Free-Wrench Read online

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  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 arm
ed 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.

  “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.