by Stephen Hunt
Amelia yelled out again to the lashlites, her voice cracking with the effort.
‘We’re too far away, dearie,’ said Damson Beeton. ‘And lashlites are too proud to hunt a fleeing pocket airship. The god Stormlick fills the wings of those who hunt worthy prey, and that does not include chasing cowards who flee a fight.’
Amelia struggled vainly. ‘The people of the winds have got to stop Quest.’
‹They are too late,› said the voice in her skull. ‹The chamberyou saw in that tomb was designed to withstand all the ingenuitymy rebel grouping within the Camlantean polity couldthrow at it. The House of Quest can seal their people insideand release the death mist at their leisure after it has beenproduced in sufficient quantities to guarantee the exterminationof the world. Lashlite lances will not break their way in.’
‘There has to be a way to get inside it.’
‹There may be an alternative. But to get to it we need tobe free and back down on the streets of the city again. Whichof your hands do youvalue the most?›
‘What?’
‹Left or right?›
‘I’m right-handed.’
‹Left it is. Grit your teeth. Your screams will draw theattention of the crew.›
They did. One of the sailors put down the sounding scope he was using to guide the pocket airship between the Camlantean spires and turned around.
‘Have we been boarded?’ demanded the bosun, his peaked cap swapped for one of the soul-cloaking crowns.
‘It’s that bloody university woman,’ replied the sailor, staring out of the porthole. ‘Yelling like she’s being rogered by a pike.’
‘Go back and see what she’s about,’ ordered the bosun. ‘Unless she behaves, I’ll put her off early-’ he made a tipping motion with his hand, ‘-and give her a little wash in the sea without the bother of a landing.’
Unhooking one of the pistols from the gun rack on the wall, the sailor slipped a glass charge into the weapon’s breech, then unlocked the door to the storage cabin. Black oil washed the floor of the next compartment, thirteen imbecile steammen juddering about and spitting system fluids over the cargo hold, their voiceboxes humming in the nonsense tongue of a low-order language. Thirteen of the damn infected things. Unlucky for them and the future of the Steamman Free State both.
A tri-wheeled creature of the metal slipped up in front of the sailor, its dome of a head rotating before it pissed a stream of dark oil up at the airship sailor’s striped shirt.
‘Oh, you dirty little bugger,’ cursed the sailor.
One of the jack cloudies stuck his head through the pilot room door and laughed at the sight of his colleague. Humiliated, the fouled sailor kicked the idiot thing over with an angry lash of his boot, then squeezed around the steel box in the floor where the clockwork of the rudder guidance system was clacking away in response to the helmsman’s touch. Making enough of a noise that the sailor didn’t hear the strange whining from the steamman lying in the corner. Not that he would have recognized the sound if he had heard it. There wasn’t a mechomancer in the world — let alone an airship sailor — who would have recognized the noise of siltempter components resetting to zero in a final attempt to clear away the putrid steamman infection; for no mechomancer had ever been to the Liongeli jungle and made it back alive from the realm of Prince Doublemetal. And the annoyed skyman was many things, but he was no mechomancer.
The sailor opened the stern door of the storage hold and stepped out onto the rear gantry, calling across to the observation cabin behind. ‘Shut your cake-hole, woman. If you make one of us use the jenny line to come across to you, you’ll have cause to scream.’
But Amelia only yelled louder still as the thing that had burrowed deep into her mind continued to work its way down her bloodstream to her bound wrists, converting the salts in her left hand’s sweat glands into acid. Burning liquid bubbled from Amelia’s now blackened skin until at last the bonds snapped.
‹Rub your wrist over the damson’s hand ties now,› commanded the voice inside her skull.
She did as she was ordered and screamed as the cold metal of the agent’s manacles came into contact with her skin.
‘I’m bloody warning you for the last time,’ the sailor shouted.
‹That’s it, professor. I’m converting the chemicals in yourblood into a healing hyper-accelerant now. The pain’s mostlyin your mind.›
In the opposite cabin the sailor lifted his pistol and drew a bead on the bobbing woman opposite.
‹You should have enough acid left in your hand to rubonto the box on the belt of the damson’s hex suit. That’s themechanism to unlock her armour.›
‘Get ready to duck,’ said Damson Beeton, bending her head as far as the hex suit would permit to look across at the sailor. ‘I will tell you when.’
The sailor’s finger was closing around the trigger when Ironflanks’ four arms wrapped themselves around his chest. And compressed. It was the sailor’s turn to scream, struggling as the scout turned him about and pushed him into the gaggle of infected steammen, the imbeciles pawing his snapped ribs with metal manipulators and whistling in childish awe at his shuddering conversion into a broken bag of meat and bones. With a crack, the pistol in the dying sailor’s hand detonated into the steering box, the springs and cogs of the clockwork mechanism flailing as uselessly as the suddenly non-responsive rudder control turning in the pilot’s hands. The pocket stat pitched down; her externally-mounted expansion engines swivelling at angles that Quest’s airship works would never have envisaged, the dome of her pilot cabin shattering along with the mirrored glass of one of the Camlantean spires. Pushing forward, the pocket airship rammed herself deeper into the Camlantean structure, the rise and fall of her expansion engines fading as her propellers broke themselves trying to walk across the floor.
