Free-Wrench, no. 1 Read online

  “You seem awfully comfortable dangling above the deck like that,” Nita said, a bit nervous just watching.

  “Aw, you get used to it. You can get used to pretty near anything. Speakin’ of which, how are you liking life on the ship? Getting the swing of it?”

  “I think I’ll be able to manage it for as long as I have to.”

  “I can tell you, it’s great having another girl my age on board. Or just about, anyway. Being on the ship with a bunch of other men can wear on you. And there isn’t a looker among them. ’Cept maybe my brother, but regardless of what you heard, us folk from Westrim don’t date inside the family.”

  “I actually haven’t heard much of anything about Westrim.”

  “Well, it’s just as well. Pack of lies, the lot of it. Well, the bit about us being the best drinkers and the best fighters is the God’s honest, but the rest is malarkey and hogwash.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. How did you end up on a ship like this?”

  “Not much of a story, really. Coop and I were from one of the flat-tops, you know, down in the south tip of…” She glanced to Nita, then smiled. “Oh, I forgot. You’re not from around there. Well, the folks who settled the west side of Rim just called it Westrim. Not a real imaginative lot, I guess. There’s some mountains down south with pretty flat tops, you know. They got a real name, I guess, but we just called them the flat-tops.

  “Anyway, Coop and I raised goats there. I don’t know what sort of meat you get down in Caldera, but around here you either get goat, sheep, or if you’re real rich, you can get some beef from down on the plateaus. We were raising goats because they do good on the steep parts of the mountains. Problem was, we were pretty far down the slope, closer to the fug than we probably should’ve been. Along came a storm one day, kicked up the fug real good and just washed it right over our land. Killed the goats, darn near killed us, except we managed to get a couple of masks on, but that’ll only keep you safe for a few days before that stuff starts eatin’ at your skin.

  “We couldn’t see, we couldn’t climb, and a big cloud of the fug was just sitting on us, but then down comes this ship. Cap’n Mack, back in his coast patrol days. He barely made it through the storm himself. Lost most of his men over the side. The only folk left were him, his wife, and Gunner. This was before Wink even. He dipped the Wind Breaker down in the fug and hauled us out. We said we owed him for that, and he said we could work it off, but really I think he was just finding a way to give us a place to stay, since our home was wrecked. He’s a big softy. Don’t let him fool you. Turned out both Coop and I were pretty good crewmates. So we stayed. Not a bad life, all things considered. And… uh oh, here comes Wink. He’s looking agitated, something’s up.”

  The creature shimmied up the rigging, then across Lil’s legs. He hopped up and down madly and pointed with his horrifying strand of a middle finger toward the mooring line on the near side of the ship. The line was jerking at its mounting in an unnatural way.

  “What is it?” Nita asked.

  “Eh, it happens whenever we have to stop at the Lags. Move aside, but stay up here.” She left the needle to dangle and drew her revolver.

  Once she’d managed to shoo Wink off of her, Lil quickly descended the rigging and stepped up to the railing. A moment later a ragged-looking young boy no older than nine reached the top of the mooring line, a knife clamped in his teeth. He was greeted by the barrel of a revolver between his eyes.

  “Hoo-wee! They sure are startin’ ’em young these days, aren’t they? I don’t know what you’re after, you little rodent, but unless it’s an extra hole in the head”—she clicked back the hammer—“you ain’t gonna find it on this ship. I think you should head back where you came from.”

  The would-be looter wisely chose to withdraw.

  “Faster than that, shrimp,” she said, squeezing off a shot over his head.

  The child slid down the rope and climbed in a panic down the tower.

  “Make sure you tell the other brats about the crazy lady on the Wind Breaker,” she called after him. She brushed off her hands and holstered her weapon. “That’ll keep ’em nervous for a while. You figure you can finish that patch up there? I want to get started on the boiler so the winch will be working to haul up the goods.”

