The Calderan Problem (Free-Wrench Book 4)

by Joseph Lallo

  “It’s fine! Come down here,” Nita called. She turned to Lil. “If anyone who cares that you’ve still got inspectors aboard is present here, we’ve got bigger problems than them finding out.”

  A peculiar creature emerged from the ship, moving deftly down the chains affixed to the gig. It scampered over to Nita and clambered up her dress to hold snug to her side. It was an aye-aye, about the size of a cat, roughly monkey shaped, and having a wide-eyed face that was a hideously endearing cross between that of a bat and a kitten. The skittish creature looked nervously to the soldiers at the edge of the airfield and huddled close. It reached out and tapped a message with a spidery finger on Nita’s arm.

  We were not supposed to let people saw, tapped the little creature, wrapping her notched tail around herself like a security blanket.

  “It’s fine, Nikita. We’re friends here,” Nita said.

  Friends didn’t brought guns, she tapped, further illustrating the less than ideal grammatical training the beasts had received.

  “Relax,” she said, stroking the aye-aye.

  Nikita, unconvinced, continued to survey the potential threats. Her timid surveillance continued until her nostrils flared and she glanced down at a small purse hanging by Nita’s side. She looked up to Nita.

  You brought good food, she tapped.

  “I can’t sneak one by you, can I?”

  She reached into the purse and pulled out a macaroon to present to the aye-aye. Nikita took it, tapped out a thanks, and hopped down to trot to Coop. Despite the well-tailored outfit not really offering room enough for her, she managed to wedge herself into his jacket to nibble at her macaroon.

  “Where is Wink?” Nita asked, glancing up at the ship in search of the aye-aye who served as the ship’s main inspector.

  “Back with Gunner,” Lil said. “We figured it’d help him get word in and out of you-know-where if he needed to.”

  “Ah. Clever thinking. All right, everyone, let’s go. I can’t wait to show you my hometown properly,” Nita announced.

  The group headed to the edge of the airfield, where a line of carriages awaited them. The vehicles looked, as many of the fruits of Calderan engineering did, like they were far too delicate to be of any real use. Nevertheless, in addition to the driver, the first carriage easily seated Captain Mack, Butch, Coop, Nikita, and one of the soldiers. Nita stepped into the second carriage and was eagerly joined by Lil while Drew piled into the second row of seats to struggle with the fiddly process of stowing his camera again.

  “Judging from the wear and tear on the Wind Breaker, I suppose you and the crew have been busy for the past few months.”

  Lil slouched into the chair and tugged at her uncomfortable outfit. “Are you kidding? I think we hauled more cargo and did more sneaking and creeping since you left than we did in all the time you were with us.”

  “Still helping get the ichor well fortified?” Nita asked.

  Lil blew out an exasperated breath. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  #

  A dim room flickered with the light of a gas burner. Gloved fingers twisted valves and tightened fittings, shifting the wild yellow flame to a faint blue one. What little light remained came from the glowing contents of glass vials clamped to various bits of apparatus. Some shone with a golden light, others with piercing green.

  Dr. Samantha Prist leaned low to inspect the flame. Dark lenses flipped up from her goggles to reveal serious eyes. Satisfied, she twisted open a clamp and inserted a beaker filled with a milky gray fluid.

  “Batch seventy-five, test three,” she stated, her voice raised as though speaking to someone far away. “This is the two percent solution, testing at high heat. I am adding the extract now. A ratio of one to one hundred extract to solution by volume.”

  She selected a vial and a pipette from a rack behind a conspicuous blast shield on the other side of the room and paced back to allow a single drop to fall into the beaker. She then replaced the vial and gently stirred the beaker with a glass wand. Again she leaned low, scrutinizing the swirling mixture. It thickened and slowed, becoming almost pure white.

  “The first reaction has been completed. Moving it into position. Set the timer for precisely ninety seconds and start it on my mark.”

  A distant clicking and cranking indicated an unseen assistant had complied with her wishes.

  “And… mark.” She shifted the beaker over the flame and backed away. “Are we counting?” she called.

  “You just press the button on the top of the fing, right?” called a gruff voice.

  “Yes, Donald.”

  “And when you press it, it starts ticking?” he said.

  “Yes, Donald,” she said, somewhat more wearily.

  “And you asked me to press it, right?”

  “Point taken, Donald,” she said, peering over the top of the blast shield. She picked up a pen and clipboard. “When I ask for it, give me the time remaining.”

  Prist jotted down a note or two and watched the beaker carefully. “Time!” she called out.

  “Fifty-two,” Donald replied.

  “At thirty-eight seconds, there is the formation of a thin blue crystalline crust on the exposed portions of the solution,” she said aloud as she wrote.

  The crust continued to grow, then took on a luminous shimmer.

  “Time!”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “At sixty-two seconds, light production begins.” She flipped her dark lenses down. “From this point forward the concoction is extremely shock sensitive.”

