Free-Wrench, no. 1 (3 page)

“Now. Let us not have sour faces around my
table, hmm?” said Marissa as she cleared away the emptied dishes.
“Josh and Lita have a full day ahead of them, and Nita has a long
day behind her.”

“Yes, off with you, children. The academy
wants me to select a lecturer to fill in for me.”

The family stood to go about their day, but
Nita lingered. Her mother had moved unsteadily to the parlor and
stood staring at something on the mantle. It was littered with
vases, statues, sketches, and paintings, as well as a large
handmade clock of Nita’s father’s design. Gloria could have been
staring at any one of them, but Nita knew without asking which it
was that held her mother’s gaze.

“Mother?”

“Oh. Yes, Amanita dear?” she answered, shaken
from her reverie.

“How long has it been?” Nita asked, plucking
a small figurine of a deer from the mantle. It was skillfully made
from clay, but, unlike the other figurines, it was unglazed and
unpainted.

“Oh… sixteen years now. Oh cruel fate, eh? To
take my gift from me before I could paint my final piece.” She
paused to settle down to a chair. These days she couldn’t spend
more than a few minutes on her feet. “Tell me, dear. What you do at
the steamworks, does it make you happy? Does it feed your spirit
and nourish your heart?”

“It is very fulfilling.”

“Then cherish it, love. You won’t have it
forever. And you never know when you might lose it. I think back
sometimes. To balls I attended, galas I hosted. I think of all the
hours I could have spent with my fingers in the clay or with a
chisel in my hand. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t give to have
just one of those hours back again. Just one more day that I could
hold a brush and know that the line I paint would stay straight and
true.” A tear ran down her cheek. “Oh, but listen to me. No sense
talking like that. We look to the future in this family. I can
still teach, eh? Off with you. Get some rest. Don’t listen to your
silly old mother.”

Nita lingered for a moment more, looking
thoughtfully at the unfinished figurine, then placed it on the
mantle and left her mother to rest.

That evening, as the sun
was setting, Nita arrived at the steamworks for her shift. The
events of the morning were still heavy on her mind, but she tried
to push them aside and focus on the task at hand. The day shift had
removed the broken section of pipe and the jammed valve, but
daylight had run out before the replacement could be installed,
leaving it for Nita and her partner to do. Tonight that partner
happened to be Drew.

“Blast it,” he muttered to himself. “I must
have left my five-sixteenths in the locker. Do you have yours?”

Nita slipped a wrench from her tool sash.
“You really ought to take better care of your tools.”

“Yeah, yeah. Give me a break; I’ve got other
things on my mind today.”

“Oh, that’s right. Your picture device. You
know, trading with the outsiders is strictly enforced and very
limited. I don’t think we’ve had a legitimate shipment in three
years. How exactly do you plan to get away with using this device
if you manage to buy one?”

“I’ll just say I found it in a curio shop
from the old days before we closed the borders. For all anyone
knows, the cam-er-a is an ancient invention out there. Heaven knows
they come up with some remarkable gadgets. And
fine
spirits,
too. We make better wine, but the whiskey from out there? Hits you
like a
hammer
.”

Nita raised the new valve into place and
steadied it while Drew began to tighten the bolts.

“Do they have anything besides pointless toys
and things to feed your vices?”

“Possibly. Once they pulled out the liquor I
stopped paying attention to anything else.”

Nita narrowed her eyes.

“Relax, Nita. I kid. They have all sorts of
things. They make excellent optics. My best telescope came from
them. They’re always eager to show off their firearms as well, but
even
I’m
not foolish enough to be caught with one of those.
There are rare delicacies, exotic fabrics and pelts, tinctures,
ointments…”

“They sell medicines?”

“Well, I wouldn’t call them
medicines
.
One was to regrow hair. Another was to, er, restore vigor.”

“Oh. Well, do they work?”

“What are you implying?” he asked, nervously
running his fingers through his hair and checking his reflection in
the fresh pipe section.

“You know what I mean.”

“If you’re so interested, why don’t you come
along? We’ll take my brother’s boat up to Moor Spires. They’re due
to dock there in a few hours. They’ll be leaving just before
morning, so hopefully this replacement doesn’t take all night, and
we can skip out a bit early.”

