Iron Jackal (6 page)

She trimmed the aerium ballast and levelled out just above ground level, close enough to make Frey give a little squeak in the back of his throat. The desert floor rushed by beneath them. Jez banked hard and swung away from the light as she heard the rattle of machine guns from behind. Tracer fire flitted past the
Ketty Jay
, chewing up the earth below.

‘Malvery!’ shouted Frey. ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Orders?’ Malvery suggested.

‘Well, consider yourself bloody ordered. Shoot them!’

‘Right-o,’ said the doctor, and opened up with the autocannon.

Another explosion pounded the
Ketty Jay
, but Jez had sensed the shell whipping through the air and pulled away just in time to avoid being swatted into the ground.

‘How in the name of rotting bastardy are they scoring on us at that range?’ Frey demanded.

‘Lucky shot,’ said Jez. ‘Next one’s going way wide.’

As if to illustrate her point, a bloom of fire lit up the night some distance to starboard. She kept up an evasive pattern. The fighters couldn’t draw a bead on her. She could tell when they were lining up on the
Ketty Jay
by the angle of their light beams, and then she would dodge. They swooped, missed, and looped back into the air to try again. They were slender, needle-nosed things, streamlined like flattened darts. Built to look good, like all Samarlan craft.

‘Can’t keep this up for ever, Cap’n. We need to lose them fast.’

Frey got out of his seat and peered through the windglass of the cockpit. The play of the fighter’s lights were showing glimpses of the terrain ahead. A colossal outcrop reared out of the ground a few kloms ahead.

Suddenly his face lit up. ‘There,’ he said, pointing.

‘I don’t get it.’

‘They’re following the glow from our prothane thrusters, right?’ he said. ‘Well, this aircraft doesn’t only run on prothane.’

She grinned as she caught on. ‘I’d buckle in if I were you, Cap’n.’

‘Harkins!’ Frey said. ‘Let the crew know. Batten down. It’s gonna be choppy.’

Harkins just stared at him, his face blank with fright.

‘Move it!’ Frey snapped. The shock broke Harkins’ paralysis, and he scampered out of the cockpit and up the corridor, calling the alarm. Frey threw himself into the navigator’s chair and secured the straps. Ashua slipped her arm through a gap in the bulkhead and braced herself.

The lights from the fighters behind them slipped and swung all around them. Tracer fire chased them through the night. The outcrop loomed ahead, blacking out the background as Jez took them on a course that would skim close to its flank. Another explosion tore through the air. The frigate was getting nearer, and its shelling would become more accurate as it did.

Frey was a bag of nerves by now. Jez could hear it in his heartbeat and smell it on his sweat. ‘Malvery!’ he yelled. ‘Will you
get those fighters off our tail
?’

‘If you think it’s so easy, come up here and do it yourself!’ Malvery yelled back. He fired another burst, a dull
thump-thump-thump
of artillery, then guffawed triumphantly. ‘There you go! Happy now?’

One of the Samarlan fighters went screaming overhead, close enough to make Jez duck in fright. It corkscrewed through the air, trailing flames from the stump of a wing, and smashed into the side of the outcrop in a smoky cough of fire.

‘Here we go,’ Jez shouted over the roar of the engine and the sound of distant machine guns. ‘Malvery, quit firing when I say!’

‘I just got bloody started!’ he cried indignantly.

Jez ignored him. ‘Everyone hang on to something! Malvery, now!’

The autocannon fell silent. The outcrop was to starboard now, mere metres off their wing-tip. She took it as close as she dared, knowing her pursuers wouldn’t match her. They pulled away, intending to catch her on the far side. But instead of flying past it, she banked hard to starboard, swinging around the back of the outcrop. The
Ketty Jay
’s thrusters screamed as she powered through the air. Her frame shook with the stress. Jez heard a string of bumps and crashes from the depths of the aircraft, as everything that wasn’t secured went sliding and clattering across the floor. Malvery began spluttering a string of frightened curses as the aircraft tipped to almost ninety degrees, bringing him face-to-face with the sides of the outcrop, only a dome of windglass between him and a thundering wall of rock.

