Salvage

by R J Theodore

  “‘Ow yo lot gon nick a ghost,” Tisker asked, standing back to his full height and crossing his arms over his chest.

  The kid gave Tisker a look like he was daft. “Got ain net.”

  Sophie spun around and grabbed the wrist of one of the kid’s mates who’d thought to circle around and try their pockets while they were distracted. He earned a cuff on the side of his head for his trouble, and Sophie searched him—including the hidden pockets—before pushing him, tripping, back into the crowd of his fellows. She kept the tin of cigarettes she found and pocketed it herself. The kid made no objection. She’d outplayed him fair. He’d probably try to steal it back another block down the street anyway.

  “All right,” Talis said, waving them along. “Enough of this play. We’ve got business.”

  That earned her glowers from the immature squad, but they returned to the alley where they’d been running their drills. Before they got out of sight, Talis saw the speaker earn a physical rebuke from his team. There was a scuffle, a tangle of scrawny limbs. One rat escaped the pile, dropped his shield and pike, and took off with the silver coin, his patrol work abandoned. A week’s worth of dinner, especially of the quality they were likely to get from Paternus Flinch, had nothing on the value of Tisker’s single coin. Shields and sticks dropped to the ground with a clatter, and the others took up a chase. The silence of their pursuit was unsettling. They were young, yes, but there was none of the innocence a child deserved to keep at that age. They were predators, stalkers, scavengers, and the toughest knobs on a stick if they had it out for you.

  Tisker looked sideways at Talis. “Paternus Flinch was never one to let his brood play.”

  “You want me to believe the alleys of Subrosa are haunted?”

  Tisker looked back over his shoulder. “Something’s going on. Maybe there’s a kid took a mind to try and break Flinch’s ranks. Wouldn’t be the first time a rogue orphan was hunted down by their own pack.”

  Talis grunted in response. That was no way to grow up. It was a miracle that Subrosa hadn’t ruined Tisker. But then, he’d had the sense to get away before it could. That wasn’t until age nineteen, she reminded herself. Slave to the crime bosses until he was too old to fit among the other kids. At his age, it was time to either cut out a life as a crime boss for himself or ingratiate himself as a bodyguard. Or bedwarmer. He was an able fighter, but no brute. Hard to develop thick muscles raised on the scraps from a miser’s table. Rather than be dead in a month, or worse, he stowed aboard Wind Sabre. Gods knew why Talis had let him stay on, but it had probably saved his life. There had always been something gentler in Tisker, something completely absent in this lot.

  Ghost, she mused. A good name for a child raised in these streets. Silent, slippery. Always a moment away from death’s door.

  The shipyard was palatial in a city where every inch of space was hard won. Well-built and well-cared-for by Jones and his crew. No loose panels to pry free and steal for other structures. The uniform boards were white-washed, simple, but the silk-smooth surfaces and perfectly fit joins stood testament to the level of craftsmanship that could be found, and hired, within.

  The tickle of sawdust and the stabbing singe of welded iron filled Talis’s nose as they crossed through the wide rolling doors into the front office. The clean smells carried in on a draft from the shipyard’s bay door and chased off the stink of the rest of the city. The lobby was framed out in a blonde wood. The wall panels were as tightly fit as the shop’s facade, but the room had a rustic feeling, thanks in part to the shelves above the lobby seating. Made from the scraps left from plankwork, their undulating live edges overlapped in waves up the wall. There was a carved box of calling cards on the lowest one, but the rest of the shelves were bare.

  On the front desk, a casual stack of worn books was piled near a carafe and a short tower of tin cups with round handles. The desk’s unfinished surface was stained with coffee drips and rippled with the impression of writing by years of heavy hands. To one side of the empty seat, a long-stemmed pipe sat waiting on a cork tray. The smell of old tobacco could barely make a dent in the overwhelming smells from fresh wooden constructions.

  Tisker beelined for the coffee and, at a nod from Talis, poured two. Sophie waved away the offer. She bounced a little on her feet and chewed her lip. No doubt the girl was too excited and anxious to handle an acidic beverage in her stomach. Talis was, too, if she was being honest, but it wasn’t in her character to turn down complimentary coffee.

