‘Cap’n? Any ideas?’ Jez asked.
‘Nope,’ he said. And that meant they were in deep, deep trouble.
Pushing on, out from the cluster of buildings that surrounded the Ketty Jay, across the open spaces of the camp. Silo’s boots pounded the packed earth as he ran, his shotgun cradled in his arms. The metal tower of the gas derrick rose high above him. Huge storage tanks rested at its base, inside a tangle of pipes and distillation apparatus.
Bullets picked at the ground, sending up scuffs of poisoned dirt. Men were running around him, forging through the foetid air and the stench of rotten eggs. Someone to his right was hit in the chest and went down in a tumble, rolling to a stop. His companions jumped over him and carried on.
On the far side of the open ground were the barracks and more administrative buildings, and beyond them, the gates to the pens. The Daks still hadn’t got themselves organised. Most retreated before the attack. Others took cover and attempted to resist, but without the coordination of their fellows, they were soon overwhelmed. The Murthians were not well drilled, but they had a clear purpose and the advantage of surprise. Bodies fell on both sides, but many more Daks than Murthians.
Silo pressed himself up against the side of a long narrow building, grateful to be out of the firing line for a moment. The buildings in Gagriisk were low, ugly and practical, with a temporary feel about them. Their windows were sealed with bubbles of windglass and their doors were stout and metal.
He heard a hiss. The door of the building opposite popped ajar with a rush of air that stirred the surrounding fog. Silo crossed over and hid behind it as it came open. He heard muffled voices, the scuff of booted feet. Two of them.
He kicked the door closed and fired twice.
They were Samarlan officers in uniform, wearing masks that covered their whole head instead of just goggles and a breather. It made them faceless and machine-like. Still, they died like everyone else when you shot them.
Silo stepped past their bodies and looked into the doorway. There was another sealed door beyond the open one. An airlock, to keep the atmosphere clean inside. So that was how they endured this toxic place. There’d be no such luxuries for the slaves.
Two Murthians ran past him, sparing him barely a glance as they headed towards the pens. Silo hurried after them. There was the sound of machine gun fire ahead, audible over the booming of the anti-aircraft gun and the scream of engines in the sky.
The two Murthians ran out of the cover of the buildings, into the open, carried on by the momentum of vengeance. A machine gun rattled; bullets chipped and puffed at the ground and walls. One of them jerked like a badly-handled marionette and went down; the other skidded to a halt and fled back into cover. Silo caught up with him at the edge of the building. He was breathing hard and whimpering, staring at his dead companion, eyes shocked behind his goggles.
Silo had no words of comfort for him. He’d learn, just as Silo had. Or he’d die.
Around the corner of the building was an area of clear ground in front of the gates to the slave pens. The Daks were dug in deep here. There were machine gun emplacements on the walls, and bunkers surrounded by stone barriers at ground level. A pair of tracked flatbed vehicles were parked near the gates, for transporting the slaves from pen to quarry. Plenty of cover for the thirty or forty guards that defended the gates, but almost none for the Murthians if they tried a frontal assault.
This is where the Daks were going, he realised. This was their emergency plan. They knew that if anyone invaded the camp, they were either coming to free the men in the prison, or the slaves from the pens. Since the invaders were Murthians, it was obvious which they’d go for. The Daks had been caught off-guard by the Cap’n’s plan, but they’d regrouped here, and Silo couldn’t see any way to winkle them out that didn’t end in a shitload of dead Murthians.
His gaze roamed the surrounding area, and then settled.
Unless . . .
He caught sight of Ehri and Fal, hiding close by. He made his way back through the buildings towards them, avoiding the open ground. There were still Murthians and Daks battling here and there, but he avoided the gunfights and soon reached Ehri’s side. She looked back at him, her expression unreadable.
~ We cannot attack with those guns there, she said.
~ We have to get through somehow, said Fal urgently. ~ Listen to them.
Silo could hear something between the sporadic rattle of gunfire and the explosions from overheard. A distant hubbub of shouted voices. The slaves on the other side of the gate. They sensed the chance at freedom, and they’d roused.