One of the remaining crewmen lay impaled on a shard of glass, but the bosun was still alive. He stumbled out of the wreckage into the tower, lifting up a brace of bell-barrelled pistols as he turned back towards his wrecked ship. Ironflanks appeared at the door of the cabin, an angel of vengeance covered in the oil of his kind and the blood of his softbody enemies. Ironflanks’ voicebox trembled with fury and the bosun recoiled back, his heart exploded by an arrow of sonic energy directed by the steamman like a punched nail. The commanding officer of the small craft slapped down, as dead as his airship.
Amelia slowly pulled herself out of the crumpled rear of the vessel, followed by Damson Beeton, her hex suit left abandoned in pieces on the observation cabin’s floor. Shattered glass was moving across the floor, flowing back up the wall to rebuild the broken window — regrowing itself around the foreign element that had attempted to pollute the integrity of the spire. The sound of the winds and the fighting outside was cut off as the window repaired itself.
‘Ironflanks, you are alive. But I saw you-’
‘I am reborn, Amelia softbody, but you may not like what I have become. A savage. A siltempter boiler heart driven by the wreckage of a steamman mind.’ Removing the cover from the airship’s broken expansion engine, Ironflanks balanced a pistol shell from the cabin outside the gas-mixing chamber.
Damson Beeton recognized what the scout was doing. She picked up the dead bosun’s brace of pistols and tucked them in her pinny, then pulled Amelia to the side. ‘Back we go, dear, let’s take cover.’
Inside the storage hold, the vision plate of one of the infected steammen pressed itself against the porthole.
‘Ironflanks,’ Amelia called, ‘your people are still inside there. You got better — there may be a cure!’
‘This is the cure,’ said Ironflanks, moving back as the blow-barrel gas ignited, the engine bursting apart and covering the pocket airship in flames. With the oil already inside the storage hold, the end was mercifully quick for the plague victims. Nodules appeared in the ceiling above, attempting to put out the fire, but the spire’s water supply had long since evaporated.
The thing inside Amelia’s head had become od
dly silent.
‘Billy? You said there was another way to stop Quest and-’
‹I am decaying. This was only meant to be a battlefieldcopy of my essence, a combat transfer, an underhand trick tospread confusion among the foe. The synapses in yourprefrontal cortex are rewriting your mind’s pathways back totheir natural condition. You are forgetting me.›
‘You said there was a way to stop Quest releasing your mist …’
‹An oblique way,› Billy used her voice for the benefit of the others. ‹The dark engine my faction concealed inside Camlantis to banish the city into the no-space realm after we blew her into the sky may still have enough power left inside its energy sinks to repeat the exercise. If so, we can send the city away again, trap Quest and our disassembler weapon in a place where his terrible solution — my people’s solution — will wither in absolute isolation.›
‘May still have enough power?’
‹We must go, my time left with you here is short.›
Amelia fingered the skin on her burning left hand. Part ruined, the remains of it felt like a lump of numb meat. She sprinted away, followed by Ironflanks and the elderly agent of the Court of the Air.
Quest watched the disciplined lines of his academy cadets filing down into the chasm, suspension capsules hissing open to swallow each young man and woman in turn, then filling with the strange yellow gel that would allow them to sleep for years, their bodies nourished, and — more importantly — their souls cloaked from the ravages of the cleansing mist. Young, malleable minds that had known nothing but loyalty to the House of Quest. Rescued from the cruel streets of the capital and the other industrial towns, then fed, clothed, taught, nurtured, honed into the best they could be. Philosopher kings. The first generation of Camlanteans to seed an empty world.
Briefly, Quest felt a twinge of grief that there hadn’t been someone like him to save his own siblings from their early deaths in the crowded, dirty tenements of Middlesteel. He sighed. He always felt so normal, so average. But the rational part of his mind realized that a person such as himself was born only once in a thousand generations. Well, the universe had borne him into her grace as a watchmaker, so it was beholden on him to fix the broken clock that was their world. Honour the vow that he made over the dirt of his brother and sisters’ paupers’ graves after the last of them had moved along the Circle for their new lives, leaving him all alone.
‘No more poverty,’ he whispered. ‘No more needless suffering.’
His engineers busied themselves about the chamber, cloaking crowns fixed around their scalps, the sounds of battle filtering down the moving stairs along with the crates of supplies still being portered inside the tomb. There were enough Catosian fighters and airship crew to hold off the lashlites for the final half hour he needed. Then the dirty lizards’ lifeless corpses would be raining out of the sky as the black mist climbed to embrace their aerial regiments.
Nobody would miss them in his brave new world.
Robur stood up, the melted components of the steammen still white hot in the ruins of the pocket airship. The soldiers of the Catosian company escorting the mechomancer stood silently behind him, wisely holding their tongues and their judgment on this debacle.
