Iron Jackal (5 page)

‘Settled in already, Doc?’

Malvery’s grinning face appeared, looking down between his legs. ‘Cap’n wants me on the watch for any Sammies once we’re out of the Free Trade Zone,’ he said. He brandished a bottle of grog. ‘Reckoned I might as well bring a friend, make a night of it.’

‘See anything?’

‘Got a fine view of the
Ketty Jay
’s arse end. I’d invite you up for a drink, but it’s pretty cosy in here.’

‘That’s alright. I’m going to see Bess.’

‘Give her my regards.’

‘Will do.’

His quarters were half a dozen metres down the corridor, behind a sliding metal door that squealed on its rollers as he pulled it aside. The room beyond was cramped and bare, comprising a pair of small bunk-beds, a basin, a chest and a cupboard. It was as clean and tidy as he could make it, but it was still little more than a metal box to sleep in. Since he had these quarters to himself, he’d laid a board across the upper bunk and used it as a bookshelf and luggage rack. He picked a heavy, leather-bound book from the row of several dozen, tucked it under his arm, and went down into the cargo hold.

The belly of the
Ketty Jay
was cavernous in comparison to the upper deck. He was making his way down the steps when he heard a growing roar, and felt the gentle and insistent push of the
Ketty Jay
’s thrusters. He held on to a railing and listened as the lashed-down cargo creaked and shifted in the gloom.

The Rattletraps were secured side-by-side in the centre of the hold. The name was a local Vardic word to describe a Samarlan vehicle that most foreigners found hard to pronounce. Crake thought it perfectly suitable to describe the three armoured sand-buggies that Ashua had rustled up. They were grimy contraptions that looked like they hailed from some distant and uncivilised frontier. They had large, dusty tyres and sat on thickly coiled springs for suspension. Two of them had rotary gatling guns mounted on top of their roll-cages.

He eyed them uncertainly. Ashua would be driving one. Jez had volunteered to drive another. There wasn’t much that Jez couldn’t drive or fly, when it came to it. Apparently, she’d had experience with similar vehicles while working for Professor Malstrom, back before she was caught by a Mane.

Silo would be taking the third Rattletrap. No one knew
what
he had experience in. His past was unknown to Crake, except that he’d rescued Frey from certain death after Frey had crash-landed in Samarla many years ago. Crake had always supposed there was a story to it but, as far as he knew, no one had asked and Silo wasn’t telling.

Crake, for his part, had always wondered where a Murthian slave learned to speak Vardic so well. He hardly ever spoke to anyone on the crew, so it seemed unlikely that he’d learned it on the
Ketty Jay
. Curiously, his phrasing and regional burr came from Draki, the southernmost duchy of Vardia, which bordered onto Samarla. Draki was traditionally regarded as a cultural and literal wasteland, populated by rural people from peasant stock who eked a living from the hard earth, half of it poisoned by the Blackendraft blowing in from the Hookhollow volcanoes to the west. How Silo could have learned Vardic from Draki folk was a mystery.

Well, whatever the truth, Silo was confident he could drive a Rattletrap better than anyone else here. And if Silo said so, then it was true.

He made his way to the back of the hold, where a small area was separated off by a wall of crates and a tarpaulin curtain. Beyond was his makeshift sanctum. It was disappointingly bare, little more than a private area for him to work because his own quarters were too cramped. There was a desk and a chalkboard, a cupboard full of apparatus and equipment and space for a small summoning circle, but that was all. Barely adequate for even a fledgeling daemonist.

For the past few months he’d been increasingly frustrated in his attempts to expand his knowledge of the Art. Frey had given him the space and let him do whatever he wanted – mostly because he didn’t understand what Crake was doing – but the simple fact was that he needed a proper sanctum and you couldn’t have one on board an aircraft. Anything fragile would eventually break when it was shaken about in flight. His delicately calibrated machines never stayed calibrated for long. The electricity supply wasn’t robust enough to risk calling up anything dangerous, since the resonator might fail and let it out. He would drain the
Ketty Jay’s
batteries if he used them while she was grounded, and he’d never dare attempt a summoning while they were in the air.

