Elsewhere in the warehouse, Gunner and the Coopers crossed paths. Unlike Nita, they had been focusing on quantity over quality from the beginning. Gunner was a walking armory now, strapped with rifles, pistols, ammunition, and strange assemblages of metal pipes, wooden stocks, and triggers that seemed far too large to be a weapon intended to be fired by or at a human. The siblings had grabbed anything and everything light enough to carry and small enough to shove in a sack.
“What’s that big brass tube there, Gunner?” Lil asked breathlessly.
“Something called a ‘rocket-propelled grenade.’ I am thoroughly interested in two of those three terms, so I suspect I’ll find it quite useful,” he said.
“I got a mess of booze and some of those tins of fancy fish eggs they charge so much for. Plus, I got a couple of those cameras and the stuff to take a pile of pictures. I reckon we could start taking our own girlie pictures. They always sell real good.”
“Yeah, but where you gonna get the girlies?” Lil asked.
“Well, there’s you, and there’s Nita, and Butch.”
“If you think me or Nita are gonna dress up like them girlies you’re always selling pictures of, that brain of yours needs adjusting. And no offense to Butch, but she don’t seem like her pictures would fetch much of a price.”
“Well, what did you get?”
“Perfume and a bunch of bolts of that fancy fabric they make down here, and some of them good binoculars and telescopes and such,” she said. “I still got some sacks left. I want to do another round to fill ’em up.”
“Coop, Gunner, Lil!” Nita called out as loud as she dared.
“There you are,” Lil said. “Where’s your sacks? Time’s a-wasting!”
“How much can the Wind Breaker carry?” she asked.
“More than we can, so get to filling those sacks.”
“No, I mean it. How much can it carry?”
“We ain’t been able to overload it yet. When the cap’n had the fuggers fix it up for the long-haul trips, he had them swap out the envelope for one of them heavy-lifter ones they use for hauling coal up from the mines down here.”
“Could it handle three tons?”
All eyes turned to Gunner.
“Just about. The handling would suffer, but it would get off the ground. Why?”
“Follow me. Bring the sacks. I think I’ve found a way to really make the most of this,” she said.
She led the way to a loading area, which contained all sorts of large steam engines ready for installation, and where an enormous and curious device—a long, flat platform on wide, rubber-studded wheels—stuttered and hissed. The platform’s bed was already loaded with a few miniature boilers and small steam engines, the likes of which only the fug folk seemed able to create. An arm’s-worth of sacks had already been loaded onto it and were well secured. On one side of the platform was a glowing firebox hooked up to the most complicated tangle of pipes, tubes, gears, springs, levers, and valves any of the crewmembers had ever seen. A seat was bolted to the side of the mechanism and surrounded by wheels and levers.
“What the hell is that?”
“They just call it a ‘steam hauler.’ It is a steam-powered wagon. All we need to do is get the goods out here so they can be loaded, right? This can haul five times as much as we can. We load it up, roll it out, and empty it into the gig.”
“Can you operate it?” Gunner asked.
“I think I can get it moving.”
“Let’s do it then. Get this thing loaded up.”
Coop turned his head, angling his ear toward the wall. “Uh-oh. You folks hear that?”
“What is it?”
“I think we been found out. I’m hearing turbines and a lot of yelling.”
“Let’s just get out of here!” Lil said. “Take what we got. It’s already worth more than we made in the last few years put together.”
“No. I’ve got a better idea. Coop, get to the door, clear it of fug folk, and do what it takes to block it, then get back here and start loading this bed with anything you can.”
He fired off a salute. “This’ll be fun!” he called out while running.
“Nita, you get to loading this up. I want this bed filled.”
“What should I do?” Lil asked.
“I don’t care how, but get yourself up to the roof with the flares. And listen very carefully, because you’re not going to have much time to explain this to the captain…”