Free-Wrench, no. 1 (20 page)

“Lil and I take out the fugger all quiet
like, then you and Gunner get the door open. After that, we take
everything we can carry,” Coop said.

“This is gonna be fun! We’ll signal you by
shutting off the light,” Lil added.

With that, the two siblings sprinted silently
down the alley. Nita and Gunner followed far behind.

“Is this the sort of thing you do often?”
Nita asked.

“No, attempting to rob the people who supply
the entirety of our technology is uncharted territory for us.”

“The Coopers seem awfully at ease with
it.”

“Those two haven’t got the brain power to do
anything but live in the moment. Working out the consequences or
dangers of a given action takes too much effort. Sometimes I envy
them,” Gunner said. “You’d think it would make them poor workers,
but when you’ve only got mind enough to have a single train of
thought, you have no choice but to throw yourself entirely into
it.”

“I’m not certain if you’re trying to insult
them or compliment them.”

“Merely observing. You can sort the rest out
yourself.”

#

The guard took a deep breath of the chilly
air and tightened his jacket. He always hated when he pulled guard
duty. It was utterly pointless. In six years of guard duty the most
action he’d seen was when some shingles blew off the roof during a
storm. Every night was the same: standing on this old wooden
landing beside a reinforced door, a barred window, and a flickering
phlo-lamp, quietly listening to his pocket watch tick away the
hours until one of the patrol ships stopped to drop off his
replacement. He heaved a sigh and turned to the window, adjusting
the brightly colored ascot that he’d added to his otherwise drab
uniform. That, at least, was the nice thing about guard duty. No
one with the authority to reprimand him ever came out this far, so
he was free to take some dress-code liberties.

A skittering stone caught his attention and
he turned, reaching for his gun. There was nothing to be seen, just
the same empty stretch of courtyard that filled his view every
night. He turned back and leaned side to side, trying to get a full
reflection of himself in the glass behind the bars.

“Still looks a bit crooked if you ask me,”
Lil said.

The man panicked, reached for the rifle
again, and found it missing. He turned to the source of the voice
and swiftly discovered that his rifle hadn’t gone far. It was now
in the hands of a skinny surface-dwelling girl with a mischievous
gleam in her eye. He gasped and tried to call for help, but before
he could utter a syllable a hand covered his mouth.

“What’s the matter, fella? You never done
this before?” Coop asked. “See, when someone points a gun at you,
you keep quiet. Chances are, the only reason they didn’t pull the
trigger is because they didn’t want to make a ruckus and draw any
attention. If you go and draw attention yourself, they may as well
shoot. Now I’m going to ask you for the key to this here door. And
if you do anything but answer quietly, I’m gonna have to bust your
neck, and I never done that before, so it might take a few tries. I
don’t reckon that’ll be too comfortable for you. You
understand?”

He nodded.

“So.” Coop removed his hand and stepped in
front of the guard. The fug person was typically tall and thin,
making him the rare individual that Coop had to look up to talk to,
if only slightly. “Where’s the key?”

“Don’t have the key. The quartermaster has
the key, and he only comes here to pick up and drop off shipments,”
the man said desperately, adding, “Please don’t kill me!”

“Well, see, you ain’t got the key, so you
really aren’t that useful to us. Say…” Coop grabbed the ends of the
ascot. “What do you call this thing?”

“It’s an ascot,” he said.

“What’s it for?”

“Well, it’s for being all fancy like,
obviously,” Lil said.

“That ain’t what
I’d
use it for,” Coop
said.

“What else could you use it for?” she
asked.

He replied with a demonstration, using it to
yank the man’s head down and pulling it into a powerful head butt
that sent him to the ground.

“I s’pose that’s more of a reason
not
to wear one,” Lil said.

“That’s what I was trying to show off.”

“Well, then you done a good job. Not so much
for this fella, though. I guess he’ll get the point when he wakes
up.” She stepped over the unconscious man and twisted off the flow
for the light. “I like his gun, though.”

Nita and Gunner hurried across the darkened
courtyard.

“Psst, Gunner,” Lil hissed when he was near
enough to hear. She held up the gun. “Jealous?”

“Put that down. Make yourself useful and
scout the area for other guards while we get the door open,” he
growled.

