Diego and the Rangers of the Vastlantic

by Armand Baltazar

  “There’s no need to kick things,” Ajax’s voice called from somewhere behind the turbines.

  Diego jumped. He’d assumed he was alone.

  Ajax appeared at the top of a catwalk, pausing to lace his boots.

  “You sleep down here?” Diego asked.

  “I find the sound peaceful. Can’t stand all that silence topside.” Ajax slid down the staircase railing. “Go clear your head. And by that, I mean go get my tool kit from the barge. It’s by that odd red robot. I was trying to decipher how it was constructed. Whoever built that sure had a unique style.”

  “Huh, I’ll have to check it out,” Diego said.

  Diego headed topside and made his way aft. A rope bridge connected the ship to the barge. It wobbled and bounced as he crossed. He was halfway there when he spotted Lucy and Gaston picking through a pile of scrap metal not too far from Redford, chatting and laughing. Diego jumped down to the barge and gave them a wide berth. He circled around behind Seahorse, reaching Redford without them seeing.

  Diego patted Redford’s shoulder affectionately. “How you doing, big guy?” he asked. “You didn’t happen to see a yellow toolbox, did you?”

  Diego searched through the disorganized piles of scrap. He could hear Lucy and Gaston rummaging around on the other side. They were looking for parts to fix something on the bridge, but Diego couldn’t care less. He didn’t know what bothered him more, hearing Gaston’s lame jokes or Lucy’s fake laughs.

  Finally, he spotted the toolbox in the shadow beside Redford. He bent to pick it up and froze. A few feet behind the toolbox was a boxy device. Diego recognized it in an instant: a generator. Just like what the captain had tasked him with building. This must’ve been the one he was making the replacement for. Maybe he’d intended Diego to find it. Who knows why it doesn’t work? At least if I copied this, I’d have a chance, Diego thought.

  He wondered if the Maker’s Sight would work now. He placed his hands on the generator housing and closed his eyes, trying to clear his thoughts, trying to see the way the parts linked together.

  Darkness . . . then a flash, but not of the generator. Instead, Diego saw something he didn’t recognize. A metallic device shaped like an octopus. Possibly Elder technology, yet it was . . . strange. He felt like it was something he needed—

  But then it was gone, and his eyes popped open.

  Diego gasped. Somehow, he was now standing next to Redford, and clenched in his hand was an early-twenty-first-century computer tablet. It was filthy and broken. What had happened? He had no memory of moving, or picking it up!

  The vision of that strange octopus-shaped device was already fading. Diego considered the tablet. Something in the back of his mind whispered that it was important. He tucked the device under his arm, grabbed the toolbox, and headed back.

  Diego spent all day in the engine room. He had no luck with the Maker’s Sight, so instead he labored for hours trying out various possibilities for the generator construction, his thoughts drifting back every now and then to that weird moment on the barge. When he got frustrated, he helped Ajax, who was calibrating the bearings on one of the engines. That work was more satisfying, as Ajax was a good teacher, and it took Diego’s mind off his roadblock with the generator.

  By the time he returned to his and Petey’s room that evening, he was covered in smudges of grease from his head to his feet. He brought the tablet with him, and despite spending a few moments fiddling with it, he’d had no luck making it work either.

  Petey was sitting on the floor surrounded by maps, measuring distances with the sextant. He found Paige lounging on his bunk, flipping through a cookbook.

  “Had to get some time away from Her Highness?” Diego asked, leaning on his desk.

  “Looks like I’m off the hook, suckas,” Paige said. “Look what I found stuffed inside one of the pots in the back of the kitchen.” She held up a book with illustrations. “This tells you how to actually prepare some of that nasty crap in the food stores into something that even you North-side dorks might like.”

  “That’s great,” Diego said.

  “I’m making progress on these charts,” Petey said. “Gaston was a big help with the basics.”

  “I’m sure he was,” Diego said.

  “What, you don’t like him?” Petey asked.

  “Sometimes he’s kind of . . . too much.”

