Skykeep (2 page)

“Better not be taking your time on this one,
Nita. We’re losing the green stuff pretty good,” Lil called
down.

Nita looked up to see the deckhand standing a
short distance farther up the envelope. Her legs were in a wide,
solid stance, and each foot was hooked under a piece of rigging.
This kept her hands free to take aim at a wailer ship, which was
much closer than the one Gunner was targeting. The vehicle—little
more than a cigar-shaped steam turbine slung under a long, thin
balloon—carried two men. Both the ship and the men were referred to
as wailers, named for the high-pitched scream of the engine that
forced them through the air. Wailers were raiders who wanted to
clear out the crew of a ship so that the cargo and supplies would
be theirs for the taking, and lately they had been taking an
extreme interest in the
Wind Breaker
.

The wailer in the rear seat of the ship was
lining it up for an attack run. The one in front was manning a gun
that was a match for the one Gunner operated below—a precise match,
since the
Wind Breaker
crew had salvaged theirs from a
wailer ship that had attacked previously. Judging from the angle of
the ship, the wailers were planning to run a string of shots
directly toward Lil, but the deckhand seemed unconcerned that she
was about to be perforated. She simply leveled her weapon and
readied her shot.

By the time Nita was far enough around the
curve of the envelope to set her feet on the surface, the wailers
were near enough for her to see their crazed eyes behind their
smoked-glass goggles. At the same moment, Lil and the wailer gunner
pulled the trigger. A row of hollow tubes traced a line along the
Wind Breaker
’s envelope, biting deep and sending up
streamers of thin green vapor. Lil’s shot punched a neat hole in
one side of the enemy ship’s envelope and out the other. It was a
good shot, one that would eventually send the vehicle fleeing back
to the mother ship that launched it, but at the rate they were
filling the
Wind Breaker
with holes,
eventually
wouldn’t be soon enough. The shot also startled the pilot enough to
send him veering to the left, curving the line of darts away from
Lil. One of them punched into the envelope just to the left of her
foot, snagging the rigging that secured her. Lil’s left foot
slipped free; she lost her balance and began to slide along the
envelope. A quick hook of her right foot got it twisted in the
supports along the side of the envelope, and she came to a sudden
stop dangling upside down by one foot.

“Lil, are you okay?” Nita said, crouching
down to call to her friend.

“I’m fine, Nita. See to the leaks and don’t
bug me while I’m aiming,” Lil said, seeming almost to be unaware of
the precariousness of her predicament.

She clicked the lever of the rifle, ejecting
the spent casing and chambering another round while Nita shifted
her attention to the nearest of the tubes. The forceful stream of
green was escaping phlogiston, the only substance that could keep a
ship like this aloft without needing an envelope the size of a
small city. The circumstances of the last few months had made it
pretty precious stuff, so she knew she had to work fast to cut the
losses down. With one hand tightly gripping the rigging, Nita
slipped her pack around in front of her and pulled it open. The bag
held a variety of swatches of the same cloth that made up the
envelope, and a tight-topped tin of black tar. She pinned the jar
under one arm and pulled free the lid, which had a built-in brush
already loaded with the gooey contents.

The following task would have been a lot
easier if she had three hands, not to mention if she were on solid
ground and not being shot at by lunatics. She threaded her legs
through the rigging to free her hands as Lil had, then held the
brush in one and grasped the first of the tubes in the other. With
a well-practiced sequence of motions, she pulled the tube and
discarded it, swiped a thick glob of tar onto the hole as it vented
green gas, then clamped the brush in her teeth and fished out a
patch to slap over the hole. She repeated the process for each tube
she could reach, then repositioned and started over. Above her
head, the sound of the wailing engine of their attacker started to
draw closer.

“Lil,” Nita called out warily, keeping her
eyes on her work. “Is the wailer on its way back?”

Lil fired another shot, the thundering crack
splitting the air. A moment later the stuttering grind of a
stricken steam turbine heralded the accuracy of the attack.

“Not no more it ain’t,” she called back. The
attacker’s malfunctioning ship turned to retreat. “Let’s see Gunner
take out a wailer while he’s upside down!”

