It took another hour before the clamp and strap arrangement was secure enough for both men to be satisfied. They stepped back from the skimmer to examine it. Hildesman had to give Brother Davvis credit. Even as far as field repairs went, this one was pretty slap-dash, but the fact that they had done it with the barest of bare minimal resources said something about the Junior Engineer’s ingenuity.
The glue was still curing on the small tears in the rear left pod, but the bent pod had been almost completely straightened out. Brother Davvis smeared a generous portion of the uncured glue over all the clamps and straps, and Hildesman helped him set it with another pair of makeshift torches from the fire. Then, he sat back. The glue wouldn’t be cured yet for a little while, so they had a brief minute to catch some rest, such as it would be.
Brother Davvis, true to his trade, spent the time inspecting his prototype for other signs of damage. He spoke aloud as he worked, and Hildesman let the drone of the engineer’s monologue wash over him as he rummaged in his pack. The Order’s supply kits had included all the essentials, though Hildesman wasn’t overly fond of their field rations or their choice of water purifier. Fortunately, he had predicted they would use Order-made alchemics and had planned ahead. A small tin flask in his pack contained trapper’s tea, and he uncapped it while he watched the inspection.
“I had to vent too much of the mix from the boiler,” Brother Davvis said, raising his voice above his own drone. Hildesman looked up from his flask, capping it and stowing it in a vest pocket.
“So this next leg of the trip we’re flying without a gun placement? That’s less than ideal. Direhawks still range this far south, sometimes.”
“Reduced capacity, at the very least,” Brother Davvis answered, tapping a dial with one knuckle, then checking on some sort of Tessenium heater fixed to the boiler’s base. “I wager you have enough here for…maybe five or six shots. Normal load is for a couple dozen. We have the rounds, but not the mixture.”
“Can we refill it? I found a stream not far from here. I have a spare canteen I could empty out. Even if we needed the water, your Siblings packed us plenty of water treatment pellets.”
“We can, but with the modifications I made to the regulator and the rest of the bow, we’d lose too much shot power. And I don’t have a spare regulator with me that I could swap out.”
Hildesman opened the compartment on the machine’s tail and retrieved his handheld steambow, then held it up towards Brother Davvis, half-shrugging in an unspoken question.
“Oh! That could work, actually. Can I see that bow? Whose design is it?”
Hildesman handed over the bow. “Bought it off Resmith in the Southern Foundry district. Not sure if the design was his own or if he worked from an existing blueprint, but he does good work.”
“It’s a slightly modified Order design,” Brother Davvis said, examining the barrel and the boiling plate on Hildesman’s steambow. “Yes, I can use this.” Without further elaboration, Brother Davvis pulled his wrench and driver from his bandolier and began to disassemble the back of the steambow. When he realized what he was doing, he looked up and offered “Uh…I can fix it for you when we get back to the Wall.”
“Rather have the skimmer armed than have a third weapon for myself anyway. I’ll go fetch that water. What’s the boiler’s capacity?”
“About six liters.”
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“Gonna take me a couple trips, then. Canteen’s only got room for two and a bit.”
“On that note, do you have the cartridges for this bow?”
“In the storage compartment. Why?” Hildesman checked his equipment, settling the empty canteen on his hip opposite his bolter. He left his black powder rifle in the control basket; he would move faster without it. For good measure, he slid the Order’s classified battery into the bolter’s socket.
“I think I can reclaim some of the mixture from the boiler and convert it into cartridges. I just have to swap the regulators and your old bow should be able to fire those cartridges. But I don’t have any empties. Do you mind?”
Hildesman thought about the warnings Brother Davvis had given him about the recoil of the improved bow. “Is it gonna take my arm off when I try to shoot it?”
“Not likely. Gonna leave a heck of a bruise if you use the stock, though.”
“Do it.” Hildesman had lived with bruises before. In fact, he was still healing a little from where the direhawk had slammed him into a tree. By ash and metal, had that only been three days ago? He rubbed his ribcage absently. He was looking forward to getting a break from all of this.
Brother Davvis got to work while Hildesman fetched the water. Fortunately, the direct route to the stream was just a couple of minutes on foot. By the time he returned with the first canteen, the boiler had been emptied, and Brother Davvis was setting the glasswork cartridges on the gunner’s seat. Where previously they had been filled with clear water, they now held some sort of greenish fog, presumably Brother Davvis’s secret mixture.
“That’s not liquid,” Hildesman commented, setting the filled canteen down next to Brother Davvis.
Brother Davvis took it without looking up and carefully poured it into the boiler. There was a groan and some pinging sounds as the metal suddenly cooled, but the boiler’s walls were thick and held up fine under pressure.
“It’s an unusual gas. You know how gasses have weight?” Hildesman grunted acknowledgement. “Well, most gasses, that weight is pretty constant. You can mess with it, since they don’t occupy as much space. You can pump two liters of air into a one-liter container, and if the container is strong enough, it will hold. And of course, the weight of a liter of hot air is less than the weight of a liter of cold air.
“My Brothers and Sisters working with chemistry and alchemy think that it’s because everything is made up of tiny little motes of stuff. Matter. Their models suggest that in solid objects, those motes are all locked together, like a puzzle. In liquids, the motes can move freely across each other, but they still fall to the ground. And in gasses, those motes just float around and bump off of each other. That’s why we can put more gas into the same amount of space; the motes have all that free ‘nothing’ between them.”
“Sure, I think I remember a Sister from alchemy giving a similar explanation at one point.” Hildesman hadn’t fully understood the explanation then, and he didn’t fully understand it now, but it seemed to make sense to Brother Davvis.
“Well, my mixture does one better. I don’t know how it works, but for some reason, it seems like all the stuff motes in that particular gas want to get as far away from each other as possible. Makes it a nightmare to capture, but once I do…it releases with a lot more force than ordinary gasses. More, even, than if you turn the liquid stuff into a gas like with a normal steam bow. I’m actually kinda glad I don’t know what that mixture looks like as a liquid. I’m not sure the results would be pretty.”
Hildesman accepted that explanation, and slid the cartridges into the case in his pack before going to refill the canteen a second time.
At the stream, he had just lowered the canteen into the water when something made him instinctively tense. It didn’t take him long to figure out what was wrong. All the night insects had stopped buzzing. The fish that had been snapping at them were nowhere to be seen, either. Something was here. Something that had a Tessenium field, or the insects wouldn’t have vanished.
Even as he realized it, he heard a screeching howl north of him along the stream. It was a sound Hildesman knew all too well. A direwolf had caught their scent. Hildesman shouldered the canteen without stopping to cap it and began to sprint back to their makeshift campsite.