He hadn’t needed the sailors’ garbled reports of a murderous steamman running about at large in the streets with a couple of murderous women by its side to tell him of his mission’s failure — the ruptured heart of the airship bosun spoke volumes for which of his thirteen test subjects had shrugged off his virus. Was Ironflanks’ survival due to some esoteric technique of the knights steammen, like their ability to fight with sound? Abraham Quest was not a forgiving man and word of this disaster was sure to filter back to him, imperilling Robur’s seat in the perfect new world they had planned together.
Robur looked up at the commander who stood at least a head higher than the top of his own thinning skull. ‘You have a tracker capable of following them?’
She saluted. ‘There is a worldsinger cowering in the Leviathan, a soul-sniffer. He can follow the trail of their essence like a bloodhound if we motivate him properly.’
‘Send for him.’
He was not stymied yet. This was a setback, not a complete failure. What had been imagined by the mighty mind of the great Robur could not simply be unimagined, and there were plenty more steammen he could kidnap and infect with the work of his genius. He just needed to perfect the technique. Yes, the dissection of a certain steamman scout running around outside would be the first step to a far more potent form of his virus of the metal.
Robur beckoned for his mechomancer’s tools, watching while his assistants placed his oak cases in front of him. Behind Robur, the Catosian commander looked on with professional interest as he removed a series of blades and rotating teeth belts, attaching them to a hilt with a high-tension clockwork drive. The Catosian city-states had so little experience fighting the people of the Steamman Free State. But he would show these unnaturally muscled beauties how it was done.
‘What is that?’ asked the officer, unable to contain her curiosity any longer.
‘A hull-opener,’ said Robur. ‘A steamman hull-opener.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Three of the House of Quest’s armoured vehicles steamed backwards, their single tracks bouncing over the boulevards, the short stubby cannons on their prows at maximum elevation, tossing shells upwards. Reversing through the stream of fleeing sailors, they were followed by the tentacles of a skrayper, gel-swollen trunks of flesh lined with spines swaying and slaying as they went. But even the reins inserted above the skrayper’s sensitive ridge of optical cells could not urge the monster to squeeze any lower between the spires, so its lashlite handlers had to be content with trailing its twitching tentacles along the pavement, whipping across lines of Catosians as the soldiers emptied their rifles. A few of them were left flailing, impaled on the wiry flesh as if they were so many insects on Dr Billickin’s patent flypaper.
One of the tentacles curled out, guided by the heat-sensing flesh inside the limb and, wrapping itself around the hot barrel of a vehicle’s cannon, battered two tanks off the road before raising the vehicle — treads spinning useless in the air — into its monstrous maw filled with whale-like teeth. The skrayper fed on sunlight, but it had to get its trace minerals from somewhere. A cannon gunner attempted to climb out of a side hatch but only succeeded in falling into the gullet early, passing straight through the teeth and into the jelly-like absorption gel. The armoured carriage followed him, rotating slowly through the stomach liquids as the last of its energy expended itself through the track. A shiver ran down the skin of the skrayper. Oh, this was good. Far richer in irons than the massive schools of helium globules that drifted through the stratosphere. After this day of feeding it would be able to drift lazily through the heavens for months, just filling itself with the glorious white light.
At the end of the boulevard the Minotaur crashed through the buildings of Camlantis, one of its three massive aerospheres severed and making its own last flight into the heavens, the remaining two hull units blanketed by the bodies of as many skraypers as could latch onto the airship, squeezing the life out of this strange new entrant into their realm. It took every iota of the lashlite riders’ talents to keep the creatures focused on ripping apart the Minotaur and not flailing their tentacles at each other. This was not breeding season and without the pain the lashlites were able to cause with their riding wires, the sky would have been filled with a mass of furious, sparring skraypers.
On the ground, a line of Catosian soldiers ran towards the collapsing airship only to be driven back by the ferocity of the lashlite assault. Fifty flights of aerial warriors were circling overhead, each squadron of the flight taking a turn to peel off from the formation and fill the air above the downed aerostat with a storm of lances — whistling down to strike the hundreds of crewmen trying to climb out of the torn walls of their airship.
‘Withdraw!’ barked a Catosian centurion, recog
nizing the grim reality of their situation. ‘Find a spire and mark your targets from the tower windows.’
A bugler took up her command and sounded the retreat, poignant echoes of it bouncing off the shining skyline of Camlantis. They kept their line, each woman in lockstep as they fell back, sliding glass charges into their rifles and maintaining a volley of fire up at the diving lizards, closing ranks where lances thudded through their number. The enemy seemed almost fanatical about retrieving the corpses of their lifeless warriors; but unlike the lashlites, the free company fighters had no compulsions about abandoning the bloody carcasses of their fallen behind them.
Waving her pistol, the centurion fell back through an archway into an arcade of what might once have been shops. Striding out of a lifting room at the centre of the arcade came Veryann.
‘First!’
‘What is your disposition, centurion?’
‘Casualties are running at half our strength and the only aerial support left effective now is the Leviathan, but those winged jiggers have jammed her mooring lock on the spire. She’s stuck fast and running thick with lizards. Boarding parties are being repelled on every deck.’
‘And your orders?’ asked Veryann.
‘Stand and hold, First.’