Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (37 page)

Owen shook his head, sadly. ‘I hope you survive for long enough to be disappointed, then.’

Carter snorted as the man walked off.
Just long enough to get off this bloody rock
.

Adella returned and asked him to help her get new bandages from the supply chambers. They were on the far side of the station, ten minutes’ walk through the passages. He was becoming far too conversant navigating the maze of old tunnels
. It really is time to get out of here
. After they found the chamber, he pulled open the door and switched the light on inside. Canvas-covered crates piled high against all three bare stone walls. He pulled covers off, and as he turned, he saw that Adella had dropped her slave’s robe to the floor, was standing there pale under the dim electric light. She pushed him gently down against one of the crate’s canvas tops, her mouth pressing against his, brushing his upper lip.

‘We can’t!’ protested Carter. ‘You know what they’ve said they’ll do to any woman who gets pregnant on the station.’

‘But we never do,’ said Adella. ‘You must have heard the noises coming from the showers late at night. Everyone’s doing it. The water here’s laced with something that prevents women becoming pregnant, a chemical. I’ve heard as much from the old hands.’

‘But it can’t work all of the time.’

‘It works,’ she said, untying her hair and letting it fall behind her. ‘They don’t want trained miners too weak to work, pleading their belly. And what’s the point of waiting? There’s hundreds of ways we can die in the sky mines. This is the only way I know we can be happy. The Vandians can’t take this away from us.’

‘I don’t know…’

She moved closer to him. ‘I trust you, Carter. You’re the only man here who has what it takes to lead a breakout. And I know you’re going to take me with you when you do. We’re not back home anymore, are we? All the rules and the way things should be while courting… they don’t count for spit out here. We need to live while we can. Why should I die without knowing you properly?’

Adella had a point, and Carter was moving beyond the time he could resist her entreaties, the heat in his blood swelling to match hers.

‘Nobody else here understands you like I do,’ said Adella. ‘You’re the only one who deserves me. Who deserves… this. So this is what I would like you to do…’ She whispered in his ear.

Carter did as he was bid until his head spun. He felt guilty and foolish… flirting with danger, but the lust inside him was too overwhelming now. Carter could as much stop what was happening here as he could halt breathing. It might be wrong; but there were a hundred worse acts when they were both imprisoned to a lifetime of labour, and none of them under his control.

The next day Carter came across Kerge in one of the equipment bays, a large chamber filled with machines, devices covered by tarpaulin, others stored in wooden crates on beds of slugs made of a white substance he couldn’t put a name to. The gask lay in the shadows of a large drilling unit, tinkering with the machinery, a crescent of tools spread out across a leather blanket as if the twisted man was a surgeon about to operate on his patient. A couple of slaves worked at the far end of the chamber, moving the components of a conveyor belt onto antigravity stones to carry them across to the new sky mine. Nobody was close enough to hear their conversation, which was just the way he wanted it.

‘You got a minute?’ asked Carter.

The gask pulled himself out from under the drilling unit, sitting down beside his tools. ‘Are you here to help construct the new sorting lines on the station roof?’

‘I’m about a little mischief,’ said Carter. He pointed to the little silver machine only just visible poking out of a leather tool satchel. ‘Like stealing parts to rebuild yourself a new abacus box.’

‘I only took components from machines beyond repair,’ said Kerge. ‘They were of no use to anyone except me. I do not consider that theft, only the optimum use of resources.’

Carter raised his hands openly. ‘You’ll get no complaints from me. I like a little initiative. Only thing that’s going to keep us alive up here. Is it as good as the box you had back in the forests? You can use it to tell the future?’

‘I am not a fortune teller, manling,’ complained Kerge. ‘This merely helps me study the boughs of the great fractal tree. The future is what you make of it. It is free will which navigates the branches. Free will is the true substance of the universe.’

‘But if something was going to happen,’ continued Carter, ‘and it was significant enough, it would register on your sums?’

‘Only in the near-term,’ said Kerge, ‘and even then, those events wouldn’t be guaranteed.’

