“Certainly, Lalith.”
She keeps her arm close to her side as she exits the fortress. It’s true that it’s been hurting all night, ever since she stood in the rain and witnessed the Divinity on the clifftops. But adjusting her prosthetic won’t help it any for what she’s planning for tomorrow night.
She thinks about the tall, cold walls of Signe’s test assembly yard, and the canvas roof. Now, she thinks. How to crack that particular nut?
***
Mulaghesh isn’t alone the next evening when she stands on the seawall road, watching the waters. Small clumps of Dreylings dot the path, all watching for the arrival of Sigrud—lost prince to a faded royal line, instigator of the coup that ended the pirate kings’ clutch on the Dreyling Republics, and one of the founders of the nascent United Dreyling States. The Dreylings gossip quietly, wondering if the wind will be behind him, if his ship is in a bad state, if he’s come to inaugurate the next step of their expansion. They mostly ignore Mulaghesh, who’s wearing her black leather greatcoat over her fatigues, hiding the monstrously large electric torch hanging from her shoulder. Saypur has advanced many technologies, but lead acid batteries aren’t one of them yet.
There’s a collective intake of breath as the ship emerges from the night, a tower of rippling sails on the waves. Some of the sails are rent and tattered, as if the ship’s gone through one hell of a fight.
“It’s him,” whispers one of the Dreylings. “It’s him!”
“What has happened to the ship?”
“Are you a fool? Have you forgotten that the dauvkind swore to drive piracy out of our shores? What else would he be doing?”
Mulaghesh can’t help but share their anticipation. Sigrud’s one of the few people besides Shara who survived all of Bulikov’s madness with her, and he’s the one person in the world who might believe that she actually saw a long-dead Divinity last night. But she knows she can’t speak to him, not yet. I have other ugly little deeds to do, she thinks, and begins walking back toward the harbor works.
As someone who spent the last half decade in the shadow of Shara Komayd, Mulaghesh rarely gets to feel clever. But as she watches the various Dreylings streaming down to the SDC headquarters, she gets to feel a rare flash of brilliance.
Of course the Dreylings are eager to catch the slightest glimpse of their dauvkind, their lost (or used-to-be-lost) heir to the throne. Of course that’ll make them distracted and reluctant to attend to their duties. And if Mulaghesh ever wanted to sneak behind the iron walls of Signe’s test assembly yard, now would be the chance.
Her pulse quickens as she enters the harbor yards. She stands in the shadow of a crane and watches, marking when and where the patrols make their rounds. Moving calmly and smoothly, she dances around the patrols, passing through prep yards, girder yards, cable yards, and finally the pallet yard.
Mulaghesh pauses only once, as she walks beneath the guard tower with the PK-512. She’s acquainted enough with that behemoth of a weapon that she checks it out every time, wondering if it might come alive with its hellish chatter. As usual, though, it’s unmanned and dormant. She continues on.
The test assembly walls swell up before her. It’s quite dark here, as this area is not well lit like the others. She crouches in the shadow of the walls and slowly makes her way down toward the checkpoint. She stops when she sees a Dreyling guard sitting in the booth, smoking anxiously, his rifling slung over his back. He’s short for a Dreyling, somewhat rotund, and looks quite irritated.
A second Dreyling approaches, trotting up the path, this one with a closely cropped red-blond beard. “His ship’s pulling in now!”
The short Dreyling in the checkpoint booth glowers at him. “Don’t tell me that! I don’t want to hear about that.”
“Surely you can get away for a minute? L?fven and his team are all shutting down for the occasion. They’re pulling all their trucks up at the fuel yards.” He points northeast, almost right at Mulaghesh. She shrinks up against the wall.
“Would you shut up? You know I cannot leave my post!”
“But certainly yo—”
“You know what’s in here,” says the short Dreyling. “The CTO would drown me if I walked away.”
“Ach,” says the red-bearded Dreyling, “I suppose that’s true. Well. I will see for you, and tell you all about it!” With an excited good-bye, he sprints off for the SDC headquarters.
Mulaghesh thinks, then sneaks back along the walls in the opposite direction. When she hears the roaring of truck engines, she slows.
It’s the loading dock of the diesel fuel yard, which happens to back right up into the iron walls. She watches as a dozen large fuel trucks park, their hulking forms lumbering into their spots. It takes nearly twenty minutes for them all to go still. Mulaghesh watches carefully as the drivers hop out and toss their keys into what seems to be a checkout box. Then the supervisor—this L?fven, perhaps—locks the checkout box and follows them down the road.
She looks at the trucks. They’re about fifteen, sixteen feet tall. Then she looks at the walls, which are a little more than twenty feet tall.
“Hm,” she says.
She waits, then sprints across the loading dock to the checkout box. She never learned to pick locks, and she certainly couldn’t do it now, one-handed. So she grabs a nearby prybar, slots it behind the lock’s bolt, and gives it a hard shove.
All those one-handed press-ups come in handy, and the lock pops off with a screech. A lock is only as good, Mulaghesh thinks, as whatever it’s bolted into. She grabs a numbered key, finds the right truck, and starts it up.
The fuel truck is a beast to maneuver. She’s always hated driving automobiles, especially now that she’s one-handed, and she’s intensely aware that she’s probably now piloting several hundred gallons of highly flammable fluid. But despite all this she slowly, uncertainly backs the truck up to the iron walls. She stops only when the bumper of the truck actually touches the walls themselves.
She jumps out, grabs an oil-stained rope from a trash heap, and clambers up on top of the truck. She runs to the back end where the bumper is up against the wall. The wall is still about seven feet higher than the truck, but she can make it. She ties the rope to a handle on the back of the truck, then hurls it over the wall. It lands on the canvas roof with a plop.
She pauses, thinking about how she’s going to do this.
“I fucking hate being one-handed,” she mutters.