The Black Lung Captain (30 page)

Frey whistled. 'This way!' he cried, beckoning them towards a doorway that led into a wide corridor.

'Why
that
way?' Malvery asked as they hurried over.

Frey looked lost for an answer. 'Just because,' he offered at length. 'Crake, cal your golem, eh? She's had her fun.'

'Bess! Come on!' Crake shouted. Bess came pounding eagerly through the debris. He patted her on the shoulder and pointed up the corridor. She lumbered off, and they folowed.

The smoke was thicker in the corridors, and it was hard to see more than a few dozen metres. Crake's eyes stung and he wanted to cough. Figures stumbled through the gloom ahead of them, caling out for help, asking questions, shouting orders. They fled at the sight of Bess.

The crew of the
All Our Yesterdays
was in disarray. The Awakeners didn't have the martial discipline of the Navy, or combat instincts of pirates and freebooters. They were scholars and preachers, who relied on their Sentinels for protection. This was not a craft intended for battle, and hardly anyone carried weapons or knew how to use them.

A short way along the corridor they came across a wounded man lying against the wal. He was smal and bald, wearing glasses with one lens cracked. Blood leaked from a gash in his forehead, staining his colar. He wore a white cassock with red piping, the uniform of a Speaker, the Awakeners' rank and file.

Frey crouched down in front of him. The man looked up at him, dazed.

'You're carrying a special cargo,' said Frey. 'Where is it?'

The Awakener focused, and his eyes hardened as he realised who they were. 'I'l never talk. The Alsoul wil protect m—'

Frey pistol-whipped him round the head with shocking speed. The man fel on his side, wailing and blubbering, holding his aching skul.

'Not doing a very good job so far,' said Frey. 'You think the Alsoul wil protect you from a bulet in the ear?'

'It's that way!' the Awakener cried, pointing up the corridor.

Frey grabbed him by the colar and puled him upright. 'Take us,' he said. He shoved the little man towards Malvery. 'Watch him, Doc.'

Malvery grinned and waved his shotgun. 'Don't think of running, now,' he advised his prisoner. Then he poked the barrel into his back. 'Lead on, mate.'

They went deeper into the craft, folowing their guide as he stumbled through the smoke. He was holding his head as if it would burst. People ran this way and that in the dim emergency lighting, arms over their mouths, coughing into their sleeves. Crake heard the murmur of distant flame, and once they heard an explosion that made the whole craft shiver.

The people they encountered were occupied with fighting smal fires or attempting to escape. Some wandered, blank-faced and shel-shocked, through the ruination. Occasionaly a Sentinel was brave or idiotic enough to stand up to the invaders, but they were gunned down in short order or pulverised by Bess.

Crake stepped over their corpses, and those of others kiled in the crash. Their eyes were wide and they stared at nothing. He dry-heaved at the sight. He'd seen dead men before, but he was too delicate to take it right now. He just wanted this whole affair to be over so he could find a bed and sink into oblivion.

The smoke got worse as they went on, and soon everyone was coughing except Jez. The crackle and snap of a fire was clearly audible now, and they could feel the stifling heat of it.

Frey stopped up ahead, at a corner where a corridor branched off from theirs. He peered round and held up a hand. 'Trouble,' he warned.

Crake caught him up and looked round the corner. Through the murk, he could just about make out the obstruction. The corridor was choked with torn metal and the floor had buckled upward, forming a jumbled barricade.

'I can't see anything,' Crake said.

'When you've been shot at as often as I have, you get used to assuming the worst,' said Frey. 'They'l be waiting for us.'

Crake wiped his tearing eyes, and as he did so he thought he saw someone moving behind the barricade. But when he looked again, he wasn't sure.

Frey went to their prisoner. 'Is there another way round?' he demanded.

'This is the only way,' said the Awakener. 'It's in a room at the end of that corridor.' Frey grabbed him by the colar and glared at him, searching for a lie. 'I swear by the Alsoul!' he cried, his voice high and fearful.

Crake took sour pleasure in seeing the prisoner cringe. He hated Awakeners even more than he hated overprivileged layabouts like Hodd. Them and their ridiculous faith, based on the thoroughly insane ramblings of the last king of Vardia. It would be comical if it weren't for the fact that half of the population believed in their rubbish. It was the Awakeners who championed the persecution of daemonists. Many good men and women had been hanged because of them.

