Chapter VIII: Blimp Repair

The next few days are not worth being written about. Lady Halflance spent about an hour chewing me out, using her most flowery and profane language, explaining in a full speech why my running off had made her look undisciplined and idiotic. When that was done, it was time to do the reverse operation to that crazy afternoon at the train station, about a billion miles away in Amrinval. As before, I took as much of our things as I could, even letting Anna and Unity pile some of their personal things into my arms. The only thing harder than carrying all of that stuff was navigating through the dozens upon dozens of other Bluerose visitors trying to do the exact same thing. 

The treaty grounds were roughly divided into a bunch of different factions, clusters of small wooden huts, made of identical materials but easily distinguished by the type of woman seen hanging around around the front door. The two politicians, Halflance and Burnardor, were neighbors, living in two larger structures near the center of the grounds. Their respective assistants and servants and so on then formed two big chunks of the inhabitants, staying as far away from one another as possible while still being near to their commanders. Anna, Unity, and I all stayed at the very edge of Halflance’s sphere of influence, near the border with the platoon of Bluerose troops led by Sir Margaret. A little bit down the river bank was a small cluster of huts taken up by Dr. Ironseed and her crew, the practiced scientists and explorers. The Durkahns, feeling untrusting or just wanting to remain close to the people who knew them and spoke their own language, clustered in the other half of the treaty grounds. I couldn’t really distinguish the entourages of the three negotiators, but I could see that the Durkahni soldiers, outnumbering the Bluerosers by five to one, had indeed decided to set up shop right next to Halflance and Burnardor. 

Even after the initial flurry of activity, which made me very thankful I’d gotten the extra sleep in instead of staying for the ceremony, the treaty grounds were always busy. While the raw supplies were handled by local Durkahn workers, the cooking of the food was handled by cooks from the various delegations. Supposedly this was to further cooperation between the factions, but everybody knew that it was a measure to prevent any tampering. They were constantly busy, it felt like, hurrying around with boxes of food and requests for spices from the other kitchens. There were also various couriers sending messages to the dignitaries and to each other, while personal tailors and seamstresses searched desperately for spare cloth patches and thread. 

And, of course, I was not allowed to just sit around and watch the crowds pass by. Though I might have been, if it weren’t for Halflance and her disapproval of my conduct during the opening ceremony. After being forced to stop chewing me out so that I could unpack, she spent nearly the entirety of the first day stewing over what to do with me. She was feeling too merciful to just punch me, and she couldn’t restrict me to my chambers when my chambers were back in Amrinval. For a while she seemed to have settled on the idea of making me work in the kitchens, until an evil miracle took place overnight. 

So, on the morning of the second day, at about six in the morning, Lady Halflance burst into my room and announced that I was on machine repair duty. The zeppelin had undergone a huge amount of wear and tear, the generators were rusty and old, the one radio allowing for contact with Bluerose had been broken open by someone exceptionally clumsy, and my months of studying at the Halflance estate meant that I was more qualified to repair those things than 99% of the other people at the treaty grounds. 

I spent that entire day and a good chunk of the next one going from generator to generator, figuring out what was wrong and scrounging for spare parts to fix them. After that, it was on to something slightly easier: blimp repair. Or, depending on who you ask, airship repair or zeppelin repair. The scout ship that had done so much work during the mountain crossing had finally come to rest in a flat plain about fifteen minutes outside of the treaty grounds. The airship engineers were cobbling together a machine to replenish their hydrogen reserves, but they could handle that. The problem was that the navigator, a compact but sophisticated analytical engine in the airship’s core, had been damaged by rough skies. I was given the job of fixing it.

They had carefully lifted the navigator outside of the blimp so that I could get around to the back of it, and set out every spare part, instruction manual, and relevant tool they could find. When I showed up, Anna personally escorted me to make sure I didn’t get into any trouble, and to hold extra tools.

The first hour was fairly okay, as far as these things go, mostly because I was just exploring the innards of the navigator and getting an idea of what was going on. After that, I realized that I didn’t have the answer, and it all went downhill from there. I spent fifteen minutes staring at the navigator to make it work, then several more minutes screaming at it to motivate it to fix itself, then at least half an hour trying to disassemble part of it, only to later realize that that part was completely undamaged. My efforts weren’t helped by the annoying tendency for my brain to give up on focus entirely and spend minutes at a time thinking about music I’d heard, or trying to overhear the conversation the engineers were having, or trying to remember why I had wanted to go to Urcos in the first place.

So, about halfway through hour three of my marathon repair attempt, I found myself leaning against the navigator, wishing I had something to drink while I stared out across the horizon. It was a good view, at least, huge and cold and impossibly empty aside from the scattered farmsteads.

“Lady Halflance is going to be rather cross if she finds you like this, you know.” Anna had stayed faithfully by my side the entire time, which was definitely more diligence than I would have had in her shoes. 

I shrugged. “Not like I have another option. This shit is impossible. Maybe if she shows up I could show her exactly why this is an absurd assignment…”

“Still,” Anna said with a shake of her head, “you shouldn’t just give up like this. Keep faith, Miss Emma, it’s the most valuable thing you have.”

I sighed. “I’m not giving up. It’s just like when you get stuck trying to come up with the right workaround for a programming thing. The best option isn’t to keep beating your head against it, the best solution is to take a step back to think. Maybe find a rubber duck if you can.”

“A… rubber duck?” Anna said with an expression of genuine confusion. “Never heard of such a thing.”

“Oh, right. It’s a computers thing, where you take a rubber duck and you explain what your problem—“

“You act as if I know what a rubber duck is,” said Anna. “I suppose I’ve seen a duck before, and I know what rubber is, but the two together…?”

