Free-Wrench, no. 1 Read online

  Deafening thunder rang out, and the whole of the ship jerked aside as if struck. The force of it sent Nita’s attacker stumbling back toward the railing and nearly threw him overboard, but he held firm. Out of the corner of her eye, Nita saw a burst of greenish gas as the wailers’ main ship began to plummet. Her main attention remained on her own threat as the man recovered and raised his pistol once more. A second, quieter crack filled the air and the wailer jerked backward, dropping his weapon and cupping his hand to his chest. Another crack split the air, and the man, stricken, finally went over the side. Nita swept her eyes across the deck until she spotted Coop, smoke still drifting from the barrel of his rifle.

  “Direct hit! Gunner, Lil, back on deck, now!”

  Just like that, the battle was over, though not without its costs. The turbines above were sputtering and out of rhythm. The largely intact wailer craft lay splayed across most of the central stretch of deck, its envelope now dangling from a single line and leaking a stream of green vapor, its steam fans grinding. Before the fiery rush of battle could fully subside, Nita hurried to Coop to help him to his feet.

  “That was quite a shot, Coop,” Nita said. “Are you all right?”

  “Been worse, ma’am,” he said, handing over his rifle and investigating the gash on his arm. It was shallow but long, and bleeding copiously. “Dang it. This here’s my favorite shirt. My favorite arm too.”

  Lil appeared from below decks and ran to her brother’s side. “Big brother, move your fingers for me. Come on now.”

  “I’m fine, Lil. Nita and I held the deck just fine.”

  “You all right, Nita?” Lil asked, looking her new crewmate up and down.

  “I think so. A little bruised, but nothing serious.”

  “You handled yourself pretty good, I’d say. I knew you wouldn’t end up going over the side. And you didn’t turn green even once while you were up here.”

  “Turn green? From what?” Nita asked. She looked about, then locked her eyes on the horizon. “Oh… oh dear…”

  For the first time, the frenzy had died down enough for her brain to process her surroundings beyond a knee-jerk threat assessment. On the previous day the shifting of the deck and the realization of their altitude had been enough to make her sick amid a barely discernable haze. Now the sky was clear, and they were over a thousand feet high. The part of her mind trained to recognize beauty thrilled at the sight, a ring of endless sea in all directions, the sky a brighter blue than she’d ever seen it, and cottony clouds so near she felt she could touch them. Unfortunately the part of her mind charged with self-preservation, already stretched to the limit with the battle and shakily coming back to normal, wanted no part of this view or any other that wasn’t firmly rooted on solid ground. It seemed determined to voice its displeasure in much the same way it had the day before.

  “I think I’m going to—” she began, stumbling toward the railing.

  “Belay that, Ms. Graus. There’s still a job to do,” Captain Mack barked.

  Nita flinched, first wondering how he could possibly believe he might be able to order her digestive system to behave, then wondering why it had seemed to work.

  “Cap’n, permission to take him down to Butch,” Lil said.

  “Do it,” the captain said.

  “When did this happen?” Gunner called from behind them, circling the remains of the wailer craft.

  “I didn’t have any weapons, and their grappler was out of reach. I had to improvise,” Nita said.

  Gunner nodded in appreciation. “I always did want to get a look at one of their fléchette guns!”

  “Indulge your weapon lust later, Gunner. I want a complete list of all damage, inside and out. Take Ms. Graus with you. Teach her a thing or two. Lil, once you’ve seen to Coop’s arm, I want you up here on lookout. It wouldn’t be the first time we encountered two wailer ships at once. And I don’t like the way the turbines sound. I’ll have to stay at the wheel. It is going to be a fight keeping this ship on course. You have your orders. Move.”

  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, relea
sing 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?”

  “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.”

  #

  After forty uncomfortable minutes of working mostly by glove-addled touch in the steam-filled room, trial and error allowed Nita to locate the proper valves to shut off the flow to the broken pipes. The air in the boiler room cleared, and it ceased to feel like a sauna. By then the firebox, with its previous refueling having been rudely interrupted, was doing little more than smoldering. Gunner fetched the coal and slow-burn and dumped them inside. The pair of crewmembers watched as the gauges slowly rose on the active lines.

  “There. That’s about as good as you’re going to get without doing any real repairs,” Nita said.

  “I’ll go talk to the captain and see how this changes things. I think you’ve earned a few minutes of reprieve. In an hour, report to the primary deck.”