The engines subtly changed their hum and Nita
instinctively stopped her work to hold a bit tighter. She’d been
working on these engines long enough to get a feel for their
rhythm, and she knew a sharp turn coming when she heard it. The
ship turned and tilted, rolling enough to put Lil almost directly
beneath Nita. The deckhand was dangling away from the envelope with
one hand clutching the rifle and the other outstretched to catch a
piece of rigging. While Nita watched, Lil wrapped her free arm
around an upright, hooked her free foot over the same rigging that
entangled her other one, and rolled the trapped ankle to free it.
Thus released she tumbled forward, her feet flipping down in front
of her. The one-armed grip on the rigging held long enough for her
scrambling feet to hook back into the rigging below them, and just
like that, Lil was righted and facing the ship. The sight was
enough to briefly make Nita forget the puzzle of how to reach and
patch the remaining leaks and instead work at the riddle of where
Lil had learned to do such things.

When Nita set the thought aside again and
looked up, she started making a mental tally of the remaining
leaks. As far as she could see, everything that was left was on the
portion of the envelope ahead of the turbines. She edged her way to
a space between two of the motors and began to work her way
forward. To her right she noticed the remaining wailer whisking out
from under the
Wind Breaker
and attempting to circle back to
continue the work of its departed partner. A peppering of shots
from Gunner’s fléchette gun met their mark, and suddenly retreat
seemed to be a far preferable idea for this wailer as well. Both
damaged ships—one of which seemed to have a damaged pilot also—were
heading in the same direction. A fortuitous breath of wind
scattered the clouds ahead of them, and the shifting mist revealed
the silhouette of a ship a bit larger than the
Wind Breaker
,
lurking not far away.

“He’s going to fire the cannons with us up
here, isn’t he?” Nita muttered to herself.

“Brace for cannons!” Lil called out, the
deckhand’s voice barely audible over the rattle of the turbines on
either side of Nita.

She slapped the lid to the jar back in place,
stuffed it in the pack, and held tight to the metal bands to which
the turbines were mounted. A half second later a deafening thump
pitched the ship forward so savagely it felt as though they had
collided with something. Gray smoke and a cloud of what the captain
called “grapeshot” belched forth from the ship’s port-side forward
cannon. The silhouette in the clouds shuddered, then began to pivot
and descend, either unwilling or unable to return fire. With its
retreat, and the desperate attempts of its crew, who deployed an
attack craft to catch up, the morning battle had been brought to an
end. Nita breathed a sigh of relief, then worked her way slowly out
from between the turbines and toward the edge of the envelope.

“Lil!” she called, spying her crewmate just
as she was making ready to swing herself back onto the deck.

“Yeah?”

“Would you please ask the captain to shut
down the engines so that I can finish patching?”

“Sure thing. I’m heading down for some hash.
You want Butch to fix you a plate?”

Nita looked to the dozen or so remaining jets
of green gas, as well as one rather significant tear. She sighed.
“No, I’ll get my own… I think I’m going to be here awhile.”

#

Three hours later, Nita trudged into the
loading bay-slash-bedroom. All things considered, the encounter had
gone rather well. Almost thirty punctures from the attack, but
she’d gotten temporary patches on them within a few minutes, and
enough stitches to make the patches permanent before any of them
let loose. The first time she’d had to do a patch job like this, it
had taken her the better part of a day, and they’d lost enough
phlogiston to require a stop at a port in order to refill. Today
they were able to top off from their stores. One of the spikes had
lodged itself in the turbine as well, but removing it seemed to
reveal little more than some very minor warping, which could be
fixed another time. Considering she was smeared with tar, chilled
to the bone, and still dressed in her pajamas, a bit of
procrastination on that matter could be excused. She plopped down
onto the crate and pulled down her desk again, doing her best to
wipe away the tar from her hands before delicately picking up the
pen. She knew she couldn’t finish the letter, since writing more
would inevitably smudge the page with tar. That was all it would
take to make her mother worry about any number of things that might
have put it there. Instead, she would add one last thought for the
moment before stowing her pen and cleaning up.

I know I should be working a bit harder to
get these folks ready to take care of themselves, but sometimes it
feels like a shame to know I’ll be leaving them once I do. After
all, I think I’ve finally gotten used to the routine.

