Driftmetal II

by J. C. Staudt

  “I’d be glad to, except… I didn’t catch your name, sir.”

  I smiled. “Hal Nordstrom. Tell Lafe that Hal Nordstrom was here, and that I was quite pleased to have met the acquaintance of his lovely family. Oh, and please do give him this for me.”

  I pulled out my last chunk of gravstone and pretended to drop it on the floor. “Clumsy me,” I mumbled, crouching to pick it up. The two small, toy block-sized boxes I slid underneath the counter were wired into the same long-distance bluewave remote I’d used on Thomas. They were the best insurance policy I could muster on such short notice.

  I stood and set the gravstone on the counter’s glass top. If Yingler happened to visit his family before we ran into each other again, I wanted him to know I’d been there. If we crossed paths first, I’d make sure he found that out the hard way.

  “What’s this? A rock?” asked the sister, picking it up.

  “A rock of particular significance to Lafe and me, as it pertains to our friendship,” I said. “The two of us have shared many fond memories involving rocks like these. He’ll know what it means when he sees it. A good day to you both, now, and I pray for Lafe’s safe and timely return.”

  “As do we,” said the elder woman.

  I tipped my top-hat again, then turned and left the deli. I was still reeling at this stroke of luck, certain of the advantage I’d gain from it if I bided my time. As any good villain will tell you, plotting is the oil that keeps the cogs turning. And finding an adversary’s weakness is the bread and butter that nourishes the darkest soul. Family was as good a weakness as I could’ve hoped for. Heavens knew Yingler had already used mine against me.

  The streets were filling up toward mid-morning, and so was the sky; the fog had cleared out, and the sun was burning through bright and hot. It was always brighter and hotter this high up in the stream, without so many clouds to hamper it. I was used to that. What I wasn’t used to were the strange looks people were giving me as I strolled along in my shoddily-constructed disguise. I tried to stare back and make menacing facial expressions to frighten small children whenever I could.

  Now that my other business was done, it was time to get moving on those new turbines. I found Marinsic & Sons on the edge of town, a brick warehouse with a hand-lettered sign over the storefront, its wainscoting shiny with a fresh coat of green paint. Boat racks lined the property outside; most bore airships of the more complicated varieties. The other spaces were filled with motorcars and hover chassis. The Kalican Heights was large enough to support land-bound vehicles, inasmuch as the wealthy had both the funds to support them and the patience to put up with them.

  The warehouse interior reminded me of my dad’s workshop on Atherion, and a little of Chaz’s in Pyras, though the machinery here was far more mundane than the stuff I’d found in the latter. A sweaty grease monkey in a ponytail and a blue canvas bodysuit wiped his hands on an oily rag, making them dirtier, as he came over to me.

  “Howdy,” I said.

  “Picking up or dropping off?” he asked.

  “Neither. I’m inquiring after a ship called The Nimbus Queen.”

  “She’s here, alright,” he said, pointing.

  She was an airship; a big commercial vessel with a long balloon and rows of porthole windows, built for the sole purpose of carting passengers between floaters.

  “How long ‘til she’s airworthy again?” I asked.

  “Listen, sir. We’ve been working around the clock here. I can’t give you a definite timeframe, but my guess is it’ll be another three days, at least.”

  I must’ve hit a soft spot. If that ship had been anywhere near full capacity when it came down, there were dozens of disgruntled travelers stuck in town, waiting to get to where they were going. That gave me an idea.

  “How much for the turbines on that scrapper out in the yard?” I asked. “The one with the missing runners.”

  “For just the turbines? Hmm.” He scratched his forehead, leaving a black smudge.

  “Assuming they’re functional,” I said.

  “Yeah, they work. But they’re not new.”

  “That’s obvious enough. How much?”

  “Say, thirty thousand for the pair?”

  I grimaced and shook my head. “I’ll give you ten, all upfront.”

  He thought for a moment. “Can you do fifteen?”

  “I can do twelve, or I can walk out. Up to you.”

  “Deal.” He held out his hand.

  “I’ll be back in half an hour,” I said. I shook with him, then turned and left.

