by Stephen Hunt
‘I was thinking more about the act of boarding and taking two airships in flight before they can be scuttled,’ said Jack. ‘It’ll be flash work up there.’
‘My strategy is sound,’ said Omar. ‘The Imperial Aerial Squadron are cowardly curs who need the protection of canvas and cabin just to brave the reach of the heavens. They won’t know how to operate your strange metal airship and will have their hands full with the prisoners they have made of your people. We shall swoop down on them with our claws reached out, like a flight of eagles taking a pair of fat pigeons.’
‘I thought the strategy came from your commander of many faces?’ said Jack.
‘Master Uddin values my advice,’ said Omar. ‘He asks it many times, recognizing the wisdom that I hold within me. Besides, the duty for all loyal guardsmen can be found in our oath to the ruler of rulers — this impostor Caliph Eternal must be toppled and the rightful light of lights returned to his throne to rule.’
Jack nodded. The oath a man makes. And what of the promises Jack had made to his brothers in the poorhouse, to come back for them with enough money to free them from that dirty, squalid place for good? To be together again as a family? I can only keep them if I live through today.
There had been a touch of iron in the young guardsman’s voice when he mentioned his oath. The kind of iron the leaders of the street gangs used back home when discussing which properties and marks to target for a robbery.
‘But there’s more than your oath at stake here,’ said Jack.
‘You are correct in that,’ said Omar. ‘The dogs who plotted this treason, the grand vizier and his minions and his precious Sect of Razat — they burnt my home and destroyed my inheritance and killed everyone I knew, everyone I loved. They have left me with nothing except my life among the guardsmen. Tell me, Jackelian, what would you do to such people as did that to you?’
What would he do?
‘Whatever I had to,’ said Jack.
‘And you will live to see it, Jack Keats,’ said Omar. ‘You will live to see the day I plunge my steel into their leaders. This I swear on the blood of my father.’
A pair of guardsmen emerged from the side of a tent holding long curled horns and blew a bugle-like summons, a haunting, echoing call. Everywhere around the camp, the draks’ riders appeared, guardsmen running towards the reins of their chosen mounts. Jack followed Omar to his creature, the sinuous neck rearing eagerly against the reins of the stable hands holding them, the young guardsman mounting the double saddle just behind the base of the neck first, extending a hand down to Jack to mount up behind him.
The stable hand reached up to pat the saddlebags beneath their feet. ‘All the grenades we can spare,’ he said, and tapping long dangling weaves of rope, added, ‘as well as propeller snarls for their engines.’
Omar raised his hand casually, as if to say, all this he already knew and did not need to be reminded of it.
‘Do you have the day’s smoke colours?’ asked the stable hand.
‘Yes,’ said Omar. ‘But I only need two of them. Red smoke for “dive and attack”, and green smoke for “release boarders”.’
‘May the Caliph Eternal’s blessings light your way. Tails up!’
A beating noise sounded, low at first, then louder and louder, like wet sheets being shaken out to dry, and Jack realized it was the talon wing of draks taking to the air. They were starting from the other end of the piece of land wedged between the hills, like a ripple of scaled flesh erupting down the valley. T-shaped silhouettes broke for the sky, pushing higher and higher as they curled around each other and filled the firmament with their din — the noise of their beating wings swelling as if a thousand angry spears were shaking in warriors’ mailed fists. On the rear of the saddle, Jack felt himself rock as their drak started to bound forward, its wings angling back as it built up speed, the ground shaking out dust with the weight of its charge. Omar was shouting something down to it, cracking his reins, but Jack was too terrified to make sense of the foreign-sounding cry, his knuckles white on the pommel of the double saddle. The ground below had almost disappeared in the mist of dust being driven up off the hard valley floor. The drak’s long neck was tilted down like the straight edge of a lance, and they were running through the kicked-up, wing-beaten powder of the draks who had taken off seconds earlier, now lost in the haze.
Jack willed himself not to bite his tongue. How did these monstrous creatures sense each other well enough not to pile into each other within such a damn soup? Omar shouted something back to him, and Jack was just hearing it as ‘Hold on!’, when the drak threw itself up and, still charging, fanned its wings out as though they were sails.
