Free-Wrench Read online

Chapter 3

  Nita, still heavily loaded with her tools and the sack that contained her payment and her change of clothes, labored a bit to reach the top of the shaky ladder. Things became slightly easier once the bottom of the ladder pulled taut with a second passenger, but after a moment a realization came to mind.

  “Mr. Cooper?” she called over her shoulder.

  “You can call me Coop, ma’am,” he replied.

  “Very well, Coop,” she said, stopping for a moment to catch her breath and better engage in conversation. “Are you staring at my bottom right now?”

  “Well, ma’am, you’re ahead of me on the ladder. I can’t rightly do otherwise at present,” he said. “I was always taught ladies first, but I don’t think Ma and Pa ever anticipated this particular situation. Could be worse though, ma’am. At least you’re wearing britches instead of a skirt.”

  “True enough. I don’t suppose you could look aside until I reach the top of the ladder.”

  “If it’d make you more comfortable, ma’am, but if its privacy you’re looking for, you’ll find it a bit hard to find on an airship. Close quarters and cramped spaces don’t leave too much room for modesty, and thing’s’ll be a good deal tighter with another soul on board. Looking away now, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Coop.”

  She hurried up the final stretch of ladder and crawled through a small hatch in the belly of the ship. It was wrapped in three sides by a railing and led into a tight, dim little room that smelled strongly of gear oil and burning coal. The roof was low, barely high enough for her to stand without stooping, and the only light came from a handful of bizarre little contraptions arranged along the top edge of the wall. They looked like glass pipes with brass fittings on either end, and they gave off a weakly pulsing glow of sickly yellow-green. At either end of the room was a winch, and manning the lever beside one of them waited a young woman with more than a passing resemblance to Cooper, who was pulling himself into the ship now. In the center of the room was a much larger hatch than the one they’d climbed through, beneath which hung the boat.

  “Haul it up. I’ll pull in the mooring lines, and we can skedaddle before the fog breaks up and the Calderan scouts notice us. Once we’re clear I’ll hop down and hand up the goods,” Cooper said. He was tall enough that he had to slouch a bit to avoid scraping his head, but he did so with a practiced ease that didn’t cost him any speed. “Oh, and this here’s Amanita Graus. She’ll be joining us for a bit.”

  “I know who she is. You think I couldn’t hear you jawing back and forth?” said the woman as Coop hurried off. She pulled the lever, prompting a hiss that brought the winches to life, then extended a hand. “Pleased to meet you, Amanita. Did I hear your friend down there calling you Nita?”

  “Yes. Most people call me that. Amanita can be a mouthful at times.”

  “Nita it is, then. I’m Chastity. Folks round here call me Lil. Short for Lil’ Coop, seein’ as how I’m Coop’s baby sister.”

  “A pleasure to meet you.”

  “The cap’n will want to meet you before anyone else. He’ll be at the helm on the main deck, so we’ll just head up there when the gig is reeled in.”

  Nita stood, looking down through the larger hatch and listening to the click of the winch. As she did, two very distinct and very powerful feelings came over her. The first was an intense feeling of vertigo. The climb hadn’t seemed terribly long when she was looking up, but looking down was another matter. The waves below made her head spin, and realizing that they were held aloft not by something good and solid like a building but by a tattered bag and some ancient rigging filled her with a cold, hollow anxiety.

  The second feeling, one easily as unsettling, was the realization of just what she had done and how quickly she had done it. Everything had happened so fast! In the space of a few minutes the distant hope of a treatment for her mother’s problem had turned into an opportunity that could easily slip away. In the moment, her decision seemed like the only one. There hadn’t been time for fear or doubt. In a way it was just the same as the day before when she’d raced to the bypass valve. Had she thought about it, running toward a boiler that was on the verge of explosion was a hideously stupid idea, but in the end it had been the right thing to do. She could only hope that this decision was the right one, too. In these first moments after stepping off the proverbial cliff, it certainly didn’t seem that way.

  After one last glance through the hatch, she swallowed hard and hastily decided not to think about any more cliffs for a while, proverbial or otherwise.

