Free-Wrench, no. 1 (5 page)

“Haul it up. I’ll pull in the mooring lines,
and we can skedaddle before the fog breaks up and the Calderan
scouts notice us. Once we’re clear I’ll hop down and hand up the
goods,” Cooper said. He was tall enough that he had to slouch a bit
to avoid scraping his head, but he did so with a practiced ease
that didn’t cost him any speed. “Oh, and this here’s Amanita Graus.
She’ll be joining us for a bit.”

“I know who she is. You think I couldn’t hear
you jawing back and forth?” said the woman as Coop hurried off. She
pulled the lever, prompting a hiss that brought the winches to
life, then extended a hand. “Pleased to meet you, Amanita. Did I
hear your friend down there calling you Nita?”

“Yes. Most people call me that. Amanita can
be a mouthful at times.”

“Nita it is, then. I’m Chastity. Folks round
here call me Lil. Short for Lil’ Coop, seein’ as how I’m Coop’s
baby sister.”

“A pleasure to meet you.”

“The cap’n will want to meet you before
anyone else. He’ll be at the helm on the main deck, so we’ll just
head up there when the gig is reeled in.”

Nita stood, looking down through the larger
hatch and listening to the click of the winch. As she did, two very
distinct and very powerful feelings came over her. The first was an
intense feeling of vertigo. The climb hadn’t seemed terribly long
when she was looking up, but looking down was another matter. The
waves below made her head spin, and realizing that they were held
aloft not by something good and solid like a building but by a
tattered bag and some ancient rigging filled her with a cold,
hollow anxiety.

The second feeling, one easily as unsettling,
was the realization of just what she had done and how quickly she
had done it. Everything had happened so fast! In the space of a few
minutes the distant hope of a treatment for her mother’s problem
had turned into an opportunity that could easily slip away. In the
moment, her decision seemed like the only one. There hadn’t been
time for fear or doubt. In a way it was just the same as the day
before when she’d raced to the bypass valve. Had she thought about
it, running
toward
a boiler that was on the verge of
explosion was a hideously stupid idea, but in the end it had been
the right thing to do. She could only hope that this decision was
the right one, too. In these first moments after stepping off the
proverbial cliff, it certainly didn’t seem that way.

After one last glance through the hatch, she
swallowed hard and hastily decided not to think about any more
cliffs for a while, proverbial or otherwise.

The hoisted dinghy finally drew near enough
to the hatch to completely block her view of the water below, and
Lil threw the lever in the opposite direction.

“That’ll do ’er for now. Let’s get you up to
meet the cap’n before—”

A brass pipe with a flared opening ran from
the wall to the ceiling, and from it blared a gruff and distorted
voice. “Lil, get our passenger to the deck.”

“You can set your watch by that man,” she
whispered irritably. She stepped up to the flared end and spoke
into it. “On our way, Cap’n.”

Lil motioned for Nita to follow, then ducked
through the low doorway. Nita took a moment to push her worrying
attitude and more worrying circumstances out of her mind and tried
to busy it with other tasks, like taking in her new surroundings
and shipmates. Lil was dressed much as her brother was, minus the
long coat and with the addition of a tattered red bow holding what
was probably shoulder-length hair into a short ponytail. Her boots
had a more pronounced heel, and she had on worn leather fingerless
gloves. Grease, soot, and one or two other things Nita couldn’t
identify smudged her clothes and face. All things considered, she
could easily have passed for one of the workers in the
steamworks.

She led Nita through a series of short and
horribly cramped hallways. Though there were plenty of doorways,
there were very few doors. Curtains seemed to be the norm where
privacy was called for, and elsewhere even
they
were absent.
Each room was claustrophobic and had every square inch of space
crammed with maps, tools, or boxes. Space, it would seem, was at a
premium here, so much so that much of the infrastructure and
workings of the ship were entirely exposed. Pipes crisscrossed the
ceiling, and tubes ran in sagging bundles laced between them. Here
and there they would poke up to the next level or down through the
floor, and valves and gauges seemed to be randomly scattered about
their lengths. Again, it was not unlike the chaos she worked in
every day at the steamworks, albeit in miniature. Having so much
copper and brass around her made her feel a bit more at ease, like
seeing a familiar face in a strange town.

