Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (47 page)

‘Maybe you should just trust me.’

‘And maybe you should just tell me – so I don’t start thinking that you’ve lied about how you’ve got a fool-proof way of escaping; say, to string me and the boys along. I’m not aiming to play possum on the ground, so you can try to jump a company of heavily-armed Vandian guardsmen, hijack their patrol ship, and hope I can fly it.’

‘I said I had a scheme for an escape,’ said Carter, ‘not a suicide.’

‘We’re trusting you, here,’ said Noah. ‘I think it’s time you started trusting us back.’

‘Okay then,’ sighed Carter. ‘We ride out the worst of the eruption down here. What’s going to happen back on the station when it stops?’

‘Same as always,’ said Eshean. ‘Scouts out as soon as it’s half-safe to fly, all the men loaded into transporters. Everyone looking for the biggest claim with the best mix of ores. A bloody battle between the houses, and the lucky ones head back to the station with a fresh claim to tie-up.’

‘Exactly,’ said Carter. ‘Too busy to search for us until the dust’s settled. And by then we won’t be here. We won’t wait until it’s half-safe to fly, we’ll light out of here when it’s quarter-safe to fly, and follow the ejecta-mass straight up.’

Eshean laughed. ‘Are you planning to stake an early claim for the princess? Hell, you saved her brat’s life and she never freed you. What’s raising a flag on a chunk of gold-veined rock going to buy you?’

‘Gold, no,’ said Carter. ‘I’m planning to stake a claim to the least viable rock we can find… small, basalt, empty and useless. Not enough metal in it to make a wedding ring if you broke the whole thing down and ground it into dust. Just large enough to land a transporter on it. Maybe a nice hollow on its roof we can cover over with camouflage netting. And what would happen to that rock?’

‘Dear God!’ said Noah. ‘If it had enough velocity, it’d be ignored – straight up into the trade winds, dragged out for millions of miles, maybe!’

‘And we’d be sitting pretty on it,’ said Carter. ‘From what I’ve heard, plenty of those rocks stay in the air, a navigation hazard to aircraft looking to save fuel at maximum altitude. Other rocks bomb into the sea. But either way, we’d have a transporter to reach the ground safe. One of the imperium’s neighbours would do for me. We can set down somewhere remote, swipe local clothes off a village clothes line to cover our slave brands, then head for any city big enough to have an airport where we can work passage on a merchant carrier. Even if we never see Weyland or the league again, we’ll be
free
. Free of this hell.’

‘That might work,’ said Noah, his voice growing excited.

‘It will,’ said Carter. ‘Alan, you’re a pilot, your skill should be worth plenty outside the imperium. When we reach a nation inside the guild system, I can find a librarian’s hold and convince its master that I’m one of their fellow-archive stuffers. They’ll help us fix our position relative to home. Show us the way back. We can do this!’

A frown creased Eshean’s features. ‘But Carter, a plan like that – we could have taken more people. We could have broken out with a dozen transporters full of prisoners!’

‘Hell,’ said Carter, ‘we could have taken the whole caboodle. And as soon as the Vandians catch on that one of their barracks is floating as empty in the sky as the ghost station, they’d realise the trick we pulled and send battleships chasing after rock in the air for a little target practice. This was only ever going to work with a single transporter, its crew’s bones believed to be scattered out here, covered in lava.’

‘You’re a hard bastard, Carter. We could have taken more people…’

‘That’s horseshit. Ditch your guilt right here – I could barely scrape together the four of you with the guts to try to escape.’

Deeli vigorously shook his head in agreement. ‘You’re right, you’re right. Someone would have informed on us. An overseer, a spy, a slave. The last escape attempt was ten years before you were taken. Fella worked in the repair bays, real cushy job too. Dug a passage out of the station that only he knew about. Put a glider together inside it. He was planning to fly onto the top of a supply ship at night, leap off its hull as it was approaching a Vandian city. The soldiers were waiting for him when he landed on its hull. Someone sold him out. One of us. Vandians staked him down in the hangar and brought in a torturer. We had to line up and watch. In shifts. Took him three days to die.’

‘What was his name?’ asked Carter.

Tears welled in Deeli’s eyes. ‘I don’t remember.’

Carter shook his head. Deeli was close to breaking. But perhaps that was okay, he had been here the longest of any slave. ‘Doesn’t matter. He was us, every one of us here. That’s all we need to remember.’

