Cipher Hill

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “In a minute, they’ll be loose. We just need to shut the thing down. Could mean killin’ the captain. Could mean bustin’ something important,” Mack said.

  A similar look came to the faces of both Prist and Gunner. Gunner glanced to the stout, smoke-belching chimney jutting up out of the deck.

  “You did say you had formulation three,” he said. “The suppressant.”

  “Yes, yes, two of them,” Prist said quickly, digging them out of her bag.

  “Care to let your cap’n in on what you’re plannin’?” Mack said.

  “With your permission, Captain, I believe I have a mission for Wink.”

  “I ran out of ideas an hour ago. If you’ve got somethin’, just make it quick.”

  Prist threw two canisters into a sack as Wink dashed down to them. They hung the sack over Wink’s neck. The load was almost more than he could handle. “Listen close, Wink. It’s very simple…”

  #

  Tusk watched the dials arrayed along a sequence of pipes before him. He was tucked deep in the bowels of the ship, alone in a room that had twins all around the ship. No windows, only one door. Everything about the ship’s motion was translated in some way into the readings on these dials. Given the utter darkness that so often gripped the fug, navigation without visibility was nothing new. The attack would be different, however. For that, he would at least need a spotter. Two of his crewmen were in position for that. He consulted charts and attempted to recall the precise means of navigating in such a way. While he’d taken the precaution of developing a basic proficiency in such things, this was the first time he’d been forced to put it to use outside of a strictly instructional setting.

  The ship lurched forward, and several of the dials spun a good deal faster. There were two speaking tubes in this room. A large one connected to the rest of the system, able to relay orders to anywhere the crew might congregate—and thus likely to be overheard by the members of the Wind Breaker crew who had made it onto the ship. A smaller system ran only between the scattered control rooms. He tapped this second one.

  “Unless I am mistaken, we have lost our tether,” Tusk said. “Can someone confirm?”

  “Stand by, sir… Yes, it appears the grappler line is hanging loose. It looks to have broken free of the other dreadnought and done considerable damage to its rigging along the way.”

  “Excellent. And if I am reading these dials correctly, and I was correct regarding our initial position, Secant should be targetable now.”

  “Not quite, sir. Soon.”

  “And main cannons are loaded?”

  “Yes, sir. But we don’t have anyone in position to reload. We’ll only have one shot per cannon.”

  “That’s fine. One or two direct hits will do until we pass over and empty our bomb bay to finish the job.”

  Tusk heard a startled sound echo forth from a tube beside him. “What is wrong? Report,” he demanded.

  “My apologies, sir. I heard something. I thought it might be a crewman trying to get through the door. It was just an inspector scrabbling across the outer hull.”

  Tusk paused. “Leave the room immediately. Locate and destroy the inspector!”

  “It was on the exterior, sir. Heading up to the main deck. I won’t be able to reach it. And I’m in lookout position.”

  “Someone get out there and kill that thing!” he hissed.

  “Tusk, it is an inspector. We have greater concerns,” the captain replied over the system.

  “I’ve disabled our own inspectors. That means it is one of theirs.”

  “What difference does it make, it is just a—”

  “We do not underestimate the Wind Breaker crew!” Tusk barked. “I cannot believe it has come to this… Captain, are you in place in a navigation room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Control is yours.” He loaded his revolver. “Something is about to happen to this ship, and clearly I am the only one capable of thinking clearly and flexibly. I shall deal with matters personally. Captain, navigator, and spotter remain in place. Anyone else who values their life enough to survive to see tomorrow, and their career enough to remain employed thereafter, meet me on the main deck at the mounting point of the first of the secondary envelopes. Come armed.”

  #

  Nita scrambled through a corridor far wider than any she’d ever seen on a ship. She slotted her cheater bar over the end of one of her wrenches, hooked it over a pipe, and leaned her weight from it. Lil huffed along to another set of pipes and used borrowed tools to do the same. With a groaning screech, the pipes ruptured. The spray of steam that resulted was markedly weak.

