The Calderan Problem (Free-Wrench Book 4)

by Joseph Lallo

  The ships they rode would run down after only a few minutes, and they would get steadily slower after the first minute or so. That would put them in terrible danger of being unable to dodge the deck guns of the false Wind Breaker if they were too near to it when the bulk of their speed was spent. She didn’t care, and clearly neither did the grunts. Both screaming ships drifted up and assumed a flight path that would take them directly over the enemy ship.

  Behind them, an apocalyptic crack signaled the first of the mother ship’s cannons firing. A heartbeat later a dozen new holes opened in the hull and envelope of the false Wind Breaker. She looked back to Gunner’s ship. Where once had been the starboard cannon now was a smoldering hole. The entire cannon had exploded from the overpacked charge. Whole panels and planks peeled away from the ship and plummeted into the water. Gunner fought the ship under control and began to aim the second cannon even as flames crawled, fanned by the rushing wind, over the belly of his ship.

  She looked forward again. Donald passed over the false Wind Breaker and dropped his sack. It struck the front of the envelope and flashed into what at first appeared to be a cloud of twinkling blue dust. As the dust collected, it formed clusters of short spikes. The crystals spread along the surface of the envelope until they encased one of the five turbines. It made a horrid grinding sound, then stopped cold.

  “What the hell was that?” Kent shouted.

  “A happy accident,” Dr. Prist called back.

  “That was a happy accident?”

  “The advancement of society is fueled by the mistakes of chemists. Now get close! I don’t want to miss!”

  Kent angled the wailer down, bringing it as near to the churning blades of the ship as he dared. Prist swung her sack and let it loose. Despite the proximity, she didn’t score a direct hit on the remaining turbines. Luckily, she didn’t need to. The crystals grew forward, even against the blast of the turbines, and soon consumed three more. Two of them ground to a stop. The other shattered through the shell of crystals, but the pair of attacks had left the ship with just two healthy turbines out of five. Kent pulled up, and a moment later Gunner unleashed the contents of the remaining cannon. A cloud of shot chewed up the aft end of the gondola, shearing some of the rigging and leaving the gondola askew as well as pulverizing the rear cannon. A secondary explosion shook the rear of the ship, suggesting the rear cannon had been loaded when it was struck.

  “That’s all we can do,” she called back to Kent. “Head for shore!”

  #

  Gunner fought with the airship’s wheel. Flames were beginning to lick up onto the deck now. The screech and crackle of bits of the gondola tearing away were constant, sometimes drowning out the worrisome rumble of the steam pipes. As the gondola lost weight, the ship gained both speed and altitude. Combined with the effects of the bizarre but fascinating bombs the others had dropped—against his orders—his ship might just have been able to catch up with the false Wind Breaker. Alas, losing substantial portions of the infrastructure had made it almost impossible to control.

  He glanced aside to the wailer ship the others—also against his orders—had readied for him.

  “A captain goes down with his ship. That is the tradition,” Gunner affirmed.

  He raised his sight and peered down at the badly damaged copy of the Wind Breaker. It had slowed to a crawl, and phlogiston billowed out of the holes in the envelope. Not nearly enough, though. If the crew of that ship prepared even half as well as his own, they would have enough spare phlogiston to reach their target. He swept his sight to the shore now. They were near enough for him to see the individual defense cannons in enough detail to know they were slowly shifting. Two of the nearest ones were taking aim at his airship. Between the flames working their way toward his remaining fuel and blasting powder, the overworked boiler threatening to rupture, and the engines set to burst to pieces, the cannons were in a four-way race to see what would destroy his vessel first.

  Gunner turned the wheel toward the false Wind Breaker. If he could align himself nearer to it, perhaps the cannons would strike it in their attempts to blast him out of the sky. Any hope of that was instantly dashed as the wheel spun free, some element of the linkage between it and the controls for the propellers finally breaking loose. He was officially at the mercy of the wind and what little life the engines had left in them. He raised the sight again and swept it across the gondola of the Wind Breaker. A second section of rigging had torn away. The deck sagged, members of the crew fighting against the slope to reach their stations. And there, clinging to the side of the gondola, was the tiny form of an inspector.

