Driftmetal

by J. C. Staudt

  “Whatever you dropped from that shipment must’ve been pretty important to get them so upset with you. Too bad it’s lost to the Churn by now, or sitting smashed up on some floater. How much do they want, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “They said the part of the shipment we lost was worth three hundred thousand chips. They want three-fifty, including interest and damages that resulted from the loss.”

  “Dear sweet merciful Leridote.” I scratched my noggin, trying to stimulate the idea that was growing in my brain-cavity. “Have you paid them anything yet?”

  “Nothing. We still haven’t repaired all the damage to the Galeskimmer. The other half of your fee would’ve gotten us over the top and started us well on our way in the savings department.”

  I looked at my companions. Chaz was still looking a little spacey, still coming back from that nasty knock to the head. Blaylocke was leaning against the ship’s railing with his arms folded in front of him, holding a strip of cloth to his wound. Vilaris was giving me that squirrely look of his, the one that says, ‘don’t do what I think you’re about to do, or I’ll lose it.’

  I flashed Vilaris a sly grin and cleared my throat. “I can’t help but feel like this partnership has started off on the wrong foot. Let’s let bygones be bygones and start over, shall we? We’re going to be working together very closely over the next few weeks, and I want everyone here getting along. We need to be a well-oiled machine if we’re going to do this—”

  Sable’s knifeblade flicked out again. She took two quick strides toward me and jerked the blade up to my throat. “What in the heavens’ name are you going on about?” she said.

  I winked at her. “We’re partners now, you and I. Your crew and mine.”

  “I’m afraid you are very much mistaken,” she said.

  “Am I? I don’t think so. You see, by the time you manage to scrape together three hundred and fifty thousand chips, your Uncle Angus will be a skeleton. Shoot, I’ll be an old man by then. Call me a fool for overlooking it until now, but it’s just become startlingly apparent to me how much we need each other.”

  “We don’t need the likes of you, or your primitives, to blacken our good name.”

  “Well then, let me tell you what I need,” I said. “I need a ship. This one will do the trick. I need my friends to be protected by a good group of upstanding techsouls. Case in point.” I waved a hand toward her crew. “And last, I need to find a certain gentleman by the name of Alastair Gilfoyle. When you help us find him and take back what’s ours, this life of indentured servitude you’re leading will be over. Because in exchange for helping us, I’m going to offer you half my share of the takings.”

  Vilaris scrunched up his face. “Your share? Since when do you have a share?”

  “Since I agreed to launch this little excursion for you, Clint. You told me I would be paid for my troubles. As payment, I want a one-quarter share of the haul, to split with the fine folks who live and work on the Galeskimmer.”

  “You can’t take that much of the city’s income,” Vilaris blurted out.

  “I can, and I will. It’s a one-fourth share or it’s nothing at all.”

  “Wait a minute… what city?” said Mr. Scofield.

  I grasped for words. “The city we’re all from. Bannock,” I lied.

  “Bannock is no city. It’s a drift-town, at best.”

  “We call it a city sometimes. Give us a break.” I turned to Sable, desperate to change the subject. “Captain Brunswick… do you and your crew really want to spend the next several years of your lives scraping by, trying to earn enough to pay your debts? Or would you rather help us and get your uncle back right away? Don’t delude yourself. This is going to take a lot longer than you’re willing to admit, unless you help us.”

  Sable lowered her blade. She took off her hat, wiped the sweat from her brow with a thin white shirtsleeve. When she spoke, she was addressing her crew. “You all heard him. We have a long road ahead of us if we go it alone. Getting Captain Angus back means making sacrifices. Knowing what we know now changes things. All in favor of combining crews and working together for a short period of time, raise your hand.” She counted. “All opposed?” She counted again, then looked at me. “The matter appears to be settled, Mr. Nordstrom.”

  This time, old Landon Scofield and young Eliza Kinally were the only ones who had voted against us. I hadn’t heard a word out of Eliza’s mouth since we’d been on board. I didn’t even know what job she had on the ship. But it was apparent that, for any number of available reasons, she didn’t like us.

