by Joseph Lallo
“I believe I’ll just take your advice at this point and pop below decks.”
“Tell Kent and Donald to be ready.”
“Naturally.”
She hurried to the hatch below. Gunner throttled down the propellers, slung his rifle in front of him, and clicked the sight in place.
“It’s been far too long since I’ve been able to put this to proper use.”
#
Two men, sitting astride something that amounted to little more than a cigar-shaped steam turbine barely large enough to accommodate them, streaked through the sky toward the airship ahead. The turbine made a terrifying wailing sound, which explained why most people who fell victim to such a vehicle called both it and its riders “wailers.”
“What do you make of this, Bozz?” called the man in front, his hands tight around the controls for a small spike gun and a pair of grapplers.
“What do I make of what, Zed?” bellowed the man in the rear, his goggles and face so smeared with grease it was almost terrifying to realize he was the one guiding the vehicle.
“They ain’t runnin’. The ship up there. Even turned off their props!”
“I make of that that they’re dummies.” He smiled to reveal teeth as grease-blackened as the rest of his face. “That bein’ a fugger ship, this’ll be a pleasure. Don’t get a chance to pick them clean too often.”
The sheer speed of the ship brought them to their target in very short order. Bozz shifted the ship aside, and Zed fired off a grappler. It bit into the deck. The line pulled taut and with practiced ease wailer the ship was pulled tight to the deck. The pilot shut down the turbine and both men hopped off. They each pulled pistols and stalked slowly forward. The deck was deserted.
“Heh. See, Zed? I told you. All those fuggers are cowards. Every last one of ’em. Probably they’re down below, shivering and hugging their knees. Serves ’em right for comin’ up where the sun shines.”
A second wailer latched on to the opposite side of the ship, and two more riders hopped aboard.
“You don’t suppose the ship’s deserted, do you?” Zed asked.
“A ship doesn’t get out this far without a pilot. Take it from me. You spend much time down below the fug?”
“Not when I can help it.”
“Something this small? Two crewmembers.”
“No… Really?”
“Yep.”
“This’ll be a snap then.”
They cautiously approached one of the two hatches leading below decks, their counterparts on the other side doing the same to the other hatch. The door at the end of the cramped stairway was shut tight. Zed threw his weight against it, thumping hard as he could. The door didn’t budge. He backed away and raised his pistol to blast where he imagined the brace—or the man bracing it—might be. The pause in his thumping was enough for him to notice there was a commotion coming from the other hatch.
“Go see what’s what,” Zed said.
Bozz bounded up the steps, shouted, then tumbled down the stairs and landed in a mound atop his partner. The two looked blearily up the steps to see Kent, the butt of his rifle raised to deliver another blow if necessary. He wore dark glasses and still squinted through them.
“I’d stay down boys. It’ll do you good. Leastways it’ll do you plenty of bad if you don’t.” He brought the muzzle down to highlight the threat in case the words were insufficient. “Donald! Gunner!” he said. “You boys set?”
A distant scuffle came to an end.
“All set. These fellas ain’t gettin’ up,” Donald called.
The second grunt thumped over. He appeared behind Kent, rope in hand, and descended to start tying up the wailers.
Kent smiled. “Nice, boys. I wouldn’t worry if I were you. Think of this as a trade.”
#
It was the work of less than a minute for Donald and Kent to disable the boarding party. The entire process was over so quickly that the distant ship had yet to pull into position to open fire with its main cannons and hadn’t come close enough to fire with its deck guns.
“You sure these fings work as easy as you said?” Donald asked, looking uncertainly at the two-seater hanging from the side of their ship.
“Tug these handles until you’re heading toward the ship and tug those handles to fire the grapplers. Fire them when you’re going through the rigging and you’ll come to a stop right over the deck. Just hold tight. You don’t want to be thrown over the opposite side.”
Donald looked to Kent. “You fly, I’ll shoot.”
