Free-Wrench Read online

Chapter 7

  Nita and Gunner walked slowly along the deck, cataloguing the damage. She did her best to avoid looking over the edge, as she wasn’t sure how long her scolded stomach would remain obedient, and she was in no hurry to put it to the test again.

  “Six more damaged planks. One will need to be replaced,” he remarked. He turned to her. “You handled yourself rather well.”

  “Don’t talk to me,” she growled.

  “Have I done something wrong?”

  “You wanted to throw me over the side not two hours ago.”

  “Ah, that. I can see how that might strain our working relationship a tad.”

  “A tad, yes. These three barrels went over the side. What were they?”

  “Rain water. Might be a problem, but not an immediate one. At any rate, I’m what you might call a pragmatist.”

  “No, you’re what I might call an ass.”

  He looked up. “I don’t like the way that bit of rigging is fastened. We’ll need to get Lil up there to take a closer look. This is still your first time in the air, Nita,”

  “You’ll call me Ms. Graus until I say otherwise.”

  “Very well, Ms. Graus. The sun hasn’t even set on your first day, and we’ve already been attacked. I don’t know what sort of people you’ve encountered in your short life, but how many would you say could manage to function in conditions such as these?”

  “Not many,” she grudgingly admitted. “This pipe here is pierced.”

  “That’s one of the captain’s speaking tubes. Nonessential. Crewing an airship is a lifetime commitment, which isn’t to say it is a very long one. Survival is rare and comes only at the cost of some very unpleasant decisions. We are alive because we’ve known when to cut our losses and trim the finger to save the hand.” He held up his three-fingered right hand. “Literally in my case. And trust me when I say that losing a crewmate is no more pleasant than losing a finger. I’d rather cull the herd early than lose someone I’ve had time to know and work with.”

  “If telling me that advising my murder was motivated by your desire to avoid heartache in the long run is supposed to improve my opinion of you, it didn’t work.”

  “So be it. I’d think twice about how you choose to direct your spite, though. Your life and livelihood still rely upon you doing a good job.”

  “I always take my job seriously, Gunner, even when my life isn’t on the line. What’s that up there?”

  He looked where she was pointing. A very faint but unmistakable stream of green vapor sprayed out of the center of a patch on the envelope overhead.

  “Bad news. Very bad news. Captain! One of the nails caught a patch. Not on a seam, slow leak. So long as it doesn’t open any more, we probably won’t have to lower our altitude for a few days.”

  “Patchable?” the captain called back.

  “It’s on the underside of the envelope, but tough to reach. It might be tricky unless we’re at port.”

  “Anything else as bad or worse?”

  “Not on this deck.”

  “Fine, get down to the boiler and find out what’s wrong. We’re barely limping. At this speed, we certainly aren’t getting to Keystone before our supplies run out, and we’re nowhere near any friendly ports.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Gunner led down to the boiler room, but before they were halfway there it was clear they wouldn’t find any good news when they reached it. The hallway was dense with steam.

  “This doesn’t bode well,” he said.

  The door to the boiler room belched steam around its edges, and a bizarre rattle sounded, like an angry woodpecker was trapped on the other side. Gunner grasped the handle and gave it a pull, but the only result was a weak groan of wood.

  “It’s stuck. Give me a hand here.”

  She once again slid one of her cheater bars from her belt and wedged it into the door. Between the two of them, they managed to dislodge the door, releasing a blur of frenzied gray fur and angry chattering. Nita screeched as something scrambled up her leg, up her back, and onto her head.

  “What in the world?! Get it off me!”

  “Okay, Wink. Off there. Maybe this will teach you not to linger next to the boiler,” he said. He plucked the creature from her head and set him down, then snapped three times and pointed. “On the deck, Inspector. Get to inspecting.”

  Wink peered up at the two of them, taking the time to give each of them their own dirty look, then hopped off down the hallway, stopping at the edge to stare at them and tap halfheartedly at the planks of the floor. Nita tried to shake off the bizarreness of what had just happened and pulled down her goggles. Gunner did likewise, and the pair made their way inside the boiler room.

  Steam is dangerous stuff, and getting burned once is more than enough to teach someone the value of caution. It was clear by their deliberate motions and careful avoidance of all of the direct streams of steam that both Nita and Gunner had learned to respect it. This being the boiler room, the need for ventilation to feed the fire and remove the smoke meant that enough of the steam escaped to keep the chamber from being too hot to enter, but it was perilously close.

  “This is bad,” Gunner said. “This is very, very bad. The boiler is broken.”

  “Well, the room is still intact, and nothing seems scorched, so the primary workings are probably in good shape. All of that sharp maneuvering probably just put a bit of stress on the joints and ruptured a few.”

  “What difference does that make? The boiler is broken.”

  “Yes, so I’d imagine we should get to work fixing it.”

  “We don’t fix boilers, Ms. Graus. We feed them, water them, blow out the brine, and replace valves. Only the fug folk fix boilers.”

  “I thought you were the ship’s engineer.”

  “This ship doesn’t have an engineer,” he said incredulously. “No ship has an engineer. The fug folk don’t leave the fug for the likes of us.”

  “Do you mean to tell me that the fug folk are the only ones who even know how to fix these boilers?”

  “As I said, they are the only ones who fix the boilers, period.”

  “That’s absurd! What do you do in situations like this?”

  “We pray that situations like this don’t happen, and if they do, we limp along and hope we get lucky enough to catch a tow back to the fug.”

  “Well, at least that explains why the captain would have made the armory officer the engineer. It struck me as rather questionable judgment to assign boiler maintenance to a man trained to make things explode. Let me see what I can do…”

  “Don’t do anything!” he said, pulling her back from the tangle of pipes.

  “Why in the world not?”

  “Do you know why no one knows how to fix these boilers? Because the fug folk don’t allow anyone else to fix the boilers, or any of their equipment. If they so much as suspect you of doing work on their boilers, they’ll refuse to service them ever again, and you risk losing trade rights with them entirely. That’s the way things are done out here. This gadgetry is firmly in the fug folks’ domain. We can patch holes in the gondola and rips in the envelope, but anything that goes clink when you tap on it is off limits.”

  “You make it sound like these people are your masters.”

  “Look. Life is just easier if we play by their rules, all right?”

  Nita stepped out of the steamy room, already soaking wet, and pushed up her goggles. “What exactly do these fug folk allow you to do?”

  “Well, they let us adjust the knobs and such, and they let us swap out these valves here.” He reached inside and pulled their only spare valve from a crate just inside the door. “Everything else is done by them—or else.”

  Nita pursed her lips and thought. “Clearly some of the pipes are ruptured, we’re wasting pressure. If we can shut off the pressure to the broken pipes, at the very least the intact pipes will have full pressure.”

  “And you can do that just by turning knobs?”

&nb
sp; “Yes,” she said flatly.

  “Do it.”

  She shook her head and slid her goggles back on. “You people had the gall to suggest I would be a liability.”