  “Good,” I said. “This is surely the start of a very lucrative and prosperous arrangement. We need to fire up the turbines and set a course upstream if we’re going to find Gilfoyle.”

  The crew glared at me.

  “Not an order,” I said, “just a suggestion. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be getting back to bed.”

  I caught another handful of dirty looks as I made my way belowdecks. They can hate me if they want to, I told myself as I crawled into my hammock. They can keep on hating me after I make them filthy rich, for all I care. Just as long as they don’t treat me like some lowborn swabbie. I’ve been captain of my own boat, for crying out loud. One day, I’ll retake command of my Ostelle. Nobody will ever order me around again after that. I drifted off to sleep, my head swelling with pride, eager to dream of all the good things to come.

  “I’m impressed.” My eyes shot open at the sound of Sable’s voice. I found her standing beside my hammock, a hand on her hip. “Not many people can twist a hopeless situation to their advantage like you can.”

  I yawned and stretched. “Yeah, well, I’m not many people. And you’re no fool, either. You caught on to how impressive I am without a single hint. Usually I have to spell it out for people.”

  Sable’s hand was at my throat. No blade this time—just her cold, skinny fingers. She was doing a fair job of convincing me that she was not a friendly person.

  “I thought I told you to behave yourself while you were aboard my ship,” she said.

  I tried to gulp, but the lump didn’t make it past her grip. “I was behaving myself just fine. Then they dragged me out of bed for a whipping I didn’t deserve. That isn’t a situation I’m comfortable behaving for.”

  “Why didn’t you just follow orders?”

  “Following orders would suggest that I’m a lesser being than the person who’s giving them,” I said. “I’m no slave, sister. I’m your cargo, not your hired hand.”

  “Oh, you’re our cargo, are you? Maybe we ought to find a nice big empty crate to shove you into.”

  “If it’s the only way I can get a decent night’s sleep without you jerkwads being all over my case about it…”

  She tightened her grip on my throat and leaned in. Her braid slipped around her back and fell onto my lap with a whop. I could smell her, the faint animal scent of unwashed woman beneath layers of perfume.

  “I don’t care how much you’re worth to us,” she said. “This can be an easy trip for you. Keep on provoking me, and I’ll see that it’s a hard one. Up to you.”

  I kissed her. Wrapped my hand around the back of her head and pulled her in tight. She shrieked into my open mouth, wrenched away, punched me high on the cheekbone. The blow left me stinging, and a little stunned as well. Probably no more stunned than I’d made her.

  “You asshole,” she shouted. She was seething, nostrils flared, face flushed as purple as a beet.

  On a good day, that kiss would’ve been a love story in the making. Today, it was just a guy distracting a girl from choking him to death. I’ll admit it wasn’t the most elegant way of achieving the desired effect. But when you wake up to find an angry woman threatening to cause you harm, you only have so many options.

  “Ow,” I said, rubbing my cheek. “I’m sorry… I don’t know what came over me. I just… couldn’t control myself a minute longer.” I might’ve pulled off the sentiment, if I hadn’t been laughing. />
  “If you ever lay a finger on me again, I’ll have Mr. Scofield beat you so good you’ll forget how to bleed.” There wasn’t an ounce of joviality in her. I didn’t realize she’d triggered the blade until I heard it slide back in, just before she stormed out of the cabin.

  I couldn’t sleep after that. I couldn’t go above and face her either, so I stayed in my hammock, staring at the ceiling and wondering if there was a way to make this boat go any faster. I wanted to be done with this. Done with them, and her. Sable had made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with me. The sooner my companions and I could get out of her hair, the better.

  The Galeskimmer turned into the wind that day. Instead of moving toward the fringe to escape the Regency’s influence, we were heading straight into the heart of the stream, where drifting cities and massive ships crested the clouds at altitudes of tens of thousands of feet.

  Vilaris and Blaylocke had their theories about where Gilfoyle might’ve set up shop, and I had a few of my own. Once we got close, all we’d have to do was ask the locals. Gilfoyle would turn up. You don’t relocate a Churn mining operation without getting noticed. Gilfoyle would be hiring workers to replace the ones he’d lost by moving. He’d also be selling his product to people in the stream as their drift-towns passed by. It could take months or years for the lowest floaters to circle Esperon, so townies were often eager to buy from grav platforms when they had the chance.

