“I’m sorry, ma’am, but we simply have no record of such an event. We hold our security in the strictest regards, and there has not been any infraction in at least ten years.”
“Uh-huh.” June-Leckie knows that even the Ferrence Gondola Company, with its near monopolistic hold over intercontinental travel, is an organization run predominantly by men, and men make mistakes. “Show me your books.”
The attendant at FGC’s head office shrugs, thinking it is safer to fulfill a woman’s request than to suffer the consequences.
June’s donning an incubator’s outerwear for today, an airy and frilly dress those fat beings waddle around in during shopping trips, their servants fetching items they’ll never be able to enjoy. She’s ashamed to assume such a disguise and can’t wait to be back in functional trousers and boots. However, the dozen staff behind the front desk do not hide their stares of adoration or straight backs, so June deems the outfit justified. There is a woman here, and you should not waste her time.
The man returns carrying three binders. “These are infraction records dating back at least ten years,” he says of the first one before gesturing to the remainders. “These two hold the cargo manifests for the same period. If you want, ma’am, we can contact the employees who may have been on staff at the time.”
If they’re still alive. “Maybe.” June takes the books, moves away, and sifts through the manifests.
Ferrence is a private company, and though the Far Flung Sails own the gondolas, they often have to outsource mundane duties like transporting supplies. She advised her girls who were leaving Hyrnlak to stow away on these private vessels due to less security and an even lesser chance of being chained to an incubation vat if discovered. Hells, she can’t even remember exactly how she arrived in Kaskit, only that she just… woke up there.
She had ridden months in that dark space, its walls pressing in on all sides. It must have been a box, and boxes are carried on transport gondolas, and she must have eaten something too, for how did she not wither away upon returning? She can hardly trust her thoughts now.
A glass window at the head office’s front door is now reflective as a bullwheel terminal blots out the Twin Pales. She regards herself in it, how she looks the same as she did those five years ago. Her stomach is flat, her shoulders defined, her quadriceps bulging more than any woman she’s seen in this city and most men. She’s always been proud of the latter ones. Yet, if five years have passed, shouldn’t she have noticed a difference in herself?
She returns to the binders and double-checks the manifests, discovering twenty that would match the one leaving the Hyrnlak Archipelago’s bullwheel terminal around the date she had. There are standard entries of military rations, artillery, ammunition, weapons, heavy shells, and vesicle gas—that one alone makes up half—but nothing mentions equipment she could have stowed away with.
She can remove the legal approach, at least. “It wouldn’t be in the manifests anyway,” she tells herself and the clerk. “I rode in without them knowing.”
The clerk looks rather ugly when he smirks at the mention. “Our stowaway policy is zero tolerance, ma’am, though, of course, we would make an exception for an incubator.”
Of course. Why would an incubator be riding a gondola back from the Hyrnlak Archipelago? She’s almost blown her cover, or this man is just playing along with some woman’s childlike fantasy. She doesn’t remember feeling this coddled.
She leaves the head office with the same annoyance and confusion that she arrived with, not a single step closer to discovering where those five years had gone. Frankly, she doesn’t know if she ever will be or if it’s worth trying. Maybe she should blame the Inciter strand blindly and move on, attributing that missing chunk of her life to an unworldly presence inside her.
“Insulting staff, aren’t they?” The man speaking is young, with long black hair sheened down to his shoulders. His skin is pampered almost to match an incubator’s creamy complexion. He looks at June behind square spectacles. “I bet you could get your matron to hang every last of them if you wanted.” He laughs.
Mother. June remembers feeling the process come circle at seeing the woman.
This man is quite dashing for someone at least five years younger, maybe ten, yet naive enough to have fallen for the incubator ruse. On one shoulder, he carries a cylindrical container.
“What’s in there?” June asks.
“This? Oh… just plans, is all.”
“May I see?” she scoots over and beckons the man to sit. “I have nowhere to be.”
“Your matron won’t mind?”
June adores her power over this man, the way she can move her body in a command, and he will answer. “Not in the faintest.”
He sits beside her on the steps to the Ferrence office and unfurls the cross-sectional diagram of a structure with many rooms and passages. Seconds pass before its true identity materializes as a gondola. “A draft copy,” says the man, “a proposal, but something bigger than even the Far Flung’s largest vessel.”
June gazes in wonder at the schematic, its fleshed-out detail, all drawn by hand but with the precision of stencils. “Its chambers are huge,” she says, noting the measurements of the holds. “You could fit a platoon in each of those.” She counts the chambers. “A whole company then, right? Seven platoons each.”
