Free-Wrench, no. 1 (24 page)

She coughed and fought to regain her breath,
her mind not yet recovered enough to appreciate the miracle of
falling from one airship and landing on another. She swept the deck
around her with blurred vision. Either because of its hasty need to
launch, or simply by design, the ship operated on a skeleton crew.
Each fug person rushed to follow orders bellowed through megaphones
from a helm near the fore end of the main deck. The crew was so
busy they had not yet noticed her.

Reason wormed its way slowly back into her
mind. They wanted the stolen cargo back. That was the only reason
they hadn’t decimated the
Wind Breaker
. Chances were very
good they would have no such qualms about killing a stray crewman.
If she wanted to survive, even for a few minutes more, she was
going to have to get out of sight before they noticed her. And if
there was any hope of getting the stolen medicine back to her
mother, she was going to have to find some way to help the
Wind
Breaker
get away. Stumbling to her feet, she rushed for the
nearest hatch to the lower decks.

#

“We lost Nita!” Coop said.

“Is she dead?” Captain Mack asked.

“I don’t know. She might have ended up on the
dreadnought.”

“Then she’s dead either way. Looks like she
got that leak fixed before she went, but we lost a lot of gas.
We’re going to have to bleed some altitude, and we can’t stay up
here or those harpoons will get us. I’m taking us aside.”

He guided the rapidly descending
Wind
Breaker
to port, swinging down behind the main envelope, then
out and away. Gunner scrambled to reach the sack of weapons that
had been thrown about the deck by the attacks. It had become lodged
in the mounting of one of envelope struts. He fished out a
blunderbuss and took aim at one of the propellers as they swept
past. Pulling the trigger unleashed a cloud of pellets. At this
range the bulk of the blast met its target, causing the motor to
vent steam and sputter to a stop. Though there were no fewer than
eleven other propellers still functioning, it was heartening to
know that the ship wasn’t indestructible.

Their drop began to level off as they cleared
the side of the craft. The bad news was that this left them at
close range and in good position for the dreadnought’s deck guns.
The good news was that they were now close enough for Coop and
Gunner to target the crew with their pistols and rifles. Firing
from ship to ship didn’t allow any real accuracy, but by
maintaining a constant hail of bullets on the way, they managed to
keep the enemy gunmen in search of cover. It led to something of a
standoff, because they knew that if they attempted to escape, Coop
and Gunner wouldn’t be able to keep the enemy gunners busy.

“I’m going to slow her up,” Captain Mack
said.

“I’d advise against it, Captain,” Gunner said
between shots. “I’ve only taken out three of their guns and none of
their gunmen. If we fall back, the forward guns could fire on you
and the helm.”

“I don’t figure on there being guns there for
too much longer,” Captain Mack said. He leaned to the speaking
tube. “Forward cannons loaded, Lil?”

“Good to go, Cap’n!” came her reply.

He smiled. “Firing starboard cannons.”

Firing a shipboard cannon at point blank
range is not typically done for quite a few reasons, all of which
were perfectly illustrated in the following moments. The blow was
devastating, instantly reducing a stretch of the gunship’s hull to
splinters. Shards of former ship flew in all directions, some
pelting those enemy crewmembers lucky enough to be spared the
primary blast, much rebounding back and scouring Coop, Gunner, and
the captain. The gunship shuddered to one side, the
Wind
Breaker
to the other, and then they crashed together,
dislodging or damaging most of the guns and leaving the starboard
side of Captain Mack’s ship badly damaged. The explosion knocked
all three crewmembers on the deck to their backs, and there they
remained, motionless.

#

Nita was thrown against the wall of an one of
the dreadnought’s internal hallways as a cloud of splinters left
her scraped up and thanking her lucky stars that she’d kept her
goggles in place. When the cloud settled down, she saw that the
hallway ahead of her was now missing, replaced with rushing wind
and moonlight. The damage revealed something else, however. Until
now she’d seen precious little of the dreadnought’s steam system.
Unlike the cheaply and minimally built
Wind Breaker
, the
dreadnought was clearly a war machine, meant for battle, and thus
meant to withstand attack. The vital workings were hidden deep
inside, where even a blast like the one she’d just narrowly avoided
could not reach them. In the shattered remnants of the hall,
however, the splintered back wall revealed stout steam pipes. She
followed what little of them she could see. It wasn’t much, but it
was enough to give her an idea of where the boiler was. If there
was one thing that could destroy this ship in one fell swoop, it
was the boiler.