  “He seemed cool to me,” Petey said. “He has all these amazing stories about traveling the world, strange ports, and huge battles.”

  Diego shrugged and sat on the floor. He ran his fingers over the tablet.

  “What’s that you’re fiddling with?” Petey asked.

  “Just something I found,” Diego said, running his finger over the dark glass surface.

  “You know it’s not going to work, right?” Paige said.

  “How do you know?” Diego said.

  “I know that magnetic-field spikes act like intermittent electromagnetic pulses and render tech like that useless,” Paige said.

  “True,” Petey said.

  “Thought so,” Paige said. “Well, you boys can sit around and play with that janky old tablet. The captain wants to show me something that he thinks might make things run smoother in the kitchen, then I’m off to meet Lucy in the galley. Later, fools.”

  “Man,” Petey said as the door closed behind her, “why do they have to make everything so hard?”

  Diego didn’t answer. He fiddled with the tablet again.

  “Hey,” Petey said after a minute. “You all right?”

  Diego thought about explaining that weird moment by Redford. The more these strange things started to add up, the more overwhelming it felt to keep it to himself. And yet Santiago’s words echoed in his head: You must keep this power secret. “Petey,” he said instead, “I don’t know if I can live up to what I said. Balsamic wants me to build this generator, and I spent all day staring at it and got nowhere.”

  “Come on,” Petey said. “You’re Diego Ribera. You’ve built entire robots. You just need a little more time. It’s a lot of pressure. You’ll figure it out. You always do.”

  Diego laughed. “Maybe not this time.”

  “Here,” Petey said. He stood up and tossed Diego a stack of folded clothes.

  “What are these?” Diego asked, sitting up.

  “The captain brought them. Spare clothes. I’m pretty sure they’re World War I uniforms.”

  “Ugh, they reek,” Diego said, holding up the bristly material.

  “Yeah, but our own clothes stink worse,” Petey said, slipping on one of the shirts.

  They had to roll up the pants and sleeves to get them to fit, and once they were dressed, they had a laugh at their appearance. Soon after, Diego settled back into silence, lying on his bunk, listening to the slow rhythm of the sea, worrying about the strange silence in his head.

  Diego and Petey headed to the galley a few hours later. They were about to enter when they heard voices from around the corner.

  Is that the girls? Diego wondered. He moved quietly down the passageway and peered around the corner. Paige and Lucy were standing at the rail outside the galley, speaking in hushed voices.

  “I’m holding up the best way that I can,” Lucy said. Diego was surprised to see her wipe at her eyes. “But I . . .” She held up her hands. “I’ve got blisters everywhere; my back feels like a broken spring. I can’t even make my bed up to the captain’s standards, or lace these silly boots. I’m useless.”

  “Come on, girl. That ain’t true, and you know it. You’ll get the hang of it.”

  Lucy shrugged. “I should be able to, but I’ve never had to do any of these things before, being raised the way I was. And I would have gotten in trouble if I’d been seen doing such things. Now, trying to learn them all at once, while also learning to be a ship’s pilot. It’s . . .”

  Paige rubbed Lucy’s shoulder.

  Lucy sniffed, wiped her nose, and then looked at her hand in disgust. “If my mother saw me lea
king like this, she’d box my ears and ground me for a week. Must maintain proper form and all.”

  “Who gives an Elder rat about proper form?” Paige said.

  Lucy laughed. “You’re lucky. Everything is about proper form where I’m from. She’ll disown me for running off in the first place.”

  “Not if you save your father and brother she won’t.”

  Lucy sighed. “Well, that’s only if my father doesn’t cast me off the second he sees me out here.”

  “They sound mad harsh.”

  Lucy nodded. “You don’t do what’s not done. That’s the Emerson way.”

  “But I don’t get that,” Paige said. “I thought your mother was a suffragette back in London. Wasn’t she doing ‘what’s not done’? Those women went against the times fighting for the right to vote, trying to make it better for our kind.”

  Lucy half smiled. “Mother believed that a woman should have the right to be a whole person in the eyes of the world. But you should have seen Father’s reaction when he found out about that. He snuffed it right out.”

