by Stephen Hunt
Amelia found the entrance to the bathysphere barred to her — a simple rotating combination lock. With no hope of guessing the sequence she placed the muzzle of the carbine an inch from the metal and turned her head as the blast from the short rifle jounced off the hatch. Hot metal lanced her hand. The lock was mangled, but it still held. She beat the butt of the carbine on the hatch, exposing the locking mechanism. Curse the Sprite for being so well built by its long-dead royalist engineers. Desperation grew in Amelia as she heard stirrings from the lower decks. She smashed the rifle as hard as she could against the lock, shattering the wooden butt with the impact. On Amelia’s last blow the Sprite shook violently as if a fire squid had scooped up the u-boat from the river to rattle it around, a muffled detonation that knocked Amelia off her feet, and landed her across the dead sailor. Then all was still again, an unnatural silence tinted only by the eerie crimson light.
A head popped up through the floor hatch — it was cooky, the grizzled old chef still wearing his oil-spattered apron. He looked down the corridor, took in the dead sailor and the carbine still in Amelia’s grip, then pulled himself up, running terrified to the bathysphere hatch, practically sobbing when he saw the ruin that was all that was left of the locking system. Amelia got to her feet, covering him with the carbine, but he was so horrified that he showed no sign of even being aware of the weapon.
‘Did you not see the red light?’
Amelia glanced up at the illumination strips. ‘The red light?’
‘Silent bloody running,’ moaned the crewman. ‘There’s a pair of seed ships above us and your gunshots have blown us to them. They’ve depth-charged our engines, we’re dead in the water.’ He started pulling distraughtly at the door, but it was beyond use. There would be no escape that way. A hissing sound came from inside the rear conning tower.
Old cooky gave up, slumping to the deck in despair. ‘Jonah. Jonah. We never should have kept you here.’
She glanced down the corridor. There were screams and shouts coming up from the lower decks as the crew realized what was happening, all thoughts of silent running abandoned as they began to panic. Amelia turned around. Cooky was reaching for the holster of the sailor she had killed. ‘Don’t do it, cooky. I’ll shoot you if I have to, I swear I will …’
He continued to fumble with the flap and slid the pistol out. ‘Save the last shell for yourself.’
Amelia sighted her carbine before she realized what cooky was doing. The pistol barrel slid into his mouth and he exchanged a luckless look with the professor before he pressed the trigger and whipped into the wall of the corridor, the explosion taking off the rear of his head. Amelia felt like being sick. She had made Billy Snow promise she wouldn’t end up like those poor soul-scrubbed zombies swaying empty on the block of Rapalaw Junction’s comfort auction; but Billy Snow wasn’t here. Whatever death in the jungle was awaiting the officers of the expedition who had been marooned, it was looking like they had got the best of the bargain. She pointed the carbine at her own heart and willed herself to squeeze the trigger. Just a small squeeze, that was all that was needed. Tighter, tighter. As she tried to find the resolve to do it, a weight seemed to press down on the weapon, lowering the barrel away from her body.
‘I took that way, and I was very wrong to do so.’
‘Father!’ Amelia called into the empty corridor, but there were only the dead bodies of the sailor and cooky to hear her. She was going mad, justifying her gutlessness with echoes from the past.
Above Amelia the hissing grew louder. The mindless drones of the Daggish Empire were cutting their way into the u-boat.
They needed fresh flesh for the hive.
It was sweltering work, hacking through the green deeps of Liongeli, avoiding the trails favoured by the land’s lumbering predators. Ironflanks led the way, his four arms cutting back the vegetation. The others quickly realized that his habit of whistling in mimicry of the jungle’s creatures was born out of his stacks overheating — better to release pressure in a way that sounded natural, rather than announcing his presence with a full piercing lift of his boiler’s whistle.
‘Can we not rest?’ wheezed the commodore. ‘We’ve been an age breaking our way through these infernal green halls.’
‘An age?’ said Ironflanks. ‘We have hardly started our journey, Jared softbody.’
‘There was a call from the rear of the line. Billy had found something, his fingers tearing a scrap of canvas from a bush by his side. ‘This is not a creeper.’
