The Fenmere Job by Marshall Ryan Maresca

Author:Marshall Ryan Maresca [Maresca, Marshall Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2020-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Verci woke well after the sun rose, Raych and Corsi already gone to the bakery. That was to be expected, but he was surprised how heavily he’d slept. Not that he didn’t need it. He took a few minutes to check his injuries—both of them still hurt like blazes, his foot oozing blood despite the stitches. He changed out the bandages and tested his weight on it. He flinched as he put his foot down. That wouldn’t do.

He went to a trunk and dug out the leg brace from when he broke his foot. The same foot. Why was he the one always getting injured?

That wasn’t entirely true. But it seemed like his body took punishments to match the ones Asti’s mind had.

That wasn’t fair. If his body matched Asti’s mind, he’d be confined to the rollerchair.

He put the brace on. It was designed to keep the weight off his foot, let him take it on his calf and knee. Less than ideal, but it worked well enough to get around and not put pressure on an open wound. Good enough to work in the shop today.

The shoulder was mostly stiff. He couldn’t get it all the way up. That he’d just have to stretch and let heal.

He had the breakfast Raych had laid out for him, with a little scrawled note with a charcoal pencil saying. “Honest work! Love, Raych.” He took the plans that Carrigan had left behind and looked over them. Unfortunately, so much about the plans were meaningless to him. He understood the designs, in terms of the gear work and the moving parts, but all the numbers were just so much junk. Plus, he couldn’t look at a set of plans and figure out what was wrong. He’d have to build.

He finished eating and went down to the shop. Today was supposed to be a building day—the front of the shop was ready except for merchandise to display, save a little sweeping and tidying. But he was not in a sweep and tidy mood. Asti could do that when he arrived. Asti was good at that.

So he settled into making a replica of the device on the plans. At worst, it would be a small waste of his time and he’d have an odd toy to sell.

Near as he could figure, the device was a central engine—gears and springs and steam pistons, it seemed—that pulled a series of wound cables, and then released them again. Each cable pulled a covered wagon of sorts, though it looked like it was designed to run on a track, like a mine cart. That made a certain amount of sense, but it was clear the main machine had an imbalance of power. Even at the small scale he was working, the cable kept snapping, or the wagon carts would crash into the machine hub. And he wondered if they expected manpower to operate every element, and where those controls ought to be. That seemed to be the major problem with the plans, he felt; no place for a person to work it.

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