  A lobby bench with worn blue cotton cushions faced away from the workshop, but the sight of the carved wooden sirenia mounted across from it was nothing compared to the view behind. To one side, a crank-weighted lift was ratcheted several feet off the ground, and a hanging sign marked ‘PRIVATE’ hung in front of the shaft entrance. Talis took the tin cup from Tisker and leaned against the railing, which divided the lobby from the workshop, to watch and wait for the shop’s proprietor. Tisker moved into a position watching the front of the shop and the traffic outside.

  Before her, the ceiling opened to the full height of the work yard. There was more than enough clearance to inflate a quadruple lift balloon. The workshop was on the anti-Nexus edge of Subrosa, and its five-level bay opened over skies empty except for light haze and Rosa’s motes of mica dust.

  Rigging-walks and launching gantries surrounded the central work area, circling the open floor where a half-finished hull sat propped up on shores. Planking wrapped halfway up the sides of the rib frame. Work crews hovered around the belly of the ship, wary gazes turned on their boss at the far end of the yard.

  Jones. A wiry, hardened figure with a crooked right leg and noticeable lean to his spine. He braced himself over a table near the construction area, and a flattened wool cap shaded the hollows of his eyes over a patchy beard that followed the line of his jaw and left his cheeks bare.

  Pencils, rulers, measuring lines, and a tin cup sat to the side of the unfurled paper plans Jones stabbed at with a long finger. In his other hand, he held a jack plane as though he’d been interrupted in his own work to clarify a point for his builders.

  “Blast you,” he snarled, loud enough for Talis to hear across the yard. “The strakes should’ve been switched to the half width for the tumblehome. Where’d you even get more of the full width? You jackals take it from another job’s rack in the lumber shed? You better not have tarred any of that!”

  The man to his side twisted a cap nervously in his hands as he tried to see, beneath Jones’s finger, where his team had gone wrong. His shoulders sagged, and he muttered something. The heavy infill planer was brandished as though to throw at the man, but the cowering figure rushed off and began yelling corrections to the waiting crew in heavy pidgin. They leapt into motion, and the sound of hammers, saws, and sanding took up, reverberating through the space.

  The yard master pivoted on his left foot as if to head back to the task from which he had been interrupted, but spotted Talis leaning against the lobby frame. He tossed the jack plane down on the table and crossed the yard in his uneven gait, his thumbs stuck in the front pockets of his sawdust-frosted trousers.

  “Captain Talis, you lucky devil.” He swung one hand around and met hers. They clasped each other’s forearms and gripped tightly.

  “Hey, Jones. You remember my crew.” She nodded back over her shoulder.

  “Naw, but you and me, I remember.”

  “May the fond memories help you sleep at night, you goat,” she said with a smirk. “How’s business?”

  “Busy. Lots of new entrepreneurs since that fricassee at Nexus, but I didn’t tell you that. How’s Wind Sabre? You treating my girl right?”

  Tisker coughed and shuffled behind them. Talis sighed.

  “The hells you do to my ship, woman?” He crossed behind the front desk and shifted the pile of books, stowing them under the counter.

  “Nexus, like you said.” Tal
is put her cup down for another coffee, but Jones pulled a tall glass bottle from a low shelf and tipped that over it instead. Poured himself one.

  “So. Lost?”

  “Not quite. We know exactly where she is. Frozen cold in the swirling junk below.” Talis raised her cup to the ship’s memory. She had been the ship’s third owner, but Jones made her look new again before she slid off the keel blocks into Talis’s command.

  Jones closed his eyes for a moment, then tossed back the rye whiskey and poured himself another. “Good ship. Nice mods we made on her. Got a lot of business out of that girl’s thinking.” He tilted his head at Sophie who had invented all sorts of fancy cogworks for Wind Sabre and traded Jones license to resell them in exchange for a steep discount on their own installations.