Frey shoved the man away, having evidently decided he was teling the truth. 'Get out of here,' he said. The prisoner needed no second invitation.

Jez looked around the corner at the barricade, then back at her captain. 'Ful frontal assault?' she suggested cheerily.

Frey sighed. 'Why not?' He slapped Bess on the shoulder. 'You first, old girl.'

Bess thundered off with a roar. Bulets and screams greeted her as she piled into the barricade like a battering ram.

'That's stirred 'em up,' Malvery grinned.

'You have to admit, she's effective,' Frey said, loading his revolver.

'Are we going to help her at al?' Jez asked.

Frey snapped the drum closed. 'Let her mop up a bit first.' He counted off a few seconds, listening to the wails of Bess's unfortunate victims. 'Now.'

They ran for the barricade, cloaked by the smoke. Crake stayed low, slipping along the side of the wide corridor, mouth dry and throat tight. He was worse than useless in a firefight, but he couldn't leave Bess to do it alone.

Bess was already over the barricade by the time Frey and the others reached it. They scrambled between the twisted girders and plates of ripped metal, shooting at anyone the golem had missed. Crake heard more guns on the other side. He came across a man who'd been impaled by Bess, a spike through his guts, stil horribly alive. Silo pushed past and put him out of his misery with a shotgun.

He saw Jez, aiming and firing up the barricade through the smoke. A figure at the top jerked like a marionette and fel backwards. Bess was roaring somewhere out of sight, and men shrieked and swore. Blood pounded in Crake's head. He saw a figure scrambling along the barricade, aimed, and almost fired before Silo grabbed his hand and pushed it down.

'It's the Doc,' he grunted, and then headed up the slope.

Crake squinted, and saw that Silo was right. He slumped against a girder, overwhelmed with relief.
Stupid! Stupid!
He'd almost shot a friend.

Then he saw a movement, behind them, someone hiding in the rubble that they'd passed. He was squatting, his eye to a rifle, aiming upslope.

Crake couldn't see wel enough to know who it was, but the rifle gave them away. None of his companions carried rifles. He thrust out his arm with a yel and emptied his revolver in their general direction. The Sentinel flinched as bulets sparked off the barricade al around him. Then, rather surprised at finding himself unhurt, he switched his aim towards Crake.

A shotgun blast, deafeningly close to Crake's ear. The Sentinel flailed and disappeared.

Silo emerged through the murk, eyes bright in his narrow, beak-nosed face. He gave Crake a strange look, then grabbed him by the arm and propeled him up the slope to the crest.

Beyond the barricade was another barricade. The corridor had compressed like a concertina, leaving a narrow, junk-strewn battlefield between. Corpses lay here and there. Bess was busy making more. Frey, Malvery and Jez hid among the debris, picking off the Sentinels as they fled from the golem's wrath. Beyond the second barricade, the red glow of flames could be seen. Thick black smoke roiled along the ceiling.

Silo pushed Crake down as bulets came their way, and they began to creep through the forest of tangled metal. The heat and smoke at the crest were too much to stand for more than a few seconds. Crake tried to shoot at a fleeing Sentinel, but his gun clicked empty. He found a sheltered spot and fumbled some more bulets into the drum while Silo blasted away.

Then, al at once, the fear hit.

It came from nowhere, overwhelming, clawing at his throat, robbing him of breath. It was thick enough that it seemed like a physical weight, crushing him to the floor. He wanted to scream and run, but he couldn't move. He stared this way and that, eyes wide and desperate. filed with primal dread. To his right, he saw that Silo had been similarly affected. He was huddled down like a rabbit in the shadow of a hawk.

What's happening to us?

The makeshift battlefield had gone silent. Crake folded trembling fingers round the edge of his shelter and peered out.

There was a figure standing on the crest of the second set of battlements, backlit by the restless glow of the fire. It was cloaked, hooded and masked, dressed head to toe in close-fitting black leather. Crake felt his stomach knot into a bal at the sight.

An Imperator. One of the Awakeners' deadly elite. Men who could read your thoughts, who could scour a mind clean with their terrible gaze. The ultimate inquisitors.