  In town, I paid fifty chips to hire a horse and cart for the afternoon, with a fine elderly gentleman by the name of Isaac to drive it for me. We picked up the turbines and collected Sable and Dennel before heading back into the woods, bound for the Galeskimmer and our two hapless hitchhikers.

  “How did you two fare today?” I asked.

  Mr. McMurtry furrowed his brow. He and Sable opened their bags to show me pockets that were still mostly full of gravstone.

  “So… not well.”

  They glared at me.

  “I found a driftsmith, but he said he was already stocked up on gravstone for the next six months,” said Sable, tossing me a knowing frown.

  I shrugged. “I work fast.”

  “You’re not fast. You just got there first.”

  “I have some news that might cheer you up,” I said. “Thomas and Rindhi’s airship was not a private charter. The Nimbus Queen is a passenger blimp.”

  “I feel a scheme coming on,” said Sable. “And?”

  “And…” I said, pretending offense, “the mechanic at Marinsic & Sons says The Nimbus Queen won’t be fixed for another three days at least.”

  Sable rolled her eyes. “Go on.”

  “I really don’t understand why this is upsetting you so much,” I said. “All I’m talking about is making a few extra chips. Darigal is way out of our way. If we’re going there already to drop off Thomas and Rindhi, why are we not capitalizing on the surplus of waylaid travelers by price-gouging them for a ride?”

  “That’s… actually not a bad idea,” said Mr. McMurtry.

  “I don’t agree,” Sable said. She lowered her voice so old Isaac couldn’t hear from his seat on the bench. “We stole millions of chips worth of gravstone, with the whole crew of your parents’ boat and half a hundred Civvies bearing witness to the theft. The Regency is after you; Lafe Yingler and your parents are after you; and the heavens know Gilfoyle probably has half a dozen bounty hunters after you too—to get back that detestable medallion around your neck, if not to retrieve his fortune in gravstone.”

  “I don’t see why any of that is grounds for disagreement. What could possibly go wrong?”

  “You are an incredibly aggravating person to be around, Muller Jakes,” Sable said.

  I gave her a toothy grin. “That’s why you like me.”

  Dennel took stock of Sable’s expression, then spat off the side of the cart. “I wouldn’t be so sure, lad.”

  About halfway through our trip down the forest path, I determined that old Isaac wasn’t much of a risk-taker, since he refused to take his cart off-road when I made the suggestion. I stopped him when I knew we were getting close to Thomas and Rindhi’s campsite and hopped off. “I’ll be back with them in ten minutes,” I said. “If I’m not, it’s because I killed them.”

  “Muller…”

  I flung a dismissive hand behind my head as I strode off into the woods.

  It took me more than a few minutes to track them down, but I knew when I was close by the wisps of campfire smoke and the smell of soiled underwear. The two men were still sitting on the same log, though the gravmine had given their makeshift seat a good thrashing. I’d half expected them to have run off or set a trap for us when we returned, but it appeared as though they were as predictable a pair as I’d ever come across, and that no such misfortune would befall me today.

  They sat there on their splintered log and watched me come
toward them. I stopped when I reached the opposite side of the smoldering campfire and said, “Just because the Captain insists on bringing you hobos along doesn’t mean I’ll hesitate to throw you both overboard if you try anything else like what you did earlier today. I’ll write to Gretchen myself and tell her to look for you in the Churn.”

  “Is that you?” Thomas asked, crossing his legs.

  “Who else would it be?” I said.

  “I just didn’t recognize you at first. What happened to your mustache?”

  Apparently, my mustache had fallen down and stuck to my shirt while I was trekking through the woods without my noticing. I tore it off and pressed it back on where it belonged. “I told you we had some pressing business in town,” I said. “Now stop asking questions and get your junk together. It’s time to head back, and the others are waiting for us. Oh, and if you say a thing about my disguise in front of the old townie who’s driving the cart, I’ll pulse you ‘til you’re radioactive.”

  Neither of the men said anything more as they gathered their things. I gestured for them to take the lead, and I followed them back in the direction of the road. It was getting colder as afternoon fell into twilight, the high-altitude air turning to white mist at the edges of my breath.

