In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  And then at last, there was something new…

  Carter stood in the station’s hangar, rubbing the stubble on his face while Owen rummaged around in one of the aerial transporters, re­turning with a handful of leather masks, round biscuit-tin-sized canisters on either cheek to hold air tanks and a voice amplification device built into its shaped mouthpiece, lending the speaker a tinny machine-like burr. Carter blinked the sleep from his eyes, leaning on a length of thick, heavy wood… a pickaxe with its head removed. Kerge was with them, too, the young gask trained in the use of the transporters’ survey equipment.

  ‘You’ll need this to breathe,’ said Owen, the slave checking the masks’ seals. ‘The stratovolcano pumps out pyroclastic flows and gases strong enough you can smell them up here on a bad day.’ Anna Kurtain was the pilot who would take them down to the edge of the caldera to check the ground sensors for seismic activity. She arrived in the hangar accompanied by an unwelcome sight: Duncan Landor, swinging his wooden club as if he was a constable rotating a truncheon.

  Anna laid a palm on Carter’s chest, the other on Duncan’s. ‘You can both save it for the other houses’ hitters, right? ‘

  ‘No problems from me,’ said Carter.

  ‘I’m not planning on starting anything,’ growled Duncan.

  ‘Good,’ said Anna. ‘Because between Old Smoky down there and the princess’s rivals trying to kill us, I’m going to need you watching for anyone coming after us, not fixed on each other.’

  ‘I find your people’s proclivities towards violence quite disturbing,’ added Kerge.

  ‘You don’t get any argument from me, there,’ said Anna. ‘Be a lot better if the ores erupting from that stratovolcano were fairly parcelled out by the gods. But being as we are where we are, us Weyland slaves are just playing the bad hand we’ve been dealt. Walking away from the game isn’t a choice anyone gets to make.’

  ‘It’s why the princess raids the same country, rather than mixing too many nationalities together,’ said Owen. ‘It’s easier to make her slaves pull together as a cohesive force – easier to fight off a rival house’s miners when they come swarming towards your claim.’

  Carter noticed the gask was carrying something that looked very much like the small calculating device he had lost back in Northhaven. ‘You found a new one?’

  ‘I constructed it,’ said the gask, ‘from spare pieces in the machine shop.’

  That’s a useful skill to have, Carter mused. Reckon it’s one worth cultivating for an escape, too.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Anna, ‘we lucked-in, getting you, spiky. We’ve got slaves that’ve been on the station’s maintenance team for a decade, and they know less about imperial gear than you do.’

  Owen, Duncan, Carter and Kerge climbed into the transporter, slipping on masks, while Anna climbed into the cockpit up front. There was no roof on top of the flying cage, so Carter could stand up and glance around at the hangar as they prepared to take off. Rotors under the platform spun into action, and the craft hovered, shaking in a cloud of oily smoke above the hangar floor before tilting forward and powering out into the sky. In the back, all four slaves held on to the metal benches, pieces of equipment sliding about the stowage area under the seats.

  ‘We’ll be making more and more of these trips over the next few weeks,’ said Owen. ‘There hasn’t been an eruption for a while – we’re overdue. Late. After the last rock blew apart under our feet, we’ve been mining nothing but vapour up here. There’s a lot of pressure from the princess to score a good claim with the next eruption. She has plenty of rivals in the imperial family out to stop us getting one, too. They scent weakness. A chance to remove Princess Helrena from the emperor’s favour and yank her sky-mining concession from her hands. It’s going to cut up rough, that much I can tell you.’

  ‘If there’s an eruption due,’ said Duncan, ‘then what happens if the volcano goes off and we’re checking sensors down there?’

  ‘If we’ve got time, we’ll just light out back to the station in the transporter.’

  ‘And if we don’t?’

  Owen bent under the bench and pulled out a metal crate. He unlocked it and lifted out a strange silvery suit that looked like it might be made of metal… but it was too light in his hands to be. It was as shiny as a mirror and had a transparent panel up top on the full-face mask. ‘This is a survival suit. If the volcano is throwing out poisonous vapours and you’re working on the surface of a sky-mine, you’ll need to wear one of these.’