  He gritted his teeth. “He sneaks aboard an enemy ship. He fakes his own death. And even after days of pursuit and dozens of cannon blasts, Wink is still alive?”

  His lip twitched. “To hell with tradition. If our ship’s inspector can survive this mission, then I’m seeing it through to the end.” He limped for the wailer. “You can’t very well be the captain of a ship with no controls anyway.”

  A distant clap came from the shore. His hands gripped the wailer’s rigging just as a shell tore through the far side of the main ship like tissue paper. Ropes and struts snapped. The skin of the envelope tore open and released its load of phlogiston in one vast plume. Gunner hauled himself onto the wailer’s pilot seat as the airship dropped from the sky. Thick ropes held the wailer in place, dragging it down. He tugged at the line, but the knot was under too high a load. It would have to be cut. He drew his pistol from his belt, but the violent wind rattled and shook the wailer so violently he couldn’t bring the weapon to bear on the rope without risking putting another bullet in his own leg, or worse, in the wailer’s pressure tank.

  One of the airship’s whirring propellers finally sagged against the deck. Its blades shattered, shards of metal shredding the deck and scything through the air. Tattered and splintered wood gave way, and the stricken ship dropped away from the wailer. The mooring planks and an irregular chunk of the deck dangled beneath it, weighing it down, but he finally managed to fire off a shot to sever the knotted rope.

  Now free of the additional weight, his escape ship hung gently in the air, drifting to a stop. The whirring and churning of the doomed airship’s engines, and even the whistling of the wind, faded to silence. It was the first time in two days he’d not been assaulted by the mechanical din of a failing ship. For any other person at any other time, clinging to a flimsy two-person airship hundreds of feet over the sea would have been an incomprehensibly dire situation. For Gunner, it was a precious moment of respite. The peace came to an end when the main ship struck the water. The miraculously intact boiler, once immersed in the cold sea, ceased to be a miracle. A chest-thumping blast sent shards of wood and iron hissing in all directions.

  The strokes of luck necessary for Gunner’s heart to still be beating after all he’d been through were difficult to count. Fate, it would seem, felt there had been one too many, and the scales were due to be balanced. A fragment of what had once been the main ship’s boiler whistled past him on its journey toward the clouds. It didn’t strike the wailer’s envelope, nor did it strike his body. That would have been far too swift and simple. Instead, it sliced neatly through one of the pipes that supplied steam to the little turbine that powered the wailer. Venting steam sent it into a spin. It took every ounce of his strength to keep from being thrown free. After a stomach-turning minute of helpless rotation, the steam tank ran dry and he twirled to rest again, adrift in the sky as the ship he’d been pursuing limped toward its target.

  He reached up to vent enough of the gas from the little envelope to avoid drifting endlessly upward.

  “Well… That’s that then…” he said.

  #

  Alabaster barked into the megaphone he’d kept since the shipyard. His intended use for it was the delivery of stirring speeches in the face of those who would oppose him. After one of the hits to the ship caused steam to start spraying from the speaking t
ubes, he’d been forced to put it to the more mundane use of addressing the crew.

  “Why are we moving so slowly?” he cried. “Victory is at hand! The ship is destroyed, and the purpose of this ship is fulfilled. The cannons are defending us, not attacking us. And yet we crawl toward history instead of bounding!”

  The lengthy pursuit had taken its toll on the crew of the false Wind Breaker as well. One of the crewmembers had been killed, the captain was injured, and the remaining two crewmembers were exhausted. Yet despite this Alabaster seemed tireless, fueled entirely by his righteous fury and the promise of infamy.

  “It is a wonder we’re still moving at all!” the captain called. “Pipes and linkages are broken all over the ship. It’s all I can do to keep on course.”

  “We slowed when those fleeing cowards streaked over us. Has it occurred to you they may have done some damage to our turbines?”

