Free-Wrench Page 5

Chapter 4

  Nita stepped out of the captain’s quarters. She felt dizzy, and there was more to it than simply the pitching and swaying of the ship. Now that the impulse and certainty that had driven her to embark on this insane mission had begun to wear off and the captain’s words had begun to sink in, doubt reared its ugly head. This ship and its crew couldn’t be less like the world she was accustomed to, and while she certainly had been seeking something new, this was a good deal more than she’d had in mind. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this, so she defaulted to what she always did when things seemed out of control: calm down, focus on one thing at a time, and look for someone who knows what’s going on. If she was to assist this Gunner fellow, then for now she would simply find him. Easy enough.

  She pushed open the doorway to the deck and climbed the stairs. A chilly rush of air slapped her in the face, stinging her eyes enough to compel her to pull her goggles into place. When she could see again, she immediately noticed something very wrong.

  The ocean was missing.

  Minutes ago they had been just a few dozen feet from the churning blue waves below. Now there was nothing but the gray haze of morning above, below, and all around. The sun was only just beginning to rise in earnest behind them, providing a single point of reference in the form of a fuzzy red blob of light. It was profoundly disorienting, elevating her dizziness into stomach-turning vertigo.

  Nita held tight to the nearest railing and tried to push the feeling aside. She scanned the deck for the others. Coop was nowhere to be seen, but Lil was tidying the coiled up moor line. When she noticed Nita, Lil walked confidently across the swaying deck. She wasn’t wearing goggles, making do with squinting to cope with the rushing wind, and had donned a short jacket. It was clear why she kept her hair as short as she did. An inch longer and the wind would be whipping it against her face despite the bow.

  “That was a quick visit. Everything go okay with Cap’n?” Lil asked. She leaned a bit closer and looked Nita in the face, then lit up with impish delight. “Oh ho! Looks like this is going to be a blessed voyage, because Nita here is fixing to make an offering!”

  “What? I don’t…” Nita struggled to say, but her stomach put a quick end to the conversation by making a short but intense attempt to put her mouth to a more colorful use.

  “Come on, darlin’. This way, quick.” Lil took Nita’s hand and led her toward the edge of the ship. “You’ll feel better in a minute.”

  Nita didn’t have the will to object, simply stumbling along with Lil in a daze until she reached the waist-high railing at the edge of the deck. She held tight to it, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.

  “It’s not lookin’ good for this one,” Lil said to a crewmate, shaking her head.

  “I feel… I feel a bit better. I just needed a moment,” Nita said.

  “You sure? You’re still lookin’ a tad green round the gills,” Lil said.

  Nita intended to assure her new crewmate that she was perfectly fine, but she made the unfortunate mistake of opening her eyes before she did so. Her head hung slightly over the railing, which gave her an unobstructed view off the side of the ship. Below them, a break in the fog provided the briefest glimpse of the sea below, but it was enough to make it clear that they weren’t dozens of feet from the water anymore, they were hundreds. It was the final straw.

  “There it is! Oh Spirit of the Journey, please accept our humble offering of this greenhorn’s lunch in exchange for your good graces,” Lil said with her head lowered in mock prayer.

  “I’m sorry,” Nita said, when she’d recovered enough to do so. “This is so embarrassing. I’ve been on a ship a hundred times, and I’ve never been sick.”

  “Airships are a whole different beast. Happens to everyone on the first trip,” Lil said. “At least you were outside when it happened. You might want to carry a bucket around though, until you get your air legs. Were you after anything up here, or did you just want to feed the ducks?”

  “I was supposed to find Gunner,” she said, pushing up her goggles to rub her eyes. What she wanted most was to find a corner to crawl into until she could get her head straight, but nothing was ever solved by being meek. Best to get to work as soon as possible. She pulled a small bottle of water from one of the pouches on her belt, rinsed her mouth out, and slid the goggles back into place.

  “Atta girl! That’s him up there.”

  Nita looked toward the prow and saw the man she’d briefly glimpsed during her first visit to the deck. He was working the controls. That was a mercy, at least. It meant he was facing away from her and hadn’t witnessed her little bout with airsickness. She straightened up and took a few plodding steps up the stairs, trying to judge the roll of the ship and move only when doing so wasn’t likely to tip her over the side.

  “Hello. You’re Gunner?”

  “That would be me,” said the man at the controls in a far more crisp and unaccented voice than the others.