And then the lights disappeared. The outcrop stood between the
Ketty Jay
and her pursuers, and for a few seconds they flew in utter darkness.

Jez did an emergency kill on the thrusters and boosted the aerium engines to maximum, pulling the
Ketty Jay
’s nose up as she did. The aerium engines hummed as electromagnets pulverised liquid aerium into gas, filling the ballast tanks, making the
Ketty Jay
lighter than air. Jez rode the momentum that they already had and took the
Ketty Jay
up into the night, her thrusters now dark, invisible against the background of the sky.

Nobody saw them go.

As the
Ketty Jay
became lighter, the air resistance slowed them down. Jez airbraked until they were stationary and then let them rise like a balloon, straight up into the atmosphere. The frigate glided past like a shark to starboard, dwindling beneath them, its floods trained on the outcrop where its quarry had disappeared. The fighters swooped and banked, searching for the telltale glow of thrusters. But they were all looking in the wrong place.

When they’d gone high enough, Jez vented aerium to equalise the weight and the
Ketty Jay
stopped rising. The Samarlans were still looking fruitlessly for them, a klom below. Jez slumped back in her seat, then turned around and grinned.

‘That was a good idea, Cap’n.’

‘I’m impressed, anyway,’ said Ashua, rubbing her arm where it had been bruised by the bulkhead.

Frey unbuckled himself, rolling his shoulder, and reached over to give Jez a pat on the shoulder. ‘Don’t know what I’d do without you.’

Jez retied her ponytail to disguise the flush of pleasure she felt at that. Sometimes, she decided, being half-daemon was not so bad at all.

Four

The Train – Frey Rallies the Crew – Rattletraps – Harkins Fumbles

‘T
here it is.’

Frey wiped sweat from his brow with his shirt sleeve, then took the spyglass from Ashua and put it to his eye. Before him, a scorched and blasted land lurched away towards a broken horizon. Scattered buttes and mesas faded hauntingly into the distance. Shallow hills of scree nursed hardy scrub grass and gnarled bushes. It was a cooked, cracked vista of dusty orange and red, split by narrow, branching fissures.

He followed the curved line of the tracks till he found the train, which was making its steady way towards them. Apart from a few circling birds, it was the only thing moving out there.

‘I count twelve carriages,’ he said. ‘Don’t see any guns or escort.’

Ashua shifted next to him. They were lying on their bellies at the crest of a slope, in the meagre shade of an enormous witch-tree that reached twisted wooden claws towards the sky as if in agony. Witch-trees were the only thing that grew to a good size out here in the Samarlan badlands, and they were evil-looking things.

‘Might be we got lucky,’ Ashua suggested.

Frey snorted to show what he thought of that. He handed the spyglass back to her. She took it and regarded him with narrow green eyes. Her ginger hair was damp with sweat, and a droplet of it trickled down the side of her throat. Frey imagined doing impure and depraved things to her. Fresh sweat on a woman had that effect on him.

‘Why don’t you go get the crew ready?’ she said, in a tone that made him suspect she knew what he was thinking, and wasn’t overly impressed by it. ‘I’ll let you know when it’s time to go.’

Frey coughed into his fist. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll do that.’ He scrambled down the stony slope, suddenly grateful to be away from her.

You’re getting hot for street-rats now? Where are your bloody standards?

He decided it was probably Trinica’s fault. While she was around he restrained himself from messing with other women, which meant he’d been celibate for a couple of weeks now, ever since they cooked up this plan together. But just being near Trinica was enough to leave him embarrassingly frisky, and Ashua had begun to seem like an awfully tempting alternative.

No
, he told himself sternly.
Behave
.

The crew were waiting with the Rattletraps at the bottom of the slope. Even in the shade it was swelteringly hot, and they were guzzling water when he arrived.

‘Train’s coming,’ he said.

‘About time,’ Malvery said. ‘Reckon Pinn’s about to melt.’