  Carter reached out and felt the flimsy foil surface of the survival suit. ‘And how well does this fabric stand up when that beast is spitting fire?’

  ‘There are caves on the stratovolcano’s slope,’ said Owen. ‘Shallow, formed from old air pockets. Look for shiny black rocks, find a cave and hunker down inside with the suit on. As long as you’re not covered by a pyroclastic flow or directly hit by ore fall, you might stay alive for long enough to signal a friendly transporter.’

  ‘How long can these transporters stay up in the air?’ asked Carter.

  Owen laughed. ‘Not long enough, Northhaven. Not nearly long enough. That greenhorn’s speech you got on the station, it’s the God’s honest truth. Unless Kerge here can build us a warship twice as fast as anything the Vandians can muster, we’re never getting back to Weyland. Best you could hope for is dying on the road, an old man with a price on your head.’

  ‘What’s the range of one of these aircraft?’

  ‘Quarter of the way out of the dead zone, maybe, before it runs out of fuel. Good luck walking the rest of the way out with just the water and food you can carry on your back. Plenty of burning magma to rain down on your skull and not a lot to hide behind when the guards come flying overhead.’

  ‘There’s got to be a way out of the sky mines.’

  ‘You really are fixing to get yourself killed,’ said Duncan.

  ‘I’m a Weylander, damn you,’ said Carter. ‘I was born a free man and I’m fixing to die one too.’

  ‘The empire can only enslave your body,’ said Kerge. ‘Your mind, manling, is always free. It is your greater part, your own domain and nobody else’s.’

  ‘I can see how that’s a helpful way of thinking, given how we’re imprisoned here,’ said Carter. ‘But I never was much of a one for philosophising. Back home, I was stuck in a hole with the guild of librarians. Now I’m stuck on a sky miner’s rock anchored above the Devil’s own acres, and I find neither situation is much to my taste.’

  ‘There are strange attractors at work,’ said Kerge, tapping his makeshift calculator. He sounded puzzled. ‘There is no certain fate to be found in my numbers.’

  ‘If that’s the gask way of saying we’re up shit creek without a paddle, I have to say, your numbers are pretty much the same as mine,’ said Duncan. ‘And I didn’t need one of your abacus boxes to work it out.’

  Owen raised his air mask briefly, tilting the canteen to his mouth and gulping water down before passing it to Carter. ‘You greenhorns need to be careful who you speak to about trying to escape. Slaves who mouth off too loudly about escape tend to be snatched by the Vandians and never seen again.’

  Carter raised his mask for a second to rub away tears of sweat. God, it’s a furnace out here. And I thought it was hot inside the station. It’s got nothing to the air outside. ‘How the hell do they hear about escape plans? From what I’ve seen, the imperium snobs let the slaves get grubby and don’t dirty themselves too much with the mining business.’

  ‘As long as our quotas are met, that’s true enough. But the empire has informers among us. The way things happen up here, you just know it.’

  ‘Vandians?’

  ‘No, Carter. Slaves. Our own people. Traitors that want a promotion, people who’re looking to wangle serving inside an imperial household – they inform on us to get it. There’s a radio room in the station, only Thomas Gale’s staff are allowed inside. You see any of your Northhaven people slipping off towards the radio room, you
let people know… quietly.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Sky mining is a dangerous business, lots of ways for a slave to die doing it.’

  ‘Nobody from Northhaven would turn informer,’ said Duncan.

  ‘I used to think the same thing about my prefecture,’ said Owen. ‘Then one day a man called Will Kamber, he was a constable back home, gets taken as a house slave for Helrena Skar. We worked it out afterwards; all the people he tried to buddy up with. Some of them were killed trying to run, others snatched – vanished without trace from the station. He wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last to sell out.’