  “It’s no good,” Nita said. “That steam should be screaming out of the pipe if it were in use. I’ve never encountered a ship that could route the steam around so easily. This ship is a masterpiece.”

  “Quit admirin’ it and pick another set of pipes to bust,” Lil said.

  “If what I saw from above is right, the next best chance to find the main feeder pipes is clear on the other side of the ship!”

  “Then I guess we’re…” Lil tipped her head to the side. “I hear shootin’. Up top. Come on. If pokin’ holes in this ship ain’t doin’ no good, at least I can poke some holes in some crew.”

  The pair rushed to the nearest stairs, and from there to the deck. They peeked out. Coop had taken cover nearby, his pistol out and his eyes sweeping.

  “Keep your heads down, you two,” Coop barked. “These fellas found their spines and came out of hiding. They been takin’ pot shots at me and Wink, who’s scrabblin’ around up there.”

  A pair of gunshots rang out and shattered the end of the railing Lil and Nita had taken cover beside.

  “What’s Wink doing here?” Nita said.

  “Darned if I know. They been keepin’ him too busy to tap out anything,” Coop said.

  “I reckon if the cap’n and them sent Wink up here, they got a plan,” Lil said.

  “Where are they shooting from?” Nita asked.

  “Bullets mostly comin’ from there and there,” Coop said, gesturing to the port and starboard sides of the ship a few dozen yards away. “But they got a couple more all over. Been runnin’ their mouths through the speaking tubes, orders and such of where to shoot.”

  Lil glanced over her shoulder in the direction the ship was heading. If they weren’t already in cannon range, they were close. “We can’t wait too much longer!”

  “They’re taking orders via the speaking tubes…” Nita said. “Coop! Get down! I have an idea! Lil, come with me.”

  The pair rushed down into the corridor again. She found the nearest outlet of the speaking tube.

  “What’re you up to?” Lil asked.

  Nita slipped a wrench from her sash and gingerly felt some of the nearby pipes, smiling when one of the soft rubber tubes was almost too hot to touch.

  “A speaking tube system is basically just another set of steam pipes, but without steam flowing through them,” Nita said, working at the tube’s fitting.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So let’s fix that. Cover your ears.”

  Nita yanked the steam tube free and jammed it into the speaking tube. The result was immediate and excruciating. An ear-splitting whistle blared out of every speaking tube, and one by one they began to spray scalding-hot steam.

  #

  In the rigging, Wink was huddled behind a small steam manifold when Nita’s sabotage happened. Thanks to his sensitive ears, even though the nearest speaking tube was well below him, the sound was startling and nearly painful. But when he recovered, he saw that the handful of fug crewmen who had been shooting at him either had all been forced to dive to the ground to avoid being sprayed with steam or were covering their ears with both hands. This was his chance. He dove and swung his way through the rigging, working his way up to the top of the huge, smoke-belching chimney. The edge of it was scalding hot, but he hauled himself up and tossed the sack he’d been given inside. As it tumbled down into th
e belly of the ship, one of the crewmen recovered from Nita’s attack and fired. The bullet missed Wink but struck the chimney, rattling it enough to dislodge him. He tumbled down and hit the deck running, bounding toward the stairwell that protected Lil and Nita. Coop scrambled across the deck to join them, and they all braced themselves for what was sure to be a punishing explosion.

  What came was quite the opposite. From somewhere deep inside the ship came a soft thump, a sharp crack, and a mighty hiss. Then… silence. The ship seemed to simply go to sleep. The whistling in the speaking tube died away, and the steam stopped belching. Above, the blades of the many propellers spun down. The thousands of mechanisms all around the ship sputtered and seized. In the space of a minute, the only sound that remained was from the wind and rain.

  “… What just happened?” Coop asked.

  Nita reached up and tapped a steam pipe.

  “The pipe’s barely warm…”

  “Must’ve put the fire out under the boiler,” Lil said.

  “Whatever that was must have taken all the heat out of the boiler, too,” Nita said. “Otherwise, the ship would still have to cool down before it finally died.”

