She pushed up her goggles, revealing a bit of an inverted raccoon mask of grime-free skin around her eyes, and slipped her wrench into a bandoleer of others. “Captain?” she replied.
“Turbine three sounds like she’s grinding a bit,” he called.
She tipped her head in imitation of his own gesture.
“Aye, Captain. Sounds like she’s picked up a bit of ice. She’ll quiet down once she warms up a bit.”
“Don’t make claims like that if you’re only dreaming them up to keep from having to scurry up the rigging.”
“Captain, I’ll gladly scurry up the rigging if you’ll get someone down here to grease up these bearings and get them back in place.”
“What’re those bearings for?”
“They’re part of the primary linkage between the ship’s wheel and the turbine manifold.”
“And what’ll happen if they don’t get put to bed proper?”
“Once we get to full pressure you won’t be able to steer the ship. Valve three will lock up, the whole system will seize, and the port side of the ship will blow off.”
“… I reckon you’d best be the one to put them to bed,” he said.
“Aye,” she replied, slipping her goggles back on and disappearing below the deck again.
Mack pushed his hand into his long leather coat and tugged a pocket watch from the vest beneath. “Fourteen minutes past,” he muttered.
Stowing the watch, he instead pulled a spyglass from his pocket and raised it to his eye.
“And here comes the crew now. Heaven forbid they show up with time to spare before we shove off.”
Nita poked her head up again. “Are you talking to me, Captain?”
“Just keep at it,” he snapped.
“Aye, Captain. Just a bit more and we’ll be all set.”
He squinted as a figure sprinted along the frosty, crowded pier toward the ship. At a glance one might not know what to make of it. The individual was barely taller than a child and bundled up from head to toe. A bright red stocking cap revealed a flutter of blond hair peeking from beneath it, and a sparkling pair of blue eyes shone in the narrow gap between the cap and the matching scarf wrapped around the rest of the face. The figure wore a heavy leather coat that almost dragged on the ground, its sleeves dangling a good six inches past the hands hidden within. And yet, with barely a distinguishing feature to be seen, anyone familiar with the lunatic moving with reckless abandon across a slippery, rotten walkway thousands of feet above the churning waves would have known precisely who it was.
“Looks like Lil found what she was after,” Mack said.
Lil skipped the ladder dangling from the bottom of the Wind Breaker’s gondola, instead leaping first to the mooring post and then to the mooring line, scurrying up with all the agility of a monkey. As she drew nearer, the eager young deckhand’s voice began to rise above the howling wind and hissing machinery.
“Nita, Nita! They had it!” Lil crowed as she hopped over the railing and scrambled across the icy deck.
She skidded sideways across half the deck and snagged the edge of the opening concealing Nita to keep from flying off the other side.
“I talked to the ol’ coot who runs that antique shop, and he said a fella showed up a few days ago with a big stack o’ books. There was only one copy of this one, so he sold it to me cheap.”
Nita poked her head up and pushed her goggles up again. “That’s wonderful. Usually when something is rare like that, the shopkeeper can name his price.”
“Yeah, that’s what he thought too, but he obviously ain’t never haggled with a Cooper. I told him if there ain’t but one, then he ain’t never gonna sell but one. And if he ain’t never gonna sell but one, he ain’t gonna make much money on ’em anyhow, and since I was the only one lookin’ to buy one, either he gets what I give him or he gets nothin’. He saw it my way after a bit.”
“Lil, Nita’s putting the bearings to bed. You leave her be,” Captain Mack scolded.
“Aye, Cap’n!” she said with a crisp salute. She leaned low and whispered. “You an’ me are gonna read through it after supper, right?”
“Absolutely. I’m looking forward to it,” Nita said, swapping out her wrench for a smaller one and ducking away again.
“Lil, did you get what I sent you for?”
“’Course I did, Cap’n!” she said, clomping to the steps leading up to the helm.
She slid one of the dangling sleeves up to reveal a dainty hand and unbuttoned one of the side pockets of her coat. After a bit of rummaging, she revealed a bundle wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. “Got quite a bit of mail this month, Cap’n.”
“Good, good. Get it down in the galley and we’ll divvy it all up later. Where’s the rest of the crew?”
“Gunner went wheelin’ and dealin’ with our usual guy about the phlogiston. Seems like the news ain’t good on that one.”
“When’s the news ever been good for us?”
“Well, Butch seems happy with what she picked up from the market. Says the food always keeps better when it’s cold. Lots of fresh stuff this time around, not so much pickled and salted. Coop’s found some fun stuff too, I hear.”
“So long as Coop has his fun, it’s all worth it, I reckon,” Mack rumbled.
He raised the spyglass again and spotted a few more familiar figures lumbering toward the ship with a good deal less energy. They boarded one by one, sounding off through a brass speaking tube beside the ship’s wheel to let the captain know they’d arrived.
Nita finished her work on the system and slid the section of deck back into place. Coop, the other deckhand and Lil’s elder brother, made his way to the deck and with Nita’s help unmoored and hauled in the lines. Though he was a good deal taller and lankier than his sister, the family resemblance in both face and personality was uncanny. The stout ropes crackled and stubbornly refused to coil neatly.
