Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles) (14 page)

“How long will the runes keep us afloat?” Toller asked.

Tanner perked up. He hooked a thumb at Madlin. “This one’s runecarving is all that’s keeping us up?”

“Dunno,” Madlin replied, ignoring Tanner. She pointed to the battle. “Longer than that one’s going to last.”

“They look evenly matched,” Jamile said. “This might go on for hours.”

Madlin shook her head. “Half the ship’s aflame. It’s only a matter of time before—”

KTHOOOOM.

The Acardian frigate was split in half as a great billowing gout of flame and smoke exploded out the side.

“... it reaches the powder.”

The midmorning sun made the Katamic sparkle and shimmer, bright enough to hurt any eyes that lingered too long. Madlin sat on the aft deck, starboard side, letting her feet dangle over the edge of the ship. She stared off ahead as the current carried them along, watching for signs of life among the wooden wreckage of the ship, which she had learned was the
Fair Trader
. Four of the pirates had managed to swim to the
Darksmith
and were locked up in a soggy crew compartment below decks. At times she thought she could see movement among the debris, but the two spyglasses aboard the ship were in great demand and she hadn’t the energy to argue for a longer turn.

Tanner and Jamile had gone to bed—separately, as far as she knew. The two seemed to be growing closer as Jamile and Madlin argued more and more often, so the other possibility wouldn’t have surprised her. Captain Toller was working with his navigator and the nautical charts to determine where the current would take them. She had spent a few moments watching them before growing bored and frustrated. They had no idea where they were thanks to the ship’s compass being damaged in the battle and the fact that neither of them could find a sextant. The current maps were bunk as far as Madlin could tell, anyway—more of a guideline to the lay of the shipping lanes than a means to calculate a course.

Of Dan there had been no sign. If he was the storybook warlock he claimed to be, he should have survived. If he was the spiteful little shit she had grown to consider him, he was probably already aboard and was just making her worry.

On the subject of the Mad Tinker, there was agreement among the three Korrish twinborn aboard: he needed to know nothing until they knew where they were. For a man with a thousand worries, adding one he could do nothing about would benefit no one. For now, they would bide their time and see where the current took them.

Chapter 11

“When Jennai died, I swore I’d raise Madlin right, have her follow in my footsteps. Maybe I should have worn daintier shoes.” -Cadmus Errol

A steady rain fell in what they’d come to call the Valley of Twisted Steel. The
Jennai
—which had absorbed the
Cloudsmith
, name and all—sat with engines at idle as welders worked under tarpaulin tents to connect the two ships more securely. After the attack three days prior, they had set down near the wreck of the Ruttanian vacu-dirge and set about salvaging materials at once. Crews in breather-cloth masks cleared kuduk bodies from the site and stacked them for the crows at the far end of the valley; they weren’t worth the risk of a smoke plume to burn, or the effort of digging a grave to bury.

Mechanics and welders stripped the outer structure for beams and hull plates, but Chipmunk waited until the interior of the ship was cleared before leading salvage crews aboard to go through the lighter supplies. It was awkward as a snake in shoes getting around on her crutches, both for the frequent jutting of parts from one cabin into another and for the fact that the majority of the walking was done on walls, as the hulk had settled on its side.

“Grab those charts,” Chipmunk ordered, pointing to a pile of papers that had survived the fires and shards of blasted glass that sweepers had already cleared away. “The spy glass, too.”

“Lens is shattered,” one of the workers reported, holding the offending spyglass for her to see.

“Take it anyway. I might be able to grind a new one,” she replied. She pointed with a crutch to a hatch in the adjoining wall, oriented sideways from waist to head high. “Let’s check the briefing room.” The Ruttanian ship was the same make of Horlaide Company airframe, with only minor differences in accommodations and armaments differentiating them. She knew the layout, even sideways, nearly as well as she knew the
Jennai
.

“Aye, General Rynn.” Another of the salvage crew took three hearty tugs on the handle before the catch released, letting the door swing open into the next room with a clang that had Chipmunk and the rest of her team clutching at their ears. Chipmunk managed to keep one of her crutches tucked under her elbow, but the other fell to the floor.

