The Black Lung Captain (53 page)

So I suggest you put your mind to the task, ma'am.'

Jez barely heard him. The crackling in her nerves had got stronger and stronger. The power in the sphere was reaching out to her, flowing into her, overwhelming her. She could feel the onset of a trance, the flip into the surreal other world of the Manes. She fought against it.

I can't be responsible for this.

Thousands of lives. Al that death would be on her head. Because she was a Mane. Because of the daemon that dwelt inside her.

I can't.

The Manes would come, and they'd give the Invitation to anyone they could, and they'd kil everyone else.

But there was Frey, stil struggling, even with a gun to his head. Frey, her captain, the man who'd given her a home on the
Ketty Jay
when she'd despaired of ever finding one again.

'Thirty seconds,' said Crattle, who was consulting a pocket watch. Trinica looked on, unmoved by Frey's plight.

It wasn't a matter of making it work. It was a matter of
preventing
it from working. The sphere
wanted
to be used. Its power leaped eagerly to her, threatening to tip her, to bring on the trance that she knew would be the final step in activating it. Once she let her daemon have its head, it would cal its brethren. The eager voices from the Wrack howled encouragement, battering at her resistance.

Al those people on one side of the equation. Frey on the other.

'Twenty seconds.'

How could she watch his hand chopped off, then another, then a foot? If she held out now, could she realy hold out til the end? What if she crumbled halfway through? That would be worse than death to Frey, to leave him without hands, and she'd stil have lost.

It came down to a choice. Between the man she knew, and the thousands she didn't.

'Ten.'

All those people. Because I'm a Mane. I should have died back there in the snows that day.

But she hadn't. And that was part of her now. For better or worse.

'Five.'

She gave up her resistance. The sphere took her like a flood. The trance was almost instantaneous. Between blinks, the world turned to a hyper-real twilight.

Her senses became superhumanly clear. She could hear guns firing in the hangar, a sound that had been muffled by the rock until now. Something was up. Bess was awake. She could hear her footsteps.

'Four.'

But whatever help might come, it would come too late to stop Frey being maimed. And she wouldn't alow that.

'Three.'

The silver lines on the sphere glowed with a spectral light, beaming out from within. Crattle stopped counting. He stared, entranced.

Then there was a terrible shriek, a hurricane of sound that tore through the room and blasted her senses white.

And with that, it began.

Thirty-Five

No Ordinary Storm —

Bedlam In The Sanctum — Frey's Authority

Harkins clutched the shotgun tight as he came down the stairs into the cargo hold of the
Ketty Jay.
He was trembling with fear and an awful, nauseous excitement. Every shadow could be the one hiding his enemy. Part of him dreaded the sight of that damned despicable cat. Another part, that voice which sometimes got defiant when there was nobody around to chalenge it, was hoping Slag would show his face after al. A squeeze of the trigger, a bloody puff of fur, and al his troubles would be over.

Oh, who was he kidding? The noise alone would probably scare him witless. He'd deliberated for a long time between pistol and shotgun, on that basis. In the end, he'd picked the one that most suited his shooting style. He always closed his eyes and cringed away whenever he fired at someone, so accuracy was impossible. The shotgun was louder, but the scatter effect made it a bit more likely that he'd actualy hit something.

He swalowed and made himself go down the stairs. Crates and boxes and vents: al possible ambush points. He wished he hadn't come aboard at al. But he had to get a gun. That was the thing. He had to get a gun, to save Jez.

He'd sat with his heart in his mouth, listening via Crake's daemonic earcuff to the gunfight at Grist's warehouse. He thriled every time she spoke. She was so strong, so capable. He imagined himself battling alongside her, grim-faced, feling guards with a keen aim. And after they'd won, she'd be kind to him. She'd offer soothing words and encouragement, the way she sometimes did.

But then he'd heard the hangar doors slamming. Jez's voice. 'It's a trap!' And he knew they were betrayed.

After that, there was little more than a garble. The earcuffs had been taken off them, it seemed. The signal, weak at this distance, became weaker stil. Sounds were muffled. It was hard to tel what was going on. Once in a while, he heard voices he knew. The Captain's, for one. And Jez. Sweet Jez.