  “She’s got plenty more where that came from,” Talis said. “We’re here to commission you. Need a full complement of refits on the Bone barque that carried us in, a couple dozen twenty-fours, fixed and pivoting, and I’ve promised Sophie you’ll build her something all her own.”

  Jones gave her a hard look and put the bottle away. Drained the cup and refilled it with coffee. “You lost your ship two years ago, you said? How you work without one since? I’m not going to trade a whole barrel and all the cogs for Sophie’s cleverness. This ain’t a charity, woman. You gotta imagine the overhead I pay on this place.”

  “Relax, you old bastard. Our purses are heavy, and don’t tax your old ticker with how.”

  “You are a lucky devil, you know that.” He grinned, picked up the unlit pipe from the desk, and clamped the bit between his teeth, speaking around it while he fished for a match. “All right, you want a ship. Let’s go up to the loft.”

  Jones lived above the office, at the back of his studio. Several easels were set up with roughly outlined plans for ships in multiple styles. Very few customers brought their own designs to build, usually picking what they wanted from the displayed models. Jones had a miniature of every vessel he’d ever built. He made them early in the process to eyeball it for issues then later; when a ship departed his bay, it became a prize in his portfolio and an item on the menu.

  “You should keep these down front,” Talis murmured, walking around the space. She found the one she wanted and took it off the shelf. A tiny model carrack, detailed to the smallest minutia. A rigid lift balloon glazed with matte varnish to appear plump with air, as though the pair of engines were hot and ready to make way. Talis ran a hand down the miniature hull and recalled walking along the railing at midship, open sky around her and nothing but her own business to worry about.

  Jones grunted. “Kids try to take ’em. At least if I keep them up here, I might hear the little rats trying to operate the lift first, and they know they’re cornered if I catch them.”

  Jones cleared off a table, rolling up sketches and sliding them into an aluminum tube. He capped the tube and placed it in a vertical rack with a half dozen others. With a gesture at the cleared table, he invited Sophie to spread out her vellum.

  Tisker waited in the office. No doubt helping to find the bottom of the carafe of coffee. Jones knew him well enough to wager much the same and started up a fresh brew on a hot plate to one side of his studio.

  Sophie smoothed out the finalized drawings she brought and placed Jones’s lead weights in the corners to keep them from curling back up, though they fought her.

  Jones looked over her shoulder and let out a low whistle as the details tickled his shipbuilder’s mind. For a moment there was nothing but the sound of the coffee brewing and the construction floating in over the loft railing. An industrial sewing machine started rat-tat-tat-tatting, chomping on heavy canvas.

  “You half-Rakkar or something, girl? This ship is as mechanical as a wind-up trap.”

  Sophie’s cheeks twitched as she tried to keep the smile in check, but there was no hiding the glow of pride in her eyes. “Been exposed to a bit of Rakkar thinking lately, yeah. But the plans were started years ago. We’ve run into a few situations where these mods would have been nice.”

  “‘Nice.’” Jones pulled the pipe out of his mouth again and pocketed it in his waistcoat. “Nice, nothin. Conveniences, gadgets, ain’t worth the trouble of all those moving parts. That’s too much customization. Impractical. You better rein your girl in, Talis.”

  “Don’t be lazy, Jones.” Talis crossed her arms and leaned against the side of a drafting table. “Or can’t you handle it? Like you said, this is Rakkar-level engineering. We can take it back across the border again.”

  Jones spat on the floor, leaving a puddle of thin phlegm on the smooth, natural wood boards. “Cave dwellers, like hell you are. Not gonna stand for that. Like they even know how to catch the wind. You got offsets?”

  And with that impunity leveled against him, Jones stopped resisting the designs. Sophie showed him her measurement tables, and they haggled over details. He rejected a few designs, redrawing them on a smaller pad until he was satisfied with how their components would fit the ship’s nature and run without, as he put it, ‘rattling loose.’

  Talis sat herself in Jones’s handmade rocking chair and watched them go. She knew the shipbuilder just had to put his thumbprint on it, so he didn’t have to admit the young girl had shown him a thing or two about design. By Sophie’s bearing, Talis knew the girl was getting everything she wanted and didn’t need her captain stepping in to defend against the cranky old shipbuilder.

