hollow base note that reverberated gently in her chest.

"Hey!" A voice down the line yelled. Pram turned to see Kenneth, the chief engineer, eyeing her from beneath a set of bushy black eyebrows. The man's entire head was a mess of thick black hair. "I just had the old girl polished. Just cause you drive this baby don't mean you can go greasin' 'er up with your nasty, unwashed hands Beazley." Pram smiled wickedly and dragged a squeaking finger down the side of the Bella.

"But my baby likes getting dirty boss," she replied, slapping the engine barrel underhanded and turning to it. "Don't you baby?" He belly laughed.

"Something wrong with you Beazley," he said, slapping a black-streaked hand across the front of his overalls. "Gotta say I'm a fan, but there is definitely something wrong." He rapped his knuckles against the hull. Pong. "Good thing I'll be rid of you once we hit Coalton, eh?" She shrugged.

"Dunno yet boss," she said, "Cartwright said Compton's ready to throw me a fairly big stack to stay on till Brut."

"Oh yeah?" He asked, raising a heavy eyebrow. "How much?"

"The envelope had weight to it," she replied, "let's just leave it at that."

"Nice," he said, "wish I could renegotiate from time-to-time. But my place is here, with my beloved Bella." He patted the hull. "So you gonna take the offer?"

"Maybe," Pram said, adding: "Probably. Not like I have much else going on at the moment, and I'd hate to have to just ride somebody else's train back to Crosus for the next job." Kenneth grunted.

"Fair 'nuff," he said, "but how's about we get to work before we lose ourselves in daydreams of grandeur."

"I don't even know what that means boss," Pram replied. Kenneth had grown up in the colonies before moving out east for schooling. The decades had grayed his hair, but he had never lost his colonial penchant for saying indecipherable bullshit.

They walked to the far side of the hull, where a two-step ladder led up to the front of the engine compartment. Kenneth pulled out a gold colored key and popped open the access hatch, gesturing for Pram to go first. She fake curtsied and he shook his head at her before following her inside.

The power plant was the two-car-long heart of the Bella Faccia. It sat just behind the conductor's car. Masses of curled silver, gold and black piping twisted and coiled around the inside of the car, all terminating in and emanating from the cylindrical central chamber. It was a cramped, squatting walk for anybody taller than Pram. Everywhere else but here she felt like a visitor. Here? Here she was home.

"Hello?" Called a voice from the backside of the central chamber. It was Pico, Kenneth's assistant engineer. "This car is off-limits to none essential personnel during the inspection period." Pram could make out the shifting light of an electric torch casting skinny shadows through the pipework.

"Come off it, Pico," said Kenneth, his voice booming in the small compartment. "There's a lock on the door, who'd be coming in here what wasn't allowed? And who told you to get started early?" Pico's eyes popped up from the shadows.

"We're behind schedule boss," he said. He shrugged his skinny shoulders. "Mr. Cartwright wants the Bella up and ready to go by the time the last crew of civilians finishes boarding."

"I swear I can feel that man's chin whiskers on my prostate he's so far up my ass," Kenneth muttered. "Alright then Pico, finish whatever you're doing and get back up here. Beazley's gotta turn this girl over and get those batteries charged, or our fancy ladies in the passenger cabins are going to start complaining that they can't see down their noses at the wait staff."

"A-alright boss," he said, ducking down and hitting a pipe with his chin in his haste. Ping. "...motherfucker."

"I swear I hate not being able to pick and choose my assistants," Kenneth said. Pico, who was bout four years too young for the job he currently held, had been forced on Kenneth by somebody high up the chain of command. Kenneth blamed his misfortunes on nepotism. Pram, admittedly, didn't like the guy either. He was...slimy.