The grunts climbed aboard the bizarre vessel. Gunner produced a pry bar and started to lever the grappling hook free.
“Gunner,” Kent said, glancing over his dark glasses.
“Yes, Kent?”
“Don’t miss.”
Gunner lifted a long rifle with a complex network of lenses along its length and steadied it on the railing of the ship.
“I don’t miss,” Gunner said, his tone making it clear this was not a boast, it was a fact.
The hook fell away and retracted, both Kent and Donald holding tight to the controls as the wailer craft drifted aside. They adjusted various knobs and switches until the turbine spun to life. As the pair took a wide turn toward the approaching ship, Gunner leaned low and looked through the sights.
Though his face was a mask of concentration and duty, his spirit was singing. This was his calling, the thing for which no man had ever been better suited. The distant ship came into view. It was only slightly larger than the fug ship, but much better suited for long-distance travel. The wailers made their living lurking in the skies along trade routes. They could linger for weeks at a time without need to resupply. With a ship like that, the trip to Caldera and the battle that was likely to follow would be much more achievable. First he saw their flag-line. Five red flags, three black ones. This wailer crew was quite a successful one then. Five ships scuttled and three full crews killed. Any guilt for what he might have to do whisked away.
He flipped another lens into position, magnifying his view further until he could see the expressions on the faces of the crew rushing to the deck to man the deck guns. One by one he fired on them, taking care to strike only the crew and not the ship. He darted his aim from one deck gun to the next, picking off any crew foolish enough to attempt to target Kent and Donald as they got closer.
Soon enough the crew thought better of the deck guns. They took up pistols and rifles. One by one, most before they could manage a shot, he felled the armed crewmembers.
“Samantha, my second rifle,” he called.
“I’ve got it here,” the doctor said, rushing up from below decks with a shorter, less optically enhanced weapon.
He fired the final bullet in his present rifle and handed it off to her, accepting the replacement and sighting up his next target through its comparatively inferior optics. He fired only three shots with the weapon before she tapped him and handed his now reloaded long rifle back to him. He swapped back, and not a moment too soon. A man with a shotgun had taken aim at Kent and Donald, who were now mere seconds from reaching the ship. A single bullet took the man down.
The grunts activated the grapplers as instructed, and their trip came to a sudden and graceless end. Once they were certain there was indeed a ship beneath them, they dropped down and made short work of the rest of the crew. Inside of five minutes, Kent was at the wheel and Donald was tooting the all clear on the steam whistle.
Gunner set the weapon beside him. The intensity of the moment, pushed aside by years of discipline and training, came upon him now that the task was done. His hands shook, his heart raced, every part of his body taking this moment of calm to deal with the stress of the last hectic minute.
“Are you well, Mr. Van Cleef?” Dr. Prist said, crouching beside him to feel the side of his face.
He took her hand. “Under the circumstances, I believe ‘Guy’ would be appropriate,” he said. “I must complime
nt you on a swift and efficient reload.”
“It isn’t precisely what I would call a complex procedure. And… well, to be perfectly honest, I don’t approve of violence of this sort, but I can at least appreciate when such acts are administered with skill.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me. I’ve got to climb aboard that other wailer and get aboard the mother ship.”
“Why? Can’t Kent and Donald handle it?”
“I don’t know if you’ve ever witnessed a docking procedure between two ships not intended to dock, but it isn’t a task for the uninitiated. And loaded as we are with coal, burn-slow, and ammunition, I’d rather avoid the excitement of a collision. Unless you’re concerned about being alone on the ship with these ruffians.”
“When you put as fine a point on something as that, I think it is probably best if you get to the other ship as quickly as possible.”
“Agreed. Be ready to move your things from this ship to that, and in a terrible hurry. What we gain in range, we lose in speed, so there is no time to waste.”
#
Far ahead, the duplicate Wind Breaker continued its journey to the west. Of the five turbines, only three were running, and those sputtered and stuttered quite bad.