‘Back in Northhaven, if there was a drought, we’d send people out to the forests to speak with your elders. They’d tell the farmers when the best chance of planting seeds was, so crops could make it to harvest time.’

‘This is not the point of our studies. I am sure the elders were merely being polite to your emissaries. We are polite to everyone.’

‘But they weren’t guessing, were they?’ said Carter.

‘
Guessing
,’ spluttered Kerge, as near to indignation as Carter had ever seen the humble gask get. ‘Do you know how long it takes to master probability science? How many hours of study a gask must spend before he or she is considered even a neophyte of the greatest of disciplines?’

‘Kerge, I know you’ve got a brain that would make the brightest engineer in Weyland weep like a fool at his own stupidity. And I’ve got a good use for your smarts. I need to know when the next eruption is due, when that monster of a stratovolcano is next going to blow.’

‘Please tell me you are not trying to curry favour with the overseers here?’ said Kerge. ‘Attempting to buy your barracks extra rations by using foreknowledge? The Vandians will not free you for it, they will hold on to you all the tighter, like a prized pack animal.’

‘You might not want to know how I’m planning to use what you tell me.’

‘I am straining to maintain a low profile on the station,’ said Kerge. ‘Apart from myself, there is only one other slave here who is twisted far from the common pattern of manlings, and I am only tolerated as a useful tinkerer of machines. If the Vandians realise the true extent of my differences from the common pattern, I will end up in a zoo or on an imperium dissection table.’

‘The Vandians won’t hear about your talents from me,’ said Carter. ‘And if you like, I might be able to solve those problems of yours with a little passage out of the sky mines in the near future…’

‘I can discern no path ahead of us where an escape attempt leads to anything except death and disaster,’ said Kerge. ‘We must stay here and conserve our strength.’

‘Hope for the best, but plan for the worst,’ said Carter. ‘Help me out. I just need your best guess on when Old Smoky down below is going to start spewing again. That’s not too much to ask, is it?’

Kerge sighed, but reached for his abacus box all the same. ‘So be it. But I see no good coming from this, and I do not need to contemplate the branches of the great fractal tree to tell you
that
. If this foreknow­ledge is for use in some hasty escape attempt you are concocting, I beg you to reconsider.’

Carter shrugged noncommittally.
Fine for you to talk about sitting around and contemplating matters. If Adella and I had a snug place in the repair bays fixing the Vandians’ toys for them, maybe we might bide our time for a while too. But we are where we are. And whatever my future is to be, it sure won’t be dying in a tunnel with a pickaxe in my hand.

EIGHT

CITY OF THE AIR

Jacob walked back down the corridor in the
Night’s Pride
with Sheplar Lesh. Like the rest of the enormous aircraft, its interior was formed from some kind of hardened paper. As strong as oak, but weight for weight, as light as the wax-paper a butcher wrapped around his wares. Jacob was lucky he had managed to convince the carrier’s captain to permit Sheplar and himself access to the carrier’s navigation chamber to check the course of their journey against Carter’s travels. Naturally, the ‘convincing’ had come in the form of a generous transfer from Jacob’s dwindling stock of trading coins
. This crew could give old Master Lettore a run for reticence when it comes to guild secrets.
Their merchant carrier was heading for the Kingdom of Hangel. The only thing Jacob knew about the nation was that someone out there needed a hell of a lot of firearms, shells and ordinance. They would be in the air for four weeks, covering nearly sixty thousand miles, yet barely making a dent in the distance that they needed to cover to catch up with Carter. Most of the ground they passed over was lightly populated. A few tiny settlements. Grass plains that stretched forever like a vast yellow ocean of scrub and dirt. It made him glad he was flying over it, not riding through it. And it gave him feelings of insignificance. Not for the first time, Jacob felt doubts well inside him.

Jacob looked at Sheplar. ‘What the hell can have happened to Carter and Northhaven’s taken to have travelled so far in such a short period of time? It doesn’t seem possible.’

