Skykeep

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “I can give it a try, but as Nita’s pointed out more than once, I’m more adept at blowing things apart than putting them together. Plus…”

  “Plus what? You got more excuses?”

  “I don’t think I’m the only one who’s been seeing that look in Nita’s eye since the beginning. We all knew ever since that first wailer skirmish she wasn’t going to be a short-timer on this crew. She had the skill to make herself useful and to keep herself alive. I think we can all agree she fit into this crew like she was the missing piece we didn’t realize we were missing.”

  “It’s true. Nita has the sky in her blood now. She’s here to stay,” Coop said.

  The captain nodded. “Well, now it’s up to us to keep ourselves alive and to get our missing pieces back. From this moment, we’re assuming they’re alive and working just as hard to get back to us as we are to get them back.”

  “How are we going to get them back if we don’t even know where they went?” Gunner asked.

  Suddenly Coop became very still. “We do know where they went.”

  “What are you talking about?” Gunner said.

  “They went down that shaft. You said there was climbing gear. The fuggers took them down that shaft.”

  “Well obviously, but I don’t think they’re still down there, Coop. The fuggers probably loaded them up onto a ship and brought them heaven knows where.”

  “But they brought them from there. If we’re going to find somebody, where else we gonna start but from where we know they must have been?”

  “Are you suggesting we should climb down that shaft until we strike fug, then find our way out the way the fuggers came in?”

  “I’m not suggesting you do it. I’m telling you I’m fixing to do it.”

  “That’s going to be a hell of a climb, Coop,” the captain said.

  “Before you snagged us for your crew, Lil and me was tending a herd on the plateaus, remember? We had to climb half a mountain just to get home for supper.”

  “Climbing a mountain and climbing a mine are two different things, Coop. You’ll be climbing in cramped space, and in the dark.”

  “I don’t know what kind of shepherds you talked to, but round my parts we didn’t climb our way back home until after sundown. And if things is cramped, that just means there’ll be plenty to grab hold of if I slip,” Coop said.

  Captain Mack and Gunner looked at one another.

  “What’ll we do when he gets down there?” Gunner said.

  “Fix him up with some of them phlo-flares you rigged up. When he sets off down the hole, we’ll take the Wind Breaker down into the fug. When he gets out, he’ll set off a flare, and we’ll fetch him up.”

  “I’m not sure either of you are thinking this through…”

  “Do you want to get them girls back or not?” Coop growled.

  “I absolutely want to get those girls back, but I feel obligated to be the level head in this scenario. What exactly is the outcome we are looking for? Either we’ll get down there and the trail will be cold, or we’ll get down there and we’ll find fuggers waiting for us.”

  “If we find a cold trail that just means we spent that time doing nothing, which is what we’re already doing, and if we find us some fuggers, then either we’ll ask real nice what they done with the girls or else we’ll kill them, which would make for a real nice start to this rescue mission, regardless,” the captain said.

  Gunner considered the words. “Fair enough.”

  “Coop, you suit up with everything you need to get down that shaft, plus everything you need to persuade a few fuggers to be polite and obliging if needs be. Gunner, give him some flares. Once you’re on your way, I’ll get the mayor to give his best guess on where that shaft punched through to the fug, and we’ll be as near to it as the wind will allow. But make sure you get us unmoored first. With them girls gone and you in the hole, we’re going to be running mighty light on crew.”

  #

  Coop held firm to a line and rappelled into the inky blackness below. Some might have marveled at the speed with which some skills come rushing back after years of neglect. It had been years since he’d done any rock climbing, after all, and he was climbing like a pro again after just a few minutes. Coop wasn’t the sort to introspect and reflect on such things, though. He wasn’t really the sort who would reflect on anything. As far as he was concerned, skills like these came back quickly because if they didn’t, he would die, and he was far too busy to die today.