  The hoisted dinghy finally drew near enough to the hatch to completely block her view of the water below, and Lil threw the lever in the opposite direction.

  “That’ll do ’er for now. Let’s get you up to meet the cap’n before—”

  A brass pipe with a flared opening ran from the wall to the ceiling, and from it blared a gruff and distorted voice. “Lil, get our passenger to the deck.”

  “You can set your watch by that man,” she whispered irritably. She stepped up to the flared end and spoke into it. “On our way, Cap’n.”

  Lil motioned for Nita to follow, then ducked through the low doorway. Nita took a moment to push her worrying attitude and more worrying circumstances out of her mind and tried to busy it with other tasks, like taking in her new surroundings and shipmates. Lil was dressed much as her brother was, minus the long coat and with the addition of a tattered red bow holding what was probably shoulder-length hair into a short ponytail. Her boots had a more pronounced heel, and she had on worn leather fingerless gloves. Grease, soot, and one or two other things Nita couldn’t identify smudged her clothes and face. All things considered, she could easily have passed for one of the workers in the steamworks.

  She led Nita through a series of short and horribly cramped hallways. Though there were plenty of doorways, there were very few doors. Curtains seemed to be the norm where privacy was called for, and elsewhere even they were absent. Each room was claustrophobic and had every square inch of space crammed with maps, tools, or boxes. Space, it would seem, was at a premium here, so much so that much of the infrastructure and workings of the ship were entirely exposed. Pipes crisscrossed the ceiling, and tubes ran in sagging bundles laced between them. Here and there they would poke up to the next level or down through the floor, and valves and gauges seemed to be randomly scattered about their lengths. Again, it was not unlike the chaos she worked in every day at the steamworks, albeit in miniature. Having so much copper and brass around her made her feel a bit more at ease, like seeing a familiar face in a strange town.

  Lil led the way to a ladder that brought them three decks up, where it emerged onto the open top of the ship. For a moment, any doubt she had was wiped away by pure fascination. The very top of one of the lower spires was at eye level here, giving her a point of reference of not only how high they were, but how much they were swaying with each breeze. Coop and another man were busy along the railing at the edge of the deck, tugging at small ropes to untie large ones. She could hear the peculiar fans turning above her, a regular pattern of squeaks, rattles, and hisses forming a sort of rhythm to which the deck crew worked.

  “You’re gonna want to hang onto something,” Lil said. “Coop’s just about got the last line loose, and then comes the big swing.”

  Nita steadied herself against one of the support struts that ran up to the gas bladder, and not a moment too soon. When a mooring line came loose, the whole of the vessel lurched away from it, swinging like a pendulum. The fans rattled to life, righting the ship against the remaining line, which the other deck worker released a moment later, prompting a second and far more ponderous swing. The tempo of the fans quickened into a steady buzz, and the ropes above her creaked and whined with the ship’s acceleration. Stone spires passed by near enough to spit on, and then the world around them pitched hard to the side as the airship took a sharp turn. Nita’s knees almost gave out when she turned to the left and received an unobscured vi
ew of the ocean, the angle of the deck so sharp that she felt sure she and everyone else should be tumbling off.

  The turn tapered off and the ship righted itself, but Nita was reluctant to release her grip. Everything around her still seemed to pitch and roll in a stomach-turning way. Lil continued toward the steps leading up to the upper tier, then turned when she realized Nita wasn’t following her.

  “Come on, the cap’n’s up at the fore end. What are you waiting for?”

  “I’m waiting for the ship to settle a bit,” Nita said, deciding to leave out the bit about waiting for her stomach to do the same.

  Lil smirked. “Ship’s as settled as it’s gonna get until we’re tied to something solid again. You’ll get used to it pretty quick if you stick around long enough. Or you’ll go overboard,” she added with a shrug. “Believe it or not, I fell over once, on my first launch. No one warned me about the swing. Wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to happen twice, so I got my air legs right quick after that. Come on, this way.”

