Skykeep (26 page)

“I’d rather if you folks put
your
hands up,” Coop said.

“You are outnumbered,” the pilot said.

“Perhaps, but not to toot my own horn too
much, I’d say
you
are outgunned,” Gunner said, clicking back
the hammer on each of his monstrous pistols.

“Plus, we were outnumbered when we blew up
both your ships, too. So just think of what we’ll do to you,” Coop
said, using his free hand to brush some splinters that had dug
their way into his cheek when the scout ship was under fire.

“Be reasonable. You’ve destroyed both ships
that could have carried you out of here. The next ship to come in
is going to be loaded with fug folk. Even if you can hold us at bay
until then, once they arrive you are finished.”

Coop looked to Gunner. “I thought these guys
were supposed to be smart.”

“I suppose no trait is perfectly
universal.”

“… What are you talking about?” the pilot
asked.

“What do you think? That we
walked
here?” Coop said.

On cue, the distinctive five-engine rumble of
the
Wind Breaker
rang out around them, and it emerged from
the darkness, lit by the dying glow of the deflating airships. The
captain appeared, peering over the prow at the half-demolished
remains of what ten minutes earlier had been a tidy little supply
station and two fully operational ships. At the sight of the ship,
both ground crew and their supervisor dropped down, throwing aside
their weapons and putting their hands behind their heads. The pilot
remained on his feet, weapon in hand.

“You boys don’t quite get the ins and outs of
stealth, do you?” Mack called out. “You get what we’re after?”

“I think so, Cap’n, but we might want to have
a word with these three to make sure,” Coop said.

“There’s four of us!” the pilot said.

Coop pointed his pistol at the man’s face.
“Not if you don’t drop that gun, there isn’t.”

In the face of this very important piece of
mathematics, the pilot wisely disarmed.

“Anybody left in them ships over there?”
Captain Mack called out.

“There’s a four-man crew still on my ship. Or
what’s left of my ship. If they survived,” the pilot said.

“Whichever two of you folks is the lowest
ranked, head over to the wreckage and pull out any survivors. You
didn’t kill any of my crew. I don’t feel obliged to take any of
yours. And boys, while we’re here we may as well top off our
supplies. I don’t reckon these boys would want to see us stranded
in their backyard. You boys all right?”

“A few bruises, and I believe I turned my
ankle abandoning ship, but otherwise unharmed, Captain,” Gunner
said.

“Got a few slivers in my face, and it feels
like something’s sticking into me pretty fierce under my jacket
here…” He opened his jacket to reveal Nikita—eyes shut tight and
ears flat against her head—clutching as tightly as she could. “Oh,
never mind that last bit. That’s just Nikita. I don’t think she’s
got a taste for field missions.”

#

Once the remaining crew in the cutter had
been retrieved, remarkably intact thanks to the slow speed at which
their ship touched down, Captain Mack had them restrained and left
Gunner on guard. Coop and Nikita boarded the
Wind Breaker
,
and Wink joined the trio in the captain’s quarters. On other ships
there might have been a captain’s suite. On the
Wind Breaker
it was more akin to the captain’s closet. This was likely the first
time four members of the crew had been able to fit, and that was
only because two of them were aye-ayes.

“All right, Coop. Let’s have it,” Captain
Mack said.

“Nikita overheard a report, I guess coming in
from that cutter we took down. Or maybe going out to it, I don’t
know. It was addressed to Wink. Says it was from Nita,” Coop
said.

The captain’s face didn’t betray any emotion.
He simply accepted the words and quietly considered them. Wink, on
the other hand, perked up immediately. He hopped down to the desk
between the captain and Coop and crept up to Nikita.

Nikita repeated the forwarded report, he
drummed on the desk.

Nikita looked uncertainly upward.

“Well go ahead, little critter,” Coop
said.

Coop said no more reports, she tapped.

“You can report to the rest of the crew. Just
no one else.”

Nikita repeated the forwarded report, Wink
tapped.

