Iron Jackal (64 page)

When she got out, everyone was shouting. She blinked dust from her eyes and looked back along the flank of the vehicle. The machine gun emplacement was getting smashed to pieces by Grudge’s autocannon. Samandra Bree slipped lightly down the side of the truck, dropping onto one of the wheels and then to the ground. She swung out her shotguns and started blasting as the Sammie guards came running at them from the side.

Ashua couldn’t help taking a moment to marvel. There was something magnetic about the sight of a Century Knight in action. This wasn’t the scrappy, hectic gunfighting she’d seen on the street, or the sterile, regimented form of the soldier. Nothing was random, and everything was fluid. Samandra was always moving, but she always knew where she was moving to. There was a lever-action shotgun in each hand. Between each shot, she spun the shotgun fast as an eyeblink, chambering a new round as she did so. Every time she pulled the trigger, Sammies at impossible range went down.

These
were the Century Knights she’d heard so much about, the heroes she’d idolised as a child. These were the men and women who let nothing stand in their way.

‘Get inside! We’ll take care o’ these fellers!’ Samandra called over the booming of Grudge’s autocannon. The others were already clambering over the front of the dump truck, picking their way through the rubble and down the smashed front steps into the power station. Ashua joined them.

She found herself in a cavernous corridor. It was lit by some unknown source, but the faded hue of the walls was dark and vaguely menacing. A thin ridge followed the curve of the ceiling like a spine, and exquisitely fashioned ribs ran its length. There were small signs of decay, cracks in places and bits broken off here and there, but it still retained a louring grandeur.

Oh, Maddeus
, she thought.
Gloomy and elegant. You’d have loved this place
.

Bess leaped off the muzzle of the dump truck and crashed to the ground in front of her, making her jump. Malvery slapped her on the back.

‘No time for daydreaming, eh?’ he said cheerily.

‘It’s alright for you,’ she said, rolling her neck. ‘You were in the
back
of the truck.’

‘Ah, you’re a tough little thing. You’ll live,’ he said, and then strode off to help Pinn, who was struggling his way down the front of the vehicle with only one working arm.

She’d have thought it condescending from anyone but Malvery. But she didn’t like to be snappy when the doctor was around. In fact, his bluff, comradely manner made her feel quite good about herself. He inspired an unfamiliar emotion in her. Trust. He just seemed, well . . .
decent
, somehow. And Ashua couldn’t remember that last time she’d thought that about anyone. Not even Maddeus.

A smile touched the corner of her mouth. Maybe Maddeus had the right idea after all, forcing her in with this lot. Maybe he’d been looking for someone to hand her off to for a long time, ever since he knew he was dying. She wondered how much he’d already known about the crew of the
Ketty Jay
when she came to him with the news that they were working together. She wondered, in fact, who had started the chain of whispers that led Frey to her in the first place.

Maddeus wasn’t a decent man. But he looked out for her. He always had.

She put thoughts of her erstwhile guardian from her mind, before they could threaten her. Night was the time for those thoughts, when she was alone in her nook in the hold, and the black sadness came for her. For now, she would only permit herself the hard, sharp thoughts of a survivor.

The others were grouping up now, and together they hurried further into the building, with Bess leading the way.

Ashua flexed her hand on the grip of her pistol and followed. This place unsettled her. She’d spent her life in the bomb-torn ruins of Rabban, and later in the close, dusty streets of Shasiith. She’d never seen anything like this, and it made her feel threatened.

But she’d deal with it. The way she dealt with that golem, and the fact that Jez had turned into a daemon right in front of her eyes. Because that was how she lived. She took the world as she found it. She didn’t expect a thing and she didn’t give a whole lot back. What was, was, and that was pretty much all there was to it.

The corridor bent ahead of them, and the golem disappeared. Ashua hung back, keeping her eyes peeled for soldiers. She heard shouts and gunfire, and Bess roaring, and then a wet rending sound. A Sammie screamed briefly for his mother.

By the time Ashua came round the curve of the corridor, the screaming had stopped and the floor was bloody. Bess was chasing a couple of guards, who were fleeing for their lives. Pinn kicked someone’s detached arm out of his path.

They came to a junction where three corridors gathered in, their curves flowing into one another as if they were liquid frozen in place. Bess was waiting for them, the guards having escaped her. Bree and Grudge caught them up there, Samandra reloading as she came.

‘They’ll keep their heads down for a little while,’ said Samandra, thumbing over her shoulder to indicate the way they’d come. Grudge was backing up the corridor behind her, his autocannon slung low on his hip. ‘Won’t be long in followin’ us, though. We’ll have to fight our way out like we fought our way in. And they’ll be waitin’ out there in numbers, you can bet on that.’

‘Bess,’ said Silo. ‘How tough you think these walls are?’

Bess put her fist through one.

‘Reckon we can make our own exit when the time comes,’ said Silo.

‘Colden!’ Samandra called to her hulking partner. She pointed at the hole in the wall. ‘Now why can’t you do that?’

‘Ain’t strong enough, I guess,’ came the humourless reply.

Samandra winked at Silo. ‘Colden. He’s a real card. Keeps me in stitches.’

Silo showed his customary lack of reaction.

‘Apparently you Murthians ain’t exactly a laugh a minute yourselves,’ Samandra commented.

‘Ain’t much about our situation that’s funny,’ Silo replied.

Ashua was used to Silo’s inscrutable manner by now. At first she thought he was arrogant in his silence, a haughty freed slave aping the style of the Sammie nobles. Later, she wondered if he was just dumb. But she’d noticed the quiet respect the others gave him, and she’d seen the way they all accepted his command without question. Even Crake, who was the smartest man on the crew in her opinion. So maybe there was more to Silo than he showed.

