Skykeep Read online

  When Nita set the thought aside again and looked up, she started making a mental tally of the remaining leaks. As far as she could see, everything that was left was on the portion of the envelope ahead of the turbines. She edged her way to a space between two of the motors and began to work her way forward. To her right she noticed the remaining wailer whisking out from under the Wind Breaker and attempting to circle back to continue the work of its departed partner. A peppering of shots from Gunner’s fléchette gun met their mark, and suddenly retreat seemed to be a far preferable idea for this wailer as well. Both damaged ships—one of which seemed to have a damaged pilot also—were heading in the same direction. A fortuitous breath of wind scattered the clouds ahead of them, and the shifting mist revealed the silhouette of a ship a bit larger than the Wind Breaker, lurking not far away.

  “He’s going to fire the cannons with us up here, isn’t he?” Nita muttered to herself.

  “Brace for cannons!” Lil called out, the deckhand’s voice barely audible over the rattle of the turbines on either side of Nita.

  She slapped the lid to the jar back in place, stuffed it in the pack, and held tight to the metal bands to which the turbines were mounted. A half second later a deafening thump pitched the ship forward so savagely it felt as though they had collided with something. Gray smoke and a cloud of what the captain called “grapeshot” belched forth from the ship’s port-side forward cannon. The silhouette in the clouds shuddered, then began to pivot and descend, either unwilling or unable to return fire. With its retreat, and the desperate attempts of its crew, who deployed an attack craft to catch up, the morning battle had been brought to an end. Nita breathed a sigh of relief, then worked her way slowly out from between the turbines and toward the edge of the envelope.

  “Lil!” she called, spying her crewmate just as she was making ready to swing herself back onto the deck.

  “Yeah?”

  “Would you please ask the captain to shut down the engines so that I can finish patching?”

  “Sure thing. I’m heading down for some hash. You want Butch to fix you a plate?”

  Nita looked to the dozen or so remaining jets of green gas, as well as one rather significant tear. She sighed. “No, I’ll get my own… I think I’m going to be here awhile.”

  #

  Three hours later, Nita trudged into the loading bay-slash-bedroom. All things considered, the encounter had gone rather well. Almost thirty punctures from the attack, but she’d gotten temporary patches on them within a few minutes, and enough stitches to make the patches permanent before any of them let loose. The first time she’d had to do a patch job like this, it had taken her the better part of a day, and they’d lost enough phlogiston to require a stop at a port in order to refill. Today they were able to top off from their stores. One of the spikes had lodged itself in the turbine as well, but removing it seemed to reveal little more than some very minor warping, which could be fixed another time. Considering she was smeared with tar, chilled to the bone, and still dressed in her pajamas, a bit of procrastination on that matter could be excused. She plopped down onto the crate and pulled down her desk again, doing her best to wipe away the tar from her hands before delicately picking up the pen. She knew she couldn’t finish the letter, since writing more would inevitably smudge the page with tar. That was all it would take to make her mother worry about any number of things that might have put it there. Instead, she would add one last thought for the moment before stowing her pen and cleaning up.

  I know I should be working a bit harder to get these folks ready to take care of themselves, but sometimes it feels like a shame to know I’ll be leaving them once I do. After all, I think I’ve finally gotten used to the routine.

  #

  Around noon, after the patching of the envelope had been finished, Nita took a moment to scrub herself clean of the layer of tar and the stink of phlogiston. Life had become much more tolerable for her once she’d worked out a method to rid her skin and clothes of the sticky black gunk she so often worked with. Her sister of all people had been the one to work out the solution, which was to mix a bit of the crew’s soap with some crushed-up Calderan lava rock and a healthy dose of orange rinds. The mix took some experimentation to get right, but now tar was much less of an inconvenience, and the stuff smelled so nice Lil had taken to using it as well, even when tar wasn’t an issue.