  “I don’t know, Alabaster. I was distracted by the two cannon hits we took right after that. The ones that killed my engineer.”

  “Am I to believe there was but one member of this entire crew with the skill to keep the ship in operation? How could anyone be so foolish as to fail to include even the most basic of contingencies?”

  “There are only so many people willing to go on a suicide mission, Alabaster. So unless you think you can fix the ship, I would suggest you get some ropes and see about lashing the gondola to what rigging is left before the whole bloody thing drops off.”

  “I care not if the gondola drops off, so long as it drops over the mouth of the volcano. How long until we reach it?”

  “At our present speed, perhaps an hour.”

  “And at our full speed?”

  “Minutes.”

  “Our focus is thus established. We must restore our proper speed. The simple fact that the crew of the formerly pursuing vessel is now heading toward the shore introduces the very real possibility that it will inform the cannoneers that we are not who we seem. Until we get past the cannons, the risk of failure looms.”

  “Then climb up and see what’s gone wrong!”

  “I shall do just that! I shall haul this sorry crew to victory if I have to do it on my very back!”

  He dashed to the nearest rigging. Scaling it was no simple task, his injured arm slowing him greatly, but he forced aside the pain just as simply as he did the fatigue. Now that they were no longer under attack, there was no need to worry that an unexpected dodge would shake him free, so he sacrificed security for speed, putting his afflicted arm to work until he rounded the upper curve of the envelope and saw the sapphire carnage Dr. Prist’s handiwork had left behind.

  “What madness is this?” he said, approaching the edge of a treacherous patch of jagged blue crystals.

  He waded onto the patch of crystal and hammered at it with his heel. It took three solid blows before a goodly hunk of it cracked and sloughed off like ice from a pitched roof. He looked over the pieces of glassy blue material jamming the workings of three of the turbines.

  “This will take ages to undo if I am forced to resort to simple hammering like a thickheaded brute,” he reasoned.

  He held tight to the ropes of the rigging where they stretched across the dome of the envelope and investigated the stuff. It was already laced with fractures. If not for those tiny breaks, he might have still been bashing at the piece he’d knocked free.

  “They are damaged… but what has been done to damage them? It could have been any of the impacts. Or perhaps the crystals simply form in this manner. Bah, they wouldn’t have been able to stop the turbines if such was the case. What then…”

  As he turned the puzzle over in his mind, out of habit he found himself scanning the sky. A few days of constantly seeking to escape a pursuer had a way of swiftly instilling new behaviors. This one, it would seem, was a worthwhile addition. In his hasty sweep of the horizon, a tiny speck of darkness caught his eye. It was far off, and high above, but far too large and swift to be anything but an airship. As he focused, eyes watering in the unwelcome brightness of day, he detected just a whisper of red in the vague blotch against the clouds. It was all he needed to see. In a way, it was what he’d been waiting for.

  “And so they have come. I am truly fate’s most favored son. My greatest foes shall be on hand to see all that they’ve worked for vanish in a puff of fug.” He turned to the locked turbines and gave the mound of crystal a kick. “Provided I can get this worthless ship running!”

  #

  “I wouldn’t’ve believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, Cap’n,” Lil called from her perch at the forward railing of the true Wind Breaker.

  She lowered her telescope and turned to Captain Mack. “She’s taken a couple of hits, but I’d swear that ship ahead looks more like us than we do.”

  “Coop,” the captain said. “What have you got?”

  The other deckhand was in a far more precarious position. One arm was wrapped in rope as he stood on the outside of the ship’s railing and hung almost parallel to the water below. He too held a telescope.

  “Looks like loads of flotsam in the water. Some of it’s still smokin’. An airship must’ve just gone down.”

  “Cap’n, that’s Gunner’s ship. It’s gotta be. They took Gunner down!” Lil fretted.

  “Any sense of what sort of ship it was, Coop?” Captain Mack said.

  The deckhand leaned even lower, as if the additional few inches would make the difference. “Ain’t enough left to… now wait a minute… Looks like there’s a string of them wailer flags.”