  “Gonna be a clutch of months to get this done, you know.” He spoke over at Talis, not aware the money was the crew’s shared asset. Thought the captain, as typical in their off-the-books lifestyle, was going to own the boat outright.

  But it was a union, this new ship. She’d captain it. Lead them, anyway. Sophie, Tisker, and Dug had equal shares in it. Couple of years ago, Talis would have cut off her own hands rather than split ownership of Wind Sabre. But a couple of years ago, Sophie’d been ready to set off on her own just to build this new creation, or at least an earlier rendering of it. Couple of years ago, Talis had thought them just captain and crew, but she’d been a holy kind of wrong. The four of them were twisted together in a rope tighter than the individual strands. Over two years, sharing one room, they might have been across each other’s throats with a blade from living in such close quarters. But they’d knitted tighter, been in it together. She knew that now.

  And her crew needed to get out and exercise that strength. “Fine. We’ve got the Bone ship we can run in the meantime.”

  “Another ship you can sink?”

  At Jones’s look, she wished she’d lied and told him she sold Wind Sabre. “It needs those mods done proper.”

  “Bring your ship around to my docks. Crew can do the install tomorrow afternoon. I assume you’re in a hurry like always.” He stood up and stretched his back, rolling his shoulders to counter the forward-bearing posture of working over the designs. He tapped the vellum with the callused tip of his ring finger. “But I tell you what. These designs are worth something. Folks ain’t gonna pay for the whole trussed-up barrel—no one carries about like you lot—but I can parcel these out as add-ons. Upgrades. You let me sell off these plans in my shop, and I’ll cut the install of the full modset to half.”

  Talis leaned back and glanced about the room. Found one of the modification miniatures and spun its tiny ratchet. “Cut it to zero, and you’ll still be set for life. My girl’s plans are worth ten whole ships, never mind a dozen winches.”

  Jones laughed, a bark of disbelief. “I ain’t in the business of patents, and those mods aren’t going to be cheap. I can’t make normal margins on that work until they get popular enough to machine them in quantity. Might be ten years out. Might never take off. But ship upgrades, I can run this shop on upgrades. That’s what keeps the lights on and the landlord’s bite muzzled.”

  Sophie knew better than to let her emotions show, but the pride at Talis’s compliment
was obvious. Always good, to wear pride during a barter. She leaned against the table and tucked the pencil she’d been making notes with over her ear, then started to roll up the plans, including the notes she and Jones had been making on the smaller sheets.

  “You know, that’s a fair idea. Sophie, since we’d be waiting anyway, what you say to opening a shop of your own in Subrosa?”

  “Shut down your game, woman. You’re no shipbuilder.” Jones was prickling, eyeing Sophie’s movements as she retracted the prized designs from reach.

  “I can be any thing I want to be, Jones. You know me. I’m a stubborn bastard.”

  “It’s my quality reputation people come for, and you’re getting a bargain at twenty-five percent.”

  He was backing down. Talis bit down on a grin before her satisfaction set his stubborn streak off again. “Ten percent,” she countered. “If it’s all right by Sophie.”

  Sophie pretended to muse over it, capping the tube that kept her plans safe. “Guess that depends on the price of the build, too.”

  Jones was outnumbered. He was a builder. A craftsman. Talis and Sophie were the merchants. The pirates.

  In the end, they agreed on a fair price for the new construction—slightly above what Talis had hoped for, but far below Jones’s first number. In return, they squeezed him to fifteen percent of the going rate to install Sophie’s own modifications on their Bone ship.

  They left Jones with Sophie’s plans and a sack of presscoins shiny enough to make his eyes water.

  Jones’s work to upgrade the barque set the timeline: a day until they could push off again. They drafted up a shopping list of supplies, and Talis split it between them. Until they were back in the skies, they agreed one of them would bolt themselves inside the ship as guard at all times. Dug would keep first watch, and they left him seated atop the deckhouse, back straight and gripping a new set of knives lightly across his thighs.