The Iron jackal

Twenty-Two

Five nights left.

Everyone was in a hurry at the moment, thought Harkins.

They’d hurried out of Thesk as fast as the Ketty Jay would take them. They’d hurried across Vardia, flying non-stop all day, with tireless Jez taking the controls when the Cap’n had to sleep. They hurried over Silver Bay, red and gold in the last light of dusk, into the Free Trade Zone, back to Shasiith by midnight. There they dropped the Cap’n off, with Malvery for a bodyguard, and then hurried back out of the city again, because they didn’t want to stay in dock for too long. They were afraid of being caught by the Sammie soldiers, still out for their blood after that whole messy business with the hijacked train.

They’d returned to the city a few hours later, to a different landing pad, for the rendezvous. No one had turned up, so they took off again, hanging in the dark of the night sky, floating weightless on aerium ballast until it was time to head to the second rendezvous at a different landing pad. By now it was past dawn, but this time the Cap’n was waiting, with Malvery and Ashua. He’d had some trouble tracking her down, despite the fact she’d left word for him, and he was fretting about the wasted hours. He called a crew meeting immediately, and everyone hurried to get it over with so they could get back in the sky.

Hurry, hurry, and it didn’t really feel like they were getting anywhere. The more they hurried, the faster time seemed to slip away.

If the Cap’n died, the Ketty Jay died. They all knew it. None of them were capable of taking command. Their little world would fall apart. They assembled in the mess with a grim sense of purpose.

Ashua stood at the head of the room with Frey. Harkins couldn’t say he was exactly glad to see that ginger-haired young woman back on board. Her stupid tattooed face annoyed him. He hadn’t forgotten her unkind words while he was fumbling with a lit stick of dynamite in the Rattletrap.

The rest of the crew were arranged around the table in varying positions of recline. Crake was yawning in his pyjamas and robe, looking hollow-eyed and exhausted. He’d been working in his sanctum all day and night, and had somehow roped Silo in to help him with the strange mechanical bits and bobs he’d picked up in Thesk. He’d just gone to bed when they woke him up again for the meeting.

Next to Crake, Malvery was sucking down coffee and looking dour. Silo smoked one of his vile roll-ups, which made Harkins’ eyes sting and his throat tickle. Pinn sat eagerly to attention, instead of his usual slouch.

He was up to something. Harkins could tell.

Pinn had been in a sulk last night, because they had to leave his Skylance in dock at Thesk. During the day, he’d disappeared into the quarters he shared with Harkins and banned anyone from entering. When he emerged, he was fairly bouncing with excitement. It was all very suspicious.

Harkins hated that hamster-cheeked dunce more than ever since his little stunt at the race. Bad enough that Harkins had no aircraft any more, nowhere to escape to. He felt like half a man without it, and he’d gone a bit hysterical until the Cap’n assured him he’d get a new one. But to have his moment of glory stolen from him… that was the worst thing yet! It was enough to make a man mad with rage, enough to make him… well… stamp his feet, or something.

Jez had seen it, though. Jez, leaning against the wall in her jumpsuit with her arms folded, hair tied back with a rubber strip. Jez, who stubbornly refused to swoon at his feet. His display of extraordinary bravery – doubly impressive since it came from an abject coward – had produced no discernible effect on her at all. What was a man supposed to do to stir her heart, for rot’s sake? How much heroism would it take? Harkins was seriously beginning to think that he wouldn’t survive much more of it.

He glanced at the cupboards above the stove. Slag, not to be left out of a crew meeting, had installed himself up there, and was listening with one ear while noisily devouring a rat. A thin trail of blood had been smeared across the counter and up the cupboard door, which surely couldn’t be hygienic. But at least the cat didn’t bother him these days. He took some satisfaction in that.

‘Alright, listen up!’ said Frey. ‘Let’s make this quick, before the Sammies get wind we’re here. Try not to interrupt for a minute, if you can manage that, and we’ll get on our way. Miss Vode has a couple of things to tell us.’

All eyes moved to Ashua. She leaned forward over the table, hands on the back of a chair.

