Free-Wrench, no. 1 (11 page)

Steam is dangerous stuff, and getting burned
once is more than enough to teach someone the value of caution. It
was clear by their deliberate motions and careful avoidance of all
of the direct streams of steam that both Nita and Gunner had
learned to respect it. This being the boiler room, the need for
ventilation to feed the fire and remove the smoke meant that enough
of the steam escaped to keep the chamber from being too hot to
enter, but it was perilously close.

“This is bad,” Gunner said. “This is very,
very bad. The boiler is broken.”

“Well, the room is still intact, and nothing
seems scorched, so the primary workings are probably in good shape.
All of that sharp maneuvering probably just put a bit of stress on
the joints and ruptured a few.”

“What difference does that make? The boiler
is
broken
.”

“Yes, so I’d imagine we should get to work
fixing it.”

“We don’t fix boilers, Ms. Graus. We feed
them, water them, blow out the brine, and replace valves. Only the
fug folk fix boilers.”

“I thought you were the ship’s engineer.”

“This ship doesn’t have an
engineer
,”
he said incredulously. “
No
ship has an engineer. The fug
folk don’t leave the fug for the likes of us.”

“Do you mean to tell me that the fug folk are
the only ones who even
know
how to fix these boilers?”

“As I said, they are the
only
ones who
fix the boilers, period.”

“That’s absurd! What do you do in situations
like this?”

“We pray that situations like this don’t
happen, and if they do, we limp along and hope we get lucky enough
to catch a tow back to the fug.”

“Well, at least that explains why the captain
would have made the armory officer the engineer. It struck me as
rather questionable judgment to assign boiler maintenance to a man
trained to make things explode. Let me see what I can do…”

“Don’t do
anything
!” he said, pulling
her back from the tangle of pipes.

“Why in the world not?”

“Do you know why no one knows how to fix
these boilers? Because the fug folk don’t
allow
anyone else
to fix the boilers, or any of their equipment. If they so much as
suspect you of doing work on their boilers, they’ll refuse to
service them ever again, and you risk losing trade rights with them
entirely. That’s the way things are done out here. This gadgetry is
firmly in the fug folks’ domain. We can patch holes in the gondola
and rips in the envelope, but anything that goes clink when you tap
on it is off limits.”

“You make it sound like these people are your
masters.”

“Look. Life is just easier if we play by
their rules, all right?”

Nita stepped out of the steamy room, already
soaking wet, and pushed up her goggles. “What exactly
do
these fug folk allow you to do?”

“Well, they let us adjust the knobs and such,
and they let us swap out these valves here.” He reached inside and
pulled their only spare valve from a crate just inside the door.
“Everything else is done by them—or else.”

Nita pursed her lips and thought. “Clearly
some of the pipes are ruptured, we’re wasting pressure. If we can
shut off the pressure to the broken pipes, at the very least the
intact pipes will have full pressure.”

“And you can do that just by turning
knobs?”

“Yes,” she said flatly.

“Do it.”

She shook her head and slid her goggles back
on. “You people had the gall to suggest I would be a
liability.”

#

After forty uncomfortable minutes of working
mostly by glove-addled touch in the steam-filled room, trial and
error allowed Nita to locate the proper valves to shut off the flow
to the broken pipes. The air in the boiler room cleared, and it
ceased to feel like a sauna. By then the firebox, with its previous
refueling having been rudely interrupted, was doing little more
than smoldering. Gunner fetched the coal and slow-burn and dumped
them inside. The pair of crewmembers watched as the gauges slowly
rose on the active lines.

“There. That’s about as good as you’re going
to get without doing any real repairs,” Nita said.

“I’ll go talk to the captain and see how this
changes things. I think you’ve earned a few minutes of reprieve. In
an hour, report to the primary deck.”

Nita nodded and made her way wearily out the
door.

“Good work today,” he called after her. “Not
just with the boiler, but with the attack. Good to see you’re
willing to get a little blood on your hands.”

