Free-Wrench, no. 1 Read online

  “I seem to be going full speed. Either of you care to explain how that happened?” He glared first at Nita, then at Lil. “Lil, did you leave the greenhorn alone in the boiler room at all?”

  “No, sir, Cap’n. I was in there cleaning it up most of the time you were gone. She couldn’t have done nothing, or I’d have known for sure. The only time she went in there by herself was to feed it with fuel a minute ago.”

  His glare turned to Nita again. “Did you do anything you shouldn’t?”

  “I was on deck, keeping watch and taking apart the wailer as ordered, Captain,” Nita said. “As she says, I didn’t have time enough with the boiler to do anything even if I tried.”

  “Probably cleaning the boiler out shook something loose and got them running again. You know how twisted up those boilers are. Poke around with one bit on one side of the ship and it causes all sorts of stuff to happen way on the other side.”

  The captain chewed his cigar and continued to hold the women in a measuring gaze. “Gunner, head down to the boiler room and have a look around. Let me know if it looks like she did anything.” Gunner quickly obeyed. “You’d best hope he doesn’t find anything. Both of you. But for now, make yourselves useful and load up the aft cannons. If one of those ships does come after us, I want to give it something to think about.”

  “Aye, aye,” Lil said. “Come on. I’ll show you how to do it.”

  Nita eagerly followed her crewmate below decks. With the Wind Breaker being as small as it was, the pair had reached the workings of the aft cannon before Nita felt they were comfortably out of earshot.

  “Thanks for your support back there,” Nita said.

  “Who me?” Lil said. “Don’t worry about it. You Calderans are smart folk. Help me with this door, would you?” She grabbed one side of a heavy wooden door on temperamental slides. Nita grabbed the other. “You wouldn’t be dumb enough to tinker around in something after you were told not to. Now, this is the powder magazine. Gunner wraps these little packs of gunpowder in paper. Call’s ’em charges. You’re going to need at least one in each cannon. Cap’n likes a medium load, so that means two. And there’s three cannons, so that… well, that’s two each.” Lil counted out two packs three times. Each was a cheese-wheel-shaped packet of brown paper about six inches in diameter. “Unless he says otherwise, we load with grapeshot. That’s those little cloth bags down there. Grab one per cannon and follow me. Careful, they’re heavy.”

  “Isn’t it a little absurd though, not being allowed to repair your own ship?” Nita asked. She hefted one of the indicated cloth bags. It was almost as heavy as the monkey-toe strapped to her back and clacked when it moved, as though it was filled with individual chunks of metal.

  “Rules are rules,” she said with a shrug. She turned across the narrow hall and awkwardly kicked open a brace holding another set of sliding doors, then caught the handle with her heel to haul it open.

  The doors opened to reveal the most concentrated mass of gears, chains, ropes, and pulleys that Nita had ever seen outside of the workings of the town clock back home. Three angled baskets dangled in the center of the space, and beside each hung a chain with a weighted pull, along with a separate loop of chain. The baskets were in three sections, one in front of the other, and were just the right shape to hold the bags and powder charges.

  “Charges go in the middle, shot goes in the first basket, and when those are loaded up, you go back to the magazine and get a cap.” She turned and fetched a metal disk. “These things blow up easy, so you put them last so you don’t knock them around.”

  Nita loaded the baskets. “But prohibiting even simple repairs makes no sense.”

  “Maybe it’s because I ain’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but most things don’t make much sense to me. All I know is there’s enough you have to do on a ship that it just isn’t worth wasting the effort to start fooling with things you aren’t told to do, or are told not to do. Now you just pull on this here chain until it goes up to the top and drops back down here empty. That means the cannon’s loaded. You pull this chain, and that means the cannon’s primed. Now when the captain wants to fire, he can do it right from the helm, or he can call out ‘fire aft cannon,’ depending on how busy he is, and we can pull that cord. Unless the speaking tube is busted, his voice will come out of the pipe right there. You can talk back too.” She cleared her throat. “Cap’n! Lil at the aft cannon! Can you hear me?”