  Though his mind was mostly occupied with the complicated task of descending into the bowels of the mountain, one or two thoughts wormed their way into whatever nooks and crannies of his mind were free to grapple with them. The first was the grudging acceptance of the fact that climbing in a mine was indeed much different than climbing a mountain, even at night. As dark as a moonless night might be, it had nothing on a mine. The darkness was as thick as porridge, and the weak blue flame of the mining helmet he’d borrowed barely seemed to slice so much as a wedge into it. Early on in the climb that didn’t matter. The shaft was almost perfectly vertical, and the fuggers had left all of their climbing anchors and ropes in place. Leave it to those arrogant swine to assume no one would even attempt to follow them. Once he reached the point where the shaft was increasingly mingled with natural caves and tunnels in the mountain, the lengths of rope and strings of anchors began to thin out and he was left looking for handholds and footholds by the light of the aforementioned weak helmet flame. They were not the climbing conditions he would have chosen, but all it took was one little flicker of an image in his mind, the thought that something might be happening to his sister at that moment, and he was practically flinging himself into the blackness.

  Another thought that had disturbed him from time to time was the matter of finding his way through the mine. Again, once the initial shaft ran its course there were no shortage of branching paths, and he assumed only one of them was the right one to take. Sometimes it was easy enough, because there was an anchor driven into the rock here or a rope hanging from an outcrop there. Other times there were long stretches of relatively level ground with branching paths in all directions. The way forward at those times had been determined by whichever path had the strongest chemical sting against his skin and the foulest scent in the air. When he’d progressed far enough that he needed his mask to breathe, he knew he had to be close. Of course, he also had even less visibility and had to cope with getting enough air through a mask that made it difficult to breathe even without exerting himself, but one of the benefits of spending half his time among the clouds was learning how to get by without much “air” to his air.

  The ground snuck up on him for the third time since he’d been climbing. That tended to happen while rappelling in the darkness. The seat of his pants hit the jagged rocks hard enough to ensure that he would be walking funny for the next few hours, and he wisely took a few moments to recover. When he felt confident he could stand without falling over, he leaned aside to place his hand on the ground to hoist himself up, but it brushed against something that was certainly not stone.

  “What in the world?” he muttered, gingerly touching it again.

  It felt like a length of string. He turned to it, casting the light of the mining helmet to reveal a thread stretched between metal struts driven into the stone. One strut also had a small bundle of something that looked and smelled a bit like burn-slow mounted to it.

  “I don’t know what this thing is,” he muttered to himself, “but I know the fuggers must have put it here, and that means it probably means to do me harm. Best to leave it be.”

  He stepped over the wire with exaggerated care… and planted his foot squarely on a second wire.

  The wire popped free, and he instinctively broke into a full sprint. In less dire circumstances, sprinting along the ground at the base of the latest of several multihundred foot drops would not have been very keen survival instinct, but in light of the unknown mechanism that he had just trigge
red, he decided it was the least suicidal of the options available. He got a total of ten steps away before his sprint turned into an out-of-control tumble down a loose gravel slope. About halfway through his tumble, a deafening blast roared through the cave as the trap he’d set off detonated.

  A flash of light and a wave of debris filled the air, and the rattle and clatter of his rapid descent was replaced by the sudden silence that came from the ears getting more than they could handle. Now in utter darkness and in the best case temporarily deafened, Cooper was left with nothing but touch to navigate by. In this case, navigation was limited to getting a rough idea of the size and shape of the gravel he was tumbling along as he fell.

  After what felt like several hours of rolling, he slid to a stop. The fall had not treated him kindly. His body felt like one enormous bruise, and it was a miracle both that he’d not broken any bones and that his mask hadn’t become dislodged. One of his rifles had broken free of its strap, though, and both of his pistols were somewhere along the slope. But a quick inventory taken while attempting to catch his breath indicated that, aside from a broken lamp on his helmet, he was otherwise still fully equipped.

