Choose Omnibus (Choose: An Interactive Steampunk Webserial Book 3)

by Taven Moore

  “I know it is. That’s why folks call me Hank.” He straightened and shifted his glare to Bones. “And until I say otherwise, it’s still Captain McCoy to you.”

  “Captains,” pointed out Bones with a droll voice, “have ships.”

  “I have a ship!” protested McCoy.

  “No. You had an HH-class ship. Now, Ratchet has an HH-class ship.”

  “I’m going to get the ship back, Bones,” McCoy growled.

  An HH-class ship? Remora’s heart fluttered. “Pardon me,” Remora said. “HH-class—that’s an airship, is it not?”

  “And what would a pretty little thing like you know about airships?” McCoy said with a sideways grin that he no doubt thought was charming.

  A flush of heat darkened her cheeks and she mentally added “condescending” to McCoy’s growing list of faults.

  She tossed her head and gave an airy laugh, “Oh, I suppose I couldn’t possibly know a thing about big, important airships. Only,” she paused, as though it had only just now occurred to her, “I do know that the first HH (or, as it is properly named, Harris Hawk) class airship was commissioned by the Duke of Northington as a naval warship in 1782. Its unique conglomerated design allowed the navy to successfully hunt pirates both in the air and on the sea, cutting off all possible escape routes. This went on for almost three years before the pirates themselves got their hands on the design and began using them even more effectively than the navy. They began to engage, surround, and then escape using the mobile splinter ships, foiling all attempts to follow and bring them to justice. Such was the success of these pirates that the Duke himself ordered all of the HH destroyed if ever they entered any port controlled by the Queen’s navy.”

  Sweetly, she concluded, “Is that, perchance, the airship about which you were speaking?”

  She allowed herself to gloat, just a little, at the stark astonishment on Captain Daniel Hank Whatever-He-Wants-To-Call-Himself McCoy.

  After a moment’s awkward silence, Bones sought her attention. “Miss Price—”

  “Please, do call me Remora.”

  He nodded, a motion accompanied by the faint sound of gears grinding. “Remora.” She rewarded him with a smile as he continued. “We need your help.”

  “Like hell we do!” burst McCoy.

  “If you have a better plan, by all means, enlighten me,” said Bones.

  Remora lifted an eyebrow. After a moment of silent fuming, during which the ticker did not so much as twitch, McCoy finally gave a jerky nod.

  Bones continued as though he’d never been interrupted. “We find ourselves beset by monetary adversity. A loan shark by the name of Ratchet has impounded our ship and we have no way to retrieve it. I calculate that you are wealthier than your current dress and situation might suggest. I propose a business agreement, by which you secure the note against our ship on our behalf, with our contracted promise of future repayment. With interest, of course.”

  McCoy barked once in protest, but Bones ignored him, his faintly glowing eyes locked on Remora’s face.

  “You’re pirates,” Remora stated. She didn’t ask. The answer was obvious. Only pirates could possibly have an HH-class ship, and only a pirate would have been in a backwater bar like the Jolly Rooster. She knew this because she herself had only been in the Jolly Rooster to find a pirate captain. Was it possible that fate itself had intervened to deliver exactly what she needed to begin her quest?

  She looked at McCoy again, her gaze appraising. The corners of his lips twitched. “You got a problem with that, darlin’?”

  “Miss Price,” she corrected, frowning.

  The man’s ego truly boggled the mind. A pair of pretty eyes and a crooked grin might have gotten him through a few scrapes, but it did nothing to balance his rudeness.

  Still, his first mate was both logical and polite. And even though the captain was a scoundrel, he had yet to threaten her with true harm. Verbal barbs and battles, she could endure. No, she decided, the man was irritating, but not dangerous.

  Regardless, he was the only option she had left if she intended to begin her journey before society forced marriage upon her.

  She smiled, decision made. “No, no problem at all. As a matter of fact, I find it rather convenient.”

  6. A Simple Question

  Convenient? Just what sort of Ardel-tongued remark was that? Roith’delat, she was easily the most unfath­omable and maddening female he’d ever encountered.