And so she repeated the message once again,
verbatim. For some reason, hearing the message seemed to make Wink
progressively more proud. By the time the last piece of information
was repeated, his little chest was sticking out and his head was
held high.

… All other prisoners but one were enemies of
the fug folk. We needed them all freed.

After a short string of numbers and letters,
the approximate coordinates of Skykeep, the message was
complete.

The captain wanted the report meant for Wink,
he tapped out.

“Yes, Wink. That’s what we were after,” the
captain said.

The captain was welcome, Wink replied. He
turned to Nikita. Wink thanked Nikita for the report.

“I do believe this is the least surly I’ve
ever seen the one-eyed bugger. What’s got into you, Wink?” Coop
asked.

Forwarded reports were very important.
Important inspectors got forwarded reports. Wink received a
forwarded report. Wink was important.

“We’ll discuss this whole forwarded message
matter in a bit. But let’s see if I got the gist. Nita and Lil are
locked up in a floating fortress I never heard of. Those
coordinates sound an awful lot like one of Lil’s sloppy guesses. If
I was a fugger trying to throw me off the scent, I sure as hell
would have come up with something that was a little less fanciful
than all that. So I reckon it’s the truth. You see any maps while
you were in that office?”

“Just the old ones they had before the fug
showed up.”

“Any new places marked on them?”

“None I could spot, but once I figured out I
wouldn’t find the Ph’lac’try on the map I stopped looking.”

The captain nodded and pulled open a drawer
beside him. Inside was a bundle of rolled up maps. He picked one
and unfurled it to the extent that the captain’s tiny excuse for a
desk would allow. Then came a compass of the circle-drawing
variety, the stub of a pencil secured in its end.

“We’re here, right around where Crophaven
was. If they built this in what used to be a town, and Fugtown used
to be one too, then let’s assume the fug folk do all of their
building in the carcass of something that was already there. So the
Phylactery is going to be on this map, it just won’t be called
that.” He placed the pivot on Crophaven and began to widen the
points. “About here is as far as a cutter can go on a full stock of
fuel and water.” He drew an arc, then moved the pivot. “This here
is where Lil’s guess puts the place. Which is smack in the middle
of a mountain, so we know she wasn’t spot on.”

“Which means it was definitely her that came
up with these numbers,” Coop said, the weight of anxiety lifting
from him as he spoke. This was the first evidence he had that Lil
was still alive, and to look at him, you’d think he’d received a
handwritten message telling him she was alive and well. “Ever since
she dropped that navigation gadget over the side and you told her,
she couldn’t use it if she was going to be climbing, she never did
get us closer than fifty miles.”

Mack drew a circle around the mountain.

“And she was never much more than a hundred
miles off,” he added, widening the compass for another circle.
“Best guess, then, is that the girls are somewhere in this bit
here.”

The section of the map that fell between the
second two lines and behind the first contained three cities.

“Coyneville…” Mack said. “Looks like the
ground there is all marsh. Not the sort of place you’d want to
drive anchors for them chains she described. Then there’s old Caer
Kaetri… She said there were hounds or some such. Wild hunting-type
hounds. Caer Kaetri is dead center of a plain. I don’t know what
sort of animals are left down here, but if them hounds are hunting,
I have to figure they’ll be doing it in a forest. And Shuttermill
has one. From the name, they probably had a sawmill, too. And if I
remember correctly, that’s where that big foundry used to be.
Pretty much everything you’d need to build floating prison.”

“So that’s where the girls are?”

“Best I can figure. And so long as we fill up
on burn-slow and find at least one more place to soak up some water
along the way, we can just about make it there in two days’
traveling, mostly by fug. Did you say anything to those boys down
there about what you were looking for?”

“We didn’t get a chance to get too friendly
with them.”

“Good. The
Wind Breaker
’s fast, but
the fugger cutters are faster. If they know we’re heading to that
prison, at best they’ll be able to get a message through to get
them ready for us, and at worst we’ll run into a fleet between
there and here. Better they don’t know.”

