Jack Cloudie j-5

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘We’re feeding the boilers with everything we’ve got,’ the steamman’s voice came back faintly over the whine of noise at the other end. ‘You’re going to need to keep your cardsharping to your desk on the bridge, I don’t have time to help you. The calculation drums are turning so fast inside the chamber, they’re smoking oil faster than I can lube the machinery. We’re burning the drums out up here.’

  Overheating with less than half the ship’s systems activated? What had Jack been thinking of, believing that he could run the vessel as her mad, dead designer had intended? Setting our iron genie free of her bonds.

  ‘We’re about to receive the lower squadron’s broadside,’ announced Lieutenant McGillivray behind Jack. ‘And the second squadron will open their bomb bays above us, if we last long enough for them to overfly us.’

  ‘We’ll survive that long, Mister McGillivray,’ said Jericho. ‘Their broadside will be incendiary shells, designed for a normal airship. Even carper will burn if it’s made hot enough — but we’re going to find out what this knightly mailshirt we’re wearing is good for, eh. Bosun, what’s our windage?’

  ‘Southerly, sir,’ called the bosun. ‘We’re tacking against it, they’re riding it down onto us.’

  ‘That fleet’s admiral knows his trade, then,’ said Jericho. ‘Wind right behind them. In about a minute, the lower squadron’s propellers are going to throw their rotors into full reverse and brake their formation, just as they release those aerial mines of theirs. The other squadron will rise above their mines and let the wind carry their full ordnance onto us — I believe they’re counting on opening their bomb bays above a floating wreck. Mister Keats, how are you doing there?’

  ‘Still restarting the ship’s automation, captain,’ called Jack.

  ‘Helm, when they release their mines, throw our engine cars into reverse, make it look as if we’re trying to avoid the mine field at first, but then I want you to plot a course directly through their ordnance.’

  ‘Sir?’ queried the ship’s master pilot.

  ‘Their mines are attracted to RAN canvas, man, not metal plate, d’you see? The lower squadron will pull back to avoid the killing zone. Their mines are going to become a buffer zone that will shield us from being raked at close quarters.’

  ‘And the ’stats that are climbing to overfly us?’

  ‘So much the better, we need to be exactly where they seem to want us, master pilot,’ boomed Jericho. ‘Put us right under the shadow of their bomb bays.’

  ‘Squadron on our altitude is braking, sir,’ barked the watch. ‘Just as you said. Multiple launches from their bomb bays. Seventy, eighty, no, upwards of a hundred aerial mines in the air and running.’

  Jack glanced up, the dark chutes of a host of mines blowing towards them, a swarm of charges spinning underneath shadows of billowing fabric. Jack had to fight to keep his eyes on the console in front of him rather than watching the moon-silhouetted cloud of death sweeping through the night towards the Iron Partridge.

  The airship wasn’t responding fast enough, Jack realized. The entire voyage he had spent trying to keep this beast of a craft slumbering and now he was trying to rouse her. His hands slippery with sweat, he cleared the dust off the dial indicating the transaction-engine chamber’s processing cycles, its dial hand twitching in the blue zone. They were still running too cold.

  Have I murdered everyone on the ship? Seconds away from hitting the enemy and the Iron Partridge was stuck in a fatal no-man’s land somewhere between full automation and complete manual flight.

  Jack picked up the speaking tube to the transaction-engine chamber. ‘I can’t lift all the seals on the automation, Coss. They’re fighting my overrides. I’m not going to have enough time to do this …’

  ‘You’re acting as though your job is still to keep the ship locked down,’ the steamman’s voice sounded back. ‘Kiss my condensers, but you have all the help you need, Jack softbody. You have the airship herself!’

  The airship. Yes, Jack had the airship. His hands danced over the punch-card writer, composing a last desperate sequence of commands that was intended to let the Iron Partridge perform surgery on herself, allow the iron genie to crack her own bottle.

  There was a second where Jack had fed the punch card into the injection mechanism before the hiss of the card being sucked out of his fingers merged with the decompression of the bridge as a mine detonated volcanically against their hull. Something happened, written in fire and debris and confusion. His consciousness blacked out for a second. The detonation sent him sprawling into his equipment and down, hard, to the deck.

