Flotsam

by R J Theodore

“Yeah, well, he was rash, too.” Compulsively, Talis lifted the mug again. Burned her tongue one more time. Least of her personal injuries that night, she figured.

  Sophie watched her thumb trace the edge of the hinge in the table’s stowed side. “He’s worried I’m gonna leave. Hoped getting the bi-clutch would smooth things over.”

  Talis put the mug down a few inches farther away than before, trying to keep her hands off it and spare her mouth. Her tongue had developed a bumpy texture where the hot liquid kept scalding her. She leaned back against the bulkhead behind her and crossed her arms.

  “Well? Are you?”

  A light thud sounded as Sophie opened her mouth to speak. It came from somewhere along the hull. Instead of answering Talis’s question, Sophie cursed the carelessness of the dock workers.

  But here they were. Talis had asked the question, and she was going to get an answer.

  “You know, owning your own ship isn’t all open skies and cool breezes.” She shifted her hips so the angle of her slouch was more comfortable. “Sometimes you have to make a decision between what’s right for the long run and what you think you want in the moment. And your crew will have their own opinions.”

  Sophie pulled a wire-bound folio out of a cargo pocket in her pant leg and put it on the table. There was a pencil hung on a string and tucked into a makeshift loop of elastic that kept the folio closed. Unfolding it to lay open on the table in front of her, she traced the contour of a carefully folded sheet of paper inside.

  Sophie’s ship design. That thing went almost everywhere with her.

  “It’s the one thing I’ve always wanted.” Sophie looked up at her. “You know that.”

  “A shiny new ship to be proud of,” Talis said. “Doesn’t mean you have what it takes to be the captain.”

  Sophie flicked one corner of the folio’s back cover. “I don’t want to be told how to take care of it. As long as someone else is captain, I’m always going to have to swallow my arguments about what’s best for the ship and its systems.”

  “Don’t remember you ever swallowing your arguments with me.” And that was why Talis didn’t want to be having this conversation right now.

  Sophie bristled. “I hold back my opinion a lot more than you think,” she said, leaning forward and snapping the folio closed. “That’s why when I finally do speak up I need you to hear me. Tisker sees it. He went off and sold all his stuff so I wouldn’t have to argue it with you. So you couldn’t fly this ship into disrepair and leave us stranded until your old boyfriend comes by and scoops us up.”

  Talis pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes for a moment. Was that coffee cooled off yet? She reached out, took a sip. Close enough.

  “So you are leaving?”

  Sophie absently turned the folio in a slow circle while she chewed her lip. Another thud sounded outside the hull and she glared in the direction of the sound, twitching. When she answered, her voice was small and strained. “If that’s what you think is best. There was a first mate on the docks, told me Sky Opus needs a new wrencher.”

  Talis scoffed. “That sagging retrofit trawler? I don’t see that as very likely to earn you your new ship anytime soon.”

  Sophie eyed the spot on the floor where the coffer had been laid open at dinner. “Could be nearly there with the extra share you said I’d get for the business aboard The Serpent Rose. Wouldn’t take much more for a deposit at Jones’s shipyard.”

  Scratching at her cheek, Talis frowned. “Okay, so you wanna go? Go. But a deposit isn’t a ship. It isn’t the signing bonus for a crew. It isn’t the cost of your first contract, or the fuel you’ll need, or supplies.” Sophie’s shoulders were slumping. She knew this already, but Talis pressed on, feeling herself at her limit and backed up against a wall in this conversation. “You wanna be captain of a half-framed hull, you can show yourself to—”

  The entire conversation was punctuated with small sharp thumps accosting the hull, and each one made Sophie twitch and eye the bulkhead as if she could see the culprit through the joined planks. But the next thud that hit the hull was so strong, it rattled the flatware stowed in their cabinets, and was accompanied by the sharp staccato clinking of chains gone loose. Sophie planted her hands on the table and propelled herself to her feet.

  “Are they rotting drunk out there?” she exclaimed, pushing away from the table and heading toward the access. “They’re going to crack the hull open!”

  And she was gone.

