Skykeep (19 page)

“No. I reckon not. Look, once we had Nita and
we knew she could take care of the ship good and proper, we pitched
that rat of yours overboard. I don’t know if you ever had to deal
with one of them things, but they aren’t the nicest little buggers
to be around. Better off without ’em, that’s what I say.”

The warden scratched down some notes, and Lil
allowed herself a brief grin. In the days after their heist of the
warehouse and the subsequent battle with the dreadnought, Captain
Mack had spent a fair amount of time drumming into their heads “the
story.” Together, the crew had concocted a careful retelling of the
facts, and central to that was the issue of Wink. The story had it
that once Nita was added to the crew, they disposed of their now
unnecessary inspector. This would explain the lack of reports to
the fug folk without revealing that they knew how the reports were
being sent.

Linn moved to another page.

“You’ve been operating quite effectively
without direct contact to our facilities. It begs the question of
how exactly you can stay aloft without some of our more unique
resources.”

“You might be the only folks who
make
phlogiston, but you ain’t the only ones who
have
it.
Everybody and their mother needs the stuff, so there’s plenty of it
around. Same goes for burn-slow.”

“It is forbidden to sell those resources to
anyone banned from maintenance.”

“Yeah. It’s forbidden to rob fugger
warehouses and such, too. And we did that just fine. We’re good at
the forbidden stuff. That’s how our bread is buttered. Speaking of
that, you folks ain’t got no
clue
how to make a proper
breakfast. You’re good at tinkering, but I ain’t never
had
a
worse plate of eggs.”

The warden shuffled through his pages some
more. “Yes, I understand you’ve got quite a cook on board. And
she’s a surgeon as well?”

“Butch. Finest doctor I ever met.”

“Where did she receive her training?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask the cap’n.
Maybe he’ll have a chat with you before he blows this mess out of
the sky.”

“You seem quite confident in the capabilities
of your former crew.”

“They’re still my crew, Linn.”

“The
Wind Breaker
is a zephyr,
correct? Made for a crew of sixteen?”

“Yep.”

“And yet you had only a crew of five, before
the addition of Miss Graus.”

“Six… remember, that was before we tossed the
inspector.”

He scratched down a note. “And now that crew
is down to four. The
Wind Breaker
has achieved some truly
mythic things in the past, but do you really believe they can
perform another miracle without you and Miss Graus on the
crew?”

“You ain’t listening, Linn.
We’re still on
the crew
. Just because I’m not eating Butch’s cooking or
holding one of Gunner’s guns doesn’t mean I’m not toting my share
of the load. You can’t win this one, because we got folks on both
sides of the walls. All you did by locking us up here was let us
know you got plenty of people down in the fug who ain’t too happy
with how things are being run. And you call the stuff we done a
miracle. It ain’t. It’s just what we do. And we’re going to keep
doing it. You can throw your best ships at us, we’ll knock them out
of the sky. You can throw your best men at us, we’ll fill them full
of lead. You can hire every last bandit, marauder, raider, pirate,
and whatever else you can find to hunt us down. We’ll take care of
them, too. See, this is what you folks don’t get. I been down in
the fug a few times. You got these nice cobblestone streets, right?
And you ain’t got a lick of sun down there. And you know what I see
coming up out from between those cobbles? Weeds. That’s us. Try and
take away everything we need and we’ll still find a way to squeeze
through the cracks. You folks can push hard as you want. All you’re
doing is teaching us folks to push back harder. And we’re good
learners, the
Wind Breaker
crew. We learned our lessons.
’Bout time you folks learned yours.”

Linn looked her evenly in the eye, and Lil
looked right back, a defiant smile on her face.

“I think that will be all for today, Miss
Cooper. Thank you for your cooperation,” he said.

The guard stepped in and roughly hoisted Lil
from the chair.

“Have your fun while you can, screw. The
clock’s ticking on this place,” she said. “And I’m going to
remember the ones who was and who wasn’t nice.”

