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On the Wind Breaker, the crew had all survived Captain Mack’s desperate attack. Butch had made her way back to the deck and was now busy rousing the dazed captain, who’d been knocked back from the controls by the force of the blast. His face was covered in tiny scrapes, and one lens of his glasses was cracked, but he was otherwise intact. He stood and took the controls again.
“On your feet, men. We might still get out of this,” he ordered.
The Wind Breaker, without him active at the controls, had veered toward the gunship and now butted against it. He tried to steer it away, but dislodged rigging from the larger ship had become entangled with the support belt for his turbines, holding the ships together. He eased the controls in and out, causing the ship to tug away bit by bit, but as he did the remaining crew of the dreadnought wheeled over a pair of strange contraptions.
“Boarding hooks, men! On your feet!” the captain ordered. He reached for his pistols.
“Keep your hands raised. You’ve got three rifleman targeting you right now.”
He turned to find his counterpart on the dreadnought standing on the deck, speaking through a megaphone.
“You really impress me, Captain West,” said the enemy captain. “No one has dared to assault anything concealed by the fug in a century. We have kept the dreadnought on standby constantly for decades, but this is the first time under my command that we have had to use it. Again, I applaud you. I’m inclined to believe that it was through little more than an overabundance of raw gall and foolishness that you achieved this, but I doubt that any amount of daring could come so close to success without a keen mind behind it. And no keen mind would place all of its eggs in a single basket. For instance, I am not sure when or how you inserted one of your crew onto my ship, but we’ve found her.”
He signaled and the guards hauled Nita out into view.
“Again, the mere ability to insert her convinces me that you have tricks up your sleeve. In a moment, my men will board your ship. They will search it, and they will recover all that you have stolen. You will also tell us of any information you have been able to deliver to anyone else through whatever means. If you cooperate, you will be allowed to live, and, in time, your fees will be paid and your life will continue. Men, deploy the boarding hooks.”
“I really wouldn’t do that,” Gunner said, his voice slurred from his own brief trip into unconsciousness. He had in his hand what was either a shotgun sawed down to the size of a pistol, or a pistol modified for firing shot. “The last time I fired this, I nearly broke my wrist, but I’m confident that with it I could kill three of you in one shot without aiming.”
“I reckon I could take a few myself,” Coop said, sitting up and raising his own pistols.
“And I’ll mop up what’s left,” Lil said, emerging from the hatch with her stolen rifle.
“Captain, please. For your own sake and theirs, I beseech you to get your crew under control,” the enemy captain said.
“I’d say they are following my standing orders just fine.”
“Perhaps your infiltrator can reason with you.” He turned to Nita. “Explain to him what you’ve seen, that nothing he can do can destroy this ship.”
He placed the megaphone in front of her mouth. After a steadying breath, she spoke: “Captain Mack. I am not going to plead for my life. I understand that what we do, we do for the ship. But promise me one thing. When this monster goes down, find a way to get the medicine to my mother. And tell her that I’m sorry.”
Captain Mack nodded. “We’ll do that, Ms. Graus. You can count on it.”
“What do you mean by that? Your tampering didn’t do anything to the boiler,” the enemy captain said.
Fate, in one last showing of its fine sense of humor, chose that moment to finish the work Nita had started. The loosened and damaged coil box finally succumbed to the intense heat of the overfed firebox. The nontrith components gave way, allowing the phenomenal amount of power stored in the coiled spring to burst free. A ribbon of nigh indestructible material unfurled in an instant, punching easily through the walls of both the firebox and the water chamber. Its sturdy structure thus compromised, the boiler began to vent superheated steam. Forced upward by the escaping vapor, the whole of the house-sized boiler thrust through the decks, crashing through them as if they were gingerbread and continuing unimpeded through the envelope above. No matter how secure and well-engineered the design, the sack of gas couldn’t withstand such massive damage.
The explosion sent the crew flying and threw Nita to the deck along with the captain. The dreadnought continued to splinter and crack, the fore end drooping as the envelope lost the ability to hold it aloft. The secondary envelopes, still intact, held firm to the aft of the ship, and the damaged craft began to come apart. Captain Mack pushed hard at his controls, turning the Wind Breaker away from the disintegrating dreadnought. Lil madly scanned the decks of the two halves of the sinking ship. Finally, on the deck of the falling fore end, she saw Nita, clutching a piece of rigging.
“Cap’n! Nita’s still down there. We’ve got to do something,” she cried, pointing.
Captain Mack’s sharp mind clicked away, his eyes sweeping across his own ship’s deck. Finally they came to rest on the cowering and just recently recovered creature at his feet, Wink.
“Give me the longest lifeline we have, and make sure one side is secured,” he ordered. He pulled some levers and set the Wind Breaker to descending, though the damaged fore end of the dreadnought was moving swiftly away. He plucked up Wink and set him on the control harness. “Do you want to prove your loyalties to me once and for all? To stay on this ship, as a part of this crew?”
Wink gave a very deliberate and very emphatic tap.
Captain Mack took the end of the presented lifeline. He tied a large loop into it, then attached it to Wink’s harness. “You see that greenhorn?”
Wink looked to Nita’s rapidly retreating form on the deck below. He again tapped.
“Bring her home.”
With that, he picked up the creature and hurled him off the edge of the ship.
Wink plummeted to the deflating envelope, where his deft claws quickly found a grip. He looked up, his one eye wild with fear and confusion, then looked down. With a vocal sound that could only have been frustration, the beast scampered down the deflating envelope and into the rigging.
The wind was catching the falling ship now, drawing it under the Wind Breaker where no one could see what was happening. Captain Mack guided the ship down and away, doing his best to follow the path of the accelerating descent of the dreadnought. They were close to the surface of the fug, and getting closer. All eyes but the captain’s were on the coil of lifeline still on the deck as it whisked foot by foot off the side of the ship. The dreadnought plunged beneath the surface of the fug now, forcing the horrid stuff aside and sending it rushing up on all sides like soil hurled from a crater. Mack restored the levers, slowing the Wind Breaker lest they follow the ship into the toxic stuff. They began to climb again, and the lifeline was nearly at its end.
One final loop of line was drawn off the edge and the whole of the rope went taut. They were rising steadily now.
“Start hauling that line in,” Mack ordered.
Gunner and Coop jumped to the task, pulling the line up quickly but steadily. Lil looked anxiously over the side as more of the rope was pulled up from the fug. Finally a form became visible. Wink dangled from the line where it had been tied to his harness. A moment later, her arms hooked through the loop but her body motionless, came Nita. They hauled her up to the ship, where Butch rushed to her side. She placed her head on Nita’s chest, then hammered at her ribs with two firm blows. It prompted a raking breath, then a deep, hoarse cough from the Calderan girl. She gasped and coughed again, hacking out a wisp of purple vapor.
“Well,” she croaked when she looked around to see the crew standing over her. “I always say, there’s nothing like a nice vigorous ending to an uneventfu
l day.”