  Lil led the way, and Nita stumbled behind her like a drunk until they reached the front end of the ship, where the captain stood at something that looked like a cross between a traditional ship’s helm and the control harness for one of the steam drills they used to excavate new rooms in the steamworks back home. A spoked control wheel rose from the deck in front of him, and beside him trailed a row of brass levers with linkages between them such that no lever could move too far along without dragging its neighbors with it. The levers had ancient, tarnished labels riveted to a weathered wooden control board. Those that she could read said things like “Turbine 3” or “Forward, 1/4 power” with graduated markings indicating further fractions of power. Tubes, ropes, and chains led in a tangled knot both up and down from the controls, leading to pulleys and manifolds that distributed adjustments all around the ship. The captain’s hand danced across them, sliding this lever up and twisting that knob while making minor adjustments to the wheel. Opposite the panel of levers and knobs stood a second panel outfitted with compasses, spinning wind meters, and other instruments.

  After marveling at the apparatus responsible for running the ship, Nita took a moment to observe the man. Dressed similarly to the rest of the crewmembers she’d seen, his clothing suggested that it may have been some sort of uniform, but he clearly wore it with more care and pride. The sleeves of his long coat weren’t rolled. He wore it open, like the others, flapping in the breeze. His vest was straight and buttoned, a gold chain leading from a buttonhole to his watch pocket. His trousers were black, but less worn than those of his crew, and his boots were polished to a higher sheen and were of a much finer make. He wore thin tan gloves with openings over the knuckles and between the fingers. Around his head he’d tied a charcoal-gray kerchief, and a pair of round spectacles with dark glass lenses and a strange rectangular side lens stretching back from the hinge to shade his eyes from the side adorned his face. Long steel-gray hair hung down from beneath the kerchief, and he wore a similarly colored beard and mustache, which looked to have been carefully trimmed at some point in the past but had since been neglected. He was perhaps in his fifties, though his skin was weathered, roasted, and pitted enough to make him seem far older. His teeth, whiter than she’d expected, clamped around the smoldering stub of a thin brown cigar that burned with an almost candylike scent. While his crew so far had all run on the thin side, he was overall thicker and more intimidating, not portly or muscle-bound, just broader in his chest, arms, and legs.

  “Cap’n Mack, Amanita Graus. Nita, this is Cap’n Mack,” Lil said.

  The captain turned to Nita and gave her a measuring look. “Let’s see the trith.” He spoke out of the side of his mouth rather than sparing a hand for long enough to take the cigar away, and his voice was rough enough to make it clear that this wasn’t his first cigar. It probably wasn’t even in the first thousand.

  She pulled the exposed coil box out of its pouch and held it out to him. He glanced down to it, then back to her eyes, not a flicker of a change in his expression to suggest what might be going through his mind. When he held out his hand, she placed the box in it.

  The captain inspected it for few moments. “Gunner, get over here and take the wheel. Lil, go handle packing up the mooring lines. Ms. Graus, this way please,” said the captain. Despite the presence of the word “please,” all three statements were clearly orders.

  The crew snapped to his commands, and he strode quickly toward the steps down from the upper tier without waiting for an answer from Nita. In her years at the steamworks, she’d worked under enough different foremen and supervisors to know that it didn’t do you any good to illustrate an inability to follow directions as a first impression. She didn’t know enough about this captain to know what kind of man he was, so it was best to stay on his good side. He walked along the swaying deck with nary a stutter or a stumble, as though he didn’t even notice the way it pitched and rolled with the breeze. Nita didn’t even try to follow him directly, resorting instead to the same roundabout path that she’d taken to reach him, one that gave her uninterrupted contact with a railing or strut.

  Nita reached the stairs and found the captain standing in a doorway at the bottom of another staircase, this one leading back toward the top tier of the deck and providing access to the ship’s interior beneath it. When she caught up with him, he turned and led her down a short hallway to a door emblazoned with a plaque that read Captain’s Quarters. The captain pushed open the door to what Nita expected to be the grandest room on the ship. Though they had no airships, Caldera had glorious and well-appointed seagoing vessels. As a Graus she’d often been offered a place at the captain’s table during mealtimes and had been given the ship’s tour on the flagship of the Calderan fleet. On each of those ships the captain’s quarters had been a place large enough and comfortable enough to match a room one might find on solid land.