  Dennel, Sable, and Isaac were shivering by the time we returned. The journey had taken a good deal longer than ten minutes, what with Thomas’s pancaked face and Rindhi’s joints still recovering from the pulses I’d shot through him. Those hand pulsers were no joke; a single shot from one of those things would’ve fried the shorts off a lesser man, so Rindhi was a trooper for having endured them the way he had.

  With the turbines taking up the bulk of the space on the cart, I let our two injured vagabonds hop on board with Sable and Dennel while I strolled along behind.

  Thomas finally spoke to me once we were moving again. “Do you really think I’m a fool to hope for Gretchen’s love?” His face was downcast, but he looked up at me as though he genuinely cared about my take on the situation.

  “It’s never a foolish thing to want someone to love you,” I said. “What’s foolish is that you tried to force her to. Just think of all the stupid things you did to get yourself into this mess. You’re a coward, Thomas. Why would you expect Gretchen to take a risk on you when the first thing you did after telling her how you felt was to run away? And that’s not even the worst of it. Because of the way you skipped town, you don’t know whether the next thing you’ll feel is Gretchen’s hand or an assassin’s bullet. At least if you’d stayed to take what you had coming, you’d have been around to either die bravely or get the girl.”

  Thomas hung his head and began to cry again. Not a desperate, pained sobbing this time; just the quiet, muffled tears of a defeated man. Rindhi put an arm around him and sat there silently as the little cart jostled them down the road.

  I would’ve felt bad for Thomas. As a matter of fact, I’ll go so far as to admit I did feel bad for him, briefly. But the medallion humming on my chest wasn’t doing much to strengthen my normally-limited sense of empathy. It was doing quite the opposite, in fact—only I didn’t realize it at the time. It was my fault for taking on an augment I knew so little about. As far as I knew back then, the benefits outweighed the drawbacks.

  A dense fog was creeping down the river when we came to the road’s end, stretching out from the waterfall and reaching along the banks to where the Galeskimmer lay at rest. I was relieved to see she was still where we’d left her, looking so serene and majestic. But it didn’t take me long to see that something wasn’t right.

  “Stop the cart, Isaac,” I said. “Wait here—all of you.”

  I trotted off the road and into a thicket to have a closer look, zooming in with my enhanced eye so I could get a glimpse of the finer details. It was difficult to see with any great clarity in the waning half-light, and I dared not turn on my eyelight to help. I scanned the whole boat, looking for any stray signs that something might be amiss. I’m not sure what it was that had alerted me; just a feeling I had. Or some hallucination birthed by the head injury I’d suffered at Platform 22. Or maybe it was the medallion, speaking to me like the conscience I’d never had. If so, it was a dark conscience—more to aid me with the element of surprise than to warn me of danger.

  Along the ship’s starboard side, I noticed something. A scratch. The boat was already burned in several places from the engine fires, and it was nicked up badly from the rigors of all the travel and storms and warfare it had been through. But this scratch was new. A climbing spike, or a hatchet, maybe.

  Never one to wait for reinforcements, I hurdled over the thicket and bolted toward the ship without letting the others know what I’d seen. I vaulted onto the deck and looked around. The medallion was murmuring, kicking into high gear, and my body was giving it permission to take over. The ship’s deck was empty, but the door to the captain’s quarters was hanging ajar.

  I made for the crew’s quarters first, drawing Rindhi’s pulser on my way down the stairs. I’d come almost to the bottom when I heard a whimpering sound. Little Neale Glynton was lying in a pool of wet blue blood, his chest open and raw. I didn’t have to look at it long to know it was bad. Very bad.

  I saw no sign of the others. There hadn’t been any evidence of a struggle above, but there was plenty of it down here. It looked as if someone had thrown two buckets of paint into the spin cycle of a washing machine; there was both red blood and blue, smeared and spattered over tossed bed sheets and slashed canvas hammocks.

  I ran back upstairs and screamed for Sable and the others to come. Mr. Isaac came down with them, standing back to watch in horror as little Neale began to choke. Rindhi assessed the boy’s wounds, then looked at me and shook his head. That’s something I already knew, my expression said to him.