T’ricola took the cloth from the blind sonar man and sniffed it through the three olfactory holes in her head armour. ‘It’s burnt and it looks like — no, it cannot be …’
The others gathered around to examine it.
‘It’s a piece of catenary curtain,’ said T’ricola. ‘Burnt off from an airship hull.’
‘The RAN do not fly missions this deep into the interior,’ said Ironflanks. ‘Rapalaw Junction counts itself lucky if Jackals’ aerostats answer the garrison’s siege alarm.’
‘Yet here it is,’ said T’ricola.
Commodore Black pushed his head between the trees behind them. ‘There is more through here, and a terrible sight it is to behold, too.’
Bearing the officers’ pistols, Gabriel McCabe and Veryann pressed through the bush, emerging into a clearing where the jungle was growing back over hacked-down trees and felled ferns. The others came through after them.
‘It’s the remains of a camp,’ said Gabriel.
‘Not just a camp,’ said the commodore. He pointed at a wall of unopened crates lying buried by Liongeli’s green mass. ‘I recognize those blessed things: it’s a mobile fortress. They didn’t even have enough time to bolt it together.’
Ironflanks cleared the vegetation back. White bones lay amid the debris, picked totally clean by legions of scavengers. ‘I don’t believe I am familiar with the term.’
‘That’s because your people have been fighting the brigades of Quatershift and not the red-coated devils of Jackals,’ said the commodore. ‘And count yourself lucky for it.’
‘It is a conceit of their parliament’s new pattern army,’ said Veryann. ‘A modular construction system Jackelian regiments use on campaign. A walled fort that can be raised or dismantled in a period of hours; a ridiculous toy that encourages defensive thinking and belies the very name, “mobile”, that it sports.’
Billy Snow rapped one of the boxes with his cane. ‘The wood on these crates hasn’t rotted through. They’ve been here less than a year I would say.’
T’ricola pulled out more catenary curtain sheeting from the vegetation, blackened and brittle. ‘So an airship came down here and the survivors were trying to build a camp? But celgas is not flammable, so why would the hull end up so burnt?’
‘Celgas may not be flammable,’ said Ironflanks. ‘But an airship will burn all the same if it tries to pass low over Daggish territory. Their flame cannons would scratch one from the sky for daring to pass over the nest.’
‘Perhaps the stat’s navigation and steering were wrecked?’ mused T’ricola. ‘They could have drifted over the greenmesh by accident and been brought down. The RAN fleet was pretty well scuppered when Quatershift attacked Jackals; this could have happened during the war.’
‘I saw the fleet brought down over the hills of Rivermarsh,’ said the commodore, ‘when the wicked shifties were given a drubbing in the skies true and clear by King Steam’s forces, assisted in no small part by my own genius. I don’t recall seeing any Daggish there, nor any airships making a run for it towards Liongeli.’
‘It was a big battle,’ said Veryann. ‘It was said that the shroud of cannon fire remained over the downs like a mist for a week afterwards. You can’t have seen all the action.’
‘Aye, it was thick work,’ agreed the commodore. ‘There was the rebel leader’s army of demons, the treacherous shifties and half our own people fighting against us. A hard pounding, that day, for poor old Blacky, wading through the bloo
d of our brave boys with a sabre in one hand and a pistol in the other. But the steammen knights boarded the fleet when it was turned against us and cut the airships up from inside, using King Steam’s fighters as cannonballs and boarding parties both.’
‘Well, there you are,’ said Veryann. ‘No doubt this is the remains of one of those RAN vessels. Broken during the war and left to drift on the winds of fortune.’
‘And drift a rare long way it did,’ said the commodore. He looked at Veryann with a knowing glint in his eye. ‘And where were you and our expedition’s beloved benefactor during the invasion of 1596?’
‘On a paddle steamer halfway between Jackals and the colonies. We were tending to the house’s business in Concorzia.’
‘You were lucky, then,’ said the commodore. ‘Safe on a boat is where I would have liked to have been during that wicked conflict. But curse my unlucky stars, fate was not so kind to me that year.’
T’ricola bent over the trailing creepers, picking at the debris. ‘I see no Quatershiftian uniforms here.’