  She nodded, repeating the baffling statement. “Convenient indeed. Well, I think I’ve seen enough,” she said, ripping off the top button of her coveralls.

  Hank blinked. She finds out that her cellmates are pirates and her reaction is to begin taking off her clothes? Nothing this girl did made any sense.

  Copper glinted briefly against her newly exposed throat as she moved to the back of the cell and placed the button on the sill of the barred window. Reaching behind her neck, she unfastened a slim chain and removed a necklace with an oddly shaped pendant.

  Hank squinted to get a closer look. If anything, it looked like a curled spider with a keyhole in its back. What could she be up to? She didn’t think he’d be able to convince Ratchet to take that hideous thing in trade for his ship, did she? It wasn’t even gold!

  She set the spider pendant next to the button, then removed both earrings—flat, teardrop-shaped copper disks—and placed them on the sill as well.

  She reached for the next button on her coveralls, then paused, glancing toward him as though she’d forgotten he was there.

  “Don’t stop on my account. By all means, honey, do continue,” he drawled, lifting an eyebrow.

  Twin patches of red blossomed on her cheeks and she lifted her nose skyward before primly turning away. Hank didn’t bother to stifle his chuckle. Not that he’d want anything to do with a shapeless stick of a girl like her anyway, he assured himself. He preferred a different kind of woman: a woman with curves; one who fluttered her eyelashes at him when he smiled. A woman who made sense.

  Bones shifted, joints grinding noisily, and Hank looked up to find the ticker glaring at him, eyegleam flaring red. Scowling, Hank backed off. Fine. Let Bones have it his way this time. Appeasing a silver spoon was a small price to pay if it meant he’d get his ship back.

  Not that it mattered. With her back turned to him, he couldn’t see anything, anyway.

  After a moment, she added a small phial of water, a silver locket, and a black velvet package to the windowsill before re-buttoning the coveralls.

  Oblivious to his thoughts, she unrolled the velvet package and laid it flat. The wan sunlight revealed an array of tiny tools, each carefully tucked into a special pocket or flap. From one pocket, she removed a set of delicately rimmed spectacles and perched them on the tip of her nose, a flick of her finger dropping two layers of magnifying lenses in front of her right eye.

  Hank’s eyes narrowed. No . . . she couldn’t possibly be—

  “You’re a cogsmith,” said Bones, verbally completing Hank’s thought.

  Buttoning complete, she turned and smiled brightly at the ticker. “I dabble, really. I’ve never built anything larger than a small dog. I can’t imagine building something as impressive as a ship, or even a hoverracer. Mostly, I just make gadgets.”

  Hank’s brows drew together. Nobody “dabbled” in cogsmithing. That would be like learning to speak dresl on a lark. Cogsmithing was complicated. And dangerous. She made it sound like a hobby—like silk painting, or collecting seashells.

  Deftly, she withdrew one of the slim tools and picked up the spider pendant. She began inserting the tool into the pendant, spinning and prying. Periodically, she replaced one tool with another.

  “That is how you recognized me as a ticker, then,” said Bones.

  Hank smiled to himself. Ah, so the fact that she’d immediately recognized Bones as a ticker had bothered his first mate. Good to see that she unsettled Bones as much as she unsettled him.

  Without lifting her eyes from
the pendant, Remora took one of the earrings from the windowsill and began affixing it to the pendant. She nodded. “I’ve seen pictures of tickers before, in the Ardelan Encyclopedia. I must say, the entry went into a great deal of detail, but you’re far more impressive in real life. The article made it seem like you’d be a mindless drone.” She reached up for the second earring, and began attaching that as well. “I am quite pleased to find it proven wrong.”

  Hank shifted uncomfortably. That particular conver­sa­tion needed to end, and quickly. The last thing they needed was to have someone checking into Bones’s past. Bad enough she’d recognized him as a ticker to start; pure luck that she didn’t know enough about tickers to realize just how unique he was.

  “How do you know so much about airships?” he asked, hoping to distract her. “Another hobby?”