#

Around noon, after the patching of the
envelope had been finished, Nita took a moment to scrub herself
clean of the layer of tar and the stink of phlogiston. Life had
become much more tolerable for her once she’d worked out a method
to rid her skin and clothes of the sticky black gunk she so often
worked with. Her sister of all people had been the one to work out
the solution, which was to mix a bit of the crew’s soap with some
crushed-up Calderan lava rock and a healthy dose of orange rinds.
The mix took some experimentation to get right, but now tar was
much less of an inconvenience, and the stuff smelled so nice Lil
had taken to using it as well, even when tar wasn’t an issue.

Once clean, Nita’s first order of business
was to change into her work clothes. The outfit was a practical
leather-and-canvas ensemble, though, as the work of a Calderan, it
was tailored to fit her properly and accented with gleaming
brass-and-copper hardware. She wore a corset for back support
rather than fashion and topped the outfit with a double sash of
wrenches and other tools, and had adorned her goggles with a small
butterfly made from brass gears by her brother.

Not until she considered herself presentable
did Nita finally make her way into the galley for her first proper
meal of the day. It wasn’t rare that her many duties aboard the
Wind Breaker
kept her from eating when she would have liked
to, but it was never any fun. One of the few things that had come
as a pleasant surprise regarding life on the airship was the
quality of the food, and it was a shame to miss it when it was
fresh off the stove. Glinda West, or Butch, as she was
unfortunately nicknamed, was the cook and medic of the ship. She
was nothing short of a miracle worker with a saucepan. Day in and
day out she would take the same unappetizing provisions and turn
them into the hearty delicious meals that fueled the crew. Her
dishes never would have made it back on Caldera, as visually they
fell into the brackets of either “green-brown mound of lumpy mush”
or “crusty, fried hunk of something unidentifiable,” but Nita had
long ago learned that the dinner table was a place where color and
composition weren’t always necessary to create a masterpiece.

Though at the moment Butch was the only other
person in the galley and she could have sat anywhere, Nita took her
usual seat at the first table to the left of the entrance and
pushed up her goggles.

“Good afternoon, Butch,” she said, running
her hands across her braided brown hair and yawning. “I don’t know
if I’m late for breakfast or early for lunch, but if you’ve got
anything that’s hot, I would love a plate of it.”

Butch muttered something surly from her
station behind the counters and among the stoves of the galley. She
was a sixty-year-old bulldog of a woman who always sounded angry
and spoke a language Nita hadn’t quite been able to learn or even
identify, but the rest of the crew assured Nita that the cook liked
her. Butch pulled a clean tin bowl from the shelf and ladled a
thick soup into it, handing it over with a spoon and two dense
biscuits. Nita stood and took the meal, breathing in the meaty
aroma.

“Slop-in-the-pot today? Always one of my
favorites,” Nita said sincerely.

Butch nodded and put out a mug of tea. While
the rest of the crew seemed to drink either ale, rum, or coffee
exclusively, Butch and Nita shared an appreciation for a good cup
of tea. She took the warm beverage and returned to her seat to dig
in to her meal.

She’d barely started when the sound of wind
echoed out of the flared tube just beside the door.

“Get yourselves to the galley,” barked the
voice of the captain. “The weather’s being obliging, so I think the
ship can mind herself for a bit. I’ll put Wink on watch. Don’t
dillydally. I don’t want to be away from the wheel long.”

Again Butch muttered something, this time a
good deal more vigorously and colorfully, and began to line up
bowls along the front of the counter. She slotted them into grooves
that would keep them from sliding with the motion of the ship and
stirred up the pot in preparation for portioning. The crew began to
file in one at a time, each wearing his or her own variation of the
unofficial uniform of the ship: black canvas trousers, a tan
button-down shirt, and a brown coat. First was Ichabod Cooper, the
rail-thin and sandy-haired young deckhand known by the whole
crew—including his own sister—as Coop. Through some miracle of
grooming that Nita had not seen fit to investigate, he seemed to
have perfected the technique of having permanent stubble. She’d
never seen him clean shaved or with a beard. He also tended to keep
his sleeves rolled up, though from the number of scars on his
forearms it seemed he’d be better served with them down.