  The light continued to grow brighter, to the point that it would have been painful to observe without her eye protection. Now brilliantly illuminated, the room was visible as a wonderland of science. Every instrument and scientific vessel one could desire had a place in a rack, case, or shelf all about the room. The exceptionally tall figure of Donald the timekeeper sat in a full-body protective outfit. It looked to be heavy canvas, topped with a rigid mask with a glass visor. He sat behind a large sheet of smoked glass sandwiched between two layers of mesh.

  He turned to a mechanical timer and flipped up the visor of his helmet. “Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen…”

  As he continued the countdown and the light gradually decreased, an odd stuttering chatter filled the air. Dr. Prist hurriedly checked the fuel line for the burner before realizing sound was coming from outside the room.

  “Is that…?” Her eyes shot open. “That’s one of the spike guns. They’re going to shut the gate!”

  She scrambled for the speaking tube on the wall and clanged at it with a nearby instrument before bellowing into it.

  “Whoever is listening, don’t shut the gate yet!”

  “Nine. Eight,” Donald continued.

  A long, low grating rumble caused the glassware to rattle in its racks. Then came the thump of a fortified gate slamming into place outside. It shook the room so forcibly that a large canister fell from its shelf. She caught it smoothly and set it aside, then flinched at the sound of breaking glass and a burst of light.

  “I cannot work in these conditions!” she growled through clenched teeth. “Do these idiots not realize that there are delicate scientific procedures going on here?”

  Donald shrugged. “Seems like anyfing that’ll be spoiled by a loud noise isn’t worth doing. My mum used to make a soufflé that would fall if you slammed a door.”

  Prist cupped her hand over her eyes. “Fascinating as your anecdotes are, I think now that the damage is done we should probably see what exactly happened.” She clanged at the tube again. “Would someone please come to the laboratory and explain to me what precisely just cost me an afternoon’s work?”

  “Ugh,” a voice replied in disgust from the other side of the tube. “Do you have to bang the tube first? It is very disturbing.”

  “Well I’m sorry, Kent, but as you aren’t inclined to answer in a timely manner otherwise, it is an unpleasant necessity,” s
he said with the barest smattering of sincerity to the apology.

  “Digger’s headed your way with the explanation.”

  Dr. Prist turned a knob on the wall, dialing up the green phlo-lights mounted in the walls. She removed her goggles and adjusted the tight bun of her hair.

  “Is anyone hurt?” she asked.

  “Not yet, but we’re working on it,” he rumbled.

  She turned away from the tube and sighed. Dr. Prist had first been thrilled to be given the opportunity to work in the Ichor Well facility, aptly named for the nearly unique feature at its center. Ichor was a phenomenally rare substance of profound value and utility. To date this was only the second known source. Despite being the primary ingredient in at least three concoctions that made modern life possible—the phlogiston that kept airships aloft and lit, the burn-slow that kept them running, and the fug that created the fug folk in the first place—its existence and nature remained largely unknown.

  As a chemist of considerable skill and even greater ambition, she had been held as a backup in the event that the primary researcher at the original ichor source, a place called South Pyre, were to lose his life. It was a frustrating position, as it provided the constant promise of an opportunity to work the most wondrous substance in existence without ever actually fulfilling that promise.

  Her current reality was, objectively, far more tolerable. After the ichor well had been discovered, a group of enterprising individuals with chips on their shoulders had decided to take control of it. They were the Well Diggers, and recruiting Dr. Prist through less than proper means had been the first order of business. Her days were filled with experiment and discovery. But this new freedom to pursue her interests came at the expense of conducting her research in the center of a facility that all the most powerful people in her society would much prefer no longer existed. It was, if nothing else, a source of considerable distraction.

  She took a moment to look in a mirror on the laboratory wall to fix her hair a bit more thoroughly. Her long features and paper-white skin were typical of fug folk, as was her tall, lean build. What separated her a bit was her garb. The society that had formed within the fug was a fairly divided one. The people of the cities were almost ruthlessly proper in their dress and behavior. They did not dirty their hands with low work and viewed most other individuals with barely masked disdain. The workers, most of whom were a larger breed of fug person referred to as “grunts,” were a more boisterous and less formal bunch. Dr. Prist was in an exceedingly “dirty hands” position, but still held herself to the same standards of presentation that the upper class preferred. This typically translated into dresses with too many buttons, boots with too many buttons, and shoulder-length opera gloves. That the dress had to be protected with a rubber smock and the gloves had to be swapped for chemical-resistant ones from time to time were simply occupational inconveniences.

  A visitor knocked firmly and insistently on the door.

  “Come in,” she said.

  The man who opened the door was a fellow who, like her, maintained something of the upper-class sensibility in his clothing. Also like her, he was engaged in work that the true upper class would never dream of performing. Unlike her, while she managed to get her work done while remaining spotlessly clean and with barely a hair out of place, his vest and trousers were scuffed and threadbare, to say nothing of a shirt that required close inspection to determine if it had ever been white.

  His name was Digger—or at least, so he was called. His real name was Fenton Ebonwhite. The Ebonwhites were as close as the fug folk had to nobility, though in Fenton’s case it was the sort of nobility that would be poisoned to ensure the line of succession maintained an acceptable trajectory. Meanwhile, “nobility” in this case generally meant “the people jealously holding on to most of the money and power and keeping the rest of us down.” It was thus unsurprising that he preferred to go by a nickname.

