Free-Wrench, no. 1 (14 page)

“You’re going to want to cover your ears.
This one’s got one hell of a report,” Gunner said.

A crowd of pursuers descended on the beach.
Gunner pulled the trigger. The sound was remarkable, more like a
cannon than a revolver. It was enough to convince the mob to dive
for cover.

“Is this the way supply stops usually go for
you people?” Nita called down.

“On the Lags? More often than not!” Coop
called back, taking aim with his own pistol and firing.

“Gunner, climb up and shut off the winches
when we get close enough. Ms. Graus, get to the deck and haul in
the mooring lines. Glinda and Coop, help me coax these dirty
dealers to turn the other cheek.”

Nita scrambled through the ship and up to the
main deck. There were already return shots ringing out by the time
she got there. Either the guns they were using were inferior, or
else the envelope was tougher than it looked, because the bullets
were doing little more than plinking off the turbines or bouncing
off the fabric with a resonating
foomp
. She tried to ignore
the insistent voice in her head asking where those bouncing bullets
might end up and what was keeping the attackers from firing at her.
There was no winch or reel to bring in the stout mooring lines, so
she simply grabbed hold of the free line and threw it over her
shoulder to drag it across the deck. Two more trips back and forth
brought the free end aboard.

Captain Mack labored up onto the deck, his
breath heavy and wheezing.

“Gunner, Coop, get ready to help her with the
other line,” he ordered.

“I can handle it,” Nita said, crouching down
to the rope and watching as Lil fought to release it from the
tower.

“This one’s gonna be a good bit heavier,”
Coop said. “How else do you figure Lil’s getting on board?”

Nita’s eyes widened and she looked to the
tower again. The scrawny young crewwoman finally dislodged the rope
and called out.

“Take ’er up!” she cried. She then glanced
down to see a particularly brave local clambering up the ladder
toward her. “And be quick about it. I got company down here!”

The captain took the helm and pulled hard on
a lever, conjuring a grinding noise from above them and causing the
ship to sharply ascend. Lil leapt from the tower and snagged the
hanging line. She swung far under the rising ship.

“We pull when she swings away from the ship,”
Gunner instructed. “One, two, three,
heave
!”

Between the three of them, they were able to
haul up half of the rope before she swung back. Another swing and
another haul pulled Lil near enough to the deck for her to plant
her feet on the hull and walk herself along it, with the help of a
more constant pull, until Gunner reached down and dragged her
up.

“Cap’n,” she said breathlessly, “you wanna
maybe give me the heads-up that you’ve got that sort of thing
planned? I just got through cleaning the boiler and was powerful
sore even before I had to go jumping off the ship and swinging
around like a monkey.”

“Did we just rob those people?” Nita
asked.

“No, Ms. Graus. We negotiated a fair price
and shook hands on it. Then they tried to say some nonsense about a
docking fee. Far as I’m concerned, you break an agreement, you
break the
whole
agreement. So we helped ourselves to the
gear and goods and left what we figured they deserved.”

“And what was that?”

There was the distant thump of an explosion.
All eyes turned to the heavily armed airship that she’d figured for
a patrol upon their arrival. Black smoke belched from the side, and
the turbines on the starboard side had stopped, sending it into a
slow spin.

“I left them a pyrotechnic demonstration,”
Gunner said. “Seemed like a fitting trade to me.”

The captain looked over the controls, tapping
a pressure gauge and adjusting a few levers. “On the off chance
that one of those other ships is on their payroll, I’d say we’d
best skedaddle,” he said.

He slid a row of levers up, and the ship
lurched forward, pitching down somewhat as the turbines roared to
life… all five of them. At the unexpected acceleration and the full
chorus of pumping steam, he turned angrily to Lil and Nita.

“I seem to be going full speed. Either of you
care to explain how that happened?” He glared first at Nita, then
at Lil. “Lil, did you leave the greenhorn alone in the boiler room
at all?”

“No, sir, Cap’n. I was in there cleaning it
up most of the time you were gone. She couldn’t have done nothing,
or I’d have known for sure. The only time she went in there by
herself was to feed it with fuel a minute ago.”

