The wind gave them hell, but just as Hink was thinking it was time to tell the crew to kiss their boots good-bye, the breeze shifted and nudged the Swift’s tail, giving her the air she needed. The Swift scraped over the top of the Black Sledge, leaving more than a little dust behind.
“Seldom?” Hink called out.
“Dead on, Captain,” Seldom yelled.
And then as if in response, the Black Sledge shuddered and rocked as she fell away beneath them. A gout of flame took up the port side of her—Seldom’s torch hitting dry tinder. They’d go up in a flame if they didn’t dump water to put out the fire. Of course, without enough water, there’d be no steam to keep her up or put her down soft. Especially not with a storm looming.
The way Hink reckoned it, Captain Barlow had himself a handful of hard decisions to make right about now.
And otherwise occupied was just how Hink liked the crew of the ships he was about to board.
“Guffin. The wheel,” Hink said.
Guffin jammed a staypin in the controls, unlatched his belt line, and with one hand on the overhead bars made his way across the ship to the helm.
Once there, Hink unlatched and left the wheel in Guffin’s hands, not waiting to see if he had latched the harness to the interior framework of the ship or kicked boots into the straps.
Hink caught at the framework as he ran to the door Seldom was manning.
“Give me as long as you can,” Hink said.
Seldom nodded. “Always do.”
Hink unlatched his breathing gear, dragging the scarf at his neck up over his nose, and buttoned it to the leather lining at the edge of his goggles. This high, the cold could freeze a man’s face right off.
Seldom unplugged Hink’s hose, then latched around Hink’s torso the harness that would haul him home. He handed Hink the three-hooks, two rakelike handles with metal barbs at one end and leather cuffs at the other. Hink buckled the cuffs around his wrists and gripped the handles.
“Keep her up, boys!” he yelled. Then Captain Hink stepped out the door and into the brace of wind.
The fall was fast, hard, and at the same time seemed to take forever. Wind blasted his eyes, face, and near tore off his clothes. The Black Sledge was just a few stories below him, and if he hit it right, the netting that covered her canvas would be plenty enough for him to catch on to.
Captain Hink hit the ship and swung the hooks in both his hands, which did a hell of a job of tangling up with the ropes.
He grunted in pain as his shoulders bore the weight of his landing and his arms nearly ripped from their sockets. It took him a second to breathe air back into his lungs and shake the dizzy out of his head. Then he was scrambling down the netting, toward the windows.
He hung down off the netting, his harness line still attached to the Swift. If this was gonna get done, it’d have to be fast, before the lines fouled and he’d have to cut free.
That is, if he lived long enough to cut free.
He pulled his gun, shot the window, and then smashed the glass out of it with the heavy barbed end of the hook. No return fire, which meant he’d caught them away from the glass, maybe busy, say, trying to douse the flame crawling up the side of their ship.
He pushed in through the broken window. Not much slack on his line left, and he’d be damned if he was going to cut free to go any farther.
The smoke that rolled through the old tub was choking and hot. Captain Barlow was somewhere in that mess, shouting orders. The dim shape of men scurrying to do as their captain told them impressed Hink. Even though Barlow was a snake-bellied traitor, he knew how to run a tight ship.
If the Sledge had any luck still on her ledger, she might make it through this little debacle.
They say luck favors the brave and fortune favors fools. Hink decided that he must be just enough of both today. One of Barlow’s crewmen was shock-still and strapped to the side bar, likely watching his life march before his eyes. Hink didn’t have to take but a step or two before he was in front of the man.
“I’m commandeering your services, sailor.” Hink hit him across the back of the head with the blunt end of the hook. The man sagged and Hink took up some swearing as he pulled the extra hauling harness off of his belt and strapped it around the man. He attached a second line onto the rope that was latched to his own harness so they both had a chance to be pulled back up to the Swift.
“You better be worth the trouble,” Hink muttered as he lifted the man up across his shoulder and stomped back to the window.
Once he’d muscled the both of them out the hole and up the ropes on the outside of the ship, a yell from behind him clued him in that the crew had been stirred up. Then gunshots rang out, louder than the flames, louder than the fire, louder than old Barlow himself. Hink knew he’d better get off this puffer fast if he wanted to keep on living.
He pulled on the rope, three hard tugs in a row, and pushed away from the ship like a kid swinging for a water hole.
The added weight of the unconscious man on his harness near took the breath back out of him as they slammed into the side of the ship. But Mr. Seldom had caught his signal. Hink felt the jerk and pull of the rope winching upward.
The Swift’s engines changed tone as Guffin maneuvered her up and away from the foundering Black Sledge.
Hink glanced up at his ship. She was a shiny beauty, ghostlike and luminescent against the smoke and clouds. Even swinging the waltz on a string beneath her, he couldn’t help but smile.
The ground far, far below him twirled as he was hauled upward. The Black Sledge seemed to have done some fair good in putting out the fire, and was smoking downward at a relatively safe speed toward a green bowl of a valley cradled between two peaks. They might make it down just fine.
Or they might be stuck in the middle of a range, with little in the way of supplies and a winter storm bearing down.
As if reflecting on his thoughts, the sky flashed with a rattle of lightning, thunder rolling way up above the glim fields. Rain started off in spits that turned into a good hard-driven drizzle. Even at this height, it was still just rain and not ice or snow.
By the time Hink was reaching up for Mr. Seldom’s and Molly Gregor’s hands to haul him into the Swift, he was soaked down to his long underwear and shaking from the cold.
“Who’s this?” Molly asked of the man he deposited on the floor.
“Didn’t catch his name,” Hink said, shivering under the blanket she tossed over his shoulders.
“If you’re cold, Captain,” she said, “you can work the boilers on the way home.” Molly’s sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, and sweat trickled down the side of her neck and glossed her cheeks. Every inch of her exposed skin was tanned and dusted with soot from the big engine.
Hink grinned. “Wouldn’t want to put you out of a job, Molly.”
“The way you handle a boiler?” She scoffed. “We’d be dead before sunrise. Captain,” she added.
Seldom finished unlatching the harnesses and ropes between Hink and their guest, and then dragged the man by the armpits off to one side where he could latch him into the straps and framework there and keep him from getting stepped on by the crew.
Hink shoved up to his feet and, holding the blanket around him, walked over to Guffin, at the wheel.
“Heading?”
“Due west. Thought we could bed down in one of the hollows there.”
“We got the guts for that, Molly?” Hink asked.
“We’ll need to take it slow, but she’ll get us there,” Molly said. “So long as the storm doesn’t kick up too strong.”
“Aim us over the ridge, Mr. Guffin,” Hink said. “Easy as you can.”