I need a place to work
, he told himself.
A home, with a sanctum. Or I’ll never get any better.

But that would mean stepping off the
Ketty Jay
for good. And there might still be bounty hunters looking for him. He’d seen neither hide nor hair of the Shacklemores for a long while now, but it was dangerous to assume they’d given up.

Bess, who was standing dormant in a shadowy corner, roused herself as he approached and came lumbering over. She was a golem of tarnished metal and chainmail, standing eight feet high and five broad. Her face – if indeed she
had
a face – was set low between enormous shoulders and hidden behind a circular grille. Only two twinkling stars were visible where her eyes might have been, twin glimmers in the abyss.

She hunkered down in front of Crake so he could give her an awkward hug, and bubbled happily in the depths of her chest cavity.

‘How are you tonight, Bess? Happy to see me?’

She rocked back and forth. Since she had no neck, it was the closest she got to a nod.

‘Good girl,’ he said, rubbing his hand over her hump. ‘Good girl.’

He found it was easiest to treat her like a pet, though he wasn’t exactly sure what she was. Was there still something in there of the eight-year-old she’d once been? Perhaps. But he’d come to terms with the death of his niece as best he could. He’d come to terms with his part in it, too, although that had been much harder. The remorse and regret would never truly end. This golem carried some memory of that beautiful child, but it wasn’t her inside that armoured suit. The real Bess was dead. What was left was an echo of her, an imprint.

But that was something.

‘Look what I brought you,’ he said, holding up the book. The title was printed on the red leather cover:
Stories for Little Girls
. Bess couldn’t read, but after a moment she recognised the book. She clapped her hands with a loud crash of metal, tottered backwards on her stumpy legs and plonked herself onto the ground.

Crake sat down cross-legged next to her. She loomed over his shoulder as he opened the book, craning in eagerly to see the colourful illustrations.

‘Which one shall we read tonight?’ he asked.

Bess made a quizzical noise: an eerie, otherworldly coo. She sensed a question, but she didn’t understand what he’d said. He was never quite sure how much she comprehended of speech. She seemed to have good days and bad days. Or perhaps she was just good at guessing his intentions rather than interpreting the actual words.

‘I’ll pick, shall I?’ he said, turning to one that he knew was her favourite.

She hunkered closer, her face-grille pressed close to the page. Maybe it was the pictures she enjoyed, or maybe she just liked to hear him talk, even if she didn’t know what he was saying. It didn’t matter. While she kept listening, he’d keep reading. He’d brought her into the world, and he had responsibilities. An honourable man had to live up to his responsibilities.

‘
The Duchess and the Daisy-Chain
,’ he announced, and he began.

The desert was a cold and empty place at night. Sand and stone, from horizon to horizon. Barren outcrops jutted out of the steel-grey dunes like rotten teeth. It was a new moon, only visible as a round absence in the swathes of stars overhead. Their frosty shine, coming from an impossible distance, was barely enough for human eyes to see by.

For Jez, piloting the
Ketty Jay
, it wasn’t a problem. The night was as clear to her as the day.

They were a long way outside the Free Trade Zone, deeply into illegal airspace. She flew with the lights out and thrusters running quiet. With only the sky as a background, the
Ketty Jay
was a speck hurtling through an infinity of black. Only her thrusters gave her away, their blazing glow alien to the chill dark. But there was nothing to be done about that, except hope that nobody was sharp enough to spot them.

Jez had dropped into a shallow trance as they flew. Her uncanny vision was something she didn’t have to think about, but it was only when she was in a trance that the full range of her Mane senses kicked in. Then she could sense the wind, calculate it, as if its turbulence was something visible and easy to predict. She was aware of Ashua’s heartbeat, fast and nervous, betraying her outwardly confident exterior. She could hear the workings of the aircraft, purring with health since it had been overhauled at Trinica’s expense. It had been a thank-you for saving the pirate captain from the Manes, the very creatures that had given Jez these gifts. They lurked on the edge of her consciousness these days, no longer calling to her as they used to, quiet presences like ghosts at her shoulder.

