Free-Wrench, no. 1 by Joseph R. Lallo Read Free Book Online

coat weren’t rolled. He wore it open, like the others,
flapping in the breeze. His vest was straight and buttoned, a gold
chain leading from a buttonhole to his watch pocket. His trousers
were black, but less worn than those of his crew, and his boots
were polished to a higher sheen and were of a much finer make. He
wore thin tan gloves with openings over the knuckles and between
the fingers. Around his head he’d tied a charcoal-gray kerchief,
and a pair of round spectacles with dark glass lenses and a strange
rectangular side lens stretching back from the hinge to shade his
eyes from the side adorned his face. Long steel-gray hair hung down
from beneath the kerchief, and he wore a similarly colored beard
and mustache, which looked to have been carefully trimmed at some
point in the past but had since been neglected. He was perhaps in
his fifties, though his skin was weathered, roasted, and pitted
enough to make him seem far older. His teeth, whiter than she’d
expected, clamped around the smoldering stub of a thin brown cigar
that burned with an almost candylike scent. While his crew so far
had all run on the thin side, he was overall thicker and more
intimidating, not portly or muscle-bound, just broader in his
chest, arms, and legs.
    “Cap’n Mack, Amanita Graus. Nita, this is
Cap’n Mack,” Lil said.
    The captain turned to Nita and gave her a
measuring look. “Let’s see the trith.” He spoke out of the side of
his mouth rather than sparing a hand for long enough to take the
cigar away, and his voice was rough enough to make it clear that
this wasn’t his first cigar. It probably wasn’t even in the first
thousand.
    She pulled the exposed coil box out of its
pouch and held it out to him. He glanced down to it, then back to
her eyes, not a flicker of a change in his expression to suggest
what might be going through his mind. When he held out his hand,
she placed the box in it.
    The captain inspected it for few moments.
“Gunner, get over here and take the wheel. Lil, go handle packing
up the mooring lines. Ms. Graus, this way please,” said the
captain. Despite the presence of the word “please,” all three
statements were clearly orders.
    The crew snapped to his commands, and he
strode quickly toward the steps down from the upper tier without
waiting for an answer from Nita. In her years at the steamworks,
she’d worked under enough different foremen and supervisors to know
that it didn’t do you any good to illustrate an inability to follow
directions as a first impression. She didn’t know enough about this
captain to know what kind of man he was, so it was best to stay on
his good side. He walked along the swaying deck with nary a stutter
or a stumble, as though he didn’t even notice the way it pitched
and rolled with the breeze. Nita didn’t even try to follow him
directly, resorting instead to the same roundabout path that she’d
taken to reach him, one that gave her uninterrupted contact with a
railing or strut.
    Nita reached the stairs and found the captain
standing in a doorway at the bottom of another staircase, this one
leading back toward the top tier of the deck and providing access
to the ship’s interior beneath it. When she caught up with him, he
turned and led her down a short hallway to a door emblazoned with a
plaque that read Captain’s Quarters . The captain pushed open
the door to what Nita expected to be the grandest room on the ship.
Though they had no airships, Caldera had glorious and
well-appointed seagoing vessels. As a Graus she’d often been
offered a place at the captain’s table during mealtimes and had
been given the ship’s tour on the flagship of the Calderan fleet.
On each of those ships the captain’s quarters had been a place
large enough and comfortable enough to match a room one might find
on solid land.
    This was not a policy shared by the captain
of the Wind Breaker . The captain’s quarters were as cramped
as any other room she’d seen, if not more