  “Yes, Lil.”

  “You want us down here on reload detail, or should we report to the deck?”

  “Report to the deck. Gunner just returned.”

  “Aye, Cap’n.” She turned to Nita. “Easy as that. Don’t look so nervous. This stuff hardly ever blows up by mistake.”

  Nita followed Lil back to the deck and willed her nerves into settling down. Her father had always joked that she and her sister would have made fine gamblers, because when they had a mind to, they could be as stone-faced as a statue. She dearly hoped he had been right, because the captain was already suspicious enough. Nita couldn’t afford for him to see the same concern that Lil had spotted.

  On deck, Coop, Gunner, and the captain were gathered around the helm.

  “Ms. Graus, I had a word with Gunner,” Captain Mack said. “You got anything to say?”

  “Nothing, Captain,” she said.

  “And if I were to tell you that he found what you did?”

  “Then I would have to ask to what he was referring.”

  He glared at her. She stared back with every ounce of stoicism she could muster. Finally he turned back to the controls.

  “Nothing he shouldn’t have found,” he said. “Head down to the gig room and start unloading the wagon. Once that’s through, tear it apart and patch up some of the holes in the deck. Coop will lend a hand.”

  Nita nodded and went on her way again. It took every last bit of will she had to avoid sighing in relief.

  Chapter 10

  With all five turbines back in operation, they were back on schedule, less the twenty hours they’d spent heading out to be resupplied. At that rate, if there were no more problems, they would hit Keystone just in time for their meeting with the fug folk. The journey turned out to be blissfully uneventful, though it was hardly restful. During the next two days Nita learned firsthand the amount of work it took to keep the Wind Breaker airborne. Once an hour the boiler was fed, and three times a day they dipped down to the ocean to take on enough water to keep the steam coming. Spare moments were spent patching up those things they could and creating a list of those things they couldn’t.

  Nita received a crash course in a dozen new skills, from carpentry to navigation. The only thing they never allowed her to do was take the controls. The captain reserved the right almost exclusively for himself, spending most of his waking hours keeping his ship on course. Gunner and Coop took the controls while he slept. Even during mealtimes he was more often at the controls than at the table. As Nita learned, this gave the other members of the crew a chance to speak freely about those things they would rather he not overhear.

  “And that’s the first time I ever heard the cap’n scream,” Coop said, laughing and wiping a tear from his eye.

  “You know, Brother, as many times as you tell that story, I still don’t believe it. The cap’n would stare death in the eye. I don’t reckon he’d be afraid of something as simple as a snake.”

  “I ain’t sayin’ he wouldn’t stare death in the eye. I’m just sayin’ that if death was a snake, he’d be screamin’ like a little baby while he was doin’ it,” Coop said. He turned to Nita, “You got any questions about the cap’n, Nita? While he’s not here is just about the only time you’ll get ’em answered.”

  She took a sip of their recently acquired supply of something her fellow crewmates referred to as grog. The others seemed to love it, though Nita simply could not develop a taste for what appeared to be two randomly chosen types of alcohol mixed with copious amounts of questionable water. />
  “What I’m mostly curious about is how this crew came together. I know how Lil and Coop joined, but what about you, Gunner?”

  “It isn’t a terribly interesting tale, I’m afraid. I met the captain while the Wind Breaker was just another patrol ship. This was ten years ago, back when Westrim and Circa were just signing a peace treaty after all of those skirmishes. The governing council decided a few joint patrols needed to be put together to show we could work together. Little did I know the vastly divergent ideas of proper training held by the Circa Naval Academy and… does Westrim even have a training curriculum?”

  “We do things the proper way,” Coop said. “Conscription and apprentice… tion.”

  “And I can only marvel at the airmen it has produced. I was their armory officer, then as now, and the only fully college-trained member of the crew. Which means—”

  “Which means he knows how to read books writ by folks who know how to do things, while the rest of us actually know how to do them,” Lil said.