Spit and blood. We're all dead meat.

The Imperator came walking unhurriedly down the slope of the barricade. The Sentinels were al gone now, dead at the hands of Bess or her alies, but the Imperator was not troubled at being outnumbered. No one dared to raise a gun to him. They were al afflicted with the same awful fear.

He was heading for the spot where Frey hid. Crake saw his captain go scrambling away on his hands and knees, shaking his head, begging incoherently. The Imperator drew a long black knife from his belt and walked relentlessly onward.

There was a screech of metal, and Crake's gaze went to Bess, who was puling aside a girder that was in her way. She was not crippled by fear like the rest of them, it seemed, but only bewildered by the sudden end to the violence. Seeing the Imperator advancing on Frey, she went lumbering in to attack.

The Imperator held up a dismissive hand. Bess froze, mid-stride, and toppled over with a crash. She didn't move again.

The sight was like a punch in the chest to Crake. He wanted to scream her name, but no noise would come. What had been done to her? Why wasn't she moving? Had she been put to sleep, the way he put her to sleep with his thraled whistle? Or had she been extinguished, like a candle? The thought that he might forever lose the chance to save his niece, to atone for his crime - it was more than he could possibly suffer. If that was the case, he'd rather die now.

The Imperator turned his black gaze to Frey, pinning him like an insect. Frey roled over on his back, whimpering. The Imperator put his boot to Frey's chest and shoved him down. He leaned over his victim, knife raised.

A gunshot made Crake jump. The Imperator staggered sideways, clutching his shoulder. Another, knocking the black-clad figure back further.

Jez, getting to her feet, pistol in her hand. Jez, and yet not Jez. There was a strange look to her now. Her usualy pale face had gone paler stil. Her hair hung lank, eyes dark, lips skinned back over her teeth, a snarl on her face. Something animal in the way she moved, slightly crouched. Feral.

The Imperator straightened. The bulets hadn't harmed him. Jez puled the trigger again, but the gun was empty. She tossed it aside, and as she did so, she
flickered.
One moment she was there, the next she was half a metre to her left, and the next she was back again. Quick enough to be a trick of the eye. But Crake saw it.

I knew it,
he thought.
I knew it all along.

The Imperator's grip on Crake's mind had weakened. The paranoia, the nameless horror, receded to bearable levels. In some distant, rational part of his mind, he found he
recognised
this feeling of horror that the Imperator inspired. In a strange way, it was familiar to him. He'd come across it before, to a lesser degree, in his experiments. It was the feeling of being close to something
wrong.
The body's instinctive reaction to something not of this world.

What manner of man is this?

The Imperator backed away from Jez, blade in his hand. Frey scrambled off gratefuly to cringe in a new hiding place. Jez prowled closer to the Imperator, her gaze fixed on him. Nothing physical had changed about her, but her
aspect
was different. Where once there had been a petite woman in a baggy jumpsuit, now there was something fearful. Something inhuman, alien. A creature that wore the shape of their navigator.

The Imperator was intimidated by her, his dark grandeur diminished. He readied his blade as she moved closer. Then, when she was close enough, he lunged.

Jez flickered. Suddenly, she seemed to be in three places at once: before him, beside him, behind him, flitting from one position to the next in the time it took to blink an eye. The Imperator's thrust hit nothing; Jez sprang on to him from his left, hands clutching the masked head. Her weight took him down to the ground. She smashed his skul twice against the floor, the second time accompanied by a grotesque crack. Then she tore his head off.

The effect was immediate. It was as if Crake had been gripped by an invisible hand, squeezing his chest, and now it had been released. He gasped like a drowning man reaching the surface. Next to him, Silo was experiencing similar relief.

It had an effect on Jez, too. She stood up and staggered backwards, the Imperator's head dangling from one hand. There was an expression of bewilderment on her face, a look of shock and fear. No longer was she the feral thing they'd seen a moment ago. Now she was smal, and scared. She stumbled for a few moments, and then her eyes roled back and she fel to the ground.

Crake hung on to a girder, letting the strength seep back into his body. The choking smoke and murk was getting thicker by the moment, but he breathed it anyway, and coughed. It was worth it, to be alive.