Free-Wrench, no. 1 Read online

  “Can’t imagine there wouldn’t be,” Mack called back. “You folk do seem to find a way to charge for damn near everything.”

  If the officer had heard the jab, he made no indication. Instead he took the controls of his ship and steered it off toward the center of Fugtown. Mack turned to the chaperone. The fug person was eyeing the ship with the trained suspicion of someone who expected nothing less than murderous treachery at the root of any given interaction.

  “This ship looks like it’s been recently patched,” he said. “What are those?”

  He indicated two sections of railing that were wrapped and tied with blankets. Each bulged up beneath its covering.

  “Telescopes. We take folks on sightseeing trips. Wasn’t sure if the fug would be good for ’em, so we trussed ’em up. You’d be surprised how sensitive those things can—”

  “Why is your inspector wearing a harness?”

  “He’s been up to things he shouldn’t be up to. Thought it was wise to keep him where I could see him. No telling what sort of hijinks—”

  “If it isn’t performing its duties, you should have it replaced. It is clearly damaged.”

  “He might be a handful sometimes, but he’s still been part of the crew for a while. I think he can be straightened out. You want any food while we’re waiting? My cook’s still on board, and she’s the best in Keystone.”

  “Certainly not,” he said with the same revulsion as if he’d been offered a raw pig head to eat. “I am here to ensure you don’t do anything foolish. I don’t want any of your horrid swill, and I don’t want to hear about what you use this broken-down ship to do.” He pointed the rifle at the captain. “Just keep quiet until then, and this assignment will at least be tolerable.”

  “If that’s the way you want it to be,” Captain Mack said. He turned to watch the patrol ship retreating, then pulled a half-smoked cigar from his pocket and idly twirled it through his fingers. “A word of advice though, if you ever find yourself on my ship again.”

  “What insipid advice could you possibly give me?”

  “Don’t insult my ex-wife’s cooking.”

  “I will do whatever I—”

  A heavy clang cut his statement short as Butch delivered a punishing blow to the back of his head with a meat tenderizer. The blow was enough to send him to the ground in a dazed stupor. She growled a vicious, unintelligible statement and spat.

  “Sometimes I wonder why we ever separated, darlin’. I’ll tie him up. You keep an eye out for that flare.” He knelt beside their prisoner and got to work. “The fella is going to have a very interesting bruise to remember this by.”

  #

  The away team had made it to the edge of the courtyard. Overhead, the worrying drone of a second patrol ship loomed. Around them sprawled a “neighborhood” of neglected buildings. It was the first unsupervised look any of them had seen of what the fug had left behind, and it troubled them in a profound way. When a war sweeps through a place it leaves the city in ruins, broken and unlivable. Such was not the case here. Though many of the buildings were beginning to suffer from lack of maintenance, some looked perfect. If she’d not known the truth, Nita could have imagined a bustling community making its home here just days ago. A sense that all of the people had simply vanished, leaving their world behind, lingered.

  Nita took in what she could see of their surroundings. They were walking along the edge of what had probably been the main road of the area. Unlike the artful architecture of her own home, the buildings were boxy and utilitarian. Some were multistory homes, but as they moved on, most were stout and sprawling structures, factories perhaps, or warehouses. They’d been built simply and efficiently from masonry, but everything had an unnaturally dark tint. The fact that everything, from the shingles to the iron fences, and even the withered trees, had the same tint suggested that the fug was to blame.

  The droning of turbines grew louder, and the dim green light of a ship cast a long shadow.

  “Come on, let’s get to the alley. We’re far enough from the main city that any motion at all will give us away,” Gunner said.

  They huddled together in the long, tall space between two warehouses and waited for the ship to pass by. The patrol ship seemed to coast to a stop above them, its green light painting a stark line across the ground, forcing them farther back into the shadows. Finally the turbines revved, and the ship moved on.

  “We gotta be close now. That ship is lingering right around this spot,” Coop said.