His glare turned to Nita again. “Did you do
anything you shouldn’t?”

“I was on deck, keeping watch and taking
apart the wailer as ordered, Captain,” Nita said. “As she says, I
didn’t have time enough with the boiler to do anything even if I
tried.”

“Probably cleaning the boiler out shook
something loose and got them running again. You know how twisted up
those boilers are. Poke around with one bit on one side of the ship
and it causes all sorts of stuff to happen way on the other
side.”

The captain chewed his cigar and continued to
hold the women in a measuring gaze. “Gunner, head down to the
boiler room and have a look around. Let me know if it looks like
she did anything.” Gunner quickly obeyed. “You’d best hope he
doesn’t find anything.
Both
of you. But for now, make
yourselves useful and load up the aft cannons. If one of those
ships does come after us, I want to give it something to think
about.”

“Aye, aye,” Lil said. “Come on. I’ll show you
how to do it.”

Nita eagerly followed her crewmate below
decks. With the
Wind Breaker
being as small as it was, the
pair had reached the workings of the aft cannon before Nita felt
they were comfortably out of earshot.

“Thanks for your support back there,” Nita
said.

“Who me?” Lil said. “Don’t worry about it.
You Calderans are smart folk. Help me with this door, would you?”
She grabbed one side of a heavy wooden door on temperamental
slides. Nita grabbed the other. “You wouldn’t be dumb enough to
tinker around in something after you were told not to. Now, this is
the powder magazine. Gunner wraps these little packs of gunpowder
in paper. Call’s ’em charges. You’re going to need at least one in
each cannon. Cap’n likes a medium load, so that means two. And
there’s three cannons, so that… well, that’s two each.” Lil counted
out two packs three times. Each was a cheese-wheel-shaped packet of
brown paper about six inches in diameter. “Unless he says
otherwise, we load with grapeshot. That’s those little cloth bags
down there. Grab one per cannon and follow me. Careful, they’re
heavy.”

“Isn’t it a little absurd though, not being
allowed to repair your own ship?” Nita asked. She hefted one of the
indicated cloth bags. It was almost as heavy as the monkey-toe
strapped to her back and clacked when it moved, as though it was
filled with individual chunks of metal.

“Rules are rules,” she said with a shrug. She
turned across the narrow hall and awkwardly kicked open a brace
holding another set of sliding doors, then caught the handle with
her heel to haul it open.

The doors opened to reveal the most
concentrated mass of gears, chains, ropes, and pulleys that Nita
had ever seen outside of the workings of the town clock back home.
Three angled baskets dangled in the center of the space, and beside
each hung a chain with a weighted pull, along with a separate loop
of chain. The baskets were in three sections, one in front of the
other, and were just the right shape to hold the bags and powder
charges.

“Charges go in the middle, shot goes in the
first basket, and when those are loaded up, you go back to the
magazine and get a cap.” She turned and fetched a metal disk.
“These things blow up easy, so you put them last so you don’t knock
them around.”

Nita loaded the baskets. “But prohibiting
even simple repairs makes no sense.”

“Maybe it’s because I ain’t the sharpest
knife in the drawer, but most things don’t make much sense to me.
All I know is there’s enough you
have
to do on a ship that
it just isn’t worth wasting the effort to start fooling with things
you aren’t told to do, or are told
not
to do. Now you just
pull on this here chain until it goes up to the top and drops back
down here empty. That means the cannon’s loaded. You pull this
chain, and that means the cannon’s primed. Now when the captain
wants to fire, he can do it right from the helm, or he can call out
‘fire aft cannon,’ depending on how busy he is, and we can pull
that cord. Unless the speaking tube is busted, his voice will come
out of the pipe right there. You can talk back too.” She cleared
her throat. “Cap’n! Lil at the aft cannon! Can you hear me?”

“Yes, Lil.”

“You want us down here on reload detail, or
should we report to the deck?”

“Report to the deck. Gunner just
returned.”

“Aye, Cap’n.” She turned to Nita. “Easy as
that. Don’t look so nervous. This stuff hardly ever blows up by
mistake.”