  Nita looked uncertainly at the sling. “I suppose I can try…”

  “You’ll do great. Just remember, you need three rows of stitches. Pay attention to if Wink gets jumpy, and be ready to intimidate some punks if he does.”

  Before she could object, Nita’s shipmate disappeared into the bowels of the ship, leaving her to once again muse over the remarkable way that the absurdity of this adventure was so effective at overshadowing the constant danger.

  Chapter 9

  After some initial difficulty, Nita got the knack of sewing while dangling from a hastily tied harness high over a deck that was itself high over the ground. Wink never seemed to show the same urgent agitation again, so she wasn’t required to develop her punk-intimidation skills, a fact that left her both relieved and strangely disappointed.

  She climbed back to the deck, Wink shadowing her as always, and made ready to join Lil in the boiler room. Her own experiences with cleaning boilers probably didn’t have much in common with those on a ship. The steamworks boilers were large enough for a three-person team to climb into and had to be hoisted away from the heat of the volcano with building-sized winches. Even on the smaller scale of the ship, it was bound to be terribly unpleasant. She was heading for the nearest ladder below decks when something caught her eye. In one of the crates of wailer ship parts rested a pipe connection. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands.

  “This… this might work.”

  Nita glanced around to ensure the deck was clear of any shipmates or other witnesses, then crept to the damaged floorboards and pulled them aside. She held the salvaged connector down to the broken one. It was a perfect match.

  “Of course it matches,” she remarked quietly. “The fug folk make these machines, too. It makes sense they’d reuse parts.”

  She turned the connector over. It even had a similar amount of wear. Her mind began racing in tight circles. She had been ordered not to make repairs, but this was such a small thing. It, along with her earlier judicious manipulation of the various valves and switches, would certainly get all five of the turbines spinning again. Lil was scraping away at the boiler, rattling the pipes across the entire ship. She’d never know this was even happening. No one would know.

  The reasons to do it began to accumulate in her mind. She could restore the ship, get them back on schedule, and get a chance to negotiate for her mother’s medicine. The only reasons not to do it were an order from her new captain and the vague and dubious threat of reprisal from unseen boogeymen. She hesitated, but only for a moment. All she needed were tools, which Gunner had required that she leave in the boiler room to prevent her from… well, from doing precisely what she was planning to do. She crept up to the hatch to the lower decks.

  “Lil! Do you need me to come down there? Or should I remain on deck to keep a lookout and get this wailer taken apart?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” the deckhand called back. “It’s kind of a tight squeeze. Not a two-person job. I reckon you should stay up there, keep an eye out and such, and slice up that ship some more like you said.”

  “Not a problem, but I’ll need my tools.”

  “These are them on the floor in here, right? Well, come on down and get ’em! Just be quick about it, so’s we don’t leave the deck empty for too long.”

  Nita hurried down the ladder and into the boiler room. When Lil indicated there wasn’t room for two people on the boiler-cleaning job, it was a drastic understatement. There wasn’t even room for one. She had somehow wedged herself halfway into a hidden hatch near the top of the boiler and contorted into a configuration that human anatomy had never intended. She hung entirely upside down with both legs splayed outward at odd angles. Her
upper body was out of sight, squeezed into a space that didn’t appear to be large enough or even the right shape to conceal her. There was the constant sound of scraping, and bits of grit could be heard tinkling down to the bottom of the boiler.

  “Are you okay in there?” Nita asked.

  “It ain’t my favorite job,” she said, her voice distorted by the boiler’s interior. “Lucky this only happens now and then. The hard part is getting out again. I might need your help for that bit.”

  “I’ll keep my ears open,” Nita said, snatching up her tool belt, tool sash, and—out of habit—her monkey-toe. “Heading back to the deck.”

  “I’ll meet you up there when I’m done. It’ll be before you know it.”