  Lil squinted in the distance. “What’s that at the other end of the alley? Across the other courtyard there.”

  Gunner, pulled a rifle from his back and raised it, peering through the scope.

  “I can just barely make it out through this pea soup. It looks like a single guard, lightly armed, standing in front of a well-lit door,” he said.

  “That’s got to be the place. Let’s go. Everyone know their parts?” Nita asked.

  “Lil and I take out the fugger all quiet like, then you and Gunner get the door open. After that, we take everything we can carry,” Coop said.

  “This is gonna be fun! We’ll signal you by shutting off the light,” Lil added.

  With that, the two siblings sprinted silently down the alley. Nita and Gunner followed far behind.

  “Is this the sort of thing you do often?” Nita asked.

  “No, attempting to rob the people who supply the entirety of our technology is uncharted territory for us.”

  “The Coopers seem awfully at ease with it.”

  “Those two haven’t got the brain power to do anything but live in the moment. Working out the consequences or dangers of a given action takes too much effort. Sometimes I envy them,” Gunner said. “You’d think it would make them poor workers, but when you’ve only got mind enough to have a single train of thought, you have no choice but to throw yourself entirely into it.”

  “I’m not certain if you’re trying to insult them or compliment them.”

  “Merely observing. You can sort the rest out yourself.”

  #

  The guard took a deep breath of the chilly air and tightened his jacket. He always hated when he pulled guard duty. It was utterly pointless. In six years of guard duty the most action he’d seen was when some shingles blew off the roof during a storm. Every night was the same: standing on this old wooden landing beside a reinforced door, a barred window, and a flickering phlo-lamp, quietly listening to his pocket watch tick away the hours until one of the patrol ships stopped to drop off his replacement. He heaved a sigh and turned to the window, adjusting the brightly colored ascot that he’d added to his otherwise drab uniform. That, at least, was the nice thing about guard duty. No one with the authority to reprimand him ever came out this far, so he was free to take some dress-code liberties.

  A skittering stone caught his attention and he turned, reaching for his gun. There was nothing to be seen, just the same empty stretch of courtyard that filled his view every night. He turned back and leaned side to side, trying to get a full reflection of himself in the glass behind the bars.

  “Still looks a bit crooked if you ask me,” Lil said.

  The man panicked, reached for the rifle again, and found it missing. He turned to the source of the voice and swiftly discovered that his rifle hadn’t gone far. It was now in the hands of a skinny surface-dwelling girl with a mischievous gleam in her eye. He gasped and tried to call for help, but before he could utter a syllable a hand covered his mouth.

  “What’s the matter, fella? You never done this before?” Coop asked. “See, when someone points a gun at you, you keep quiet. Chances are, the only reason they didn’t pull the trigger is because they didn’t want to make a ruckus and draw any attention. If you go and draw attention yourself, they may as well shoot. Now I’m going to ask you for the key to this here door. And if you do anything but answer quietly, I’m gonna have to bust your neck, and I never done that before, so it might take a few tries. I don’t reckon tha
t’ll be too comfortable for you. You understand?”

  He nodded.

  “So.” Coop removed his hand and stepped in front of the guard. The fug person was typically tall and thin, making him the rare individual that Coop had to look up to talk to, if only slightly. “Where’s the key?”

  “Don’t have the key. The quartermaster has the key, and he only comes here to pick up and drop off shipments,” the man said desperately, adding, “Please don’t kill me!”

  “Well, see, you ain’t got the key, so you really aren’t that useful to us. Say…” Coop grabbed the ends of the ascot. “What do you call this thing?”

  “It’s an ascot,” he said.

  “What’s it for?”

  “Well, it’s for being all fancy like, obviously,” Lil said.

  “That ain’t what I’d use it for,” Coop said.

  “What else could you use it for?” she asked.

  He replied with a demonstration, using it to yank the man’s head down and pulling it into a powerful head butt that sent him to the ground.

  “I s’pose that’s more of a reason not to wear one,” Lil said.