He felt a surge of fierce pride at the sound. The Murthians weren’t like the Daks; they would never lie down and submit to slavery under the Sammies. So many generations they’d been under the yoke, yet they were still angry, still eager for the fight. Once, he’d thought a more subtle approach might have been more sensible, that their mulelike resistance to being ruled would be the very thing that kept them in chains for ever. But, hearing those voices, he knew he’d been wrong. The smallest compromise would have been the first step to giving up. And his people never gave up.
He surveyed the ground in front of the gates. Several bodies lay there, Daks and Murthians, blood seeping into the dirt. Too many had fallen on the Murthian side already, some of them barely adults, killed in the first battle they ever saw. All of them here on his account, because of his plan to attack Gagriisk.
He thought he should feel something, but he didn’t. Where was the crushing weight of responsibility? Where was the guilt he’d been so terrified of all these years? He’d never wanted to be a leader again after his failed coup against Akkad. He’d become a follower instead, for fear of repeating the same mistake and inviting another tragedy. But now here they were. People were dying because of him. And he looked on their bodies, and nothing happened.
He was a violent man who led a violent life. That was the way of it. Handing off responsibility was just a chickenshit evasion. How many people had he killed on the Cap’n’s behalf? A fair few, he reckoned. The Daks brutalised his people all their lives, but in the end they were slaves too, and only following orders. Did that make them innocent? Not in his eyes. So how did being a follower excuse him from responsibility, just because he let someone else make the choices?
Lead or follow, it didn’t matter half a damn. People lived and died, regardless. If those kids didn’t die because of him, they’d likely die some other way pretty soon. In the end, all a man was responsible for was himself. And that went for everyone.
Well then, he thought. Raise your voice, or don’t.
~ I have an idea, he said.
~ Tell us, said Fal.
Silo pointed. Beyond the open ground there were a few more small buildings, and visible behind them was the anti-aircraft gun emplacement, set atop a shallow rise.
~ I think that gun could be more usefully employed.
Ehri and Fal exchanged a glance. Silo saw the grin in Fal’s eyes.
~ Lead on, old friend, he said. ~ We’re with you.
Thirty-Three
The Law of Averages – Desperate Measures – Jez is Lost – Panic – A Costly Assault
Time was running out.
Jez’s eyes were better than anyone’s, but even she couldn’t see through the dazzle of the bulldozer’s lights as it came grinding towards them. She’d managed to shoot out two of the floods, but it was a waste of time and bullets. The lights all merged into the glare, making them indistinct and hard to hit. The bulldozer would be on top of them before she could take them all out.
She couldn’t see any way to get past it, either. Guards hid behind it, using its metal body as a shield, the way their targets were using Bess. The crew would be butchered if they tried an assault. Even if Bess led the way, that vehicle was big enough to crush her under its plough, and the instant they broke cover the bastards crouching overhead would shoot them.
She could smell the fear-sweat on her companions. This wasn’t t
he kind of scrape they could skip out of with a daring plan and a bit of luck. They were out of options, and genuinely scared. Pinn was the only exception. He laughed at death for the same reason he laughed at complex mathematics: it was all a bit too much for his brain to handle.
She popped up and aimed a shot over Bess’s hump. No good. The mist foiled her again, and she had to duck away from a volley of return fire.
Bess was virtually impervious to small-gauge rifles like the Daks had, but she moaned in distress all the same as she was peppered with gunfire. Crake muttered soothing things to her and occasionally yelped as a bullet came too close. It was a miracle no one had been hit yet.
But the bulldozer was getting nearer, and the folds of the quarry wall would be scant protection once the enemy got an angle on them.
She racked her brains for an answer. A sharp smell filled her nostrils, derailing her train of thought. She looked over her shoulder, and saw that Pinn was crouched down, holding a tin full of some kind of transparent jelly in the hand of his wounded arm. With his free hand, he was dipping bullets into it. When he was done, he struggled to put the tin back in his pocket, and then began loading the drum of his revolver.
‘Pinn?’
‘Flame-Slime!’ he cried over the gunfire. He snapped the drum closed and spun it for effect.
‘What?’
‘Professor Pinn’s Incredible Flame-Slime! Don’t you remember?’
