Free-Wrench, no. 1 (13 page)

“I actually haven’t heard much of anything
about Westrim.”

“Well, it’s just as well. Pack of lies, the
lot of it. Well, the bit about us being the best drinkers and the
best fighters is the God’s honest, but the rest is malarkey and
hogwash.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. How did you end up
on a ship like this?”

“Not much of a story, really. Coop and I were
from one of the flat-tops, you know, down in the south tip of…” She
glanced to Nita, then smiled. “Oh, I forgot. You’re not from around
there. Well, the folks who settled the west side of Rim just called
it Westrim. Not a real imaginative lot, I guess. There’s some
mountains down south with pretty flat tops, you know. They got a
real name, I guess, but we just called them the flat-tops.

“Anyway, Coop and I raised goats there. I
don’t know what sort of meat you get down in Caldera, but around
here you either get goat, sheep, or if you’re real rich, you can
get some beef from down on the plateaus. We were raising goats
because they do good on the steep parts of the mountains. Problem
was, we were pretty far down the slope, closer to the fug than we
probably should’ve been. Along came a storm one day, kicked up the
fug real good and just washed it right over our land. Killed the
goats, darn near killed us, except we managed to get a couple of
masks on, but that’ll only keep you safe for a few days before that
stuff starts eatin’ at your skin.

“We couldn’t see, we couldn’t climb, and a
big cloud of the fug was just sitting on us, but then down comes
this ship. Cap’n Mack, back in his coast patrol days. He barely
made it through the storm himself. Lost most of his men over the
side. The only folk left were him, his wife, and Gunner. This was
before Wink even. He dipped the
Wind Breaker
down in the fug
and hauled us out. We said we owed him for that, and he said we
could work it off, but really I think he was just finding a way to
give us a place to stay, since our home was wrecked. He’s a big
softy. Don’t let him fool you. Turned out both Coop and I were
pretty good crewmates. So we stayed. Not a bad life, all things
considered. And… uh oh, here comes Wink. He’s looking agitated,
something’s up.”

The creature shimmied up the rigging, then
across Lil’s legs. He hopped up and down madly and pointed with his
horrifying strand of a middle finger toward the mooring line on the
near side of the ship. The line was jerking at its mounting in an
unnatural way.

“What is it?” Nita asked.

“Eh, it happens whenever we have to stop at
the Lags. Move aside, but stay up here.” She left the needle to
dangle and drew her revolver.

Once she’d managed to shoo Wink off of her,
Lil quickly descended the rigging and stepped up to the railing. A
moment later a ragged-looking young boy no older than nine reached
the top of the mooring line, a knife clamped in his teeth. He was
greeted by the barrel of a revolver between his eyes.

“Hoo-wee! They sure are startin’ ’em young
these days, aren’t they? I don’t know what you’re after, you little
rodent, but unless it’s an extra hole in the head”—she clicked back
the hammer—“you ain’t gonna find it on
this
ship. I think
you should head back where you came from.”

The would-be looter wisely chose to
withdraw.

“Faster than that, shrimp,” she said,
squeezing off a shot over his head.

The child slid down the rope and climbed in a
panic down the tower.

“Make sure you tell the other brats about the
crazy lady on the
Wind Breaker
,” she called after him. She
brushed off her hands and holstered her weapon. “That’ll keep ’em
nervous for a while. You figure you can finish that patch up there?
I want to get started on the boiler so the winch will be working to
haul up the goods.”

Nita looked uncertainly at the sling. “I
suppose I can try…”

“You’ll do great. Just remember, you need
three rows of stitches. Pay attention to if Wink gets jumpy, and be
ready to intimidate some punks if he does.”

Before she could object, Nita’s shipmate
disappeared into the bowels of the ship, leaving her to once again
muse over the remarkable way that the absurdity of this adventure
was so effective at overshadowing the constant danger.

After some initial
difficulty, Nita got the knack of sewing while dangling from a
hastily tied harness high over a deck that was itself high over the
ground. Wink never seemed to show the same urgent agitation again,
so she wasn’t required to develop her punk-intimidation skills, a
fact that left her both relieved and strangely disappointed.

