In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘I can see where the clasp is bent,’ said Anna, rubbing burning ash-fall from her dark curls. ‘Grab that sensor spike and use it to lever the metal up.’ The sensor spike had spilled from the cargo onto the station’s dark basalt surface. Carter scooped it up and returned to the cockpit.

  ‘I get to save you, after all,’ rasped Carter.

  ‘You’ve not done it yet, Northhaven. Belt’s bent inside. Push the spike through the lock without impaling me, then twist it up to free the release.’

  He located the bent lever behind the central disc, steadying it with one hand while he pushed the tip of the sensor spike in. It was just narrow enough to slip through the mechanism, but would it hold when he tried to spring Anna? The pilot wrinkled her nose in disgust as a black wash flowed over Carter’s sandals.

  ‘You’ve not just soiled your trousers, Northhaven?’

  ‘Not unless I’m leaking engine fuel,’ said Carter.

  ‘That’s what I was afraid of. Doing it fast would be good. Before some chunk of magma hot enough to put a match to the stove lands by your toes.’

  He ignored the lancing pain in his arm as he applied pressure to the spike, sweating like a pig in the fierce haze of volcano dust. With a clack, the lever bent back into shape and Carter caught the slave woman as she fell out of her seat.

  ‘Now you’ve saved me.’ She stood up, leaning against the upended cockpit. You, me, Kerge and Owen, where’s…?’

  Her question was answered by a moan from the other side of the fragmented craft. Duncan Landor lay trapped underneath the middle section of the aerial platform, pushing vainly against the weight of metal. A large boulder off to the man’s side held up enough of the craft to have stopped it from crushing him to death – a lucky rock. Without it, Duncan’s body would be paste. Duncan’s legs and lower chest were pinned under the mangled metal, only his head and arms free as he struggled to lift the wreckage.

  ‘Sweet saints.’ Anna’s breath sucked in. ‘That’s a hell of an umbrella you’ve found yourself, man.’

  ‘I’ll swap it for the bunkroom below.’

  ‘We need to find a strong length of metal, lever the debris off,’ said Carter.

  Anna shook her head. ‘Not even if you were a circus strongman, Northhaven. That transporter’s made from reinforced steel. We’d need a hydraulic shaft jack to lift it – there’ll be one of those in the mining stores.’

  Carter looked at the pool of fuel spreading in the pelting rain of burning rubble. It was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened.

  ‘I’ll break off the corner of the boulder, make enough room to slide him across, then pull him out.’

  ‘That boulder is all that’s holding up a couple of tonnes of metal. If it crumbles…’

  ‘So go inside. Find that shaft jack and bring some extra hands back with you.’

  Anna shook her head angrily, but ran for the air vent anyway, calling out. ‘I’ll bring some buckets of water too, to douse the flames leaping across your crazy head.’

  Carter knelt by Duncan and began striking the boulder near the ground, the sharp metal sensor spike clattering against the rock.

  ‘Why?’ moaned Duncan. ‘Back at Rake’s Field you would have run me through.’

  ‘You were the one who called me out, remember? Besides, this might be the end of you, yet. You could end up flatter than a daisy in a flower press, wouldn’t that be a cheery sight?’

  ‘Maybe that’ll make you happy. Take off, you fool. You’re just tickling the rock. And those sparks are likely to cook us both in this lake of fuel.’

  ‘Damned if I will.’

  Duncan’s tone became more urgent. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s going to annoy you to owe me something,’ said Carter. ‘And because any one of us that dies in this hell is a victory for the Vandians. I’ll be damned if I’ll give their empire anything they don’t take at the point of a gun.’

  Cracks began to finger out from the section of stone Carter was attacking. There was an angry creaking from the platform, as if the wreckage was moaning.

  ‘Trying to get inside your mind is worse than understanding a damn woman’s.’

  Raising the spike with both hands, Carter brought it crashing down against the boulder. ‘I’m real simple to understand. Get out of my way or get flattened. If I’ve a motto, that’s it. One day soon these Vandians are going to find out they didn’t take a slave. They just bought a whole mess of trouble and shipped it home.’

