Free-Wrench Page 12
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As deeply as Nita believed that there was beauty to be found in anything, she had to grudgingly agree that some places did a better job of hiding it than others. The Lagomoore Islands, for instance, lost any trace of beauty once the ship was near enough for them to see the clusters of rusty, ramshackle buildings and smell the rancid and acrid smoke that rose from them. The perfect, little points of emerald visible from the sea revealed themselves to be cluttered with the remains of easily a dozen airships that had crashed or, judging from the looks of the people milling about on the shore, been shot down. The Wind Breaker’s lazy spiral downward took them on an aerial tour of the largest island, where three more airships docked. Each ship had a unique configuration, but they all shared a similar level of disrepair. The largest of them was clearly the patrol ship for the island, based upon the raw firepower it had on display. It had as many cannons as it had portholes and twice the turbines that the Wind Breaker had.
Whereas a sea ship needed little more than to drop an anchor near the shore to dock, things were somewhat more complex for an airship. The anchor was always an option, but seldom a desirable one. In this case their dock was a quartet of rickety wooden towers jutting up from the shore in a roughly square configuration. The captain maneuvered his ship as gently as he could, bringing it to a near stop as they approached the first tower, where a man waited. Gunner heaved a mooring line to the man, who scrambled to secure it. Once secured, Gunner threw a second line to a second tower. Once satisfied the towers would keep them in place and the mooring lines were properly taut, Captain Mack gathered his crew.
“We’ll probably be onshore for the better part of two hours. Lil, Ms. Graus, your orders are simple. Patch the envelope, clean the boiler, and shoot any noncrewmember who tries to board the ship. If there’s time left after that, finish disassembling that wailer ship. Leaving it intact might draw some of their brothers itching for justice, but the parts should be worth something. We’ll be back with as much food, fuel, and water as we’re willing to pay for in two hours. Be finished by then.”
With that, he and the rest of his crew were on their way.
“Okay, you heard the cap’n,” Lil said. “Follow me.”
She walked to a supply chest on the deck, still sporting some nails from the attack. From inside she fetched a lidded bucket of what looked like pitch, then handed Nita a brush, a long hooked needle, a length of rope, and some thread.
“Come on. I’ll show you the ropes,” Lil said. She led the way to the base of the rigging below the leak. It was a narrow net leading from a set of tie-downs on the deck to some fasteners on the envelope above. She gave the rigging a tug. “These are them. I’ll head up and get things ready. Give me the rope, then go cut a piece of the emptied-out envelope from that wailer you took care of. About… yay by about… yay,” she said, giving a rough sizing with her hands.
Lil clutched one end of the rope in her teeth and scampered effortlessly up the rigging. Once she reached the top she threaded the rope it and lowered it back down.
“Now put the brush in the bucket and tie the rope to the handle, then come on up.”
Nita tried to follow the directions. The first part was simple enough, but climbing the rigging turned out to be easier said than done. Nevertheless, she managed to reach the top with a bit of effort. Lil hauled the bucket up, tied off the rope, and pulled out the brush.
“The first step’s easy. Just slather a bunch of this black stuff around and over the hole.” She planted one foot on a knot in the rigging and swung out over the deck, reaching as far as she could and giving the fabric of the envelope a few good swipes. “Then you do the same to the cloth there. Not too much now. Then you slap it over the hole like that. Now the tedious bit. Gotta tie a sling so’s I can get a good angle on this.” She pulled up some of the slack end of the rope and tied a loop to the top of the rigging, then slipped her arms through the loop and stood against the rope, stretching the loop to its limit and positioning herself directly below the bulging patch. “Now you just sew it. Gotta do three rows.”
“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.