She climbed back to the deck, Wink shadowing
her as always, and made ready to join Lil in the boiler room. Her
own experiences with cleaning boilers probably didn’t have much in
common with those on a ship. The steamworks boilers were large
enough for a three-person team to climb into and had to be hoisted
away from the heat of the volcano with building-sized winches. Even
on the smaller scale of the ship, it was bound to be terribly
unpleasant. She was heading for the nearest ladder below decks when
something caught her eye. In one of the crates of wailer ship parts
rested a pipe connection. She picked it up and turned it over in
her hands.

“This… this might work.”

Nita glanced around to ensure the deck was
clear of any shipmates or other witnesses, then crept to the
damaged floorboards and pulled them aside. She held the salvaged
connector down to the broken one. It was a perfect match.

“Of course it matches,” she remarked quietly.
“The fug folk make these machines, too. It makes sense they’d reuse
parts.”

She turned the connector over. It even had a
similar amount of wear. Her mind began racing in tight circles. She
had been ordered not to make repairs, but this was such a small
thing. It, along with her earlier judicious manipulation of the
various valves and switches, would certainly get all five of the
turbines spinning again. Lil was scraping away at the boiler,
rattling the pipes across the entire ship. She’d never know this
was even happening. No one would know.

The reasons to do it began to accumulate in
her mind. She could restore the ship, get them back on schedule,
and get a chance to negotiate for her mother’s medicine. The only
reasons not to do it were an order from her new captain and the
vague and dubious threat of reprisal from unseen boogeymen. She
hesitated, but only for a moment. All she needed were tools, which
Gunner had required that she leave in the boiler room to prevent
her from… well, from doing precisely what she was planning to do.
She crept up to the hatch to the lower decks.

“Lil! Do you need me to come down there? Or
should I remain on deck to keep a lookout and get this wailer taken
apart?”

“I’ll tell you what,” the deckhand called
back. “It’s kind of a tight squeeze. Not a two-person job. I reckon
you should stay up there, keep an eye out and such, and slice up
that ship some more like you said.”

“Not a problem, but I’ll need my tools.”

“These are them on the floor in here, right?
Well, come on down and get ’em! Just be quick about it, so’s we
don’t leave the deck empty for too long.”

Nita hurried down the ladder and into the
boiler room. When Lil indicated there wasn’t room for two people on
the boiler-cleaning job, it was a drastic understatement. There
wasn’t even room for one. She had somehow wedged herself halfway
into a hidden hatch near the top of the boiler and contorted into a
configuration that human anatomy had never intended. She hung
entirely upside down with both legs splayed outward at odd angles.
Her upper body was out of sight, squeezed into a space that didn’t
appear to be large enough or even the right shape to conceal her.
There was the constant sound of scraping, and bits of grit could be
heard tinkling down to the bottom of the boiler.

“Are you okay in there?” Nita asked.

“It ain’t my favorite job,” she said, her
voice distorted by the boiler’s interior. “Lucky this only happens
now and then. The
hard
part is getting out again. I might
need your help for that bit.”

“I’ll keep my ears open,” Nita said,
snatching up her tool belt, tool sash, and—out of habit—her
monkey-toe. “Heading back to the deck.”

“I’ll meet you up there when I’m done. It’ll
be before you know it.”

Nita made her way quickly back to the primary
deck. Repairing the connection took only a few minutes, but she
nevertheless did it with great care. The whole enterprise would be
pointless if the repair didn’t work. She also kept a close eye on
Wink all the while, lest another looter take advantage of her
distraction and sneak aboard, but the ship’s inspector seemed more
interested in her own activity than the approach of an intruder. In
no time she had the replacement part firmly in place and tied the
moldy rag over it as it had been before. She then tossed the broken
connector into the mound of discarded parts and got to work on
disassembling the rest of the wailer craft.