They came across a few more Sammies as they made their way deeper into the power station. Not all were guards; some were technicians, or perhaps scholars of some kind. They let those ones go, but nobody who was armed escaped Samandra’s shotguns. She was almost casual about the way she took them out. Ashua admired her callousness. There was no room for sentiment in their world.

There weren’t many Sammies on the inside, and the intruders kept up such a rapid pace that nobody had time to organise against them. The corridors curved and branched, rarely straight and rarely displaying a sharp angle, running like veins through the building.

The rooms they saw had all been cleared of furniture and debris, but what was left was fascinating enough. There was a long chamber with formations like stalactites hanging down from the ceiling, black and glittering, made up of millions of tiny cuboids that lit up in curiously organised ripples. There was a room of many platforms, a three-dimensional maze of smooth dark ceramic, and a room full of sunken trenches that twinkled with blinking lights.

Then Samandra, who had been scouting ahead, came hurrying back down the corridor. She beckoned to them, a strange smile on her face.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said. ‘You
gotta
see this!’

Forty-Two

The Dreadful Engine – Oblongs – Bess Meets the Locals – The Bridge

A
in’t right
, thought Silo.
Ain’t right at all
.

The room that Samandra had led them to was no more remarkable than any other he’d seen in this place. But there was a large elliptical hole in the far wall, where once there might have been a window. The raucous noise of machinery came from beyond. And it was through that window that they saw the thing which had got Samandra so excited.

They looked out over a chamber of breathtaking size. It must have spanned the whole width of the power station’s central building, because it was possible to see the massive flanks of the hourglass structures at either end. The sloped sides of their lower halves swirled with gas and lightning, and every few seconds the vast rotating arms that stirred them went swooping by with a low rumble.

The near side of the chamber was taken up with dozens of black oblongs, standing upright and arranged in staggered rows. They were five metres on their longest side. Slow lightning writhed beneath their surfaces.

Beyond them, the floor suddenly dropped away, and a narrow bridge reached over a wide trench to a small semicircular platform. There, Silo could see what looked like a bank of panels and controls. They were dwarfed by the machine that loomed over them, as if they were the keyboard to some monstrous pipe organ. It was the machine that drew his eye and appalled him. A dreadful engine, unlike anything he’d ever seen before.

It was a mass of thrashing movement. Pistons pumped in and out, brass arms rotated, gears clanked and shifted. In amid the more familiar elements were stranger ones. Cylinders of bottled lightning, flickering inside coloured gas. Rows of spikes that tilted rapidly back and forth in sequence, and shot sparks when they came near the conducting rods that stood opposite. Globes that crackled with energy. Fields of tiny connections which shivered and switched back and forth.

The metal parts he could understand. The lightning fascinated him. But that wasn’t the problem.

The damned thing had
muscles
.

At first he couldn’t be sure of what he was looking at. It was only as he watched them stretch and flex that he recognised them by their movement. They were muscles, giant muscles sewn into the machinery, bulging and loosening with the tug and thrust of the parts around them. Taut diaphragms stretched in the spaces between the metal. Tendons pulled. The fleshy parts were a deep red-black, and glistened with lubrication.

Pinn watched the muscles pumping, an expression of utter disgust on his face. Eventually, he gave his verdict. ‘That is bloody horrible.’

‘If there was anythin’ needed blowin’ up in this whole city, I reckon it’s that,’ said Malvery.

Samandra pointed down at the bridge, and the small semicircular platform at the other side. ‘There,’ she said.

Silo grunted his agreement. ‘Move out!’ He ushered them towards an oval doorway at the side of the room.

The doorway led to a gallery overlooking the engine chamber, and from there they found steps leading to the chamber floor. The chamber seemed even larger from down here. The vast ceiling had the same dark, supple grandeur of the corridors they’d passed through. He could appreciate the size of the hourglass structures now: their brass-and-bone shells towered to either side of the great machine. The whole place was like a temple, and it might have been wondrous, if not for the repulsively organic engine throbbing and churning at its heart.

Rows of black oblongs stood between them and the bridge. The rows were set irregularly, so they would have to pick their way through. Pinn, who had been one of the first down the steps, was staring into one of the oblongs, watching the progress of the blue lightning as it moved slowly across the darkness.

‘What are they?’ Pinn asked.

‘Batteries,’ said Silo. ‘Best guess, anyway.’

‘Then what are
they?
’ Malvery asked. The doctor had turned around and was looking behind them. The wall to either side of the stairs was covered with dozens of strange bulges. They were bulbous at one end and thinned to a point, almost two metres end to end. They looked like seed pods, except that there was machinery integrated into the leathery white exteriors, a framework of metal with many small dials and gauges set into it.

Before anyone could advance an opinion, they heard shouts from overhead. Sammies, somewhere out of sight. Reinforcements.

‘Don’t touch nothin’,’ said Silo, and they moved on into the forest of oblongs. This whole damn place set him on edge. The sight of that engine . . . It was against nature, against Mother. Metal and flesh, fused. Was it
alive
in some way?

He spat. Didn’t want to think about the possibilities. What kind of people built a thing like that?

As they moved further into the rows, they saw Sammies emerging onto the gallery above them. One of them aimed his rifle, but another man knocked the barrel aside angrily. Silo couldn’t hear them well enough to make out the words, but it seemed to be a heated discussion.

Then, nothing. Nobody fired. Nobody made any move to descend the stairs and pursue.

Silo didn’t like that one bit.

‘Why aren’t they following?’ Pinn asked.

Silo saw something move out of the corner of his eye, further down the row. He spun towards it; but whatever it was, it had moved out of sight. After a moment, he wondered if there had been anything there at all.

‘Keep goin,’ he said, his voice low and wary. He kept staring at the spot where he’d seen the movement, but he saw nothing more. After a moment, he took his own advice.