She doubled back and found her way down the
stairs, dodging into side halls whenever the rare crewman appeared.
A few twists and turns took her into the depths of the ship, where
enormous pipes hung in exposed runs along the walls, leading her
directly to the boiler. It was massive, as it would have to be in
order to get a behemoth like this moving at all, let alone with the
speed and agility it had demonstrated. The boiler approached the
size of the ones back at home; but just as the ones the fug folk
had built for others were unnecessarily complex, that same
brilliance had streamlined the workings of this one to be manned by
a single fug person standing on an elevated platform at one side of
the room like the conductor of an orchestra. He worked like a man
possessed, eyes scanning dozens of meters, pulling levers to dump
bins of fuel into chutes and twisting valves to regulate
pressure.

She climbed onto the catwalk and crept low
behind him, though with his level of distraction she could have
been beating a base drum without drawing his attention. It wasn’t
until she’d slunk two steps away that he finally turned to inspect
the sound of her footsteps, and when he did he received a wrench to
the side of his head. He crumbled quickly to the ground, and she
was left at the controls of the massive ship’s power supply.
Cranking open some valves and tightening up others, she began
dumping extra fuel into the firebox and manipulating the water
flow. In essence, she was gathering together the sum total of what
she’d learned about how to keep a boiler from blowing—and doing the
opposite. One by one, though, safety valves and other fail-safes
triggered.

“They
do
know how to build a good
boiler when they want to…” she grumbled.

“We are receiving irregular power to the
turbines. Get them regulated, now!” came an order from a clearer
and much more elaborate version of the
Wind Breaker
’s
speaking tube. “Main Engineer, report! … Report! … Secondary
Engineer, report to the boiler, and bring two guards.”

Nita looked around desperately. There wasn’t
much time left, and it was clear that no amount of standard
tinkering was going to get this boiler to explode. She felt around
her equipment, searching for something that might do some good.
She’d lost a good deal of tools during her fall. Finally her
fingers came to rest on an oddly bulging pouch. She pulled it open
to find the exposed coil box. As the footsteps of the engineer and
his guards began to echo down the hall, an idea came to mind. She
leapt down to the floor of the chamber and sprinted to the firebox.
Once there she hauled it open, loosened a few screws on the coil
box, and threw it inside, slamming the firebox door shut after. She
then commenced bashing madly at any connected pipes she could
reach.

“Stop right there!” cried a voice a few
moments later.

She turned to the doorway to find two guards
with weapons raised.

“Go ahead,” she replied. “Fire your weapons
in the boiler room. Nothing would make me happier.”

“That’s the Calderan! How did she get on the
ship? Best not to kill her. Grab her and bring her to the captain,”
the engineer said, climbing to the catwalk and beginning to undo
her sabotage.

#

On the
Wind Breaker
, the crew had all
survived Captain Mack’s desperate attack. Butch had made her way
back to the deck and was now busy rousing the dazed captain, who’d
been knocked back from the controls by the force of the blast. His
face was covered in tiny scrapes, and one lens of his glasses was
cracked, but he was otherwise intact. He stood and took the
controls again.

“On your feet, men. We might still get out of
this,” he ordered.

The
Wind Breaker
, without him active
at the controls, had veered toward the gunship and now butted
against it. He tried to steer it away, but dislodged rigging from
the larger ship had become entangled with the support belt for his
turbines, holding the ships together. He eased the controls in and
out, causing the ship to tug away bit by bit, but as he did the
remaining crew of the dreadnought wheeled over a pair of strange
contraptions.

“Boarding hooks, men! On your feet!” the
captain ordered. He reached for his pistols.

