Skykeep (25 page)

Neither of the crewmates needed to confer on
what was to come next. If there was any information to be had, it
would be in the tower. The building wasn’t exactly a fortress. They
were deep enough into the fug and far enough from trade routes that
the fug folk probably didn’t expect any surface people to ever
see
the place, let alone try to infiltrate it, so there were
no fences or other such security measures. The only problem
presented to them was the fact that the useful part of the station
office was at the top of the tower, which was only accessible via a
well-lit, exposed staircase that they couldn’t hope to climb
without being seen. Gunner motioned for Coop to stop.

“Clearly we’ll need to coordinate a diversion
to keep eyes off the stairs until one of us can… damn it, Coop,”
Gunner whispered, first assuming Coop had actually heeded the
motion to stop and then realizing that he hadn’t.

The nimble deckhand swiftly and silently wove
his way to the base of one of the supports for the tower and
scrambled from strut to strut, climbing the structure like an
oversized ladder.

“I suppose I’ll just keep watch then,” Gunner
growled to himself, flattening himself to the ground and keeping an
eye on the camp through the scope of his rifle.

#

Coop reached the upper catwalk with little
difficulty. He’d probably catch an earful from Gunner once he got
back, but that was anything but new. Coop had always felt that it
was better to get an earful and get the job done than follow the
rules and come up empty. He peeked up into one of the windows of
the station and found it filmed over with the purple fug residue.
He wiped at it with his sleeve and peered through. Sure enough,
with the supervisor on the ground overseeing the resupply of the
ships, the office was empty. The telltale clack and tap of claws on
the beacon pole overhead revealed that the station had a resident
inspector, but as long as it stayed on its pole, it wasn’t a
problem. Coop crept up to a door and eased it open, slipping
inside. It was a sparse office. A few phlo-lights provided
ample—and at the moment, unwanted—light. One wall was covered with
scattered charts and maps, file cabinets aligned neatly below them.
A desk was pushed against the opposite wall, which had its share of
charts and mounted folder hangers as well. The two remaining walls
were floor-to-ceiling windows, meaning that any sneaking he did was
largely pointless, since he was practically on display for the
people below.

He kept low and eyed up the maps and charts.
Something seemed off about them. Though he knew there couldn’t be
more than a dozen large fug folk settlements and maybe another
dozen stations like this one dotting the land between them, the
maps before him had hundreds of places labeled, and those in the
positions he knew to be fug settlements didn’t have the proper
names. He wondered at first if they might have been some kind of
code, but then it dawned on him. The problem was that the maps were
incredibly
old
. He should have assumed as much from the
purple tint to the paper. These maps were from before the calamity,
or at least were copies of those from before. The places listed
were the towns and cities that had been wiped out a hundred or so
years earlier when the toxic stuff rolled over the continent and
killed, chased away, or changed the residents. No doubt the fug
folk all knew the names of the old cities that coincided to the new
ones, and thus hadn’t felt the need to replace the maps.

“This ain’t going to do us no good at all,
Nikita,” he muttered. With a resigned sigh, he crept over to the
first of the file cabinets and pulled it open. “Dang it, if I knew
there’d be all this reading, I would’ve waited for Gunner to get up
here.”

#

Gunner was breathing slowly, sweeping his
scope back and forth between the base of the tower and its windows.
Judging from the fact five minutes had passed and Coop was still in
the tower, the information they were after wasn’t forthcoming. At
the moment, that didn’t matter, as both crews and the ground staff
had taken the arrival of the cutter as an excuse to gather at the
base of the tower to chatter, spread gossip, and generally
socialize. The supervisor had produced a bottle, and it was being
passed around. Hopefully this was a sign that neither crew had any
intention of leaving anytime soon, but hoping was a terrible battle
plan, so Gunner put his mind to work on a better one.

