Free-Wrench Read online

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  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.