“Keep your hands raised. You’ve got three
rifleman targeting you right now.”

He turned to find his counterpart on the
dreadnought standing on the deck, speaking through a megaphone.

“You really impress me, Captain West,” said
the enemy captain. “No one has dared to assault anything concealed
by the fug in a century. We have kept the dreadnought on standby
constantly for decades, but this is the first time under my command
that we have had to use it. Again, I applaud you. I’m inclined to
believe that it was through little more than an overabundance of
raw gall and foolishness that you achieved this, but I doubt that
any amount of daring could come so close to success without a keen
mind behind it. And no keen mind would place all of its eggs in a
single basket. For instance, I am not sure when or how you inserted
one of your crew onto my ship, but we’ve found her.”

He signaled and the guards hauled Nita out
into view.

“Again, the mere ability to insert her
convinces me that you have tricks up your sleeve. In a moment, my
men will board your ship. They will search it, and they will
recover all that you have stolen. You will also tell us of any
information you have been able to deliver to anyone else through
whatever means. If you cooperate, you will be allowed to live, and,
in time, your fees will be paid and your life will continue. Men,
deploy the boarding hooks.”

“I really wouldn’t do that,” Gunner said, his
voice slurred from his own brief trip into unconsciousness. He had
in his hand what was either a shotgun sawed down to the size of a
pistol, or a pistol modified for firing shot. “The last time I
fired this, I nearly broke my wrist, but I’m confident that with it
I could kill three of you in one shot without aiming.”

“I reckon I could take a few myself,” Coop
said, sitting up and raising his own pistols.

“And I’ll mop up what’s left,” Lil said,
emerging from the hatch with her stolen rifle.

“Captain, please. For your own sake and
theirs, I beseech you to get your crew under control,” the enemy
captain said.

“I’d say they are following my standing
orders just fine.”

“Perhaps your infiltrator can reason with
you.” He turned to Nita. “Explain to him what you’ve seen, that
nothing he can do can destroy this ship.”

He placed the megaphone in front of her
mouth. After a steadying breath, she spoke: “Captain Mack. I am not
going to plead for my life. I understand that what we do, we do for
the ship. But promise me one thing. When this monster goes down,
find a way to get the medicine to my mother. And tell her that I’m
sorry.”

Captain Mack nodded. “We’ll do that, Ms.
Graus. You can count on it.”

“What do you mean by that? Your tampering
didn’t do
anything
to the boiler,” the enemy captain
said.

Fate, in one last showing of its fine sense
of humor, chose that moment to finish the work Nita had started.
The loosened and damaged coil box finally succumbed to the intense
heat of the overfed firebox. The nontrith components gave way,
allowing the phenomenal amount of power stored in the coiled spring
to burst free. A ribbon of nigh indestructible material unfurled in
an instant, punching easily through the walls of both the firebox
and the water chamber. Its sturdy structure thus compromised, the
boiler began to vent superheated steam. Forced upward by the
escaping vapor, the whole of the house-sized boiler thrust through
the decks, crashing through them as if they were gingerbread and
continuing unimpeded through the envelope above. No matter how
secure and well-engineered the design, the sack of gas couldn’t
withstand such massive damage.

The explosion sent the crew flying and threw
Nita to the deck along with the captain. The dreadnought continued
to splinter and crack, the fore end drooping as the envelope lost
the ability to hold it aloft. The secondary envelopes, still
intact, held firm to the aft of the ship, and the damaged craft
began to come apart. Captain Mack pushed hard at his controls,
turning the
Wind Breaker
away from the disintegrating
dreadnought. Lil madly scanned the decks of the two halves of the
sinking ship. Finally, on the deck of the falling fore end, she saw
Nita, clutching a piece of rigging.

“Cap’n! Nita’s still down there. We’ve got to
do something,” she cried, pointing.

Captain Mack’s sharp mind clicked away, his
eyes sweeping across his own ship’s deck. Finally they came to rest
on the cowering and just recently recovered creature at his feet,
Wink.