Ash and Brine Rib

Mara threw herself flat against the oily deck plates before the steam could skin her eyebrows.

The metal burned right through the fabric of her coveralls, but she didn't let go of Chata. The adjustable wrench—thirty centimeters of mild steel with a handle wrapped in dirty thread and three notches filed into the moving jaw—snapped onto the hex nut with a dry click. It was a perfect fit, one of those rare instances when luck decides to waive the toll.

"Turn, you damned thing!" roared Onofre from above, shoving the hydraulic jack under the compressor bed.

Mara clenched her teeth, braced her boot against a hull rib, and heaved with both hands. The frayed lace of her left boot snagged on the bleed valve, yanking at her ankle annoyingly. She didn't even bother freeing it; she put her whole shoulder into it. The locknut creaked, shed a crust of alkaline rust, and gave half an inch to starboard. The agonizing whistle of the steam dropped two octaves, turning into a muffled gurgle.

The galleon lurched upward, groaning in every timber, and then floated.

Silence.

Not a silence of calm, but that deafening pause that comes when the nozzles swallow thin air and the craft settles midway between the earth and nowhere.

The middle strata smelled of pumice and rancid lard.

At that altitude, the sun was no more than a poached egg smashed against a grey sheet; a milky smear that stole the shadows but rendered faces the color of rapeseed ash. The wind had died completely. In the jargon of the blind ports, they called it "the boilermaker's doldrums": not a breeze to fill the auxiliary sails, nor enough density for the drift fins to bite with any purpose.

Everyone on deck was moving with deadened files, smoothing down the burrs on the nozzles so the meager warm air wouldn't whistle. In the bilge, Onofre Cuesta sat on a tallow barrel and rubbed his bad knee with a calloused palm.

"You've got a knack for ironwork, brat," he said, spitting a thread of black tobacco that splattered against the hot boiler plating. "Though you nearly gutted us against the dock with your rushing."

"If I hadn't gone under, the nut would've blown the lead jacket," replied Mara, sitting on a crate of oakum. Her face was smeared with soot and a saline crust itched furiously on the bridge of her nose, right beneath the rubber rim of her flight goggles. "You owe me a life, Cuesta."

"I owe you a kick in the backside if Sabino comes down the ladder. And don't just call me Cuesta, I'm old enough to be your grandfather three times over."

Onofre reached into the pocket of his cracked leather vest, pulled out a dull pocketknife, and sliced off a thumb-sized piece of tough jerked beef. He offered her a bite.

Mara looked at it. It smelled of concentrated saltpeter and coal dust.

"Pass. I still have food."

She rummaged in the side pocket of her canvas rucksack—the one with the zipper jammed by a rusted safety pin—and extracted a greasy wrapper. A pressed carob biscuit: sixty percent loose crumbs, forty percent pocket lint. She snapped off a piece with her fingernails and popped it into her mouth. It tasted like old flour and sawdust, but it quieted the metallic aftertaste left by the thick bilge air.

"Does this piece of junk always fly this slow?" she asked, chewing half-heartedly.

"It flies the way ships fly when they don't want to be written down in an official ledger," retorted the old man, chewing his jerky with a circular jaw movement that made the warts on his chin dance. "Prado knows what he's doing. Up there, there are no laws, but there are cannons that ask no questions."

"Prado looks like a schoolteacher who drank bad coffee."

"Prado is a mangy dog, but he knows the fog shoals better than any drunk in San Telmo."

From the brass speaking tube hanging from the ceiling dropped a metallic voice, filtered and distant as if coming from the bottom of a well:

"Engines. Report on nozzle two."

Onofre didn't flinch. He finished chewing, wiped his fingers on his thigh, and walked leisurely over to the mouthpiece.

"Nozzle two with clean draft, commander," he tossed out in a voice so flat it sounded read from a customs manual. "Brine on the fins, nothing a couple of brats can't scrape off with a bronze spatula."

"I don't want white wakes. If we leave a trail in the milky layer, the coast guard will hunt us down before noon. Keep the purge on closed circuit."

"Understood, sir."

The tube clicked when Prado closed the valve from the bridge. Onofre let out a snort that rustled his nose hairs.

"Accomplices of the fog," the old man muttered, picking up a wooden mallet and a curved scraper. "The fog absolves no one of their debts, but at least it gifts you half an hour of mutual blindness. Here, do something useful before I regret not throwing you into the basin."

He tossed her a flexible-bladed spatula.

The starboard bank was a maze of pipes sweating warm condensation.

Mara liked mechanical disorder. It had a logic people rarely understood: gears didn't lie; if a valve failed, it was due to wear or poor tempering, never out of spite. With the spatula, she began clearing away the saltpeter crusts that grew like whitish mushrooms at the flange joints.

The ship floated so still that a plumb line hanging from the bulkhead barely swung half a finger's width. It was that deceptive calm of the middle strata, where the wind is unheard, only the muffled lament of rivets expanding from the chamber heat.

Upon reaching the firewall bulkhead, behind the secondary boiler, Mara bumped into the stoker's plate.

It was a thick plate of mild steel secured by four wingnuts. Two of them were loose, bent from hammer blows as if someone had tried to force them without the proper tools. Mara crouched down. A draft of cold air seeped through the lower gap.

She had no business opening it.

Her job was to scrape the salt.

She wedged the claw of Chata under the lip and pried.

The plate gave way with a dull snap. Behind it were no return pipes or steam jackets. There was a blind niche, one of those smuggling hollows built into the master frames to sneak liquor or instruments without paying a toll in the free ports.

Inside rested a square tin of pipe tobacco, sealed with tar tape to protect it from the sulfurous moisture.

Mara glanced over her shoulder. Onofre was still at the bow nozzle, delivering steady, rhythmic blows to a stubborn clamp: clack, clack, clack.

Carefully, she tore away the dried tar with the tip of her pocketknife. Inside there was no tobacco.

There was a small notebook with black oilcloth covers, bound with a rotting rubber band that snapped at the merest touch. An unofficial maintenance logbook. The pages were rice paper, yellowed by oil vapor, filled with pressure calculations, three-way nozzle diagrams, and thrust corrections.

Mara flipped through the first pages mechanically, trying to make out the previous machinist's cramped handwriting.

She stopped dead.

Halfway through the notebook, the faded ink gave way to firm strokes of soft graphite pencil. A stroke leaning to the left, with the number fours drawn with an open loop and the letter 'd' with a very long tail crossing the upper line.

No one across all three archipelagos wrote pressure logs that way.

Only one person.

"Adjusted secondary blade clearance to two hair-widths. The nozzle coughs with cold air, but it'll hold the pass through San Jerónimo Channel if we don't force the draft."

At the foot of the paragraph, next to the abbreviated signature—an 'S' crossed by two dots—was the date.

Mara read the numbers three times.

November fourteenth.

Her father had shipwrecked on the outer reefs on October twentieth. Eighty leagues south, according to the sealed report Headquarters had handed her mother along with an empty chest and a denied pension.

November fourteenth.

Three weeks after being officially dead, her father had been right in this very bilge, tightening the very same bolts with a pencil behind his ear.