  “Delude yourself as you will. To my great surprise, while the rest of the crew at the time was a damnable collection of misfits and imbeciles, the captain is remarkably skilled. Once that storm cost us most of our crew, he found himself this new pair of misfits and imbeciles, but at least they turned out to be quick learners. Not that they could have earned a degree as I have.”

  “I might not have a degree, Gunner, but at least I can still count to five on one hand,” Coop said, wiggling the fingers of both complete hands.

  “Which is fortunate for you, since you can’t count to five without your hand.”

  “Well, what about Wink?” Nita said, her voice raised in an attempt to cut off the volley of insults.

  “What about the little beast?” Gunner asked.

  She eyed the creature warily. He was nestled among the rafters, staring back with the same unbroken, distrustful gaze he had locked on her for the past few days. “Well, Lil said Wink was the newest member of the crew.”

  “It’s actually a cute story. See, that storm wiped out most of the crew, and that included their old inspector. Can’t run a ship without one, so the cap’n dipped us down into the northern patch of the fug where they train those things. Something had happened that day. I guess maybe a bunch of the things got in a fight. One of ’em was pretty torn up. Lost an eye and had a bad leg. They were going to kill it. The cap’n wouldn’t have any part of it. He demanded to be sold the little guy. He says he was doing it to save money, but believe you me, there was more to it than that. Him and Butch nursed that thing back to health, and to this day I’ve never seen a more devoted inspector. Until you showed up, the darn thing used to hang around the cap’n any time he wasn’t sleeping in the boiler room or doing his inspections. Now he seems to have taken a liking to you. I think he’s sweet on you.”

  Nita glanced at Wink again. “Somehow I don’t think that’s the reason. What species is it?”

  “Oh, heck, I don’t know. What about you, college boy?” Coop said.

  “It is just an inspector. I only studied things that matter.”

  Wink drummed his fingers. Butch, still stirring a pot, spoke up, though Nita didn’t understand a word of it. Instantly Coop and Lil burst into laughter.

  “No kiddin’?!” Coop said.

  “What?” Nita asked.

  “He’s called an aye-aye!” Lil snickered.

  “Fate does have a sense of humor, don’t she?” Coop added. “You reckon we should just call him an aye now?”

  The ship creaked with a turn, a motion that drew Lil’s eyes to the nearest porthole. “Oh, we’re coming up on Keystone! Let’s get out to the deck, Nita, you’re going to want to see this.”

  Nita and the rest of the crew made their way to the deck, and sure enough, it was a sight she would have been sorry to miss. The continent of Rim was so called because many of its coastal regions were formed by a chain of steep mountains. Along this section of the coast the mountains were narrow and jagged, like the blade of a massive serrated knife. Straddling the peaks of a low section of the mountainside was the city of Keystone, almost surreal in the setting sun. Buildings were built in tiers upon the seaward face of the mountains. Scaffolds and stilts had been built onto the stone, and where the mountain ended, the spindly framework continued, forming a bridge of sorts that served as the base for a bustling community. The buildings were tall and narrow, like the mountains themselves, and smoke and steam belched out of chimneys along the skyline. At the edges of the town where the mountain peaks began to rise up again, the buildings followed. They formed towering and precarious vertical neighborhoods, with long cables ferrying wood and brass cable-trams high over the city, while funiculars were carved into the steepest mountains to carry trains of similar cars down to the main city.

  The air around the city was filled with airships. Some were not much larger than the two-man contraptions that had attacked them, while others were practically flying cities, multiple envelopes holding them aloft while dozens of workers scurried across their decks. Mooring towers that were considerably better made than the makeshift contraptions of the Lagomoore Islands rose in regular rows along the very tops of the mountain peaks, extending far beyond the edges of the city, and more occupied long elevated piers that jutted out over the sea.