The first beat was followed by a second and a third as the drak angled up over the dust, the heads of its fellow flyers arrowing out behind them. To Jack, they resembled serpentine sea beasts emerging from the ocean on monstrously powerful wings. After four minutes, their drak gained its cruising altitude. Not so high that they would have needed the dangling breather masks Jack had seen being packed into the drak’s saddle bags, and well within the operating height of a pair of airships crossing clear skies over what they no doubt regarded as friendly territory. Now all of the guardsmen were in the air, the draks had formed into a double ‘V’ arrangement. Omar and Jack’s drak was towards the centre of the inner V’s left-hand wing. Such a formation, flying high, would resemble a flock of migrating birds to observers on the ground, with no way to scale the aerial legion against the cloudless, cerulean sky.
Omar pointed to the riders to their right with one of the big leather riding gloves he used to guide the reins. ‘There is your friend, the big one with a eunuch’s tonsure.’
Jack nodded. Henry Tempest. If the details of the pre-flight briefing he had attended still held true, all four Jackelians should be riding somewhere on the inner ‘V’. It was Jack and the commodore’s job to peel off and take back the Iron Partridge — the easier mission, with her guns theoretically silenced by the absence of her gunners and a foreign prize crew trying to keep control of the handful of RAN sailors they would have manning the airship’s stations. The captain of marines and Westwick were taking the harder task of assaulting the well-manned prison ship.
Jack’s mind went into a fugue as they flew for hours and hours, hypnotized by the cold winds and the beating sun above. The monotonously regular ground passing below like a backdrop painting from a stage set.
Eventually a faint spume of white smoke went up from the head of the formation — enemy sighted. The flight of draks began to wheel and climb and Jack was finding it harder to breathe. Each intake of air into his lungs felt as if two strong hands were pushing down onto his chest, restricting his muscles from working. Jack leant forward to tap Omar on the shoulder, indicating the saddlebags, and croaking: ‘Masks?’
‘No,’ Omar called back, flicking the long reins up to the drak’s vicious muzzle. ‘Enemy airships — running — semi-pressurized. Breach board will — be — our advantage.’
Our advantage. Jack was grateful they weren’t facing a fighting Jackelian crew — an experienced crew who would try to tire an attacking wing of draks by climbing further. Instead, it was the guardsmen who had taken up position at a higher altitude and, ready for a dive. Did the Imperial Aerial Squadron’s airships have their own version of a crow’s-nest dome topside and an h-dome on the bow, manned by experienced spotters with telescopes? And how diligent would they be flying over ‘safe’, friendly territory?
Then, there they were, below and ahead, two airships — the familiar glinting silhouette of the Iron Partridge, and to her port, the profile of a Cassarabian ’stat, matching the tortoise-like speed of the heavy prize vessel.
Red smoke fanned out from the head of the flight — the sight that every Jackelian sailor dreaded. Omar shouted something to Jack, just before the drak turned downwards and drew in its wings. As their monstrous steed plummeted, Jack realized he had called for ‘snarls’ — propeller snarls. He reached dow
n to the middle of the saddle, where the long weapons were dangling — sticky white fronds like hundreds of pieces of string bound in the middle by a leather circlet. RAN lore had it that the material was secreted from human-hybrid spiders kept scuttling about in some womb mage’s dungeon — but whether that was true or not was irrelevant to the effect they would have when impacting upon an airship’s rotors.
‘Port, forward!’ yelled Omar as the drak’s velocity increased still further, pointing to the Iron Partridge’s front engine, which grew larger with each second they plunged. ‘Throw — on the — brake.’
The wind was whipping the propeller snarl in Jack’s hand, the dull metal hull of the Iron Partridge rising up fast — a trick of the angle, as if the drak was stationary and it was the airship and ground being hurled up at them.
