Free-Wrench, no. 1 (17 page)

“He can’t do this!” she cried as she was
pulled with deceiving strength back to the tram.

“He can do whatever he wants. Now shut your
mouth before you make things any worse! Go back to the ship. I’ll
be back in an hour and a half, and we will discuss this matter
further.”

Her thin escort, nearly crushing her with
vicelike fingers that looked as frail as eggshells, herded her into
the tram.

“Please! You can’t do this! Do you know what
I had to do to
get
here?”

“The matter is closed,” he said. His tone was
gentle, the voice an adult reserves for explaining to a child
something that someone so simple could not possibly understand. “It
was closed before you arrived. It was closed before we ever knew
your name. What you were seeking was never a possibility. I’ll send
you on your way now. The door will open when you reach Keystone
again. Good day, madam.”

He pushed her with just enough force to send
her backward into the tram, shutting the door before she could
recover. And so she was sent on her way. After a few days that had
felt like a lifetime, her great gamble had ended in failure in the
blink of an eye.

The ride to the surface
was the longest, loneliest time of Nita’s life. The weight of all
that she’d done, the cold realization of the risks she’d taken and
the decisions she’d made, pressed down on her like a lead weight.
She had left her life behind, gone where her countryman had wisely
chosen and warned her not to go. In doing so, she had taken her
life into her own hands… and she’d had a hand in taking the life of
another. She’d earned the trust of a group of scoundrels and just
as quickly squandered it. Now she was left at their mercy and with
nothing to show for it but regret.

By the time the tram broke through the
surface of the fug, the sun had finished slipping below the
horizon, and the starless night was upon her. She trudged from the
tram when it pulled up to the catwalk. The fug poured out around
her, exposing her to fresh air once more. The mountain air was
cool, but compared to the chemical chill of the fug, it was almost
muggy. She pulled free her mask and, for the first time, caught an
unfiltered whiff of the stuff that still clung to her clothes. It
was horrid, overpowering. She could compare it to nothing in her
life to date. Somewhere between strong solvents and burning weeds,
but each to a depth and scale that almost caused her to wretch.

She wandered back to the closest thing she
had to a home for thousands of miles, the trusty
Wind
Breaker
, and climbed aboard. Her feet had barely touched the
rungs of the dangling ladder when the distinctive sound of a gun
cocking came from above. She looked up to see Gunner, apparently
the one who’d drawn the short straw and remained behind to defend
the ship.

“Ms. Graus. I’d suggest you announce yourself
next time,” he said, easing down the hammer of the pistol. It was
yet another fresh one from his collection, this one with a flared
end and a barrel as wide as that of a shotgun.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered, continuing up the
ladder. “And you may as well call me Nita.”

“Oh? Why the change of heart?”

“Because I think your first impression of me
was a sound one. I was a liability after all.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said, lending a
hand and hauling her up the last few rungs. “You’ve proved to be
versatile, at the very least.”

“Perhaps too much so.”

“You didn’t.”

She nodded slowly.

“Where? I scoured that boiler! Nothing had
changed!”

“It was up on the deck. I didn’t… I…”

Gunner’s fingers tightened at the grip of his
weapon, and he slowly eased the hammer back again. “Where is the
captain?” He uttered the words almost as a demand, as though Nita
was holding the captain hostage somewhere.

“He’s still talking to them.”

Her crewmate’s face was a mask combining
concern and fury.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“What happens now is I make damn sure that
you don’t go
anywhere
or touch
anything
until he
comes back.”

“You aren’t going to kill me, are you?”

“I won’t do
anything
I’m
not
ordered to do, and I will do
everything
I
am
ordered
to do. Because that is what a crew does. It obeys its captain.”

Over the next hour, the crew returned one at
a time, calling out to Gunner and climbing into the gig room to
find Nita at gun point. The looks in their eyes were like daggers
to her heart, but what hurt most was that not a single one of them
needed to be told what was happening, nor what had happened. They’d
expected this from her, regardless of what they hoped. The only one
who spoke was Lil, and only a single word.

