“They would rather keep us grunts in the factories, making money for them. Plus, they say we’re apt to disobey orders. They don’t really feel that we’re enough like them to be trusted.”
“Do they do the same with the women? Keep them hidden away working?” Nita asked.
“The ladies are hid away, all right. But not for working. There just ain’t many of ’em. Maybe as many as there are grunts. Maybe less. When there’s so few, you make sure you keep ’em safe. And there’s nothing as dangerous as dealing with the surface folk, far as the bosses are concerned.”
“Fascinating,” Nita said. “How long have you been here?”
“Three years, the bofe of us,” Donald said.
“Have you ever seen anyone escape?”
“We never even seen someone let out. They don’t let people leave the Ph’lact’ry. You get sent here to die, slow.”
“Beats dying fast,” Lil said with a shrug.
“No, Lil. It really doesn’t,” Kent said. “About twice a year, someone goes over the side rather than spend another day here. A minute of free fall is still a minute free.”
“It doesn’t really seem that bad,” Nita said.
“Except that dangling box they put me in,” Lil said.
“At least you’re a little shrimpy fing. You probably fit just fine. Last time Kent got put in there, he couldn’t straighten his neck out for a week,” Donald said.
“Hey! Watch who you’re calling shrimpy, beanpole. You’re this close to being the first couple of fuggers I ever actually liked,” Lil said.
“Oi,” Donald said, elbowing Kent in the ribs. “Ask what you were wondering about the other day.”
“Oh, right! Is it true that captain of yours took down a scout ship by dropping a boat on it?”
“Ha! Not only is it true, but I’m the one who dropped the boat!” Lil said proudly.
Lil and the two grunts continued to chat and share stories for the better part of forty minutes. It wasn’t precisely what one would call friendship. The grunts were, if anything, starstruck at meeting one of the only humans they considered famous. Nita chimed in now and again, but mostly she devoted her time to observing as much as she could about the courtyard. She ran a few dozen scenarios through her head of how they might get away, but none of them were promising. They couldn’t risk doing anything to threaten the facility’s airworthiness because it would only have to drop a few dozen feet for it to be deep enough in the fug for them to suffocate. That meant no firing on the envelopes, no attempting or even threatening to unfasten them. And at the same time they couldn’t even try to physically leave the facility. All ships docked below the fug, so they would need filter masks just to board them. Finally she abandoned the thoughts. It was as she’d said to Lil. They had their small tasks. Better to stick to solving those than attempt to tackle something as insurmountable as a full escape. And so she walked about the courtyard looking for weaknesses. Looking for possibilities. Slowly, some new ideas began to form.
Nita paced over to Lil and the grunts as Lil was reaching the conclusion of one of her raunchier jokes.
“… and the farmer said ‘If he’s that far in, I think he’s a goner!’” Lil said.
Kent burst out laughing. Donald scratched his head. “But what’s that got to do with a shoe?”
“Sorry to interrupt, but how long did you say we would stay out here in the yard?” Nita asked.
“An hour,” Kent said, wiping a tear away. “Not a minute less.”
“How much longer do you suppose we’ve got?”
“I don’t know. Oi! Warden Blanc! How much longer?” he called out to a guard standing near one of the staircases.
His cry was addressed to the very man whom Lil had tried to choke during their arrival. The assistant warden reached into an inside pocket of his elaborate uniform and tugged free a pocket watch. “Two more minutes,” he replied. “Start lining up for your restraints.”
The appearance of a pocket watch was not lost on Lil. She gave Nita a meaningful glance, then turned to the grunts as the group began to line up near the stairs for their chains to be applied. “So Blanche over there tells me we can get out here for a midnight yard time if we’re good.”
“Heh. Sometimes. If they’re in the mood. And you ask nice,” Kent said. “I manage that a few times a year. Cleaning and the like, usually.”
“Most times the guards won’t do anyfing for you. They’d rather do fings to you,” Donald added.