“Well… no. I didn’t bring any money.”

“No need. They don’t have any use for our
currency. Why would they? Fortunately for us, it is just as
difficult for them to get Calderan goods as it is for us to get
theirs. Sea salt, jewelry, anything we make is worth more than gold
to them. If you
really
want to get in their good graces,
bring them something made of trith.”

“Trith? The stuff they make the coils
from?”

He nodded. “They can’t make it out there.
They’ll trade just about anything to get some.”

Another gift from the volcano, trith was
first created centuries before by some of the very first settlers
on the islands. An alloy made of half a dozen metals and a special
mineral found only in the volcanic stone of the mountains, it had
properties that no other metal could match. Paper-thin ribbons of
the stuff could be made into coil springs that could store ten
times the energy of a steel one, seemingly without fatigue. Thin
bars of the stuff were stronger than several inches of iron, and
once forged not even the heart of Tellahn’s volcano could manage to
do much more than soften it. It didn’t rust or even tarnish. It was
little surprise that its creators named it trith, which, in the old
tongue, meant perfection. The formula for creating it existed as a
closely guarded secret, and making it proved quite expensive, but
it was nonetheless common in Caldera thanks to the fact that nearly
all that had ever been made was still in use.

Perhaps seeing her will weakening, Drew
pressed on. “Come on, if nothing else you’ll get a chance to meet
someone from outside of Caldera. Not many who can say they’ve done
that.”

She turned the offer over in her head. It
would be a lie to say she’d never been curious about things beyond
the Calderan borders. One of the few regrets she had about working
in the steamworks was the simple fact that her skills would be of
use in few places on the isles, and thus there would never likely
be anything new or exciting to look forward to in her career. A
small but vocal part of her yearned for novelty, to see new sights
and experience new things. If nothing else, these black-market
folks promised plenty to see.

“All right. I’ll join you this time. But
neither of us are going anywhere if we don’t get this valve
in.”

Few better ways exist to ensure problems will
arise in a given task than by making plans for afterward. Halfway
through completing the installation they discovered that one of the
mounting holes hadn’t been machined properly. Once it had been
removed, corrected, and fitted again, the supply crew managed to
send along the wrong size nuts and bolts. The horizon was already
starting to get rosy when they finally finished up the project and
were given permission to leave.

“Ugh, I feel disgusting,” she said, hurrying
out of the last roughly hewn tunnel and into the locker room.

“Well, you’ll have to feel disgusting a bit
longer if you want to make it to the market on time. We’ve got to
leave now, no time to shower,” Drew warned. He checked the clock
and quickly emptied his locker into a bag.

“I suppose I can bring my clothes and get
changed when I go home. We’ll be done before the sun is up; there
shouldn’t be
too
many people to offend with my
ripeness.”

“And just think of the wonders you’ll be
bringing with you! Which reminds me. Don’t forget to bring
something to trade.”

She nodded and hastily grabbed a few bags of
salt and a brooch she’d left in her locker months ago. After a
moment of thought, she grabbed a large coil box and two smaller
ones. The prospective payments were loaded into a bag and thrown
over her shoulder. With that they made their way quickly to the
pier a few streets away, where Drew’s brother Linus waited in the
early morning fog.

The boat was anything but impressive, a
simple, flat skiff. It had two large paddlewheels on the side for
propelling and steering, and a sputtering boiler to power them
occupied the rear. Being a Calderan vessel, however, it was painted
with bright, cheery colors in an intricate scheme and had a
figurehead carved with skill to resemble a barracuda. The side
proudly proclaimed it to be
The Triumph
.

“Any later and I’d have left without you,”
Linus said, flipping open a pocket watch and leaning close to the
yellow flame of the boat’s oil lamp.

“You’d have wasted your time then, because
you don’t know today’s password. Now let’s get on with it before we
miss them.”

Linus untied the boat, and the trio made
their way along the shore to the western side of Tellahn. Their
destination was a jagged cluster of outcroppings a bit more than a
mile off shore. They were far too small and too steep to be
considered islands, standing out of the water like menhirs erected
by a particularly haphazard ancient civilization. In the days
before Caldera had isolated itself, the cluster served as a neutral
ground where authorities could make sure that nothing too dangerous
was brought to the islands. Now it was a largely forgotten feature
of the shore that just so happened to be perfect for mooring an
airship near enough to the surface to avoid drawing too much
attention.