“Why?” The word wouldn’t have sounded any
different if she’d spoken it with a knife sticking out of her
back.

Almost precisely two hours from when the
first tram had picked up Nita and the captain, the final tram
dropped him off. He climbed the ladder to find Gunner and Nita
still in the gig room.

“I am going to my quarters,” he said. “Nita,
follow me. The rest of you will have your orders soon enough.”

Nita took the long walk to Captain Mack’s
quarters in silence. When they reached the door he pulled it open
and marched inside. She stepped in after him, and before she closed
the door Wink hopped through and scampered up to his net hammock.
The captain eased into his seat.

“Sit,” he said.

“Captain, I—”

“Sit down and hold your tongue. I’ll speak to
you when I’m ready, and until I do, you will keep quiet. I want
answers and nothing else. There ain’t nothing to defend. These are
orders, Ms. Graus. Long past time you started following them.”

He fished a fresh cigar out of its jar and
lit it, finally chasing away the chemical stench of the fug that
still faintly clung to him. After two more contemplative puffs he
blew out a cloud of black cherry smoke.

“It was at the Lags,” he said. “When it was
you and Lil. That’s when you did it. You looked me in the eye and
you lied.” He puffed again. “There’s something to be admired there.
Ain’t no one but the missus put one past me like that in a dog’s
age.” Another puff. “Tell me. Did you think about what this would
mean for Lil?”

“Lil had nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, she did. You were her responsibility.
Didn’t think of that, I take it? Not surprised. Doesn’t seem to me
you do a lot of thinking when it doesn’t suit your ends.”

“Captain, it was a mistake—”

“A mistake. That’s what you call a mistake in
Caldera, is it? You repaired something you were ordered not to. You
lied to me and my entire crew. You tinkered with this ship, which
is our livelihood and may as well be our lives, and you did it
because you believed after just a few hours among us that you knew
better than any of us how
our
world worked. That’s not what
I call a mistake. That’s what I call arrogance. Irresponsible,
childish arrogance. It’s cost me a dear price, and I mean to see it
does the same to you.”

“What did the fug folk demand of you?”

He took another slow drag on the cigar and
released it with a breath. “Everything. They knew how much we had,
and with the usual fleecing they give us plus the cost of the
repairs and the ‘small’ fine for your disobedience, that leaves us
flat busted. They didn’t ruin us. You don’t slaughter a sheep for
its wool, but everything we done for the last few years has been
for nothing.”

“I’m so sorry. Captain, I promise you, when
we return to Caldera I’ll give you everything you need to replace
what was lost.”

“You presume an awful lot to suggest you’ll
get the opportunity. Some debts can’t be paid with a pile of coins.
Some debts require blood.”

Nita took a deep breath. “You seem to be a
reasonable man, Captain. What would blood solve?”

“It would make an example of you, Ms. Graus.
This is a ship. I don’t give a damn about how many minds a ship
has, but it can only have one will. The will of the captain. Right
or wrong, I can’t have disagreement. You saw it during the wailer
attack. We work as one, toward one goal. If there is doubt or
dissension, the ship will fall apart.”

He puffed at his cigar for a few more
moments.

“So what will you do?” she asked.

“I ain’t decided yet, and you don’t want to
rush me. Not so soon after dealing with the fug folk. Them folks
boil my blood.”

“May I ask you a question?”

“Seems you might not have too many more
chances. May as well.”

“Do you follow their rules because you want
to or because you have no choice?”

“I got no problem with following the rules of
people I respect… but that ain’t the case with these folk. They got
us under their thumbs, and they know it. You think it’s bad what
they’re willing to do to your mother? That ain’t the half of it.
They’ve sat idle while whole cities starved because their ships
were too beat-up to pick up supplies, and the fuggers wouldn’t
budge on the price of repairs. They’ve choked off shipments of coal
to places in northern Circa because they found out the locals were
mining their own seam to top off their supplies. The fuggers demand
reliance and will punish anything that threatens it. Most times I’d
say they want profit above all else, but sometimes it seems to me
they want one thing even more. Power. Letting your mother die.
Letting them folks in them cities die… They throw away plenty of
good business just to make sure we know who’s in charge. If I could
get out from under them, I’d… well, best not to say what I’d
do.”