  This was not a policy shared by the captain of the Wind Breaker. The captain’s quarters were as cramped as any other room she’d seen, if not more so. It contained a desk piled with maps, books, and manifests, all held in place by leather straps affixed to the desk’s corners. The walls were entirely covered with built-in shelving and cabinets, and most bulged with bottles, boxes, and more papers. The opposite wall had three large portholes, and strung across the space in front of them was a net hammock. Nita took a deep breath and immediately regretted it, as the very wood of this room was saturated with the same sickly sweet smell as the cigar in his mouth, though there were a few earthy undertones that put one in mind of a barnyard. A map of the world was pinned to the ceiling, with Caldera among a handful of locations marked. A pair of chairs occupied the remaining floor space, one behind the desk and one in front of it.

  “Take a seat,” he said, doing the same as he placed the coil box on the desk. He pulled at drawers on his side of the desk, revealing first a tall, narrow jar with a locking top, from which he pulled a cigar. From another drawer he extracted a box of matches and a tin box, into which he placed what remained of his cigar stub. He struck the match, lit the cigar with care, and drew in a long breath, which he released with a few smoky words. “What’s your game, Ms. Graus?”

  She waved off the cloud of smoke that carried his words and coughed a bit. “Game, Captain? I thought I’d been quite clear about my intentions.”

  “A pretty young girl from a well-to-do family kicks up a fuss and buys herself onto my rust bucket of a ship for a king’s ransom and for darn near no real reason. All that after a couple of generations of no one having a mind to so much as go sightseeing off those islands of yours. Either you’re up to something, or you’re not quite right in the head. Could be a bit of both, I reckon.”

  “My mother suffers from Gannt’s Disease, and we’ve no way to treat it properly. At worst she could be weeks from death; at best the treatments will preserve her for a few years more. She is a young woman, Captain, no older than you. If there is even the smallest chance to cure her, I don’t
know that there is any other choice to make.”

  “Even if you’re speaking the God’s honest truth, I don’t think you’ve thought this through.”

  “I’ll admit I tend to be a bit impulsive when things look desperate, but the choices I make tend to be the correct ones. I stand by what I’ve said. I don’t know that a person in my position could have, in good conscience, acted any differently.”

  “Don’t you, now? Well, let’s see how a man in my position ought to act. This is all idle musing, mind you. Just for the sake of for instance and such. Here’s the way I see it. I run a floating black market, so I’m clearly not an angel. A wealthy heiress falls into my lap. Seems to me like a nice healthy ransom would be in order.”

  Nita stiffened in her seat.

  “Most of the folk in my line wouldn’t think twice about it. Hell, if I were ten years younger, I might have tried it myself, but those guns round the border would make it a mite tricky to deliver the demand, and I’m just not up to the effort. No, ma’am, ransom isn’t what I’ve got in mind. The easiest thing to do would be to kill you, keep what’s worth keeping from that bag of yours, and heave the rest in the sea, you along with it.” He picked up the coil box. “This here? A lot of men have spilled a lot of blood for a lot less, and as I understand it, this isn’t the half of it. You want my honest opinion, Ms. Graus? I don’t see a lot of ways this comes out right for you. What’s to keep me from just picking these boxes apart and not giving your medicine no never mind?”

  She took a slow breath. “Well, Captain, and again for the sake of ‘for instance’ as you put it, if you were to try pulling one of these apart, I don’t think you’d be doing much else ever again. I’ve seen these boxes being built. I apprenticed under their maker, in fact. It takes a hell of a lot of force to get that trith coiled. If you give it the chance to uncoil without the proper care, it will straighten itself out, and something that thin moving that fast won’t slow down much on its way through wood, steel, flesh, or bone. In case you haven’t noticed, those cross pieces holding that box together are also made of trith, because anything less couldn’t withstand the stress. Once I’m satisfied you’ve done all you can to keep your end of the bargain, I’ll be happy to show you how to take one apart and maybe even help you cut it up. But not before.”