  Once clean, Nita’s first order of business was to change into her work clothes. The outfit was a practical leather-and-canvas ensemble, though, as the work of a Calderan, it was tailored to fit her properly and accented with gleaming brass-and-copper hardware. She wore a corset for back support rather than fashion and topped the outfit with a double sash of wrenches and other tools, and had adorned her goggles with a small butterfly made from brass gears by her brother.

  Not until she considered herself presentable did Nita finally make her way into the galley for her first proper meal of the day. It wasn’t rare that her many duties aboard the Wind Breaker kept her from eating when she would have liked to, but it was never any fun. One of the few things that had come as a pleasant surprise regarding life on the airship was the quality of the food, and it was a shame to miss it when it was fresh off the stove. Glinda West, or Butch, as she was unfortunately nicknamed, was the cook and medic of the ship. She was nothing short of a miracle worker with a saucepan. Day in and day out she would take the same unappetizing provisions and turn them into the hearty delicious meals that fueled the crew. Her dishes never would have made it back on Caldera, as visually they fell into the brackets of either “green-brown mound of lumpy mush” or “crusty, fried hunk of something unidentifiable,” but Nita had long ago learned that the dinner table was a place where color and composition weren’t always necessary to create a masterpiece.

  Though at the moment Butch was the only other person in the galley and she could have sat anywhere, Nita took her usual seat at the first table to the left of the entrance and pushed up her goggles.

  “Good afternoon, Butch,” she said, running her hands across her braided brown hair and yawning. “I don’t know if I’m late for breakfast or early for lunch, but if you’ve got anything that’s hot, I would love a plate of it.”

  Butch muttered something surly from her station behind the counters and among the stoves of the galley. She was a sixty-year-old bulldog of a woman who always sounded angry and spoke a language Nita hadn’t quite been able to learn or even identify, but the rest of the crew assured Nita that the cook liked her. Butch pulled a clean tin bowl from the shelf and ladled a thick soup into it, handing it over with a spoon and two dense biscuits. Nita stood and took the meal, breathing in the meaty aroma.

  “Slop-in-the-pot today? Always one of my favorites,” Nita said sincerely.

  Butch nodded and put out a mug of tea. While the rest of the crew seemed to drink either ale, rum, or coffee exclusively, Butch and Nita shared an appreciation for a good cup of tea. She took the warm beverage and returned to her seat to dig in to her meal.

  She’d barely started when the sound of wind echoed out of the flared tube just beside the door.

  “Get yourselves to the galley,” barked the voice of the captain. “The weather’s being obliging, so I think the ship can mind herself for a bit. I’ll put Wink on watch. Don’t dillydally. I don’t want to be away from the wheel long.”

  Again Butch muttered something, this time a good deal more vigorously and colorfully, and began to line up bowls along the front of the counter. She slotted them into grooves that would keep them from sliding with the motion of the ship and stirred up the pot in preparation for portioning. The crew began to file in one at a time, each wearing his or her own variation of the unofficial uniform of the ship: black canvas trousers, a tan button-down shirt, and a brown coat. First was Ichabod Cooper, the rail-thin and sandy-haired young deckhand known by the whole crew—including his own sister—as Coop. Through some miracle of grooming that Nita had not seen fit to investigate, he seemed
to have perfected the technique of having permanent stubble. She’d never seen him clean shaved or with a beard. He also tended to keep his sleeves rolled up, though from the number of scars on his forearms it seemed he’d be better served with them down.

  “Oh, Gunner. I’d be obliged if you’d take a look at the sights on my rifle. Can’t seem to hit the broad side of a barn with it these days,” he said over his shoulder to the man behind him. “Morning, ma’am. You’re getting pretty quick up the rigging.”

  “Thank you, Coop. You know, we’ve been working together for months. I don’t believe it is entirely necessary to call me ‘ma’am.’”

  “Aw, you’re a Calderan. If I’m not gonna call a fancy sort like you ‘ma’am’ now and again, I may as well not use the word at all.”

