Cipher Hill

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “And just what matter is that?”

  She scoffed. “It simply isn’t done. We are quite literally from two different worlds.”

  “I see. And this is how you feel.”

  “It is the way of things.”

  “Samantha, let me tell you something I have learned in the past few months. The way of things is badly in need of a revision. So if your only motivation for or against a course of action is ‘the way of things,’ consider doing what you want, rather than what ‘is done.’”

  “Yes. Yes… I… Ahem.” She straightened up and fixed her hair. “I shall take it under advisement.”

  He chuckled. “Do keep me posted on your decision.”

  “Shall we get back to it? Time is wasting.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  #

  “What do you reckon we should do, Digger?” Coop said.

  Digger, who looked a bit on edge in the best of circumstances, seemed terribly anxious. “I’m not even certain I understand what he wants us to do.”

  “We’re supposed to get more ships to come and help out. You got any friends with ships you reckon we can persuade to help out?”

  “Coop, the entirety of my wealth and every favor I could muster went into getting the Ichor Well established. What you see here is all I have to offer.”

  “Oh… Well I ain’t got nothin’ neither. This here’s a real poser.”

  “I don’t understand how your captain can possibly expect any of you to do what you’ve been told. It is a stack of impossible tasks.”

  “Gunner findin’ better ways to poke holes in ships ain’t too tough. It’s what he’d be doin’ with a couple weeks off regardless.”

  “Granted. But for the rest of us, he’s asked us to conjure up two armies.”

  “An army and a navy, more like.”

  “Split hairs if you must, but for the first time I doubt Captain Mack’s judgment.”

  “You ain’t never doubted his judgment?”

  “Never so thoroughly as now. He takes a series of difficult-to-impossible tasks and assigns them to those beneath him without instruction. If we succeed, it will look as though he’d made all the right decisions, and if we fail, he can blame it all on us. Does that sound like leadership to you?”

  Coop cocked his head. “You ain’t never had a boss, have you, Digger? Besides, I wouldn’t worry about who takes credit. If we fail, we’re liable to be dead, so it won’t much matter. Back to thinkin’.”

  “There isn’t any sense thinking it over. We don’t have the ships, and even if we did, we don’t have the crew.”

  Nikita crawled out from inside Coop’s jacket and sat on his shoulder. Coop fished some waxed paper from his pocket and unfolded it to reveal a macaroon, which he held up for her. She took it and nibbled happily.

  “It’s just the crew that’s the problem,” Coop said. “This is the fug. Everyone roundabout the base of the mountains makes their money buildin’, fixin’, and sellin’ airships. No shortage of ’em about. Just a matter of gettin’ ’em in the air.”

  Digger rubbed the bridge of his nose. “That is broadly true, but it isn’t as though we just leave the ships in ready-to-fly condition. And we certainly don’t keep them armed. And even if we did, ‘only needing the crew’ is quite large enough a hurdle to completely cripple our chances at success. Remember, after all, that we need crew that can be trusted, and that knows how to do air-to-ground and air-to-air combat.”

  “Nope,” Coop said.

  “What in that statement could you possibly be disagreeing with? These are facts.”

  “No one said they need to know how to shoot.”

  Digger shut his eyes tight. “What good would they be if they don’t know how to fight?”

  “Cap’n didn’t say nothin’ about them shootin’. He said he needed more folks to be shot at. Ain’t no trainin’ involved for folks to be targets.”

  “I think it was implied that we needed them for combat aid. He said ‘air support.’”

  “I ain’t the best thinker, Digger. I worked out awhile back that things go smoother the fewer empty spots I fill in when folks give me orders. So I ain’t gonna sit here and try to work out what the cap’n meant when I can just go by what he said.”

  “But—”

  “What’s easier, Digger? Gettin’ a bunch of ships, or gettin’ a bunch of ships that can fight?”