  Sable knelt beside the boy, her eyes filled with tears. “Neale, what happened? Where are Eliza and Thorley? Where’s Nerimund? Where did they go?”

  “Ridgebacks,” he said, sputtering. “Took them.”

  “When? How long ago?”

  The boy shrugged one shoulder. He gulped something back and drew in a shallow breath.

  “Neale, hang on. You’re going to be okay,” I lied. In spite of that cold, uncaring side of myself whose advice I always tried take—that side which was so deep within the medallion’s grip at the time—I cared about that kid. I knew he was dying, and it was making me angry that we were about to lose him like we’d lost Mr. Scofield. But this wasn’t happening because of those blasted law-lovers and their crusade to enforce justice at any cost. This was the ridgebacks’ doing—just a bunch of dumb animals who had decided to be brutal for brutal’s sake. Animals I was going to find and crush under my boot like vermin.

  Dennel came back from the storage room. “We’ve got ourselves a problem. The gravstone is gone. It’s all gone.”

  If I’d been angry before, I was now moving past the point of violence and into the domain of the blind and the half-mad. Don’t get me wrong; nobody’s ever going to convince me there isn’t a time and a place for senseless violence. I’ll find times and places for it every day of the week. But you don’t get away with stealing my stuff and killing my friends. You just don’t. If you think you are, you’re in for an extra dose of the most horrific behavior I have to offer. I was going to get back our gravstone and the rest of our crew, or I was gonna die trying.

  There on the cabin floor, little Neale Glynton slipped away from us, soft as an afternoon breeze. His last breath gurgled out of him through a chest full of blood, and I bit my lip to keep the touchy-feelies inside. I was too angry to be sad. Or at least, that’s what I had to tell myself.

  “Where do the ridgebacks hang out around here?” I said, turning toward Mr. Isaac.

  “Most say they’re down in Torag Canyon.”

  “I’ll pay you another fifty chips to take me there.”

  The old man hesitated. “Well sure, but I turn back as soon as I’ve shown you the way. I may be old, but
I’m not fixin’ to die just yet.”

  “All you have to do is get me there,” I said.

  “I’ll warn you… you may find a lot more than ridgebacks in that canyon. Some say there are evil things at work.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Oh please. Spare me the local ghost stories. You don’t think I actually believe in any of that hogwash, do you?”

  “I don’t much subscribe to the stories myself,” Isaac said. “All’s I know is that nobody who’s gone past the markers has ever come back to tell folks what was on the other side.”

  “What markers?”

  “Three ancient obelisks guard the entrance to the canyon. No one knows where they come from or how long they’ve been there. They say there are dark forces flowing through the very ground in those parts.”

  “Show me dark forces and I’ll show you the marvels of modern technology.”

  Sable looked at me with her warning eyes. “Be careful, Muller.”

  “Careful’s not what I do,” I said. “You should know that by now.”

  “I also ought to tell you that no one who goes in there ever comes out again,” said Isaac.

  “You just watch me,” I said. “If there’s one thing I’m better at than going in… it’s coming out.”

  3

  We loaded the new turbines onto the Galeskimmer and buried Neale in a smaller grave beside Mr. Scofield’s. Sable was distraught; if Scofield’s death had rattled her, losing the cabin boy had put her heart through an earthquake. Thomas wept, not because he’d ever known the deceased, but because he was a weepy sort of guy. Even hard Mr. McMurtry gave a good raindrop or two throughout the proceedings.

  Isaac, Rindhi and I did a fair bit of digging, then stood by and kept our eyes dry for the rest. I’d like to think we were each affected in our own way, but I can only speak for myself.

  I didn’t sleep that night. Instead I stayed up late to double-check the ship’s clinker arrays and wire up the new turbines, making sure nothing I’d repaired since the scuffle at Platform 22 had come undone. I had wanted to head straight for Torag Canyon, knowing that every second we spent here put our lost crewmembers in greater danger. But it would’ve been stupid to venture into ridgeback territory in the middle of the night. I am stupid, but I like to think I can turn it off when I need to. Besides, I’d managed to convince Mr. Isaac to stay overnight for a little extra coin so he could be my guide the next day.