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Nita was thrown against the wall of an one of the dreadnought’s internal hallways as a cloud of splinters left her scraped up and thanking her lucky stars that she’d kept her goggles in place. When the cloud settled down, she saw that the hallway ahead of her was now missing, replaced with rushing wind and moonlight. The damage revealed something else, however. Until now she’d seen precious little of the dreadnought’s steam system. Unlike the cheaply and minimally built Wind Breaker, the dreadnought was clearly a war machine, meant for battle, and thus meant to withstand attack. The vital workings were hidden deep inside, where even a blast like the one she’d just narrowly avoided could not reach them. In the shattered remnants of the hall, however, the splintered back wall revealed stout steam pipes. She followed what little of them she could see. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to give her an idea of where the boiler was. If there was one thing that could destroy this ship in one fell swoop, it was the boiler.
She doubled back and found her way down the stairs, dodging into side halls whenever the rare crewman appeared. A few twists and turns took her into the depths of the ship, where enormous pipes hung in exposed runs along the walls, leading her directly to the boiler. It was massive, as it would have to be in order to get a behemoth like this moving at all, let alone with the speed and agility it had demonstrated. The boiler approached the size of the ones back at home; but just as the ones the fug folk had built for others were unnecessarily complex, that same brilliance had streamlined the workings of this one to be manned by a single fug person standing on an elevated platform at one side of the room like the conductor of an orchestra. He worked like a man possessed, eyes scanning dozens of meters, pulling levers to dump bins of fuel into chutes and twisting valves to regulate pressure.
She climbed onto the catwalk and crept low behind him, though with his level of distraction she could have been beating a base drum without drawing his attention. It wasn’t until she’d slunk two steps away that he finally turned to inspect the sound of her footsteps, and when he did he received a wrench to the side of his head. He crumbled quickly to the ground, and she was left at the controls of the massive ship’s power supply. Cranking open some valves and tightening up others, she began dumping extra fuel into the firebox and manipulating the water flow. In essence, she was gathering together the sum total of what she’d learned about how to keep a boiler from blowing—and doing the opposite. One by one, though, safety valves and other fail-safes triggered.
“They do know how to build a good boiler when they want to…” she grumbled.
“We are receiving irregular power to the turbines. Get them regulated, now!” came an order from a clearer and much more elaborate version of the Wind Breaker’s speaking tube. “Main Engineer, report! … Report! … Secondary Engineer, report to the boiler, and bring two guards.”
Nita looked around desperately. There wasn’t much time left, and it was clear that no amount of standard tinkering was going to get this boiler to explode. She felt around her equipment, searching for something that might do some good. She’d lost a good deal of tools during her fall. Finally her fingers came to rest on an oddly bulging pouch. She pulled it open to find the exposed coil box. As the footsteps of the engineer and his guards began to echo down the hall, an idea came to mind. She leapt down to the floor of the chamber and sprinted to the firebox. Once there she hauled it open, loosened a few screws on the coil box, and threw it inside, slamming the firebox door shut after. She then commenced bashing madly at any connected pipes she could reach.
“Stop right there!” cried a voice a few moments later.
She turned to the doorway to find two guards with weapons raised.
“Go ahead,” she replied. “Fire your weapons in the boiler room. Nothing would make me happier.”
“That’s the Calderan! How did she get on the ship? Best not to kill her. Grab her and bring her to the captain,” the engineer said, climbing to the catwalk and beginning to undo her sabotage.
Free-Wrench Page 30