‘You must have faith in Khow’s ability to track his son,’ said Sheplar.

‘Faith? Sad to say, friend, that vessel’s been leaking ever since Mary died.’

Jacob rested a hand against the hull. Beyond a porthole, Jacob could see the carrier’s main wings stacked above each other tri-plane fashion, connected by struts each the diameter of a lighthouse. The aircraft’s hangars were visible too, slung under the lowest wing, the tiny black dots of scout planes landing and taking off. You learnt to tune out the constant humming from hundreds of propellers after a few days on board, but the rotors’ vibration was always there running gently through the fuselage. The town-sized carrier was rarely quiet. Children playing; the honk of livestock in pens; orders being called between aircrew. The
Night’s Pride
wasn’t anything like the decks of any nautical vessel Jacob had trod. Her interior had been divided into two areas – functional sections like the bridge and the cargo holds and the navigation rooms, and open neighbourhoods where walls were painted with frescos, surfaces decorated with colourful engravings of unfamiliar gods and totems. They even had chambers where plants grew… miniature vegetable gardens flooded with light from cathedral-tall stretches of glass. Other vaults where hundreds of market stalls sat arranged across stepped levels, ladders on the walls leading up to family lodgings where passengers could glimpse vignettes of family life through open doorways. Men and women taking tea together on ornate rugs, children studying and scratching across blackboards, arguments between spouses, games of chance. A society in the sky, paying its way by transporting goods and passengers across the vast distances of the world below. There were people born in these corridors who had never been on the ground and had little desire to go there, either. The locals were polite enough towards Jacob, Sheplar, Khow and Sariel, but they talked of life on the dirt as if it was another world.
To them perhaps, it is
.

‘I know it sounds contrary coming from a churchman,’ added Jacob, ‘but I never was that comfortable taking on faith those things which I can’t explain.’

‘There are many things with which I am uncomfortable, Jacob of Northhaven. The strangeness of being on an aircraft of this size. Not being able to pilot her. Not being able to grapple with the crosswinds and feel the spirits of the wind. But the rightness of the direction in which we travel, that I do not doubt. It is a true wind that carries the
Night’s Pride
. As far away from home as we are, that much I know. It is a
true
wind.’

‘Not much of an aircraft as far as your people are concerned, I guess,’ said Jacob. ‘Sure wouldn’t be able to take this bird down onto a landing field in one of your canyons.’

‘She is the right size for what her crew require,’ said Sheplar. ‘As is a flying wing for what the skyguard needs.’

‘When I was living at the monastery in Rodal, Brother Frael and I would watch your flying wings skim past. He would say that you were flying with the angels. He’d use the ancient name for them, the
ethreaal
, and declare they were the same as your wind spirits.’

‘There are many spirits in the wind.’

‘There’s quite a few angels mentioned in the good book, too.’
Maybe one from the heavenly host to look after us up here. That would be nice.

‘You have evil spirits in your faith?’ asked Sheplar.

‘Fallen angels, you mean?’ said Jacob. ‘Devilish spirits? In our church we know them as
stealers
, for the way they steal their way into the hearts and minds of men, and cause all sorts of wickedness.’

‘We say much the same about the evil spirits of the wind,’ said Shep­lar. ‘Although I think that is often too easily an excuse for a person’s lack of honour. To blame your actions and omissions on the wind.’

‘I reckon you’ve got a point there.’
Maybe one that’s a little too close to home
.

‘Your friend the monk sounds much like my uncle,’ said Sheplar. ‘He raised me inside the temple at Yundak. He was a powerful wind chanter and rose high within the order there.’

‘What about your parents?’

‘My mother died giving birth to me. My father was a skyguard pilot. He perished when I was seven, driving off an incursion of nomads from the north. A ballista bolt struck his plane.’

‘I reckon he would have been proud to see you following in his footsteps.’

‘It’s a hard thing to live up to a father’s name,’ said Sheplar. ‘Shamar Lesh was renowned as one of the greatest pilots in the skyguard. My family always expected me to follow in his path. In truth, I would rather have been a wind chanter like my uncle. A simple, ordinary life, helping those who make pilgrimages to the temple.’