Lil saluted. “Will do.”

Once again, with disturbing silence, she
vanished into the darkness, Coop hot on her heels.

“Okay, let’s see what we have here,” Nita
said, eyeing up the door and turning up the flame on her gas
lamp.

Unlike the rest of the building, which was a
fairly simple (albeit very large) brick warehouse, the door looked
like something from a vault. Thick iron bars ran through heavy
braces on either side and were connected in the center to a massive
gear with easily the most complex lock Nita had ever seen. There
were three keyholes interlinked with rods and cogs, and other gears
connected the central one to a series of smaller braces up and down
the sides of the door. The lock seemed to hold in place two smaller
rods that ran up from the base of the door and down from the top,
preventing the gear from turning.

“This looks like trouble,” Gunner said. “I
suppose I’ll get the explosives.”

Nita looked closer at the locking bars and
gave them a tap with a wrench. “It looks like these are the only
things we’ll have to overcome. If we can force these, the rest of
the door should open just fine.”

“That’s still a metal bar the size of your
thumb. How do you propose we force them?”

“Why do you think I carry this thing?” she
said, shrugging off the wrench from her back.

She hoisted it from the ground and tightened
its jaws around the hexagonal hub of the central gear. When it was
firmly clamped in place, she unsheathed the cheater bars and
screwed them together, inserting one end into a hole in the wrench
head and heaving with all of her might.

“Lend a shoulder,” she said, refitting it
into a hole that angled the bar lower.

The two of them crouched, braced a shoulder
against the far end of the bar, and put their backs into it. Slowly
the locking bars started to creak. They worked together, counting
off and then thrusting against the bar, earning a fraction of a
degree of additional rotation each time. Before long the Coopers
returned.

“We didn’t see anyone, but we got far enough
down to see a light at the other end of the warehouse, so there’s
probably another guard on the other side. And he probably doesn’t
have a key either, so he’d have to come through this door. What’s
going on here?” Lil said.

“Give us a hand, we’ve just about got this,”
Gunner grunted.

The four of them working together made steady
progress until, with a final heave, the locking bars curled free of
the gear and it turned freely, drawing back the braces and
unlocking the door.

“Hoo-wee!” Coop said, wiping the sweat from
his brow. “Is this what they have the ladies doing down in Caldera?
I pictured them teaching you how to be classy and all that.”

Nita removed the wrench and looped the ropes
through its jaws to hoist it onto her back. “Well, sometimes class
can come in handy. But you don’t need class if you have a
monkey-toe.”

“Let’s go!” Lil said, shoving the door
open.

“Take it slow,” Gunner said. “I’ve heard bad
things about the sort of stuff they’ve got in here. And we don’t
know if it is empty.”

They stepped inside and pushed the door shut.
Nita turned the flame in her lamp to full, and each of the others
pulled strange glass and brass cylindrical contraptions from their
equipment and twisted the ends. The ubiquitous green light
blossomed inside the devices, revealing their surroundings. Though
the light didn’t cut far into the darkness, it was clear the
building was massive and cavernous. There were no walls inside,
only huge shelves reaching dozens of feet into the air, nearly to
the ceiling. The warehouse was easily large enough to contain
several whole buildings from some of the less industrial portions
of the city.

The entryway was caged off within the
building, a small chamber set apart from the main warehouse. A desk
protected by bars sat to one side, no doubt meant to be manned by a
clerk charged with auditing what came in and went out during
operation. The gate leading to the rest of the warehouse wasn’t
nearly as sturdy as the one outside, but it had enough piping and
tubing running around its edge to pique Nita’s curiosity. As Coop
and Lil investigated the gate, Nita held her lamp close and
followed the tubes.

“This one’s pretty rickety, and the walls and
the fug should make sure no one can hear if we bang around a bit. I
bet Gunner and I can force it without your fancy doodad,” Coop
said.

“Let’s do it. Every time a patrol goes
overhead there’s a chance they will notice the guard is down.”

Nita let them go to work heaving at the door
while she continued to trace out the tubes. One led to a valve
lever on the clerk desk. From there it led up over the door to a
lever that hung down below the edge, and then over the cage. She
raised her lamp higher.

