Free-Wrench, no. 1
Read Free-Wrench, no. 1 Online
Authors: Joseph R. Lallo
Tags: #adventure, #action, #steampunk, #airships
By Joseph R. Lallo
Copyright ©2014 Joseph R. Lallo
Cover By Nick Deligaris
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Contents
Caldera was a chain of islands
just about as far from any major continent as was geographically
possible, and that suited its people just fine. The prevailing
opinion about their neighboring countries was that they were
vicious, brutish places of savagery and debauchery. A long stretch
of choppy sea between them made for good peace of mind. As the name
would suggest, Caldera wasn’t so much an archipelago as a set of
volcanoes that one by one peeked their heads up out of the sea
floor to see what all of the fuss was about. This, too, suited its
people just fine. It gave them an abundance of free heat. Combined
with sea water, that created plenty of steam, and steam was what
made the world go round.
The largest island was called Tellahn, home
to both the mightiest volcano and, where it met the sea, the
largest steamworks in the whole island chain. The East Seaward Hub,
as the massive facility was called, was a bustling hive of activity
day and night. It supplied the bulk of the power for the island and
sat at the heart of a cluster of factories and facilities that did
the dirty work for the whole of the nation. The steamworks was an
intricate knot of pipes and valves, perpetually muggy, soot
covered, and reeking of sulfur. It was as close to hell as most
Calderans could bear to imagine, but to a rare and precious few it
was paradise.
Two such workers toiled in a claustrophobic
hallway near the third of ten boiler chambers. Intended for pipes
rather than people, little care had been put into making it
hospitable. What small amount of light there was came from the dim
blue flames of gas lanterns dangling from the belts of each worker.
The walls had the texture of a cheese grater, still jagged from the
day the tunnel had been roughly carved through the lava rock.
Making it even more treacherous was the walkway, which was a warped
catwalk of oiled wood. The only thing to grab on to, should a
worker become unsteady, was the unforgiving wall or the
scalding-hot steam pipes. Needless to say, a wise steamworker
quickly learned to step lightly and surely and wore thick gloves
just in case.
“Keep your eye on that meter, Nita!” cried
the foreman, a stout man with his face hidden behind a pair of
brass goggles. “It’s running a bit high.”
“I see it, Marcus,” she said, pulling her
gloves tight and adjusting her own goggles. Even with lenses
carefully designed to keep from fogging, the moisture constantly
built up. “I don’t like the way these pipes are shimmying
either.”
As rare as it was to find someone willing to
go to work in the steamworks every day, Amanita Graus was rarer
still, a
woman
willing to do so. She’d been working at the
steamworks since her seventeenth birthday, and in the three years
since then she’d proved herself to be an asset. In most situations
it might have been difficult for a woman to find a place among the
primarily male workforce, but, truth be told, the steamworks was so
short on staff they were happy to have anyone willing to take up
some of the slack. She currently worked as a free-wrench, a laborer
traded between sections and facilities to lend an extra hand where
it was needed. As one of the most demanding jobs they had, it
required a working knowledge in every trade in the steamworks.
“I agree. Inspect the next fifty yards of
pipe toward the boiler. I want to make sure the bypass valves are
clear.”
Nita nodded and got to work. Despite being
the rare female steamworker, she was dressed and equipped as
roughly as the men were. That meant at least one layer of leather
or canvas over most of her body, a pair of chunky work gloves, and
a rugged pair of work boots. To maintain the various-sized nuts,
she wore a bandoleer of assorted wrenches and other tools, and an
array of pouches hanging from her belt, along with two holstered
rods. Most men wore a reinforced back-support belt with suspenders
to take the edge off of the heavy lifting so frequently a part of
the job, but Nita had found that a lightly modified corset did much
the same job. The only other feminine touch she’d made to her
equipment was a tasteful little butterfly accent on her goggles, a
gift from her younger brother. The whole of the ensemble was
fastened in place and held together with brass or copper rivets and
buckles, as well as a prodigious number of leather belts.
The senior worker began a new order, but his
voice trailed off as the usual hiss and rattle of pipes, thicker
than his thigh, turned into a worrying rumble. Clumps of the sooty
crust that tended to cling to every surface like frost in the early
days of winter began to shake free as the vibration of the pipe
became increasingly violent.
“Down! Brace for a breech!” the foreman
said.
The man and woman hunkered down with their
backs to the pipes and covered their heads. After a nerve-racking
few seconds of escalating rumbling, a nearby pipe ruptured, sending
a thunderous clap reverberating down the tunnel and throwing the
workers against the catwalk. Steam came rushing out of a foot-long
fault in the pipe, filling the tunnel with a thick fog and a
deafening whistle. Nita fought her way to her feet. Acting on raw
training, she grabbed a wrench and began to tap on the pipe. Since
a good hard rap on the pipe could be heard throughout half of the
mountain, the workers had developed a simple tap code to
communicate. She listed off their status: two workers, tunnel 3A,
major breech, no injuries. As soon as she was through, she heard
the message begin to echo back, a nearby worker pounding it out
again to acknowledge and spread the word. Next she found the
pressure gauge.
“It is still climbing!” she called out on the
off chance that she might be heard. “We’ve got to reach the bypass,
or we could lose the whole boiler and half the mountain!”