“Let me get that for you, General.” If it weren’t for the fact that she went to bed each night with hands sore as a brawler’s and arms that ached from holding up her weight all day, she’d have felt as if she were the laziest human in the rebellion. Her troops and workers went out of their way to not only follow orders, but anticipate them. They coddled her every opportunity they got.

“Thanks,” she muttered as she rebalanced herself on three points instead of two. “First two of you in there, give me a boost up.”

With her crew’s aid, she went from one compartment to the next, picking through the debris of over a hundred kuduk lives that had been lost in the crash. The bodies at the valley’s end had all of their pockets emptied, their rings pocketed, their wallets’ contents bundled into the rebels’ little treasury. The crew quarters contained far more useful—and occasionally heartrending—loot. They found books and magazines, extra clothes and uniforms, sweets, bottles of liquor, and a few pocketclocks. From all the ship, they also found seventeen decks of playing cards, eight pairs of dice, and a chessboard with most of the marble-carved pieces broken. Walls in the crew quarters were often adorned with flashpops stuck to the walls with painter’s tape. They came in two basic styles: flirty images of kuduk women, and various family flashpops with wives and children.

“Peel those off the walls,” Chipmunk ordered after the fifth room with the portraits. “I’m sick of kuduks staring at us while we work.”

“Yes ma’am. But what do you want done with them?”

Chipmunk thought a moment. Shredding them didn’t seem fitting. There would just be bits and pieces of kuduks staring up from the floor with their sepia eyes. Burning seemed like more trouble than the portraits warranted. “Pile them up in a sack and leave them with the bodies of the ship’s crew.”

There was so much to salvage in the rooms. Chipmunk had to order personnel rotations to send sacks of plunder to the
Jennai
and fresh legs and backs to continue gathering. While she lifted nothing but her own weight and carried nothing but her crutches, Chipmunk was growing weary from the exertion.

“Can’t we just take this whole ship in a sack and sort it out later?” Chipmunk mumbled. She intended the comment solely for herself, but a woman from her salvage crew overheard.

“If the
Jennai
can lift while it’s full o’ holes, why not this heap?” she asked.

The gearworks in Chipmunk’s head made a grinding, grating sound as a lever wedged a new pinion into her thinking engine. “One hour break,” she called out. “Someone give me a lift out.”

The planning room of the
Jennai
had a central table strewn with maps and charts that gave detailed accountings of the surrounding terrain. Atop the pile was the log book from the Ruttanian ship
Sulfurous
, lying open to its most recent entries. Pages scattered around the table bore hastily scratched calculations, and more were being added by the minute.

“Best case, I think we’ve got at least a day and a half before the Ruttanian Air Corps finds us, assuming they sent a ship as soon as the
Sulfurous
didn’t return on schedule,” Chipmunk said.

Erefan shook his head. “Not conservative enough. You’re making assumptions that might not be true. What if they weren’t scheduled to turn back?” He pointed to the map. “What if they weren’t a patrol, but traveling point to point. If they were heading—”

“Wouldn’t they be here already?” Chipmunk asked. “If Twincrag Sky Aerodrome sent out a search vessel as soon as the
Sulfurous
failed to arrive, it would have been here ....” She scribbled as she talked, lines of numerals and mathematical symbols, “... eight hours ago, at least.” She flipped the page around so that her father, Kandrel, Bosley, and Sosha could see her sums.

“Could be that the Tephis Aerodrome cables Twincrag, has them investigate when the ship goes missing,” Kandrel suggested. Bosley and Chipmunk bent over their sums to calculate.

“They’d be here in anywhere between an hour to three, depending on the local winds,” Erefan said, interrupting the hasty mathematics of his daughter and the ship captain. “I figured that scenario already. It’s more likely than the worst case, but it still means we ought to get our arses off the grass and above cloud level.”

“I think it’s worth the risk staying,” Chipmunk replied. “The most likely scenario in my mind, Ruttanian Air Command doesn’t brown their trouserbacks the minute an airship is late. Plus, we’re assuming that if they hadn’t encountered us when they did, the
Sulfurous
was heading straight back to dock.”

