The Tinkery

Chapter 10

The alarm clock on Silas’s nightstand read four fifty-two when he heard the knock at the Tinkery’s rear door. He had been awake since four-thirty, lying in the dark listening to the building settle around him, his mind already on the day’s sequence of tasks. He dressed in the dark, pulled on his boots, and was halfway down the first flight of stairs when June knocked a fifth time.

He opened the rear door. She was standing on the step in her leather aviator’s coat, helmet under one arm, a canvas bag over the other shoulder, and the expression of someone who had been awake for some time and had been managing their impatience with limited success.

“It’s not yet five,” Silas said.

“I know,” June said, noting his terse attitude. “I couldn’t sleep.”

He looked at her for a moment. “Coffee’s not made yet.”

“I’ll make it.”

He stood aside and let her in.

~*~

They had the Skiffer jacked up and onto the transport cart by six-fifteen. Silas had collected the bottle jacks from the storage area over the previous two days. Seven of them in various sizes, acquired over the years for various purposes and stored with no particular organization. They positioned three jacks at the frame’s main structural nodes, raised the Skiffer in sequence, first the forward pair, then the rear single, keeping the frame level throughout, and slid the cart underneath and lowered it back down.

The cart was Silas’s work from late the night before. A flat steel platform on six swivel casters, the casters salvaged from a large display cabinet he’d retired from the exhibition floor two years earlier, with two toolboxes bolted to the platform’s forward section and a raised lip around the perimeter to prevent anything from rolling off during transport. He had welded the frame himself on the small acetylene rig in the machine room, and the welds were more sound than pretty.

They covered the Skiffer with the canvas tarpaulin, pulling it down over the cyclorotors and tucking the edges under the frame members so the shape underneath was not identifiable as anything in particular, just a covered load on a cart, featureless and unremarkable. June tied the tarp corners to the frame with short lengths of cord while Silas opened the loading dock door, the heavy rolling gate going up on its counterweighted track with the same metallic rumble it had made for thirty years.

The truck was in the alley, waiting for them. It was an Airsteed Opus commercial hauler, the bed sitting forty inches off the ground on its air cushion system, the multi-axis ionic thrusters producing a low, steady hum at idle that was more felt than heard through the dock floor. The driver, a broad-shouldered man in his forties with a grey canvas jacket and a coffee thermos wedged between his thigh and the door, was watching them in the side mirror. When the dock door came up he spun the Airsteed in a single smooth arc, the vehicle rotating on its own center axis, a maneuver that no wheeled truck could execute, and backed to the dock edge in one continuous motion, the rear of the bed aligning with the dock floor to within two inches.

He had the door half open when June and Silas were already moving the cart onto the truck bed.

“Need a hand?” he called.

“We’re fine,” June said, “Thanks.”

He settled back into the cab. Through the rear window, Silas could see him pick up the thermos and twist open the lid.

They positioned the cart at the forward end of the bed, directly over the main support frame of the truck’s chassis where the ride would be most stable, and Silas began tying the precious load down. He had brought his own rope, and he worked the first one through the cart’s frame and around the bed’s tie-down cleats in a pattern that prevented both lateral movement and vertical lift. June did the second length while he did the third, and they finished simultaneously.

Silas pulled each line hard, checking the tension. He pulled them again.

“They’re tight,” June said.

“I know,” Silas said, and pulled them a third time.

He checked the tarp corners. He put his hand on the Skiffer’s frame through the tarp, feeling the rigidity of the tie-down.

“Silas.”

“One moment.”

He checked the tie-downs again.

June rolled her eyes and looked at the sky, sure they were going to lose daylight before he was done fooling with the ropes.

~*~

The driver’s name was Ned. He told them this when they climbed into the cab with June in the middle, and Silas at the window. He introduced himself with the easy sociability of a man who spent his working days in a cab with strangers and had made peace with the whole thing. He had a face that suggested he’d been outdoors in all weather for most of his adult life, and he handled the Airsteed with the relaxed attention of someone who has been doing something long enough that the skill has become unconscious.