  ‘They’re probably regretting it already. You’re going to get us all killed, you son-of-a-bitch.’

  ‘The Vandians first, Duncan. Them first.’

  Duncan yelled as the boulder began crumbling while the weight pressing in on him shifted; but the wreckage held in place as the boulder’s side fell away. Carter grabbed the largest loose piece and pitched it behind him, reaching in for any other chunks of chipped-off rubble he could dislodge and remove. He worked as fast as he could, blinking away hot, dusty sweat from his eyes. Carter tossed every lump of rock he could find, ignoring the warm puddle of incendiary liquid pooling across his knees.

  ‘Damn!’ yelled Duncan as the sound they had dreaded hearing began crackling on the other side of the debris. ‘Don’t let me burn, God, please…’

  Carter’s heart sank. Scarce seconds left. He grabbed Duncan’s arm and started to pull him free, the man crying out in agony. ‘What, and have Benner Landor pissed at me for letting the heir to Hawkland Park crisp up on some mined-out rock?’

  Both of them screamed as Carter dragged Duncan clear of the wreckage, inch by inch: Duncan’s teeth clenched in pain while Carter yelled in rage at the fiery rubble raining down on them, at the broken transporter, at the Vandians and every slave in the sky mines who had goddamn ears to hear. Flames leapt up the edges of the broken craft as Carter dragged Duncan backwards and out of the tangled mess. A noisy fart cracked from Duncan as Carter heaved the young landowner wobbling up to his feet, bearing the man’s weight against his shoulder. ‘Hell, Mister Hawkland Park, I thought that was the volcano!’

  ‘This is going to go up like blasting powder,’ growled Duncan, the two of them limping towards the air vent.

  ‘You’re not wrong. Still, better out than in.’

  They nearly collided with Anna, a gang of men hauling mining gear up the steps as they popped the air vent’s door. The second it unlocked, what was left of the fuel tanks met the flames behind Carter, spinning steel wreckage peppering the landscape as a flower of fire reduced the crashed transporter to fragments.

  Anna laughed to see the two of them alive. ‘Carter Carnehan. Hero of the dispossessed. King of the slaves.’

  ‘I’m nobody’s slave. Just a Weyland man stuck on a rock.’

  ‘That’s as maybe, but you’re going to sweat like a slave, Northhaven, we all are.’ Anna pointed to the increasing tempo of fiery rain outside. ‘That’s building up to a full-scale eruption, and Princess Helrena, she’ll be wanting herself a nice fresh rock full of something expensive. Trust me: she’s one lady none of us wants to disappoint.’

  SEVEN

  OUT OF THE NATION

  If Talekhard was a city that never slept, it must be, Jacob mused, because of the constant roar of aircraft landing and taking off. Visitors might as well adopt the consensus view and sup on the teat of the non-stop stream of vice and licentiousness available to the city’s guests. Jacob needn’t have worried about a pastor, gask and mountain pilot drawing inquisitive stares arriving at the city. They might as well have painted their maintenance train red and ridden the line all the way into the town’s central station while dancing naked on top of the engine car for all the notice anyone would have taken of their arrival. Abandoning the train in a siding and walking in the remainder of the journey had been, it transpired, overcautious. Talekhard sprawled across a flat rocky saltpan, hemmed in by canyon walls twenty miles distant – empty ground ideal for planes to land, take off and taxi across. But the city made up for the remo
teness of its location by importing all the taverns, gambling dens, bawdy houses, fighting pits and race tracks that any aircrew on leave could desire. It made Northhaven and its visiting sailors look like a serene saints’ day service in front of Jacob’s altar. All the constables Jacob spotted wore port authority uniforms, and short of arresting locals stabbing someone for their wallet, there didn’t seem much in the way of enforcing the laws going on. Maybe that’s what being a free port meant. Free to do anything shy of murdering a fellow reveller on ground leave. Stevedores from the freight yards mingled with aircrew from a hundred nations, every colour and hue of humanity weaving and wobbling and deaf to the roar of arriving aircraft kicking up clouds of dust from the flats. Space to land even the largest of flying machines – six-hundred-propeller carriers filled to the gunnels with cargo. The landing staff had their work cut out, galloping across the flats on geldings and flashing landing pennants at circling craft. Trying to clear space for bigger craft. Keeping the ground organised for a mosquito storm of smaller planes acting as shuttles for those carriers too large to land. Fuel traders dodged through the field staff, flashing signs that advertised their prices and fuel purities towards the air as though they were penitents waving prayers at heaven. Jacob and his friends arrived from the direction of the salt flats, mingling anonymously among passengers and crew leaving their parked aircraft.

