Free Riveted by Meljean Brook Page A

he had difficulty going up and down the ladders to this deck. He usually sent instructions and messages from his quarters, relaying them through García.
    “Fridasdottor! There you are, girl!” His voice boomed down the corridor. Leroux always shouted—as one had to do in this part of the ship when the engines were engaged. They were silent now, but he still yelled. Too many years in an engine room had destroyed his hearing.
    “Chief Leroux!” she shouted back. “I’ve heard that García turned in his papers!”
    “That boy did, and ran off.” Leroux didn’t care that Garcíawas a forty-year-old man, just as it didn’t matter that Annika wasn’t a girl any longer. “You’ll be acting as my first on this run.”
    “Yes, monsieur.”
    “Eh?”
    “Yes, monsieur!”
    Thin lips pursing, he gave her a considering look. “I’ve never had a girl as first.”
    Annika smiled in response. Before Leroux, she’d never taken orders from a man, either.
    His eyes narrowed. “Always smiling, you are. We’ll look over that generator together tomorrow. Don’t think I haven’t noticed how you’ve avoided learning about it.”
    That erased her smile. “Yes, monsieur.”
    “The captain doesn’t want to take on any new men until we’re back to Port-au-Prince. Until then, you’ll be a two-section watch and splitting the third’s duties with Chandler. As first, you’ll decide how to split them. Don’t take the worst jobs for yourself.”
    Maintaining the privy pipes and flushing systems. “I won’t, monsieur.”
    “All right. You know what you ought to be doing now?”
    What would García typically be working on before they left port? “I need to perform the engine checks before we fire her up again, and make certain the balloon warmers are in order.”
    Leroux nodded. “We don’t want that envelope deflating the moment we fly into arctic weather.”
    And didn’t want a spark from a badly maintained warmer igniting the hydrogen. “Yes, monsieur.”
    “Then get to it, girl.” With that, he was off, his walking stick thudding against the boards.
    Even though Mary had opened the portholes, the engine room was stifling. Humid air continually rose through the open hatch in the deck floor that allowed for easy access to the furnace and boilers on the deck below, the vapors condensing on the pipes andpropeller shafts overhead. A rhythmic rasp from the boiler room told her that Mary was stoking the furnace, which was never allowed to go out. The copper pipes carried heated water through the ship, warming the cabins; another bank of brass pipes carried sound from the quarterdeck, for commands shouted throughout the ship. Usually the engine was too loud for the stokers to hear those orders, so they relied upon the telegraph dial instead. The setting on its face matched the dial on the captain’s bridge, allowing Vashon to order them back or ahead under partial or full steam. Currently, the indicator arrow pointed to STOP .
    The great steam engine filled most of the room, a hulking beast fabricated from iron and ingenuity. She lay sleeping now, her oiled pistons that drove the propellers at rest, the turbines quiet rather than screaming. Beautiful, but Annika liked her best when she woke and worked.
    The scraping from below ceased. Mary climbed up out of the furnace room a moment later, the freckles of her hands and face concealed by a light dusting of coal. A blue paisley scarf covered vibrant red hair, the same shade that Annika remembered her mother’s had been before gray had dulled it. Since her mother had been stolen as a young girl from a Horde crèche in England, however, no relation likely existed between her mother and the third engineer despite that resemblance. Annika had a better chance of being a blood relation to the woman. Only a few years older than Annika, Mary had also been born in Manhattan City; unlike Annika, however, she hadn’t been living alone on the streets and taken by a woman from