Nita followed Lil back to the deck and willed
her nerves into settling down. Her father had always joked that she
and her sister would have made fine gamblers, because when they had
a mind to, they could be as stone-faced as a statue. She dearly
hoped he had been right, because the captain was already suspicious
enough. Nita couldn’t afford for him to see the same concern that
Lil had spotted.

On deck, Coop, Gunner, and the captain were
gathered around the helm.

“Ms. Graus, I had a word with Gunner,”
Captain Mack said. “You got anything to say?”

“Nothing, Captain,” she said.

“And if I were to tell you that he found what
you did?”

“Then I would have to ask to what he was
referring.”

He glared at her. She stared back with every
ounce of stoicism she could muster. Finally he turned back to the
controls.

“Nothing he shouldn’t have found,” he said.
“Head down to the gig room and start unloading the wagon. Once
that’s through, tear it apart and patch up some of the holes in the
deck. Coop will lend a hand.”

Nita nodded and went on her way again. It
took every last bit of will she had to avoid sighing in relief.

With all five turbines
back in operation, they were back on schedule, less the twenty
hours they’d spent heading out to be resupplied. At that rate, if
there were no more problems, they would hit Keystone just in time
for their meeting with the fug folk. The journey turned out to be
blissfully uneventful, though it was hardly restful. During the
next two days Nita learned firsthand the amount of work it took to
keep the
Wind Breaker
airborne. Once an hour the boiler was
fed, and three times a day they dipped down to the ocean to take on
enough water to keep the steam coming. Spare moments were spent
patching up those things they could and creating a list of those
things they couldn’t.

Nita received a crash course in a dozen new
skills, from carpentry to navigation. The only thing they never
allowed her to do was take the controls. The captain reserved the
right almost exclusively for himself, spending most of his waking
hours keeping his ship on course. Gunner and Coop took the controls
while he slept. Even during mealtimes he was more often at the
controls than at the table. As Nita learned, this gave the other
members of the crew a chance to speak freely about those things
they would rather he not overhear.

“And that’s the first time I ever heard the
cap’n scream,” Coop said, laughing and wiping a tear from his
eye.

“You know, Brother, as many times as you tell
that story, I still don’t believe it. The cap’n would stare death
in the eye. I don’t reckon he’d be afraid of something as simple as
a snake.”

“I ain’t sayin’ he wouldn’t stare death in
the eye. I’m just sayin’ that if death was a snake, he’d be
screamin’ like a little baby while he was doin’ it,” Coop said. He
turned to Nita, “You got any questions about the cap’n, Nita? While
he’s not here is just about the only time you’ll get ’em
answered.”

She took a sip of their recently acquired
supply of something her fellow crewmates referred to as grog. The
others seemed to love it, though Nita simply could not develop a
taste for what appeared to be two randomly chosen types of alcohol
mixed with copious amounts of questionable water.

“What I’m mostly curious about is how this
crew came together. I know how Lil and Coop joined, but what about
you, Gunner?”

“It isn’t a terribly interesting tale, I’m
afraid. I met the captain while the
Wind Breaker
was just
another patrol ship. This was ten years ago, back when Westrim and
Circa were just signing a peace treaty after all of those
skirmishes. The governing council decided a few joint patrols
needed to be put together to show we could work together. Little
did I know the
vastly
divergent ideas of proper training
held by the Circa Naval Academy and… does Westrim even
have
a training curriculum?”

“We do things the
proper
way,” Coop
said. “Conscription and apprentice… tion.”

“And I can only marvel at the airmen it has
produced. I was their armory officer, then as now, and the only
fully college-trained member of the crew. Which means—”

“Which means he knows how to read books writ
by folks who know how to do things, while the rest of us actually
know how to do them,” Lil said.

“Delude yourself as you will. To my great
surprise, while the rest of the crew at the time was a damnable
collection of misfits and imbeciles, the captain is remarkably
skilled. Once that storm cost us most of our crew, he found himself
this
new
pair of misfits and imbeciles, but at least they
turned out to be quick learners. Not that they could have earned a
degree as I have.”