  “Good morning, Nita,” said Gunner, their shorter, mildly less lean armory officer. Despite some missing fingers and the fresh singes on his face and sleeves, the man was actually quite capable. He was just a little too enthusiastic at times. “And Coop, I very much doubt the sights of your rifle have miraculously misaligned themselves overnight.”

  “Well, then why do you reckon I didn’t pick off them two pilots like I did a week back?”

  “Because you stumbled out onto the deck half-asleep and started shooting. I’m lucky you didn’t hit me while you were up there.”

  “Lucky for you boys somebody on this ship knows how to work a rifle proper,” Lil said, more formally Chastity “Lil Coop” Cooper, as she pranced into the galley. She was the younger sister of Coop and a regular chip off the old block.

  “How long you reckon it’ll be before you let us forget about that lucky shot of yours?” Coop asked.

  “What, the one where I was dangling off the side of the ol’ gasbag by one foot and still made the two of you look like you were the ones that didn’t know which way was up? I reckon it’ll be quite a bit.”

  “I’ll tell you what. When we get back to the island, we’ll hang me up by my foot and see what I can do.”

  “And just what island are you talking about, Coop?” Lil asked.

  “That one south of Caldera. The one where we hid most of our haul from the heist a way’s back.”

  “The one that’s underwater most of the time and ain’t got so much as a tree on it? The one that we only use because of the cave under it that you can’t get to most days?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Whereabouts you reckon we’re going to hang you on that island? The trees that ain’t there?”

  “We’ll hang me off the ship,” Coop said. “Just so long as Gunner fixes the sights on my rifle first.”

  “It is a poor artist who blames his brush,” Gunner countered.

  “What’s painting got to do with you not knowing how to true up an iron sight?”

  “Enough, all of you,” commanded the sandpaper-rough voice of the captain, a man the Coopers called Cap’n Mack.

  He was moving with purpose, though Nita was not certain she’d ever seen him move otherwise. Some people were a captain in name only, a leader simply because the position had been vacant and no one else had the years or training to fill it. Captain McCulloch West was a captain to the bone. His crew didn’t follow orders due to anything as flimsy as a chain of command. They followed orders because he was giving them. He puffed on a cigar that smelled like burning cherries and pulled off a pair of dark lenses that had left his eyes the only portion of his face not roasted golden brown by the sun. There was a weariness to him that had become progressively more noticeable in the preceding weeks. His red-rimmed eyelids likely hadn’t shut for more than an hour at a time in days. He rubbed them irritably and cleared his throat.

  “Everybody grab a plate and a seat. I don’t like giving the inspector the bridge for more than a minute or two. That goes double considering the number of wailers who’ve been catching our scent of late. We’re going to make this quick. Once our engineer here patched up the nicks we picked up in this latest brush and we topped off what we lost, that put us down to our last canister of phlogiston.”

  “No, already? Seems like it wasn’t two weeks ago we bought five canisters from them smelly folks from over where Gunner comes from,” Coop said.

  “We did. But since then we’ve been slashed up and poked full o’ holes near a dozen times. How are we set for ammunition?”

  “We’re down to about half our usual stock for small arms, and very low on fléchettes. The cannons are pretty well stocked,” Gunner said.

  “And fuel?”

  “We could use some. Between coal and burn-slow we’ve got enough for maybe three more round trips to Caldera,” Lil said.

  “How are the nuts and bolts, Nita?” the captain asked.

  “The boiler is running fine. One of the turbines took some hits. I’d like to rebalance it. At this point the main envelope is more patches than anything else. Another few weeks like these and we’ll be needing a new one. Other than that, we’re doing well enough.”

  “Good. Then just so long as we don’t lose any more phlogiston, we’re not in trouble. But since we’ve been doing a right sorry job of defending this bucket lately, there are going to be some changes. I want two lookouts on deck at all times. That includes when we are at port. If Gunner hadn’t been in his quarters tinkering with that new gadget of his last time we tried to spend the night in Keystone, we’d’ve been cleaned out. And if you’re on lookout detail, I want you armed. Nita, that means you’re going to need to brush up on your shooting.”