They rest of the day had been rather uneventful,
though it confirmed a few things they’d suspected. For one, it
became clear that the pair of them would never see the cafeteria.
Lunch was served in their cell, as was dinner. This suited them
just fine. It gave them time alone to discuss their ideas, reassure
one another that the crew would find them as soon as it could, and
generally keep their spirits up. Supper was some sort of horribly
overcooked cutlet and a mound of what was probably cabbage. Despite
its unsuitability for the meal in question, they were still only
given a spoon to eat with, so a fair amount of eating with their
hands was necessary.

When night came, both Lil and Nita slept like
the dead. The following morning brought more horrific eggs and
Nita’s second “chat” with the warden, this time focusing largely on
surveillance. The warden was careful with his wording, but it was
clear before long that he was trying to determine how exactly the
Wind Breaker
was able to avoid being detected. Nita stuck to
the story, and eventually she was returned to her cell.

“How did it go?” Lil asked, tossing something
up in the air and catching it periodically as she backed against
the far wall to allow Nita to be released from her bonds and
ushered inside.

“It went well enough. He’s not as subtle as
he thinks he is, though I think he’s reading questions written by
someone without his tact. What are you tossing?”

The cell door slammed, and the door was
locked.

“A hunk of bread from breakfast,” Lil
said.

“Isn’t it stale?”

“It was stale at breakfast. Now it’s a rock.”
She knocked it on the wall.

“Then why do you still have it?”

“Thinking I might clock one of the guards
with it.”

“Do you think it’ll do any good?”

“It’ll make me feel better.”

“It’ll also get you put in isolation.”

Lil tipped her head back and forth, then
tucked the chunk of bread into the waist of her pants. “We’ll play
it by ear then. Might still be worth it.”

A thump and knock came from the far end of
the hall.

“Yard time,” called a guard from behind the
door.

“Blast it! I just locked the door,” the guard
growled.

“Maybe they should give you all watches, so
you’d know when it’s time for this sort of thing,” Nita said.

“
That
would be
intelligent
.
Management doesn’t make
intelligent
decisions,” the guard
muttered. “They make
budgetary
decisions. So only shift
leaders and the wardens get watches. So until I get the second
stripe on my sleeve, I’ve got to waste my time with this
idiocy.”

“That’s a real shame,” said Lil.

The guard ignored her.

“Maybe you should buy your own watch,” she
said.

Again he had no reaction.

“Oh, I see. You’ll get all friendly and
chatty with Nita but not with me.”

“Yes, because the Calderan has manners, and
you are an uncouth, boorish street urchin.”

“Oh, well la-de-dah. I didn’t know I was
supposed to put my pinkie up when folks slap manacles on my
wrists.”

The guard finished securing them and brought
them to the surface. Shortly afterward, the fug folk prisoners from
the lower levels started to arrive, and when Kent and Donald
reached the surface, they quickly sought out the two crewmates.

“Huh, you owe me your muffin,” Donald said,
punching Kent in the arm.

“I know, I know, you win it, fair and
square.”

“What were you two gambling about?” Nita
asked.

“And where are you getting these muffins?”
added Lil.

“They don’t give you muffins wiff breakfast?”
asked Donald.

“All we get is bread that’s liable to crack a
tooth.”

“The guard’s been eating your muffins
then.”

“Does their treachery know no bounds?” Nita
said jokingly. “But again, what was the bet about?”

“Oh, Kent here thought one of you would have
kicked it by now.”

“It’s only our second day!” Lil said.

“I said you’d make it to the end of the
week.”

“What happens if we live beyond that?” Nita
asked.

“I don’t fink that’s very likely,” Donald
said.

“Well, then I contend you each owe us a few
muffins if we manage,” Nita said.

“What do we get if you lose?” Donald
said.

“If they lose, they’ll be dead,” Kent
said.

“Oh, right… I suppose that’s a proper
penalty. It’s a bet,” he said, shaking hands on it.