“Stop forcing the door!” she yelped, when she
spotted its final destination.

The rest of the crew looked first to her
widened eyes, then to what they were locked upon. It was an array
of what looked remarkably like firearms. They were mounted above
the cage and pointed downward, and in place of their trigger
assemblies were a series of pneumatic plungers.

“If you force the door open it will open the
valve and fire them,” Nita said.

“You sure?” Coop asked.

“No, but do you want to test it?”

“I reckon not. So what do we do about
it?”

She pulled a pair of locking pliers from her
tool sash. “Give me a boost.”

Gunner laced his fingers together, and she
planted a boot in his hands, stepping up until she was level with
the top of the cage. She adjusted the pliers and reached through
the bars to clamp them down good and hard on the tube leading to
the triggers.

“Okay,” she said, hopping down. “That should
do it. But just in case, let’s make this quick. All at once.”

They braced themselves, each casting a wary
glance above, then on the count of three charged the gate. Under
their combined force the door crashed open, flipping the trigger
lever. The group tumbled in a heap down the short flight of stairs
leading down to the factory floor. Behind them, they heard the slow
whistle of pressure slipping through her improvised clamp.

“Oh no,” Nita blurted. She leapt to her feet
and scrambled up the stairs, then up the outside of the cage. With
a panicked swat she flipped the trigger lever back down and
retreated back to the floor. The whistle faded away, and the guns
remained mercifully silent. She breathed a sigh of relief and
climbed up to retrieve her pliers.

“Can we get to looting now?” Lil asked,
evidently unfazed by the rapid-fire near catastrophes. “So far this
heist has been mostly opening doors.”

“Yes, go. Just don’t get killed,” Gunner
said. “We need all of us alive and carrying as much as we can to
make this job worth our while. Lil and Coop, you’ll be after
anything that looks like it is worth a bundle. Nita, since you have
an eye for it, you’ll be after technology, information, and
medicine. I’ll go for weaponry.”

“Big surprise there. Come on, Brother. I’m
itching to go shopping!” Lil said.

They spread out, Lil and Coop scampering like
schoolchildren while Gunner and Nita moved with more care and
purpose. As mazelike as this place seemed to be, it
was
a
warehouse. The fug folk had no intention of hiding anything, no
doubt making the reasonable assumption that the toxic atmosphere,
the network of spies, the patrol ships, the guards, and the traps
would be enough to keep potential thieves from making it this far.
Aisles were clearly marked, and there were even inventory booklets
at the end of each row listing the contents and their locations.
Nita rushed from booklet to booklet.

“Medical: Equipment,” she read aloud.
“Medical: Documentation. Medical: Drugs!”

She sprinted down the aisle. Leading from the
floor to the top of the shelves was a rolling ladder on a runner,
the likes of which one might find in a large library. Nita took a
running leap and grabbed onto the ladder, coasting along with it as
rows of oddly named canisters whisked by her. Finally she grasped
the edge of a shelf and brought herself to a stop.

“Tomocin,” she said with a hushed voice.

It was a small, unassuming jar with a spring
top, the kind you might store preserves in, and yet everything she
had done in the last few days had been to get her hands on it. The
jar was filled to the brim with a fine white powder. At a glance
she might have mistaken it for sugar. She carefully stowed three
jars of the precious stuff, then began to load up on other jars
with useful indications. When she’d filled a sack, she slid down
the ladder and rushed back to the edge of the aisle to find her way
to the books that would teach her how to administer the
treatments.

The minutes rolled by as she weighed herself
down with medicines, design books, and gadgets. At first she took
her time to find things that were sturdy enough to survive rough
handling and still fetch a high price. There were clocks, strange
tools, complex locks, and items that, even with a description, she
couldn’t comprehend. Gradually she used less and less care,
choosing instead to get her bags filled as quickly as possible.
Every passing moment filled her with more anxiety, since what
little planning they had done was focused on escaping before they
were noticed, and there was little hope of that happening if they
didn’t get moving quickly. As she progressed down the aisle devoted
to the more technical devices, they steadily grew in size and
complexity, tools being replaced with machinery, then replacement
parts, and finally something that managed to force all of the fear
and worry from her mind, allowing her inner engineer to practically
froth at the mouth.