‘Here’s the situation,’ she said. ‘The man you want is being kept by the Sammies a long way south of here, outside the Free Trade Zone. Usually they’d have executed him without a second thought, but Ugrik is the fourth son of the High Chief of Yortland, and I suppose they’re not keen on starting an international incident. That said, they’re not keen on letting him go, either. I reckon they don’t want him telling anyone where he got that relic from, in case more go looking.’

‘So, what? We’re breaking him out?’ Crake snapped his fingers in the air. ‘Easy! Why not? Maybe we can smash a few more national treasures on the way.’

Ashua looked at Frey uncertainly. He rolled his eyes and waved at her to continue.

‘Er… well, anyway, there’s a problem,’ she said. ‘We know where he’s being kept, but we don’t know exactly where it is. It’s located somewhere in the Chi-a’ti sulphur basin – otherwise known as the Choke Bowl – an area covered with toxic geysers which is more or less permanently clouded by fumes.’

Silo moved in his seat and spat a word. Harkins didn’t know what it meant, but it came loaded with a frightening quantity of hate, and it sounded like he was naming the place. Gagriisk.

‘You know it?’ Frey asked him.

Silo glared at the table. ‘Allium mine. Murthian work camp. Place is a death-hole.’

‘It’s also well fortified,’ said Ashua, ‘with a standing defence force of a single small frigate and ten fighters.’

‘Oh, that’s just bloody fantastic!’ said Crake, who was evidently in a snarky mood this morning. ‘And I suppose we’re just going to waltz in there, guz ihat’ns blazing, yes?’

‘Waltzing in with guns blazing is pretty much the only way you’re gonna get your man out,’ said Ashua. ‘None of you lot would pass for Sammies or Daks, so chances of infiltrating it are pretty slim. You’d all be mordant before long.’

‘That means dead,’ said Frey proudly.

Crake looked at Ashua with a puzzled frown. Harkins saw her give him a quick wink, and he cracked a small, private smile. Harkins wasn’t sure what had passed between them – a shared joke about the Cap’n, perhaps? – but he wished people would just say what they meant and stop using words like ‘mordant’ altogether.

Jez spoke up then. ‘So, what you’re saying is, the only way to get Ugrik out is a frontal assault on a fortified camp?’

‘Yeah,’ said Frey. ‘That, and we don’t know how to find it.’

‘The Choke Bowl covers hundreds of square kloms,’ said Ashua. ‘And the mine’s location is secret.’

‘Cap’n,’ said Jez, with the tone of someone struggling to understand why she was even having this conversation. ‘There’s seven of us. Nine if you count Bess and the cat. Ten if she’s coming.’ She nodded at Ashua, then looked at Frey. ‘ Is she coming, by the way?’

‘Yeah,’ said Frey and Ashua at the same time, though neither of them looked at all happy about it. ‘Temporarily,’ Frey added. ‘We can always use another gun.’

Harkins wondered if that was the real reason, or if Ashua had demanded to come in return for the information. It seemed like the kind of weaselly trick she might pull. Apparently, the reason the Cap’n hadn’t been able to find her last night was because she’d had a close shave with some Sammie soldiers, and gone into hiding. Shasiith must have been really dangerous for her now, if she thought she was safer on the Ketty Jay.

‘So,’ Jez continued, ‘let’s be generous and say Bess counts for three. That makes twelve of us, assuming we put the cat in some armour and strap an autocannon to its arse.’

‘Which isn’t actually a bad idea…’ Malvery mused, studying Slag. Slag looked up from his rat, sensing that he’d become the centre of attention, and hissed at them.

‘How many guards in this camp?’ Jez asked Ashua.

Ashua shrugged. ‘I’d say at least a hundred.’

Malvery coughed and spat half his mug of coffee into Crake’s ear. ‘A hundred? amp;rsquoredoI’; he cried.

Crake sighed and dabbed at his face with the sleeve of his robe. Harkins had some sympathy for him. It seemed like you couldn’t get through a day round here without someone spitting something over somebody.

‘That does sound rather a lot,’ the daemonist pointed out.

Malvery sat back in his chair, folded his arms over his belly and blew out his moustache with a huff. ‘Well, Cap’n, allow me to be the first to say that this frontal assault plan is bollocks.’