‘I have an extra canteen,’ said Deeli, tapping a bag. ‘Water mixed with mogo tuber. Strong dose, man. Die in minutes. We can take it if it looks like we’re going to be captured.’

‘Pour the water on the soil when we land,’ said Carter. ‘We’re not going to need it.’ He slipped the air mask over his face and hooded up.

Outside, the noise of the eruption grew louder and louder, their cave floor jouncing in the earth tremors until they had to extend their arms like frightened children and huddle together to stop themselves being tumbled around the cave. The supply crates they’d taken in for safe-keeping shook and clattered until Carter feared they were going to shatter. It was growing hotter, too, although he was too scared to sweat. Thick fumes began to fill the space, until Carter was almost sick with the rotten-egg stink, even through the respirator and silvery hood of his survival suit. He closed his eyes tight and focused on the regular click of his mask measuring out fresh doses of air. Might as well be ants caught under the hooves of a cattle stampede for all that they could do to influence their fates now.

Carter inspected the camouflage netting he had dragged off the transporter while Noah, Eshean and Deeli emptied the cave of the supplies they’d stored, rapidly refilling the craft. Every surface was coated in dust, although strangely, the standing circle seemed to be clear of a powder layer, as though there was some invisible shield protecting it. Sections of netting had been eaten away by the eruption, its camouflage surface left littered with black rock residue. Carter tipped the rubble out onto the slope. The netting was intact enough to deploy a second time. And more importantly, their transporter still looked operational enough to take to the air. Alan checked the engine and rotors over as fast as he could while calling it through. Their craft had to survive a race through the centre of the storm of ejecta-mass and come through undamaged enough to land and take off one last time. Waiting on the ground had given Carter a too-close-for-comfort insight into when an eruption started to lose force – far more precise than being holed up in the station and waiting for the storm to abate. Carter wouldn’t recommend it as a way of getting the jump on the other sky miners. Not even to his worst enemy. He had sat hunkered down inside the cave for more than five hours, every minute of that time spent anticipating his end. Now he was out in the open again, shaking from exhaustion and excitement and fear.
One last stake to fight over. And the next rock is going to be all yours.

‘She’s air-worthy,’ announced Alan, climbing into the pilot’s seat up front.

Carter swung himself onto the crew cage at the back, stowing the camo cover. ‘Then the air is where we need to be.’

Noah laughed, joining Eshean and Deeli on the craft’s seating. ‘What do you think they’ll say in Northhaven, if they see us walking back through the gates?’

‘Where’s everyone else?’ muttered Eshean.

Carter blinked in surprise. In truth, the idea of escaping from the sky mines had been his obsession for so long – the only thing he had been able to think about – he’d never even considered what life might be like back in Weyland. ‘Everyone I cared about back home is dead.’
And what about the people back on the station?
nagged the voice. He ignored it. Hadn’t the other slaves had their chance? ‘I don’t think I’ll go back. I was planning to sign up as a sailor and see the world. Maybe I’ll just start from this end of the world.’

‘I want to go back,’ said Noah. ‘See if my folks were left alive after the raid. If they are, they deserve to know that I didn’t die as a slave out in the middle of the beyond.’

‘I’ll travel with you,’ said Eshean. ‘As big as the world is, there’ll never be a country like Weyland or a town like Northhaven. I don’t know how welcome we’ll be, though, outside of our kin. Our faces are going to remind folks about a disaster that’ll be long forgotten by the time we arrive back.’

Carter tried to imagine what it might be like returning to work at the librarian’s hold in the valley, settling down to the suffocating routine that had driven him insane with boredom. And that was
before
he’d watched his family massacred, the town burnt – a forced witness to every pointless death in the slave pens and the sky mines. He wasn’t the same man, now. Home had been taken from him. Forever.

‘What about you, Deeli?’ asked Carter.

The rake-thin old hand shook his head, dejectedly. ‘I can’t go home, man. I wasn’t grabbed up in a raid, like you. My nation sells its convicts to the skels. My farm went bust in the great drought – my wife and sons passed slow from starvation and exhaustion ploughing our bare, dry fields, day after day. Didn’t see much point in working on after they died. I was thrown in debtors’ prison until my own mayor marched me to the auction block. If I travelled home, it would be a week or two before someone recognised me. They’d lock me up again and sell me to the first slaver that landed.’