“It’s the only assumption that lets us even begin calculating scenarios,” Erefan said. “We don’t get trial runs at this. We figure the least time we have safe on the ground, and make sure we’re off it before anyone’s the wiser. Rynn, I taught you all this, why are you being so obstinate?”

Chipmunk slapped her pencil down on the table. Silence hung in the air for a moment before she spoke. “That’s
General
Rynn,” she said. “And it’s not my job to play safe and hide. This is a rebellion, not an emigration, and certainly not a gutted math problem. It’s good information to have, but it’s not the only consideration. That ship has enough steel to complete all our modifications, and room to house another few hundred troops once we fix it up a bit. It’s also got more supplies than we can fit aboard the
Jennai
; we’re busting out at the rivets of this teakettle as it is.”

“How long will the runes take?” Bosley asked. The question was as good as taking her side, as far as Chipmunk was concerned.

“I’ll round up some likely candidates and teach a class on carving them. Sosha will take a sample rune around on a piece of sheet steel and we’ll see if we can find anyone else aether-capable among the troops. The levitation rune’s simple enough, there are just going to be so many around it’ll look like a typesetter went mad. I’m hoping in two to three days we can take the
Sulfurous
in tow.”

“You called yourself Rynn, you know,” Sosha said. She sat in a chair at one end the cabin. At the other end, Chipmunk sat on the floor working on a book-sized piece of steel with a screwdriver and a hammer, making tiny, elongated dents that would eventually form Sosha’s test rune.

“Slip of the tongue,” Chipmunk replied, not looking up from her work. With a sharp rap and a clatter, she dented the metal again. It jumped with each strike, and every time she had to re-orient it before she hit it again. “They knew what I meant.”

“Have you ever seen a live chipmunk?” Sosha asked.

“Not for real, just a diagram in a wildlife book. It’s too cold for them up in Tinker’s Island,” she replied. It went without saying that Eversall Deep had no woodland creatures dwelling in its depths. She looked up. “Don’t you have patients to look after?” The firefight with the Ruttanian Air Corps had left five dead, thirteen injured.

“We used to have them around the sanctuary,” Sosha said. “They’re cute, inoffensive little creatures, adorable little puffs of reddish-brown fluff with black streaks in their fur. I used to try to catch them when I was little. If you held still enough, they might forget you were there and come close, but the second you flinched, they’d bolt. None of the children were quick enough to catch one, but it was great fun trying.”

Chipmunk hit the steel again, and the rune grew incrementally. “Is there a point to this? Some joke about me being an easy chipmunk to catch, now that I’m hobbled.”

“No, nothing like that,” Sosha assured her. “It’s just ... how old were you when you got that name?”

Chipmunk set the steel aside and pursed her lips. “Twelve, maybe?” she ventured after a moment’s consideration. “Why?”

“It’s just, well, it’s just a
cute
nickname is all,” Sosha said. “I’m sure it had something to do with your hair, but it’s also just a scared, fuzzy little creature that lives in a hole in the ground.”

“Well, maybe when I was twelve, that was a pretty good description of me—minus the ‘fuzzy’ that is. I’m not a scared little girl anymore though, and I live wherever I want.”

“Maybe when you were twelve, it was a good name for you,” Sosha said. “It doesn’t suit you now.”

Chipmunk snorted. “What, I need a new nickname? What do
you
think I should go by?”

“Just Rynn,” Sosha replied. “Maybe with something tacked on as a surname.”

“Rynn’s a kuduk name. I don’t—”

“Your mother gave you that name,” Sosha said. “Your father said as much.”

“Kuduk-approved then,” Chipmunk replied. “There’s probably a Rynn in every city in Korr.”

“But only one in Eversall?”

Chipmunk shrugged. “Far as I know.”

“Then you can be Rynn of Eversall. Maybe we can start a trend, giving humans surnames, like full citizens.”

Rynn set her screwdriver down and leaned back against the bed. “You’re serious about this one, aren’t you?”

“This rebellion’s going to grow, and if newcomers don’t take you seriously, they’re going to look to someone else to lead them.”