“Clearly we’ll need to coordinate a diversion to keep eyes off the stairs until one of us can… damn it, Coop,” Gunner whispered, first assuming Coop had actually heeded the motion to stop and then realizing that he hadn’t.
The nimble deckhand swiftly and silently wove his way to the base of one of the supports for the tower and scrambled from strut to strut, climbing the structure like an oversized ladder.
“I suppose I’ll just keep watch then,” Gunner growled to himself, flattening himself to the ground and keeping an eye on the camp through the scope of his rifle.
#
Coop reached the upper catwalk with little difficulty. He’d probably catch an earful from Gunner once he got back, but that was anything but new. Coop had always felt that it was better to get an earful and get the job done than follow the rules and come up empty. He peeked up into one of the windows of the station and found it filmed over with the purple fug residue. He wiped at it with his sleeve and peered through. Sure enough, with the supervisor on the ground overseeing the resupply of the ships, the office was empty. The telltale clack and tap of claws on the beacon pole overhead revealed that the station had a resident inspector, but as long as it stayed on its pole, it wasn’t a problem. Coop crept up to a door and eased it open, slipping inside. It was a sparse office. A few phlo-lights provided ample—and at the moment, unwanted—light. One wall was covered with scattered charts and maps, file cabinets aligned neatly below them. A desk was pushed against the opposite wall, which had its share of charts and mounted folder hangers as well. The two remaining walls were floor-to-ceiling windows, meaning that any sneaking he did was largely pointless, since he was practically on display for the people below.
He kept low and eyed up the maps and charts. Something seemed off about them. Though he knew there couldn’t be more than a dozen large fug folk settlements and maybe another dozen stations like this one dotting the land between them, the maps before him had hundreds of places labeled, and those in the positions he knew to be fug settlements didn’t have the proper names. He wondered at first if they might have been some kind of code, but then it dawned on him. The problem was that the maps were incredibly old. He should have assumed as much from the purple tint to the paper. These maps were from before the calamity, or at least were copies of those from before. The places listed were the towns and cities that had been wiped out a hundred or so years earlier when the toxic stuff rolled over the continent and killed, chased away, or changed the residents. No doubt the fug folk all knew the names of the old cities that coincided to the new ones, and thus hadn’t felt the need to replace the maps.
“This ain’t going to do us no good at all, Nikita,” he muttered. With a resigned sigh, he crept over to the first of the file cabinets and pulled it open. “Dang it, if I knew there’d be all this reading, I would’ve waited for Gunner to get up here.”
#
Gunner was breathing slowly, sweeping his scope back and forth between the base of the tower and its windows. Judging from the fact five minutes had passed and Coop was still in the tower, the information they were after wasn’t forthcoming. At the moment, that didn’t matter, as both crews and the ground staff had taken the arrival of the cutter as an excuse to gather at the base of the tower to chatter, spread gossip, and generally socialize. The supervisor had produced a bottle, and it was being passed around. Hopefully this was a sign that neither crew had any intention of leaving anytime soon, but hoping was a terrible battle plan, so Gunner put his mind to work on a better one.
He already knew that the scout craft was crewed by two men, and both of them were on the ground. That meant it was largely resupplied but completely unmanned. He didn’t know how many men usually ran a cutter, but he knew enough about fugger uniforms to know that the pilot was part of the little get-together as well. Both ships were thus grounded as long as the gathering persisted. In theory this meant that as long as Coop could find the appropriate information and get back to the Wind Breaker without being seen, they might actually achieve their goals according to plan. Gunner, however, had known Coop far too long to put his trust in that sequence of events. Particularly when a better alternative could be devised.
The armory officer made his way toward the scout ship. The crew on the ground meant the ladder was down, so it was a simple matter to slip inside while the fug folk appeared to be enthralled by whatever the cutter pilot had to say. The inside of the ship was as stripped down as it could possibly be, and almost entirely occupied by fuel, water, and ammunition. The deck had the controls, a grappling hook, and a fléchette gun. He crouched behind the control wheel, kept a close eye on the gathering below, and waited for the inevitable chaos.