  Another miracle came in the form of an almost imperceptibly dim glow coming from his left. With a bit of squinting, he was just able to make out the jagged natural cave mouth that must have led out into the fug. He stumbled to his feet and walked unsteadily toward the dull purple light.

  What greeted him on the outside was a rather steep slope that was host to a deserted shantytown of sorts. Three tents each barely clung to the slope. A few half-empty crates of provisions and assorted other things were scattered among them, but his half-blurred and barely adequate vision couldn’t quite make them out. A little bit of digging in one of the supply crates revealed a handheld phlo-light. He turned the valve and summoned a strong green glow to light his surroundings.

  Now with a clearer view, he could see that people had been living here for some time. There was an outhouse dug not far away, and man-sized mooring poles had been driven into the slope. It was also apparent that the departure had been a hasty one, as one of the mooring poles had been hauled halfway out of the ground, which tended to occur when the engines of an airship were already spinning up to speed before it was completely unmoored. Here and there he also found recent char and scattered piles of ashes. They’d set fire to something before they left. Coop had no doubt in his mind that it was travel orders or some other bit of evidence that would have given him an idea of where they’d gotten off to. He sifted through the cinders, but they had been thorough. There wasn’t a single intact page.

  He started to rummage through the supplies to see if there was anything of value. He found a pistol much like the ones he’d lost—not surprising since the ones he’d been armed with were fug-made. There was also a staggering amount of ammunition, indicating perhaps they had been prepared for a fight. Pity they hadn’t still been present or he would have given them one. Under a third box of bullets, he found a well-hidden folio, which he tore open hoping to find some useful information. Instead he found images of rather scantily clad, ghost-white women, scrawny women.

  “Huh, the fuggers have ladies after all. And they ain’t got no meat on them, either,” Coop observed, flipping through the pages.

  His hearing was returning, or at least silence had been replaced with a loud hiss, when he finally decided that there simply wasn’t anything worth finding in the camp. He dug through his pack and found a phlo-flare. The name was a bit much, considering it was just a small canister of phlogiston with a valve locked closed by a pin. On the surface, phlogiston was a simple green vapor, but when released into the fug it had a brilliant green glow. This was what made phlo-lights work, but it had other uses, too. Airships in the fug could easily spot a slow leak because it would glow as bright as day. And of course, if you wanted to catch someone’s attention, all you had to do was release a stream of the stuff and it would rush skyward, tracing a bright green line to where you were waiting.

  He pulled the pin and heaved the canister, a lance of blinding green light curling into the purple-black abyss the fuggers called a sky. Now there was nothing to do but wait. And ready his rifle, of course, because there was no guarantee it would be the Wind Breaker that found him first.

  Slowly the hiss in his ears began to subside, and he heard something else. It was a quiet ticking noise. He looked cautiously to the source of the sound, which was well outside the circle of light cast by the pho-light.

  “I swear, if these fuggers left another bomb,” he growled, as though he could intimidate the hypothetical explosive into defusing itself.

  He picked up the phlo-light and paced toward the sound, swapping the rifle for the pistol. As he paced closer to the source of the ticking, he noticed it seemed a bit too irregular to be a clock—or something which would be activated by a clock. About thirty paces from the campsite, he found a long wooden pole. The bottom of it had a point that was darkened with soil, indicating it too had been driven into the slope previously. It was easily twenty feet long, and at the end was a broken reed basket. The ticking was coming from within the basket.

  Erring on the side of caution, he traced a wide circle around the basket and bent low to peer inside. Huddled within, tapping weakly, was a badly injured aye-aye. From the looks of it the former occupants of the camp had done their best to eliminate the creature in the same way that they had the paperwork. Three large sections of its fur were charred black, though in no case did it appear to have reached the flesh. What had reached the flesh was a large and ugly gunshot wound. It was probably a grazing blow, but it had nearly clipped the poor thing’s tail in half.