“Dang it, I hate the winter,” Coop muttered. “Ropes freeze solid and I can’t hardly do a thing with ’em.”
“Whole ship’s hangin’ kind of low, Cap’n. The envelope’s more white than red. I reckon we better shake some of this ice off if we don’t want to burn up all the extra coal we took on,” Lil said.
“Yep. She’s sluggish.” Captain Mack leaned down to the speaking tube. “Everyone, to battle stations. Stand by to de-ice.”
“Aye, Cap’n,” replied Coop and Lil, scurrying down through the hatch to the lower decks.
“Aye, Captain,” added Nita a moment later after pulling on her plush fur-lined coat.
“Aye, Captain,” added a somewhat intellectual voice from across the talking tube. “Though I would be remiss if I didn’t inform you that the mayor of Lock has gently requested we stop ‘de-icing’ so close to the port.”
“Let me ask you this, Gunner. Does he like the goods we’ve been bringing in from Caldera?”
“He does.”
“And does he like the money his town’s been making by selling them goods?”
“He does.”
“Then until he feels less gentle about it, he’s going to have to put up with how I do business. You about ready down there?”
“Ready, Captain.”
Captain Mack spun the wheel and felt the ship reel ponderously aside, weighed down by a crust of ice several inches thick in places. The turbines spun up, and the wind washed over the ice-laden envelope. Once he was heading head-on into the wind and out over the sea, Captain Mack leaned low to the speaking tube.
“All hands brace for de-icing,” he said. “Ready one and two. Fire.”
On his order, the two angled front cannons of the ship burst forth with a thunderous report. The recoil sent the ship swinging backward and sent a ripple of vibration from stem to stern. The shock cracked the ice away, turning the crust clinging to the deck to powder and shedding vast sheets from the envelope and the hull of the gondola. Like a majestic beast waking from a long winter’s sleep, the Wind Breaker shook off its coating of
white to reveal the gorgeous colors underneath.
Unlike the garish appearance of Alabaster’s vessel, the Wind Breaker was elegant. The envelope was a rich crimson and bore five great turbines of polished brass etched with intricate designs. The gondola was dark-stained oak. Sweeping highlights of gold had been applied with tasteful restraint. Now free of the excess weight, it slipped gracefully through the sky and out over the open sea.
#
Nita Graus wrung her sore fingers as she stowed her shovel. A brief shore leave after a long time at sea typically ended in the same way for all. The crew would gather as soon as their duties were complete to share what they’d learned and what they’d spent their hard-earned wages on in the town. For an airship, though, nothing during the winter was typical. The efficient, albeit bombastic, procedure for shaking off the ice that inevitably accumulated during the time ashore worked wonderfully for the envelope and hull. For the deck on the other hand, it only managed to pulverize the ice. That meant before any leisure time, they had to clear it all off the old-fashioned way: shovels and elbow grease.
Two long hours of scraping, sweeping, and heaving ice and slush overboard finally finished the job. Nita had the enviable permission of getting down off the deck a minute or two before the others, but it was for the unenviable reason that her shovel had to instead be put to work shoveling coal into the boiler. It traded the bitter cold for stifling, humid heat. Such a harsh swing in such a short time did curious things to the anatomy, not the least of which was cause a sharp stinging pain in her extremities for the first half hour after she was through, and almost comically frizzing her hair.
She reached the galley just as the rest of the crew filed gratefully in for a well-deserved meal.
“I swear that ice gets heavier every time,” Lil muttered wearily, shuffling up to join Nita at the counter at the front of the galley. “I can’t hardly lift my arms.”
The bulldog of a woman behind the counter set out a row of mugs and muttered something in a language Nita had yet to hear named. Butch, despite Nita’s expectations, was one of the finest cooks and most able medical practitioners she’d ever had the good fortune to meet. She was also quite sweet, though she’d never seen fit to let her face know. With her jowly frown and formidable physique one would imagine Butch to be tough as nails and mean as sin. In reality she was only the former.
“I can vouch for Lil, Butch. She has been lifting with her knees. It’s just awful up there lately,” Nita said.
“Yeah, see?” Lil said. “I don’t always ignore what you tell me. Just most of the time.”
She snagged the first two cups Butch filled and handed one to Nita. Lil downed hers in one long guzzle, while Nita sipped her own. It was a warm spiced cider, the sort of drink that felt like a glorious fire burning down one’s throat to chase out the cold.
“Mmmm… I swear, Butch, this cider is the only thing that’s kept me alive through his wretched winter,” Nita said as she took a seat.
“They don’t have winters this bad in Caldera?” said Coop, trudging in after them and taking his mug of cider.
“We don’t have much of a winter at all. Not compared to this, anyway.”
“Honestly, Coop,” Gunner scolded, “how many trips to Caldera have we made during the winter? Have you not noticed they never have snow on the ground?”
Gunner was, as his nickname would imply, in charge of munitions on the Wind Breaker. He was the only member of the crew to receive a formal education in a degree-granting institution, and he seldom missed an opportunity to remind his fellow crewmembers of that distinction. They, in turn, seldom missed the chance to remind him that his college education hadn’t kept him from blowing off several fingers over the course of his career, nor had it kept him from regularly singeing off his eyebrows. He was skilled with explosives and firearms, but skilled and safe didn’t always overlap.