  Nita nodded and made her way wearily out the door.

  “Good work today,” he called after her. “Not just with the boiler, but with the attack. Good to see you’re willing to get a little blood on your hands.”

  She nodded again, his words slowly sinking into her mind as she made her way to the bathing room, such as it was. Lil had given her a quick briefing about what passed for shipboard hygiene. It involved a bucket of nonpotable water, which, with the loss of the barrels on the deck, meant she’d be using seawater that was normally intended as ballast and feed water for the boiler. Then came the sponge and soap. She tried to put out of her mind the question of how old and frequently used each one might be. A few days baking under her leather and canvas work clothes had left her in a state that could only be improved by whatever hygienic measures were available. After she was as clean and dry as she was going to get, she changed into the only other outfit available to her, the dainty white dress she’d planned to wear home from work before she embarked on this unexpected adventure. She was in the process of rinsing out her work clothes with the remainder of the bucket when Gunner’s statement finally struck bottom.

  “Blood on my hands…” she repeated.

  That was silly. There wasn’t any blood on her hands. Gunner had done the killing. And Coop. She hadn’t… no. There was one, wasn’t there? When she’d tangled up the final craft, one man had fallen. But that was self-defense. All of it was self-defense. She hadn’t done anything to provoke those attackers, and she certainly couldn’t have reasoned with them. Still… she had taken a life today. And it bothered her. Not that she’d done it, but that, until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to her to feel anything but relief at having done it. She was supposed to be civilized. Civilized people didn’t revel in the excitement of life-threatening situations. They didn’t look back upon what had happened on that deck and admit, even grudgingly and only to themselves, that parts of it had been fun. Of course civilized people, as she’d been taught to define the phrase, didn’t fly through the sky in wondrous machines. They didn’t concoct new types of fuel that let them cross whole oceans. She shivered at the breeze in a dress that wasn’t quite adequate for the chill and wind of high altitude and wondered if maybe the time had come to update her personal definition of civilization.

  Chapter 8

  Her work suit hadn’t dried yet when the time came to meet with the captain, so she reluctantly made her way to the upper deck in her dress. For better or worse the ship wasn’t moving as quickly as it might, so the wind wasn’t quite as vicious as it had been on her previous visits. It still required her to hold her hands strategically and angle herself with care, lest an errant gust give her crewmates a show. She made her way toward the bow of the ship, taking a wide detour around the wailer craft that was still lying on the deck.

  The captain stood at the wheel, and the entirety of the crew gathered around him. Coop seemed none the worse for wear. He hadn’t even felt it necessary to change out
of his torn and bloodied clothes. The slice through the sleeve of both his coat and shirt revealed a lightly stained bandage. Butch was muttering something unrecognizable, clucking over her patient it seemed, as he filled the breaks in her ranting with scolded assurances.

  “I know, Butch. Don’t lift nothing heavy with that arm for a few days. And drink lots. I’ll do that too,” Coop said, like a schoolboy enduring a long good-bye from a fretting mother. “Oh, look, Nita’s here. We can get started.”

  “I’m sorry, am I late?”

  The captain pulled a pocket watch from his vest pocket.

  “Not quite late, Ms. Graus, but not early,” he said, clicking it shut.

  “Look at you, all dressed up in your finery,” Lil said. “That’s more what I’m used to from you Calderan folk.”

  “My only other clothes are still wet.”

  “You gotta let me try that on once. How come nobody ever brings a dress like that to trade?” Lil said.

  “Because we don’t never get no girls doing the trading,” Coop said.

  “I know that. You think I don’t know that? It was one of them… what do you call it? Rectory-ical questions.”

  “What’s church got to do with it?” Coop asked, scratching his head with his good hand.

  “I think you meant rhetorical,” Nita said.

  “Is that the one you ask but you don’t want no answer?” Lil asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Right, I was askin’ one of them.”

  “Now why would you want to ask a question but not want no answer?” Coop asked.

  “To make me look smart, stupid.”

  “Let’s get down to business!” the captain growled. “Ms. Graus’s tinkering has got two of our turbines working at full strength, which is a damn sight better than they’d been doing, but still not good by any stretch. I’m bringing us down to the surface to take on water for the boiler. We’ll drop a buoy to get an idea of our speed right now, but if I’m worth my salt, I figure we’re not going more than twenty knots.”

  “How does that compare to our proper speed?” she asked.