They began banking left, Jack’s spare hand clutching the saddle pommel tight as he pushed down into the stirrups with his boots, struggling to keep the propeller snarl level enough to hurl. Seconds away from the engine car and the drak’s wings cracked open, slowing and throwing them to one side. Jack hurled the propeller snarl and let the velocity of their fall carry it into the blurred disk of the engine car’s blades. Jack hardly caught the explosion of white chords in his wake, another drak’s flank coming close enough to theirs that he could have struck a match on the beast’s scales. They were manoeuvring through the diving press of the rest of the talon wing so fast that it felt as if his body had turned to lead, his weight doubled. As another drak banked off, clearing his view, Jack saw they were wheeling under the iron belly of the Iron Partridge. Her guns were silent, as were her engine cars, the lion-headed motors trailing oily smoke as their traction belts tried vainly to rotate her badly jammed blades.
Then the drak was out from under the airship’s shadow, and Jack saw that the Cassarabian aerostat was putting up more of a fight; a few puffs of cannon fire from the rubber-hooded ordnance along the hull aimed at the cloud of draks corkscrewing around her length. Riding a thermal, their drak soared up past the starboard plating of the Iron Partridge, angling around to pass the crow’s-nest dome.
There were fighters atop the hull and their drak angled itself to swoop down and trace a hull-scratching landing in the lee of the frill of mortar tubes. Just as agreed. Jack dismounted, landing heavily on the top plates as Omar cut the saddlebags containing the boarding gear to slide down next to him. As soon as its baggage was cut, the drak went scrabbling off the side of the airship to catch another thermal, clearing the space for the next landing.
It wasn’t easy to see the boarding party scurrying around the top of the airship with the sun floating directly astern, but there was one figure Jack would know anywhere — the commodore with his rolling mariner’s gait. He bustled over to Jack, a tinted pair of guardsman’s brass goggles strapped over his salt and pepper hair. ‘Tell me you’ve got the fuses, lad?’
‘I have,’ confirmed Jack, hefting the saddlebags.
‘You’ve come on a fair wind, then,’ said the commodore, puffing for breath at the altitude. He took the saddlebags and rifled through its contents as he walked. ‘I nearly had to put a gun to the head of the guardsmen’s armourer to get him to part with enough of his precious explosives to force our hatch. I told him that Jericho had our ship reinforced and sealed down as tight as a drum after that pair of Cassarabian birds used the hatch to board us, but the fool wouldn’t listen to me.’
Guardsmen were tying up rappelling lines around the mortar tubes — another of the commodore’s ideas. ‘The guns, lad,’ he’d said back at the camp. ‘They’ll be expecting us to come through the top hatches, and we’ll give them some fireworks there to suit. No, the rubber hoods of our thirty-two pounders are where you’ll guarantee finding an empty deck — for what skipper would put his men to guarding prisoners who could touch off a broadside against their sister ship? Our gunners will be chained up on the Cassarabian transport, and the skeleton crew they’re keeping will be console men and engine-room stokers.’
The truth of the commodore’s conjectures was about to be proved in the field by an experiment in demolition. Jack stripped the fuses as the commodore got back to the job of shaping the putty-like explosive substance around the sealed maintenance hatch on the hull.
‘While there’s pleasure to be had teasing open a transaction-engine lock,’ the commodore wheezed to Jack as he worked, ‘this is the other side of a cracksman’s art. And look at the mortal cheap rubbish they’ve given us to work with. Sweating tears in the sun, volatile enough to split the drak that carried it here in half.’
‘I know locks,’ said Jack. I had enough practice back home. If I hadn’t, I might not have ended up here.
‘Nothing to learn from old Blacky, eh? If I’d been there with you in the vaults of Lords Bank we wouldn’t have come away empty handed. There’s a time for the cerebral game, and there’s a time for the physical game, and a little fun to be had combining the blessed two.’
‘They were pumping in dirt gas,’ said Jack, ‘and the bank’s guards were coming at us from above, with the police down in the sewers.’
‘That’s what this paste is for,’ said the commodore, running a finger down the explosives pushed into the wedge of the hatch beneath them. ‘Not too much. Not too little. Seal the vents and let the bank’s guards drink their own soup. Seal the sewer tunnels and make sure the only rats Middlesteel’s finest catch are the furry four-legged variety. That’s the problem with training just on transaction engines. Give a fellow a hammer and every problem starts to look like a nail.’
‘And what did I look like to you when Captain Jericho sent you to get me from prison?’ asked Jack.
