Driftmetal (6 page)

“You think we don’t know how dangerous it is for us
up there? That’s why we want
you
to go,” Blaylocke said.

“Yet you won’t give me gravstone, money, a boat, or
a half-decent crew. You’d better get ready to do a whole lot of
crackling, because that’s the only way you’re getting me to move a
muscle for your cause.”

Vilaris gave a long sigh. “An airship and a crew of
primies is the best we can do.”

“Fine, but only if we switch from the airship to a
streamboat once we get up there. I want to hire a few techsouls of
my own choosing to supplement our crew. And I want Chaz to come.
I’m gonna need a full kit and I’m gonna need it to be in working
order.”

Vilaris was too eager to wait for Chaz’s response.
“Sure, we can do all of it. And Chaz comes too.”

“Deal,” I said, quicker than quick. “Now will you
take off these cuffs? I’m getting a headache from all the
crackling.”

Vilaris gestured, and Blaylocke obliged.

Ladies and gents,
I thought, rubbing my
abraded wrists,
that’s how you turn incarceration into
salvation
.

“Let’s get moving,” said Vilaris. “We’ve got lots to
do and too little time to do it in.”

“Chester, you’d better take the tool in for
repairs,” Blaylocke joked.

I snatched Blaylocke by the collar and lifted him,
legs dangling. I could smell his breath, rotten from
mouth-breathing and vegetable soup. “Don’t
ever
call me a
tool again.”

I let him down, poked a finger into his face. “I
will haunt your nightmares.”

Vilaris had that look squirrels get before they
decide to cross the street. I’d seen squirrels on Roathea, a
floater that boasted both the largest city
and
one of the
largest forested areas in the world.

“Get that crackler installed first thing, Chester,”
Vilaris said. “Will you be okay if we leave?”

I could tell Chaz was more afraid of me now than
ever, but he nodded and stayed with me in the warehouse as the two
City Watchmen left to find us a flight into the stream.

“I’m afraid my experience installing techsoul
modifications is limited,” Chaz said.

“That’s okay, Chaz.” He only flinched a little when
I put a hand on his shoulder. “I wouldn’t expect someone in a city
full of primies to know how techsouls work. Fortunately for you, I
know a lot about how I work. I have all the necessary ports and
terminals. We just have to build some tech and make it fit.”

Chaz gave an almost imperceptible nod.

“Don’t worry, pal,” I said. “I don’t fly off the
handle like that all the time. We can be buds without you worrying
that I’m gonna flip out on you, right?”

“Sure,” Chaz said.

I didn’t believe him.

It took us a few days to gather all the junk we
needed to start building. Before we’d so much as lit our first
blowtorch in the effort, Vilaris and Blaylocke were already antsy
to get going. Lots of pressure from the big guys, they said. A
council of three ruled Pyras; two primies, and one techsoul who
fancied himself a sort of primie-rights activist, allowed in the
city only because he was celibate and he’d sworn off mods of any
kind. They’d actually made him swear never to augment himself, so
his living in Pyras was no temporary whim. All this and more I
learned from Chaz, who had started to open up to me with a little
goading and my repeated assurances that while I was no law-lover, I
wasn’t a psycho axe murderer either.

“Any chance I could meet this guy?” I asked Chaz one
day while we were looking over a set of schematics I’d drawn up for
the new-and-improved hydraulic legs I wanted.

“Councilor Yingler? He’s a bit on the busy side, as
I understand it. And he’s forbidden to enter the Department of
Innovation due to his Vow of Remaining.”

“So I’ll go see him in the council chamber. Where’s
that?”

Chaz didn’t say anything for a while.

“Somewhere in the building, huh…”

He pursed his lips. “I shouldn’t say. Blaylocke told
me—”

“Blaylocke spews so much hot air he could get a
second job as a furnace. Come on, Chaz, buddy. Introduce me.”

“Before we leave the city, maybe,” was all he said
before he changed the subject.

An escort from the City Watch brought me home every
night to the tiny apartment they’d made up for me. Another
complement of guards stood outside my door all night, and a third
brought me back to Kingsholme every morning. The city didn’t like
the idea of playing host to another techsoul any more than I liked
being trapped there. They were serious about making sure I didn’t
find a way to seduce some primie woman and breed my way into their
perfectly preserved gene pool. I got dirty looks whenever I went
out in the streets, so I focused on designing a killer set of tech
and spent all the time I could in the workshop with Chaz. It felt
like imprisonment, but it sure beat rotting in some Regency
prison.