The fog turned anything more than a hundred
yards out into a shadowy gray form, so it wasn’t until they were
nearly upon Moor Spires that they saw the airship emerge from the
haze. It was lashed to the three tallest stones, and Nita’s eyes
opened wide at each new detail as it was revealed. Until now, an
airship had only ever been a dot in the sky drifting slowly along
as it gave her homeland a wide berth. Seeing one up close
fascinated her, though even to her untrained eye it was clear that
this ship was not what one might call a fine specimen. A bulging,
barely intact gas sack comprised the bulk of the vehicle. It had at
one point been red, but time and misuse had turned it into a quilt
of differently colored patches and grafts. The sack was enormous,
perhaps seventy-five feet long and bulging to thirty feet in
diameter at its thickest. It was rounded at the front and pointed
at the back where a trio of fins stuck off the top and sides,
giving it a stretched-out teardrop shape. The thickest part of the
sack was wrapped in a wide metal lattice, which served as the
mounting point for five barrel-sized nacelles, evenly spaced. Each
nacelle was filled with a blossom of short overlapping blades and
had a smooth metal cowling.

The hull of the ship dangled below the sack,
stretching to forty feet in length and trailing back from the front
end of the sack, following a slightly narrower profile. Like the
sack, it had signs of obvious patching, strips of blond, unstained
wood standing out against the rich brown of the original planks.
The overall structure of the ship put one in mind of a yacht-sized
pirate ship that had been hauled out of the sea. It had a flat deck
on top, separated into a main deck and an elevated tier toward the
front to better follow the lower curve of the sack. Below the
railing at the edge of the deck was a row of glass and brass
portholes running the length of the ship, and below those were a
second and third row. Jutting to the left and right from the front
of the ship was a pair of cannon clusters, three each, with a
single cluster sticking out of the back. Where it departed from the
pirate ship motif was the piping, which jutted out of and into the
hull with little rhyme or reason, and here and there escaping steam
hissed and spat. Black smoke huffed out the back of the ship from
three soot-covered metal chimneys. Thick black rubber hoses ran up
a wooden runner from the deck to the central band of the sack,
leading one by one to the nacelles.

Directly below the ship, a small dinghy hung
attached to it by a pair of slackened chains. In the dinghy was a
mound of sacks and chests and a young man, who, in the process of
relieving himself off the opposite side, had his back to the
approaching skiff. The man whistled to himself and, based on the
trajectory, was attempting to amuse himself by creating as high an
arc as possible. Linus gave the steam whistle a quick pull,
startling the young man into what was nearly a messy conclusion to
his little interlude.

“Well, that wasn’t a very neighborly thing to
do to a fella!” called out the young man once he’d managed to
finish up and make himself decent again.

“Just wanted to give you a little warning.
There’s a lady on board today,” Linus said.

“Is there? Well, ain’t my face red! How do
you do, ma’am! I hope you don’t mind if I wait until you all are a
mite closer before I introduce myself proper, just so’s I don’t
have to yell quite so much.”

There was an odd twang to the man’s voice,
but an earnest quality to his words. He also had a peculiar manner
of dressing, at least from Nita’s point of view. In Caldera, unless
one’s occupation dictated otherwise, a certain formality applied to
even the most basic outfits. Clothes were tailored, carefully
selected, and properly displayed, but no sign of similar care stood
out in this man’s ensemble. His pants were of a black canvas, faded
to gray at the knees. He wore a long brown coat, the sleeves rolled
to his elbows, revealing a tan shirt with long sleeves that were
similarly rolled. The coat was open, and beneath it was a black
vest and a loose-fitting belt weighted heavily down on one side.
Now and again a gust of wind pushed the coat open enough to reveal
a pistol. The man himself was rail thin, with sandy-blond hair
cropped short and a face with a few days of stubble. He had a
friendly but incomplete smile and more than a few scars on both his
hands and face. Compared to the dark skin of most native Calderans,
his skin was very fair, though the sun had baked it a bit
brown.