  “That’s what I was trying to show off.”

  “Well, then you done a good job. Not so much for this fella, though. I guess he’ll get the point when he wakes up.” She stepped over the unconscious man and twisted off the flow for the light. “I like his gun, though.”

  Nita and Gunner hurried across the darkened courtyard.

  “Psst, Gunner,” Lil hissed when he was near enough to hear. She held up the gun. “Jealous?”

  “Put that down. Make yourself useful and scout the area for other guards while we get the door open,” he growled.

  Lil saluted. “Will do.”

  Once again, with disturbing silence, she vanished into the darkness, Coop hot on her heels.

  “Okay, let’s see what we have here,” Nita said, eyeing up the door and turning up the flame on her gas lamp.

  Unlike the rest of the building, which was a fairly simple (albeit very large) brick warehouse, the door looked like something from a vault. Thick iron bars ran through heavy braces on either side and were connected in the center to a massive gear with easily the most complex lock Nita had ever seen. There were three keyholes interlinked with rods and cogs, and other gears connected the central one to a series of smaller braces up and down the sides of the door. The lock seemed to hold in place two smaller rods that ran up from the base of the door and down from the top, preventing the gear from turning.

  “This looks like trouble,” Gunner said. “I suppose I’ll get the explosives.”

  Nita looked closer at the locking bars and gave them a tap with a wrench. “It looks like these are the only things we’ll have to overcome. If we can force these, the rest of the door should open just fine.”

  “That’s still a metal bar the size of your thumb. How do you propose we force them?”

  “Why do you think I carry this thing?” she said, shrugging off the wrench from her back.

  She hoisted it from the ground and tightened its jaws around the hexagonal hub of the central gear. When it was firmly clamped in place, she unsheathed the cheater bars and screwed them together, inserting one end into a hole in the wrench head and heaving with all of her might.

  “Lend a shoulder,” she said, refitting it into a hole that angled the bar lower.

  The two of them crouched, braced a shoulder against the far end of the bar, and put their backs into it. Slowly the locking bars started to creak. They worked together, counting off and then thrusting against the bar, earning a fraction of a degree of additional rotation each time. Before long the Coopers returned.

  “We didn’t see anyone, but we got far enough down to see a light at the other end of the warehouse, so there’s probably another guard on the other side. And he probably doesn’t have a key either, so he’d have to come through this door. What’s going on here?” Lil said.

  “Give us a hand, we’ve just about got this,” Gunner grunted.

  The four of them working together made steady progress until, with a final heave, the locking bars curled free of the gear and it turned freely, drawing back the braces and unlocking the door.

  “Hoo-wee!” Coop said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Is this what they have the ladies doing down in Caldera? I pictured them teaching you how to be classy and all that.”

  Nita removed the wrench and looped the ropes through its jaws to hoist it onto her back. “Well, sometimes class can come in handy. But you don’t need class if you have a monkey-toe.”

  “Let’s go!” Lil said, shoving the door open.

  “Take it slow,” Gunner said. “I’ve heard bad things about the sort of stuff they’ve got in here. And we don’t know if it is empty.”

  They stepped inside and pushed the door shut. Nita turned the flame in her lamp to full, and each of the others pulled strange glass and brass cylindrical contraptions from their equipment and twisted the ends. The ubiquitous green light blossomed inside the devices, revealing their surroundings. Though the light didn’t cut far into the darkness, it was clear the building was massive and cavernous. There were no walls inside, only huge shelves reaching dozens of feet into the air, nearly to the ceiling. The warehouse was easily large enough to contain several whole buildings from some of the less industrial portions of the city.

  The entryway was caged off within the building, a small chamber set apart from the main warehouse. A desk protected by bars sat to one side, no doubt meant to be manned by a clerk charged with auditing what came in and went out during operation. The gate leading to the rest of the warehouse wasn’t nearly as sturdy as the one outside, but it had enough piping and tubing running around its edge to pique Nita’s curiosity. As Coop and Lil investigated the gate, Nita held her lamp close and followed the tubes.