  They briefly stopped for Jacob to pump one of the landing-field men for information on where the cheapest ticket agents in town might be found. Then they entered the free port proper. Talekhard’s crowded streets reflected the diversity of visiting carriers. Transients from nations that were just names on the maps in a library hold. Women in thick fur stoles with bare tattooed arms, dancing wildly outside a tavern; twisted seven-foot giants tight in neat military-style uniforms with extendable javelins strapped to their backs; aircrews wearing an eclectic wardrobe of clothing collected during life-long one-way passages across the endless surface of the world. Among these eccentric, exuberant crowds, the twisted people seemed almost tame. Street hawkers yelling their trades assailed Jacob, the din of horse-drawn cabs and rickshaws trundling through the busy avenues, touts for the music halls and taverns and gambling dens trying to outcry each other. Drunks ejected from paradise with their funds exhausted. Doxies for the molly houses calling crude entreaties from the windows above. Preachers from a dozen religions and sects proselytising to the lost – and very few visitors showing much interest in what the priests had to sell. It was hard to tell who, between Khow and Sheplar, was the more shocked by this sin city’s peacock flash of feathers… as far removed from the quiet life of the forest people and the hand-to-mouth living of the mountain folk as was possible to imagine. There was another difference from Northhaven. A free port meant free to carry weapons too. Most of the travellers and passengers strolled around the streets with the weight of knives, swords, pistols and rifles strapped to their person. There were no guardhouses at Talekhard to hand in weapons. Jacob felt for the brace of pistols beneath his duster. The uniform of a pastor or the uniform of a bandit. Which suits me better, in a hole like this?

  ‘How can an entire population function intoxicated?’ wondered Khow. In many matters, the gask was as wise as a woodland owl; but faced with the works of man, he was often left stupefied.

  ‘They’re just visiting for the most part,’ said Jacob. ‘This is the first time most of the visitors will have walked solid ground for months. This isn’t so much a city, Khow. Think of it as a pressure valve on one of those boilers your people are so adept at fixing up.’

  ‘It’s a wonder they’re fit to return to the air after shore leave taken here,’ said Sheplar.

  ‘You just judge the air-worthiness of their craft,’ said Jacob. ‘Find us a reliable carrier. Leave the state of the crew’s souls to the saints.’

  Sheplar patted the pocket where he had secreted his share of the remaining money. ‘I fear we will end up sharing a pen with goats.’

  ‘We don’t have time to visit the radiomen and send to Benner Landor for extra funds. Major Alock and his troops are going to be riding the next train that comes in.’

  Jacob hadn’t forgotten the matter of the strange miniature radio set. The one thing that made less sense than all the rest of this affair. An illicit device that could signal ahead to Talekhard. Whatever waited for them here, whoever might be coming from behind, Jacob didn’t have time to deal with it – not with his child taken to the other end of the globe.

  ‘The comfort of our trip is of no importance,’ said Khow. ‘We must book passage south and begin to close the distance.’

  ‘And you’re sure our people have stopped travelling?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘Yes, they have halted. I believe they have reached their destination,’ hummed the gask. ‘My son’s position has remained unchanged for too long for their layover to be a mere refuelling stop.’

  ‘A slave only has value when he’s put to work,’ said Jacob. ‘Until then, he’s just a food bill and the cost of a cage. Well, we’ve got money enough to rent a hotel room here. No more than a night, to be on the safe side.’

  ‘Major Alock’s men…’ said Sheplar.

  ‘Yes, they’ll be coming for us. We need to get ourselves a berth in the air before they get here.’

