The Calderan Problem (Free-Wrench Book 4)

by Joseph Lallo

  “He stays alive until we’re linked up. With the wind this mountain’s kicking up, we’re better off with someone trying to hold it steady until we’ve got them hooked. After that, take him out as soon as you’re able.”

  “I can’t hardly wait,” Lil said.

  “After we’re hooked and the deck is clear, what’s next?” Mack said.

  “Coop and me head over. He takes the helm, I find Nita and Wink and bring ’em home,” Lil said.

  “From there, we get the fake Wind Breaker away from the volcano or we die trying,” Gunner said.

  “I might skip that dyin’ part. Seems to me it’d make it harder to get the job done,” Coop said.

  “A few more yards, Captain,” Gunner called.

  Mack spun the wheel and did his level best to keep the ship steady in the turbulent air, but it was a lost cause. All he could do was creep closer. Gunner adjusted his aim and pulled the trigger. The barbed hook launched with a hiss of steam. Gunner watched its flight with a practiced eye and, as it passed over the deck, reversed the winch. His hook dropped down and bit deep into the deck. The rope tightened and the two gondolas swung toward each other. Lil scrambled farther up the tilting deck to keep her weapon trained on Alabaster. The shifting of the false Wind Breaker’s deck dislodged the mastermind from the ship’s wheel, sending him tumbling toward the far railing. When he struck it, he looked down at the vast field of lava beneath him. A horrid smile split his lips.

  “He’s gettin’ ready to do somethin’ nasty, Cap’n,” Lil said. “I’m sure of it!”

  “Coop, get that hook planted. Gunner, you get up with Lil and the two of you start takin’ shots.”

  Lil didn’t wait for backup. She pulled the trigger and watched a chunk of railing splinter behind her target. Gunner took a shot that missed by inches but scattered Alabaster with splinters. Still the madman crawled. He seemed unaware or unconcerned about the danger. His eyes were fixed firmly on a lever protruding from the ground beside the ship’s wheel. Lil looked to the Wind Breaker’s own helm and found no counterpart for it. This could only be the bomb release.

  Coop fired his hook and it latched on, winching the ships together more swiftly. This tipped the gondolas even more severely. Loose debris and untethered tools slid across the deck of the false Wind Breaker to tumble into the fiery pit below. A stray bit of rigging snapped free and drifted down along the deck. Alabaster rolled toward it and used it to haul himself toward the helm. Never one to miss an opportunity to gloat, he paused periodically to raise his megaphone from his belt and taunt the Wind Breaker crew.

  “So we meet again. A gaggle of besotted nitwits and the finest mind of this time or any other. And as before we stand at the very cusp of ultimate victory for me and the veritable end of your pathetic lives.”

  Lil and Gunner continued to take shots, but the violent shaking of the two ships and the sharp angle of their decks made a clear shot an impossibility. The two remaining crewmembers, finally having decided the damage to the boiler was no longer the greatest threat, emerged from below decks.

  “Coop, you take the crewmembers,” Gunner said.

  “On it,” Coop said, brandishing his rifle and dashing to the proper vantage.

  Alabaster huddled behind the sparse cover the helm provided, now nearly upon it.

  “As you are torn from this mortal coil like the mindless screeching simians you are, I hope your feeble brains take some solace in knowing you were bested by the very best.”

  Bullets continued to fly, and Alabaster proved frustratingly prudent. He positioned his wiry frame behind the thickly built control mast that held the ship’s wheel. He wouldn’t be able to pull the lever without exposing himself for attack, and as the two ships winched closer, their motion became more synchronized and thus the shots of the Wind Breaker crew more accurate. He held his ground and waited as the Wind Breaker and false Wind Breaker crew exchanged fire.

  When the moment came, he was ready. Lil was crouching behind cover. Gunner was reloading. It was a brief window, but wide enough for him to lean forward and grasp the lever.

  “You. Have. Lost!” he announced, heaving his weight against the mechanism.

  After an initial click, rather than the laborious grind of equipment actuating and a massive weight dropping, Alabaster tumbled forward against a lever completely devoid of resistance. It came free from the deck as he stumbled forward and sprawled out. One could only imagine the legendary tirade against fate that was already collecting in his mind, but for the moment he delayed the monologue in favor of scrambling to the shelter of the hatch to the lower decks.