  Talis sat, listening to angry footsteps stomping off toward the companionway and up to the weather deck.

  Sophie’s folio sat abandoned on the table in front of her, now rotated right-side up in Talis’s view. She’d never once looked at the design, though Sophie had offered to show her on several occasions. But it had been a while, hadn’t it? At some point she’d declined enough times that Sophie stopped asking.

  Talis flipped it open and stared at the folded sheet of paper. It felt as though she was about to read Sophie’s personal journal.

  The paper had been folded and unfolded so many times that the pencil lines across the softened creases had faded away. It opened up to a full sheet the width of Talis’s arm span. In some places the pencil lines bounced, jagged, a result of Sophie laying it out to work across the planks of the deck. It was too big for most of the ship’s flat surfaces. The table in Talis’s cabin would have been better for working on it. If she’d realized, she might have offered.

  Talis pursed her lips, stopping herself shy of a low whistle. The design was something else.

  She leaned forward to read Sophie’s small notations—mechanical specs, notes on operation of the winches and articulated flaps. Comments on the ways in which it differed from the standard designs. The construction of the engine, an exploded view of custom components and a streamlined body, took up the top left quarter of the page. Every inch of the paper was covered, as though someone had spilled a box of gears and springs and it landed in a sort of inspired order.

  It would take the entire sum from their new Yu’Nyun contract to pay for something this elaborate. The shares Sophie was currently owed would make for a deposit, maybe, but she’d have to work the rest of her life to get it finished.

  “Captain!”

  Talis jumped, feeling guilty. But Sophie’s voice was sounding on the all-ship, hollow and tinny.

  She crossed the room to the polished brass intercom panel and pushed the button to reply, dial set to the same all-speaker override so wherever anyone was they’d hear it, from the lowest cargo hold to the weather station atop the lift balloon. “Here, Soph. What is it?”

  “Hankirk’s on the move.” Tisker’s voice this time. The anxiety came through the line, as clear as if Wind Sabre’s comms were the high-fidelity crystal and copper Vein systems that Sophie had spec’d for her next ship.

  Gods rot it. She left the channel open and returned to the table to stow Sophie’s drawing safely in the bulkhead cabinet so it wouldn’t go sliding across the table when they started to move. And they needed to move.

  “You still see him?”

  “No, Cap, sorry. I didn’t even see which way he went. Had my eye on someone else lurking near our berth, then I looked back up and he was gone.”

  In large gulps, she swallowed the contents of both coffee mugs and secured them upside-down in the sink over the prongs of the dish rack.

  “Forget it, Tisker, just stay sharp ’til the ramp’s up. Everyone else,” she commanded, hearing her voice echo back in a wave from the various speakers beyond the galley hatch. “We’re done. Up. Get some coffee in you if you need it, there’s fresh in the galley. We’re pushing out. Now.”

  Subrosa’s dock manager wasn’t happy that they were jumping the schedule in the middle of the night after they’d already argued with him just hours before to accelerate it to early morning. His cheeks were red, and he stabbed at
his clipboard with a short fat finger, so that Talis was dearly tempted to knock the docket out of his hands to illustrate how much she cared what it said. She restrained herself with valiant effort, instead trying to reason with him while her crew uncoupled Wind Sabre’s side of the dock connections. But reason seemed to have little effect on him, and she quickly lost her patience.

  “You either get that rusting access open, or we’ll blast our way through it,” she told the portly man, pushing his precious clipboard back against his chest. She then turned away, hoping her bluster and her crew’s activity would scare him into complying. “Prep the forward cannons,” she ordered as she stalked back toward the gangway.

  “Don’t you dare!” he called after her. “You’ll get your ship banned from this dock!”

  Wind Sabre’s engines chuffed in short breaths and then purred to life. There was more than one harbormaster in Subrosa, and they competed for ships. This enclosed docking bay was the largest, but beyond that, the man’s threat held little sting. This was only the second time in all Talis’s years at the job that she’d ever sought out an interior berth for her ship. If she had to limit herself to the floating moorings or the undercity’s external scaffolding in the future, so be it.