  The ship’s forward motion stalled, and it hung in the air, batted about by the storm but otherwise harmless. Without steam, there was no navigation, no remote operation of any of the larger weapons. They couldn’t even adjust their altitude.

  “Attention!” Tusk called, from far across the deck. “Weapons down.”

  “Weapons down?” Coop said. “You don’t reckon he’s talkin’ to us, do you?”

  “We are surrendering,” Tusk said.

  Half-seen across the rain-swept deck, Tusk stepped into the open, dropped his weapon and raised his hands. One by one, the others around him did the same. For the first time, they had the opportunity to get a look at Mack’s dreadnought. The thing was hanging at an odd angle. Losing its grappler had sheared the rigging under one of its secondary envelopes. It was barely airworthy.

  “Ain’t nobody asked you to surrender,” Coop said. “You pick them weapons back up and finish things off like a man.”

  Lil slapped him in the back of the head. “Would you cut that out? You don’t ask a fella who wants you dead to pick up his weapon.”

  “All of you step out where we can see you,” Nita called.

  One by one the sailors stepped out and made it quite clear they were unarmed. Nita counted them out.

  “By my count, there are three sailors unaccounted for,” she said.

  “They are, as I was, holed up in some of the auxiliary helms. As those rooms are tightly enclosed and feature speaking tubes, I don’t imagine anyone inside is in a condition to attack or surrender after your little steam stunt.”

  Nita thought through the consequences of a pipe spraying steam into a small room through an opening at mouth-level and cringed a bit.

  The Wind Breaker crew slowly approached the surrendering sailors. Tusk led his men forward. They found a wide-enough stretch of undamaged deck to stand face-to-face.

  “Just what’s your game, Tusk?” Coop said, his weapon still raised.

  “The game is at an end,” Tusk said. “You have won.”

  “You still livin’ and breathin’, it sure don’t feel like we won yet,” he said.

  “Perhaps not. But you are a sailor. As a group, while it can readily be said that you have not always acted virtuously, there is nevertheless a sense of justice among you. If you were bloodthirsty murderers, the toll upon each of the many towns and facilities you have struck in the past would have been far greater. And more to the point, each of you seems to act with honor. Those with honor show mercy, even when it is undeserved. They do not attack the unarmed. There is no challenge in it. No sport in it. Proof of your distaste for senseless murder is the fact that you have evidently left Alabaster to live in captivity. If a man more deserving of murder for murder’s sake ever lived, I haven’t met him.”

  “That there’s somethin’ the two of us can agree on,” Lil said.

  “So I surrender myself. You may have come for me in search of vengeance, but because of who you are, you will settle for justice.”

  “And just why are you givin’ yourself up?” Lil said.

  “Because I cannot win. You have bested me. This is clearly the only means to survive. I am a pragmatic man. Life in chains is better than death.”

  “You think we’re thick enough to hand you over to one of your prisons to hold you?”

  “I imagine you would want to lock me in a surface prison,” Tusk said.

  Lil glanced to Coop, then to Nita. “This ain’t how this was supposed to go. We was supposed to have this big clash, and Tusk here was supposed to go down in the blaze of evil like the rascal he is. But it don’t seem right shootin’ him when he’s standin’ here actin’ all civil and such.”

  “I don’t like that he’s so sure we ain’t gonna kill him,” Coop said.

  “We can only be who we are, Mr. Cooper,” Tusk said. “It is in my nature to seek supremacy for myself and those like me. It is in your nature to serve your captain and to tug at the leash that we have held until now. You cannot bring yourself to perform so ignoble an act as to strike down an unarmed man who has surrendered. Isn’t that right, Mr. Cooper?”

  Coop looked him in the eye, blinking a bit as the rain drenched him. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Tusk looked back, impassive.

  “Nope,” Coop said.

  He fired his pistol. Tusk stumbled back, shock and disbelief on his face. Coop stepped forward and held his pistol over the fallen fug man until he was certain the first shot had done its job. When he was still, Coop raised the weapon and swept it across the remaining sailors.