  “Did I miss something? Seems like a great big switch like that ought to make something obvious happen,” Coop said.

  “I’ll tell you what happened,” Lil said. “Nita happened.”

  #

  In the gig room, Nita hung by her knees from the clamping mechanism. She’d been furiously disassembling it, all the while practically baking in the growing heat. Linkages, casings, and dozens of bolts and nuts rattled along the floor, dislodged by her frenzied sabotage. The last piece of the puzzle, a stout cable leading to the clamp’s release mechanism, had taken ages to unearth. The wire cutters were still in her hand when the snipped cable disappeared into the ceiling. Three seconds later and the bomb would have dropped onto her hastily barricaded bay doors, no doubt smashing right through.

  For the first time since she’d started working at the mechanism, her mind allowed the sounds of her surroundings to filter in. Gunshots rang out every few moments. She could hear the distant thump of boots and the shout of angry voices. A battle was blazing on deck. The smaller but far more pressing noise came from the crew hatch. It was a tiny, rapid tap. She climbed the sloping floor and unfastened the hatch. It swung open and released a wave of hot air like the opening of an oven door. An angry, frightened form rushed inside and clung to the side of her head.

  Wink rattled out a message against her goggles.

  It was hot. Wink was outside. Nita took too long. Wink wanted to go home.

  “You and me both, Wink. But until I’m sure they aren’t going to try to get in here and drop this bomb manually, we’re staying put.”

  Wink glared at her. Nita owed Wink good food, too. The Wind Breaker crew all owed Wink good food.

  “Let’s focus on staying alive long enough to get it, shall we? Now quickly, tell me what you saw out there.”

  Lil and Coop were coming. This crew was going.

  #

  The madness of two ships strapped together in an angry, broiling-hot sky cannot be overstated. The sounds of crunching, creaking wood and metal rose to deafening levels. The two envelopes were held tight, spinning turbine blades now and again buzzing against the sturdy cloth of the opposite ship, shearing fresh holes and releasing plumes of phlogiston. There were too many jobs to be done and too many places to look to catch everything that was happening. Lil and Coop ditched their rifles, which would do them little good in close quarters. They climbed up their own deck, jumped the railing, and ran down the other deck. Coop took the wheel and commenced fighting with the controls in an attempt to match efforts with Captain Mack and get the tangled ships moving away from the volcano. Lil moved with care toward, and then into, the hatches leading below decks, cautious of what or who she might find. Alabaster and his crew had disappeared below decks once it became clear their bomb was no longer obeying them, at which point the crew had lost track of them.

  “No, no! Turbines four and five down, one through three up!” Captain Mack bellowed over the din.

  “I’m tryin’, Cap’n! This ship ain’t doing too good. Half the controls ain’t doin’ nothin’ at all.”

  “Then cut or crimp the steam lines. A few more minutes of this and neither of us will be in the sky!” ordered the captain.

  “I’m on it, Cap’n!” Coop said, pulling a knife from his belt and eyeing the hoses running up to the false Wind Breaker’s turbines.
<
br />   “Gunner, how are we looking?”

  “I’m our only lookout and, counting the hole that we blew in the deck, there are three places for people to emerge. If they’ve got half a mind between them, at least one member of their crew is going to get a shot off on one of us before we can take them all out.” He swept his weapon across the deck of the other ship, then slowly raised his eyes. “Oh dear lord…”

  Mack turned. Smoke was rising, and the first wisps of flame licked over the far railing of the ship.

  “That lunatic has lit the ship on fire!” Mack called. “Everyone off, Coop, Lil, Nita, everyone off the ship!”

  “Captain, if the rigging burns through and the gondola drops in—” Gunner began.

  “I know what we’re up against, Gunner. But we can’t do anything if we’ve got people on deck when the envelope lets go.”

  “Throw me a rope,” Coop called, dashing to the railing. “I’m fetching Lil.”

  “You’ve been ordered aboard, Coop!”