Pinn was sitting with his back to one of the buggies, his skin glistening. His little thatch of hair was plastered to the top of his chubby head. ‘How does anyone live in this bloody country?’ he gasped. ‘I feel like I’m a pie.’

Frey prodded him with his boot. ‘Come on. Little exercise’ll do you good,’ he said.

Pinn grumbled sourly as they clambered onto the Rattletraps. Frey had divided up the crew according to who could drive, who could shoot and who was just plain useless. Mentally claiming captain’s privilege, he’d chosen the best personnel for his own buggy. Silo was driving and Malvery would operate the gatling gun mounted atop the roll cage. Silo seemed confident in his ability and Malvery, while not the world’s best shot, at least had experience manning the
Ketty Jay
’s autocannon.

Ashua would get Pinn on the gatling and Harkins riding shotgun. Usually he’d have left the jittery pilot behind, as he was hopeless with a weapon, but Harkins had insisted on coming, throwing glances at Jez all the while. No one had any doubt who he was trying to impress.

Jez, for her part, was riding with Crake. He was almost as bad as Harkins with a gun, but they needed him to handle Bess. She would go in the back, ready to be unleashed once they’d brought the train to a stop.

‘Alright!’ he called, when everyone was aboard. ‘I didn’t see any defences beyond the armour plate, but let’s not get sloppy. There’ll be men aboard with weapons, at least. I don’t want any of my crew getting shot. Doctors are expensive, and Malvery’s likely to saw the wrong arm off.’

‘Hey!’ said Malvery. ‘Don’t forget I’m gonna be standing right behind you with a gatling gun, smart-arse.’

The crew laughed good-humouredly. They were surprisingly relaxed, considering what was coming. Only Harkins looked in danger of panicking.

‘Everyone remember the plan?’ Frey cried. He could hear the train approaching now, a distant rumbling, getting louder.

‘Yes, Cap’n!’

‘Well, I’m sure you won’t mind reminding me then.’

Malvery rolled his eyes. ‘We’ll be heading for the engine carriage at the front, to try and stop the train,’ he said, in a dreary sing-song. ‘Ashua, Pinn and Harkins are gonna keep the bad guys busy while we do, and—’

‘Aren’t
we
the bad guys?’ Pinn asked suddenly.

They all stared at him. He shrugged. ‘Well, I mean,
we’re
robbing
them
, right?’

‘We’re
never
the bad guys!’ said Frey, horrified at the suggestion. He was surprised the moral objection had come from Pinn rather than Crake. Pinn didn’t have any morals, so he probably just wanted the attention.

He needed to nip this in the bud before they all started arguing, so he gestured towards Silo, the shaven-headed, umber-skinned Murthian, who was sitting next to him.

‘Look at this man. Proud example of his race.’ Silo gazed at him inscrutably. ‘A race that the Sammies have been keeping brutally enslaved for the last five hundred years. And the Daks are no better: they’re willing conspirators. Ashua tells me that train will be full of Daks, with maybe a few Sammies in there to keep an eye on things. Does that sound like slavery to you? No. The Daks
run
this country while the Sammies sit back and lick the cream. So don’t feel bad about popping one or two of ’em, ’cause frankly, they’re all bastards in my book.’

He surveyed his crew to gauge the effect of his words. Nobody seemed much bothered. Pinn just looked confused.

‘Plus,’ he raised a finger, ‘those on that train are gonna be armed guards. They’re
paid
to get shot. If people like us didn’t try to rob trains, they’d be out of a job.’

‘We’re providing employment opportunities now?’ Crake asked, deadpan.

‘Exactly!’ said Frey. ‘Greasing the wheels of foreign capital, and that.’

‘Cap’n,’ said Crake. ‘I do believe you know as much about economics as Pinn does about hygiene.’

Malvery mopped his pate, which had reddened and begun to peel. ‘Look, as long as we stop short of killing women and children, and we ain’t shooting adorable little puppy dogs in the face, I’m in. Now can we stop bullshitting and get this done? I want to get out of the sun.’

‘You’re not
in
the sun.’

‘Out of the shade, then. To somewhere shadier. Like the inside of a freezer.’