Nita nodded. “So I’d imagined.” The sparks of inspiration fluttered in her mind as she shuffled forward, awaiting lockup.
One by one manacles were attached and the group were moved off toward their cells. It took a rather long time to move everyone down because the staff of the place was very small, and even with restraints in place, the guards didn’t move any group that was larger than two inmates to every one guard. It took ten trips before Nita and Lil were ready to be taken to their cell, but rather than taking them together, Lil was taken first.
“The warden wants to speak with you,” said the guard.
“Does he now? Oh, this ought to be good,” Lil said with a smile, stumbling down the stairs with the guards.
#
The guards thrust Lil down into her chair, hands still shackled, with Warden Linn sitting opposite. Unlike when Nita had been interviewed, this time the door stayed open, an armed guard watching dutifully over the volatile crewmate.
“So, Miss Cooper. I’m terribly sorry for your regrettable stay in isolation.”
“Feh. It was a walk in the park. I loved it. Reminded me of home. I had a real little bedroom as a kid,” Lil said.
“Putting a defiant face on it. I hadn’t expected anything less. But I watched as they removed you from isolation. I know the effect it had on you. I take no joy in inflicting so savage a punishment, but you must be taught the consequences of violence against our people.”
“Yeah, yeah. Spare the switch, spoil the child. You’re all heart, teaching us dumb ol’ surface folk proper manners and such.”
“This will be much easier for you if you simply learn to follow the rules.”
“This is a prison, Linn. I know about prisons. They aren’t about things being easy. Am I here for any real reason, or are you just lookin’ to lie to my face for an hour?”
The warden didn’t show any sign of annoyance at Lil’s attitude, which was more than could be said for the guard, who became visibly more furious with each word Lil said. Instead, Linn simply opened a packet of pages, just like the one he’d held during Nita’s interview, and looked over the first one.
“Tell me. How has Miss Graus been performing in her duties as your ship’s engineer?”
“Better than you fuggers ever did. The Wind Breaker is purring like a kitten. We go farther on a load of coal, we go faster than we ever have, and she even got rid of most of the rattles and squeaks.”
“It is a significant task. Particularly for one unskilled in our equipment. Has there been any exterior decay? Wood rot?”
Lil grinned. “You should see the old girl. Pretty as a painting. Nita spent a couple of weeks of her own time painting up all these gold lines on it. You ain’t seen a ship so pretty. Not a speck of rot to be seen.”
“And how does she manage to be certain that it remains in such a fine state of repair?”
“If one of them little rats you have knocking on all of the boards and such can do it, then you better bet Nita can do it.”
“If you had an inspector, you wouldn’t need her to do so. The inspectors are for your safety.”
“Like I said, you guys are all heart. You care so much about us. Let me ask you this. If you actually wanted us to be safe, why wouldn’t you let us fix our own ships?”
“That’s not the issue at hand.”
“No. I reckon not. Look, once we had Nita and we knew she could take care of the ship good and proper, we pitched that rat of yours overboard. I don’t know if you ever had to deal with one
of them things, but they aren’t the nicest little buggers to be around. Better off without ’em, that’s what I say.”
The warden scratched down some notes, and Lil allowed herself a brief grin. In the days after their heist of the warehouse and the subsequent battle with the dreadnought, Captain Mack had spent a fair amount of time drumming into their heads “the story.” Together, the crew had concocted a careful retelling of the facts, and central to that was the issue of Wink. The story had it that once Nita was added to the crew, they disposed of their now unnecessary inspector. This would explain the lack of reports to the fug folk without revealing that they knew how the reports were being sent.
Linn moved to another page.
“You’ve been operating quite effectively without direct contact to our facilities. It begs the question of how exactly you can stay aloft without some of our more unique resources.”
“You might be the only folks who make phlogiston, but you ain’t the only ones who have it. Everybody and their mother needs the stuff, so there’s plenty of it around. Same goes for burn-slow.”