  He was a few years older than the other crewmembers. If Nita were to hazard a guess, she would place him within a few years of his thirtieth birthday, though on which side wasn’t clear. He was an inch or two taller than her, with black hair, a face full of stubble, and a pair of smoky and charred goggles keeping the wind at bay. His hands moved with a bit less confidence across the controls in comparison to his captain, a fact that may have been due in part to his hands. His right hand was missing the middle and ring fingers, and his left was missing the pinky. The injuries must not have been recent, because the brown leather gloves he wore had the corresponding fingers cut away and sewn up. He was of average build, dressed in much the same way as the rest of the crew save for a dedicated gun belt beneath his coat in addition to at least three holsters strapped across his chest and legs.

  “I’m Amanita Graus. The captain said I should assist you.”

  “Are you? With what exactly?” he asked, tapping a gauge before muttering to himself, “Lousy thing’s busted again.”

  “With whatever you need me to do, I suppose,” Nita said. “He wasn’t very explicit. He told me I would be working with you, and that he would be back to take the wheel soon.”

  “Well, that’s good to hear. This bucket handles like a plow,” he said. He pulled hard at one of the levers, conjuring a worrisome grind from one of the fans overhead. “I swear, I don’t know how he gets it to do his bidding.”

  “I do it by treating her like a lady, Gunner,” the captain said. He was stepping up from below decks, the freshly lit cigar clenched firmly in his teeth and streaming ash in the stiff breeze. “That means you need to treat her with care and finesse. Keep that in mind when you’re showing Ms. Graus the ropes. And make sure she meets the whole crew.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Gunner said, with a crisp salute. He stepped aside and turned to Nita. “Now, you’re to be my assistant, are you?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Well then, per the captain’s orders, I’ll give you the bare-bones rundown. No sense doing more than that right now. You’re a Calderan I see. Am I correct in assuming you’ve never served on an airship before?”

  “This is the first such ship I’ve ever set foot on.”

  “That’s just lovely. Very well, we start at the beginning then.” He released a frustrated huff. “This big sack over our heads is called the envelope. When we’re firing on enemies, we aim for theirs and try to keep them from hitting ours. There are a few different sections in there, so we can stand a few holes without falling out of the sky, but not many. We stay up by keeping it filled with a concoction called phlogiston, which has got a great deal more lift than it has any right to. We go up and down by pumping phlogiston in and out of holding tanks with pumps there, and there.” He indicated two deceivingly small mechanisms attached to the bottom side of the sack above them. “We’re standing on the gondola, specifically the helm deck. Down those stairs is the primary deck, and there are three lower decks. We’ll tour them shortly. The front of the ship is the fore end
and we call it the bow; the back is the aft end and we call it the stern. Left is port, right is starboard. The deck numbers increase as you go down, with the primary deck as deck one. There, that’s enough to get around, anyway. Am I going too fast for you?”

  “I’m following so far.”

  “Good. If there’s one thing we don’t have use for, it’s a slow learner. Now, introductions. My name is Guy von Cleef. The crew calls me Gunner for obvious reasons, and you may as well do so. You’ve met the captain already. Have you met Lil?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Coop?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Butch?”

  “I haven’t met him.”

  “Her, actually. Come along.”

  He walked briskly toward the stern of the ship, setting a pace that Nita found difficult to match without stumbling like a drunkard. All along the way he pointed his fingers and dictated terminology. Familiar mechanisms like pneumatic manifolds and pressure lines joined new terms like bottlescrews and ballast pumps. Nita tucked the information away, keeping track of a growing list of questions while focusing as best she could on walking without falling down and keeping what was left of her last meal where it should be. They walked nearly the length of the primary deck until they reached a hatch with a narrow ladder leading to the lower decks.

  On what he indicated was deck two, they found the nearest thing to an open space she’d seen so far. It was a room with four picnic-style benches bolted to the floor. Each could, if pressed, seat three people on a side, and one had a cushion and white linen covering applied to the top, both of which had faded stains the color of rust. At the far end of the room was a half wall revealing a small kitchen stuffed to capacity. Its walls were hung with well-secured cutlery, their blades gleaming in the glow of the cooking fire. The air was muggy with steam and heavy with spice. A woman stood hunched over the far counter, but the steam and low light made it difficult to see any detail.

  Gunner slipped the goggles from his face. “This is our galley and sickbay. Butch! I’ve got the latest newcomer. Mack wants her introduced around, as usual.”

  The immediate result was a torrent of foreign words spewed forth with an agitation and bitterness that transcended language. Butch turned around, clattering spoons and slamming lids on pots, and marched through the gate in the half wall without so much as a breath interrupting her incomprehensible tirade. She was sixty years old at least, and her voice was a coarse shriek that sounded at least twenty years older than that. She was heavy, with bulldog jowls and deep lines on her face, and dressed entirely in white, from the kerchief that held back her white hair to the simple white shoes on her feet. Covering her white dress was a lightly stained smock.