  ‘Nobody from Northhaven is like that,’ said Carter.

  ‘There’s a little of that in all of us. We’ve all got a choice to make here. Your gask friend is correct; the empire can’t change who you really are. There is only one person who can parcel off your honour, and that’s yourself.’ Owen stood up and stared through the transporter’s mesh walls. ‘There’s something else to think on. It’s not always the princess our people sell us out to. There are rumours that our last rock was lost that way: blasting powder was filched, set on a slow fuse and detonated. All so some son-of-a-bitch slave could get a ticket out of the sky mines from one of Helrena’s rivals.’

  Carter was about to protest, but Owen cut him short. ‘We’re a couple of minutes out from where we hid one of our lines of ground sensors. Eyes peeled for enemy transporters and ground scouts.’

  As they neared the land, Carter caught sight of a hideous, stomach-turning sight across the black wasteland. What he had first taken for discoloured lumps of stone a shade lighter than the dark plain, were, as they dove in closer, clearly bones – skulls and ribs and vertebrae protruding from the landscape, melted into dried flows of magma that had cooled and left rivulets and gullies; bones emerging like macabre flowers seeded by stealers broken free of hell. Bones large and small, familiar and unfamiliar scattered everywhere. He didn’t have to ask whose bones they were. Carter had watched dead slaves’ corpses dragged from the fever room and rolled off the station. There had been no churchmen taken as slaves to say words over the deceased, so it was for the survivors to remember the dead’s life. How many millennia had the empire existed? How many corpses had rained down here over those years? Carter had presumed the sky miners called this the dead zone because of the impossibility of escaping it alive. But they hadn’t; this was why. It was a sobering sight. The whole institution and might of the Vandian Imperium existed to ensure Carter and his friends would, one day, end up here. The very sight made him sick and angry and weary, all at the same time.

  ‘Get ready to leap off. Carter, Duncan, keep your eyes on the clouds – any transporter you spot will be unfriendly. Kerge, you’re with me – check the boxes for magma damage and grab the readout rolls for all the sensors, regardless.’

  In front of them, the stratovolcano’s black rocky slope loomed up, barren of life – not even lichen clinging to the rocks. For all of the volcano’s height, the inclination of its slope was as gentle as millennia of erupting magma could make it. Carter jumped from the back of the transporter while they hovered, grateful for the cooling air from the slowing rotors. Duncan came next, then Owen and Kerge. They had landed near the beast’s base, where the seismic sensitivity for the sensors was supposedly strongest. Carter might’ve jumped into hell for all that he could see. Endless black, blasted slopes cloaked in steam; nothing moving, the stench of the place unbearable even with the mask clasped to his clammy face. He was momentarily stunned by the silence and brooding violence of the bone-strewn landscape. He and Duncan just stood there, enmities forgotten, leaning on heavy wooden handles like old men watching a street back home. The optimism Carter had felt about his chances of escaping from the sky mines dwindled as he faced the reality of this hellish scenery. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink. The mother of all volcanoes ready to rain fire down on anyone trying to escape across the black flats. What was I thinking? He clung to the memory of his mother dying, murdered, so he could be sold into this existence. The hate was enough to rekindle his fire. Damned if it wasn’t just as fierce as anything this fiery anthill could vomit out.

  Four skids hit the dirt, Anna settling the transporter on a flat area of slope.

  Duncan grunted. ‘You ever saw anything like this before?’

  ‘Not even in my worst nightmares.’

  ‘Nothing can survive out there,’ said Duncan.

  ‘It won’t all be like this. Your heard the boss slave’s speech. The dead zone lasts just as far as this volcano spits. After that, it’s real country again.’

  ‘Hostile country,’ said Duncan. The way he pronounced the words, you could tell all hope had drained from his heart. Guess that was one thing his money couldn’t buy.

  ‘A rich country. Rich on our labour. Wealthy enough to build those steel-hulled giants they fly around in. Must have normal aircraft, too. If we can get our hands on a flying wing, it can’t be more than a few decades in the air to get back home.’

