Tin Swift

Hink handed Cedar a hammer. “Take a turn on the rivet work with Guffin,” he said. “And pray we don’t get rain.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Repairs on the Swift were taking longer than Captain Hink Cage had hoped for. Not because the men were slacking. Guffin, Ansell, and Seldom were working as quickly as they could. And quite to Hink’s surprise, so was Mr. Hunt, who proved to be a ready hand at all levels of repair he put his effort toward.

“Ever work a ship, Mr. Hunt?” Captain Hink asked as Cedar crimped the seam to align the rivet hole in the tin skin envelope.

“Not an airship.” Mr. Hunt hammered the bucktail of a rivet into place. “But I worked the yards as a young man.”

“Hup,” Guffin called. He tossed a hot rivet off the small forge and up to Mr. Ansell, who sat the other side of the rip tight as a bug in honey. Ansell caught the rivet in an iron cone, then plucked it free with tongs.

Cedar waited for Ansell to set the rivet before hammering it down tight. Cedar leaned back against the rope rigging that let him latch and crawl about the curve of the ship like a man climbing a mountainside.

“I didn’t need more than a year before I decided the sailing life was not for me,” he said.

The Swift had taken more than one shot to the main envelope, and it had taken a good part of the day to mend those tears. They were on the last rip, placing a patch more than doing any final work. The thin sheet of patch metal should be enough to hold her against the winds just so far as to Old Jack’s.

“What life did you go looking for, Mr. Hunt?”

Cedar was silent as he pounded another rivet down tight. “The university. Teaching.”

“You’re a long way from that sort of living,” Hink said, shouldering the pulley line to force the strut of the fans into place so Mr. Seldom could set the bolts proper again.

Cedar stared up at the wedge of sky above them, then back at the mostly black walls. “Yes, I am.”

“Don’t sound displeased about it,” Hink grunted, setting his heels to hold the line.

Neither of them spoke for a bit while Hink held muscle on the propellers for Mr. Seldom, and Mr. Hunt hammered another rivet into the patch.

Finally, Mr. Hunt spoke. “There’s things about this life I’d never had in the university. Not all of them bad.”

“Funny how things work out that way sometimes,” the captain said.

“So it is,” Cedar agreed.

“That’s it, Captain,” Ansell hollered as he hooked the iron cone to his belt rig. “She’s as tight as we can make her.”

“Then tell Molly Gregor to fill the bags. We’ll be dragging sky within the hour.”

“Aye, Captain.” Ansell clambered down the outside of the ship, unlatched his harness from the ropes, then dropped a good six feet to land beside the ship.

Hink just shook his head. Man was unafraid of heights or the falling from them, and seemed most alive anytime he was executing some high-wire stunt. Mr. Ansell was a man born to walk the skies.

“About time,” Mr. Guffin grumbled as he got to work on packing gear and setting the small forge to cool.

Mr. Hunt lowered himself down the side of the ship to the ground, then unlatched gear. He might not be as sure-footed as Ansell, but he still moved like he’d been crawling over airships all his life.

Moved through the rocks and tumble like he was born to them too.

Only other sort of man Hink had ever seen be quite so comfortable in every environment he fell upon was the native people.

He didn’t know if Mr. Hunt carried native blood in his veins, though his coloring leaned toward it far more than Hink’s own yellow and blue.

Cedar glanced off, suddenly still as the stones around him. His hands were held out to the side as if the wind told things to his fingers that ears and eyes couldn’t know.

A slight movement in the distance caught Hink’s attention. The wolf, Wil, coming this way. It had something in its mouth. Looked like a goat.

The wolf stopped. Cedar wasn’t watching the wolf. He was watching the sky.

Hink heard it. The hard chug of propellers pushing over the range. Sounded like she was working against the wind. Maybe against the rain.

It could be raining out there and windy enough that the rain couldn’t fall into this hole.

Captain Hink hoped he was wrong, but they wouldn’t know the flying conditions until they put their nose over the edge of this rock. And they weren’t going anywhere until they were sure that ship out there was gone hunting different ground.

Hink waited. Even Mr. Seldom stopped tinkering with his tools near the fans and leaned back so he could catch a gander at the sky.

The buzz faded off, growing faint, then coming in and out of hearing like she was threading peaks, the echo of her engines soon too quiet to stir the silence.

“Mr. Seldom,” Hink said. “Tell me we have wings.”

“She’ll fly,” Seldom said. What he didn’t say, what he didn’t have to say, was he didn’t know how long or how far she would take them.

A drop of rain hit Hink on the shoulder. Another followed. Captain Hink swore as he looped the pulley ropes and helped Mr. Seldom remove the repair braces and tackle. They were going to have to fly her out wet.

Wet, wounded, out of the bottom of hell’s well. Low on fuel, heavy on passengers, with airships scouting for their smoke.

Some days there wasn’t enough glim in the sky to make this job easy.

“Inside,” Hink yelled to Cedar and the wolf. “We’ll be launching as soon as Molly can give us steam.”

Cedar Hunt took the goat from the wolf and shouldered it as he strode to the ship, the wolf loping at an easy pace by his side. In the shuttered light, Cedar looked taller, inhuman, like a hunter out of legend, or some kind of warrior of old come to put the land right.

It was just a moment, a flicker of a thought. Then Hink shook his head. Those kinds of fool thoughts were the imaginings that had sent him down a life path even his soiled-dove mama hadn’t approved.

With wild thoughts, and wilder blood, Hink had been a terror growing up. Some days he wasn’t even sure there was enough sky and earth together to give him room to shout.

“Stop dreaming,” Seldom said as he slapped Hink on the back. Hard. “You’re all wet.”

“Wasn’t dreaming,” Hink said, following his second into the ship. “Was figuring how much money I’m about to lose getting us out of this knothole.”

“Money?” Guffin called from up near the navigation. “Whose money are you spilling, Captain?”

“There’s only one way she’ll fly,” Hink said. “Steam and gears alone won’t do it down this hellhole. No wind, no launch point. No luck. Nothing but glim.”

“We’re gonna glim-lift,” Guffin grumbled. “There goes a season’s profit.”

“I appreciate your practical concerns, Mr. Guffin, but the only men glim won’t profit are dead men. And I refuse to die in this pit. Mr. Hunt, Mrs. Lindson, and Miss Small, be sure that you’re seated on the floor, back against the wall, and buckled tight. Mr. Seldom, see that our passengers are safely secured and have a breathing mask to share.”

Hink strode to the rear of the ship to check Molly and the boilers. He braced himself for the heat as he spun the lock and stepped through the metal door. The slap of heat against his skin was thick as in a Sunday bathhouse.

It always surprised him how compact the Swift’s boilers were compared to those of other ships. Even so, the engine took up most all of the stern of the ship, making this space a collection of brass and copper, tubes, valves, iron, and rivets. In the right light—hell, in every light—the engine looked like a jewel cut and cast to sit a king’s crown.

“How’s our fuel, Molly?” Hink asked.