  “Getting the ships alone, obviously, but—”

  “Then let’s not make things harder. Cap’n wants ships in the air over the place in three weeks. That’s what we’ll get. If we work that out and there’s time to spare, then we start figurin’ out the guns and the fingers to pull the triggers.”

  Digger covered his face. “We are doomed…”

  Chapter 9

  Digger, his hair wild and his face scruffy with stubble, tore a page from a pad and crumpled it. The pile of such pages scattered against the walls of his quarters suggested the last few days of scheming had not been very fruitful.

  “No, no,” he grumbled. “It is no good. The math doesn’t work out. Even if we can get to the storage yard near Lock with enough fuel and phlogiston to get them in the air, and even if we tow three empty ships with every crewed one, we still only have enough staff to spare to get a dozen ships moving. And even then we’d be moving so slowly we might not make it for the rendezvous. And even then we’d be such massive and slow-moving targets patrols would stop us before we made it halfway there.”

  Nikita hopped from beside Coop to investigate the mound of abandoned plans, rummaging around in the pile playfully.

  “I reckon you’re right. Came close with that one, though,” Coop said, idly whittling at a piece of wood.

  “It is telling that the best idea we’ve come up with so far was the one that had only three disqualifying issues.”

  “Back to scratch then,” Coop said.

  “It has been some time since you have volunteered an idea.”

  “I ain’t the best thinker.”

  Digger gestured at the discarded ideas. “I am plainly not at the top of my game in that regard either.”

  “All right then,” Coop said, digging his heels into the table and tipping his chair onto its back legs to rock himself. “What’re some things I done that got loads of ships in the air? … You reckon we could pull another heist on Fugtown?”

  Digger glared at him. “What possible use would adding another inadvisable task to our already insurmountable heap be?”

  “When we did that, half the city got on our tail. Maybe we could lead ’em all the way to the fort. That’d give us loads of folks in the sky.”

  Digger curled his fingers in the air as if he were choking an invisible man in front of him. “Coop, it has been established that you don’t like filling in the gaps in Captain Mack’s orders, but I think even you can agree that it is understood the individuals he’s asked us to gather should at the very least not be shooting at us.”

  Coop scratched his head. “Yeah. I’ll give you that. But it is a way to get a gaggle of ships where we want it. All we gotta do is work out how to keep ’em from shootin’ at us. Bribe, maybe?”

  “So you propose we commit a serious crime, very visibly, and then, while being chased, somehow negotiate a price with literally all of those following us?”

  “We could split up the work. I’ll do the heist if you do the bribin’. Them bein’ fuggers, they’ll probably listen to you better’n me.”

  “I respectfully decline the offer,” Digger said in exasperation.

  Nikita burst from the pile of crumpled papers and scampered to the table. With her odd, overlong middle finger, she began to tap out a message. There was a ship. The inspector says it was heading to Keystone to buy liquor.

  “Dang it…” Coop said. “It’s a shame we got this on our plate. We got loads of top-class hooch for trade right now. You reckon they’ll still be in the market when this is said and done, Digger? . . . Digger?”

  Digger di
dn’t answer. He was staring at Nikita. The aye-aye looked back at him with large, uncertain eyes. She was becoming increasingly uncomfortable at being the center of attention all of a sudden. Finally, she abandoned the table and leaped to Coop’s chest, nearly overbalancing his precariously tipped chair.

  “Quit givin’ Nikita the eye, Digger. She don’t like it,” he said, holding open his coat to let her crawl inside.

  “What do we know about Nikita?”

  “We know she don’t like bein’ stared at, for one.”

  “No, Coop, I’m serious. Think about this. A year ago, you and I were both under the impression the only reason the inspectors existed was to inspect. Then we discovered that they were spying on the airships, keeping tabs on them for the fug folk. I wasn’t far enough up the command chain to know much about it. Then we discovered that they were used for rapid communication. We keep finding out new things about them, and for a long time I’ve wondered if we’d ever get to the bottom of it. But it strikes me now… she knows. She knows everything she can do.”