She was stil alive. She was in trouble. And he was the only one who could help her.

The past month had been hard on him. He'd spent the majority of it in the Firecrow's cockpit. It would have been easier if they hadn't been hopping around towns in the arctic, but the Firecrow had no heating when the engines weren't running, so he spent his nights cocooned in blankets, shivering. Harkins wasn't a reader - in fact, he didn't do much of anything except fly - so a large proportion of his time had been spent staring into space and thinking of nothing. The need to relieve himself drove him out now and then. He'd head into whatever town was nearby and use what facilities he could find. His contact with the crew was minimal.

The only person he saw with any regularity was Jez, who brought him his meals.

He'd looked forward to those visits with a mixture of anticipation and dread. He loved to see her. She'd usualy inquire how he was doing, even though she was often distracted. He'd babble something, and his tongue would run away with him, and eventualy he'd stumble to a stop. It was embarrassing that she should see him that way. She knew why he was hiding. He was afraid of the cat. He thought that maybe she seemed a little less kind to him nowadays, and wondered if it was something to do with that. Had he failed her? Or did she have other things on her mind? After al, it must be a burden being a Mane.

Pinn had told him the news, gleefuly, during one of the rare moments when he wasn't depressed about his own sorry love life. 'Your girlfriend's a Mane!' he crowed. 'She's the walking dead! How'd that be, eh? Humping a dead one!' He leered horribly and made a pumping motion with his hips. 'I always pegged you as a necromofeliac.'

Harkins had never heard of one of those before, but it didn't sound like something he wanted to be. Stil, he wasn't particularly concerned by the news. Alive or dead or some combination of the two, she was the same old Jez to him. What did concern him was how the rest of the crew began to talk about her after it became known that she was a Mane. They were mistrustful and uncertain. She didn't deserve that.

He tried to keep her spirits up when she came to visit him, but he always got tongue-tied. Did she think he was like the others, muttering behind her back? He hoped not, but it was hard to tel. Damn, why couldn't he just make his mouth say what his heart felt? Why was he born with a knot between his brain and his voicebox?

Wel, actions spoke louder than words anyway. And he needed to be brave. That fat fool Pinn had deserted them good and proper, so there was no one left but him. He needed to be strong for Jez. Somehow, he was going to save her.

He wondered how he'd possibly find the courage to single-handedly defeat Grist's gang of smugglers, if he couldn't deal with one elderly cat.

He hurried down the stairs, across the cargo hold and down the ramp. The Cap'n would have chewed him out for leaving it open, but he needed his escape route clear. He'd left the hood of his cockpit up as wel, just to be extra sure. If he spotted Slag, it would only take him seconds to reach the safety of the Firecrow.

He scampered off the
Ketty Jay
and came to a halt with a sigh of relief. The cat wouldn't folow him out here. Stupid animal. He closed up the ramp and locked it by punching in a code on the exterior control panel, located on one of the
Ketty Jay'
s rear landing struts.

That was when he saw what was happening to the sky.

The morning had been chily and grey when he entered the
Ketty Jay
in search of the weapons locker. A shapeless haze of cloud had hung overhead, and the sun had been low on the horizon, shining with a sharp, glittering light.

But things were different now. The sky had curdled and darkened. The wispy, inoffensive sheet of cloud had turned thick and black. Pulses of light flickered in its depths. A strong, icy wind had struck up, blowing the ear flaps of Harkins' cap against his cheeks. Despite the gathering storm, the sun was stil visible in the east, between the cloud and the horizon: a shining pupil in a slitted eye. It cast a spectral light over the bleak vista.

Harkins didn't like this. Not at al. There was an eerie, oppressive quality to the atmosphere. He had keen senses when it came to detecting threats. He'd had a lot of practice at being scared, and he was good at it.

This was no ordinary storm.

The clouds were moving, but it wasn't the wind that was pushing them. They were swirling, slowly at first but getting faster, as if stirred by a spoon. Gathering, becoming dense, drawing inward towards a single spot. At that point, the pulses of light had reached a frenzy. The cloud roiled and turned. Silent lightning threw out giant sparks.