“So it all comes down to whoever has been
giving them their information.”

“No one is telling them. They just know. And
you aren’t earning any points suggesting one of my crew would have
ratted the rest out.”

“I apologize. I suppose there wasn’t any
member of the crew to see what
I
did either… except…” She
turned her eyes to Wink. The creature huddled backward under her
glare. Her mind began to flood with days of observations slowly
connecting. “Captain, when they gave you the figure of what you’d
owe, did they include what I had in my bag?”

“The pendant and the trith coil. What I’d
included as your intended payment.”

“But not anything else?”

“No.”

“Why not? Surely if they knew you had it to
spend they would have required that of you as well. Particularly
knowing that it was
my
property, that of the
perpetrator.”

“What are you getting at?”

“They didn’t ask for it because they didn’t
know about it. I seldom let the bag out of my sight. None of the
crew knew how much I had.” She opened the bag and pulled out the
full-size coil box, slamming it on his desk. “This is made mostly
out of trith. Unless I’m wrong, this should have been worth more
than any single thing on the ship. If they just magically knew
things, they would have demanded it, wouldn’t they?”

The captain didn’t answer immediately, his
mind briefly preoccupied by the immense wealth that had just been
dropped in front of him. “This was what you were going to use to
pay for the drug?”

“If they would have given me the chance.”

“I don’t know a fug person who wouldn’t step
over his own mother to get that much trith.”

“So they clearly don’t simply
know
things. Someone must be telling them.”

“But no member of my crew would ever do
that.”

“How much do you know about Wink and his
kind?”

“What’s to know? He’s an inspector. Maybe not
the best, but the best one I’ve had.”

“But how intelligent are they?”

“Intelligent enough to take a simple order
and to know a good board from a bad one.”

“What if they were smarter than that?” Wink
dropped down to the floor and hopped to the door, attempting to
haul it open. Nita braced it shut with her foot. “I said that there
was no one to see me do the repair, but Wink was there the whole
time, watching me. He’s been watching me since I arrived.” Now Wink
started to chew at the door, chisel-like teeth carving easily into
the wood. “And he seems to be awfully interested in getting away
now that I’ve started talking about his potential treachery.”

The captain stood, leaned across his desk and
caught the creature by the tail, raising it up and dropping it to
the desk, where his other hand held it.

“I’ll allow that he’s acting a mite odd at
the moment, but smart as he might be, the little thing can’t talk,
and even if he could, he never meets the fug folk face-to-face.
They have me take him off the ship when we send it down for
repairs.”

“You don’t need to speak—or even meet
face-to-face—to communicate, Captain. Back in the steamworks, we
worked out a tap code to hammer out messages along the pipes. Wink
does something awfully similar whenever you get close to the fug,
doesn’t he?”

“The strut check…” He looked down to the
beast. For the first time, genuine fear replaced the vague distrust
in its eye. The captain held Wink’s pelt tight and stood him up.
“Let’s just test this. I’ll make it simple for you. One tap for
yes, two for no. Do you want me to give you to Glinda to see what
sort of stew she could make of you?”

The creature’s head darted back and forth,
looking the two humans in the eye. It was telling enough that he
wasn’t frantically tapping his fingers as he usually did when
something had him agitated. He struggled a bit more, then seemed to
give up. He extended his spidery middle finger and gave two
deliberate taps.

“Have you been the one telling the fug folk
about us?”

Wink’s head and ears drooped.
Tap.

“
You little piece of filth!”

“It makes perfect sense. The fug folk
require
all airships to have one, and since they are
inspectors, they get free run of the ship,” Nita said.