She was a half-Mane. Once that knowledge had tormented her, but now she was beginning to settle into the idea. She no longer feared the ones who had made her what she was.

Something tugged at the edge of her senses. A disturbance in the desert winds. She frowned, and tracked its source.

‘Malvery!’ she called through the doorway. ‘Five o’clock high! You see anything?’

The
Ketty Jay
was too bulky for the pilot to see behind the aircraft, which was why they often had a lookout in the cupola. After a few seconds, Malvery called back. ‘I see it. Sammie frigate. Bit of a way off.’

‘They coming towards us?’

Another pause. ‘Reckon so. Reckon they’re coming at quite a clip, as well.’

‘Might be we’re just going across their flight path,’ said Ashua from the shadows at the back of the cockpit. ‘They might not have seen us.’

‘Change course,’ said Frey quickly, from the navigator’s station. Jez did so, turning the
Ketty Jay
to a new heading that would force the Samarlans to correct if they wanted to intercept. Minutes ticked by, counted by restless tapping of Harkins’ boot as he tried to contain the explosive hysteria building up inside him. When she judged that enough time had passed, she called again.

‘Doc?’

‘Still coming.’

Jez swore under her breath. ‘They’ve seen the thruster glow.’

‘At that distance?’ Frey said. ‘There’s no way they—’

He was interrupted by a flash and a deafening concussion. The
Ketty Jay
rang like a struck bell and slewed to port, sending Ashua and Harkins sprawling to the floor and almost knocking Frey out of his seat. Jez wrestled with the flight stick and brought the
Ketty Jay
back to an even keel.

‘Pretty sure they have, Cap’n,’ she said.

‘They’re lobbing artillery at us, the rude sons-of-bitches!’ Malvery yelled, outraged. ‘And now they’re putting out fighters!’

‘How many?’

‘Four.’

A small frigate, then, if it was only carrying four fighters. But the odds were hopeless even so.

‘Better make ourselves scarce,’ said Jez. She hit the thrusters and the
Ketty Jay
roared as she surged forward.

‘Let me fly,’ said Frey anxiously, getting up from his seat. ‘I can—’

‘Greatest respect, Cap’n, but sit yourself down,’ she said with a casual firmness that stopped him in his tracks. ‘You’d be blind out there. And you can’t fly where I’m going.’

‘Where’s
thaaaAAAA
—’ Frey’s question turned to a yell as Jez dumped aerium from the tanks and pushed the
Ketty Jay
’s nose down, sending her into a steep plunge towards the ground.

‘Dropping to the deck, Cap’n,’ she said. ‘Let’s see if they dare follow us.’

‘Without lights?’ Ashua cried. ‘Are you insane? You can’t fly that low to the ground when you can’t
see
it.’

Jez spared a moment to look over her shoulder. ‘I’ve got good eyes,’ she said.

Powerful flood beams swung across the landscape as the approaching frigate and its fighters tried to get a light on them. Harkins let out an involuntary yelp as he saw how close they were to the rocky desert floor.

By going low to the ground, she forced the Samarlans to make a choice. They could either plunge down and match her altitude – a dangerous option in the dark – or they could make shallow dives while firing and then pull up. That meant they couldn’t get on the
Ketty Jay
’s tail, and made her much harder to hit.

‘Fighters coming in!’ called Malvery.

‘Deep or shallow?’ Jez called back.

‘You what?’

‘The angle. Deep or . . . Never mind,’ she said. The cockpit was suddenly illuminated from outside as the beams found them.

The fighters were rigged for night-flying, with banks of floodlights along their wings. She could estimate their angle of approach by the slant of the light as it shone past the
Ketty Jay
and cast her shadow on the ground. The fighters had chosen the lowest-risk strategy. Even with lights, flying close to the ground on a moonless night was too dangerous for their tastes. They didn’t have the advantages that Jez did.