Iron Jackal (35 page)

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 meant 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?’

Twenty-Three

The Sound of Living – Trinica and Death – Silo Tells His Tale – Discovered

T
he noise, the damned
noise
.

Frey remembered that sound. He remembered hearing it as he lay dying on the tilted floor of the
Ketty Jay
’s cockpit. Through the cracked windglass, through the metal hull, he’d heard it, endless, dipping and swelling but never, ever stopping.

That day, he’d lain for hours in the punishing heat, while his life leaked slowly through the bandage around his waist. The blazing Samarlan sun was made green by the foliage pressed up against the windglass. He sweated, and breathed, and the tiredness in every muscle seemed to multiply with every breath until it felt like he was being smothered with heavy blankets. His eyes wouldn’t stay focused, and the edges of his vision had gone dark.

He’d listened to the insects. The nameless, invisible monsters, who existed in their millions but could never be seen. They sawed and creaked and chirped and whirred and chattered in a maddening cacophony.

That’s the sound of living
, he thought that day.
One big, confused and messy blare, nothing matching or making sense, and nothing of it meaning shit all. Just everyone trying to yell louder than everyone else. I’m better off out of it.

It was a rare philosophical moment, but he’d reckoned he was due one, since he considered himself dead meat at that point. He’d crash-landed his aircraft in the trackless mountain jungles of northern Samarla with a bayonet wound in his guts. The rest of the crew was gone, butchered by the Daks in an ambush when they set down to deliver supplies for Vard infantrymen. When he finally blacked out, he never expected to wake up again.

But Silo found him, having crawled in through the cargo ramp, which had fallen ajar during the crash. The Murthian nursed him back to health, using the medical supplies and food that had never been delivered. In return, Frey flew him out of Samarla.

Nine years since that day, give or take a few months. And now they were back. Back to the same sweltering jungle. Back to the same spot where he’d crashed, more or less. It was just inside the Free Trade Zone now, which had been set up after the last war, but its new status hadn’t changed it a bit.

Nine years, and those bloody insects still hadn’t shut up.

Frey pushed through the undergrowth, his trousers damp and his shirt sticking to his back. Silo was ahead of him, clambering up a slope, picking his way through the trees. The jungle was menacingly foreign to Frey’s eyes. The trees that grew here were not like the trees of home. Their strange forms, scaly bark and towering size made him uneasy. Almost as uneasy as the stranger he followed.

Nine years, and he’d never asked who Silo really was.

It seemed ridiculous, when he put it like that. He’d always just assumed that he was naturally incurious. He respected a man’s privacy, and it wasn’t his business what Silo’s life had been like before they met. But after nine years in each other’s company, well, there had to be more to it than simple idleness, on both their parts. Silo didn’t want to tell him. Frey didn’t want to know.

Or was it that he didn’t want to
care
?

And it wasn’t only Silo, either. He found himself actively switching off on the rare occasions when the less close-mouthed members of his group started talking about their past lives. Usually they were drunk at that point, so he had an excuse to forget it, but still . . . strange behaviour, really.

He supposed it was because their past lives didn’t involve him, and anything that didn’t involve him was by definition unimportant. Each of them existed only from the moment he met them, as far as he was concerned. Past experience suggested that they’d fade just as quickly after they were gone, although that wouldn’t make the parting hurt any the less. He didn’t feel bad about that; he thought it an honest appraisal of his character. He’d been that way since he could remember. Growing up in an orphanage meant a lot of goodbyes and a lot of new faces. Impermanence was the defining quality of Frey’s life.