Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (36 page)

Jacob slapped the man harder and pushed the barrel between his teeth. Khow appeared and rested his long gnarled fingers on the pistol. ‘This is not you, manling. Do not do this thing.’

Jacob hesitated, fighting the anger surging up inside him. ‘You tell whoever set you to this that they’ll find out who I am. And when they do, they won’t much care for the discovery.’ He rammed the pistol butt into the man’s nose, his head crashing back in a fountain of blood.

‘It’s not people such as this you have to fight,’ said the gask.

‘One battle at a time. Until the day is ours.’

‘Quickly, now,’ urged Khow, pointing towards a frisson of activity centred on the customs house. Officers sprinted out of the warehouse doors, arrowing in on the sound of the triplanes’ roaring engines, angry armed men shoving their way through a queue of wagons lined up for checks. ‘Our paths are narrowing.’

Narrowing like the end of a noose.
‘To the
Night’s Pride
, then. For better or worse.’

Jacob and the others followed the pilot inside the triplane, a windowless cargo chamber filled with wooden crates, all of them stamped with the Landsman Weapon Works’ legend. She climbed a ladder and disappeared behind a simple curtain sealing off the cockpit. Outside, the engines built up to a throaty crescendo as the triplane’s nose doors began to swing down, sealing off their view of the salt flats. Benches had been built into either side of the fuselage, just enough room to sit down and hold on to the freight’s netting as the aircraft turned, jouncing along the flats, its bouncing speeding up with the clamour of its engines. Then the stout transport angled up into the air, accompanied by the crack of gunshots from the ground. Fuselage splintered towards the rear of the plane as one of the bullets broke through and found a home inside the freight, and then they were spiralling and twisting upward. Jacob felt the clutch of gravity lessening as they climbed towards the
Night’s Pride
.

‘I think we have worn out our welcome in Weyland,’ said Sheplar. ‘That was a strange experience for one who is used to being the hunter, rather than the hunted.’

Jacob clutched the webbing as the triplane spiralled ever higher.
I wish I could say it was a novelty for me. If just leaving home alive is this hard, how difficult will it be to find Carter out there?

Carter shoved back the brute of a man he faced. He spotted another slave trying to slip behind Duncan and brain the man.
How long before we have to abandon the anchor point?
The Weylanders hardly needed green armbands to distinguish them from their attackers. The rival mining force had similar features to Rodalians, their curses so mangled they hardly registered as words at all. Whatever land had been raided to take these hostiles for slaves, that country hadn’t short-changed its sons on ferociousness. Enemy sky miners dropped off the transports in seemingly endless waves, screaming unintelligible war cries at the Weylanders, their aggression cold enough to turn a man’s blood to stone. Would it have made a difference to Carter if his enemies had hailed from one of the league’s neighbours, a fellow member nation of the Lanca?
Probably not.
Carter stepped in and shoulder-slammed Duncan’s attacker, knocking him sprawling over a boulder. Unlike the station’s exterior, the battleground on this new rock was anything but smooth-surfaced. Cracks and pits and miniature valleys a man could tumble into, falls that would kill you as sure as an opponent’s club finding its mark. Carter saw Duncan trade blows with the man facing him, blocking the pickaxe handle, turning it and bringing the club down on the attacker’s knee. A crack of heavy wood sounded as Carter fended off a pickaxe handle, then he ducked on instinct as an enemy transporter buzzed down, nearly giving him a haircut with its humming rotors. Two of the rival house’s slaves pushed forward with an anchor cable lowered from their craft, waiting for the defenders to be distracted enough for them to rush in unopposed and trade lines. A group of Weylanders guarded the anchor point, yelling muffled abuse through their masks and waving their clubs menacingly towards the invaders, bravado and fear fuelling their challenges in equal measure. This brawl had degenerated into a mad, deadly game of tug-of-war; the
war
part of the game given extra emphasis by the violence. Their rock was still heading towards the princess’s territory, its motion not yet arrested by enemy transporters trying to drag the stake towards their own slice of sky. Owen’s words proved prophetic. It wasn’t difficult to hate this rival slave force when they were landing blows on you, Carter’s bruised and bloodied body pitted against the yelling banshees.
Not in the slightest
. Two invaders jumped Carter simultaneously, one of them slipping an arm around his neck while the other ripped off his mask. Trying to suck in the almost non-existent air at this altitude, Carter half-fell as he was brought to his knees by the two assailants’ weight. Another slave with a pickaxe handle rushed forward to cave in Carter’s skull, but Duncan appeared from nowhere to clash sticks with the screaming slave. Undaunted, the two holding Carter dragged him on his knees towards a chasm… a gap in the rock that ran all the way to the open sky. He couldn’t breathe, let alone fight them off. It was as though he inhaled fire, his lungs burning every time he gasped vapour and smoke. Carter’s chest heaved as his body convulsed, hopelessly gasping the thin air. With a last, desperate burst of strength, Carter kicked his way to his feet, grabbed the man trying to hold him down and lunged forward, using the momentum to flip the fighter over his head and into the chasm. The remaining slave grappled with Carter, working hard to send the Weylander after his comrade. Then he hesitated a second as a siren began to drone from the rear of one of the transporters, the slave’s head urgently glancing from left to right. Carter kicked out at the man, but it was too late, the hoary little slave had discontinued the wrestling match and was running full pelt towards a landing transporter. Carter pulled back from the rim and staggered towards the boulder where his mask lay abandoned, still pumping out little spurts of air. He shoved it against his mouth, sucking greedily for a full minute before he had the wherewithal to slip the straps around his head. All around the rock, enemy transporters ditched their cables and pulled away.