  Her angry rant came to an end as suddenly as it started, and she stared expectantly at Nita.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand,” Nita said.

  “She wants to know your name. She also said a great deal of very colorful words about people who interrupt her cooking, but it wasn’t really relevant to the subject at hand, and I’d rather get through this quickly,” Gunner explained.

  “I’m Amanita Graus.”

  “Glinda West,” said the woman, followed by what Nita hoped was a foreign pleasantry of some kind.

  “West? Are you the captain’s sister?”

  “Ex-wife,” Gunner said.

  “Oh. Pleased to meet you,” Nita said, holding out her hand.

  Again there was a brief rant with a greater than usual amount of hand waving.

  “Butch has a strict clean-hand policy. No handshakes.”

  “Oh, very well,” she said, offering a curtsy, or as near as she could offer without wearing an actual dress.

  Butch seemed mollified and offered a short statement that was, for once, not screeched like a harpy.

  “She’s sorry to hear about your mother, and she hopes we can finally pry some real medicine out of the fug folk.”

  “Thank you for your kindness.”

  The woman nodded once and turned, walking back to the kitchen.

  “Butch is our cook and medic, so if you stick around it’ll, pay to be on her good side,” Gunner said quietly as they left. “If you happen to figure out how to manage that, be sure to let the rest of us know.”

  “What’s that language she’s speaking? I don’t recognize it.”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t know. You’ll learn to understand her though, if you make it as a crewmember.”

  “Why do you call her Butch?”

  “That’s not really relevant to the orders I was given.” He progressed down the hall, pointing out rooms as he went. “These are strong rooms, filled with the goods we sell and the goods we get in return,” he said. “They are locked tight, and only the captain has the key.”

  “If this is where you store the goods, what do you keep in the cargo hold?”

  “If we could afford an airship with a proper cargo hold, we’d scarcely need to risk our necks with a monthly trip to Caldera. Wind Breaker was built as a coastal patrol ship. We converted the additional crew quarters for provisions, goods, and fuel. We also managed to scrape together some better turbines, a bigger boiler… I suppose it is easier just to list the things we didn’t modify. That would be… well, I suppose the primary deck and the armaments. This ship has a pretty good set of teeth. Two sets of fore cannons, one set of aft. We try not to fire the aft cannon. It tends to knock the galley around a bit.” He indicated the final pair of rooms on the floor. “These rooms are the only remaining crew quarters. This one belongs to the Cooper siblings. This one is shared by myself and Butch. There is no spare, so you’ll either be stringing up a hammock with the Coopers or staking out a spot elsewhere.”

  “Yours and Butch’s room is off limits?”

  “No more so than the Coopers’ or anywhere else on this ship. To be frank, I don’t want to waste my time moving my stuff to make room for a greenhorn who’s just as likely to not last more than a day with us.”

  “Don’t write me off so soon. I’m sure I can be an asset.”

  “Yeah, so did the rest of them.”

  “And that happened to them?”

  “They didn’t cut it. It’s that simple. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t feel inclined to move my collection for someone who won’t be with us for very long.”

  “Collection of what?”

  He pushed open the curtain. One half of the room was tidy and included a neat hammock hanging with a sheet and comforter arranged on top in what must have been the nearest equivalent to a made bed as one was likely to find on a ship. The other side was like an armory, or perhaps a museum of the history of warfare. It had almost as much gleaming cutlery secured to the walls as the kitchen. Swords, daggers, and knives were joined by flintlock pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, a multibarreled contraption with a crank on the side, and some sort of tube that she would have guessed was a musical instrument if not for the company it kept.

  “Assorted firearms, bladed weapons, and bludgeons. Some precataclysm antiques, some original creations, all fully restored and functional.”

  Nita watched as a particularly strong shift of the ship jostled the wall-mounted portion of the collection, much of which was directly over his hammock.

  “Aren’t you afraid something might fall on you?”

  “It only happened once, and the scar is barely noticeable. I still contend that Coop was playing with my cutlass and didn’t return it to its mounting properly.” He cut himself off, shaking his head and chastising himself under his breath. “Never mind. Doesn’t matter. Waste of time. Onward to deck three, which is more or less our utility deck.”

  He led the way to another ladder and brought Nita to deck three. By virtue of the shape of the ship, this deck was somewhat shorter than the one above. It was primarily an I-shaped hallway running past six rooms, three on each side, and two larger rooms at the far ends.

  “The fore and aft rooms hide the workings of the cannons. The ammo hoists and
such. If you’re to be my assistant, you’ll spend much time in there, so no need to open those doors for now.”

