“I prefer them at a distance,” Talis said, and pushed back from the railing. With the clouds about to envelop and hide the ship, it was time.
Yawning, Sophie trailed behind her to the hidden locker tucked behind a coiled mass of rope line. “Xe’s never seen one. The whole ship's instruments went dark when they tried to explore a cloud. And I don’t get many chances to see them.”
Talis stiffened. Never mind the mention of their alien guest, that last phrase sounded to her like another complaint about Sophie not having her own ship. But the girl leaned forward with anticipation as Talis tabbed the latch release on the locker, and retrieved a bundle from a harness mounted within. A lumpy box, wrapped in oilcloth and bound with a leather strap.
Even its buckle was an alchemical marvel. It could tell if there was line of sight to Nexus, and would refuse to release. As the cloud enveloped Wind Sabre, replacing aubergine sky with a soft gray that closed in around the railing, she thumbed the buckle and flipped a catch, and with a whir, the metal judged their cover. A ping indicated its approval, and its latch disengaged. The buckle smacked her hard on the thigh as it dropped away. She cursed, unwrapped the strap, and tossed it back into the locker.
It was no handicap that the device required fully obscured skies to operate. She had no intention of being caught by Onaya Bone or any other of The Five, and punished for using alchemy. Parting with the presscoins for that buckle was punishment enough.
Precisely how it worked, Talis had no idea. It required no fuel, minimal maintenance (just wipe the carbon off the metal connections before packing it away again), and if it were to ever break, even Sophie would be helpless to fix it. So she was mindful of her grip as she unwrapped the oilcloth with rain-wet hands.
It had a name, something arcane like a tripolarizing kiparcoiled band-conducted electro-ionic… kajig. Talis couldn’t remember, exactly. Alchemists tended toward flamboyance when naming their devices, and it wasn’t as though she openly talked about owning one.
It was comparable in size to a small jewelry box, except that it had sliding panels to open and close it instead of a hinged lid. Behind the panels, glass bulbs were filled with cloudy liquid as a sandglass might be filled with fine grains. The bulbs were mounted inside circular metal housings, on tracks filled with ball bearings. She used a fingernail to flick one arm open and rotate a glass bulb dextral until it was upside-down, and then flicked the arm back across that housing to lock it in place. She repeated the motion for the other glass bulbs, alternating dextral and sinistral for each and then slid their covers back into place until they latched with contented clicks.
A panel on the bottom of the box released four trailing wires, each pronged at the end, equal in number to copper panels mounted in the back of the hidden locker. Each wire clipped into place, charges carefully aligned positive and negative. With that done, Talis secured the box back into its harness. She then wrapped the strap and buckle inside the oilcloth wrapping and tucked that into the bottom of the locker so it wouldn’t damage the box or interrupt the current if a sudden shift in the angle of their flight sent them sliding.
“I’ll consider it a good day if I disappoint you again,” she said to Sophie, and thumbed a toggle switch on the top of the device.
There was a thrumming pulse from the box, which Wind Sabre’s hull seemed to answer with a deeper tone of its own. Talis swore, as magenta light arced from the toggle’s metal fitting, catching her fingertips before she could pull them away. A sharp stabbing coursed up to her wrist. She tasted copper. She shook her hand to dispel the tingling sensations and held the offended limb against her chest.
Sophie laughed. If she was hurt by Talis’s unwillingness to banter, she didn’t show it. She wandered off, checking the lines as she made her way forward, eager to be the first of them inside the storm.
That was a pleasure Talis would gladly cede. She secured the locker, then retreated under the cover of the wheelhouse where Dug stood with Tisker at the helm. At her approach, Dug moved away, stiffly walking past to take up a watch on the port side, making it clear he preferred to stand in the rain than share a space with her.
She had already explained herself to him. He’d already made up his mind about the soundness of her decisions. She could either wait out his anger or see him disembark with Sophie on the other end of it.
That would leave Talis with a near-empty ship. The ship she bought to be home for her and Dug. Would she even want to keep it if he left?
And if she didn’t care about the particular ship as much as the bodies aboard, why not talk to Sophie about joint ownership of the next?
Her ego stepped in to elbow the sliding mess of such thoughts aside. Did she really want to have to fight with Sophie over priorities and not have the old fallback of ‘it’s my ship, you’ll do what I say’ as a last resort? Sharing a ship might be just the final tilt their friendship needed to go over the edge.
Talis shook herself. She was letting the dreariness of the rain get to her.
“Anyone check on our guest lately?”
“Scrimshaw’s not exactly happy, Cap,” Tisker said, squinting into the rain as it drove sideways across the deck. “Curled up below complaining of a delicate stomach. Though I think my stomach would be delicate with that food, too.”
The crew had taken to calling the alien Scrimshaw as