My new kit wasn’t the collection of sought-after
tech I’d lost to Gilfoyle and his men, but when Chaz and I were
done tinkering, I was satisfied. I felt confident again too,
something I hadn’t felt since the night they took it all away. And
I was
heavy
, unused to being weighed down with so many extra
components. If I’d wanted to shoulder a fuel tank the size of a
cow, Chaz said, he could turn my feet into a pair of hover engines.
Or if I wanted a turbine for a hat, he could make me a man-sized
airplane. He had the idea of turning my fingertips into a swiss
army knife, each one a different tool, and the one about putting
driftmetal in my calves and rigging up a set of gravstone clinkers.
He insisted that I install a few weapon mods until I told him any
moron knows you never store explosives inside your body. If there’s
one thing a techsoul knows, it’s how to exploit the tender spots on
another techsoul. So I said ‘no thanks’ to all those things, but
yes to a whole slew of others that I was planning to test before we
got into the thick of things. As it turned out, I never got the
chance.

On departure day, a sparse crowd had already
gathered in the city square by the time we arrived to find a small
airship waiting to bear us aloft. An envelope of thick canvas skin,
the sausage-shaped gasbag was an unremarkable beige color. Rigging
lines attached it to the boat beneath, an aerodynamic wooden craft
as slender and graceful as an old seafaring vessel. Rotating prop
engines were mounted to its sides, and it had a windowed command
bridge at the fore.

“She’s a beaut, isn’t she?” Chaz said proudly.
“
The Secant’s Clarity
.”

I hated airships. Slow, unwieldy things.
Like
flying a turd on crutches
, Dad used to say. “You built
her?”

“Designed, built, and flight-tested,” said Chaz.

“How’s she gonna hold up when we get rammed by a
streamboat full of pirates?”

“You’re the captain, not the gunner. You leave the
ship’s defenses to my more capable hands.”

Chaz wasn’t afraid of me anymore, and I wasn’t sure
I liked it. By the time the ship was loaded and ready to lift off,
the streets were jammed with people. We stood on deck and looked
out over the throngs, the four of us breakfasted and dressed in the
finest trimmings Hildebrand’s Haberdashery had to offer.
An
entire city full of primies
, I thought. I still couldn’t
believe it. I basked in the attention, knowing I was a hot
commodity. So what if half the city hated me and knew I was doing
this against my will? The other half didn’t. I couldn’t help but
observe the fairer sex amongst Pyras’s citizens.
I don’t care
what anyone says—primie girls are just as gorgeous as techsoul
women
. I decided not to share the thought with my companions,
though.

I had the jitters, but they were a different kind of
jitters than the heart-pounding, clammy-handed thrill of pulling
off a big score. They were the jitters of knowing thousands of
people were relying on me. Suddenly the whole thing stank of
helping people
. But what could I do? Chaz had installed that
sub-signal shocker, bolted it into a compartment near my wrist that
he’d locked with a cipher key. They could reduce me to a quaking
pile of synth whenever they wanted. Blaylocke had convinced Chaz to
let him hold onto the remote—even more reason to be on my worst
behavior.

“You never did take me to see that techsoul
councilor of yours,” I said. “Think he’ll show up for the big
send-off?”

Chaz wrinkled his mouth. “Maybe.”

“Councilor Yingler runs most of our errands to the
stream,” said Vilaris. “He’s the one who used to trade directly
with Gilfoyle. I don’t think he’d like you very much. I think if he
wanted to meet you, he’d have arranged it by now.”

“Oh come on, everyone likes me,” I said.

Blaylocke snorted.

“Everyone who’s not an idiot,” I said.

“You really think you’re capable of finding us a
crew?” Vilaris asked. “Reliable, honest techsouls?”

“Yes and no,” I said. “Yes to the first question. No
way to the second. You want
sailors
crewing this boat, or
nannies? Reliability and honesty come second to skill and
know-how.”

“He can’t do a thing,” said Blaylocke. “We should’ve
sent him on this fool’s errand by himself.”

“Yeah, well I’m
thrilled
about having you
along, too,” I said.