  “Fine, you number-crunching landlocked bastard,” she called back over her shoulder, projecting her voice so he could pick it up over the clanks and bangs of the dock equipment as his team bustled around their corner of the bay. “I’ll fasten my clamps elsewhere from here on out.”

  She refused to glance back at him. Didn’t need to. The dock workers had hurried to help them push off. Their manager’s pride was none of their business. But making sure their equipment stayed functional for the next ship heading in, so they didn’t have to shut down the berth for repairs—that was their business.

  The gantry pulled away, retracting the thick hose leading from the dock’s furnace lungs, and Wind Sabre exhaled her own steam. There was a slight ruffle in the canvas along the length of the lift balloon as the hot air supply transitioned, then the envelope went taut again.

  Dug and Tisker made a deliberate show of winding back the gangway, and Talis easily hopped the distance from the walkway onto the end of Wind Sabre’s ramp. As if that was how they always cast off. No panic, just business at full speed.

  She heard the uneven footsteps of the manager as he rushed off, probably to log another fee against her account. There was no profit in banning her, she knew. But he could make a tidy sum leveling all appropriate fines against her.

  Once her captain was aboard, Sophie left her lookout position on the catwalk that wrapped around the lift balloon above. She slid down the ratlines, padded barefoot across the deck to the companionway, and went below to monitor their engines.

  The panels of the bay door trembled, then clattered into motion, the cacophony bouncing through the multi-tiered docks once again. The rolling door stretched far below them and moved so slow, Talis started pacing.

  “Don’t wait for clearance,” she ordered Tisker. “Take us down a few levels and get us the hell out of here.”

  “Aye, Cap,” he said.

  The deck made a small lurch into motion. Fully fueled engines were far less sluggish than when the firebox was near empty. Their berth was in back and on the third level of the five-level docking bay, with at least seven ships between them and their escape. Dug crossed forward and stood his own watch upon the bowsprit.

  Tisker deftly maneuvered the ship down and around the others tied off at the berths below them. Sophie called up from her new position at the observation windows in Wind Sabre’s belly to help him avoid snagging their ventral rigging on someone else’s gantry or lift envelope. Watch crews on the other airships’ decks cried out in alarm at the unorthodox flying, but they could do little more than shake their tiny fists from the railings of their ships.

  Wind Sabre slipped out beneath the edge of the rolling door into the dark purple night skies of Peridot, and Tisker palmed the brass acceleration levers forward as far as they’d go.

  Chapter 19

  The Yu’Nyun ship cast a large shadow across Wind Sabre’s deck. Talis took a deep breath and stepped up from the worn wooden planks of her ship onto the smooth gleaming ramp that beckoned her aboard the starship. She felt a chill rise from the metal plating, run like ice water across her bones, and settle at the nape of her neck. Sophie stepped up behind her with a light, eager hop.

  The alien vessel, both inside and out, was like no airship Talis had ever seen or could ever have imagined on her own. Everything was smooth, as shiny in its guts as it was across the outside of its hull. Not beautiful though, she decided. Sterile. Its entirety was crafted of the aliens’ glossy white material and gleaming silver metal. Everything reflected the glare of the harsh white lights recessed into the overhead. It stung her eyes and felt brighter than the yellow daytime glow of the pumpkins, brighter than the piercing green of Nexus.

  Four aliens greeted Talis and Sophie in a small austere compartment between the multi-paned external hatch and a matching one in the opposite bulkhead. The welcome party was dressed similarly to the veiled alien’s entourage from the day before, but Talis couldn’t tell if any of them were the same individuals. They did not carry weapons, Talis saw, and she was surprised to realize that she had expected them to. She wore her pistol on her own hip and wondered if she ought to have left it behind, though she’d been wearing that and the revolvers the first time she met the aliens. At least today her clothes were clean and there were no bugs left in her hair.

  “Follow,” one said to them via the disembodied voice of its translator, and Talis and Sophie were folded into the middle of the group.