The man regards her. “You must read a lot about the Emergence Corps. And yes, I designed it to fit an entire company. The pods are equipped with parachutes and can be dropped from a great height. I haven’t thought about how to get them back inside the vessel, though. Maybe bungee cords, chains, pistons, or we don’t use pods, but… well… I won’t bore you with the details.”
The image of men falling from the sky, unsuspended by rails, boggles June’s mind. If such an operation could be completed often, it would eliminate the need to march through maligned infested areas, perhaps saving the costs of what will probably be the most expensive gondola ever constructed.
Something the man said earlier pulls June back. “Wait, you designed this?”
He blushes. “It is my passion.” He offers a hand but pulls it back once he realizes he should not be touching an incubator without documented consent. “Herbert Skelton, the second, at your service, ma’am.”
Herbert Skelton. The Herbert Skelton. “Shipspinner,” June utters, remembering the Flung gondola leaving for the Hyrnlak Archipelago—leaving without her.
“Yes, you’ve heard of me, then?”
The office’s door opens, and a clerk from behind the front desk peeks his head out. “Sir? We’re ready for you any minute.”
Skelton holds a hand up to swat the Ferrence clerk away, but the door is already closing. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Would love to stay and teach you more, but I’ve got something.” He rolls up the schematic and turns to go.
June, however, knows the sway she holds over this man, one of the most influential forces in Kaskit. She grabs his hand and stomachs her pride. “Wait,” she says, thinking this could work. “I really would like to know more about it. Tonight. If that’s alright?”
A man as busy as Herbert Skelton II would spend his time stuck in offices, inspecting terminals or poring over design tables. A man like Herbert Skelton should not have a moment to spare for anyone else. Thankfully, he does not think June is just anyone else.
For the briefest moment, he takes her hand, unsure what to do with it, and shakes it, as a man would, in an awkward gesture that June has the saving respect to return. He sifts through his pockets. “I have an office just down the street, we could-”
“I’m afraid,” June starts, “I would like a more detailed explanation. No distractions from others, you understand?”
Skelton does understand. He is a young man, the easiest type of human to manipulate. He wants to say what they are both thinking, but he cannot, for the consequences of his being wrong are much worse. June reads all this in him and so much more.
So, she takes the lead. “Your private quarters, please,” she says. “You have to keep these designs away from prying eyes, don’t you?”
Skelton nods, trying to calm his excited mind. He hands her a card with an address and a paragraph of directions, and June lets her fingers graze his own as she takes it.
He looks down. “Till then, ma’am.” He leaves inside the building.
June begins planning what she will say.
----------------------------------------
The exposed hull of the massive ship looms over June, a gaping skeleton of thick wood, scaffolding, and a curtain of dangling ropes. Torchlight flickers inside its open mouth, marking the path between the shipyard hovels. It is a yard of obsolescence, a graveyard of monuments, and a past age. That a shipspinner would live in it speaks more of his dedication to the craft than anything.
“You’re going to be alright in there?” Tale asks, leaning one foot on the cab’s wheel.
It’s the tenth time he’s asked the question. June has been to Jubilee and back, so she has no qualms about roaming a shipyard at night. “Better than you would.”
“It’s still not a safe place for a woman. Not unless she has business, and even then, it’s in and out, with a pimp in tow and a troupe of mercenaries in wait to make sure she doesn’t get whisked up.” He grunts. “I can get you an escort, June.”
There he goes again with his chivalry. “You may as well alert the whole yard to our presence,” June tells him. “I’ll be fine.”
Jethry considers her. “Then just me, please, until you reach this man’s doorstep.”
“You’re sweet,” but he isn’t. He is in one of those clingy moods, better in bed right after the deed than anywhere else. The thought of such an act with Tale always disgusts her. “If High Constable Tale Jethry is seen here, it would look like he botched an undercover mission.”
Tale looks like a child not getting his way, ready to stomp his feet. “Who is he anyway? Someone important, yeah, but important enough to go here?”
Tale needs something to shut him up. She leans in close so that all he can see is her face. “I will tell you tonight when I return, but I promise you it is worthwhile. Alright?”
The man fumes but cannot argue. “Alright. See you tonight.”
June commits to nothing in her smile.
She enters the inner shipyard through the gaping galleon, and its tenements are the old vessels that once sailed the oceans when it was safe to. June guesses how far those retrofitted boats traveled, likely reaching the continents beyond Salvarin, stopping at the Ardern Straight before it became the Abscess. Now, they are squat structures stacked atop each other, with ladders and ropes swaying in the night’s calm wind, lattices of scaffolding cutting through the Lone’s face high above, the celestial body tracking June’s progress.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
Light burns in the windows, assemblers off their shifts sitting on ledges, hocking and jeering at her, thinking she’s some discrete prostitute, one among the women who defy the incubators and act as companions for the men in the yards, charging exorbitant sums and then disappearing. Other than their words, the men give June no trouble.