  Jack’s head throbbed in agony as he pulled himself to his feet. The impact of the blast had turned the Iron Partridge into the wind, and smoke was billowing past the control car’s cracked canopy, the chutes of the enemy’s aerial mines visible through knives of broken glass, mines floating all around them like night-borne seeds blown off a meadow.

  Jericho lay sprawled across the deck, part of the canopy embedded in his chest. The captain was just conscious enough to recognize Jack stumbling over to kneel down by his side.

  ‘Is the helm — able to answer our control, Mister Keats?’

  Jack repeated the skipper’s faint query towards a group of sailors pulling the two dead pilots off their stations, then nodded in confirmation at the captain as the crew wrestled the Iron Partridge back onto her course.

  Captain Jericho tried to turn his head as a clacking sound passed through the vessel, low at first like crickets chirruping in grassland, then louder and louder. Piston arms extending, pneumatic systems connecting, plates opening, steam-tensioned clockwork powering up, spars locking into place. A thousand hungry, chattering systems drawing mechanical breath for the first time, manual overrides themselves being overridden. A minute before, the Iron Partridge had been a dead thing, imperfectly flown by a full-sized crew of hundreds of sailors. Now we’ve been demoted to mere components within the machine.

  ‘I believe you were — successful — Mister Keats,’ coughed Jericho, blood spilling from his mouth across his high collar. He gestured for Lieutenant McGillivray to come over. ‘Under — full — automation the master cardsharp has — equal rank to the first lieutenant. Given — First Lieutenant Westwick is not on board — you now have seniority on the bridge, Mister Keats.’

  ‘Sir!’ McGillivray protested.

  ‘It’s the — admiralty ordinances — Mister McGillivray,’ Jericho smiled weakly. ‘You — know — how highly — I respect the navy’s confounded ordinances.’

  ‘Of all your commands, captain, this is the bloody daftest,’ said McGillivray. ‘With respect, sir, of course.’

  ‘When did — I ever — receive — that from any upland — officer?’ asked Jericho. ‘The — ship — is yours — Mister Keats. I would ask you — one favour.’

  Jack had to stop himself from choking on his reply. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Not the navy’s — graveyard for — me. I still maintain a family — plot. My wife and son are buried there. Plant — m’bones — down there next — to theirs.’

  ‘I shall, sir.’

  Jericho’s final sigh joined the whistling of the wind through the bridge’s broken canopy, merging and melding with it, until only the wind was left. Trying not to shake, from the cold and the shock of his captain’s death, Jack got to his feet, every eye on the bridge gazing uncertainly at him.

  Lieutenant McGillivray removed Jericho’s jacket and slowly covered his corpse, making a makeshift blanket of the uniform. ‘Difficult boots to fill, these. What are you orders, master cardsharp?’

  ‘Is that it?’ interrupted the bosun, pointing a finger at Jack. ‘The skipper’s gone and we’re meant to salute the boy just because he knows how to cut a punch card for that white elephant on the upper deck?’

  ‘Shut your trap, now, bosun,’ barked Lieutenant McGillivray, ‘and belay that bilge. I won’t tolerate bellyaching on the bridge.’

  ‘I’m just saying what’s on
everybody else’s mind,’ spat the bosun. ‘He’s a bloody pressed hand, one step ahead of the gallows. Our cabin boy’s been in the service longer than this one — some twistery of the regulations, and the ordinances reckon he should be put in charge? Then damn the ordinances, I say!’

  There were murmurs of agreement from around the bridge. Just saying what was on everybody else’s mind. Jack’s included. What would Captain Jericho have done, what would the skipper have said, to reassert control here?

  The bosun looked as if he was about to launch into another tirade, but suddenly he was sent flying, collapsing against the altimeter station as a smoke-blackened figure weighed into him with ham-sized fists, beating him into unconsciousness. It was Pasco!

  ‘Off him, man,’ shouted Lieutenant McGillivray running over to pull the hulking engineer off the bosun. ‘You’re doing murder to him.’