  “Then it was a wailer ship. And that means there was a way off,” the captain said. “I want both of you to get to searching the skies.”

  “Aye, Cap’n,” they said in unison.

  Mack leaned down to the speaking tube beside the ship’s wheel. “Glinda, are the cannons loaded?”

  His medic’s muffled voice barked back in a flurry of complaints.

  “You knew the rules of my ship, Glinda. Everyone can do everyone’s job. … If needs be, I would cook up a meal, but we ain’t had the need. And now ain’t the time to dig that up again. Just give me a yell when the cannons are loaded.” He shook his head and muttered under his breath. “That woman’ll be the death of me yet.”

  Lil and Coop had taken up positions on opposite sides of the deck, their telescopes moving in slow sweeps.

  “Anything yet?” the captain called.

  “There’s an awful lot of sky to cover, Cap’n,” Coop said.

  Captain Mack set his eyes on the ship ahead and started to sift through his options. If they’d faithfully copied the Wind Breaker, it would have a rear cannon, so he would have to be mindful of it. They were gaining ground, but not quickly enough to be within cannon range before they were over Tellahn. If he were the man commanding the cannoneers and two ships showed up matching the same description and one started firing, his orders would be to take down the one on the offensive before a stray shot hit a busy street or defenseless home. There was the very real chance this would come down to a ship-to-ship small-arms battle. He grinned. That was just fine. They may have copied his ship, but no one could copy his crew. If it came down to man versus man, his people would come out on top. All he had to do was get them there.

  He teased the controls for the engines, pushing them a bit further than they really ought to go. The turbines were squealing, but they’d hold for a few minutes more before he had to back them down again. Like a musician tuning his instrument, he trained his ear on the chorus of whining mechanisms and eased them to the very limit of safety. They reached the pitch he was seeking, then were joined by a barely audible tapping he’d learned to pay close attention to.

  Nikita, their second and more recently recruited inspector, appeared working her way down along the rigging. She’d been riding atop the envelope, remaining as vigilant with her ears as the rest of the crew had been with their eyes. From the look on her face, her careful surveillance had
been successful. She skittered to a stop at his feet and anxiously drummed out a message.

  Nikita heard a gun. A gun like Gunner’s gun, not like a ship gun, she tapped.

  “Do you know where it came from?”

  Yes.

  “Tell Coop. Fast.”

  Nikita was visibly grateful at the order, dashing to her favorite member of the crew and climbing into his jacket. After she finished rattling out her message to him, she extended her little arm and Coop followed the gesture with his telescope.

  “I should’ve known. Three fingers below the horizon, Cap’n. Off to starboard.”

  Mack turned some valves and adjusted the turbines again. The ship pitched forward, and there, barely visible against the churning sea, was Gunner, still clinging to his drifting escape vessel. Mack altered course just enough to bring them within range of his stranded crewmember.

  “Get the gaff ready. We don’t have time for a second pass,” the captain called.

  Coop fetched a long, sturdy stick with a hook at the end and tied it securely to an eye at the top of the mooring winch. They swept past Gunner’s damaged vessel, and Coop handily hooked it as simply as if he were hanging a hat on a hook. Gunner held tight to avoid being thrown free when his ship was yanked along with the Wind Breaker. When the initial jolt was over, Coop grabbed a rope and held out his hand.

  “Welcome back aboard, Gunner,” he said. “Now get off o’ there so’s we can cut it free.”

  “No,” Gunner said, his voice hoarse. “We need it. We need its grapplers and winches.”

  “We got grapplers and winches from the last time we snagged one of these.”

  “We need all the help we can get,” Gunner said. “Trust me.”

  “Coop, drag that broken-down wreck aboard.”

  “I’m tryin’, Cap’n, but he wants I should pull up the ship along with him,” Coop said.

  “Just get them both aboard and cut the envelope free.”

  “Aye, Cap’n,” he said.

  He heaved Gunner from the seat of the vessel to the deck with little effort. When the armory officer’s legs hit the deck, they crumbled beneath him. Lil rushed to his side and helped him up.