  The interior hatch spun open, onto a corridor that curved away in both directions. Talis squinted against the overwhelming whiteness and wished for her tinted goggles. Sterile, cold light flooded from perforated panels in the overhead. Matching deck plates cast the same lighting up from narrow strips at the bottom edges of seamless curving bulkheads, to either side of a felted carpet walkway, so that no matter in which direction she looked, the eye-watering brightness pervaded her vision.

  Apparently unfazed by the blinding interior, Sophie turned her head every which way, taking in every detail as they were led along. A long list of questions was clearly building up behind her lips, but all Talis cared to see was a vent or porthole, and the friendly purple-black of open skies beyond. Instead, the ice-white bulkhead stretched on, interrupted only by nondescript hatches along the interior, each with a smooth square panel beside it at approximately shoulder height for their hosts, or eye level for Talis and Sophie.

  The entire way, one corridor seemed to be twin to the next. Access doors retracted into the bulkhead, opening on new concentric round corridors. Wherever the engines were installed—which was not obvious from the exterior—their guides did not bring Talis and Sophie past them.

  Assuming Talis had her bearings true, they were led to the fore of the ship. Their group squeezed into a narrow compartment that carried them up, or at least the sensation felt like up, and deposited them into a short corridor, the first straight one they’d encountered. At its far end, a tall arching hatch split into three triangular sections that receded into the bulkhead as they approached. Through the doorway came such sounds and rhythms as Talis felt certain she would know anywhere: The operations bridge. Her own crew was not large enough to require formality in their shifts and watches, but the murmur of reports and commands passing back and forth, the hum and tones of systems readouts, and the particular sensation of focus pervading the cabin was as similar to her academy experience as the alien ship itself was foreign.

  They entered onto a small platform on the second level of an airy double-high deck station. From each side of the landing, a sweeping staircase of shallow steps led down to the main deck, where more than a dozen aliens sat at various posts or moved between them. ‘Companionway’ was the proper
aeronautical term. Stairs were for the landlocked. But she’d never seen such a grandiose set of steps, even on luxury yachts. The ornate, decorative banister made it easy to imagine she was in the foyer of a large estate rather than on a vessel, and it felt more accurate to think of the gracefully curving steps as stairs.

  One of their guides gestured to starboard, then led them down to ops. The rise between each step was half the height she’d consider comfortable, and she wondered how the towering aliens had the patience not to skip two or three steps at a time as they descended.

  Beneath the landing on which they’d entered, the two staircases cradled an elaborate captain’s chair. Nestled into the hollow of the architecture, a wide, shallow bowl surrounded a high-backed seat. The console around the seat was host to a series of readout screens mirrored from several other stations.

  Talis had assumed that the veiled individual she met the day before was the ship’s captain. But the regal alien that sat upon the command seat was a different creature. Its body carvings were not as delicate as the individual whose torso and sweeping head had been perforated so dangerously. This individual’s carvings looked more calculated, more efficient.

  The Yu’Nyun captain wore no veil but was dressed to leave no doubt as to its superiority over the others that crewed the bridge, as if its posture did not do the job already. A rippling, shimmering blue fabric, tailored so as to appear dramatically opulent but not restrict the wearer’s movement, draped over its body and one arm. The material appeared opaque at first, but then Talis realized the outline of the alien’s torso could be seen when it moved. Its arms were banded in more blue, edged in silver. Silver-toned rings circled through matching eyelets in the trim. More fabric draped from the back of its head, from piercings in the sides of its exoskeleton. Talis saw others of the crew with such rings along the sides of their arching heads. Varied in number. A sign of rank? Of successful missions?

  The majority of alien personnel wore blue loincloths and short waistcoats of the same color. The tops were solid only at the sides and connected in the front and back with silver leather bands, while similar straps loosely joined the sides of loincloths above the knees. Beneath those minimal pieces, they wore nothing else. On a Cutter, the clothing would have been scandalous, and definitely too cold for the chill in the air. Either their plated bodies prevented the Yu’Nyun from sensing the cold as she did, or they preferred a little bite to the air. Talis saw goosebumps on Sophie’s shoulders above the neckline of her top, and the girl’s exhalations swirled in the air. Her own, as well. But the aliens must have been as cold inside as their ship was, and no silver condensation appeared from their parted mouths.