#
“Well, this here’s mostly numbers, so that ain’t gonna be it,” Coop muttered, tossing a sheaf of pages aside. “That’s a list of parts, don’t care about that.”
He’d long ago given up on the concept of slipping in and out without anyone knowing he’d been there, opting instead for the much faster method of making a massive mess and getting away before they found it. The first three filing cabinets had their contents strewn across the entire interior of the office, and the fourth was well on its way. As he opened the latest drawer, Nikita suddenly shifted an ear toward the ceiling. After a few seconds more, she crawled out of his jacket and climbed on top of the filing cabinet.
“Don’t go wandering off now,” he whispered. “We’re going to be heading out in a great rush once I find what I’m after. Ph’lac’try… Ph’lac’try. Dang it… you know what? You think maybe that starts with a P instead of an F? I better not have to start over.”
Nikita looked straight up at the roof, where the endless tapping continued to rattle out. When it came to an end, Nikita hopped to the ground and crawled back into his jacket, reaching out to tap something on one of his buttons.
Report forwarded to inspector Wink, she tapped out insistently.
“Hey, hey now. What’d we say about you sending any reports?” he hissed, wrapping his hand around the button to silence the message.
Nikita chittered and switched to a different button. Reply intended for Nita.
“You’re liable to be thrown off this crew if you don’t… wait now. What was that last bit?”
Reply intended for Nita.
“Okay… let’s hear what you’ve got to say. And go slow now. I ain’t the best at this tapping stuff…”
#
From Gunner’s perch on the deck of the ship, he had an excellent vantage to see both the gathering below and Coop inside the tower. What he was seeing at the moment was Coop crouched beside a filing cabinet doing absolutely nothing. That was something the deckhand could not afford to be doing, because the bottle that had served as the focus for the gathering of fuggers below had just run dry, and with it their interest in continuing their chat. The cutter pilot was already heading back to his ship, and the supervisor had turned to the stairs, delayed only by a short exchange with his underlings. In a moment Gunner was going to have to either abandon ship and hope that Coop could work things out for himself or put his contingency plan into motion.
“Damn it, Coop, get moving!” Gunner growled as he watched the scout crew turn to pace toward their ship.
Motion on the deck of the cutter caught his eye, and he looked up just in time to see a crewman, in similarly excellent vantage to see the interior of the tower, step up onto the deck to light up a quick cigarette. It took all of six seconds for him to glance at the tower, widen his eyes in shock, and call down to the others.
“Took longer than I’d expected,” Gunner proclaimed, springing up from behind the controls.
First he swapped his rifle for his monstrous shotgun and took aim at the nearest mooring rope. A single thunderous blast both sparked mass confusion on the ground and cleanly severed the rope. The whole ship pitched to the other side until he turned and blasted the deck side of the remaining rope, cutting the ship entirely free. It began to drift slowly but stea
dily upward, making him a moving target as the crew on the ground opened fire. Fug folk weapons were top notch, but a crewman’s sidearm wasn’t quite up to the task of taking on a whole scout ship. Particularly not once Gunner took control of the fléchette gun and gave the ground a quick spray to send them running for cover.
Much as he would have liked to cut down the entire crew on the ground, he knew that if Cooper had failed, the best chance they would have to get the information they needed would be to question the survivors. That lamentably meant there had to be survivors. Instead he took aim at the envelope of the cutter ship, since the crewman on deck had already reached a gun and was attempting to do the same to him. Before he pulled the trigger, he flipped down a pair of dark lenses on his goggles. Properly protected, he released three seconds of concentrated fire, which perforated the cutter’s bladder enough to fill the air with the brilliant green glow of escaping phlogiston. It was a glow as bright as day, blinding the darkness-adapted vision of all on the ground. He continued firing until he saw the mooring lines slacken, a sure sign that the whole ship would crash down before much longer.