  “And?”

  “And the fact that most of the messages being sent using the inspectors are still in plain language rather than some sort of code means two things. Most people don’t know we know what we know, and the people in charge have been relying upon security by obscurity.”

  “What all is that now?” Coop asked, rocking back and forth on the back legs again.

  “It means they never expected us to find out, so they never bothered to hide it. One of the great failings of the fug folk, particularly those in charge, is a tendency to underestimate the intelligence of those they consider their inferiors.”

  Coop pushed a bit too hard and tipped his chair backward, hitting the ground with a thud and sending Nikita panicking to the top of a bookcase. In his flailing, he lost his grip on the whittling knife and nearly stabbed his own thigh.

  “A not entirely unjustified opinion to hold, but a flawed one nonetheless,” Digger added.

  Coop climbed to his feet and fixed his chair, then fetched Nikita. “What’s this all got to do with Nikita again?”

  “I don’t know. But the time has come to find out.” He looked to the little creature, who was tucking herself back into the front of Coop’s jacket. “Nikita, what exactly was your job?”

  Nikita glanced up at Coop, as if for permission, then completely tucked herself out of view. Thus hidden, she reached out and tapped out her answer on one of Coop’s buttons. Nikita looked for things that were wrong and told fug folk about things that were wrong.

  “Yes, yes. Besides that,” Digger said.

  Nikita told people what people told Nikita to told people.

  As much as Nikita had adjusted and improved in her time with the Wind Breaker crew, including accepting that she had a name rather than just a number, she’d yet to fully shake some of the oddities of her training. The most awkward of the tendencies was the unwillingness to speak in anything but the past tense.

  “What sort of things did you tell?”

  Messages.

  “Did you ever give orders?”

  Some messages were orders.

  “Was there any way that the people receiving messages could be sure that the message came from who they thought it came from?”

  Inspectors told their number when they told their message. Ships had their own inspectors. Places had their own inspectors. Places told other places and ships told other ships when there was a new inspector. Nikita delivered that message many times.

  “I see. So we would need to know the name of a very important person, and the name of their inspector, to issue false orders as that person.”

  Coop’s brow furrowed as he wrestled a thought from his brain. “You reckon we could go find out the name of the inspector that belongs to an admiral or some such, then make like he’s sendin’ orders to show up and blow holes in that fort?”

  “It isn’t the worst idea, but I have my doubts.”

  “How come?”

  “Because it would have to be done secretly. If he found out we’d learned his inspector’s name, he could simply get a new inspector and all is lost. Not to mention the people at the highest levels tend to issue orders in a specific way, which means we’d not only need the admiral’s inspector’s name, we’d need to know how to formulate an order.”

  “That don’t sound too bad to me.”

  Digger drummed his fingers on the desk. “Admittedly, it is the most workable plan we’ve got so far. But there are issues.”

  “I reckon I know why folks call you Digger.”

  “It’s an ironic nickname based on the fact that I am supervisor to a group of—”

  “It’s because you don’t quit diggin’ until you found reasons not to do things,” Coop said. “It’s a wonder you ain’t talked yourself out of gettin’ dressed in the morning out of worry that you’d twist an ankle puttin’ your pants on.”

  “Coop, think about this for a moment.”

  “Done thinkin’. We got us a plan. Let’s get on it.”

  “But what if—”

  Coop stood. “You can hem and haw and ‘what if’ once we botch it. Plenty of time for that later. Let’s go.”

  #

  Light leaked through the tightly fastened shutters and beneath the door of a small, seedy pub in the Westrim town called Lock. The mountain kept the harshest of the setting sun from the establishment, which was tucked into a largely forgotten corner of one of the platforms upon which the mountain town had been built. Given the proclivities of the patrons, even that much light was undesirable.

  When the door swung open, the smattering of customers who were just beginning their nightly slide toward intoxication flinched in unison. The bartender squinted at the pair of figures who stepped inside.