  The tension on board was palpable for the remainder of our journey. Chaz was getting better every day, remembering who he was and becoming more like his old self again. Blaylocke was still a jerk, but the crew’s mistrust forced us to put our differences aside and band together. I even bit the bullet and swabbed a few decks. After a day or two, I decided I didn’t want to feel bad about kissing Sable anymore, so I got over it. She didn’t, though.

  We stopped twice during the trip for fuel and supplies. The first time was on a thickly wooded floater with gargantuan saibon trees called Lorehawke; the second was on Jaddow’s Bluff, an oddly-shaped drift-town that looked like a jagged ice cream cone with half the scoop missing.

  On our ninth day out from Mallentis, Mr. Scofield guided the Galeskimmer through a fluffy carpet of clouds and brought us into a calm breeze near the Knuckles—half a dozen drift-towns joined together by a series of bridges. From above, they looked almost like the strands of a spiderweb, a loose network of nodes and synapses.

  The Knuckles had been the invention of one Richard Wainsborough; his means of solving the problem of owning several floaters that required air travel to go between. Through great expenditure and hassle, he’d had them pushed together and joined by lengths of thick, flexible metal cable. Crossing one of the bridges when the winds were high was hardly safer than walking a tightrope, so most people simply didn’t. Wainsborough was long dead, and his islands had passed into the hands of his descendants, who’d parceled out various plots and sold them to private owners. The current residents considered living so close to other drift-towns little more than a fortunate convenience. As yet, no one had bothered to go to the trouble or expense of removing the bridges, and so there the islands remained, tied to one another.

  We landed on an island called Falkombe, one of the larger floaters in the chain. It was egg-shaped and hilly, with wide expanses of field, tall grasses and gnarled riverwood trees. When the wind was just right, you’d get the swampy stench of its nearest neighbor, Dunhollow, a larger island with little in the way of habitable area. Dunhollow had inward-sloping terrain and soft soil, so it held rainwater like a sponge and was covered in marshes and bayous. Wainsborough had fancied himself quite the seafarer, and he’d had a large set of docks and boathouses built on Dunhollow. By now, most of those structures had fallen into disrepair.

  It was on Falkombe that we found our first sign of Gilfoyle: four deep, round imprints in a gravel parking lot outside the general store. I recognized the imprints as being the exact same size and configuration as the hovertrucks the miners used. The gouges were severe, and I surmised that the vehicle which had made them was not only heavy and cumbersome; it had been carrying a full load. I scooped up a handful of gravel and sniffed it. Displacer engines… no doubt about that.

  “You were right, Blaylocke,” I said. “As much as I hate to admit it, you were right. Gilfoyle is close.”

  Blaylocke tried to make his smile look like a grimace. He squinted up at the clouds, a leaden matte that blotted out the sun. The day was cool and windy, the skies threatening rain, and the air dense with the fetid smell of Dunhollow’s swamps. Captain Sable had sent Thorley Colburn, the broad-shouldered rigger, along with us—to ‘help out,’ as she put it. She’d really sent him to keep an eye on us, of course, and had kept Vilaris on board to talk over a few financial matters related to our agreement. I would’ve stayed to attend the meeting, but I got the feeling Sable would’ve ignored me or excluded me from it entirely if I had. Besides, I was too hot on Gilfoyle’s trail at the moment to be bothered with the finer points of our contract. I’d seen these hovertruck imprints from the deck before we landed, and I’d been dying to get out here for a closer look.

  Chaz was wearing his mad-scientist goggles, complete with a selection of concentric glass lenses for light filtering and magnification. He flicked one aside, lowered another into place. “These are incredible specimens,” he was saying, as his gigantic eyeball darted over a palmful of gravel. The bulging oculus was red-veined and wet with rheum, altogether startling and absurd-looking.

  “Chaz, ol’ buddy… you get more excited about dirt than most men get about beautiful women,” I said.