He looked about on the deck and eventually spotted the megaphone that had so often been used to issue orders and threats to the Wind Breaker over the years. He picked it up and turned to the tower.
“Coop, tell me you got what you were after,” he said. He was now roughly eye level with the top of the tower, and still slowly rising.
Coop stumbled out onto the catwalk, shielding his eyes from the light that was only now starting to dim as the phlogiston started to run low. “You dang fool, what’d you do that for?” he called out.
“Do you have the information?” Gunner growled.
“Well, I got something,” he called back, stumbling aside as the station inspector dove in frantic terror from the roof to the walkway and scampered down to the ground.
“Then standby to board.”
Gunner dropped the megaphone and angled the grappling hook at the catwalk. It launched like a javelin, digging into the wooden slats, and before the line had even gone taut, Coop was climbing up almost as quickly as the escaping aye-aye had climbed down.
“Take the wheel, and where’s the information?” Gunner said, running back to the fléchette gun.
“Nikita’s got it. I think she overheard something or some such. Seems like it’s from Nita. Or for Nita. She’ll have to tell you in a bit.”
He steered the ship hard to port, using the power of the ship’s engines to pull the grappling hook free along with about half of the tower’s catwalk. This was much to the chagrin of the unarmed members of the ground crew, which had taken shelter beneath the tower and now had to run to avoid the falling debris. He then turned up the power on the engines and directed the ship toward the cutter for a strafing run.
“You mean to tell me the inspector is the one who found it?”
“I guess. I don’t know. Can we wait ’til the shooting’s done before we jaw about it?”
The sound of splintering wood drew their attention downward, then the hiss and flare of green light drew it upward. It would appear the remarkably dedicated crew of the cutter had kept its guns manned even as it slowly sank to the ground. In their blind firing they had managed find the scout ship. Lines of fléchettes swept back and forth across the deck, narrowly missing both Gunner and Coop but doing quite a bit of damage to the control wheel’s linkages.
“I think we should probably ditch this thing,” Coop said.
With his usual decisiveness, he illustrated the wisdom of his suggestion by immediately taking his own advice. He ran to the grappler and hopped over the side, sliding down its line and hitting the ground running. Gunner followed suit, though his dismount of the line was more of a tumble than a run. Coop helped him up, and the two began to sprint.
“I’m a bit turned around,” Coop yelled. “Which way is the Wind Breaker again?”
“It’s back that way, we’re in the middle of the station,” Gunner said.
A crunching grind filled the air as the pilotless scout ship rammed its gondola into the mostly deflated envelope of the cutter and began to drag it away from the station.
“You sure? Because I think I remember the water towers being on that side when we got here,” Coop said, as though the ship-to-ship collision wasn’t any of his concern.
“Yes, Coop, I’m sure!” Gunner said.
“Both of you put your hands up!”
Coop drew his pistol and turned, Gunner doing the same with both of his. The two members of the scout ship crew had their pistols leveled at the Wind Breaker crewmen, as did the supervisor and the pilot of the cutter, who, for better or worse, hadn’t made it back to the cutter before the mayhem started.
“I’d rather if you folks put your hands up,” Coop said.
“You are outnumbered,” the pilot said.
“Perhaps, but not to toot my own horn too much, I’d say you are outgunned,” Gunner said, clicking back the hammer on each of his monstrous pistols.
“Plus, we were outnumbered when we blew up both your ships, too. So just think of what we’ll do to you,” Coop said, using his free hand to brush some splinters that had dug their way into his cheek when the scout ship was under fire.
“Be reasonable. You’ve destroyed both ships that could have carried you out of here. The next ship to come in is going to be loaded with fug folk. Even if you can hold us at bay until then, once they arrive you are finished.”