The attacking force ran almost comically in the weak gravity towards their craft, although there was nothing funny about the cruel way they were pursued by the defenders, smashed down from the rear and bludgeoned to death by the princess’s vengeful sky miners. At the opposite end of the rock hovered the reason for their desperation. Princess Helrena’s ship floated in a cloud of engine smoke, loitering on the margins of her licensed territory, a brooding steel gigantean with all her gunports and turrets swivelled and ready to open up in defence of the prize her labour force had hauled home. A second after the ugly rock nosed across into home territory, Carter heard a drone in the air as a large squadron of transports broke through the clouds. More of the attackers or allies of the same – for no sooner had they appeared and spotted the princess’s ship ahead, they wheeled away, climbing for height and twisting and turning back into the clouds
. We were that close to dying. If they had landed a second wave, we’d have been beaten into a pulp.
Carter was overwhelmed by competing emotions. Sickness at the carnage and death… elation at surviving. Shame, too. The guns on the princess’s ship let loose a broadside, gobs of flame arrowing towards three transporters too slow to depart. The craft were trespassing inside her territory now, and they were going to pay the price. All three invaders exploded into oily black flowers, not enough debris left to tell transporter wreckage from burning flesh as their remains expanded into the sky. A cheering sounded from the Weylanders on the strike. As Carter turned around, he saw Duncan walking forward, the heir of the Landor acres dragging his bloodied wooden club like a gamekeeper having dispatched a downed flight of partridges.

‘You not raising a huzzah?’ asked Duncan.

Carter lifted the mask a second to touch the red weal of the whiplash he’d received. ‘Hell no. Maybe the Vandians will cheer
us
. Maybe that princess will come out and kiss me when she sees the strike we’ve brought home for her.’

‘Maybe she’ll kiss my arse, first.’

They walked back to Owen and Kerge, crouched by the intact survey equipment and their bodies untouched by the bloody battle across the rock.

‘Feels like your stake, now, don’t it, Mister Carnehan?’ said Owen. ‘Just remind yourself that it’s only ever theirs.’ He nodded towards the long silvery warship hovering on a spear of fire.

Guess my arse isn’t going to get kissed, either.

Carter was sitting on the edge of his bunk in the dormitory, his arms extended for Adella to remove the old bandage around his ribs, his body cracked and smarting from the battle to seize the sky mines’ new claim.

‘I was so worried about you,’ said Adella.

‘Nothing’s going to happen to me,’ said Carter. Even as Carter mouthed the words, he knew they must sound like a lie. There were a lot of promises a slave could make that couldn’t be kept. And that had to be the greatest of them all.

‘I don’t think I could go on living if you died,’ said Adella. ‘What would be the point?’

‘You’d find a way,’ said Carter. ‘Everybody here has to find a way of going on.’

