Free-Wrench Page 15

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 clin
gs 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 other 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.”