The four prisoners chatted for a bit, the
subject quickly turning to the reason that each inmate was locked
up. Crime after crime turned out to be either leniency or outright
defiance of some of the more vicious and draconian rules that the
fug folk had put in place. Acts that would have been considered
charitable in any other culture were punished more viciously than
murder. Evidently the ruling class was afraid that such charity and
minor rebellion could turn into a plague of decency that would
topple their stranglehold if left unchecked.

“… Over there’s Eggy. He wasn’t enforcing an
embargo on that other town up north. And that’s Snow. He used to do
repairs off the books. And that’s about it,” Kent said.

“What about Blanche?” Nita asked.

“Oh, right. Blanche. She’s… what did she do
again, Donald?”

“She did… it had to do with writing fings
down.”

“Oh, right, right. She was a trainer for them
inspectors, and she wrote something down she wasn’t supposed to.
That’s all I really know… I guess if we knew what it was she wrote
down, we’d have been locked up for
that
instead of what we
already did.”

More thoughts began to spark in Nita’s
mind.

“Can either of you tell me what inspectors do
on ships?” she said.

“They… inspect,” Donald said.

“Check for rot, wood worms. See if there’s
any loose pipes and steam and that. Then they kick a big fuss if
they find anything. Jumping about and all that,” Kent said.

“Anything else?”

“They also eat. And you shouldn’t look up at
one with your mouth open because—” Donald began.

“I don’t think the ladies need to be told
that bit,” Kent said.

“Well, what else would they do?” Donald
said.

“Nothing I suppose,” Nita said. “It just
seems odd that they should be trained to do a job that a person
could easily do.”

“Huh. You teach a person how to find what’s
broke, next thing they’ll figure out how to fix it, and we can’t
have that, can we?” Donald said.

Nita nodded, then turned. “Lil, can you come
with me for a moment?”

“Sure,” she said.

The pair paced off. Nita gestured up at the
clouds and swept her hands as though she was in a vigorous
discussion about some far-off destination. Her words in no way
matched the motions.

“They don’t know about the inspectors being
used as spies,” Nita said.

Lil, a bit more theatrically, began to play
as though she was engaged in the same conversation. “No offense to
them, but it seems like there’s a lot those two don’t know.”

“Granted, they aren’t the mastermind types
that we’ve dealt with before, but they’re citizens, and they don’t
know. That means at the very least that not everyone knows. And
from what we’ve seen, its fair to say there is an awful lot of
compartmentalization of information with the fug folk. Let’s
imagine that only a handful of people know. If Blanche got locked
up for ‘writing something down’ about the inspectors, then I’ve got
to believe she’s one of the people who knows, and they didn’t want
her writing any of it down, because they didn’t want anyone else to
know.”

“So? We already know it.”

“We know
that
they are spies, and we
know the language they use, but that’s only half of it… Think of it
this way. When I had to work out how to fix and rebuild the boiler
of the
Wind Breaker
, I knew what the mechanism did. It
boiled water to spin the turbines. But it took me a while to figure
out how to maintain it because between boiling water and spinning
turbines it pushed the steam through any number of valves and
splits, and if I pulled the wrong handle at the wrong time, the
steam wouldn’t go the way it needed to. There’s got to be more to
it than just tapping out a code on the main support of the
envelope.”

“And you think Blanche might know that
stuff?”

“I do.”

“And we want to know that why? Just for
reference?”

Nita turned and continued her skyward
gestures, this time with relevance to the conversation. There was a
cloud in front of the sun, making the view of the pole above the
tower much less painful.

“You see the top of the tower there?”

“Yeah.”

“Look closely.”

Lil squinted. “Is that… wait… there’s an
aye-aye up there.
That’s
what I heard scampering and tapping
and such. Thank the Lord! I thought my mind was going!”

“You don’t think there would be just
one
inspector, and way up there, if it was actually for
inspecting the place. And I doubt they are spying on
themselves.”

“So it’s for… what?”

“I’m hoping Blanche would know.”

“Well, good luck getting it out of her. She’s
a little more fuggy than the two grunts over there. And… hang on…
you got a problem, you two?”