  “And your mom let him do that?”

  “Ours is a different time,” Lucy said. “That’s what she says.”

  “Yeah,” Paige said. “But now is a different time, too. Listen, what happened to your mom really sucked, but you don’t have to repeat your parents’ mistakes. You’re allowed to be you. You can try to change the world. You can even have a black Mid-Time friend. Go for broke.”

  This made Lucy smile. “Why isn’t all this as hard for you?”

  “It is,” Paige said. “But where my parents came from, speaking up and being yourself was all they had. It’s one way that I don’t mind being like them. They had it real hard, but they took care of their own.”

  “I wish I had your parents,” Lucy said.

  Paige wrapped her arms around Lucy. “You got me, girl,” she said. “That’s even better.”

  Lucy laughed but then slumped and started crying again.

  Diego pulled back and tapped Petey on the shoulder to say they should leave.

  “What was that all about?” Petey wondered quietly as they headed for the dining hall.

  “Let’s leave them be,” Diego said. He found himself feeling bad for Lucy and also guilty for how frustrated he’d been with her. She was fighting her own battles in her head, like he was.

  Petey and Diego joined the crew as they gathered in the dining hall, no one saying it but everyone worried about what Paige would produce next. To their surprise, the trays that emerged from the kitchen contained a delicious beef burgundy, fluffy wild rice with roasted carrots and shallots, and even a sweet and satisfying bread pudding.

  “Mmm.” The captain grunted once, and then again, and then a third time, polishing off two helpings as the others were finishing their first.

  “That’s a good sign,” Gaston said to Paige, who was seated on one side of him, with Lucy on the other.

  “Ms. Jordan.” The captain stood up from the table. “That was less terrible than your other meals. Continue to cook in this manner.” He grunted to Ajax, and the two departed.

  Paige looked down at her lap, but a satisfied smile pulled at the corners of her mouth.

  “Great job, Paige,” Petey agreed around a mouthful of stew. “How’d you pull it off?”

  “Because I got mad skills,” Paige said. “But also, it turns out one of those storage containers they had back at Navy Pier was full of fresh food supplies. Captain took me over and showed me tonight. Would’ve been nice if that old bear showed me that sooner.” Paige shook her finger at them. “But nooo, that’d be too easy. He said he wanted to see how resourceful I could be those first nights with nothing but that old garbage!”

  “Mademoiselle,” Gaston said, “for you.” He’d been fiddling in his lap and now handed over his napkin, re-formed in the shape of a swan. “From an ugly duckling on the plate to grace and beauty.”

  Paige eyed him like she was readying a comeback, but then she smiled and took the swan. “Thanks.”

  “What’s with Ribera?” Lucy asked a few minutes later. Diego hadn’t said a word and had barely touched his food.

  “Ah, give him a break,” Petey said.

  Diego looked up. “No, it’s fine. I’m having trouble building that generator.”

  “I thought because of your father, you were some kind of building prodigy,” Lucy said.

  “Well . . .” Diego looked from one face to the next. “It’s fine. Just going to take a lot of work these next couple of days.”

  Gaston got up to refill their water pitcher.

  Once he was out of earshot, Diego lowered his head and whispered to his friends: “Listen, you guys meet me in the engine room later, and I’ll tell you what’s up.”

  “Is this more of your shenanigans?” Lucy said.

  “No, I swear.”

  Lucy studied him. “Very well.”

  Diego felt a rush of nerves. They were halfway through their trials, and everyone was forging ahead . . . except him. The power had deserted him, no matter how hard he tried. He’d counted on the Sight, but without it, what did he have left? His wits, and his friends.

  That would have to be enough.

  His life depended on it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Maker’s Sight

  “What’s down here?” Petey asked. “There’s a bucket of minnows.”

  “I would not get too close,” Ajax warned. He sat on a nearby catwalk, working on a small engine component in his lap.