  ‘He’s a serpent,’ spat Sheplar. ‘For an officer to betray his oath so easily—’

  ‘There were a couple of thousand good reasons inside Landor’s money chests.’ Round, metal and shiny. Jacob’s mind drifted to the impossibly advanced radio the guardsman had been using. And if we’re real lucky, robbing the party is the only motive for silencing us. ‘Alock’s people are going to want us dead before we stand before an honest magistrate. We need to find a flight broker and see how far we can get on what we’ve got left. Then we can make the decision whether it’s wiser to stay and wait on fresh funds from Benner Landor or light on out of here.’

  ‘Will your rich friend in Northhaven send more money if you radio him?’ asked Sheplar.

  That’s a real good question. ‘I don’t doubt Benner loves his children.’ But he’d already written them off as dead and the pursuit as a fool’s errand. And given how matters had begun out here, could Jacob really blame the landowner?

  Not for the first time, doubts welled inside Jacob – not only their pursuit, but the direction he was following. The gask’s understanding of maps had increased with familiarity, but the distances he described made absolutely no sense to Jacob. The slavers had flown far further and faster than the range a bandit carrier should be able to cover in the time between the raid and Jacob’s arrival in Talekhard. If Khow’s correct, we could be flying south for decades. What if the distances involved had skewed the gask’s homing instinct? Maybe Carter really was languishing in a slave market in the Burn… being whipped into the service of one of the local warlords, handed a rusty sword and marched onto a distant battlefield? Jacob could hardly stand the thought. My son maltreated, while I’m heading off in the wrong direction, chasing wood magic. Jacob hadn’t even left Weyland yet, and he had already lost Wiggins. Jacob couldn’t afford to leave three more graves scattered across the world’s endless acres, while a slave’s brutish existence whittled Carter’s life shorter, day by day. Dear God, Mary, tell me that I’m doing the right thing by him. Just give me a sign. But none came. Only the raucous free port’s revelry. A thousand drunken strangers pressing through the streets, and not one who gave a damn for the look of agony creasing Jacob’s face.

  Sheplar returned to Jacob and Khow’s table, the sad look on the flier’s normally effusive face speaking volumes for his luck in finding a crew willing to take the three of them on as passengers for what they had to pay. Jacob glanced around the lobby of the Red Roof Coffeehouse. The lobby looked more like a livestock auction than the ground floor of any coffee-house back home; brokers mingling with passengers, merchants with freight that needed shipping. Wasn’t much coffee being consumed, either – not compared to the beer and spirits
available. Mirrored walls made the throng appear a dozen times larger. Staff manoeuvred through the tables and a fog of cigar smoke, carry­ing the orders that were the price of entry to this de facto trading pit. So many brokers, and not a sniff of a damn passage south to be had for the slim funds we’ve got.

  ‘They are asking for twice as much as we have left,’ admitted Sheplar.

  ‘I’ve booked passage on ships before, and I seem to remember them being a lot cheaper than this,’ said Jacob.

  ‘The wind that fills a clipper’s sails is free, Jacob of Northhaven,’ said Sheplar. ‘Sadly, that is not the case for the fuel keeping a free trader in the air… even running at altitude with a fast trade wind behind its wings.’

  ‘Couldn’t we offer to work out our passage? A pilot as good as you – there must be airmasters in the port willing to take us on?’

  ‘Merchant carriers are owned by clans,’ said Sheplar. ‘They might accept me as crew through marriage and blood – but no other way. Pilots are the elite. It is an honour jealously reserved and guarded.’ Sheplar lifted one of their remaining coins. ‘If we are to fly, only these will gain us our cabins. If only we had more…’

  ‘I can send that message to Benner begging for extra funds. But I reckon Major Alock’s killers will be here hunting us long before another chest of money turns up.’

  ‘Money,’ said Khow, ‘is a troublesome concept.’

  Jacob shrugged. ‘A lot of the world’s problems come from too much of it, friend, and the rest from not enough of it.’ Not to mention coveting it too fiercely. Poor Wiggins lying dead on the border speaks volumes for that.

  ‘I have never begrudged a warrior’s meagre salary until now,’ said Sheplar.