She nodded again, his words slowly sinking
into her mind as she made her way to the bathing room, such as it
was. Lil had given her a quick briefing about what passed for
shipboard hygiene. It involved a bucket of nonpotable water, which,
with the loss of the barrels on the deck, meant she’d be using
seawater that was normally intended as ballast and feed water for
the boiler. Then came the sponge and soap. She tried to put out of
her mind the question of how old and frequently used each one might
be. A few days baking under her leather and canvas work clothes had
left her in a state that could only be improved by whatever
hygienic measures were available. After she was as clean and dry as
she was going to get, she changed into the only other outfit
available to her, the dainty white dress she’d planned to wear home
from work before she embarked on this unexpected adventure. She was
in the process of rinsing out her work clothes with the remainder
of the bucket when Gunner’s statement finally struck bottom.

“Blood on my hands…” she repeated.

That was silly. There wasn’t any blood on her
hands. Gunner had done the killing. And Coop. She hadn’t… no. There
was one, wasn’t there? When she’d tangled up the final craft, one
man had fallen. But that was self-defense. All of it was
self-defense. She hadn’t done anything to provoke those attackers,
and she certainly couldn’t have reasoned with them. Still… she
had
taken a life today. And it bothered her. Not that she’d
done it, but that, until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to her to
feel anything but relief at having done it. She was supposed to be
civilized. Civilized people didn’t revel in the excitement of
life-threatening situations. They didn’t look back upon what had
happened on that deck and admit, even grudgingly and only to
themselves, that parts of it had been fun. Of course civilized
people, as she’d been taught to define the phrase, didn’t fly
through the sky in wondrous machines. They didn’t concoct new types
of fuel that let them cross whole oceans. She shivered at the
breeze in a dress that wasn’t quite adequate for the chill and wind
of high altitude and wondered if maybe the time had come to update
her personal definition of civilization.

Her work suit hadn’t dried
yet when the time came to meet with the captain, so she reluctantly
made her way to the upper deck in her dress. For better or worse
the ship wasn’t moving as quickly as it might, so the wind wasn’t
quite as vicious as it had been on her previous visits. It still
required her to hold her hands strategically and angle herself with
care, lest an errant gust give her crewmates a show. She made her
way toward the bow of the ship, taking a wide detour around the
wailer craft that was still lying on the deck.

The captain stood at the wheel, and the
entirety of the crew gathered around him. Coop seemed none the
worse for wear. He hadn’t even felt it necessary to change out of
his torn and bloodied clothes. The slice through the sleeve of both
his coat and shirt revealed a lightly stained bandage. Butch was
muttering something unrecognizable, clucking over her patient it
seemed, as he filled the breaks in her ranting with scolded
assurances.

“I know, Butch. Don’t lift nothing heavy with
that arm for a few days. And drink lots. I’ll do that too,” Coop
said, like a schoolboy enduring a long good-bye from a fretting
mother. “Oh, look, Nita’s here. We can get started.”

“I’m sorry, am I late?”

The captain pulled a pocket watch from his
vest pocket.

“Not quite late, Ms. Graus, but not early,”
he said, clicking it shut.

“Look at you, all dressed up in your finery,”
Lil said. “That’s more what I’m used to from you Calderan
folk.”

“My only other clothes are still wet.”

“You gotta let me try that on once. How come
nobody ever brings a dress like that to trade?” Lil said.

“Because we don’t never get no girls doing
the trading,” Coop said.

“I know that. You think I don’t know that? It
was one of them… what do you call it? Rectory-ical questions.”

“What’s church got to do with it?” Coop
asked, scratching his head with his good hand.

“I think you meant rhetorical,” Nita
said.

“Is that the one you ask but you don’t want
no answer?” Lil asked.

“Yes.”

“Right, I was askin’ one of them.”

“Now why would you want to ask a question but
not want no answer?” Coop asked.

“To make me look smart, stupid.”

“Let’s get down to business!” the captain
growled. “Ms. Graus’s tinkering has got two of our turbines working
at full strength, which is a damn sight better than they’d been
doing, but still not good by any stretch. I’m bringing us down to
the surface to take on water for the boiler. We’ll drop a buoy to
get an idea of our speed right now, but if I’m worth my salt, I
figure we’re not going more than twenty knots.”

“How does that compare to our proper speed?”
she asked.