Silas gave him an address.

Ned entered it into the route indicator on the dash, a small brass-framed unit with a paper map drum and a mechanical pointer that utilized the city’s tri-towers, and was the miniaturized equivalent of the navigation systems Silas had seen described in the technical journals used on airships. “Twenty miles out,” Ned said, not as a complaint. “Early start for it.”

“Yep,” Silas said.

Ned pulled away from the dock, navigating the Airsteed out of the alley and onto Clement Street with the same ease he’d reversed into the dock. The ionic thrusters shifted their output as he turned, the vehicle responding to the thruster vectoring with an immediacy that a wheeled vehicle’s mechanical steering could not match. June, beside Silas, put her hand on the dashboard instinctively as they turned, then removed it when she realized the turn had produced no lateral force whatsoever. The Airsteed’s air cushion absorbed the road surface continuously and completely. The cobblestones of Clement Street, the tram tracks at the intersection, the section of repaired pavement near the Forty-Second Street station where the maglev construction had required the road to be cut and relaid, none of it reached the cab as anything more than a faint variation in the ambient sound from below.

June looked at the road surface through the side window. She looked at the dashboard. She looked at Ned’s hands on the controls, which were moving constantly but minimally, small corrections applied before they became necessary.

She had ridden in wheeled trucks. She had ridden the maglev. She had never ridden in an Airsteed.

“Airsteed Opus,” she said, reading the badge on the dashboard.

“Best vehicle I’ve ever operated,” Ned said, with all the weight of a man who has operated others and is making a comparison rather than a sales pitch. “Three years on this route. Not a single breakdown. The ionic thruster maintenance is straightforward if you keep up with it, and the company sends a technician quarterly whether you need one or not.”

The morning traffic on Clement Street was building with delivery carts, a few early pedestrians, two other Airsteed vehicles and a larger number of wheeled trucks that rocked and bounced over the cobblestones with the characteristic mechanical percussion of solid rubber on uneven stone. Ned moved through the traffic with patient confidence.

He told them about the Plymouth Patriots and the Grisham Innovators and how the upcoming match was all anyone at the dispatch yard was talking about, he said, and he had tickets, fourth row from the pitch, and his wife had already arranged a dinner reservation at Marchetti’s afterward. He thought the Patriots would take it cleanly. The Innovators had a strong front line but their coordination had been inconsistent this season, and in his view coordination was the difference between a team that won games it should win and a team that lost games it shouldn’t.

June made the appropriate responses. Silas just looked out the window.

He got like this, June knew, when he was concerned about something. She could guess at what was bothering him.

When they cleared the city’s outer neighborhoods and reached the highway, a broad road that ran straight and flat through the market garden districts toward the farming country beyond, Ned moved the thruster control forward past its city-speed detent and the Airsteed accelerated. The acceleration was not dramatic in the way of a machine straining against inertia. It was continuous and smooth, the vehicle’s speed climbing without any sensation of mechanical effort, the road noise from below dropping away as the ionic cushion pressure adjusted automatically for higher speed operation.

June watched the speed indicator. She watched the farmland on either side of the highway. She looked at the road ahead.

She said nothing for several minutes.

Then she said to Silas: “How do you know about this place?”

Silas looked out the window at the passing fields. “It’s my family’s old place,” he said. He did not elaborate, and his tone did not invite elaboration, and June did not ask again.

~*~

The driveway was marked by two stone posts, one of which had lost its cap at some point and stood six inches shorter than the other. The drive itself was unpaved, made of packed earth, overgrown at the edges with the previous year’s dead grass and the current year’s early growth pushing through it. Ned turned in without comment and took the Airsteed down the drive at reduced speed, the cushion system handling the uneven surface without complaint.

The farmhouse came into view first, two stories, clapboard siding gone grey and dry, three of the ground floor windows boarded from the outside. A chimney had lost its upper courses, and the brick ends were exposed to weather. The porch roof sagged at one end where a support had failed and not been replaced. The front door was intact, paint entirely gone, the bare wood silver-grey.