‘Like a diamond in the rough, Mister Keats. In need of a little polishing.’ The commodore drew one of the matches he usually used to light his pipe. ‘And now let me show you what just enough looks like.’
He lit each of the four fuses pushed into the corners of the hatch and there was a dull thump as the hatch jumped up out of its hinges. ‘And that’s what you get when you ask that incompetent sod Mister Pasco to seal a hatch.’
At the sound of the hatch being blown, the guardsmen who’d fixed their lines to the mortar tubes began rappelling down both sides of the airship, the soldiers standing behind Jack and the commodore pulling at the broken hatch and lifting it out of the hull plates.
Drawing his pistol, Jack made to move forward, but the commodore laid a hand on his shoulder as the guardsmen piled past. ‘And here’s your last lesson, lad. Never be the first into the breach. That’s what the army calls the forlorn hope; you need a taste for death to accept that poisoned chalice.’
The dying followed quickly enough, the sounds of shouts and the rattle of pistol fire echoing around the enclosed corridors only seconds after the guardsmen stormed below.
‘Second wave, lad,’ said the commodore, making for the maintenance ladder revealed by his demolition art. ‘We don’t want our drak-riding allies thinking we’re yellow.’
As they had anticipated, resistance from the prize crew was as light as the numbers on board the vessel, a handful of corpses in the uniforms of the Imperial Aerial Squadron marked the deadly passage of the guardsmen. With their dark leather uniforms oiled against the elements, bandoliers of shells, grenades, knives and aviator goggles, the guardsmen looked like the aerial pirates from some cheap Jackelian penny-dreadful, their manners as fierce as the edges of their blades.
Jack felt like an impostor as he followed in their bloody wake — wearing the tattered Jackelian Royal Aerostatical Navy uniform that the party had secreted in their baggage during their travels through Cassarabia in the vain hope that changing into it if they were close to being captured would save them a spy’s fate. ‘We’ll go back on board our ship like fine Jackelian gentlemen,’ as the commodore had boasted.
The pair of fine Jackelian gentlemen followed the boarding party into the transaction-engine chamber just in time to stop three guardsmen from testing their scimitars on Coss Sh
aftcrank, the steamman fending them off with a stoker’s shovel while another two guardsmen finished off the sentry who had been watching over the room.
‘He’s one of ours, the metal lad!’ shouted Jack. ‘Coss, belay your shovel!’
Coss warily lowered his shovel as the guardsmen withdrew to clear out the rest of the airship. ‘Those are the caliph’s own guardsmen, Jack softbody. Kiss my condensers, but has the world turned upside down while I have been chained up inside here?’
‘I think that would depend on which caliph you are,’ said Jack.
‘Explanations later, old steamer,’ said the commodore. ‘Anyone in drak-riding leathers is on our side. Anyone in Imperial Aerial Squadron uniforms you can clump with that old coal shovel of yours. Now, would you know if there’s anyone resembling a womb mage on board the Iron Partridge?’
‘There is such a one in the surgeon’s bay,’ said Coss. ‘Or at least so I heard from our cabin boy who has been topping up my water supply.’
‘Prize crew and prisoners?’ asked the old officer.
‘There’s around twenty of us and fifty of them on board the Iron Partridge. All the officers and the rest of our men are chained up on board an escort vessel.’
‘Is Jericho alive over there?’ asked Jack.
‘Indeed he is,’ said Coss. ‘Along with our cowardly Loa-cursed fool of a vice-admiral. Tuttle softbody surrendered the ship as quick as he could strike our colours when we ran into five enemy vessels along the edge of the Empty Quarter.’
‘Ah well, the only battles that ever counted for Tuttle were the ones fought around a dining table in Admiralty House,’ said the commodore. He looked over at the boilers, cold and shut. ‘What happened to the blessed ship? How’s she doing?’
‘The Cassarabians don’t trust our automatic systems. They think they’re cursed. We’ve been flying like a brick on full manual control ever since we surrendered.’
‘We’ll fire her back up later,’ said the commodore, leaving for the exit. ‘Right now we need to get down to the surgeon’s bay before their wicked womb mage realizes there’s been another change of ownership on board the Iron Partridge.’