Jacob nodded. Perhaps it wasn’t only Sheplar’s honour that the pilot was chasing on this pursuit into the infinite. It was his dead father’s. Maybe that explained why a single mountain pilot had seemed so eager to take on an entire bandit squadron over the skies of Northhaven.

‘A name’s something you can find yourself running from, or hiding behind.’
Or something to bury in an empty coffin.
‘You shouldn’t regret your choice to be a flier. Your mountains are the walls of the league, keeping us safe from the hordes and nomads beyond.’

‘Walls that we live on,’ said Sheplar. ‘Not that we begrudge our duty. The spirits gave us rocks to live on so that we may grow hardy, and powerful winds that we may breathe pure air, and savages to the north for neighbours so that we will never grow lazy. That is what my uncle taught. What of you? Do you have family back in Weyland?’

‘Carter’s all I have left,’ said Jacob. ‘I was an only child. My father died in an accident on our farm. My mother passed soon after, not in any good way.’
No, not in any good way at all.

‘All winds must wane,’ said Sheplar. ‘We must live while we can.’

As the local sales agent for the Landsman Weapons Works, Hayden Gant knew a few things about guns and the men who used them. As he was bundled into his own dark warehouse and had the hood pulled away from his face, he realised that the ruffian pointing a pistol in his direction was not a novice in their use.

‘I don’t have keys to the safe,’ spluttered Hayden. Three men stood in the dark open space, all bigger than a fella had a right to be. The moonlight through the skylight painted them in pale, admonitory colours. Two of the cut-throats lounged against a stack of rifle crates, while the third’s face was almost invisible under a military cap.

‘It’s not your money we’re interested in,’ growled the man with the pistol.

‘Well, if it’s arms you’re after, you’re already standing in my damn warehouse.’

‘No, we’ve got enough of them too.’

‘Then why the hell have you snatched me up?’

‘Your cargo that left yesterday. You shipped it to a crew of Tourian traders on an aircraft called the
Night’s Pride
.’

‘That sounds plausible.’

‘It should do, since it happened. I want to know where those traders are heading with your shipment?’

‘I wouldn’t last long as an agent if I was to go running my mouth off about my clients’ business, would I?’

The man leaned forwards with the pistol and slapped him hard across the face with it. ‘How long you’re going to last, that should be a pressing concern for you. And right now, it depends on whether you’ve got a destination for those guns you sold. Where are they going? Who’re the weapons being shipped to?’

To give Gant his due, his concern for his reputation lasted until the strangers put a bullet in his left knee to match the one they blasted into his right. His worries about how he would walk again… those disappeared right after he spilled his guts, telling his captors everything they wanted to know.

Major Alock waited by the body of the warehouse’s night watchman, the guard’s throat expertly slit from behind. His three troopers carefully locked the warehouse behind them, leaving the salesman’s corpse lying alongside his crates and cargo.

‘Guns are going to a country called Hangel for the local monarch, some grandee called the Grand Duke Pavlorda. It’s southwest of here… a couple of weeks in the air to reach it.’

‘Well, lieutenant, the king charged us with looking after the pastor and his expedition. It’d be remiss of us to leave him travelling all alone in the world, wouldn’t it?’

‘Yes
sir
.’