  “There has been an incident,” he said.

  “I certainly hope there was. I would hate to believe that our people were firing guns and slamming gates without proper motivation,” she said.

  “Do you recall, three weeks ago, when one of the key rings went unaccounted for?” Digger asked.

  “Remember it? Of course. We turned the whole facility upside down for days until we found it.”

  “Another set has turned up. In the possession of one of the cargo men we’ve had on the payroll for the last three weeks.”

  “I don’t imagine the matching timeline is a coincidence,” she said.

  “We caught him trying to break into the dormitories of some of the workers. He got away, but not without losing his satchel.”

  “How did we miss a second set of keys going missing?”

  “The best I can figure is that he or one of his associates managed to make copies or the means to make copies between when they were lost and when they were found. I’ve got a team changing the locks. We are also trying to account for anything missing. It turns out there has been a rash of theft of personal items that most of our crew was blaming on… well, most of our crew.”

  “You mentioned associates. That is a bad sign.”

  “In the days before we caught him, two other recent hires went missing. I very much doubt that is a coincidence either.”

  “Lovely… Do we have any idea what they were up to?”

  “Besides no good? Not yet. In that regard, however, there is one mixed blessing.”

  “Oh?”

  “He appears to be in the employ of someone utterly incapable of subterfuge. We found this among his things.”

  Digger presented her a card with a single name emblazoned in gold. At the sight of it, her face dropped.

  “Lucius P. Alabaster. I thought we were rid of that imbecile.”

  “Oh, hadn’t you heard?” Digger said. “No jail can hold him, no foe can long delay him. For he is…”

  Dr. Prist flatly completed the sentence along with Digger. “‘The most peerless criminal mind in the history of the fug.’”

  Once again she cupped her hand to her eyes. “Really now. It is bad enough the man nearly struck the killing blow on our society a few months ago, but must he butcher the language as well? One either has or does not have peers, and thus one either is or is not peerless. How does one go about applying a superlative on such a trait?”

  “I choose not to speculate on the workings of a man’s mind when he is so demented that he goes to the trouble of having his boastful manifesto printed and distributed via newspaper,” Digger said.

  “That said, he is frustratingly capable at times. This can only complicate matters,” she said.

  “It is a bit unsettling that it isn’t clear what he is up to or why. By now I would have expected him to bellow his intentions from the top of the tallest tower. Heaven help us if the man has learned tact or subtlety. But such are the matters at hand. I will of course keep you apprised of our discoveries. I trust this hasn’t been too disruptive to your research?”

  “Not too disruptive? Have a look for yourself,” she said, gesturing in irritation at the disastrous result of her experiment.

  He turned. “Impressive. Was this not the desired outcome?”

  She turned toward the broken beaker and realized that in the commotion she had neglected to investigate the nature of her experiment’s failure. In place of the gleaming blue mixture she’d been preparing, an oddly beautiful crystalline oddity clung to the apparatus. It looked as though the explosion of the beaker had been frozen in place. Jagged blue crystals jutted out in all directions, forming a spiked ball. The shards of glass that should have spilled upon the ground or peppered the walls hadn’t escaped the explosion. They were embedded in and encrusted around the bizarre crystal like an artful sugar topping on an extravagant dessert.

  Dr. Prist stepped up to it and looked it over in curiosity.

  “I was trying to isolate an impurity we’ve been finding in our ichor with th
e hopes of finding a way to increase our pyrum yield, so no, this was not the desired outcome… but that is not to say it is an undesirable one. This warrants further investigation…”

  “I have no doubt you will find the resulting information quite useful.” Digger turned for the door, then snapped his fingers and turned back. “I’d nearly forgotten, the culprit, who is at this very moment running through a very unpleasant portion of The Thicket, had also raided the mail bin prior to being discovered. One of the letters is for you.”

  “Is it?” she said, turning to him and accepting the somewhat abused envelope. She selected a small, sharp instrument from her apron and sliced open the envelope. “Ah!” she said brightly. “It is from that lovely Mr. Van Cleef. We’ve been having some very interesting discussions regarding combustibles and accelerants.”

  “Via letters?”

  “Of course.”

  “… But he is in the facility. And has been for over a week. He’s been helping us build up our defenses.”

  “I am well aware, Digger. However, Mr. Van Cleef clearly understands that conversation of this sort is benefitted by a written record. It is quite sensible. And as enriching as my time here has been, I do find myself craving the sort of stimulating discussion he can provide.”

  Donald snickered. Digger glanced to him.

  “Did I miss something humorous?”

  “No, Digger, you most certainly did not, because your mind is not so perverse as to latch on to every errant piece of potentially suggestive vocabulary as fuel for juvenile titters.”

  Donald snickered again. She sighed.

  “Go have your break and air out that childish mind of yours, Donald. But come back ready to work,” she said.

  “Glad to,” Donald said, pulling the helmet free.

  He hung it on the hook beside a rear door, then stepped outside and promptly bellowed to his associate, “Oi! Kent! She said ‘titters’!” as he shut the door behind him.