#

Over the course of the next hour and a half,
Nita tried to devote her mind entirely to the task of taking the
wailer apart. On one hand, doing so gave her a fine education about
how these fug folk built their machinery. Once she could get
through the obscuring layer of needless complexity, the basic
principles were actually quite simple, as all brilliant innovations
seemed to be. Calderan technology was elegant at times, but that
elegance focused primarily on using tried-and-true methods as
efficiently as possible. The fug folk were just as willing to
abandon the old ways as improve them, and in doing so they
underscored faults in the traditional methods that she’d never
noticed before. She found herself wishing she could observe this
craft in motion again, so that she could see for herself just what
the most mysterious innovations did.

On the other hand, immersing herself so
completely in the task served to distract her from a rather
insistent voice in her head. If it had been a voice of warning or
fear, perhaps it might have made sense to her. After all, they
had
expressed a willingness, if not an outright eagerness,
to kill her if she became a problem. In truth, fear accounted for
barely a dash of the weight on her chest. She was quite certain
neither the crew nor the fug folk would ever know what she’d done.
What she felt most of all, regardless of what logic and reason had
to say on the matter, was guilt. She was disobeying orders and
violating a trust that she’d barely earned. No matter how pure or
sound her reasons for such an act were, a part of her bristled
against it. And so she dove headlong into her task rather than
address those feelings.

She was just placing the last salvageable
component into a nearly filled crate when Lil emerged from below
decks. Her face and clothes were coated with gray dust from the
inside of the boiler. The only portion of her face spared was the
space around her eyes that had been protected by her goggles,
giving her a reversed raccoon look.

“Phew! She was a stubborn one today!” Lil
said. “I see you been busy. I’ll bet we get a tidy little payment
for that mess, huh?”

Nita held up one of the more complicated
gadgets. “This is truly fascinating.”

“Aw, it’s all a big mishmash to me.” She
wiped her head. “I could use a bath something fierce, but it looks
like I finished just in time. Cap’n and them will be coming back.
I’ll take over the watch up here. You go feed the boiler. Best to
make sure the winch is good and warm before they get here. Wouldn’t
want ’em to have to haul the goods up the ladder.”

Nita did as she was told, and the pressure
was topping off when the gruff voice of the captain rang out.

“Lower the gig! We need to be loaded and off
this trash heap two minutes ago!”

“You heard the man!” Lil called from
above.

Nita rushed to the gig room and pulled the
lever. Outside, the rest of the crew was quickening to a run by the
time the boat reached the sandy ground beneath the
Wind
Breaker
. Butch and the captain led a mule hitched to a heavily
loaded wagon. Gunner and Coop had weapons drawn and eyes trained on
the path behind them.

“You get in another disagreement, Cap’n?” Lil
called from the deck.

“You stop flapping your jaw and get that ship
unmoored! The fast way!” he ordered.

She groaned. “My share of this trip’s profits
better have a little extra in it this time!”

Nita ran to the porthole. It was coated with
grime, but she could just make out the portside mooring line.
Without warning, Lil dropped down from above, snagging the line and
looping a leather strap across the top to slide recklessly down its
length. One of the locals burst from the woods at the edge of the
beach and started climbing the mooring tower, but Lil was already
untying the line before he’d made it halfway up. She got the rope
free, pushed it off the tower, and jumped to the ladder. She slid
down and collided with the local at the ladder’s midpoint, but a
boot to the shoulder knocked him into the bushes and cleared the
way for her to continue to the ground.

“Start the winch, Ms. Graus,” cried the
captain.

“But you aren’t in the—”

“
Now, Ms. Graus!”

She yanked the lever, and the slack in the
chains began to reel in. The captain appeared and dragged out some
boards from the floor of the boat to form a ramp. He led the mule
right into the gig and off the other side, dragging the whole of
the wagon over the low edge of the boat and straddling it. He
unhooked the mule, scrambled aboard the wagon, and helped Butch to
do the same. Lil sprinted by, heading for the other tower. The
remaining two crew climbed aboard the wagon as winches began to
groan and haul the precarious pile from the ground. Gunner aimed
his overly complicated pistol.