Willow sat uncomfortably on a stool behind the grading line; a conveyor belt carrying a never-ending stream of rubble from the tunnels the slaves bored into the new mine. Their station lay moored to the fresh strike by a lattice of chains and swaying rope-walks; close enough to make the vertiginous crossing in a minute. After all, the slaves’ time was a commodity now, and the Vandians were wasting none of it in the efficient stripping of resources from the new rock. It was a pity, Willow mused, that their owners’ concern didn’t extend to making the slaves more productive by introducing a few comforts – like cushions for hard seats. Or masks to hold back the choking dust that seemed to coat everything in the hastily erected structure where she had been set to work. Willow had watched the mill assembled with unbelievable speed. Metal ribs laid down like the supports of a barn, a fine metal mesh draped over it. Then the mesh sprayed with something that looked like porridge, but set as hard as stone. A couple more hours to move in the conveyor lines and the grading machinery, before running out rails from the mine head into the hall. And, just like that, Willow had the first manual job of her life. It wasn’t work she could have ever imagined doing. What would Benner Landor have thought, having forbidden her any avenue of employment except occasionally helping him administer the family estate? And that only as a sideline when she wasn’t being tutored in the gentle world of female accomplishments intended to bring her a suitably titled husband. Willow had been allowed to dabble in the estate, but not to do anything that interfered with her father’s management. How that had eaten at her. She was every bit her brother’s equal, and had shown more application and stomach for the smooth running of the family’s holdings than Duncan ever had. While Duncan had been out drinking with his friends, Willow worked in the office, studying which lands suited which crops. Mastering the business of trade contracts and exports and duties, which unions were important, which tenant farmers were open to modern methods of farming and which too traditional to consider any of the excellent suggestions documented in the annals of the
Royal Farming Journal
. Yet when Willow stood in the same room as her useless brother, the only suggestions solicited, the only person that seemed to matter to her father, was Duncan. Her father had forgotten that he had built the house up in partnership with the help of Willow’s mother. He worked hard to forget, that much Willow could see. Perhaps that was why Willow wandered the estate half-invisible to Benner Landor. She had too much of her mother in her; from her freckles to the rich curls of her crimson hair. Maybe Benner found too much of his wife in his daughter, and Willow’s old existence had been her punishment… sidelined and forever destined to be the spare to the heir. As good a breeder as any mare in their stables, or sow in their pens. Well, fate had surely found a way to remind Willow that a life of indolent luxury was not the worst thing that could befall any Weyland woman. What would Benner Landor say if he could see his fine, cultured daughter now? A human cog in a mining machine, sweating alongside hundreds of other slaves. Sorting rubble, scanning it with brick-sized machines and then tossing rocks back into the appropriate metal bin. One for neodymium, others for erbium, promethium, samarium and lanthanum. These were the rare ores the slaves sorted for. All the basic deposits such as iron and lead were hauled off the station for smelting. The women in Willow’s grading hall only looked for the gems – quite literally.

No, Benner Landor wouldn’t have been impressed to see Willow coughing from the dust, swigging greedily from a canteen to replace liquids she sweated like a pig, her nails torn and broken from handling rocks. Her simple slave’s tunic streaked with dirt and grime and smelling ranker than the lowliest farmhand working the Landor fields. Her throat dry and gritty, her muscles aching from fourteen-hour shifts, her belly grumbling from the lack of food. Willow had started out from a lower base than the other slaves – women who were already used to the demands of hard manual labour. Even working in a Northhaven store meant early rises and lugging stock about; a whole day on your feet – and that was easy work compared to the farm labour which provided the bulk of employment back home. Willow had experienced none of it. Lacking a dozen servants with nothing better to do than follow after her, she struggled with the physical demands of the work. If there was one consolation, it was that at least she could set herself to the task without whining or complaining about everything she had lost. In stark contrast to Adella Cheyenne, who was trying everyone’s nerves with her continual histrionics and dizzy spells as the workload got on top of her. If Adella hadn’t noticed, there was a hall’s worth of slaves new to the same hard labour. Swaying on the line, trying to ignore the throbbing in their heads from the sun beating down on the grading line’s roof. Working in heat so thick you could slice it with a knife and ladle it alongside the thin portions of barley gruel slopped out here for sustenance. What Willow’s brother and Carter Carnehan saw in this manipulative little hellion, she would never know. Sadly, for Willow, the damn woman’s lack of productivity was similar to that of a Landor heir unused to anything more strenuous than a little light docket punching. So Adella had scored a seat right next to Willow.
If that isn’t an inducement to up my piecework rate, I don’t know what is.