  “Any of you other fellas reckon you know what I will or won’t do?”

  The sailors vigorously reasserted their surrender.

  “That’s what I figured,” Coop said.

  They turned to the remaining dreadnought. It was sagging in the air, having lost one of its secondary envelopes, and was leaking copious amounts of phlogiston from its main one.

  Nita shook her head. “I don’t think either of these dreadnoughts will last the night.”

  “Well, let’s see if we can’t get back to Mack and limp that thing to Secant,” Lil said. “I think we all earned ourselves a drink.”

  Epilogue

  Mr. Mallow sat with an uneasy look on his face in the rather utilitarian waiting room of a large and well-maintained building deep in the fug. He had a few fresh scars, and one arm was still in a cast, but that wasn’t the source of his unease. Indeed, that he was alive at all was more than enough for him. The circumstances of his employment had not been conducive to good health.

  A neatly dressed, stooped figure of a fug man opened the door. He looked upon Mallow with a face that looked as though it would crack if it ever smiled.

  “Mayor Ebonwhite will see you now.”

  Mallow nodded and stood, stepping quietly into the office ahead. It was a very well-appointed but not terribly ostentatious office. Certainly, it was more impressive than the austere places Tusk had called home, but it didn’t hold a candle to the sort of bizarre monuments to self-indulgence that Lucius P. Alabaster inevitably converted his dwellings into. The walls were lined with bookshelves, and the pieces of furniture were sturdy and well-built pre-Calamity relics. The man seated behind a desk was the picture of calm authority.

  “Quentin Mallow?” he said.

  Mallow blinked. “Er, yes, Mayor.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “It has been some time since someone has called me by my given name.”

  “I see. Please, take a seat.”

  Mallow did so.

  “May I offer you a refreshment?” Ebonwhite asked.

  “No, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, sir.”

  “I hope you don’t mind if I partake of something? My days are rather full, and this is taking the place of my lunch hour.”

  “Of course not.”


  The mayor looked to the man at the door. “A coffee, please. And a bowl of soup, I think.”

  His assistant nodded and stepped away.

  “I suppose you are wondering why I’ve summoned you, Mr. Mallow.”

  “I’m hoping that it’s not for what I think it is for.”

  “Oh? And what might that be?”

  “Sir, I’ve worked as the personal assistant of Lucius Alabaster and Ferris Tusk. They are arguably the two men most dedicated to the destruction of the Wind Breaker crew. With Alabaster locked way, and Tusk dead, I would say that distinction is yours.”

  “Ah. And you suppose that you are, for some reason, destined to be in the employ of someone with an inadvisable vendetta against the Wind Breaker crew?”

  “It certainly seems that way.”

  “Well rest assured I have no interest in hiring you for my organization. I am quite well staffed as it is.”

  “That is a great relief, sir. I don’t think I would survive another clash with that crew.”

  “Likely not. However, you have touched upon the reason I did summon you here. Specifically, the death of Ferris Tusk.”

  “What about it, sir?”

  “From this point forward, you shall not speak of it again.”

  “… Why?”

  “In case you haven’t noticed it, since the arrival of Amanita Graus obviated the Wind Breaker’s reliance upon the fug, the balance of power has become terribly precarious. Tusk as a man had quietly served to maintain this balance. Tusk as a myth shall, in some small way, do likewise.”

  “You wish to perpetuate the myth that Tusk is still alive?”

  “Mr. Mallow, Cipher Hill was quietly responsible for more than eighty percent of military manufacturing within the fug. And it is no more. This was achieved in part through collaboration with our own people. If the people of the surface were to learn that we have lost the ability to quickly rebound from significant losses of military hardware, they might be emboldened to launch an attack upon us that we will not survive. Couple that with the partnership between the so-called Well Diggers—shamefully under the guidance of one of my own clan—and the Wind Breaker crew and we may be facing a coup as well. It is a war of too many fronts. Any deterrent is valuable.”