“It is forbidden to sell those resources to anyone banned from maintenance.”
“Yeah. It’s forbidden to rob fugger warehouses and such, too. And we did that just fine. We’re good at the forbidden stuff. That’s how our bread is buttered. Speaking of that, you folks ain’t got no clue how to make a proper breakfast. You’re good at tinkering, but I ain’t never had a worse plate of eggs.”
The warden shuffled through his pages some more. “Yes, I understand you’ve got quite a cook on board. And she’s a surgeon as well?”
“Butch. Finest doctor I ever met.”
“Where did she receive her training?”
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask the cap’n. Maybe he’ll have a chat with you before he blows this mess out of the sky.”
“You seem quite confident in the capabilities of your former crew.”
“They’re still my crew, Linn.”
“The Wind Breaker is a zephyr, correct? Made for a crew of sixteen?”
“Yep.”
“And yet you had only a crew of five, before the addition of Miss Graus.”
“Six… remember, that was before we tossed the inspector.”
He scratched down a note. “And now that crew is down to four. The Wind Breaker has achieved some truly mythic things in the past, but do you really believe they can perform another miracle without you and Miss Graus on the crew?”
“You ain’t listening, Linn. We’re still on the crew. Just because I’m not eating Butch’s cooking or holding one of Gunner’s guns doesn’t mean I’m not toting my share of the load. You can’t win this one, because we got folks on both sides of the walls. All you did by locking us up here was let us know you got plenty of people down in the fug who ain’t too happy with how things are being run. And you call the stuff we done a miracle. It ain’t. It’s just what we do. And we’re going to keep doing it. You can throw your best ships at us, we’ll knock them out of the sky. You can throw your best men at us, we’ll fill them full of lead. You can hire every last bandit, marauder, raider, pirate, and whatever else you can find to hunt us down. We’ll take care of them, too. See, this is what you folks don’t get. I been down in the fug a few times. You got these nice cobblestone streets, right? And you ain’t got a lick of sun down there. And you know what I see coming up out from between those cobbles? Weeds. That’s us. Try and take away everything we need and we’ll still find a way to squeeze through the cracks. You folks can push hard as you want. All you’re doing is teaching us folks to push back harder. And we’re good learners, the Wind Breaker crew. We learned our lessons. ’Bout time you folks learned yours.”
Linn looked her evenly in the eye, and Lil looked right back, a defiant smile on her face.
“I think that will be all for today, Miss Cooper. Thank you for your cooperation,” he said.
The guard stepped in and roughly hoisted Lil from the chair.
“Have your fun while you can, screw. The clock’s ticking on this place,” she said. “And I’m going to remember the ones who was and who wasn’t nice.”
Chapter 6
They rest of the day had been rather uneventful, though it confirmed a few things they’d suspected. For one, it became clear that the pair of them would never see the cafeteria. Lunch was served in their cell, as was dinner. This suited them just fine. It gave them time alone to discuss their ideas, reassure one another that the crew would find them as soon as it could, and generally keep their spirits up. Supper was some sort of horribly overcooked cutlet and a mound of what was probably cabbage. Despite its unsuitability for the meal in question, they were still only given a spoon to eat with, so a fair amount of eating with their hands was necessary.
When night came, both Lil and Nita slept like the dead. The following morning brought more horrific eggs and Nita’s second “chat” with the warden, this time focusing largely on surveillance. The warden was careful with his wording, but it was clear before long that he was trying to determine how exactly the Wind Breaker was able to avoid being detected. Nita stuck to the story, and eventually she was returned to her cell.
“How did it go?” Lil asked, tossing something up in the air and catching it periodically as she backed against the far wall to allow Nita to be released from her bonds and ushered inside.
“It went well enough. He’s not as subtle as he thinks he is, though I think he’s reading questions written by someone without his tact. What are you tossing?”
