Tabitha: Bottled Lightning
Coarse but slender fingers traced the contours of each tiny piece of metal with the care and consideration of a wine taster experimenting with various vintages, before settling on the one that rang truest to their need. The bronzed metal was lifted and brought gently to warm lips where a smooth tongue tested it, and then it disappeared along with the hand into a cavity of the complex metal beast. The screw found its place and the tough fingers of the hand manipulated it steadily until, apparently satisfied, they withdrew.
The blind engineer worked slowly and with the steady pace of a person who had never been in a rush and did not empathise with those who were. He was an artist; a revolutionary, an inventor, and as he had no competition he was free to work when and how he chose. No-one else could fix this vessel; both he and its Captain knew it. Therefore his only response to the steady, agitated tapping of the Captain’s heavy boot on his floor was to turn up his grizzled mouth at the corner and return his hand to the workbench covered in screws.
His blindness, he always thought, had only ever annoyed him once, when he was very young. Since then he had grown comfortable and indeed attached to a sightless world, considering it an essential part of his genius, allowing him to work free of the distractions of shallow beauty. He found beauty in the whistle of steam and the steady click of clockwork, as from a young age he had loved machines.
He often thought that the Captain, while a dear friend, did not understand. She was a woman who, having no beauty of her own, had chosen out of spite to seek it in victory and the domination of others. This was a line he had been told many times, more often than not by people whom she had just defeated or been promoted above. The engineer did not believe a word of it, but understood the sentiment, for she was not always the easiest person to know.
In a cruel way the sentiment became their private joke, and he oft repeated it simply to annoy her. In response she would talk to him about the skies as they were, the directions of the winds and the storms she had tasted from the bow of her sleek, enormous sky vessel. They competed, as weary old friends often do, retracing the steps of long worn debates with the freshness of new experiences flavoured by reminiscence on the old. He remembered their school days, his quiet bookishness and her loud proclamations of the grandeur waiting for her in the Royal Fleet, with a certain fondness. Sometimes it felt like only he had aged, and only he had grown up.
He knew her so well he could imagine her where she sat. He had never seen, so the picture he formed in his mind was not one based on image. Instead, it was an amalgamation of every detail his other senses knew; the handsome points and ridges of her face and the texture of her hair, the coarse leather of her coat and the smooth cold of the buttons adorning it. He could think of the tools and weapons jingling on her belt, the weight of her boots and the scratching of her broken nails on his wooden countertop. In his mind he could almost taste the wind that clung to her skin, offset by the rank smell of coal. Those grand ships of the air, for all their majesty and complexity, relied, like everything else, on the old truths of smoke and steam.
He then realised that he had paused in his work; he had been so lost in thought. Slowly he was brought back by the steady but impatient tapping of the Captain’s boots. She knew not to speak overly when he worked – he needed every vestige of his remaining senses to work with his characteristic flawlessness – especially not when she wanted a job done quickly. Something was bothering the engineer, however, for it was a strange job.
When the weight of the enormous sky-vessel had crashed onto the wide rooftop of his workshop, he had simply smiled and started setting out his tools. After all, it was not unusual for the Captain to push even his expert craftsmanship to its limits and beyond, and the demands she placed on the ship’s engine brought her and her crew to his doorstep time and time again. However, the steam engine itself had not been damaged; instead, the ships hull had been battered as though rammed, a mast had been snapped clean and bullet holes riddled its side. The crew was battered, tired and incomplete and the Captain had descended upon him in a fog of adrenaline and rage, demanding medics and consultants and a direct line to her superior officers. He had helped as much as he could, fumbling and lost amongst the younger and more able-bodied youths of the remaining crew, and in his way had found the eye of the storm, settling in to fixing the savaged ship. The Captain had not yet spoken to him; he had no idea what had happened.
It was almost as though the famous Captain had lost.
***
The downpour had been torrential, devastating, less a storm and more the rage of a vengeful God. Each raindrop hit the deck and her arms, back and face like a wave of bullets with a force enough to have knocked a weaker person to their knees. She could not see, could not hear and in the freezing cold could hardly feel, the soaked leather of her gloves struggling to grip whatever they could touch. She was rendered senseless, and only her encyclopaedic knowledge of her ship kept her from tumbling over the side and into an abyss of fog and swirling, raging clouds.
She yelled orders into the fray, the wind stealing her words even as they formed and carrying them off into the night, impotent, useless, defeated by a storm unlike any she had seen in her thirty years of sailing the skies. It had enveloped them, waiting like a huge hungry animal, trapping the comparatively tiny warship between itself and a powerful, advancing army whose guns were readying themselves to knock them out of the sky. A glorious battle gone wrong, fouled even more by the blind wrath of nature itself. With every other ship in the fleet burning on the ground below, the Captain had had no choice but to order her men forward. Alone they could not face the enemy, but they could face the storm.
Choking clouds of dark smoke billowed from the ship’s funnel as coal and more coal was piled onto the furnaces by desperate hands. Her crew had disappeared below at her wild gesture; it was the safest place, the sodden rigging slipping under faltering hands and sending even the most experienced men falling to their deaths. The storm was too strong. The Captain was left alone as she desperately forced herself forward, fighting with all of the strength in her muscles and bones. The ship juddered and swayed erratically, the wheel spinning at the whim of the wind. When we get back, and we will, she thought as she was thrown several metres backwards and onto her knees, biting her tongue in the process, I am asking, no, ordering that old maniac to put the wheel indoors, tradition be damned! Then, like a miracle, her tired hands closed around the familiar brass and wooden shape, sodden leather meeting sodden leather with a tired smack.
For a long moment she simply stood there, rooted to the deck and letting the storm pummel bruises into her worn skin, because it didn’t matter anymore. By her wheel, she felt like a Captain again. Even the strong likelihood of her death felt like nothing more than a passing concern, because she would be dying with her ship. With a blast of icy wind she was thrown sharply back into the studies of her childhood, and she felt for a moment like Charon, ferryman of the dead, riding the river Styx into the underworld. She embraced the prospect of death, mastered it as though it were a new sky, even as the cold seeped into her skin, chilling her to the bone. The black spots in her vision had little to do with the rain.
It was in that moment, somewhere between life and death, cold sanity and blissful nothingness, that she saw the woman. She cut through the clouds like the tip of a knife, her wooden head thrown back in an endless scream, her hair a still but violent tangle. Her clawed hands desperately clung to the front of the ship that swiftly followed her, a ship whose hull the Captain initially took for a chunk of the night sky, it was so large, so black. It looked like a blot of ink on the paper of the clouds, vivid, out of place and steadily growing.