  “Captain…” he said. “Ma’am.”

  It was less a greeting and more a resigned warning to the rest of the patrons. Captain Mack and Butch approached the bar and sat.

  “Is the rest of the crew about?” the bartender asked.

  “What business is that of yours?” the captain said.

  “Just about every other time your deckhands come in here, they end up getting into a scuffle. And I’ve still got two more bullet holes to patch from Gunner’s last visit.”

  “They ain’t about. Just Glinda and me. What’ve you got in the way of food?”

  “Pickled eggs. Fried potatoes. Meat pies. Nuts.”

  “Two meat pies. You got my bottle back there?”

  “No one else has the nerve to touch it or the stomach to drink it,” the bartender said. He reached behind the bar and produced a shot glass and a dusty bottle of amber-colored liquor.

  “I’ll do the pourin’. And heat them pies up. Leastways, that oughta kill off anything that’s crawlin’ in them.”

  The bartender paced into the back. Two of the six patrons slipped out the door. The captain swiveled his seat to address those who remained.

  “You folks familiar with the Wind Breaker? Moored up right outside that window there.”

  There was a murmur of acknowledgment.

  “Seems just about everyone in this town but you four have cottoned to the fact that we ain’t likely to stop by anyplace for long without trouble poppin’ in to pay a visit. I don’t reckon anyone who’d drink or eat in a place like this is too worried about his health, but them fellas who grabbed their hats just now had the right idea. It ain’t a good time to share my company.”

  The bartender returned with a pan and dropped it on the top of the potbelly stove that kept the chill of the damp western winds at bay. He plopped two rather elderly-looking meat pies into it.

  “You chasing my customers away, Captain?”

  “Just handin’ out free advice for folks who ain’t eager to earn a few new scars by the end of the day. My crew and I have got ourselves an extra shadow. You all don’t want to be around when it gets dark and I can’t keep track of it no more.”

  The ominous talk was enough to finall
y convince the remaining drinkers to drain their tankards and take their leave.

  “What is it this time?” the bartender asked.

  “Beats me. Scrawny. Black clothes. White skin. Hunched over and ornery.”

  “That describes everyone in the fug.”

  “This one carries more guns than most. Purple hair, too.”

  The bartender rested his palms on the bar and hissed a sigh.

  “Why here, Captain?”

  “Only two pubs in this town. This is the one whose reputation ain’t liable to take a hit from havin’ to clean up a few puddles of blood and maybe pitch a body over the side.” He took a shot and topped off the glass. “And I ain’t forgot who was servin’ drinks to the fella who got two of my girls captured.”

  “But why’s it got to be a pub at all? Why do you have to drag that black cloud over your head in here? You’ve got the whole sky and the whole fug to do your fighting in.”

  “You ever get up north, up where the sea’s frozen up?”

  “Can’t say I have, Captain.”

  “I was a boy. Hadn’t been in the navy too long. We were running low on food, so the cap’n set us down on the ice to do some fishin’. They got these big white bears up there. They eat seals. The fish weren’t bitin’, so I spent a lot of time watchin’ this one bear. Turns out the seals have these holes in the ice for catchin’ their breath. Watched a bear just sit there, waitin’. Every time a seal would come up for air, the bear’d take a swipe. No other holes, so the seal didn’t have no choice but to take the chance. And take the hit. Until finally the bear got a good hit in and hauled it up.”

  “That’s all very interesting, Captain, but what’s it got to do with what I was talking about?”

  “Whoever this is that’s after us, it’s the same way. Findin’ the safe spots, nippin’ at our heels every time we try to catch our breath. Ain’t but one or two safe spots for us to rest, and no tellin’ how long they’ll stay safe. But I ain’t no seal. And two can play at that game. So I dock the ship outside where everybody can see. A nice, clear invitation. And I watch the door. And I keep the light lit. And we see how things go when the bear and the seal meet on the same terms.”