The cell door slammed, and the door was locked.
“A hunk of bread from breakfast,” Lil said.
“Isn’t it stale?”
“It was stale at breakfast. Now it’s a rock.” She knocked it on the wall.
“Then why do you still have it?”
“Thinking I might clock one of the guards with it.”
“Do you think it’ll do any good?”
“It’ll make me feel better.”
“It’ll also get you put in isolation.”
Lil tipped her head back and forth, then tucked the chunk of bread into the waist of her pants. “We’ll play it by ear then. Might still be worth it.”
A thump and knock came from the far end of the hall.
“Yard time,” called a guard from behind the door.
“Blast it! I just locked the door,” the guard growled.
“Maybe they should give you all watches, so you’d know when it’s time for this sort of thing,” Nita said.
“That would be intelligent. Management doesn’t make intelligent decisions,” the guard muttered. “They make budgetary decisions. So only shift leaders and the wardens get watches. So until I get the second stripe on my sleeve, I’ve got to waste my time with this idiocy.”
“That’s a real shame,” said Lil.
The guard ignored her.
“Maybe you should buy your own watch,” she said.
Again he had no reaction.
“Oh, I see. You’ll get all friendly and chatty with Nita but not with me.”
“Yes, because the Calderan has manners, and you are an uncouth, boorish street urchin.”
“Oh, well la-de-dah. I didn’t know I was supposed to put my pinkie up when folks slap manacles on my wrists.”
The guard finished securing them and brought them to the surface. Shortly afterward, the fug folk prisoners from the lower levels started to arrive, and when Kent and Donald reached the surface, they quickly sought out the two crewmates.
“Huh, you owe me your muffin,” Donald said, punching Kent in the arm.
“I know, I know, you win it, fair and square.”
“What were you two gambling about?” Nita asked.
“And where are you getting these muffins?” added Lil.
“They don’t give you muffins wiff breakfast?” asked Donald.
“All we get is bread that’s liable to crack a tooth.”
“The guard’s been eating your muffins the
n.”
“Does their treachery know no bounds?” Nita said jokingly. “But again, what was the bet about?”
“Oh, Kent here thought one of you would have kicked it by now.”
“It’s only our second day!” Lil said.
“I said you’d make it to the end of the week.”
“What happens if we live beyond that?” Nita asked.
“I don’t fink that’s very likely,” Donald said.
“Well, then I contend you each owe us a few muffins if we manage,” Nita said.
“What do we get if you lose?” Donald said.
“If they lose, they’ll be dead,” Kent said.
“Oh, right… I suppose that’s a proper penalty. It’s a bet,” he said, shaking hands on it.
The four prisoners chatted for a bit, the subject quickly turning to the reason that each inmate was locked up. Crime after crime turned out to be either leniency or outright defiance of some of the more vicious and draconian rules that the fug folk had put in place. Acts that would have been considered charitable in any other culture were punished more viciously than murder. Evidently the ruling class was afraid that such charity and minor rebellion could turn into a plague of decency that would topple their stranglehold if left unchecked.
“… Over there’s Eggy. He wasn’t enforcing an embargo on that other town up north. And that’s Snow. He used to do repairs off the books. And that’s about it,” Kent said.
“What about Blanche?” Nita asked.
“Oh, right. Blanche. She’s… what did she do again, Donald?”
“She did… it had to do with writing fings down.”
“Oh, right, right. She was a trainer for them inspectors, and she wrote something down she wasn’t supposed to. That’s all I really know… I guess if we knew what it was she wrote down, we’d have been locked up for that instead of what we already did.”
More thoughts began to spark in Nita’s mind.
“Can either of you tell me what inspectors do on ships?” she said.
“They… inspect,” Donald said.
“Check for rot, wood worms. See if there’s any loose pipes and steam and that. Then they kick a big fuss if they find anything. Jumping about and all that,” Kent said.
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