  “I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of handling a rifle, Captain. Perhaps—”

  “I’m not entirely comfortable riding my ship to the seafloor, or getting picked clean by the sort of folks who lurk around the sort of piers that’ll let us moor these days, so it don’t make much difference to me what makes you comfortable,” he barked. “Talk to Gunner, pick a weapon, and start practicing. Next time those wailers come buzzing around, I want them full of holes before they even notice they’ve found us.” He stomped up to the counter and snatched up a bowl, stuffing the biscuit into the pocket of his coat and taking the bowl but not the spoon.

  “We are too damn close to seeing our way through to the other end of this, people. We’ve got enough fugger goods stowed away in Cache Island to keep us fat and happy for the rest of our days. We just need to stay alive long enough to figure out how we’re going to sell them, and where we’re going to stay once we do. Now, as you were. Finish your meals, then draw straws on who’s manning the deck. You’ve got five minutes.”

  He turned and paced back out the door, taking a swig out of the bowl as he went. Once his footsteps had disappeared back up to the main deck, Coop spoke up.

  “You know something? I don’t know what’s sending him to his grave quicker, drinking or not drinking,” he said.

  “Times like these I do miss the rosy-cheeked, boozy lout who hired us,” Lil said. She mashed her biscuits into her bowl and scooped some of the resulting mush into her mouth. “And does anyone remember when he last hit his hammock?”

  “I’m not certain I even recall the last time he sat down,” Gunner said.

  “So what is the plan going forward?” Nita asked. “It’s been four months since we raided that Fugtown warehouse, and so far all we’ve done is stash the stuff and lend me out to fix some ships whenever we visit Lock.”

  “The captain plays things like this close to his chest,” Lil said. “When he’s ready to tell us, he’ll tell us.”

  “’Til then, we just go along,” Coop said. He’d emptied his bowl and stood to return it to Butch, snagging another biscuit when he did. “Who’s on lookout right now? And you reckon the captain counts himself as one of the lookouts?”

  “Well now, that wouldn’t make no sense, would it? If that was the case, we’ve been doing two lookouts all along. And you can’t rightly navigate the ship with a rifle in your hands,” Lil said.

  “I’m on lookout right now,” Gunner said.

  “I reckon I’ll jo
in you then. It’ll give you a chance to get my sights straightened out,” Coop said.

  Rather than dignifying the statement with a response, Gunner merely muttered something vaguely threatening and followed the deckhand out. That left only Lil and Nita in the galley.

  “So, Nita, what’re you fixing to do until it’s your turn up on deck?”

  “It won’t be long until we reach Lock, and I’m sure the captain will have a line of people hoping I can help get their boilers boiling or their turbines turning again. Between that, my maintenance work, and now these watch shifts, I’d better take this time to finish up my letter home, or else it won’t get written at all.”

  “You know,” Lil said, washing down another mouthful of her meal with a swallow of coffee, “I still don’t quite get why you write them letters. The only folks who could even deliver ’em is us.”

  “I know, but sometimes our visits are so short. Before I joined the crew, the longest I’d ever stayed away from home was a few days. Mother and I just aren’t used to spending so much time apart. Writing these letters and reading them one at a time sort of makes it feel like we aren’t so far apart. I hand Mother my book, she hands me hers, and we read and answer one a week.”

  “You ever write about me in them letters?” Lil asked.

  “Of course! Mother said she’s been working extra hard to get the Wind Breaker permission to make port so that she and the family can meet you. My brother, Joshua, in particular is interested in you.”

  Lil grinned. “Is he now?”

  “He’s a composer and he’s always looking for dancers. He says with the way you’re so fearless climbing all around the ship, he’d love to see what you could do on stage.”

  Lil twisted her head. “Now what kind of stage are we talking about here? Because the only dancers I ever seen are them girls in Keystone who do them high kicks and ain’t barely wearing no clothes. The sort Coop always spends all his money gawking at.”

  “No, no. Ballet, interpretive dance. Things to do more than simply titillate.”