Why I keep making references to things that nobody will have heard of is beyond me. Though I suppose I hadn’t even processed that a rubber duck counted as an “Earth” thing. “Um.”

Before I had to figure out how to explain what a rubber duck was, thus presumably letting me master my understanding of rubber ducks, Dr. Ironseed showed up. She had a huge floppy hat on, and a large backpack of supplies, and all in all looked like she was about ready to start walking all the way back to Grantval. 

“Emma?” she asked. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

I rapped my knuckles against the navigator, probably breaking it even further. “Apparently Lady Halflance doesn’t approve of being truant to her dumbass opening ceremony. You wouldn’t happen to know what a rotary clock relay is, would you? If nothing else, I could use a drink.”

Without a word, Dr. Ironseed set down her pack, a somewhat difficult process, and with impressive speed retrieved a glass bottle of something orange and a pair of metal cups. She walked over to the navigator, sat down right next to me, and handed me the bottle and one of the cups.

“Ooh, nice,” I said, taking off the cork. “What is this stuff? Screwdriver, mimosa, orange juice without the fun part?”

Dr. Ironseed raised an eyebrow at me. “Maybe you do have brain fever, because you just said quite a few words and I don’t understand many of them.”

“Oh come on, you’ve been through college. How can you not know what a screwdriver is?”

Dr. Ironseed continued to look at me. “A screwdriver is a tool for undoing screws,” she said. “As for this, it’s a sort of a… it’s made from vanemi fruit. More of the suggestion of an alcoholic drink than actually being alcoholic, which makes it perfect for formal events, or sitting on that mountain over there and observing the horizon, or even figuring out how to fix a navigator.”

I poured myself a glass and took a cautious sip, handing the bottle over to Dr. Ironseed. It tasted like citrus, lemons mixed with blueberries, and if I focused really hard I could maybe find the slightest hint of alcohol in the taste. “Drunk programming is the best programming. Just don’t tell Lady Halflance that I was doing anything other than taking this absolutely seriously.”

“We’re taking this completely seriously,” said Ironseed, standing up and taking a look at the navigator. “Now show me what you’ve been able to figure out, and we can get down to business.”

“You know how to repair this?” I asked, taking another drink.

Dr. Ironseed nodded. “When you’re deep in the jungles of Procellarum, hundreds of miles from the nearest mechanic, you have to do your own repairs.”

At first it seemed like having an extra person around working on the navigator would just make it more awkward, but once I’d gotten Dr. Ironseed up to speed and given her some time to look around, we actually were able to make some progress. Dr. Ironseed had an interesting idea about a single part deep, deep within the navigator having been bent in such a way as to produce bad signals. If she was right, it would be a simple replacement, but we would also have to get through half of the navigator to reach that part.

We were almost there by the time the sky started to turn the same color as the drink we’d been sharing. I was wrist deep in the innards of the navigator, random bits of glass tubing and circuitry everywhere, when I realized that Ironseed might be able to help me with a different problem I’d been working at while we were doing this one. 

“Hey, Dr. Ironseed?”

“Yes?” she said. 

“You’re an anthropologist, aren’t you? Have you ever been to Creandas?”

She nodded. “Why do you ask?”

I looked down at the navigator. “Could you hand me that wrench? I’ve seen that name on a couple of maps,” I lied. “Was curious what it’s like, why it’s always marked separately from the rest of Cassandra.”

Dr. Ironseed handed me the wrench. “I see. Well, it’s certainly an interesting place. As you could probably gather, it’s a province of the Cassandran Empire, has been for about… five hundred years, I think? You could write an entire book purely about the relationship between Creandas and the rest of the empire.”

I tried splitting my attention between the navigator and Dr. Ironseed’s words, and ended up making a few motions in the vague direction of working while she spoke. “The odd thing about Creandas is that they have a very strong sense of being Creandasian, more so than any other province. They kept their own faith and language in spite of repeated attempts to suppress both, and they hold revolts once or twice a century. And yet they fight ferociously in the Cassandran army, though separated out into their own regiments.”

I turned my focus back to the navigator, turning a few bolts and handing the metal plate back to Dr. Ironseed. “Fiercely independent fighters” definitely sounded like the place Miss Rook could have come from, but that didn’t explain what she was doing serving in the household of someone on the wrong side of a war. “Are there many immigrants from Creandas living here? Err, in Bluerose, I guess. Not many humans living up here in general.”

“Not many, no,” said Dr. Ironseed. “And I don’t imagine they’d be received very well. Some of the worst battles of the Second Succession had Creandasian regiments fighting on the other side, and they get a reputation for… brutality. It’s all nonsense, of course, but… you know how it is.”

Well, that answered one of my questions, at least. If Creandassians were hated that much in Bluerose, Rook hiding her natural accent would probably be a survival strategy more than anything. But that only raised more questions, like why she was here, and why she was working for the wife of a Bluerose general. I shook my head, throwing those thoughts aside. If I wanted to get any further, I would have to ask people who knew Rook personally, and that was assuming I even wanted to keep going considering how deeply personal to Rook the answers were going to be.

“Okay, I can see the bent part from here,” I said to Ironseed. “All I need is for you to pass me the —”

I was interrupted by the distant sounds of gunfire, dozens of firearms going off at once in a rolling blast of thunder. Dr. Ironseed and I gave each other one look of shocked confusion. I pulled my arm out of the navigator as quickly as I could, still looking at Dr. Ironseed. She was the first one to move, dashing off in the direction of the gunfire, with me following her a few feet behind.

SaffronDragon

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