‘Seconded,’ said Crake instantly.

‘Thirded,’ said Frey, which threw everybody off. ‘Look, nobody’s frontally assaulting anything with those odds. But right now we’ve got no other leads to where the relic came from, and unless we get it back there pretty damn fast, I’m gonna die horribly.’

‘Least you won’t lose your hand, though,’ Malvery pointed out.

‘Yeah, there is that,’ Frey admitted, looking fondly at his hand in its fingerless glove. ‘Anyway, we’re gonna get moving, get out of Shasiith and head to the border of the Free Trade Zone. Soon as the sun goes down we’re heading south. And between now and the Choke Bowl, someone needs to come up with a plan better than the one we got.’

He surveyed the room. The atmosphere was gloomy.

‘I’m telling you all so you know just how shit out of luck we are on this one. Seriously, I don’t have a clue how we’re gonna do this. I want to offer you the chance, if you want, to step off now.’

Harkins felt a shiver of horror. He looked at the faces of the people in the mess, and was appalled to find that nobody was protesting.

‘You serious, Cap’n?’ Malvery’s tone was grave.

‘Yep,’ said Frey, with forced lightheartedness. ‘Take a week, do whatever you need to do. Catch up on family, see the sights. Pinn, you could go see that girl you hardly ever mention any more.’

‘Hey!’ said Pinn distractedly. He was fiddling with something under the table. ‘True love is never in a hurry.’

Crake snorted and muttered something sarcastic that Harkins didn’t quite catch.

‘Anyway,’ said Frey, ‘the point is, nobody has to do this. This is my problem. None of you have any stake in it, so this is your chance to get out if you want, and no hard feelings. Reckon it’s only gonna get worse from here on in.’

Harkins was agape. No! Nobody was allowed to leave! He’d already lost his wings. He was damned if he’d lose the only people in the world he wasn’t mortally afraid of.

‘We don’t… I mean… you think we don’t have any stake in this?’ he demanded, his voice more shrill than he would have liked. ‘I haven’t forgotten why I’m here today! You… Cap’n, you gave me the chance to fly again.’ He swept the room with what he hoped was a fierce glare. ‘And I’m betting everyone else here owes you just as much.’ He stuck out his unshaven chin. ‘ I’m with you!’

Jez was gazing at him with an expression of naked surprise on her face. He felt a touch of bitter satisfaction. See? he thought. You don’t know me like you think.

Malvery was nodding. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Reckon you’re right. Don’t believe any of us’d be much right now if it weren’t for the Cap’n.’

Frey waved his hands. ‘No, no, you don’t get it!’ he protested. ‘I don’t want anyone coming out of a sense of obligation.’

‘Cap’n,’ said Crake. ‘Nobody wants to do this. Even you don’t want to do this.’

‘Still goin’ to, though,’ Silo rumbled.

‘Right,’ said Jez.

‘Right,’ said Harkins firmly.

‘ Aiieeeaaaaaarrrghhh!!! ’ said Pinn, whose arm was on fire.

The whole room watched, stunned, as Pinn scrambled away from the table, flailing. His coat was aflame up to the elbow, a bright burning wing flapping in the air. But before anyone could gather their wits and react, something even more disturbing happened.

Pinn started to laugh.

‘Suckers!’ he crowed.

‘Um,’ said Crake. ‘But your arm is on fire, though, right?’

Pinn was holding the blazing arm out straight, away from his body. ‘I don’t feel a thing!’ he declared, a big grin on his chubby face. ‘And you know why? Because my sleeve is coated in Professor Pinn’s Incredible Flame-Slime!’

A few seconds passed, during which the only sound was the restless grumbling of the flames.

‘Er… what?’ Malvery said at length.

‘Professor Pinn’s Incredible Flame-Slime!’ Pinn enthused. ‘See, I was mixing all this stuff together that I found down in the hold, trying out some new experiments.’ He paused to gauge how impressed everybody was with his scientific prowess. ‘And I came up with this! I only worked out what it could do when I accidentally set my finger on fire.’

Crake had shaken off his drowsiness and was sitting up, fascinated. ‘So it’s highly flammable and yet it insulates you from the heat,’ he said. ‘That’s actually quite astounding, Pinn. How did you make it?’

