Beyond the Endless Sky

Chapter 7

"Why does the captain call you 'Tinker'?" Clarissa asked as she shut the oven door.

Her hair was plastered to her head like a too-tight hat, and her shirt was stained with sweat-soaked soot. Despite Anita's earlier advice she had wiped her face with her leather gloves, and could feel the crust of ash on her forehead when she moved her eyebrows.

As Clarissa blinked sweat away from her eyes, she watched Anita as the woman fiddled with a pipe connector. The ship's engineer seemed chronically incapable of holding still, always examining a piece of the engine or some nearby machine. Even when she stopped to drink some water or catch her breath, it was always with a tool in her hand.

"You'd have to ask the captain," Anita replied with a shrug. She didn't turn away from the pipe she was examining and eventually scowled in disgust. "Gotta redo the coating on these fittings, could rust faster than an Avantillian ship of the line flees a fair fight."

"He didn't tell you?" Clarissa asked as she took a sip of water and set the shovel back in its wall bracket.

"Nope. Thought it was a shot at my parentage at first, but he's never called anyone tinker except me, and Mercy's liable to have shot him if he did it to be cruel," Anita explained as she examined the pressure gauges again. "Okay, that should be good for a few minutes. Grab that took satchel on that table over there and tie it to your waist. I'm hereby graduating you from 'shovel slave' to 'lackey'."

"Didn't know I had an actual job title," Clarissa said, but she laughed as she spoke, and grabbed the small pouch. It had two belts, one quite a bit larger than the other, with the tools sticking out of the bag in a way that suggested the pouch should be worn on the waist.

"Second strap goes around your thigh, bit above your knee. Put it on and get over here, I could use your help to expand the outflow pressure lines to the directional rotors," Anita said, pointing at a piece of machinery as if Clarissa were supposed to understand what it did.

"Okay," Clarissa said, trailing off as she tied the belt around her waist.

"Now, we're heading into a place called the Pillars of Volante. It's a rock formation that connects to another nearby island, and the winds are mighty unpredictable. Captain's going to need the peripheral propellers to spin around pretty quickly to make tight adjustments, so we don't become the newest shipwreck. So we need to expand the pressure we allocate to those machines by rerouting the outflow lines here." Anita tapped one of the pipes with a wrench.

Clarissa gaped, uncomfortable with her own confusion. Thankfully Anita seemed to noticed, because she smiled and winked, and tapped another pipe. "Relax. We have a fair bit of time before the pillars, I'll go over this nice and slow."

But Anita's good cheer evaporated when the captain's voice roared out from the speaking tube, "Tinker, prep for hard and unannounced manoeuvres. We might have a fight on our hands."

"A fight?" Anita blurted out in confusion. She shook her head, as if trying to wake up, then dashed over to the speaking tube. "What in the sunless skies do you mean a fight?"

"Volante pirate hunter lurking at the pillars. Mercy's sent our marque codes, but whoever's captaining that ship wants to inspect the letters in person," the captain scathed, angry enough that Clarissa jumped just at the tone. "Leslie's prepping the Banshee as we speak."

"Aye, cap," Anita's timid reply was barely more than a whisper. She turned away and was already swearing under her breath as she ran back over to the pipes she had been pointing at earlier.

"Okay, kid, we're doing the quick and dirty version of engineer-in-training," Anita said. "Grab the one-inch wrench and cut-off valves three and four over there by the boiler."