‘I see no uniforms left at all,’ said Ironflanks. ‘And that is what I find the most disturbing fact of all. Let us quit this place now, back to the trail.’
Ironflanks had taken only a single step back into the dense press of the jungle when the cry echoed through the trees. ‘Smellyouyouyoumetalmetaljiggerjiggerjigger.’
‘Tell me that is not what I think it is,’ said the commodore.
‘You know the answer to that question,’ said Ironflanks.
Gabriel McCabe glanced down sadly at the pathetic pistol in his hand. ‘I thought we had lost the thunder lizard.’
‘Queen Three-eyes knows enough to be able to follow the river upstream,’ said Ironflanks. ‘And it is the scent of my stacks she is following now.’
‘We have about a quarter of an hour,’ said Billy Snow, ‘judging by the strength of her cry, before she is on top of us.’
‘Not on top of us,’ said Ironflanks. ‘On top of me. It’s my hull she is coming for, so it is my old hull that will lead her off.’
‘We won’t last a day in the Liongeli deeps without you,’ said the commodore.
Veryann took her knife out and threw it across the clearing, embedding it in the skull of a giant python that was slipping down a branch towards T’ricola. ‘Survival is a secondary concern to the success of our mission, and that has a minimal chance of succeeding without a scout to lead us to Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo.’
‘Then we must run,’ said Ironflanks. ‘Follow me into the deepest bush and hope that it is enough to slow down Queen Three-eyes.’
They ran. Without the safety of a submersible to escape to and with the long cries of the kilasaurus max growing louder behind them. Into the dense heat of the rainforest, through walls of orchids that quivered and shot out streams of superheated pollen juice, past trees covered in running brown liquid glue where trapped animals shrieked desperately at the fleeing party, across coffee-coloured creepers that had bridged a small ravine in their search for sunlight free of the competition under the canopy. Billy Snow proved surprisingly dextrous, leaping through the twisted vines with his machete, cutting down walls of greenery and opening passages through the trees as if he had been born a feral craynarbian tracker. At times it was not clear whether T’ricola was leading him, or the blind sonar man was leading her.
Ironflanks was getting slower. He was trying to keep his stacks from venting fully, to throw Queen Three-eyes off their trail. But the effort of recycling the exhaust of his furnace was sapping his strength. If he continued at this pace, he would poison his brain with the fumes and be left with a grip on reality even more tenuous than it already was.
Ironflanks stumbled and the commodore caught him. ‘You’ve got to let it out, old steamer, or we’re going to be carrying you the rest of the way.’
Ironflanks’ voicebox trembled as he tried to find the words. ‘She will smell it.’
‘If the thunder lizard hunts by scent she will already have ours,’ said Veryann. ‘Your incapacitation will not serve us.’
The steamman stood up and his stacks whistled as a column of foul-smelling smoke lanced through the canopy above them. As the last trace of smoke left the trail, Queen Three-eyes’ voice sounded in answer, so loud that the ribcages of the u-boat officers shook in their chests.
‘I am sorry my softbody friends, I have doomed us all,’ said Ironflanks.
‘Blame my nephew rather than yourself,’ said the commodore. ‘For it’s his dark treachery that has left us marooned out here. Or blame fool old Blacky for giving him a second chance in the first place.’
‘Are you the dregs from a Jackelian jinn house?’ shouted Veryann. ‘We are not dead yet. Not while we have blood in our legs and weapons in our hands. Now run, or I’ll shoot you myself.’
Menaced by the unsteady pistol of the Catosian commander the party stumbled into life again, Gabriel McCabe taking the lead and putting all the strength of the self-proclaimed strongest man in Jackals into the swings of his machete. Gobs of green sap splashed out across them as they piled ahead, splattering their uniforms with a mess of sticky residue and then, suddenly, they were free of the press of the jungle, a clearing of grassed hills and tall emerald meadows waiting for them. Ironflanks stumbled out and looked around as if recognizing the territory. Then the howl of the kilasaurus max roared behind them. ‘Gettingclosegettingclosetoyourendendendmetaljigger.’