‘Ah!’ said Pinn, preening. ‘That’d be telling.’

Malvery studied him for a moment and then said confidently, ‘He doesn’t know.’

‘I do!’ Pinn protested.

Malvery scoffed. ‘Aye. I bet you were keeping met- ic -ulous records all the way through.’

‘Well, what kind of inventor bothers with all that boring stuff when there’s inventions to be… er… invented?’ Pinn protested. He looked slightly worried now. No doubt it was the first time it had occurred to him that he might not be able to make it again.

‘You mean you’ve invented this Incredible Flame-Slime and you’ve no idea how you did it?’ Crake asked in astonishment.

‘I made a whole pot of the stuff,’ Pinn said lamely, with a helpless shrug. ‘I mean, I…’ An expression of alarm crossed his face and he stared at his burning arm. ‘Wait a minute. This is getting pretty hoaaa aaaaaaaarrrgh!!!! ’

‘Oh, come on. You pulled that trick once already,’ Harkins sniffed, as Pinn flapped at himself, screaming.

‘Don’t think he’s faking this time,’ said Malvery, surging to his feet and pulling his coat from the back of his chair. He bundled into Pinn, knocking him to the floor and smothering his arm. Pinn rolled around shrieking beneath the doctor’s not inconsiderable weight, but finally came to rest, panting, his face white and sweaty.

‘It’s out?’ Malvery asked.

Pinn nodded weakly.

‘Come on, then. Let’s get you to the-’

Malvery never finished, because at that moment Slag, sensing vulnerable prey, leapt from his perch atop the cupboard and launched himself at Pinn’s head. Pinn howled and twisted as the cat savaged his scalp. Malvery swore and tried to beat Slag away, but the cat hung on tight, and Pinn’s thrashing mea th Pinn saidnt that Malvery hit him more often than not.

‘Somebody get that cat off him!’ Frey cried in exasperation.

‘Right you are, Cap’n,’ said Jez. She went down to one knee and held out her arms. Slag disengaged from his bloodied foe and bolted across the mess towards her. She picked him up and held him protectively against her chest, while he groomed himself in satisfaction.

‘I thought that cat hated you!’ Harkins accused, feeling somewhat betrayed at the sight of his old enemy showing such affection towards the object of his desire.

Jez ignored him, which hurt. She looked at Pinn instead, who was being helped to his feet by Malvery. ‘I think he had a grudge about the whole rum and toast thing.’

‘Infirmary. Now,’ said Malvery to Pinn, who was amusingly close to tears.

‘I can’t get up the ladder,’ Pinn whined, holding up his arms: one mildly burned beneath the tatters of his coat sleeve, the other still in a sling.

Ashua was shaking her head in despair. ‘How you lot managed to hijack a train, I’ll never know.’

Frey clapped his hands together. ‘Well, then,’ he said brightly. ‘That was fun. Now if Pinn’s done being an idiot, let’s get airborne, shall we?’

Jez liked the engine room of the Ketty Jay. It reminded her in some way of her father’s workshop: the smell of grease and oil, the heavy presence of machinery, the sticky warmth in the air. And it was certainly warm now. The Ketty Jay had only recently put down near the edge of the Free Trade Zone, and the residual heat from the prothane engine, combined with the baking afternoon sun, had driven the temperature to sweltering.

She picked her way through the tight mesh of walkways and steps that surrounded the engine assembly, following the sounds of movement, the occasional clank of a spanner. Silo was around here somewhere, as usual. In fact, she’d been counting on it. She needed to talk to someone, and there was only one man on the crew she thought would understand.

She found him kneeling in front of a panel, tinkering with the engine. Slag was there, too, lying on top of a warm pipe. The cat gave her a steady gaze as she approached.

‘Hey,’ she said to Silo.

He didn’t reply. Beads of sweat were trickling from his shaven head as he worked.

‘Can I talk to you?’

‘You talkin’, ain’tcha?’ he replied.