  “I know it, Cap’n. But there ain’t no way Lil and Nita heard you. I reckon I’d best deliver the message.”

  “Coop!”

  “Cap’n, you can do what you think you ought to when this is all said and done, but I ain’t abandoning this ship until I know Lil’s got a shot at abandoning it too.”

  “Throw him the line, Gunner,” the captain called, unwilling to waste another moment on the argument.

  Gunner obliged as the captain abandoned any finesse and attempted to haul their ailing duplicate away from the volcano’s mouth through sheer brute force. The two ships veered aside.

  Coop caught the lifeline Gunner threw and deftly looped it around his waist. He yanked the knot tight, pulled out some slack, and drew his pistol.

  The flames reached the nearest of the ropes securing the envelope. Already overtaxed, it snapped within seconds and the whole of the ship pitched backward. The motion threw Coop from his feet and yanked both ships violently. All but the captain fell to the shifting deck. By the time they were climbing to their feet, they found that whatever plan either of Alabaster’s crewmembers had in mind, they’d wisely replaced it with the same tactics favored by rats on sinking ships. They were rushing onto the Wind Breaker’s deck.

  Gunner managed a snap shot that struck one of the men, knocking him from the ship and sending him to a particularly spectacular end. The other managed to sprint across the deck and disappear into the hatch. The presence of a boarder, though, was the third most worrisome occurrence. The greatest concern was the members of the crew currently aboard a burning ship, and the second was the absence of Alabaster himself.

  #

  “Nita!” Lil called, hammering on walls. “You just holler if you hear me! Seems like this ship’s fixin’ to fail us!”

  Lil had spent enough time on a ship to know that if the gondola was hanging at this angle, it wasn’t going to be hanging at all in a few minutes. The sting of smoke also set off alarm bells in her mind. A steam-powered ship always has a bit of a smoky smell, but this was certainly the charred scent of burning deck boards.

  She climbed the slope of the hallway, walking as much on the wall as the floor. Her search had taken her through as much of the cramped interior of the ship as the damage and heat would allow, but she’d been fairly certain from the start that she’d find Nita behind the door now looming before her in the dim hallway. Wreckage blocked the final passage, but she didn’t need much of an opening to squeeze through. After getting snagged but muscling her way by it, she finally reached her destination.

  Lil hammered on the badly damaged gig-room door. “You in there, darlin’?” she cried. “Speak up!”

  “Lil!” Nita called from the other side. “What are you doing here! Get off the ship!”

  “I ain’t goin’ alone. Now are you gonna open this dang door, or am I gonna have to tear it off its hinges?”

  Lil could hear Nita working at her barricade, and finally the door swung open.

  “You just can’t stay out of trouble, can you?” Lil said, climbing into the gig room.

  “It’s gotten worse since I met you,” Nita said breathlessly. “What is going on up there?”

  “Nothin’ good. Holy smokes, look at the size of that thing…” Lil’s eyes widened at the sight of the bomb.

  “I don’t even know what it is.”

  “If Gunner and that chemist of ours have got it figured right, that’s a big ol’ keg of ichor.”

  Nita’s eyes darted about, her brain quickly working through the consequences of the revelation. “No…”

  “That’s about how everyone else reacted. And the bad news, since we don’t want it dropped, is that this whole impostor of a ship is about to drop out of the sky.”

  Nita thought feverishly. “We… we need rope. We need lots of rope. Three, maybe four lifelines.”

  “Plus one for us,” Lil said.

  “And we need to get this hatch open,” Nita said. “Wink! Where did you get off to!”

  We got off the ship! We got off the ship! tapped Wink from beside the open crew hatch.

  “Yes! Go! Tell the captain we need as many lifelines as he can spare.”

  Wink vanished through the hatch before she’d even finished the instructions.

  The pitch of the ship was at forty-five degrees and rising. With each passing moment, more ropes and lines attaching the envelope snapped and unraveled. Nita handed her pry bar to Lil, then attacked the barricaded bomb bay door with the spike of her spud wrench. Lil eagerly levered up board after board.

  “Nita,” she huffed, wiping sweat from her forehead. “What all is in these crates here?”

  “Most of them are burn-slow.”