  Pasco angrily shoved the lieutenant back, his face as red as one of their airship’s blazing engine cars. ‘Aren’t we all dead anyway? How many enemy airships are out there … one hundred, two? The only question is, are we dead as navy, as cloudies, or are we dead as stinking mutineers?’ He pointed across to Jericho’s body. ‘The old man says that the master cardsharp is the ship’s ranker when she’s running on full automation, that’s good enough for me.’

  Jack looked back to the entrance to the bridge. Three of Pasco’s men were standing there, two of them carrying the badly burnt body of a young rating. He’ll follow me, but I had better be damn sure where I want to lead him.

  ‘The engine room, Mister Pasco,’ said Jack. ‘What is our butcher’s bill?’

  ‘Thirty-two dead,’ said Pasco. ‘We’ve lost the port-forward engine car to their mines, blown clear off. Now, tell me that doesn’t matter and that you have a bloody plan, sir?’

  ‘Every life matters,’ said Jack, looking at Jericho’s arm protruding from under the captain’s jacket. ‘We stand for them, we stand for them all. As for the Iron Partridge’s plan of engagement, we’re exactly where we want to be.’ Jack raised his voice so everyone on the bridge could hear, and even managed to keep it from trembling. ‘We do what Jericho would have done. We press the attack, regardless.’

  ‘Well, at least you’ve got the old man’s daftness down pat, laddie,’ muttered Lieutenant McGillivray, but softly enough so that only Jack heard it. Yes, let’s hope I’ve guessed right about his intentions.

  Somewhere in the distance Jack could sense the tide of triumph from the steamman’s spirit of the sky, Lemba of the Empty Thrusters, as the Loa observed the changes happening across the airship. I’m doing this for us, not for you. For the crew, for the memory of Jericho, for the Kingdom. He hadn’t even noticed he was no longer doing it for himself.

  From the outside of the hull there was a fluttering wave of iron plates rising on tiny metal arms, the bridge shifting as the airship rolled slightly, the flight surface of the Iron Partridge becoming a dynamic thing, as manoeuvrable as the feathers on a hawk. Sprays of ballast water and vented gas exhaled from ducts below the plates, the airship’s lungs breathing her first real breath. In the gun deck, sighting mechanisms pushed out from under the cannons’ barrels, tiny windage rotors outside their rubber hoods dropping down to gauge the air currents. The occupants of the h-dome and crow’s-nest dome scrambled out of the way as clusters of telescope arrays fell out of the ceiling and rose out of the floor, filling the space the sailors had been occupying only seconds before. The crew inside dropped their telescopes in consternation while something deep inside the turning calculation drums of the ship’s transaction engines marked and noted the constellations outside against her charts, and then the vessel drew a small crosshair across every moving, turning lamp on every Cassarabian airship in the night sky.

  On the bridge, the strangeness of the moment following Jericho’s death was replaced with a wave of confusion as the boards and stations reconfigured themselves, sailors scrambling back as a new chair surrounded by an arc of dials and switches rose on a dais in the centre of the bridge. It was as if some throne from legend had appeared in their midst, beckoning the chosen one to anoint himself as war leader on its steps.

  Jack took the seat — settling down into its hard, iron curves — how fitting that its support was never intended to be comfortable. On the controls in front of him there was a detachable speaking tube next to a rotating drum bearing copperscripted names — Bomb Bay, Observation Car, Sick Bay, Wardroom, Lower Lifting Chamber — and Jack rotated it around until it read Transaction-Engine Chamber, picking up the pipe to speak. ‘Mister Shaftcrank, how stands our transaction engines?’

  The steamman’s voice warbled out of a voicebox set in the side of the chair. ‘Jack, is that you? Thank the Loas. All our calculation drums are turning smoothly. Processing capacity is at seventy per cent on full automation ship-wide. We have one outstanding query process in queue.’

  ‘Which system, Mister Shaftcrank?’

  ‘The ship,’ said the steamman. ‘The whole ship. Query reads, “My orders?”’

  ‘Your input, Mister Shaftcrank. Card in, engage the enemy. All the ship’s spare processes to be dedicated to gunnery and navigation.’

  ‘Engaging, aye.’

  ‘Helm is becoming sluggish, sir,’ reported the master pilot. ‘It’s as if our rudder is no longer responding.’