Coop looked to Gunner. “I thought these guys were supposed to be smart.”
“I suppose no trait is perfectly universal.”
“… What are you talking about?” the pilot asked.
“What do you think? That we walked here?” Coop said.
On cue, the distinctive five-engine rumble of the Wind Breaker rang out around them, and it emerged from the darkness, lit by the dying glow of the deflating airships. The captain appeared, peering over the prow at the half-demolished remains of what ten minutes earlier had been a tidy little supply station and two fully operational ships. At the sight of the ship, both ground crew and their supervisor dropped down, throwing aside their weapons and putting their hands behind their heads. The pilot remained on his feet, weapon in hand.
“You boys don’t quite get the ins and outs of stealth, do you?” Mack called out. “You get what we’re after?”
“I think so, Cap’n, but we might want to have a word with these three to make sure,” Coop said.
“There’s four of us!” the pilot said.
Coop pointed his pistol at the man’s face. “Not if you don’t drop that gun, there isn’t.”
In the face of this very important piece of mathematics, the pilot wisely disarmed.
“Anybody left in them ships over there?” Captain Mack called out.
“There’s a four-man crew still on my ship. Or what’s left of my ship. If they survived,” the pilot said.
“Whichever two of you folks is the lowest ranked, head over to the wreckage and pull out any survivors. You didn’t kill any of my crew. I don’t feel obliged to take any of yours. And boys, while we’re here we may as well top off our supplies. I don’t reckon these boys would want to see us stranded in their backyard. You boys all right?”
“A few bruises, and I believe I turned my ankle abandoning ship, but otherwise unharmed, Captain,” Gunner said.
“Got a few slivers in my face, and it feels like something’s sticking into me pretty fierce under my jacket here…” He opened his jacket to reveal Nikita—eyes shut tight and ears flat against her head—clutching as tightly as she could. “Oh, never mind that last bit. That’s just Nikita. I don’t think she’s got a taste for field missions.”
#
Once the remaining crew in the cutter had been retrieved, remarkably intact thanks to the slow speed at which their ship touched down, Captain Mack had them restrained and left Gunner on guard. Coop and Nikita boarded the Wind Breaker, and Wink joined the trio in the captain’s quarters.
On other ships there might have been a captain’s suite. On the Wind Breaker it was more akin to the captain’s closet. This was likely the first time four members of the crew had been able to fit, and that was only because two of them were aye-ayes.
“All right, Coop. Let’s have it,” Captain Mack said.
“Nikita overheard a report, I guess coming in from that cutter we took down. Or maybe going out to it, I don’t know. It was addressed to Wink. Says it was from Nita,” Coop said.
The captain’s face didn’t betray any emotion. He simply accepted the words and quietly considered them. Wink, on the other hand, perked up immediately. He hopped down to the desk between the captain and Coop and crept up to Nikita.
Nikita repeated the forwarded report, he drummed on the desk.
Nikita looked uncertainly upward.
“Well go ahead, little critter,” Coop said.
Coop said no more reports, she tapped.
“You can report to the rest of the crew. Just no one else.”
Nikita repeated the forwarded report, Wink tapped.
And so she repeated the message once again, verbatim. For some reason, hearing the message seemed to make Wink progressively more proud. By the time the last piece of information was repeated, his little chest was sticking out and his head was held high.
… All other prisoners but one were enemies of the fug folk. We needed them all freed.
After a short string of numbers and letters, the approximate coordinates of Skykeep, the message was complete.
The captain wanted the report meant for Wink, he tapped out.
“Yes, Wink. That’s what we were after,” the captain said.
The captain was welcome, Wink replied. He turned to Nikita. Wink thanked Nikita for the report.
“I do believe this is the least surly I’ve ever seen the one-eyed bugger. What’s got into you, Wink?” Coop asked.
Forwarded reports were very important. Important inspectors got forwarded reports. Wink received a forwarded report. Wink was important.
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