“Funny, I don’t remember a spatial anomaly on the cargo manifest,” Leo said, looking at the empty space between two stacks of crates in the cargo hold. There was quite literally nothing there to be seen, but what gave it away was the way the nothingness extended a little bit beyond the width of the alleyway, resulting in slices missing from the edges of the nearest container.
Once he fully tuned his sensitive feline vision to that spot, he noticed air had an almost luminous quality, making the hold show up in slightly different shades of green when viewed through it.
One dish-like ear twitched, catching the sound of ghouls coming up the corridor. Leo climbed higher up the crates and wedged himself into a crack.
He knew where the undead were entering the ship from. The question was, what could he do about it?
Regan encountered no one on her way to her workshop, to her great disappointment.
Her official quarters occupied as large a space as Puff’s, but the lack of bulky water tanks gave it more usable area and the opportunity to seem less cramped and cluttered. Sadly, this potential was squandered.
Lilliana had visited Regan in her quarters during the latter’s first twenty-eight hours aboard the Rebellion. Her first impression was that it looked like a bomb had gone off. That impression was wrong only in the matter of quantity. That was the cleanest and most orderly state the workshop had ever been in since. Lilliana had a certain fondness for Regan, but she made a point of avoiding her quarters.
Regan herself merely considered the workshop’s arrangement to be an efficient use of space. It was as well-organized as she could stand.
Bits of engines, pieces of machines, spare parts, and tools were piled knee-high on the floor. Larger machines and odd assemblages poked out of the sea of debris like mountain peaks breaking the cloud cover.
The parts were sorted by how interesting they were and what she thought she might be able to do with them. The tools were all left by whatever she’d last used them on, so she always knew where to find them. She had no formal training in mechanical engineering or any other technical discipline. She’d simply always been good at taking things apart. She was slightly less good at putting them back together. She was an absolute genius at figuring out how to make them explode, though.
Her spare weapons were arrayed on the walls. These included genuine Old Earth antiques, exact replicas of such weapons, and ultramodern gear designed to look like such weapons. Having grown up on a planet where magic was common enough to be banal and technology imports were strictly controlled, enchanted weapons held no especial attraction for her. Instead, she was a big fan of things like atomic mesh ceramics that looked like steel.
Finished projects—or projects in a more advanced state of completion, anyway—were closer to the surface of the piles. It was a good system. It worked for her.
Her valuables… her jewelry, main weapons, spare skinsuits, and instruments… were kept buried not just under the piles but under the floor. The old ship had been repurposed and remodeled so many times that there was now a whole network of dead spaces where decks had been partitioned by a succession of owners. By using these and the maintenance ducts, it was possible to traverse the length of the ship without setting foot on a proper floor.
After the first accidental detonation in her workshop—fifth total—Regan had quickly located and reclaimed a space between her room and Puff’s and made it into her true living quarters. She’d done a little renovating of her own so that it could only be reached from the access grate at the top of the wall in Regan’s workshop. Not even Handy, who could squeeze into spaces too tight for Regan, knew about it.
It was to this space that Regan went, after carefully sealing the door. She took the square grate cover off the wall and climbed in, pulling it back in place behind her, and then climbed down the dark shaft. It had originally had metal rungs and evenly spaced blue lights, but Regan had removed those and covered up the places where they’d been so that anybody looking in the shaft would be less likely to guess that it was ever meant to lead anywhere.
A person had to be very small, very flexible, or both in order to duck down and crawl into the horizontal portion at the bottom. Regan could make it, but she had to take her sword off and leave it in the vertical shaft. There was a flap at the end of the crawlway which made it look like a dead end. Regan pushed through it into the soft glow of the multicolored lights she’d strung across the low ceiling of the space. Her space, her private place, was roughly cubic, about six feet across each axis. There was a dressmaker’s dummy in the corner, on which she put her torc, her mail shirt, and her cape when she wasn’t wearing them. There was a cot and a chest of drawers she’d assembled from pieces. Her fiddle, harp, and whistles hung on the wall.
The bar of gold was right where she’d left it, in the sock drawer. Regan did not in fact wear socks. Her skinsuit would have rendered them redundant. It’s possible she wasn’t even aware that people normally put them on their feet. She bought socks solely for the purpose of concealing things in their drawer.
She took the heavy bar and stuck it in a pillowcase, wrapping it multiple times so that it would not swing around so much, and then knotted it to the back of her belt. She’d need her hands free, and not just for the climb back up. If the universe were any kind of fair, she’d have to fight her way back down to the alchemy lab and then the engine room.
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