  Perhaps the most wondrous sight of all was what lay beyond the city. Past the taller peaks toward the sea, lesser mountains descended into a second sea. Not more than a few hundred feet below the lowest sections of the city was an endless field of deep lavender haze, whipped by the wind into a swirling, churning mass. It stretched as far as the eye could see, broken only by the occasional island formed by a mountaintop poking through the surface.

  “What is it? That field of purple fog?”

  “What do you think it is? It’s the fug. That’s what we were left with after the calamity happened all those years ago. That’s why what remains of the population of Rim clings to the mountain peaks and plateaus,” Gunner said. “We didn’t all have a nice, clean chain of islands to hide in when things started to go from bad to worse.”

  “How far does it go?”

  “There isn’t much of the continent that doesn’t get at least a whiff of the stuff from time to time. It’s thickest here where the mountains funnel it up. If you keep your eyes peeled while flying over the heart of the mainland you might catch sight of some stretches of land from time to time, but that’s mostly at the whim of the wind and nothing you’d want to risk settling in.”

  “Where did it all come from?”

  “If anyone ever knew that, they died along with most of the rest of us when it first showed up,” Coop said. “Alls we know for sure is that it came sudden, rolling in like a tide and catching most low-lying folk by surprise. There weren’t as many airships back then. Barely any. The folks who lived were mostly the folks at sea or already in the mountains, or the ones who could get there in a hurry.”

  “Enough history. There’ll be time enough for that later. We’ll have to hurry if we’re going to be ready in time for our meeting with the fug folk we’ll be trading with,” Captain Mack said.

  Nita watched the implausible urban landscape grow larger as they approached, but slowly something at the edge of hearing drew her attention. It was a tone, pulsing at a quick and irregular rate.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “What?” Lil asked.

  “That sound. It is sort of a ringing sound.”

  “I don’t… oh. You mean Wink doing the strut check.” She pointed to one of the rigid struts that attached the turbine mounting ring to the deck. Wink had scurried up to the midpoint and was tapping at it vigorously. “He always does a good hard check of that strut when we get close to port. All inspectors do. I reckon, since there is so much steering to do to pull into a dock, they’ve been trained to check to make sure it’s good and strong before we get too close. Shakes the whole envelope, and the sound carries forever. If you listen close, you can probably hear oth
er inspectors doing the same thing on all these other ships. You just start to ignore it after a while.”

  “I don’t remember him doing it on the Lagomoore Islands.”

  “I reckon even Wink realizes that place ain’t no proper port. He mostly does it at the busy spots. Up and down Westrim and Circa, around the edge of the fug, places like that.”

  “Lil, get Nita down below and find her a mask that fits. She paid us plenty to get her down to talk to those folks personally. I want to make sure she’s ready if they allow it.”

  “Aye, aye, Cap’n,” she said. She snickered and added under her breath, “Aye-aye. Don’t that beat all?”

  Lil took her below decks and led the way to a supply room on deck three. It was filled with canisters and a handful of bizarre masks. They were made from leather and rubber, with copper fittings and a circular vent on the front. Large enough to fit firmly over the mouth, they had long, thin belts to keep them in place.

  “Here you go. Try that one on for size,” Lil said. “That’s the one we keep for guests. Might want to tap it out first. They can get dusty, and the last thing you want is a lungful of dust on your first breath down there.”

  Nita knocked it against the wall, then held it over her mouth and took a breath. “It is a little hard to breathe with this on,” she said. Remarkably, it was well designed enough that it barely muffled her voice at all.

  “Not half as hard as it is to breathe without it on once you get down there. It’ll sting your eyes a bit, too, but only at first. If that bothers you, Gunner’s goggles are good for that. Not yours or mine, though, what with the vents and all. I gotta tell you, I don’t envy you going down to talk to those folk. You think Wink can give you the creeps. Every time I see one of those fug folk I feel fit to crawl out of my skin.”

  “Are they that bad?”

  “Heh. You’ll see, I guess. Take that with you, get your bag with your payment, and let’s go.”