He already knew that the scout craft was
crewed by two men, and both of them were on the ground. That meant
it was largely resupplied but completely unmanned. He didn’t know
how many men usually ran a cutter, but he knew enough about fugger
uniforms to know that the pilot was part of the little get-together
as well. Both ships were thus grounded as long as the gathering
persisted. In theory this meant that as long as Coop could find the
appropriate information and get back to the
Wind Breaker
without being seen, they might actually achieve their goals
according to plan. Gunner, however, had known Coop far too long to
put his trust in that sequence of events. Particularly when a
better alternative could be devised.

The armory officer made his way toward the
scout ship. The crew on the ground meant the ladder was down, so it
was a simple matter to slip inside while the fug folk appeared to
be enthralled by whatever the cutter pilot had to say. The inside
of the ship was as stripped down as it could possibly be, and
almost entirely occupied by fuel, water, and ammunition. The deck
had the controls, a grappling hook, and a fléchette gun. He
crouched behind the control wheel, kept a close eye on the
gathering below, and waited for the inevitable chaos.

#

“Well, this here’s mostly numbers, so that
ain’t gonna be it,” Coop muttered, tossing a sheaf of pages aside.
“That’s a list of parts, don’t care about that.”

He’d long ago given up on the concept of
slipping in and out without anyone knowing he’d been there, opting
instead for the much faster method of making a massive mess and
getting away before they found it. The first three filing cabinets
had their contents strewn across the entire interior of the office,
and the fourth was well on its way. As he opened the latest drawer,
Nikita suddenly shifted an ear toward the ceiling. After a few
seconds more, she crawled out of his jacket and climbed on top of
the filing cabinet.

“Don’t go wandering off now,” he whispered.
“We’re going to be heading out in a great rush once I find what I’m
after. Ph’lac’try… Ph’lac’try. Dang it… you know what? You think
maybe that starts with a
P
instead of an
F
? I better
not have to start over.”

Nikita looked straight up at the roof, where
the endless tapping continued to rattle out. When it came to an
end, Nikita hopped to the ground and crawled back into his jacket,
reaching out to tap something on one of his buttons.

Report forwarded to inspector Wink, she
tapped out insistently.

“Hey, hey now. What’d we say about you
sending any reports?” he hissed, wrapping his hand around the
button to silence the message.

Nikita chittered and switched to a different
button.
Reply intended for Nita.

“You’re liable to be thrown off this crew if
you don’t… wait now. What was that last bit?”

Reply intended for Nita.

“Okay… let’s hear what you’ve got to say. And
go slow now. I ain’t the best at this tapping stuff…”

#

From Gunner’s perch on the deck of the ship,
he had an excellent vantage to see both the gathering below and
Coop inside the tower. What he was seeing at the moment was Coop
crouched beside a filing cabinet doing absolutely nothing. That was
something the deckhand could
not
afford to be doing, because
the bottle that had served as the focus for the gathering of
fuggers below had just run dry, and with it their interest in
continuing their chat. The cutter pilot was already heading back to
his ship, and the supervisor had turned to the stairs, delayed only
by a short exchange with his underlings. In a moment Gunner was
going to have to either abandon ship and hope that Coop could work
things out for himself or put his contingency plan into motion.

“Damn it, Coop, get moving!” Gunner growled
as he watched the scout crew turn to pace toward their ship.

Motion on the deck of the cutter caught his
eye, and he looked up just in time to see a crewman, in similarly
excellent vantage to see the interior of the tower, step up onto
the deck to light up a quick cigarette. It took all of six seconds
for him to glance at the tower, widen his eyes in shock, and call
down to the others.

“Took longer than I’d expected,” Gunner
proclaimed, springing up from behind the controls.

First he swapped his rifle for his monstrous
shotgun and took aim at the nearest mooring rope. A single
thunderous blast both sparked mass confusion on the ground and
cleanly severed the rope. The whole ship pitched to the other side
until he turned and blasted the deck side of the remaining rope,
cutting the ship entirely free. It began to drift slowly but
steadily upward, making him a moving target as the crew on the
ground opened fire. Fug folk weapons were top notch, but a
crewman’s sidearm wasn’t quite up to the task of taking on a whole
scout ship. Particularly not once Gunner took control of the
fléchette gun and gave the ground a quick spray to send them
running for cover.