Harkins became aware that he was making a low, distressed moan. His feet were rooted to the tarmac. The crewmen of nearby craft had stopped their work and were looking up. Tractors sputtered to a halt as their drivers tipped back their caps and squinted skyward.

This was bad. Somehow, he knew this was very, very bad.

The pulses of light at the point where the clouds were gathering became faster and more frequent. They accelerated to a flickering strobe, and finaly to a dazzling burst of whiteness that bleached the city below. The observers shielded their eyes and turned away.

The cloud had colapsed in on itself, and was being sucked away like water down a drain. It was as if the very sky was being consumed, eaten up by the hungry maelstrom.

And out of this sky, through the tunnel of the great, swirling vortex, came the dreadnoughts.

Frey blinked. For a few seconds, al he could see was white. Then darkness began to soak into the picture, giving form to the shapes around him. Fuzzy shapes and blurred colours made themselves known.

Uh?
he thought, which was pretty much the best description he could come up with for his mental state at the time.

His body was pins and needles al over, numb and painfuly a-tingle at the same time. His tongue loled in his mouth, barely under his control. There was a loud whistle in his ears.

Gradualy he came back to the world, as his overloaded senses restored themselves.

He was in the ancient sanctum somewhere beneath Grist's compound. People were picking themselves up off the ground. Grist was nearby, shaking his head, dazed. Trinica was getting to her feet, leaning heavily on a table in case her legs betrayed her. Jez lay on her side, eyes open, staring into space. The metal sphere was no longer in her hands.

Then he heard something. A rapid thump, growing louder. Like someone running. Someone very heavy.

He looked up.

Bess.

The sanctum doors were set horizontaly in the roof of the sanctum. The golem plunged through them like a cannonbal, crashing on to the stairs with a roar. Her tiny eyes glimmered behind her face-grile, bright in the gloom.

Bess was in a rare fury this morning.

Panic seized the room. Grist's men scrambled to their feet, flailing and disoriented, desperate to escape the terror that had descended on them. But there was no way out except past Bess.

She thundered down the steps and backhanded the nearest man into the wal with enough force to shatter the brickwork. Her charge brought two more men within her reach, who were too slow to get out of the way. She snatched them up by their necks and smashed their heads together, splattering herself in blood, bone and brain matter. Frey winced. That had to hurt.

Grist and his men had found their guns by now, and were rushing for whatever cover they could find, aiming futile shots at the enraged golem in their midst.

Crake, Silo and Malvery came scrambling through the ruined doors and opened up with their own weapons, picking their targets. One of Grist's men caught a bulet and went down, clutching the back of his leg. He fel into Bess's path, and she stamped him flat.

Frey didn't know how his crew had got out or how they'd got their guns back, but he was damned pleased to see them. He turned his attention to Jez, who was stil immobile, eyes unfocused. He went to check her breathing, then realised there was no point. He poked her in the nose instead. She blinked. A sign of sort-of life. Good enough for the moment.

The sphere. Where was the sphere?

He cast about for it. There! It had roled free of Jez's hands and was lying near the base of the pedestal, beneath the daemon cage.

Grist had seen it too. Their eyes locked across the distance between them. Then both ran for it at the same moment.

Frey raced through the corridor of gunfire. Bulets scored the air around him. Bess was a belowing mountain in the gloom, flinging furniture this way and that.

But al his focus was on that sphere. He wasn't even sure what he'd do with it, now that it had been activated. But he knew he didn't want Grist to have it.

Both captains lunged together, and both laid hands on the sphere. They fel into a scrabbling tangle, each fighting to pul the prize from the other's grip. Grist's grimacing face was close to Frey's: hot, smoky breath, the smel of sweat and dirt. His eyes were dark with madness, that terrible rage that Frey had seen before.

Frey fought hard, but Grist was a bul, who outweighed him by some considerable fraction. The contest was brief. Grist yanked the sphere from his fingers, and as Frey clutched for it, he drove a clublike fist into Frey's bely.