  “Ugh, they did a number on you, little guy,” he said. “What was this, your perch?”

  At the sound of his voice the creature huddled a little deeper into the broken basket. Coop looked at the ground and noticed an irregular pattern of blood drops leading back toward the camp.

  “Did you drag this whole thing from way over there?” he said. “Tough little rat, aren’t you?”

  He leaned down, holstering his weapon so that he could reach into the basket. The creature tried to cram itself even further inside, but it plainly didn’t have much strength left. Coop managed to unhook the leash that tethered the creature to the perch and scooped it up. The thing resisted with what little force it could.

  “Relax, you little bugger. The cap’n’s got a soft spot for you things. He’d have a fit if he found out I let one of you die. Besides, if the fuggers wanted you dead, I sure as sugar want you alive.”

  A low hum began to approach, and Coop recognized it immediately as the five-engined thrum of the Wind Breaker.

  “That’s them now,” he said, aye-aye held to his chest. “Let’s get you fixed up and see what you’ve got to say.”

  #

  Coop worked quickly once the Wind Breaker arrived, loading up virtually all of the remaining goods from the camp and handing off the rescued aye-aye to Gunner. Once they were on their way, surfacing and finding a hidden nook among the mountain peaks to tie up the ship, the crew rushed to the galley, which in times such as this doubled as the infirmary. Butch made a rare appearance out from behind the counter in order to tend to those who needed medical attention. First and foremost was the rescued inspector, which was still dazed when Coop entered to see what progress had been made. Butch had a needle and thread, stitching up the part of the beast’s tail that could be salvaged as the creature rested comfortably on a towel. Both swaths of blackened hair had been shaved away and some manner of ointment had been swabbed on the skin beneath.

  “What’d you give that thing? It looks like it’s actually enjoying the surgery,” Coop said.

  “Two shots of my rotgut,” Mack said. “That’s just about how much it takes to knock Wink for a loop, so it stands to reason it’d be the same for this one.”

  “Captain, is there a reason you know the precise dosage of rye necessary to anesthetize an inspector?”r />
  “That’s a fine anecdote, but one for another time, Gunner,” he said.

  “Is the little critter going to make it?” Coop asked.

  Butch muttered something under her breath.

  “Well, I’ll let you treat my bumps and bruises once you got Nick all patched up.”

  “Nick?” Gunner said.

  “Yeah. Because of that little Nick on his tail. Nick.”

  “Coop, that’s a female.”

  “… How do you know?”

  Gunner looked at him. “Do you really need me to explain that?”

  “Oh… Well, Nikita then,” he said.

  “Nikita? I wouldn’t have expected you to know a name as exotic as that,” Gunner said.

  “Remember last time we spent a night at Keystone, that waitress who wouldn’t even tell you her name?” Coop said.

  “Yes.”

  “Her name was Nikita. And she snored like a banshee.”

  “I would ask how you could have possibly wooed her, but one can only imagine it was your gift for metaphor. Should I point out that Nikita is usually a male name?”

  “That waitress wasn’t no male, and I’m not coming up with another name.”

  Butch finished her work and gently moved the aye-aye to an empty table. She made a rather pointed demand for Coop to take its place on the operating table. He reluctantly complied, initiating a rather uncomfortable and awkward checkup. There was something rather embarrassing about being given a thorough examination by the ex-wife of your current boss while he watched, but fortunately the reduced size of the crew and the increased threat of attack required that both Gunner and Captain Mack join Wink on deck for lookout duty. That meant that by the truly embarrassing portion of the procedure, he was left with only the inherent awkwardness of being ordered to undress by an older woman.

  She took nearly an hour to tend to every scrape, bump, and bruise, but in the end everything was either cleaned up, stitched up, or bandaged. By the time she was through, Nikita was coming around. The aye-aye climbed woozily from the table to the floor, then up to Cooper’s table as he was getting dressed and tried to crawl into his shirt before he buttoned it.