She stops in front of a squat house that she would have missed had she not followed the directions to a letter on Skelton’s card. There stands a bodyguard outside, a gondola crewman, one arm twice as thick as the other. “You’re late,” he bellows. “No way you’re getting full pay.”
June shrugs and says nothing.
The man bangs on the door. “Boss! She’s here!” Skelton’s voice comes from the other side. The bodyguard nods along with the words, frowns, and then turns levers and punches symbols on the door. The door clicks, and the man holds it open for her. “By the way,” he says, as his eyes crawl across her body, “mind telling me how much he paid for you?”
June pulls her robe aside, revealing the modest brown dress she had worn at the Debut and the machete hanging from her belt. “Mind if I hack your balls off first or the shaft?”
The guard grunts. “Boss has some weird kinks.” He pulls himself away from the door. “I’ll be watching when you’re done.”
I bet you’d want to watch it during it as well.
She checks for tripwires at the bottom of the door and enters an antechamber, the door closing behind her. Darkness surrounds her, and for a second, she entertains the idea that this is an elaborate trap.
Another door in front of her opens to a space much larger and decorated than the tough exterior the yards imply. It is a three-story loft with ladders leading to the other levels. On the third floor, the posts of a bed jut out. Curtains cover every window, and only a few candles light the entire apartment, setting the ambiance to a comfortable dim.
Skelton himself stands next to the door. “I’m terribly sorry for all of that.” He’s dressed down to a white buttoned shirt and beige trousers. No socks. His hair, now free of that gross product, is frizzy and unkempt. He stares at her. “My. My my.” He looks again, then thinks of hiding the gesture. “I’m such a terrible host, I’m sorry. I never got your name.”
June keeps her tone level and innocent. “And I believe we should keep things that way, don’t you?”
Skelton’s stare lingers. “Come in, then, come in. Please, get comfortable.” He works another mechanism on this side and shuts the door, checking that the curtains are closed. “You understand these precautions are necessary. Many would want to have a few choice words with me if they knew about this.”
June isn’t listening. She undoes her robe, lets it laze to the ground, and hangs her machete on the wall. She feels the fabric of the same she wore at the Debut clinging to her, relishing how valuable she feels in it.
She drops the robe to the ground and puts on her most scatterbrained expression, confused about where to hang the garment and worrying about disobeying such an influential, powerful, and intelligent man. Thank the Hells she doesn’t have to do this daily.
Skelton takes the bait, practically runs over, and hangs the robe over her machete, not even noticing the weapon.
“Hardened one, aren’t you?” he asks, looking June up and down.
“Can’t be harder than any of the others you meet spinning these big things.” She pleads on the edge of her tongue, inviting a retort.
Skelton’s eyebrows rise. “You mistake me, ma’am, I’m sorry. I do not employ… company.”
Your guard outside would beg to differ, you lying shit.
“So,” Skelton begins, “a lesson?” He gulps. “What would you like to know about?”
June presses a hand to her chin in exaggerated contemplation. He is a man of the shipyards, and she is an incubator. All she knows is how to give birth and follow her diet. “How old are you?” The question is meant to be disarming, off-topic, and an invitation for more personal ones.
A curious smile crosses Skelton’s lips, which are full and wet. “Really? You want to know?”
“Is it not something people ask you?”
“All the time, but I…” The man crooks his head as if seeing June for the first time. “In a few weeks, I will be twenty-three.”
Hells, he’s a decade younger than her and designing gondolas to be ridden in the Far Flung Sails. “An early celebration?”
Skelton confirms something to himself, finds the closest cupboard, and removes a bottle of black liquid from it. “I have something, but I’m unsure if your dietitian will allow it.” He tips the bottle towards her. “Do you enjoy lost vintages?”
June frowns. “Lost where?”
“In the Swathe somewhere, but it was long before the raw ground burst, I assure you.”
That must make the bottle at least 128 years old. June has never cared much for beverages that make you stupider and slower and infuse you with courage when you should not be lacking in it anyway. Still, she indulges Skelton to convince him he is pleasing her and that she is impressed by his comprehensive knowledge of ships, wines, and other things an incubator should know nothing about. “Fascinating,” she breathes.