‘Head for the forest on the other side,’ called Veryann, checking the charge in her pistol. ‘We can get off a few shots when the thunder lizard comes into the open. Aim for the creature’s eyes.’
Knee-deep in grass, they were plunging down one of the hillocks when the trees at the ridge of the hill flowered open, spouting white jets of liquid into the air. For a second the commodore thought that they had triggered some devilish man-eating hardwood into feeding, but the white fountain solidified into a net, scooping up the expedition members and sweeping them off their feet. They were hanging between the trees like a hammock, bound to the sticky material and swaying seven feet off the ground. Just the right height for an offering to Queen Three-eyes. T’ricola thrashed, trying to turn her sword arm on the material, but the harder she struggled, the more the netting seemed to tighten around them.
Crashing through the jungle, the kilasaurus max splintered through the last of the towering trees. She emerged in the clearing; her undersized lizard’s head darting about before settling on the direction of the hills, her nostrils flaring and snorting like those of a stallion. Sensing the ensnared presence of Ironflanks, the thunder lizard dipped down then stretched to her full height and roared at a volume that shook the netting the expedition members lay pinned against. Billy Snow dropped his machete from his left arm to his partially free right hand and tried to saw their cords of bondage but the material turned slippery, oozing a soap-like liquid that made his blade slip. ‘What is this stuff?’ he growled.
Veryann attempted to lower her pistol arm enough to get a shot off against the thunder lizard, but the gun discharged wide, the bullet disappearing over the horizon.
‘This is a rare old mess and no mistake,’ said the commodore.
The webbing of their snare trembled as Queen Three-eyes advanced towards them, roaring gusts of fetid hate from the second mouth in her chest. Reaching the foot of the hillock, Queen Three-eyes’ snout snaked around as she detected a movement in the corner of her field of vision. A line of boulders at the bottom of the hill was swivelling towards her, tracking each thumping footstep. She backed away, sensing the oddness of this place — a clearing so purpose-made for animals to graze across, yet so bereft of local life. Where tiny prey that should be running instead lay paralysed. Where rocks came alive. Too late. Slits opened in the boulders, iron spider’s legs sprouting out, the suddenly mobile rocks spraying Queen Three-eyes with an orange liquid that solidified on contact with the air and sheathed the thunder lizard in a rubber bubble. She pushed against the foul glutinous substanc
e but only succeeded in unbalancing herself, falling over and rolling back down the slope. Now the mightiest creature in the jungle lay as helpless as a toy figurine embedded inside the glass of a child’s marble. The legs in the rocks retracted and the monarch of Liongeli was left thrashing futilely inside the orange enclosure.
‘What is this, Ironflanks?’ demanded the commodore. ‘This is no Daggish trap. Those blessed rocks are machines.’
There was no intelligible reply. Something inside the steamman had snapped and he spouted a static screech of raw machine code, in the same inhuman voice as his people used to sing hymns to the Steamo Loas in their mountain fastness. ‘Look,’ called Veryann, ‘look behind us.’
On the other side of the clearing a line of dark shapes was emerging from the twilight shadow of the rainforest. Metal bodies with the edges of their arms, wheels, legs and tracks filed down to razor sharpness, their rivets extruded into spikes. Iron hands clutching spears frilled with the shrunken heads of thunder lizards, craynarbians and the race of man. One of the figures crouched like a monkey and pointed at the full net containing the Sprite’s officers. The arm indicating the catch was slipped through the bloodied sleeve of an airship captain’s uniform: the fate of the shattered aerostat’s crew had become clear.
‘Steammen,’ said the commodore. ‘By my stars, they’re steammen.’
‘No,’ said Ironflanks, recovering his higher functions, ‘they’re not.’
It was the first time any of them had heard a citizen of the Steammen Free State sob.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Damson Beeton waddled down the front garden of Dolorous Hall, whistling and happy to be up with the larks. Red fingers of sunrise fringed the skyline behind the capital’s pneumatic towers, most of the city’s mills silent, not yet throwing the dark miasma of commerce into the air. The barge from Gattie and Pierce was pulling towards the isle’s landing, using its single sail to keep down the cost of gas for the boat’s expansion engine.