  “This one’s pretty rickety, and the walls and the fug should make sure no one can hear if we bang around a bit. I bet Gunner and I can force it without your fancy doodad,” Coop said.

  “Let’s do it. Every time a patrol goes overhead there’s a chance they will notice the guard is down.”

  Nita let them go to work heaving at the door while she continued to trace out the tubes. One led to a valve lever on the clerk desk. From there it led up over the door to a lever that hung down below the edge, and then over the cage. She raised her lamp higher.

  “Stop forcing the door!” she yelped, when she spotted its final destination.

  The rest of the crew looked first to her widened eyes, then to what they were locked upon. It was an array of what looked remarkably like firearms. They were mounted above the cage and pointed downward, and in place of their trigger assemblies were a series of pneumatic plungers.

  “If you force the door open it will open the valve and fire them,” Nita said.

  “You sure?” Coop asked.

  “No, but do you want to test it?”

  “I reckon not. So what do we do about it?”

  She pulled a pair of locking pliers from her tool sash. “Give me a boost.”

  Gunner laced his fingers together, and she planted a boot in his hands, stepping up until she was level with the top of the cage. She adjusted the pliers and reached through the bars to clamp them down good and hard on the tube leading to the triggers.

  “Okay,” she said, hopping down. “That should do it. But just in case, let’s make this quick. All at once.”

  They braced themselves, each casting a wary glance above, then on the count of three charged the gate. Under their combined force the door crashed open, flipping the trigger lever. The group tumbled in a heap down the short flight of stairs leading down to the factory floor. Behind them, they heard the slow whistle of pressure slipping through her improvised clamp.

  “Oh no,” Nita blurted. She leapt to her feet and scrambled up the stairs, then up the outside of the cage. With a panicked swat she flipped the trigger lever back down and retreated back to the floor. The whistle faded aw
ay, and the guns remained mercifully silent. She breathed a sigh of relief and climbed up to retrieve her pliers.

  “Can we get to looting now?” Lil asked, evidently unfazed by the rapid-fire near catastrophes. “So far this heist has been mostly opening doors.”

  “Yes, go. Just don’t get killed,” Gunner said. “We need all of us alive and carrying as much as we can to make this job worth our while. Lil and Coop, you’ll be after anything that looks like it is worth a bundle. Nita, since you have an eye for it, you’ll be after technology, information, and medicine. I’ll go for weaponry.”

  “Big surprise there. Come on, Brother. I’m itching to go shopping!” Lil said.

  They spread out, Lil and Coop scampering like schoolchildren while Gunner and Nita moved with more care and purpose. As mazelike as this place seemed to be, it was a warehouse. The fug folk had no intention of hiding anything, no doubt making the reasonable assumption that the toxic atmosphere, the network of spies, the patrol ships, the guards, and the traps would be enough to keep potential thieves from making it this far. Aisles were clearly marked, and there were even inventory booklets at the end of each row listing the contents and their locations. Nita rushed from booklet to booklet.

  “Medical: Equipment,” she read aloud. “Medical: Documentation. Medical: Drugs!”

  She sprinted down the aisle. Leading from the floor to the top of the shelves was a rolling ladder on a runner, the likes of which one might find in a large library. Nita took a running leap and grabbed onto the ladder, coasting along with it as rows of oddly named canisters whisked by her. Finally she grasped the edge of a shelf and brought herself to a stop.

  “Tomocin,” she said with a hushed voice.

  It was a small, unassuming jar with a spring top, the kind you might store preserves in, and yet everything she had done in the last few days had been to get her hands on it. The jar was filled to the brim with a fine white powder. At a glance she might have mistaken it for sugar. She carefully stowed three jars of the precious stuff, then began to load up on other jars with useful indications. When she’d filled a sack, she slid down the ladder and rushed back to the edge of the aisle to find her way to the books that would teach her how to administer the treatments.