Behind the house, the barn was larger and in worse condition. The roof had collapsed inward along approximately a third of its length, the failure beginning at a point where the ridge beam had given way and progressing outward along both slopes. The sections that remained standing were intact, with the timber framing visible through gaps in the siding, still upright and squared, but the collapsed section had brought one of the loft walls down with it, and the debris was visible through the opening.

What June had taken from the road to be a small ruined shed resolved into the lower third of a grain silo when they came closer. Circular, built of rings of galvanized steel, the upper two-thirds gone entirely, the stone base still solid.

Ned brought the Airsteed around in the driveway area and stopped with the bed accessible from the flat ground beside the drive. He climbed out and connected the loading ramps and stepped back while June and Silas walked the cart down them, controlling the descent with their combined weight against the rear of the cart frame.

Silas paid Ned in cash, counting the bills from a worn leather fold. “Four hours,” he said.

Ned pocketed the money, tipped his cap, and climbed back into the cab. The Airsteed backed out of the driveway, turned onto the road, and moved away, and left behind no engine note, no exhaust, just the gradually diminishing hum of the thruster system until it was gone and the farm was quiet.

The quiet was substantial. A wind moved through the dead grass at the field’s edge. Birds in the treeline to the north. Nothing else.

June pulled the tarpaulin off the Skiffer and folded it, her eyes already moving across the vehicle’s exterior, looking for anything that had shifted in transit. The cyclorotors were in their mounts. The control linkages were undisturbed. The tie-down rope marks on the cart’s frame showed the load had not moved.

Silas unbolted the toolboxes from the cart and set them on the ground beside the Skiffer. He opened the first one and stood looking at its contents for a moment, running through his mental checklist.

“Let’s start from the frame out,” he said.

~*~

The pre-flight check took an hour and thirty-seven minutes.

June had known it would take a long time. She had made peace with the fact that it would take a long time, because when Silas had described the check sequence the previous evening she had understood the purpose of each step and had no rational objection to any of them. This intellectual understanding did not prevent her from feeling every minute of it.

The wind was the particular problem. It came off the open farmland in irregular pulses, calm for two or three minutes, then a sustained gust for thirty seconds, then calm again. Each time it rose she tracked it without meaning to, estimating the speed by the movement of the grass at the field edge, comparing it against the figure Silas had given her as a no-fly threshold. Each time it fell she felt the brief hope that it might stay down.

They checked every fastener on the frame, working from the port forward cyclorotor clockwise. Silas ran a torque wrench over each bolt while June read the torque specification from the notebook and watched the tool for movement. No movement. No movement. No movement. The witness paint dots on each fastener head, applied in the Tinkery, showed no rotation since application.

They traced every power cable from its motor connection back to the bus bar, pressing each cable along its routing to check for secure clip seating, checking each connection terminal for tightness and for any discoloration that would indicate heat buildup in transit. The terminals were clean. The clips were seated. The bus bar connections were tight.

They activated the hydro-ionic converter from the portable battery they’d brought for pre-ignition power, and listened to the relay sequence. Three clicks, spaced by the timing circuit, each one audible in the farm’s quiet. The hydrogen accumulator pressure gauge climbed on its expected curve. At minimum pressure, the sparker circuit armed.

The boiler fired with its characteristic whump and the sound of combustion ran in the sealed chamber, the temperature gauge beginning its climb. Steam pressure built, crossed the turbine engagement threshold, and the disc turbine spun up to its operating speed in the mere four seconds that always surprised her regardless of how many times she had witnessed it, the RPM gauge needle sweeping the scale and steadying.

Generator output: seventy-three volts open circuit. Voltage regulator output: sixty-eight volts, stable. Battery charge state: accepting trickle charge from the regulator’s secondary output, indicating the main circuit was correctly configured.