In the stream, hanging out with primies is like
wearing a bathing suit to a wedding; you might as well ask to be
ridiculed. Primies are nothing but Churn-scum to most techsouls.
Some techsouls even hate primies so much they’ll go out of their
way to kill them, so the way I saw it, having three primies along
didn’t help my chances of staying out of trouble.

“I’ll give you something to be thrilled about,” said
Blaylocke, patting the sub-signal remote in his pocket.

“I swear, Blaylocke, give me one more good reason to
pop you in the jaw and I’ll make sure you never carry another
conversation without a paper and pencil.”

We spoke to each other out of the corners of our
mouths, all the while standing at the railing, smiling at the
crowds and giving them the occasional wave or thumbs-up. Vilaris
and Chaz had gotten used to my animosity toward Blaylocke over the
previous weeks. I didn’t like the guy, and I’m not the type to
pretend I like you unless there’s something in it for me. I
couldn’t put my finger on what I found so abrasive about him. I
just knew I hated his face and everything that came out of it.

“Cool off, Muller,” said Vilaris, eyeing me. “We’re
not even off the ground yet and you’re antagonizing him
already.”

“I’m getting an early start,” I said. “You gotta run
laps before you can finish the marathon.”

I wasn’t sure where we’d find our future crew, of
course. Most of the sailors I’d worked with were my father’s men
now. My poor
Ostelle
was on the Regency’s payroll,
commissioned to hunt thieves and wanted men like me.

We’d thought ahead in that regard. Chaz, Vilaris and
Blaylocke had made themselves honorary techsouls at my behest, in
secret from their friends and families. Techsouls and primies look
alike until you get under the skin, so I’d shown the haberdasher
how to make techsoul clothing. The pants had velcro panels in the
inner thighs, the shirts and jackets had flaps that opened down the
shoulders, and the boots had heel and toe ports. My companions were
still human weaklings underneath it all, but at least they wouldn’t
stick out like ticks on an albino. As for rustling up a real
crew—it was time to find out if I had any true friends left in this
world.

4

Airships like
The Secant’s Clarity
are
nothing like streamboats. In a streamboat, the only way you’ll ever
fall out of the sky is if you lose your driftmetal runners. You’re
more likely to get an unwanted dose of ‘up’ than one of down. An
airship, on the other hand, is just a big bubble. And bubbles can
be popped.

In my capsule at the fore, I hunkered down over the
controls of
The Secant’s Clarity
as we rose toward Pyras’s
protective cloaking field. Through the wide glass panes that Chaz
had assured me were unbreakable, I could see out from the belly of
the beast in every direction but behind me. The crowds below were
sending us a deafening farewell. Far above the nearflow’s dark
maelstrom, a pure blue sky awaited us.

Chaz had suggested we each take a section of the
controls to divide up the work, but that could wait until we hit
clearer skies. He’d designed the ship so a single person could
control everything from one seat in case the need arose. Since my
reflexes were faster, and since I didn’t have the patience to shout
out my orders and wait for them to be followed, I decided I’d
shoulder the burden myself.

As soon as the topmost portions of our craft
breached the dome, I began to feel the vibrations from the debris
smacking the gasbag’s envelope like fingers flicking a rubber
balloon.
Did anyone in Pyras consider the implications of flying
an airship through a hailstorm of magnetic stones, or is there
somebody down there who
wants
us to fail?
Chaz didn’t
strike me as the type of guy who would’ve overlooked this in his
design, but I supposed it was possible. The even more disconcerting
thought was that if someone had planned to put us in an unsuitable
ship as an act of sabotage, they were probably going to get away
with it. Was that why Yingler hadn’t wanted to meet me?
Quit
being paranoid and fly the blasted thing
, I had to tell
myself.

Wind hammered the
Clarity
and threw us into a
tilt. The entire craft leaned so far sideways I could’ve waved to
the crowds without bending at the waist. When I passed through the
cloaking field, the roar of cheering voices went silent. All I
could hear in its place was the nearflow’s skirling. I could only
imagine the peoples’ cheers turning to gasps as the wind swept us
up like a broom over a breadcrumb. I struggled for lift while the
nearflow spit rocks at my windows. The air was as thick as dirt, my
companions gathered around me and clinging to the girders like a
pack of stranded rats. Vilaris and Blaylocke were grim-faced; Chaz
was equal parts terror and nausea. It made me laugh. That was
probably because I was all kitted out with new tech now. I didn’t
have as many reasons to be afraid as they did.