“Captain!” barked Alabaster, marching up to the wheel of the ersatz Wind Breaker. “I am quite familiar with the Wind Breaker’s capacity and its comings and goings. Thus, I am quite certain that we would have reached Caldera by yesterday evening if not for some manner of chicanery, incompetence, or buffoonery. Now which is it?”
The captain looked to Alabaster. He was a fug person, and thus even shaded by the shadow of the envelope, he wore both dark glasses and a large-brim hat. Most fug folk appeared gaunt and frail, even if they were no more so than a surface dweller, but this man lived up to his appearance. He was clearly unwell, withered by some illness or another. It had, among other things, eroded his will to cope with the sort of abuse Alabaster dished out in such generous helpings.
“Alabaster,” he said in a reedy voice. “We are having problems with the steam system. With only three men on the crew beside ourselves, we can only work so quickly. Matters, of course, would be different if you were to do anything beyond complain.”
“I am the leader of this mission, I’ll remind you. My cunning and brilliant mind is the engine upon which the venture runs. A chief strategist strategizes.”
“Then devise a strategy to work out how so much faulty equipment was installed on the same ship. Or get a wrench in your hand and make yourself useful.”
Alabaster glared at him. “I would demand that you do so yourself, but naturally your own skills are too severely limited and specific to be as broadly applied as mine, so in spite of the venom motivating your words, I believe I shall take it upon myself to investigate the matter. I am very likely the only member of this pathetic skeleton crew with the intellectual capacity to do so.”
He straightened his jacket and winced in pain, his arm having had little time to heal.
“A moment, Mr. Alabaster,” the captain said.
“Speak quickly. I’m off to solve the problems caused by the inadequacy of you and your peers.”
“I’m at death’s door. I’m on this trip because a financier I care not to know provided the assurance that my family will be secure should I live or die. I fully expect to die. The rest of this crew is in a similarly dire situation. But what, short of madness, has motivated you to be a part of this one-way trip?”
“You assume far too much, Captain. Perhaps you aren’t likely to survive this trip, but fate has illustrated time and again that she has greater plans for me. I have clashed with individuals positively demonic in their capacity for cruelty and violence and stepped away with mere scratches. I have been captured and returned to freedom. I have been on ships blasted from the sky. I have had weapons of all kinds fired at me, and yet I live and breathe. If I were to receive nothing more than a glorious death from this trip, I would embrace it gladly as my right and legacy. But now I realize that even this cannot strike me down. This is not the end of my story. No. This is merely a chapter in my eventual memoir. Now delay me no further. I have your problems to solve.”
Alabaster turned and marched for the hatch below decks, ignoring the muttered insults from behind him. He moved slowly, running his hands over the green wood of the refitted interior of the ship. He smiled. This was the environment of his greatest enemies. Walking these halls, feeling the sway of this ship was like stepping into Captain West’s shoes, like probing the workings of his mind. He listened to the labored shudder of the steam pipes running through the walls and over his head. He could almost respect the grizzled ogre of a man for sculpting a ragged, unremarkable ship such as this one into a symbol of resistance against the people of the fug.
Ahead, at a junction of several pipes, a worker was cursing and sputtering as steam filled the hall. Alabaster stepped up to him just as his frantic hammering sealed the leak.
“What precisely seems to be the problem?” Alabaster said. “Or have you, in your oafery, come to the conclusion that beating on the pipes until they obey you is the proper repair tactic?”
“Oh, leave off it, Alabaster,” barked the crewmember. “This ain’t my fault, and none of the other problems were my fault either. All of this was working not six hours ago. We must’ve got a load of lousy parts.”
“Nonsense. I have my criticisms for the mind behind this plan, but he has nothing if not an eye for detail.” Alabaster gave a thump to the pipe. “Good, solid, fug-made parts. No expense spared. So do not blame your own lackluster maintenance on the equipment.”