She activated the cyclorotors one at a time, running each to operating RPM and watching the ammeter for that specific motor on the instrument panel. Left forward: draw within spec. Right forward: within spec. Left rear: within spec. Right rear: within spec.

She ran all four simultaneously and watched the aggregate current draw and the generator voltage under combined load. Voltage held at sixty-six volts. The turbine RPM held at thirty-four thousand six hundred.

She shut them down, and Silas walked around the vehicle looking at each rotor mount while the blades were still spinning, checking for any vibration evidence in the witness paint at the fastener heads.

Then emergency procedures.

Total power loss: close the collective to zero, allow the Skiffer to descend, use the manual blade pitch adjustment on the backup linkage to set all four rotors to a flat pitch that would autorotate and slow the descent. She worked through this on the ground, her hands finding the manual pitch control that consisted of a separate lever on the left side of the cockpit, independent of the electrical system, connected directly to the blade articulation cam by a mechanical rod. She moved it through its range three times, feeling the resistance, confirming the range of motion was what the design specified.

Single rotor failure: the procedure depended on which rotor. Silas had written four separate procedures in the notebook, one for each rotor, because the correct response to a Left forward failure was different from the correct response to a Right rear failure, and she needed to know both without thinking. They went through all four. She said them back without the notebook. He had her say them back again.

She said them back again.

A gust moved across the farm. She tracked it. Thirty seconds. It died.

She picked up her helmet from the cart and put it on. She pulled on her gloves. She seated the goggles over the helmet’s eye cutouts and adjusted the strap.

Silas looked at her. He looked at the helmet, the gloves, the goggles.

“We haven’t covered the yaw recovery procedure in a crosswind yet,” he said.

“Silas.”

“If the wind comes up while you’re-”

“Silas. The yaw recovery procedure in a crosswind is to apply opposite yaw input and reduce collective slightly to lower the lever arm. You told me this forty minutes ago. I have it.”

Silas looked at the field. He looked at the instrument panel on the Skiffer. He picked up his notebook and opened it to the checklist page.

“You are no good to your family as a corpse.” He said as he reviewed the checklist.

“I know,” June said, keeping her voice level, “that I am no good to my family as a corpse. You have told me this plenty of times. But I intend to live. Can we please fly now?”

Silas ran his finger down the checklist. He turned the page. He ran his finger down the next page.

She fidgeted with her helmet strap.

He closed the notebook.

He looked at her for a moment. Then he raised his thumb.

~*~

June put her hand on the collective and raised it.

The Skiffer lifted from the cart without drama, the transition from ground contact to flight occurring in the space of a single smooth upward movement of the control, the four cyclorotors responding together, the craft rising level without requiring any trim correction. Two feet. Four feet. She paused at five feet, letting the hover stabilize, feeling the small continuous adjustments she was unconsciously making through the control stick. The crosswind was present, a steady push from the northwest, and she was countering it with a slight stick input without having decided to do so. It was intuitive.

Eight feet. She paused again.

She looked down at the farm driveway, at the cart sitting empty below her, at the collapsed barn roof and the grey farmhouse and the treeline beyond the fields. The perspective from eight feet was not dramatically different from the perspective from the ground, but the fact of it, the physical fact of being above the ground with nothing beneath her but air and the hum of the cyclorotors, registered in her chest as a sensation she did not have a precise name for.

She raised the collective to ten feet.

Her heart rate, which had been elevated since she put the helmet on, climbed further and then steadied, the initial spike settling into a sustained elevation that made everything slightly sharper and slightly faster than normal. She was aware of every instrument on the panel. She was aware of the wind direction on the exposed skin of her face below the goggles. She was aware of the collective in her right hand and the stick in her left and the specific tension in each.

She looked down at Silas.

He was standing ten feet below her in the driveway with his notebook in one hand and his pencil in the other, looking up at her. He made a circular gesture with the pencil, indicating she should do a slow orbit of the driveway area.

She flew the orbit.