Jez hunkered down next to him, undeterred. He’d been in a dark mood for several days now, and she didn’t reckon he’d come out of it soon. She briefly considered asking him what he was doing, but Silo wasn’t much for smalltalk. Besides, she could see that he wasn’t really doing anything. There wasn’t much to be done: the new engine needed very little maintenance. Not that it stopped Silo constantly looking for something to fix.

‘I had this dream,’ she said. ‘Well, more like a vision, I supposed you’d say.’ And she told him about it, how she’d gone back to the day she died, and looked down on her body in the snow, and how she’d stood beneath the dreadnought and listened to the cries of the Manes.

‘And I was drawn to them, you know?’ she said. ‘Damn, it was like

… Well, I suppose you’ve not heard anyone speaking Murthian for a long time now, but I bet it’d be music to your ears if you did.’

Silo glanced at her, and then away. He’d stopped messing with the engine and was paying attention now. ‘Reckon it would.’

‘I mean it felt familiar, like I missed it or something. And there were chains and ropes and things hanging off the side of the dreadnought, and I thought… I felt this compulsion to climb up there and join them.’

‘But you didn’t, huh?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘At first… When I first got caught by the Manes, for a long time after I was scared that I was turning into one of them. That nothing could stop it, and it wasn’t my choice.’ She picked at the toe of her boot awkwardly. ‘But then I faced up to them, right? You helped me with that.’

‘I recall,’ he said.

‘And they let me go. They stopped calling to me, they accepted my decision. I didn’t want to be with them; I wanted to be with you lot.’ She sat back against the rail of the gangway. ‘But ever since then, all I’ve done is wonder what I was missing out on. I mean, they can do things. I can do things.’

Silo looked at the cat. ‘Noticed that,’ he said.

She caught herself, fearing that she’d said too much. The crew could tolerate or ignore the fact that she was half-Mane because her daemonic side rarely ever got loose. But she couldn’t let anyone suspect she might be able to hear their thoughts, even if it was in an uncontrolled and random fashion. On a craft full of secrets, it would be the final straw.

‘I want to know who they are,’ she said. That, at least, was something she could admit. ‘But I can’t get close to them. I know they’re out there. I can hear their voices. But I can’t be a part of their conversation.’

The Manes were bonded by mutual understanding. Each was connected to the others in a thousand subtle ways through the daemon that united them, yet each was an individual, capable of privacy of thought. It had to be that way, or else why would the book in her quarters exist? Manes read, for enjoyment or education. It all seemed a far cry from the feral ghouls of legend.

But she’d chosen not to be a part of that, and they, in turn, had withdrawn from her. She didn’t know the plans and mysteries of the Manes. She wouldn’t be allowed to know, unless she was one of them. Humans were enemies to the Manes, and she was half-human. Until she wasn’t, until she was indisputably, entirely, a Mane, she would always be a foreigner to them.

But she’d never go that far.

‘I’m not scared of being turned into a Mane against my will any more,’ she said. ‘I’m scared that I’ll want it. I’m scared that the more I learn about them, the more I’ll learn to be like them.’ She looked into his dark eyes. ‘And the less I’ll be like me.’

‘You gonna be you no matter what,’ he said. ‘It’s just that time makes a different you. Seems stupid that people try ’n’ improve ’emselves the whole time, yet they don’t never want to change. ’ He studied her, and there was an intensity to his gaze that unsettled her. ‘Like it or not, they your people now. Ain’t easy to turn your back on your people. You don’t never stop wantin’ to be with ’em, no matter what it might cost.’

He began tinkering with the panel again, as if the conversation was over. Jez chewed over what he’d said. She might have told him more, but his face suddenly took on an expression of disgust and he threw down his spanner, making her jump.

‘This damn engine!’ he said. ‘It don’t need fixin’. There ain’t no call for me to be here no more. Man ain’t nothin’ if he ain’t useful.’

He got up, rising to his full height, and strode off down the walkway towards some steps.

‘Where are you going?’ Jez asked, bewildered.

‘I’m goin’ to tell the Cap’n how he can find what he’s lookin’ for,’ Silo threw over his shoulder.

Jez sat there for a moment, frowning. The cat regarded her with feline inscrutability. Then she scrambled to her feet.

‘Hey!’ she called as she chased after him. ‘How do you know?’