  Lil gave one of the bay doors a kick and it started to give. “So we’re over a volcano in a burning ship stuffed with extra fuel and loaded with a poisonous bomb. Coop’s liable to have a fit once he finds out we’re the ones having all the fun.”

  #

  Inside the Wind Breaker, Butch stood at the ready for the inevitable call for medical aid. She had bandages and ointments laid out and separated into doses, ready to treat everything from a bullet wound to a burn as soon as someone uttered her name. At the sound of hasty footsteps down the hall, she expected to see a bleeding member of her crew step into the doorway of her galley.

  The figure who stepped into view was someone else entirely. It was the sole surviving member of Alabaster’s crew. At the sight of her, he attempted to raise his rifle, but the cramped space and his rattled nerves made it a struggle, so he abandoned it for his pistol.

  “Hold it!” he barked, weapon aimed shakily at Butch. “You’re my hostage. Your crew is going to take me to safety, understood?”

  Butch placed her hands on her hips and glared at him, treating the threat of bodily harm with the same unshakable attitude of mild irritation that flavored her every interaction. She muttered something in reply.

  “Don’t test me, woman!” the fug person shouted, marching up to her to place the barrel of the gun squarely in her face.

  She was a formidable woman, one could tell that at a glance. But Alabaster’s man clearly hadn’t anticipated just how formidable she was. If he had, he likely wouldn’t have placed his groin anywhere in the vicinity of her knee. The error of his ways became clear in a blinding flash of pain as she leaned aside and delivered the well-aimed blow. His weapon discharged, the bullet ricocheting off a frying pan and embedding itself in one of the tables. Butch grimaced at the loud report and slapped the gun from his hand, then kicked his legs out from under him. He landed on his rifle and struggled to bring it to bear on her, but she placed a heavy boot on the butt of it to pin it to the ground. As it was strapped to the fug man, this pinned him to the floor as well.

  “You’re dead, woman! You are dead! Once I get my gun you are dead!”

  Butch wiggled a finger in the ear that had taken the brunt of the pistol’s sound, then sneered at the fallen man. He
spotted his pistol, just out of reach, and tried to grab it. Butch placed her other boot on his wrist. His eyes turned to her in fury.

  “Do you think I’m afraid of you! I knew what I was getting into. I know about your sniper and those two lunatics. You’re just the cook! Why would I be afraid of you?”

  A rare mirthful smile lit up her jowly face. Though she didn’t speak his language, Butch quite efficiently delivered the answer to that question by reaching into her apron and revealing her trusty meat cleaver.

  #

  Coop dangled beside the false Wind Breaker’s hanging gondola. One hand held him to the line to which he’d been tied. The other held a bundle of four stout lines a half-crazed, patch-less Wink had instructed him to bring. Before him, the bottom of a false gig rattled and thumped until Nita and Lil finally hinged it open.

  “You girls quit dillydallyin’. There ain’t but three bits of rigging left, and the fire’s darn near taken half the ship,” he called.

  “Never mind that, just lend us a hand!” Nita called.

  He swung himself until Lil caught his hand to drag him in. The three threw loops of rope around the bomb. It clearly wasn’t designed to be secured in such a way, but the bolts affixing the trith plates would hopefully provide enough purchase to hold it snugly.

  The ship creaked and shifted, another bit of rigging giving way. They redoubled their efforts, dripping with sweat and wheezing in the smoky, burning air.

  “There. That’s as good as we’re going to get it,” Nita said.

  “I ain’t sure four lines’ll be enough,” Lil said.

  “We only got two more ready, and those’re for you two,” Coop said.

  “Then go get ’em!” she said.

  He swung out and began to climb up the rope to fetch more lines. A slow, ominous creak rattled the ship. He looked up to see the final two pieces of rigging give way. The gondola dropped three yards before the twin towlines stopped it. Now free of the ship and its weight, the envelope rocketed into the sky, tearing free the steam lines and a fair chunk of the upper deck.

  The Wind Breaker’s envelope, already leaking and now tasked with supporting two heavily loaded gondolas, was not up to the task. They plummeted at nearly a free fall. If they didn’t drop some weight, they would all be dragged into the lava below.