  “And if I decide to sell it intact?”

  Nita sat quietly, trying to keep her expression steady and hoping that it came across as steely resolve rather than panicked realization. The captain let the silence hang in the air for an uncomfortably long time before he saw fit to break it.

  “Don’t worry yourself, miss. I did a fair amount of mischief in my younger days, but I haven’t got the vinegar for that anymore. Better or worse, I’m a businessman now, and I pride myself as a straight shooter. It’s cost me a fortune, I reckon. Plenty of men I could have swindled good, if I’d had the mind to. But being honest also kept my head off of the chopping block and out of the noose more than once. I’ll take that trade ten times out of ten. Heavy pockets don’t do much more than weigh you down when you’re swinging from the gallows. Far as I’m concerned, we’ve got a deal.” He puffed the cigar once more. “But I want to make sure you understand what sort of a deal it is. First, tide’s got to be pretty low for us to make use of those mooring stones, and it’s got to happen at night, so we only make stops in your neck of the woods roundabout once a month, if we can manage. That’s how long you’ll be with us, at the very least. Acceptable?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  “And things won’t be easy. I ain’t made a single trip between Caldera and Keystone—that’d be our home port—without at least one good, hard bump in the road along the way. Pirates, marauders, authorities, and rough weather. You ain’t seen a storm until you been up in the teeth of the thing. You think you can handle that?”

  “Again, if that’s what it takes.”

  “Good. Now, since you’re new to this sort of thing, let me explain a few things. This here ship is what we’d call a zephyr. Meant for a crew of sixteen. Of course, it’s also meant for short trips along the coast of the mainland. To make room for the extra fuel and to make space for the cargo we need to make it worth the trip to places like Caldera, we’ve been running it with a crew of six. Everybody doubles up on tasks and then some. Long and short of it, we don’t have room for tourists. You’ll need to pitch in. For most Calderans I’ve met, that’d be a problem, what with their delicate clothes and fancy colognes and their dainty hands that ain’t never seen the handle of a shovel. You look like the sort who knows how to put in a decent day’s work, though. You know how to use them wrenches?”

  “Some artists use a brush; I use a wrench.”

  “That’s fine. You’ll be working with Gunner, then. He’s our armory officer. Let him know you’re under him, and that I’ll be taking the helm back shortly. Make sure you get introduced around, too. Maybe in your neck of the woods you can jump unescorted onto a ship of strangers and not have to worry your pretty head about it, but not where I come from. Best to show a friendly face in a hurry. It’ll make it easier for us to do good by you and harder for us to do bad. Things are rough out here, and you’re going to need someone to watch your back if you don’t want to wake up with any knives sticking out of it. That means having some friends. You can start with me.” He stood and held out his hand. “Cap’n McCulloch West. The crew calls me Cap’n Mack.”

  She stood and returned the favor. “Amanita Graus. My friends call me Nita.”

  “You look tired, Ms. Graus.”

  “It’s been a long night, Captain. I work the night shift.”

  “See Lil or Coop about stringing up a bunk someplace, but see Gunner first. You’ll find him at the wheel, back up on deck. He’s the fella without the full complement of fingers.” He picked up the coil box and handed it to her. “You’ll want to keep this and the rest of the payment well hid. I vouch for my crew, but even so, you don’t leave a steak out around a hungry hound dog.”

  “Um… where should I hide it, Captain?” she asked, stowing it in her belt again.

  He puffed on his cigar. “That’s another thing you should have thought of before you came aboard. As of now, you are the lowest-ranking member of my crew. You’ll follow any orders they give that don’t conflict with mine, and you’ll have all the privileges they have, which is a mighty short list. Roundabout suppertime we’ll all meet up in the galley, and we’ll discuss the particulars of our little agreement, as well as how and when things are likely to happen. Until then, get good and acquainted with the Wind Breaker and her crew.”