  “Why not?” Petey said when the water splashed and something rocketed upward. “What the—” Petey toppled backward. A turtle the size of a bowling ball landed in his lap. It clamped down with a vicious bite on Petey’s belt buckle. “Get it off me!” he shouted, slapping at the thick, weathered shell.

  “Beauregard likes you!” Ajax called down, his deep laugh booming throughout the engine room.

  “Don’t hurt him,” Diego said.

  “Hurt him?” Petey gasped. “That’s an alligator snapping turtle. He’s about an inch away from changing my life forever! Get him off!”

  “I’m trying . . .” Diego tugged on the turtle, but Beauregard’s fierce bite wouldn’t relent.

  “He’s not going to let go until he feels like it, or finds something more interesting to bite,” Ajax said.

  “More interesting?” Petey shouted.

  “It’s no use,” Diego said. “You’ve got to give him your pants.”

  “What? The girls are coming!”

  “We’ll get him away from you and then put out some minnows to draw him off,” Diego said. “But we can’t do that while he’s right on your—”

  “All right, I get it!” Petey shimmied out of his pants.

  Diego grabbed the pants by the legs and dragged them until Beauregard was a few feet away. Then he plucked a handful of minnows and made a trail from Petey’s pants back to the tank, but the turtle didn’t move.

  Diego looked up to see Petey standing in his boxers, arms crossed, scowling. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  Diego grabbed a roll of duct tape from the nearby boiler and a length of tarp off the ground. “Maybe you could improvise?”

  “This is not funny. And who keeps a snapping turtle as a pet anyway?”

  “Beauregard is quite a guy,” Ajax said. “He is both ancient and modern at once. Timeless. The world will keep changing, but he will still be him.”

  Diego grinned. Ajax smiled too as a puff of steam escaped from a piston on his mighty arm.

  “By all that is holy!” Lucy threw her hand over her eyes.

  Paige covered her mouth like she was going to barf. “I did not climb all the way down here to see Kowalski in a skirt!”

  “It’s his fault!” Petey cried, pointing to the turtle, who had finally disengaged from Petey’s pants and started gulping down the minnows.

  Petey edged over, grabbed his pants, and darted to the far side of the space. “Now, nobody look!” he shouted, drop
ping the tarp and slipping his pants back on.

  “Are you decent yet?” Lucy asked, her eyes still mostly covered.

  “Yes,” Petey huffed, cinching his belt and then gazing at his damp fingers. “Gross, turtle spit.”

  There was a plunk as Beauregard dropped back into the tank. Diego slapped the floor panel closed.

  “I’ll be going topside now,” Ajax said, eyeing the girls.

  “Thanks, Ajax,” Diego said. Before Petey had come down, Diego had asked Ajax for privacy once everyone had arrived.

  Diego listened as Ajax’s boots clomped away along the catwalk, then up the stairs, fading into the din of the machinery.

  “So, why’d you bring us here?” Lucy asked. She scanned the room, then used a handkerchief to wipe off a railing before leaning against it. “Other than for Kowalski’s striptease.”

  “Shut up,” Petey said.

  Diego sat on the floor, the others joining him. “Seems like forever ago, but the other day was my birthday. And that morning, before we met you in the museum, my dad told me a secret about my family that I’d never known.”

  “What secret?” Petey said.

  “Well, there’s this . . . talent that runs in my family. It’s the ability to visualize how things connect, or how they’re meant to be. So I can see how technology can be put together and made to work.”

  “You mean like drawing up schematics?” Lucy wondered. “Like Leonardo da Vinci?”

  “No, not really like that. More like I can see an image of how things could be, or should look when they’re built. Once I learned that I could do this, I tried it on the gravity board my dad gave me, then on that lock at school, and then in Redford’s locker that night.”

  “That’s how Redford came to life,” Petey said. “I figured you knew where the right thingamabobs were to start him up.”

  “I had no idea, until I saw it,” Diego said.

  “You’re seeing images in your mind . . . ,” Lucy said. “You sound like one of those spiritual mediums we have back in London, communicating with the dead through their crystal balls.”

  “I don’t have a crystal ball,” Diego said. He tapped his head. “It’s in here.”