  “If you don’t mind, I would love to get a look at them. I’ve always been fascinated with machinery.”

  “I was asked to show you around and introduce you. I prefer to get my orders out of the way as quickly as possible, so I can return to more worthwhile diversions, if you don’t mind.”

  Nita eyed Gunner. Lil and Coop were kind enough at first blush to make her wonder if she’d been misinformed about the overall attitude of outsiders. Gunner seemed determined to even the balance.

  “The primary powder magazine is up this way, just ahead. The secondary powder magazine is back that way. Over here is the boiler room, water tanks, and immediate fuel supply. No need to take you downstairs. Just the gig hoist and the fuel, water, and gas storage. Oh, actually, you’ll find the head there as well, when nature calls. With that, I believe that fulfills my orders. All introductions, and a quick tour.”

  “One moment… Lil, Coop, Captain Mack, Butch, and you. That’s five crewmembers. Where is the sixth?”

  “Sixth? We don’t… oh, Captain Mack was counting our inspector. Since he wasn’t in the galley or with the captain, he’ll probably be in the boiler room.”

  He took a few strides down the hallway and pulled open one of the few solidly shut doors in the ship to reveal baking heat and a sooty atmosphere that was almost like a taste of home for Nita. She found herself strangely excited to finally see something the she was confident she would know inside and out. After all, a boiler is a simple mechanism. Surely one design could only differ so much from another. This one would be smaller than the boilers back at the steamworks, but all of the components would be the same. When she got a glimpse of the thing, she realized how very mistaken she was. The scale was the least of the changes. This contraption bore little or no resemblance to any such device she’d seen, even the wood-fired ones she’d seen in ships. It almost looked inside out. There was a firebox, steam and water pipes, and a chimney. All parts she’d expected to see, but joining them was a bird’s nest of tubes both large and small, twisting over themselves in a brass, copper, and cast-iron nightmare.

  “This is your boiler?” she asked, waving off a particularly strong whiff of the odd-smelling fumes that hissed from the firebox door.

  “Of course. Technically this is also my responsibility, but it isn’t as though there’s much to do.”

  “Not much to do?”

  “Just shovel some fuel into it now and then, refill the water tanks, blow out the brine, and swap out the bits that wear out. And we’d better hope there’s not much of that, because we’re down to just the one spare.”

  “I’ve been working as a free-wrench in the largest steamworks in Caldera for years, and I haven’t come close to mastering the different trades. Boilers need constant upkeep and inspection. I assumed that’s why your inspector would be in here. Where is he, anyway?”

  “Oh, he’s probably up in the dark corner over there. He likes it warm,” Gunner said. He leaned down and tapped the floor. “Come on out, Wink. There’s another one.”

  Nita raised an eyebrow, then took a step back when something stirred in the darkness. When it revealed itself, slinking into the glow of the fire, getting a good look did little to clarify what it was. It was a creature with wiry, ghostly gray fur. At a glance she might have thought it was a cat based on the size, but the illusion didn’t last long. The ears and nose were batlike, and as it moved toward them it demonstrated the awkwardness of something more at home in the trees than on land. A few short hops brought it to their feet, where it flicked its long, fuzzy tail and looked at them with a perfectly round red eye. The other eye was hidden beneath a cloth sash tied about the creature’s head. It turned to Nita and crouched down, drumming its spidery fingers without taking its eye off her. Nita took a step back, not sure what to make of it, but quite sure she didn’t want to be touched by it.

  “What is that?” Nita asked.

  “That’s our ship’s inspector, Wink. The fug folk require at least one of them to accompany every ship. They tap along the planks looking for wood grubs, which we can pick up from time to time when we make landfall. They’re also trained to identify and mark planks that are succumbing to rot. Mack says this ship would have fallen apart years ago without Wink here, so he usually considers him a crewmember. Rather silly sentiment, if you ask me, but captains all have their quirks.”

  “But what manner of creature is it?”

  “Some sort of jungle creature. They come from an island on the far side of Rim. At least that’s where they came from. Now they mostly come from the fug, and who knows how the fug folk get them. Enough of that, though. The captain’s order is followed to the letter. I’ve got to rest up for my watch. Get yourself sorted out. I suppose I’ll figure out what to do with you in a few hours.”

  Gunner ushered Nita out of the boiler room. Wink lingered in the still-open door. She stared down at the creature, and it stared right back. Its face had a stern, almost distrustful look as it met her gaze. With a final jittery tap of its thin fingers, it slunk into the shadows within and shut the door. It was astounding how ominous such a small creature could be.