  Nita made her way quickly back to the primary deck. Repairing the connection took only a few minutes, but she nevertheless did it with great care. The whole enterprise would be pointless if the repair didn’t work. She also kept a close eye on Wink all the while, lest another looter take advantage of her distraction and sneak aboard, but the ship’s inspector seemed more interested in her own activity than the approach of an intruder. In no time she had the replacement part firmly in place and tied the moldy rag over it as it had been before. She then tossed the broken connector into the mound of discarded parts and got to work on disassembling the rest of the wailer craft.

  #

  Over the course of the next hour and a half, Nita tried to devote her mind entirely to the task of taking the wailer apart. On one hand, doing so gave her a fine education about how these fug folk built their machinery. Once she could get through the obscuring layer of needless complexity, the basic principles were actually quite simple, as all brilliant innovations seemed to be. Calderan technology was elegant at times, but that elegance focused primarily on using tried-and-true methods as efficiently as possible. The fug folk were just as willing to abandon the old ways as improve them, and in doing so they underscored faults in the traditional methods that she’d never noticed before. She found herself wishing she could observe this craft in motion again, so that she could see for herself just what the most mysterious innovations did.

  On the other hand, immersing herself so completely in the task served to distract her from a rather insistent voice in her head. If it had been a voice of warning or fear, perhaps it might have made sense to her. After all, they had expressed a willingness, if not an outright eagerness, to kill her if she became a problem. In truth, fear accounted for barely a dash of the weight on her chest. She was quite certain neither the crew nor the fug folk would ever know what she’d done. What she felt most of all, regardless of what logic and reason had to say on the matter, was guilt. She was disobeying orders and violating a trust that she’d barely earned. No matter how pure or sound her reasons for such an act were, a part of her bristled against it. And so she dove headlong into her task rather than address those feelings.

  She was just placing the last salvageable component into a nearly filled crate when Lil emerged from below decks. Her face and clothes were coated with gray dust from the inside of the boiler. The only portion of her face spared was the space around her eyes that had been protected by her goggles, giving her a reversed raccoon look.

  “Phew! She was a stubborn one today!” Lil said. “I see you been busy. I’ll bet we get a tidy little payment for that mess, huh?”

  Nita held up one of the more complicated gadgets. “This is truly fascinating.”

  “Aw, it’s all a big mishmash to me.” She wiped her head. “I could use a bath something fierce, but it looks like I finished just in time. Cap’n and them will be coming back. I’ll take over the watch up here. You go feed the boiler. Best to make sure the winch is good and warm before they get here. Wouldn’t want ’em to have to haul the goods up the ladder.”

  Nita did as she was told, and the pressure was topping off when the gruff voice of the captain rang out.

  “Lower the gig! We need to be loaded and off this trash heap two minutes ago!”

  “You heard the man!” Lil called from above.

  Nita rushed to the gig room and pulled the lever. Outside, the rest of the crew was quickening to a run by the time the boat reached the sandy ground beneath the Wind Breaker. Butch and the captain led a mule hitched to a heavily loaded wagon. Gunner and Coop had weapons drawn and eyes trained on the path behind them.

  “You get in another disagreement, Cap’n?” Lil called from the deck.

  “You stop flapping your jaw and get that ship unmoored! The fast way!” he ordered.

  She groaned. “My share of this trip’s profits better have a little extra in it this time!”

  Nita ran to the porthole. It was coated with grime, but she could just make out the portside mooring line. Without warning, Lil dropped down from above, snagging the line and looping a leather strap across the top to slide recklessly down its length. One of the locals burst from the woods at the edge of the beach and started climbing the mooring tower, but Lil was already untying the line before he’d made it halfway up. She got the rope free, pushed it off the tower, and jumped to the ladder. She slid down and collided with the local at the ladder’s midpoint, but a boot to the shoulder knocked him into the bushes and cleared the way for her to continue to the ground.

  “Start the winch, Ms. Graus,” cried the captain.

  “But you aren’t in the—”

  “Now, Ms. Graus!”