Lil led the way to a ladder that brought them
three decks up, where it emerged onto the open top of the ship. For
a moment, any doubt she had was wiped away by pure fascination. The
very top of one of the lower spires was at eye level here, giving
her a point of reference of not only how high they were, but how
much they were swaying with each breeze. Coop and another man were
busy along the railing at the edge of the deck, tugging at small
ropes to untie large ones. She could hear the peculiar fans turning
above her, a regular pattern of squeaks, rattles, and hisses
forming a sort of rhythm to which the deck crew worked.

“You’re gonna want to hang onto something,”
Lil said. “Coop’s just about got the last line loose, and then
comes the big swing.”

Nita steadied herself against one of the
support struts that ran up to the gas bladder, and not a moment too
soon. When a mooring line came loose, the whole of the vessel
lurched away from it, swinging like a pendulum. The fans rattled to
life, righting the ship against the remaining line, which the other
deck worker released a moment later, prompting a second and far
more ponderous swing. The tempo of the fans quickened into a steady
buzz, and the ropes above her creaked and whined with the ship’s
acceleration. Stone spires passed by near enough to spit on, and
then the world around them pitched hard to the side as the airship
took a sharp turn. Nita’s knees almost gave out when she turned to
the left and received an unobscured view of the ocean, the angle of
the deck so sharp that she felt sure she and everyone else should
be tumbling off.

The turn tapered off and the ship righted
itself, but Nita was reluctant to release her grip. Everything
around her still seemed to pitch and roll in a stomach-turning way.
Lil continued toward the steps leading up to the upper tier, then
turned when she realized Nita wasn’t following her.

“Come on, the cap’n’s up at the fore end.
What are you waiting for?”

“I’m waiting for the ship to settle a bit,”
Nita said, deciding to leave out the bit about waiting for her
stomach to do the same.

Lil smirked. “Ship’s as settled as it’s gonna
get until we’re tied to something solid again. You’ll get used to
it pretty quick if you stick around long enough. Or you’ll go
overboard,” she added with a shrug. “Believe it or not, I fell over
once, on my first launch. No one warned me about the swing. Wasn’t
the sort of thing I wanted to happen twice, so I got my air legs
right quick after that. Come on, this way.”

Lil led the way, and Nita stumbled behind her
like a drunk until they reached the front end of the ship, where
the captain stood at something that looked like a cross between a
traditional ship’s helm and the control harness for one of the
steam drills they used to excavate new rooms in the steamworks back
home. A spoked control wheel rose from the deck in front of him,
and beside him trailed a row of brass levers with linkages between
them such that no lever could move too far along without dragging
its neighbors with it. The levers had ancient, tarnished labels
riveted to a weathered wooden control board. Those that she could
read said things like “Turbine 3” or “Forward, 1/4 power” with
graduated markings indicating further fractions of power. Tubes,
ropes, and chains led in a tangled knot both up and down from the
controls, leading to pulleys and manifolds that distributed
adjustments all around the ship. The captain’s hand danced across
them, sliding this lever up and twisting that knob while making
minor adjustments to the wheel. Opposite the panel of levers and
knobs stood a second panel outfitted with compasses, spinning wind
meters, and other instruments.

After marveling at the apparatus responsible
for running the ship, Nita took a moment to observe the man.
Dressed similarly to the rest of the crewmembers she’d seen, his
clothing suggested that it may have been some sort of uniform, but
he clearly wore it with more care and pride. The sleeves of his
long coat weren’t rolled. He wore it open, like the others,
flapping in the breeze. His vest was straight and buttoned, a gold
chain leading from a buttonhole to his watch pocket. His trousers
were black, but less worn than those of his crew, and his boots
were polished to a higher sheen and were of a much finer make. He
wore thin tan gloves with openings over the knuckles and between
the fingers. Around his head he’d tied a charcoal-gray kerchief,
and a pair of round spectacles with dark glass lenses and a strange
rectangular side lens stretching back from the hinge to shade his
eyes from the side adorned his face. Long steel-gray hair hung down
from beneath the kerchief, and he wore a similarly colored beard
and mustache, which looked to have been carefully trimmed at some
point in the past but had since been neglected. He was perhaps in
his fifties, though his skin was weathered, roasted, and pitted
enough to make him seem far older. His teeth, whiter than she’d
expected, clamped around the smoldering stub of a thin brown cigar
that burned with an almost candylike scent. While his crew so far
had all run on the thin side, he was overall thicker and more
intimidating, not portly or muscle-bound, just broader in his
chest, arms, and legs.