  She reached for the locket, opening it and removing a scrap of red ribbon. “You could say that,” she said. “I’ve had reason to research into airships and pirates recently.”

  As she put the locket back down and picked up the phial of water, he frowned. That wasn’t an answer. Why would a member of the gentry research airship pirates on a lark? Just who was she, anyway? Price was a common enough surname, even assuming it was her proper one, which he doubted. The gentry in this area were dominated by the Price family—she could be from any branch of that tree, no matter how far removed.

  Before he could ask his questions, she asked one of her own. “Why were you not on my list, I wonder?” She unscrewed the lid of the phial and dropped the bit of ribbon into it.

  “List?” he said, stupidly. When had they started talking about lists? And if she was cogsmithing, shouldn’t she be concentrating on what she was doing? An expert on the subject of cogsmithing he was not, but layman’s knowledge said anything touching the liquid affected the source. Wasn’t that supposed to be the difficult part?

  She dropped the button she’d pulled from her coveralls into the phial as well. “I have a list of all the airship captains in port.”

  He snorted, deciding to leave the cogsmithing to her. “As you noted, we’re pirates. Pirates don’t exactly sign the docking lists, darlin’.”

  She pulled a scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. “I said my list included all airship captains, not just the legal ones.” He unfolded the paper as she picked up the pendant and screwed the phial of water into the bottom of the spider-figure, so that it lay flat against the “belly” of the pendant.

  He glanced at the paper, but the scribbles meant nothing to him. He handed it to Bones, who skimmed it briefly. “An impressive list. It does indeed seem to include even illicit airship traffic,” the ticker said.

  Hank frowned. How did a gentry girl come across such a list? Why would she even want one? Everything he learned about this girl simply raised more questions.

  “So,” she said, picking up a copper turn-key from the black velvet and inserting it into the hole in the spider’s back. “Why weren’t you on my list?”

  She paused, one hand on the key, and glanced up at him with bright eyes.

  7. Spider

  “I guess your source wasn’t quite as good as you’d hoped,” Hank said nonchalantly, lacing his hands behind his head and leaning back against the bars of the cell.

  Miss Silver Spoon cocked her head to the side and clucked her tongue at him like an old woman. “No lies, Daniel.”

  Hank scowled. He couldn’t imagine what had possessed Bones, telling her his real name. It was more than a nuisance, it was dangerous. “Why don’t you try calling me Hank?” he suggested.

  “Why don’t you try calling me Miss Price?” she countered.

  “Fine.” She peered up at him, waiting. He threw up his hands before dropping into a mocking bow. “I would be most pleased to call you Miss Price.”

  She nodded and smiled approvingly, as if he were a puppy performing a particularly clever trick. He gritted his teeth. “Thank you, Hank. Now that we have that squared away, why weren’t you on my list?”

  Hank glanced at Bones. The ticker merely crossed his hands over his chest. He was leaving this one up to Hank. Great. Should he tell this total stranger how he managed to sneak in and out of port without getting caught by the authorities, endangering his entire operation, or should he refuse to answer and thus possibly lose whatever shadow of a chance she represented to get his ship back? Roith’delat, what a choice.

  Still, he didn’t get where he was without gambling. Granted, where he was now was in jail, but he tried not to dwell on that fact too much. Bones obviously wanted to bet on this girl as their savior—he would throw his lot in with his first mate and hope they hit the jackpot.

  He shrugged. “As you said, the HH has a standing capture-kill order on it. I can’t very well fly into harbor with the whole ship. She can float as well as she can soar. I send the hawk ships away and sail in with the nest alone. Authorities spend most of their time monitoring air traffic. They don’t watch the floaters as closely, and they surely aren’t looking for the nest by itself. As far as the port authority is concerned, my ship’s just a junker with too little sail, barely able to make seaberth.” He couldn’t hide the note of pride in his voice.

  “Clever.” She nodded, smiling. “I like that,” she said, then turned her attention to the device in her hand. Miffed, he snapped his mouth shut. It was more than just clever. It was genius, and had kept them safe ever since he first stole the old bird.