  She yanked the lever, and the slack in the chains began to reel in. The captain appeared and dragged out some boards from the floor of the boat to form a ramp. He led the mule right into the gig and off the other side, dragging the whole of the wagon over the low edge of the boat and straddling it. He unhooked the mule, scrambled aboard the wagon, and helped Butch to do the same. Lil sprinted by, heading for the other tower. The remaining two crew climbed aboard the wagon as winches began to groan and haul the precarious pile from the ground. Gunner aimed his overly complicated pistol.

  “You’re going to want to cover your ears. This one’s got one hell of a report,” Gunner said.

  A crowd of pursuers descended on the beach. Gunner pulled the trigger. The sound was remarkable, more like a cannon than a revolver. It was enough to convince the mob to dive for cover.

  “Is this the way supply stops usually go for you people?” Nita called down.

  “On the Lags? More often than not!” Coop called back, taking aim with his own pistol and firing.

  “Gunner, climb up and shut off the winches when we get close enough. Ms. Graus, get to the deck and haul in the mooring lines. Glinda and Coop, help me coax these dirty dealers to turn the other cheek.”

  Nita scrambled through the ship and up to the main deck. There were already return shots ringing out by the time she got there. Either the guns they were using were inferior, or else the envelope was tougher than it looked, because the bullets were doing little more than plinking off the turbines or bouncing off the fabric with a resonating foomp. She tried to ignore the insistent voice in her head asking where those bouncing bullets might end up and what was keeping the attackers from firing at her. There was no winch or reel to bring in the stout mooring lines, so she simply grabbed hold of the free line and threw it over her shoulder to drag it across the deck. Two more trips back and forth brought the free end aboard.

  Captain Mack labored up onto the deck, his breath heavy and wheezing.

  “Gunner, Coop, get ready to help her with the other line,” he ordered.

  “I can handle it,” Nita said, crouching down to the rope and watching as Lil fought to release it from the tower.

  “This one’s gonna be a good bit heavier,” Coop said. “How else do you figure Lil’s getting on board?”

  Nita’s eyes widened and she looked to the tower again. The scrawny young crewwoman finally dislodged the rope and called out.

  “Take ’er up!” she cried. She then glanced down to see a particularly brave local clambering up the ladder toward her. “And be quick about it. I got company down here
!”

  The captain took the helm and pulled hard on a lever, conjuring a grinding noise from above them and causing the ship to sharply ascend. Lil leapt from the tower and snagged the hanging line. She swung far under the rising ship.

  “We pull when she swings away from the ship,” Gunner instructed. “One, two, three, heave!”

  Between the three of them, they were able to haul up half of the rope before she swung back. Another swing and another haul pulled Lil near enough to the deck for her to plant her feet on the hull and walk herself along it, with the help of a more constant pull, until Gunner reached down and dragged her up.

  “Cap’n,” she said breathlessly, “you wanna maybe give me the heads-up that you’ve got that sort of thing planned? I just got through cleaning the boiler and was powerful sore even before I had to go jumping off the ship and swinging around like a monkey.”

  “Did we just rob those people?” Nita asked.

  “No, Ms. Graus. We negotiated a fair price and shook hands on it. Then they tried to say some nonsense about a docking fee. Far as I’m concerned, you break an agreement, you break the whole agreement. So we helped ourselves to the gear and goods and left what we figured they deserved.”

  “And what was that?”

  There was the distant thump of an explosion. All eyes turned to the heavily armed airship that she’d figured for a patrol upon their arrival. Black smoke belched from the side, and the turbines on the starboard side had stopped, sending it into a slow spin.

  “I left them a pyrotechnic demonstration,” Gunner said. “Seemed like a fitting trade to me.”

  The captain looked over the controls, tapping a pressure gauge and adjusting a few levers. “On the off chance that one of those other ships is on their payroll, I’d say we’d best skedaddle,” he said.

  He slid a row of levers up, and the ship lurched forward, pitching down somewhat as the turbines roared to life… all five of them. At the unexpected acceleration and the full chorus of pumping steam, he turned angrily to Lil and Nita.