“Cap’n Mack, Amanita Graus. Nita, this is
Cap’n Mack,” Lil said.

The captain turned to Nita and gave her a
measuring look. “Let’s see the trith.” He spoke out of the side of
his mouth rather than sparing a hand for long enough to take the
cigar away, and his voice was rough enough to make it clear that
this wasn’t his first cigar. It probably wasn’t even in the first
thousand.

She pulled the exposed coil box out of its
pouch and held it out to him. He glanced down to it, then back to
her eyes, not a flicker of a change in his expression to suggest
what might be going through his mind. When he held out his hand,
she placed the box in it.

The captain inspected it for few moments.
“Gunner, get over here and take the wheel. Lil, go handle packing
up the mooring lines. Ms. Graus, this way please,” said the
captain. Despite the presence of the word “please,” all three
statements were clearly orders.

The crew snapped to his commands, and he
strode quickly toward the steps down from the upper tier without
waiting for an answer from Nita. In her years at the steamworks,
she’d worked under enough different foremen and supervisors to know
that it didn’t do you any good to illustrate an inability to follow
directions as a first impression. She didn’t know enough about this
captain to know what kind of man he was, so it was best to stay on
his good side. He walked along the swaying deck with nary a stutter
or a stumble, as though he didn’t even notice the way it pitched
and rolled with the breeze. Nita didn’t even try to follow him
directly, resorting instead to the same roundabout path that she’d
taken to reach him, one that gave her uninterrupted contact with a
railing or strut.

Nita reached the stairs and found the captain
standing in a doorway at the bottom of another staircase, this one
leading back toward the top tier of the deck and providing access
to the ship’s interior beneath it. When she caught up with him, he
turned and led her down a short hallway to a door emblazoned with a
plaque that read Captain’s Quarters
.
The captain pushed open
the door to what Nita expected to be the grandest room on the ship.
Though they had no airships, Caldera had glorious and
well-appointed seagoing vessels. As a Graus she’d often been
offered a place at the captain’s table during mealtimes and had
been given the ship’s tour on the flagship of the Calderan fleet.
On each of those ships the captain’s quarters had been a place
large enough and comfortable enough to match a room one might find
on solid land.

This was not a policy shared by the captain
of the
Wind Breaker
. The captain’s quarters were as cramped
as any other room she’d seen, if not more so. It contained a desk
piled with maps, books, and manifests, all held in place by leather
straps affixed to the desk’s corners. The walls were entirely
covered with built-in shelving and cabinets, and most bulged with
bottles, boxes, and more papers. The opposite wall had three large
portholes, and strung across the space in front of them was a net
hammock. Nita took a deep breath and immediately regretted it, as
the very wood of this room was saturated with the same sickly sweet
smell as the cigar in his mouth, though there were a few earthy
undertones that put one in mind of a barnyard. A map of the world
was pinned to the ceiling, with Caldera among a handful of
locations marked. A pair of chairs occupied the remaining floor
space, one behind the desk and one in front of it.

“Take a seat,” he said, doing the same as he
placed the coil box on the desk. He pulled at drawers on his side
of the desk, revealing first a tall, narrow jar with a locking top,
from which he pulled a cigar. From another drawer he extracted a
box of matches and a tin box, into which he placed what remained of
his cigar stub. He struck the match, lit the cigar with care, and
drew in a long breath, which he released with a few smoky words.
“What’s your game, Ms. Graus?”