‘They discovered another dead slave this morning in the barracks,’ said Adella. ‘Loretta Popham. She died of poison. She was from Northhaven, too, just like us. I knew her back home. She worked as a maid in the hotel.’

‘Where the hell did she get her hands on poison up here?’

‘Mogo tubers,’ said Adella. ‘You can unearth them from the soil at the foot of the volcano. Slaves dig them up and bring them back to exchange for food rations, or lying down with the people that found them.’

‘Sweet saints!’

‘You get to travel down to the surface to run eruption checks,’ said Adella. ‘I was going to ask you to dig around for some tubers for me. Just in case it gets too much.’

‘Don’t be stupid. I’m not going to do that.’

‘You can’t stop anyone checking out from all of this, Carter. I could climb the steps to the top of the station any day I wanted and leap. But boiling those roots and drinking it down is meant to be painless. You go to sleep and you never wake up. That has to be a better end than falling.’

‘We’re going to get out of here!’ protested Carter. ‘You and me both.’

‘They’d hunt us down,’ said Adella. ‘All the guardsmen and their warships. Nobody has ever escaped alive from the sky mines. That’s a record the Vandians don’t want to see broken.’

‘They wouldn’t come after us if they thought we were dead,’ said Carter.

A brief flash of hope crossed the woman’s face. The emotion was so rare here that Carter had almost forgotten what optimism looked like. ‘You’ve got a plan?’ asked Adella.

‘I do.’ Carter explained the bare bones of his scheme in hushed tones, watching her face light up as she dared to believe there could be an existence beyond this floating hell they had been imprisoned in.

‘That could work!’ she said, after he’d finished.

‘Nobody’s ever escaped from here?’ said Carter. ‘Sure people have. They must have. It’s just the Vandians aren’t exactly going to encourage workers to carve statues of all the slaves clever and courageous enough to break out of their damn mine.’

‘How can I help you?’

‘Lend me a hand sounding people out. See who wants to go with us. We’ll need five or six people. And someone with experience flying transporters… that’s essential. People we know from back home – they need to be strong, mind and body. It would be fine if Duncan agreed to join. Only people we can trust. You know the rumours about informants among the miners? Maybe even Vandian agents pretending to be slaves?’

Adella nodded, eagerly. ‘I can do that.’

‘You can. And you forget about hiding those filthy tubers under your mattress. That’s no way to think. Once you start considering that path…’

Adella appeared abashed. ‘I won’t ask you again.’

‘The Vandians think we’re savages. To them, we’re no better than those spear-carrying wild men that live north of Rodal, raiding the fringes of the league. The empire underestimates us. That’s their weakness. All we need to do to escape from this floating hell is be smarter than they believe we’re capable of.’

‘Clean those bandages carefully,’ said a voice behind them. ‘Now we’ve got a new sky mine tethered to the station, you’re going to find out how much a man sweats at this altitude.’

Carter swivelled around. It was Owen.
How long has he been standing there
? ‘Seeing as how we’ve done such a stand-up job of taking the claim, I thought Helrena Skar might give her hitters the rest of the week off.’

‘We’ll see deliveries of working rations dropped off by the supply ships,’ said Owen. ‘That’s as much of a holiday as I’ve ever known in the sky mines. Unless you count coming close to starving when there’s no claim to work, which I don’t.’

Adella removed the last of the bandages and left to wash the blood off her hands.

Carter pulled his tunic back over his wounds. ‘No feast days for the Vandians, then? Don’t they believe in God – not even a temple filled with heathen gods?’

‘No hell full of horned stealers or heaven packed with winged ethereals. Best I can tell, the Vandians revere their emperor first and their ancestors second,’ said Owen. ‘A living god and a bunch of effigies to their grandparents in their shrines.’

‘Hell of an ego, there,’ laughed Carter. ‘Vandians taken to worshipping themselves!’

Owen pointed at Adella, cleaning her hands in the basin at the far end of the barracks. ‘You might want to tone down your own ego, Mister Carnehan. Hope can keep you alive up here for a little while. But once a person realises it’s a false hope being dangled in front of them…’

‘I have high hopes for the future, Mister Paterson,’ said Carter. ‘Don’t reckon I’ve got false ones.’