Much as he would have liked to cut down the
entire crew on the ground, he knew that if Cooper had failed, the
best chance they would have to get the information they needed
would be to question the survivors. That lamentably meant there had
to
be
survivors. Instead he took aim at the envelope of the
cutter ship, since the crewman on deck had already reached a gun
and was attempting to do the same to him. Before he pulled the
trigger, he flipped down a pair of dark lenses on his goggles.
Properly protected, he released three seconds of concentrated fire,
which perforated the cutter’s bladder enough to fill the air with
the brilliant green glow of escaping phlogiston. It was a glow as
bright as day, blinding the darkness-adapted vision of all on the
ground. He continued firing until he saw the mooring lines slacken,
a sure sign that the whole ship would crash down before much
longer.

He looked about on the deck and eventually
spotted the megaphone that had so often been used to issue orders
and threats to the
Wind Breaker
over the years. He picked it
up and turned to the tower.

“Coop, tell me you got what you were after,”
he said. He was now roughly eye level with the top of the tower,
and still slowly rising.

Coop stumbled out onto the catwalk, shielding
his eyes from the light that was only now starting to dim as the
phlogiston started to run low. “You dang fool, what’d you do that
for?” he called out.

“Do you have the information?” Gunner
growled.

“Well, I got something,” he called back,
stumbling aside as the station inspector dove in frantic terror
from the roof to the walkway and scampered down to the ground.

“Then standby to board.”

Gunner dropped the megaphone and angled the
grappling hook at the catwalk. It launched like a javelin, digging
into the wooden slats, and before the line had even gone taut, Coop
was climbing up almost as quickly as the escaping aye-aye had
climbed down.

“Take the wheel, and where’s the
information?” Gunner said, running back to the fléchette gun.

“Nikita’s got it. I think she overheard
something or some such. Seems like it’s from Nita. Or for Nita.
She’ll have to tell you in a bit.”

He steered the ship hard to port, using the
power of the ship’s engines to pull the grappling hook free along
with about half of the tower’s catwalk. This was much to the
chagrin of the unarmed members of the ground crew, which had taken
shelter beneath the tower and now had to run to avoid the falling
debris. He then turned up the power on the engines and directed the
ship toward the cutter for a strafing run.

“You mean to tell me the
inspector
is
the one who found it?”

“I guess. I don’t know. Can we wait ’til the
shooting’s done before we jaw about it?”

The sound of splintering wood drew their
attention downward, then the hiss and flare of green light drew it
upward. It would appear the remarkably dedicated crew of the cutter
had kept its guns manned even as it slowly sank to the ground. In
their blind firing they had managed find the scout ship. Lines of
fléchettes swept back and forth across the deck, narrowly missing
both Gunner and Coop but doing quite a bit of damage to the control
wheel’s linkages.

“I think we should probably ditch this
thing,” Coop said.

With his usual decisiveness, he illustrated
the wisdom of his suggestion by immediately taking his own advice.
He ran to the grappler and hopped over the side, sliding down its
line and hitting the ground running. Gunner followed suit, though
his dismount of the line was more of a tumble than a run. Coop
helped him up, and the two began to sprint.

“I’m a bit turned around,” Coop yelled.
“Which way is the
Wind Breaker
again?”

“It’s back that way, we’re in the middle of
the station,” Gunner said.

A crunching grind filled the air as the
pilotless scout ship rammed its gondola into the mostly deflated
envelope of the cutter and began to drag it away from the
station.

“You sure? Because I think I remember the
water towers being on that side when we got here,” Coop said, as
though the ship-to-ship collision wasn’t any of his concern.

“Yes, Coop, I’m sure!” Gunner said.

“Both of you put your hands up!”

Coop drew his pistol and turned, Gunner doing
the same with both of his. The two members of the scout ship crew
had their pistols leveled at the
Wind Breaker
crewmen, as
did the supervisor and the pilot of the cutter, who, for better or
worse, hadn’t made it back to the cutter before the mayhem
started.