  ‘You steal it,’ sighed Duncan, the irony dripping from his words, ‘I’ll get my father to pay for the fuel.’

  ‘To escape,’ spat Carter, carefully scanning the sky, ‘you have to want to leave. You have to feel the need to get out coursing through your blood like a fever.’

  ‘Don’t have a problem with leaving. Leaving and dying is another matter.’

  Carter despaired. It didn’t take much to knock the fight from a Landor. Deprive them of their butlers and stable boys and they went to pieces, it seemed. But anything was better than staying here to die. Anything. He wandered along the incline in high dudgeon, until something caught his eye. There was a small flat plateau where the stratovolcano’s slope met the dark plain beyond, with a circle of twelve dark menhirs raised there. He had seen standing circles back home, but this one’s presence here was an oddity. They were ancient works, beyond the memory of his people, and if druids had set up here to practise blood sacrifices, the massive stratovolcano surely would have granted the builders their wish at some time during the circle’s construction. He went over to take a closer look. The bases of the stone sentinels were partly covered by molten rock flow solidified into rivulets, but despite the damage, the dark black material seemed to glitter like starlight in the heavens. An oddity. A curiosity that put him wistfully in mind of home. He sighed and turned his back on the stones. Duncan was inspecting something behind the circle, and as Carter got closer, he noticed that it was an entrance to a cave, its mouth as impenetrable as night, a foul stench of burning hot vapours steaming out from somewhere inside.

  ‘Smells like a hound died in there,’ said Duncan.

  ‘Only fumes from inside. This rock’s got more bubbles in it than a bath-scrubbing stone. Reckon this must be one of the caves Owen was talking about.’

  ‘Feel that heat rising out of there – I wouldn’t want to try to hide inside it during an eruption.’

  Carter looked around. Owen and Kerge had headed a few feet down the slope, inspecting equipment left hidden under the overhang of the ledge of volcanic rock supporting the menhirs. An ominous rumbling sounded from the stratovolcano, growling like Carter’s empty stomach, but about a hundred times louder. The ground trembled below his boots, dislodging a dusty shower of rubble down the slope. It was as though the great satanic stealer who had created this hell was sending the party a warning to depart; mount their transporter and return to their rock in the sky.

  ‘Sweet saints,’ said Duncan, ‘I really don’t want to put one of those silver survival suits to the test. Not on my first visit to the ground.’

  ‘It’d be just our luck, so far,’ said Carter. He eyed the transporter. Anna had kept the engines running, and was bobbing up and down in her cockpit as she glanced around the slopes for potential landslides. Further than a hundred yards, though, the slopes were wreathed in steam from a variety of stink-holes; they might well hear a landslip before they saw it. Despite the tremors, Carter considered exploring
the cave, but Duncan got there before him, squeezing through the rock, disappearing for half a minute, then reappearing.

  ‘No bears sleeping inside, then?’

  ‘They’d have to like eating rock to hunt around here. I’ve slept in bigger tents,’ said Duncan. ‘We could all fit inside it if we had to, though.’

  Kerge and Owen’s checks only took another minute, and then both of them were sprinting back, a single roll of tape clutched in Owen’s hands. ‘Every sensor box smashed!’ Owen yelled to Anna, still in the open cockpit. ‘Someone’s found our stash.’

  Carter stumbled as Owen pushed him and Duncan away from the stone circle and back towards the rear of the aerial platform.

  ‘Aren’t we going to plant new ground sensors?’ asked Duncan.

  ‘Not around here. Back on board. Someone could be watching us – hoping we’ll lead them back to the rest of our sensor line.’

  Anna swivelled around in the cockpit to call across to them. ‘We could take out the camouflage netting, try and hide the transporter while we get the job done.’

  ‘Might as well break out the fire-suits, too, then,’ said Owen. ‘Find a cave and hole up. Use your nose. If it smells this bad down here, Old Smoky is going to start belching fire real soon.’