  She turned the key in the spider’s back several times, then gently placed the pendant on the floor, the slim chain pooling like copper rope beside it.

  She removed the key and moved to the corner of the room. “This . . . uh . . . doesn’t always work. You might want to stand back a bit.”

  Alarmed, Hank’s gaze darted from the pendant on the floor to her. “What do you mean, it doesn’t always work?”

  Her eyes remained fixed on the spider-pendant. “Sometimes they just explode.” She looked up and gave him a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry. I think this one’s going to work.” A pause. “Even if it didn’t, it’s not really big enough to kill us.”

  “How comforting.” He moved to the far side of the cell from the thing, back against the bars. How, exactly, had he found himself in this situation? Surely, there must be a place where a pirate could make a dishonest living and have nothing more to worry about than authorities and guards and prisons. Half-mad gentry girls and their bizarre and dangerous hobbies should never enter the equation!

  A sound from the pendant drew his attention to where it rested at the back of the cell. The little spider shuddered, teardrop earrings on its back pinging slightly as they rattled against the body. A brief whirring sound filled the cell, punctuated by a sharp grinding and a puff of black smoke, then the pendant began to move.

  Each of the spider legs unfolded, tapping against the stone floor as the little machine stood. It dipped crazily to the left, then overcompensated and teetered dangerously to the right as it gained its balance.

  Finally standing, it paused, trembling and spewing tiny plumes of foul-smelling steam from its motor. For a moment, Hank felt certain that was going to be the end of it. It would detonate into tiny metal shrapnel, which, the way his life had been going lately, would no doubt end up killing him. “Handsome” Hank McCoy, pirate scourge, slain in a prison cell by a tiny mechanical spider crafted by a madwoman.

  As if to prove him wrong, the spider finally resumed its motion, spinning in a careful circle as though getting its bearings. Circle complete, it skittered toward the window, metal legs tapping audibly against the stone as it clattered across the floor and up the side of the wall, chain dragging behind it like a bridal train. It darted through the bars and into the sunlight, then did another slow circle. With a sharp grinding noise and another puff of noxious black smoke, the earrings on its back began to spin, lifting the little spider off of the ledge. It tucked all of its legs around the phial of water on its belly and zoomed off, chain dangling behind i
t.

  “That went well,” said Remora, pleased, removing her spectacles and folding them carefully.

  “Roith’delat, I’m getting too old for this,” Hank muttered, running a hand through his hair. “So now what?” he said. “Your creepy little spiderbot’s gone. What happens now?”

  “Now,” she said, moving to the window and depositing the glasses in the black velvet and rolling it back up, “we wait.”

  “That’s your big plan? We wait?”

  She nodded and tucked the velvet container into her pocket. She walked to the tiny cot against the far wall and sat, drawing her legs up and circling them with her arms. She leveled a chiding glance at him. “Really, you’ll make yourself sick if you don’t learn how to relax a little, Hank.” She cocked her head to the side, thinking. “I believe I shall call you McCoy. I like that rather better than Hank.”

  He threw up his hands. “You can call me the Marquis of the Armaethean Skycity, if it gets us out of this jail cell.”

  She laughed, peals of true mirth that utterly transformed her somewhat plain face. She might even have been pretty, if she hadn’t been so irritating. “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, McCoy. He’s so much older than you. Furthermore, he has a mustache and smells of peppermint tobacco. You’re nothing like him at all, I couldn’t possibly call you that.”

  She’d actually met the Marquis of the Armaethean Skycity? Just which branch of the Price family did she come from? Surely not from one of the inland merchants, not if she rubbed elbows with Skycity gentry.

  Turning to ask her, he realized she was asleep, head on her knees.

  8. Uncle

  “I like her,” said Bones.

  The girl in question gave a loud snore.

  “She’s very charming. You two would make a fantastic couple. Why don’t you invite her out for some drinks, maybe spend some time overlooking the waterfalls at Barushka?”

  Bones sighed. “Must every relationship with a female be about romance for you?”