She kept the forward speed to a walking pace, as they had planned. The Skiffer moved through the turn with a responsiveness that the tethered flight in the Tinkery had not fully conveyed; with four feet of tether limiting every movement, she had been feeling the craft through a filter. Now the control inputs translated directly into motion, nothing interrupting the relationship between the stick and the vehicle.

The first orbit was precise but mechanical. She was thinking about each input before she made it.

The second orbit was less mechanical. The correction for the crosswind on the northwest leg of the path was happening before she consciously registered the wind’s effect, her hands moving ahead of her deliberate attention.

The third orbit she began to feel the craft rather than calculate it.

Silas raised his hand and made a faster circular gesture. She increased speed. Ten miles per hour. Fifteen. She flew three more orbits at fifteen, feeling the increased wind pressure on her face and the increased authority in the controls, the craft responding to inputs more crisply at speed than at hover.

Silas raised his hand again and pointed down.

She landed. The Skiffer settled onto the cart with a precision that surprised her. She had aimed for the cart and hit it within two inches of center.

She closed the collective. The rotors spun down. She sat in the cockpit for a moment with her hands in her lap before climbing out.

The ground felt different under her boots than it had forty-five minutes ago. She stood beside the cart and found that her legs required a brief conversation with her before they agreed to function normally. She gripped the cart’s edge and waited.

“Systems check,” Silas said, and she pushed off the cart and went to work.

~*~

The second check took thirty minutes. Silas examined every rotor mount, every cable connection, every structural fastener, moving around the Skiffer with his notebook and his wrench while June refilled the water reservoir from the two-gallon container they had brought. She measured the water going in against the amount the system had consumed, checked the figure against the theoretical consumption rate for the power output they had sustained, and recorded both in the notebook.

The figure matched the theoretical rate within four percent. She noted this. It meant the boiler was operating at its design efficiency, neither wasting water through improper combustion nor running the system lean.

Silas was on his hands and knees looking at the left rear rotor mount. He stood, dusted his knees, and wrote something in the notebook.

“Left rear shows light movement on the upper mount face,” he said. “The fastener is tight. I want to watch it.” He wrote something else. “And we’re bolting the bars on before the next flight.”

The bars were four lengths of the same alloy as the Skiffer’s frame, bent to form a protective cage around the pilot’s sides and forward face. It wasn’t a full enclosure, but a structure that would take the primary impact in a controlled crash and direct it away from the pilot

They went on with eight bolts each, into pre-drilled mounting points in the frame, and Silas torqued each bolt by hand and then with the wrench while June held the bars in position.

When the bars were on, she climbed in and sat in the pilot’s seat. The cage changed the feel of the space; it had been narrow before and was narrower now, the bars running eight inches outside each elbow. The forward bar crossed her field of view at chest height when she looked straight ahead, though her sightlines over it and to either side were clear.

She noted the contained feeling of the space. She decided that the feeling was not comfortable. She gripped the collective, gripped the stick, and noted that both controls were fully accessible and that her field of view for flight was unobstructed.

She climbed back out.

“One thousand feet,” Silas said, spreading the site map he had drawn on the kitchen table the previous evening on the cart’s surface. He had drawn the map from memory with the driveway, the house, the barn, the field boundaries, the treeline to the north all in evidence. He had drawn a circle on the map centered on the driveway, its radius scaled to one thousand feet. “Stay inside the circle. Ceiling is thirty feet. Half throttle maximum.” He looked at her over the map. “You crash at those parameters in that cage, you walk away.”

She fired the boiler. The startup sequence ran again. Relay clicks, accumulator pressure climbing, sparker armed, combustion thump, temperature climb, turbine spin-up, generator output stabilizing. She ran through the abbreviated pre-flight sequence Silas had specified for subsequent flights, the cyclorotors one at a time, ammeter readings, aggregate current check with the rotors at idle.

All four within spec.

She raised the collective. The Skiffer lifted.

She flew over the farmhouse at twelve feet, clearing the porch roof by eight, and continued outward from the driveway at a steady climbing angle until she reached twenty feet. She had the farm behind her now, the fallow fields extending ahead, the treeline at the northern boundary visible as a dark horizontal line. She turned right, following the arc of the thousand-foot circle, and began to accelerate.