The bottle pops, and the cork shoots somewhere up to the bedroom floor, almost like an invitation to look for it. Skelton sits across from her on the couch that sinks in the center, likely from the pressure of a hundred whores’ knees, despite what he said about not employing company. He holds two glasses and pours them.
“My father found this in the Swathe,” he says. “He found a lake out there, and you know the first thing he did? Fish.” He smells the bottle’s tip and pinches his nose. “I must not keep you long tonight?”
As long as it takes. “As long as you like.” Tale will be worried if she doesn’t return by Pale’s rise, but Tale is always concerned, making him reliable and easy to steer in the direction June wants.
Skelton hands the glass to her, clearly trying to suppress his excitement. “Best to take it slowly.”
She inspects the liquid, feigns intimidation, feigns inexperience, feigns just about every naive-seeming impulse she can manage. Reinforced by this facade of cute ignorance, June begins the inquiry, knowing most of the answers to the questions she’ll ask. “Where did you learn to spin?”
Skelton chugs back the contents of his glass. “My father taught me half of it and… other disciplines the rest.” Hells, his voice is already starting to slur.
“Ordnances,” June says, and the slip is sudden and perhaps too quick. “I’m sorry, but I’m inquisitive, and I’ve heard things. I once attended a drilling and blasting lecture at Galt Alese.” She has never stepped within feet of that academy, but Skelton would have. “It’s fascinating stuff, but I’ve never seen it work in person.” She had at Hyrnlak when the Corps blasted the holes in Jubilee before retreating.
“You know that stuff?” The young man gulps. “My old man had many curiosities, but they were just that. He was brilliant and a loyal father, but he didn’t understand the applications of everything he knew and their parallels with shipspinning. There is a lot of overlap and many more opportunities to come. So many ingredients are undiscovered. If we only had a way to get out there.”
The man will go on for hours, and a part of June wants him to. The only type of men June can stomach are the artisans, the ones so devoutly committed to their craft that they stop being men and become conduits of invention. “Which must have been useful for the Flung’s fleet to Hyrnlak that just set out?”
Skelton does not pause at the mention of classified information. “You must have seen my namesake gondola leaving the alcazar.” His shoulders straighten, and pride fills his voice. “The challenge was creating chambers to store the firestarter sap and hoses to pump it through without eroding the gondola’s frame. That took the better part of my teens to figure out.”
In June’s teenage years, she taught herself how to dismember, burn, and bury maligned, taunting the creatures and hacking them to bits for sport.
Something Skelton said before pulls her back to the meeting with the conspirators when they said a fire seed would be too much for this operation. “Is that firestarter sap the only flammable substance at your disposal?”
Despite his attempts to remain stoic, the young man is an open book to her. “There’s plenty of kinds of firestarter sap and other substances. Lapasian Maple sap is probably the most potent. Some people are even comfortable eating it since it reacts differently in our bodies, though you wouldn’t want to burp over an open flame lest you set your whole house on fire.” He takes a drink. “We have forty different kinds of these flammable substances in the yards. It’s a valuable export to the other cities in the Smatter.” He sees June focused on his words and continues. “Some burn fast, some slow. Some spread, others contain. Some start with the most fragile kindling, while others require much more potent… convincing. It all depends on the strands that are present in each mixture.”
June nods along, encouraging Skelton while becoming more interested herself. These are the kinds of explanations she can listen to all night. “Is there…” June pouts her lips, staring upwards. “Is there something that burns hot, can be contained in a medium-sized environment, and can spread quickly?”
“How medium are we talking?”
She remembers Gauss’s words in the carriage and searches for an equivalent comparison. “About the size of… a transport gondola hold of the Flung.”
“We would consider that a small space.” Skelton should be apprehensive to elaborate, but instead, he seems as if he will receive a prize for doing so. “Foktle Firestarter. Nasty stuff. Early coal miners used it to snuff out rival plots. Pack a bunch into a powder keg, light it, and roll it down a shaft. The Corps uses it to clear the smaller Gashes. It doesn’t reach as deep as the others, but it’s fast as all the Hells. There’s not as much naval application unless you can drop it straight into a Gash from above.” He looks up to the ceiling, too, bobbing his head.
Foktle Firestarter. June hasn’t heard of the stuff, but it sounds exactly like what she’ll need.
Satisfied, she uses this chance to chug back the rest of her wine, letting it slosh against her throat and burn. “Ah!” She coughs, gasps, and swallows it down with an exaggerated effort. “Sorry.” She wipes a hand over her mouth. “I’ve no tolerance for the vintages.”