She banged out this information as well, then
charged down the tunnel. The nearer she came to the boiler, the
thicker the pipe became, joining with others that branched off
toward other parts of the facility and other parts of the island.
Finally she came to a point where the pipe was half as tall as she
was, with a massive wheel set into it and a branching shunt pipe
leading straight up through the stone above and into daylight. Her
leather gloves sizzled against the wheel as she fought with it,
trying to redirect the steam flow and relieve the pressure. The
shunt was only beginning to sputter with released steam when the
wheel suddenly spun loose, snapped free from its shaft, and
clattered to the floor.
Nita didn’t waste a moment uttering any of
the profanities that flitted through her head. Instead she tugged
at the coils of rope slung across her shoulders and shrugged them
off, freeing the massive apparatus that they held to her back. The
heavy thing hit the ground with a thunk. As heavy as it was, she
always brought it with her. Her very first foreman had drummed it
into her that she would never know what tool might save some time,
save some work, or save her life, so best to bring them all. The
sheer size of it made this tool the only one she’d considered
excluding from that rule. As large as a backpack and made from a
dull purple-gray metal, it looked like the head of a pipe wrench
designed for a giant. Her foreman called it a monkey-toe, and
technically it was a so-called team wrench. Today she’d find out
how well it worked without a team.
She spun the knurled adjustment screw,
sliding the jaws open until they were wide enough to accept the
square shaft of the broken wheel, then heaved it from the ground
and onto the shaft. Two quick slaps to the screw spun it to
tightness. Now for the hard part. Holstered like twin swords at her
belt were a pair of cheater bars. She unsheathed one and slotted it
into a hole on the head of the monkey-toe, then threw her weight
against the freshly installed lever. It didn’t budge, and the
telltale ricochet of bursting nuts and bolts warned her that there
wasn’t much more time to waste. She grasped an overhead pipe and
hauled herself up to plant her boots on the lever and force it with
all of her weight and strength.
A grinding sound rattled along the pipe as
the valve grudgingly slid open. Steam began to erupt from the top
of the pipe in burps and hisses, knocking free the bubbling muck
that had filled the pipe in the years since it had last been used.
Three more steamworkers rushed into the tunnel from the boiler side
and spotted her working at the valve. One grabbed the end of her
bar to lend a hand while the other two inserted a bar of their own
into the opposite end of the wrench. Their combined effort finally
wrestled the valve fully open, and a geyser of stagnant water
sprayed from the pipe above, followed by a column of steam that
nearly reached the clouds.
Nita and her fellow workers breathed a
collective sigh of relief and wiped away the coating of gunk that
was still raining down through the opening above them.
“Well,” Nita said, pulling out a clean
handkerchief from a pouch on her belt and wiping at her goggles.
“There’s nothing like a nice, vigorous ending to an uneventful
day.”
Each shift ended with a
short but
very
necessary shower to restore herself to
something resembling a human being. That was the most inconvenient
part of being part of the female staff. There was but one shower to
be had, and modesty forbade sharing it with the men; so when the
time came for her to wash up, she had to wait until it was
unoccupied and post a sign one of the other workers had made for
her stating that the showers were Reserved For Nita until she was
through. It was one of the reasons she’d switched to the less
popular night shift. Regardless of the wait, though, she always hit
the shower. Stewing under a layer of marinated leather while she
was in the tunnels was all well and good, but it was not a pleasant
way to spend one’s leisure hours. Now her shift was behind her, her
sweat rinsed away, and her dark Calderan skin no longer stained
darker by grime and soot. Having changed into her simple white
dress, she was ready to go home.
“Good work today, Nita,” said the foreman, a
man named Stover. “See you tonight?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” she said, hanging up her
gear in her locker. “I’m going to take a few of the coil boxes, all
right?”
Stover gestured vaguely. He was coming off
his own shift, and his brain had punched out at the very same
moment he had. She likely could have asked if she could borrow his
liver and received the same response.
Just inside the walls of the Hub, at the curb
of a cobbled street behind a wrought-iron fence, was a clockwork
contraption called a “winder.” Like so many things in the Hub, it
was an accumulation of turning gears and spinning rods, with a grid
of metal cubbyholes aligned along the front. Each cubby had a lever
at its side, and in the back of the empty ones could be seen a
hexagonal socket slowly rotating. Most of the cubbies were small,
holding palm-sized boxes, but those nearest to the ground were much
larger. She pulled the lever on a pair of the largest occupied
cubbies, sliding out a bracket and dispensing two boxes, each three
inches thick and a foot square with a matching hexagonal shaft on
the front and a handle and switch on top.
“Nita!”
She turned to see one of her fellow
night-shift workers, Drew, rushing over to her. He was in his usual
after-work outfit—a collared shirt, rough black pants, and beat-up
brown shoes—and he carried a large bag of salt on one shoulder and
a canvas messenger bag over the other. Since the steamworks
generated its energy by piping seawater into boilers warmed by the
volcano’s heat, an inevitable byproduct was a copious amount of
brine, which eventually was allowed to dry in the sun to produce
sea salt. Workers were free to take as much as they liked, with the
remainder being sold.