At twenty miles per hour, the controls had the authority she had felt in the driveway orbits but with more stability as the Skiffer at speed was less susceptible to the irregular wind pulses than the Skiffer at hover, the gyroscopic effect of the four spinning rotors resisting perturbation.

At thirty miles per hour, the wind in her face was enough to make her grateful for the goggles.

The Skiffer continued to accelerate.

She looked at the throttle position. Twenty-five percent.

She looked at the airspeed indicator. The needle was at sixty-five miles per hour and still climbing.

She looked at the throttle again, certain she had misread it. The lever was seated in the twenty-five percent detent. She could feel the detent’s mechanical resistance against her hand.

Sixty-five miles per hour at twenty-five percent throttle. She had expected perhaps forty. She had planned around forty, which was the figure her calculations had suggested for twenty-five percent power at the Skiffer’s current weight.

The weight. The trimming process. The new bus bars, the resized conductor stock, the forge-hardened copper replacing the copper-clad aluminum. She had been calculating against the old weight for so long that the new weight, lighter, substantially lighter than the first tethered test, had not fully updated her intuition for what the machine could do.

Silas had said half throttle maximum.

With a grin, she moved the throttle lever to the fifty percent detent.

The Skiffer’s response was immediate and unambiguous. She was pressed back into the seat as the cyclorotors increased their output, the four rotors accelerating in the linked way the collective control produced, the craft surging forward on its arc around the farm. The wind in her face went from substantial to deafening, her hair whipping behind the helmet’s edge, her cheeks pushed by the airflow in a way that made her glad the goggles covered her eyes completely.

She looked at the airspeed indicator.

One hundred and twenty miles per hour. One hundred and twenty-eight. One hundred and thirty-four. One hundred and thirty-six.

The needle held at one hundred and thirty-six miles per hour.

She was at thirty feet, on a gentle arc, at fifty percent throttle, doing one hundred and thirty-six miles per hour, and the Skiffer felt as though it had a substantial reserve of power remaining that it had not been asked for.

She became aware of two things simultaneously.

The first was that she wanted, with an urgency that overrode careful thought for approximately three full seconds, to move the throttle to the one hundred percent detent and find out what one hundred and thirty-six miles per hour became when you doubled the power input.

The second was the voice of Silas Ames, not present in the air around her but thoroughly present in her memory, saying with the patient certainty of a man who had been correct about this kind of thing before: You are no good to your family as a corpse.

She took her hand off the throttle and left it at fifty percent.

The arc of the thousand-foot circle brought her around the northern boundary of the farm, the treeline passing below her at thirty feet, the individual trees visible as distinct shapes rather than a continuous mass. She was aware of the distance to the ground, and the speed at which that ground was passing, and the relationship between those two numbers thrilled her.

The wind blew past her face and filled her ears with the sounds of a tornado. She did not hear the alarm.

She saw the light, though.

It was on the left side of the instrument panel, a small red lamp behind a glass lens, no larger than a shirt button, and it was flashing at a rate of approximately twice per second. Her eyes registered it in the way eyes register motion at the periphery, not with immediate comprehension but with an involuntary shift of attention. In the half-second between registering the light and reading the small engraved label beneath it, the Skiffer’s nose dropped eight degrees, and the vehicle began to rotate to the left.

The label read: RTR FL / LEFT FWD.

Rotor failure. Left forward.

The rotation increased. She was no longer flying on the arc she had intended. She was yawing left, the nose swinging, the ground that had been in front of her moving to the left and then to the left-rear as the Skiffer pivoted around its vertical axis with a speed that had nothing to do with her inputs and everything to do with the asymmetric thrust from three functioning rotors and one that was not.

The fields and the treeline and the grey farmhouse rotated around her as the flat spin developed. She was still at thirty feet, at one hundred and thirty-six miles per hour, and thinking hard abut what to do next.