Inexperienced. Well-meaning. Cute. Skelton seems to forget about Foktle Firestarter and is beside her instantly, his leg pressing against hers as he leans over and smacks at her back. “My fault entirely!” He grips her shoulder with soft, manicured hands, digging curious fingers in ever so slightly, realizing what he’s doing but not stopping, for June allows him. He pulls them back and gently rubs her shoulder blades. “I meant it when I said you have quite the figure.” His eyes run down her neck and come to rest on her collarbones. “There are shipbuilders in my employ who have less muscle than you.”
Probably most, unless they’re Ox-infused. “And that’s only what you’re seeing now.” Then, slowly, June pulls his hands down deeper and deeper. She feels the warmth and the exhilaration not from inviting Skelton to her but at the power, the sway of such actions mattering so much to a man as influential as he. He watches June leading his hands, mesmerized.
Then, Skelton’s wall of inhibition crumbles. June climbs the ladder to the bedroom, and Skelton follows, working that into the performance that the young man does not know is a performance at all, where he is the star, and it’s about to enter its final act.
He is clumsy, awkward, prodding and caressing, asking for permission, asking if he can escalate further. June is precisely what he needs: encouraging, inspiring, and, when she gets bored, commanding him. The younger man takes her for himself, and June, still in control, lets him.
They are finished hours later, lazing underneath mounds of blankets and atop more pillows than any man should have in his bed. Skelton does not snore, and June thinks that she wore him out to the point of dehydration.
He finally speaks. “What were you inquiring about today at Ferrence?”
She fabricates a story about something she lost from her possession, an object as large as her, something useless an incubator would treasure.
“Ah. And you think Ferrence may not be telling the truth about whether they ever transported this object?”
In a frail and attached voice, June admits that she has feared the possibility of thieves in the Ferrence Gondola Company stealing from an incubator’s treasury.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret, then,” Skelton says. “Not really a secret, you know, I guess. More like the reality of working in an organization run by people, and people don’t always say exactly what’s happening.”
June softly nods and taps Skelton’s chest.
“Not everything is recorded in those manifests.” He quickly plugs the ensuing silence, letting the adrenaline of the earlier deed fuel him. “Now, it’s not that Ferrence does anything illegally. It’s just that… some processes, if not practical, are not recorded to their full completeness. Did I explain that correctly?”
She nods.
“Good. And so, since not everything is recorded, it stands to reason that some infractions may not be recorded either. Certain incidents would cause a bigger uproar than is worth marking down. Now, let me say that I do not condone what Ferrence is doing, but I do believe if such claims of thievery are made against them, it would have a noticeable effect on their share price and the progress of intercontinental travel. Mind you, it is abhorrent that one of the companies I consult for could potentially act so heinous, especially against an incubator. There is the greater good to consider.” He spreads his fingers on the small of her back. “Once again, I do not condone it by any means, of course, but well…”
She crawls her left hand up Skelton’s side and pokes at his ribs, his arms. He flinches, and she can not deny the excitement of manipulating him, knowing he will answer any question she asks. So, she inquires where someone would ask more about these illegal activities.
“Not in places any incubator should be.”
She tells him she is sad because the object stolen from her meant a lot, and partway through the explanation, she forgets what the thing even is, for its imaginary existence is already enough to make Skelton spill the details.
“You’re right,” he says. “Ferrence has been part of smuggling efforts for quite some time. Every transportation company is, really, as long as you have people inside. They have contacts underneath the enclosure, outside it, and in other cities of the Smatter for things like neutralizers, drugs, food, what have you.”
June’s not surprised these operations exist. She is so close now, and she ponders, out loud, where these illegal things could be stored.
Fuelled by the masculine pride gained from completing the impossible task of bedding an incubator and going unpunished, Skelton continues. “In Kaskit’s artificial rivers. Chambers on the bottom, built right into the rock. Father knew about these too because you sometimes need to work with the smugglers to get specific parts, never mind where they came from.”
The final question is straightforward and needs to be asked. June broaches it with some prodding and fondling, figuratively and physically. She appeals to his enlarged ego, his sense of moral high ground, which is, in reality, more gray than he’s willing to admit. Above all, she asks who would be involved in such an operation.
Skelton sniffs, and the words that come next don’t register immediately. “The Surgeon Elder,” he says. “Can you believe that? That quirk. I have no idea why he needs to work with the smugglers or if he still does. You hear many things in the yards. All sorts of people confide in me.”
June freezes at the mention. What in the Hells does the Surgeon Elder have to do with anything, the one who explained her memory loss as the Inciter strand? That strange physician can’t be related to all this, can he?
She has to be sure.