  “There are tiny flecks of driftmetal in a few of these stones,” Chaz explained, ignoring me.

  Blaylocke was confused. “If there’s driftmetal in them, why do they fall to the ground like normal rocks? Why don’t they float?”

  “Surely your understanding of the properties of driftmetal is better than you’re letting on,” I said.

  “Not really. Why… should it be?”

  “Things are different in Py—” Chaz caught himself and glanced across the lot at Thorley, who was kicking divots into the gravel to amuse himself. “—back home, in Bannock.”

  Blaylocke grinned. “Bannock, yeah.”

  “It’s a matter of mass versus altitude,” said Chaz. “In Bannock, we’re not used to this because we’re so low to the ground. Small chunks of driftmetal like these have a very low point of equilibrium. It sounds counterintuitive, but that’s why all the tiny floaters are in the nearflow, while the islands with the largest driftmetal veins are so high up in the stream.”

  “That’s also why all the driftmetal smiths live way up there,” I said. “You can’t work a big piece of driftmetal while it’s floating away from you.”

  “And yet, isn’t it interesting the way driftmetal is affected by gravstone proximity,” Chaz observed. “If you think of driftmetal as being like a helium balloon, gravstone is like the ribbon that keeps it from floating away. Streamboats wouldn’t exist without the gravstone control arrays that allow them to gain and lose altitude at will.”

  Blaylocke shrugged. “Whatever you say, Chester. I’m not sure I understand how it all works. As long as you know what you’re talking about, I’m satisfied.”

  “Yeah, speaking of that,” I said, “what’s a technotherapist?”

  “What makes you bring that up?” Chaz asked.

  “You’re a tinker. A gadgeteer. And the sign outside your lab at home says you’re the city’s Chief Technotherapist.”

  “It means I acclimate citizens to the ideas behind new technology. That’s all.”

  “Kind of like what you’re unsuccessfully doing for Blaylocke right now,” I said.

  Chaz laughed. “Indeed.”

  “Alright, I’m going inside,” I said. “Do you guys mind staying with Kicks McGee over there and keeping him out of trouble?”

  They said they didn’t, so I knelt and rubbed dirty smudges into my face and my clothes. I
swung the door open and entered the general store, a drab old establishment called Windmast & Co. The proprietor was a plump little man with a dark handlebar moustache and round pink cheeks that held up a thin pair of spectacles. He was dressed in a pristine vest suit and a matching black bowler hat that covered his bald spot. His well-groomed appearance belied the stuffy odor of his store, which smelled like it hadn’t had a good cleaning in years.

  “How d’you do?” I said, nodding to him. I pretended to peruse some of the dusty old crap I had no interest in, not wanting to appear too eager to interrogate the guy.

  “May I help you with anything, sir?”

  “Just looking,” I said. After a minute or two, I approached the counter.

  He looked up from the newspaper he was reading and studied me through the top half of his bifocals. Something in his stare made me think I was familiar to him, like he’d seen me before. On a wanted poster, probably.

  “‘Scuse me,” I said. “I come here looking for a job.”

  “I’m sorry sir, but we aren’t hiring.”

  “Oh, my apologies. Not to work here. Y’see, I’m a miner by trade. Worked the nearflow all my life. Trawlers, diggers, catchers, grinders—you name it, I can run it. Heard there was a new game in town… someone settin’ up nearby.” I put a little extra drawl into it, selling the hillbilly laborer persona.

  The proprietor gave me a look of understanding. “Yes, you are quite correct. There’s an operation, name of Gilfoyle and Associates, something or other. They’ve been around here a week or so. We’re just downstream of them now. If you have a way to get down, head southwest and you should see the platforms not more than a few miles out.”

  “Well I sure am grateful to you,” I said. “Say, I noticed you was sold out of them fancy neckties back there. The brown ones.”

  “I’m sorry? Oh, the cravats, you mean…”

  “Them’s the ones. You think I’d put on a good impression if I was wearin’ one of them for my interview? It’d be real nice if I could look sharp when I go in. I don’t s’pose it’d be too much of a bother if I asked you to take a look in your stock room, in case there’s any extra you might’ve missed.”