“I ain’t saying it don’t look good and solid. I’m saying they’re faulty. The whole lot’s faulty. Should’ve known something was up. The inspector hung around this spot tapping away all this morning. That little creature knew something was wrong. It’s been spot on with finding faults, just like they always are.”
“Well if our inspector identified the flaw before it failed, then why did you sit on your hands rather than preemptively repairing it?”
“I took a look and couldn’t work out what was wrong.”
“Then our inspector is more intelligent than you are. Phenomenal.”
“I don’t see you doing any good,” he said. “Now that this junction’s fixed, the ship’s back to three turbines. And if you’re done wasting breath telling me how to do my job, I’ll head over and get the last two spinning again so we can actually get where we’re headed.”
“Go. Do the work suited to your ape-ish intelligence. I shall seek out this inspector of ours, such that I might prevent the next failure before it happens.”
Alabaster marched back down the hall, his ear trained to the distant plinks of claws on pipe. When he came to a dark corner of the ship with a similar gnarl of pipes, the inspector was perched atop it, huddled down and drumming its thin fingers against a valve. When Alabaster arrived, the creature’s beady eye glanced vacantly in his direction before the inspector slinked sheepishly into the corner.
“There. This, at least, is an empty-headed creature who knows to dedicate its limited intelligence to tasks of a scope not exceeding its intellectual grasp.”
He turned the valve of a nearby phlo-light to better investigate the mechanism the aye-aye had been inspecting. Sure enough, the valve was not fully engaged. He tightened it.
“Crisis averted,” Alabaster said. “It is woefully in keeping with the sorry state of our society that there are only two effective crewmembers on this entire critical mission, and one of them is a lower primate.”
The inspector drummed its fingers and watched Alabaster. Now that the light was brighter, he had a much better view of the beast. The territorial battle had left more than a few marks. Its ghostly gray fur was striped with fresh gashes, and one eye had a terrible white scar. … Not a fresh red wound. A thick, white, fully healed scar.
Realization dawned in Alabaster’
s eyes, and the change in expression was not lost on the aye-aye. The beast dashed across the ceiling and up to a higher deck. Alabaster chased until it became clear that there was little hope of catching the spry beast. He found the nearest speaking tube and hammered on it.
“We have been infiltrated! The Wind Breaker inspector is aboard. It has been sabotaging us!”
“You killed the Wind Breaker inspector,” the captain replied.
“Clearly the little monster placed its eye patch on our own inspector.”
“You were outsmarted by an inspector?”
“The issue at hand is the presence of an enemy on our ship,” Alabaster snapped. “The creature is to be killed on sight! And it must be done quickly before—”
A high-pitched whistle pierced the air, steam releasing from a pipe not far away. Alabaster stumbled against a wall as the ship suddenly and sharply began to turn.
“Blast it! Blast it all! Find that creature! Catch it! Kill it!”
“We’re never going to be able to catch an inspector on a ship in transit, Alabaster. It can climb the outside of the hull, it can climb the outside of the envelope. It can hide places we can’t even look.”
“I am not interested in your excuses! Have you no logic whatsoever? If you want to catch the beast, guard the food. It may be able to hide, but the thing still needs to eat! I will not have my greatest triumph taken away from me by a rodent!”
#
In Lock, the beginnings of a rainstorm were complicating the docking of the Wind Breaker. It strained at its mooring lines, fat drops making an odd hollow sound as they drummed against the envelope. Lil climbed down and pulled an ill-fitting hand-me-down coat tight against the wind and rain.
She craned her neck to be sure the mooring pylons weren’t about to give out, then turned along the precarious pier leading back to the mountain-perched city. Three great wheeled pallets were already blocking the path to town, wheeling steadily toward them as a man on foot jogged ahead.
“No, no! We ain’t doin’ the wheelin’ and dealin’ bit in the rain. You folks come back and we’ll trade when the sun’s shinin’,” Lil said, trying to wave them off.