“With a stiff tailwind,
Wind Breaker
can give us fifty knots. That’s just about what I was figuring on
us managing in order to hit Keystone in two days. There’s better
than two thousand miles between us and our intended port of call.
At this speed, we’re looking at five days. We were long overdue for
a resupply even before we took on a new crewman. In a pinch the
food will last, and we can always try for some fish if we come up
short. With only two turbines running we can stretch the fuel. The
problem is water. We lost a lot of fresh water in the attack.
There’s a bit of ale left, and we might be able to manage an extra
day on the drippings we can get out of the steam lines, but we
don’t have the fuel to waste to boil up enough to be safe, and I
don’t like the idea of coming up more than a day short on water
with so much chance for more trouble before we make landfall.”

“You figure we’ve got to stop by the Lags?”
Coop said.

“That’s what I figure,” the captain said with
a nod.

“Would those be the Lagomoore Islands?” Nita
asked.

“That they would. Though they’ve changed a
bit since you Calderans closed your borders.”

“I would imagine so. They weren’t populated
back then.”

“They aren’t populated now, either. At least,
no more than a piece of meat is populated by maggots after a few
days. A couple of enterprising traders took the place over, put up
walls around all the springs, and otherwise found ways to wring a
living out of the place. Resupplying there will cost us dearly, but
it beats drying up, and it’ll give us a chance to get a patch on
that hole up there. All this presents a problem for you though, Ms.
Graus.”

“Why?”

“Getting down into the fug to talk to the
fuggers isn’t the sort of thing you do all willy-nilly. It has to
be planned weeks in advance. Before I even leave on a Caldera run,
I make sure to set one up. It is scheduled for four days from now.
With three busted turbines, we ain’t gonna make it, and this
resupply trip is going to cost us another, or just shy of one.”

“How long will it take to reschedule it?”

“Can’t imagine it will be less than four
weeks. Most likely you’ll either be back in Caldera by then, or
else you’ll be with us for another month waiting for it.”

“No,” Nita said, anxiety in her voice, “that
won’t do. My mother—”

“I know it, ma’am, but it can’t be
helped.”

“It
can
be helped. Just let me fix the
pipes.”

Captain Mack turned to Gunner.

“I told her, Captain. No repairs on the
boiler.”

“Let me just do temporary ones then. I’ll
remove them when we’re closer to shore.”

“Absolutely not. They’ll know.”

“I assure you I can do it in a way that won’t
show.”

“Doesn’t matter. They know everything that
happens out here. They probably know we’re here jawing about it,”
Coop said.

“That’s silly. How could they?” Nita
asked.

“Doesn’t much matter how they know. They just
know, and I’m not gambling that this is the time they aren’t paying
attention.”

“This has gone from a bizarrely restrictive
business arrangement to pure superstition.”

“I don’t mind a bit of superstition if it
keeps my ship and its crew safe. And I’ll thank you not to question
any more of my orders,” he grumbled, with the hint of a threat in
his voice.

“Well… I…” Nita grasped at scraps of ideas.
“At least let me look at the damage a bit more. If I get a feel for
the way the system is laid out, maybe I can find a way to reroute
some pressure to the remaining turbines.”

The captain gave her a hard look, then turned
to Gunner. “Gunner, show Ms. Graus everything she asks to see, and
make it clear to her
exactly
what she can and can’t do.” He
turned back to Nita again. “I’m giving you an awful lot of rope,
Ms. Graus. Enough to hang yourself and the lot of us. So do us all
a favor and don’t go tying any nooses.”

#

In minutes, Nita had changed back into her
work suit. It may still have been wet, but she’d rather be damp and
have all of her tools handy than dry and trying to get real work
done in a dress. Now that she wasn’t constantly avoiding streams of
dangerous steam, tracing out the operation of the boiler was at
least possible. One thing was certain from the first hard look at
it; the thing was needlessly complex. There was undeniable genius
in its design, from components that were more intricate than she’d
ever seen before to linkages that were nothing short of inspired,
but for every work of industrial art there were two unnecessary
features. Pipes traced nonsensical routes, folding back on
themselves and tucking themselves far out of the way. Manifolds of
intimidating complexity split pipes only to join them together
again. Scores of extraneous components were placed in just such a
way that removing or breaking even one of them would severely
impair the function of the whole system. In short, it was fragile
by design, intended to scare away would-be engineers and remain
just
sturdy enough to get back to the fug to be serviced
regularly by its creators. It was a testament to the brilliance of
its designers that, despite the purposeless complexity, it managed
to be easily twice as efficient as the boilers back home.