  Jack settled into the chair. ‘Do you ride, pilot?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Horses, sir? To hounds? Originally I was a farming man, by trade. The knack of guiding a horse is to point her in the right direction, apply a touch of pressure on the reins, and then just let your beast do all your work for you. Don’t fight the reins, master pilot. Just point her and let her lead you. That goes for everyone here. If your station is doing your work for you, allow your board its head.’

  There were disconcerted murmurs from the crew, levers sliding around their stations and control dials flicking to peculiar positions. It’s as if the ghosts of the navy’s legions of dead have returned to possess their vessel. But this was the way that the airship had always been intended to fly. Jack knew transaction engines; he knew them as well as he knew anything. He had to be right about this, didn’t he? The cleverest man in the Kingdom was said to have designed this bizarre oddity of a vessel. And I’m gambling that the unfinished work he left behind as his legacy might just keep us alive.

  Then the enemy fleet was overflying the Iron Partridge, bomb bays opening to finish off the Jackelian airship for good.

  Only minutes old, Jack Keats’s new command was as good as murdered in the air. His very first command. His very last?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘Heaven’s teeth, can’t you do this any quicker?’ asked the marine officer from the Imperial Aerial Squadron, his hand sweating on the pommel of his holstered pistol.

  ‘Quicker, perhaps, with your silence,’ snapped the bombardier squatting by the ventilation shaft to the barracks. He opened the last of the line of fin-bombs connected together by a knot of rubber pipes. ‘Gas bombs are meant to be triggered by impact with the ground. They were never designed to have their mixing chambers detonated on a slow release.’

  The marine officer glanced nervously across the tower concourse towards the large sealed doors of the barracks, and, seeing their anxiety, the womb mage from the Sect of Razat supervising the cull attempted to reassure the two airship sailors. ‘You have all the time you need. The beyrogs have been ordered to stay inside their barracks.’

  ‘That would be the same disloyal regiment of beyrogs with a serious fault in their breeding pattern?’

  ‘They will stay confined inside, and the womb mage responsible has already been punished,’ said the sorcerer. ‘The Sect of Razat doesn’t accept such errors in our followers’ work.’

  Kneeling by the shells, the sailor continued to work. ‘Nearly there. I just have to disable the safeties on the gravity switch.’

  ‘Last thing we need,’ said the marine officer. ‘God-cursed rogue drak riders
outside dropping grenades on our heads, and now we could have one of our own regiments of beyrogs rampaging through the citadel. I sometime wonder who our enemy is.’

  ‘That would be me,’ said a female voice. As the marine officer turned, he was smashed back into the row of gas shells, his nose bone fatally struck back into his brain by the flat of First Lieutenant Westwick’s hand.

  Omar kicked the bombardier in the face, hard enough to spin him back unconscious just as Westwick grabbed the fleeing womb mage and broke his — or in reality, more likely, her — neck.

  Commodore Black peered over the unconscious sailor’s work and quickly slid some of the disassembled components on the floor back into the exposed shell’s works before ripping out the rubber pipes connecting it to the ventilation shaft. The commodore lifted the pistol and holster from the marine, checking the body’s leather ammunition pouch for the number of charges inside. Omar took the other sailor’s gun and passed the cutlass-style sword to Westwick.

  ‘Enough wicked dirt gas here to choke half of the sewer rats back in Middlesteel,’ said the commodore.

  ‘Larger prey than rats, my strange Jackelian angel,’ said the Caliph Eternal. ‘Let us see how disloyal my defective regiment of beyrogs truly is …’

  Whatever genetic sorcery the caliphs had relied on across the ages to control their beyrogs, the potency of that power could not be denied. As soon as the young ruler entered the barracks complex, the monstrously large ranks of biologick soldiers came flooding towards him as though they were a pack of hunting hounds at feeding time and he the kennel keeper. Exhibiting much the same strange fascination as the caliph’s murdered flesh brother had shown — not quite daring to touch his person, as if he were surrounded by an invisible wall — the beyrogs demonstrated their devotion by falling to one knee, excitedly shaking their scimitars and crossbows in recognition of the ruler of rulers. The power to command them quite literally running through the Caliph Eternal’s blood.