‘You can ship out with me,’ said Carter. He began setting up the surveying equipment in the rear. Everything they would need to find a rock that was small, fast and as empty as a slave’s stomach without a claim to work.

‘Or travel to Weyland with me and Eshean,’ added Noah.

‘I don’t want to go on the road. Just land us somewhere green and far from the imperium’s reach,’ said Deeli. ‘I haven’t got long left, now, I know that. My lungs’ insides are as black as this volcano. I want to die watching butterflies chase each other over the meadows. Not sweating inside the sky mines until my corpse is tipped out on top of this never-ending bone-pile.’

‘You’re an easy man to please,’ said Carter.

‘The sky stole my life,’ said Deeli. ‘I want my death to belong to me. I’ll be the wild man of the woods, eating berries and snaring rabbits, for as long as my body holds out.’

Below them, the rotors spun into life, a blast of choking dust blown out from below the transporter. ‘Hold on tight back there,’ called Alan. ‘I’ll be pushing the engine hard to get into the mix before any of the other houses’ scouts.’

‘Let’s do it,’ said Carter. He leaned in close to the cockpit at the front, raising his voice above the roar of the engines. ‘How about you, Mister Ferris? Planning on heading to Weyland, travelling back east to the lakes?’

‘Why not,’ said the pilot. ‘I’ll have to do something with all the time I have… now I won’t be chasing rocks, ferrying hitters and blasting tunnels!’

‘One last chase, first,’ laughed Carter. ‘And you’ll find I’m not half as fussy as the princess when it comes to staking a claim.’

Alan reached for his air mask and the rest of them followed suit. Their transporter rocked in the air after it lifted away from the slopes, passing through thick black clouds rolling down the volcano in waves. They still wore their silver survival suits, useful protection against the burning gases the craft sliced through; vapour full of dust that bit like a sandstorm boiled white-hot inside a kettle. Alan used the mass of the stratovolcano’s slopes to help push them into the open skies. Something about the heat of the recent eruption seemed to have thinned the air, making the ungainly transporter even harder to fly. But transporters were built as primitive aerial packhorses, not a flying wing of the Rodalian skyguard. Then they were free of the slopes, riding the sky proper, a rain of ejecta-mass rattling against the cage’s roof. The rain wasn’t falling, though, it was still rising, and they were chasing it up, gaining altitude at a steep angle. Carter wiped dust off his air mask’s visor, gazing out of the cage’s sides. The power­ful outgassing from the stratovolcano had left a doughnut-shaped shockwave… a rolling, expanding cloud-front arrowing towards the heavens. It was being filled in by steaming vapour from the sides, but at the moment, he had been given a clear view that few sky miners would have seen. Rocks, thousands of them, small and large and every shape imaginable, lifting towards a distant blue circle of sky. Fairly soon the claims would be cloaked with steam. The vapour filled by transporters from the sky mines, craft wheeling and jostling for position. Shortly, slaves would be murdering each for the largest, most valuable rocks. Maybe Duncan would be among the fighters, Owen and Kerge too.
Too bad for them; but faint hearts don’t win freedom
.

Carter’s eyes flicked down towards the dead zone. The barren bone-scattered land was masked by outgassing from the stratovolcano, as was the hoary old smoker’s interior, but he suddenly caught a silvery glint from below. Something slipping through the smouldering cover like a shark… a steel-hulled predator. ‘Vandian patrol ship!’ yelled Carter. ‘Coming up below our rotors.’

‘I see it!’ called Alan. ‘Flying at six o’clock’

‘What the hell is it doing here?’ shouted Carter. ‘They should be sweeping the dead zone for mineral poachers, not passing through unstaked sky ten minutes before their slaves start swinging clubs at each other.’

‘We have to keep on making for the rock-storm,’ said Noah. ‘As far as they’re concerned, we’re just a scout pushed out desperately early, searching for a stake for a hungry station.’

‘Noah’s right,’ said Carter. ‘Hell, we can wave at them as they fly past. They can’t read minds. And we
are
searching for a stake. Nobody as eager as us in the air!’

His words were hopeful but his heart sank. He didn’t believe in coincidences, and his mind was racing with all the ways this escape attempt could have gone wrong.
What could have given us away?
Carter searched the clouds below. The patrol ship had vanished from sight, but then, the incredible speed those things could move at, it could be anywhere in the air. The roar of its engine was masked by the greater thunder emanating from the rumbling monster below.