“But, Cap’n, they know they got Lil and Nita,
and they know we’re down here. Don’t you think they’re going to
guess where we’re headed?”

“I’ll give you three reasons why I think they
won’t. First, there ain’t nothing a fugger loves more than keeping
secrets. They keep secrets from us, they keep secrets from each
other. Maybe it comes from spending all this time down here in the
dark, but they like keeping
other
folks in the dark, too. So
I don’t think they sent out a bulletin to tell every last fugger
who they got and where.

“Second, fuggers think we’re idiots. Every
last one of
them
thinks every last one of
us
is as
sharp as a bag of wet leather. A fugger would rather tear off his
left arm than give us the benefit of the doubt when it comes to
figuring out where they’re keeping the girls.

“Third, and most important, if they guess
we’re heading to rescue the girls, we’re dead and buried already.
And if that’s the case, may as well go on through, regardless. I’d
hate to disappoint the Reaper,” he said. “Get down there and help
Gunner tuck those fuggers away where they won’t give us any
trouble. If he told them what we were looking for, kill them. If he
didn’t, let them live. We’ve a task ahead of us that’ll need more
than a bit of help from the folks upstairs if we’re going to pull
it off. I don’t want to be wiping blood off my hands while I’m
asking for favors unless I have to.”

#

Coop and Gunner tied the captured fug folk
into the most uncomfortable and embarrassing positions they could
dream up, then stuffed the
Wind Breaker
to capacity with
coal, burn-slow, water, and every spare canister of phlogiston they
could get their hands on. While they stocked the ship, the captain
plotted a course. He would work his way to the surface and to a
trade route to the north, following it as far as he could before
ducking back below the fug to approach the prison. The longer they
could go without appearing to be heading toward the prison, the
better, and at the moment, precise navigation was more important
than stealth.

Once the course was set, he bellowed into the
speaking tube. “All hands on deck. We’ve got a riddle, and the more
minds we can throw at it the better.”

He and the crew assembled on the deck a
minute later, including Butch, Wink, and Nikita. Coop had been once
again patched up, leaving very little of his exposed flesh free of
either a bandage or some manner of medical concoction. Gunner had
his ankle bandaged.

“Coop get everybody caught up?” the captain
asked.

“Are we operating on the theory that our two
missing crewmates are being held in a sky prison over the remains
of Shuttermill?” replied Gunner.

“Yes,” said the captain.

“And this theory was devised based in part on
the exceptionally unexceptional navigation skills of Lil Cooper,
given to us secondhand through the minds of a string of lesser
primates?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m all caught up. I just wish I
wasn’t.”

“If anyone’s got any ideas about how to get
done what’s got to get done, then shout them out. We’ll be there in
maybe two days. Whatever we come up with between then and now is
what we’re doing, because I don’t want to leave them girls in that
place any longer than we already have.”

“Well, if I heard correctly, Nita included in
her message the suggestion that
all
of the prisoners should
be freed,” Gunner said.

“That was my understanding.”

“I suggest we start by abandoning that idea
and simply focusing on Nita and Lil.”

“I suggest we don’t,” the captain said. “They
put Nita and Lil in that place because they considered our crew to
be as bad as the rest of the prisoners. If the fuggers want them
folks locked up, I want them free.”

“Tremendous… Very well then. No sense making
it too easy on ourselves.” Gunner sighed.

Two hours rolled by with all members of the
crew pitching ideas. It didn’t take long before they all realized
that the task ahead was an insane one, and they therefore weren’t
likely to find their way to a solution by making sane suggestions.
Outside-the-box thinking was utterly necessary, and ideally the box
should be completely destroyed in the process. If time wasn’t a
factor, the task might have been enormously eased by heading to
their secret stash of stolen fug tech near Caldera and arming
themselves properly. That would take more than a week round trip,
though, and at the rate they’d been encountering raiders, they
couldn’t guarantee they’d make it back in one piece.

Gradually the plans expanded to include
anything that they might be able to steal from the station below
them, and the solution began to form.