“I figured we always showed up on a nice day,” Coop said with a shrug, as though it was an entirely understandable mistake.
Gunner shook his head. “Each day I grow a bit more concerned to know how frequently my life is in your hands.”
“Just because I don’t spend all my time figurin’ things that don’t need figurin’ doesn’t mean I ain’t good at my job,” Coop said.
Butch set out the first few plates of that night’s meal. This was the one part of her culinary skill set that fell short. Her food was delicious and nutritious. A single bowl of her famous stew was enough to keep the crew working through the sixteen-hour days that were the norm. But she had never really gotten the hang of presentation. Her concoctions all fell into either the “crispy and brown” or the “mushy and brown” side of the spectrum. Today’s meal was a thick soup with a stack of flaky biscuits to go with it.
Coop took his bowl and palmed three biscuits. Before he turned away, a small furry hand with spidery fingers reached out from between two buttons on his shirt and snagged a fourth. The space between the buttons was too small for the biscuit, but that didn’t stop the little unseen critter from trying to pull it inside. Finally Coop took a seat and snatched the biscuit away.
“Nikita, what’d I say about eating while you’re tucked away in there? If I end up with crumbs in my britches just one more time, I ain’t letting you in there anymore.”
Coop looked up to find the rest of the crew staring at him. “I meant my shirt, not my britches,” he clarified.
“And you believe that is somehow better, do you?” Gunner quipped.
Coop unbuttoned his white shirt and stuck his hand inside. A small bulge beneath his shirt stirred, then a creature somewhere between a cat and a monkey crawled out. It had ghostly gray fur, a vaguely bat-like face, a prehensile tail, and cunning hands with a bizarrely long middle finger. The thing managed to be both adorable and hideous in equal measure. It was an aye-aye, one of two on the ship. This one was named Nikita. Ever since her rescue from an unfortunate attempt on her life, she and Coop had become inseparable. It didn’t seem to bother the deckhand.
“All right, all right. Everybody get your plates and settle down,” said Captain Mack as he entered. “I’ve got the wheel propped for course, but I don’t trust these winds, so I want to get the meeting done and my belly filled before too much longer. Everyone present?”
“Everyone except Wink,” Lil said, loading up two bowls and plopping down at one of the bolted-down tables beside Nita.
The captain tilted his head up and bellowed. “Wink! Get down to the galley, now!”
In moments a second aye-aye came skittering through the door and climbed up to the table beside Nikita. The two creatures were quite similar in appearance, though each had their distinctive features. Wink wore an adorable little eye patch and was a bit larger, while Nikita’s tail was missing a large tuft of fur near the end where she’d nearly had it cut short during her final moments under the care of her prior “employers.” It was also notable that while Nikita’s face was perpetually timid when she wasn’t tucked away inside Coop’s shirt or jacket, Wink had mastered the art of making his tiny face look positively surly.
Captain Mack loaded up his mug and bowl and leaned against the wall between two of the tables, sipping from each rather than wasting his time on utensils. “Let’s have the reports. How’d everyone do? Gunner?”
“Not much good news I’m afraid. I got three canisters of phlogiston, and not one of them is completely full. All told we might have two full ones if we married them up,” Gunner said.
“Blast it, why didn’t you get more?”
“There wasn’t any more to be had! You know as well as I how much the fuggers have squeezed off the supply. I only got the third canister by underscoring how we were the crew who took down the dreadnought. If it wasn’t for our reputation, we’d have run short of phlogiston a month ago.”
“How do we look on the inventory?”
“After that clash with the wailers we were down to six canisters. This brings us to about eight. At the rate we’ve been los
ing the stuff between new gashes and pinpoint leaks, I wouldn’t give us more than two more months of staying in the air if we don’t find a steady supplier.”
“What about the rest?”
“Coal isn’t a problem. Our stores are brimming with it. We’re getting low on burn-slow again, but there’s a bit more of it back at the stash. Ammunition is plentiful. As a matter of fact, our munitions supplier threw in an extra case of packed charges and told us to ‘down some of them fuggers for me.’”
“We’re not in the business of killing, we’re in the business of trade.”
“That’s not how most of Rim sees it these days.”
Mack drained his mug and set it down to free up a hand for biscuits. “Anything else?”
“I was able to find a lens that might work for—”
“I’m not interested in that gadget of yours, Gunner.”
“Captain, you saw what it did to that scout’s envelope.”
“I also saw it burn through enough phlogiston to keep us aloft for weeks. Like I said, we’re not in the business of killing, so set it aside. Coop, how about you?”
“Spent some time in the tavern,” Coop said.
“That’s nothing to brag about, Coop,” Lil said.
“I reckon it is something to brag about, Lil, on account of what I heard while I was there. You now Johnson? Fella with the three teeth and the crooked nose? Anyhow, he said he had some sort of new stuff. Better than phlogiston. Said he’d sell me the recipe if—”
Captain Mack rolled his eyes. “You didn’t pay him nothing, did you?”
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