‘Yes, but what are you doing with it?’
‘Fire-bullets!’ he said.
‘You’re making incendiary bullets? What’s the point?’
Pinn shrugged. ‘It’s gotta be useful for something.’ Then he stood up and aimed. ‘Watch.’
‘Wait, Pinn, don’t!’
But she was too late. He fired the gun. A flaming bullet, like a tracer round, shot away into the murk.
‘Ha-ha!’ Pinn cried triumphantly, after he’d pulled himself back into hiding. ‘Told you it’d work!’
Jez pointed at his revolver. Flames were licking out of the drum, where the other bullets had caught fire. Pinn yelled and lobbed the blazing revolver away. It skittered to the edge of the rock shelf and came to a halt with its barrel facing towards them. A moment later it went off as the bullet in the firing chamber ignited, sending it skipping over the edge and away.
Pinn looked down at his bound arm, resting in its sling. Blood was seeping into the white fabric. His chubby face was grey. Lodged in the wall behind him, the bullet was still on fire.
‘Bollocks,’ he said. ‘Right in the same damn place.’ Then he fainted.
‘Doc!’ Harkins cried.
‘I saw,’ said Malvery, who was busy firing off shotgun rounds. ‘Ain’t got time to deal with that shit-wit right now. Even if he has just invented self-cauterising bullets.’
‘You did warn him not to shoot anyone by accident,’ Ashua said to Frey. ‘You should take up prophecy.’
‘Just playing the law of averages,’ Frey replied.
‘S’pose it wasn’t victiming after all,’ Malvery commented.
Jez crammed herself back into cover. Bullets pinged and scuffed around her. The crew’s casual quips didn’t fool her; it was cheap bravado. She felt the beginnings of panic taking hold. The breather mask felt suddenly confining – a remembered response from the days when she used to breathe – and she tore it off and threw it away. Damn it, there had to be a way out. Half-Mane or not, if they shot her in the right place, she’d be dead for real.
The Manes.
She realised she could hear them.
She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate. They weren’t here, not physically. Their howls were phantom echoes on the edge of her consciousness. But they were distressed. They sensed her fear and shared it. All this time they’d stayed away, respecting her wish to be left alone, but now they couldn’t help themselves. Like a mother unable to resist the cries of her child, they flocked to her, offering her their support and solidarity, lamenting their inability to help.
Why didn’t I want to be one of them? She couldn’t remember now. There was a feral simplicity to their love, the call of the pack. They were intelligent, they were people, but the daemon in them had made them primal. Like animals.
Like animals.
Her eyes flew open. Once, when she hadn’t been long on the Ketty Jay’s crew, she’d found herself in a situation like this. Pinned down on a landing pad in Rabban, defending the craft with Silo and Harkins, surrounded by twenty of Trinica Dracken’s men. She’d heard a man’s thoughts that night, sensed where he was, and shot him through the head at forty metres in the dark. While he was running.
She could jump in and out of the cat’s head. Why not these guards? She’d tried and failed before to force herself into a human’s thoughts, but she’d had more practice now. If she could feel where they were, she could shoot them.
If she could do it. But any chance was better than no chance at all.
The chaos all around her was no obstacle. These days, she could slip into and out of a shallow trance easily, even while doing something else. But she needed to go deeper now. She’d been tentative while trying out her new abilities, afraid of what might happen. But there was no time to be careful any more. She needed to plunge.
It was as if she was falling into a deep well, dropping like a stone towards her own core. Her head went light and then she couldn’t feel her skin any more. Suddenly, she wasn’t there, no longer in the body of Jez but limbless and loose in the void. She fought to find the path she’d learned to take when she rode inside Slag’s skull, the route her instincts had carved. She knew how to do it; she just didn’t know how it was done.
She felt herself slipping, felt a change in her mind that sent it flowering open, thrown wide to the world. And she could hear voices, a dozen voices, then ten times that, the babble of a crowd. Frantic snatches of thought invaded her head, cramming in, a bewildering muddle. She heard three languages and understood them all. She felt the screams of the dying as if they came from her own throat. She was all the people everywhere in Gagriisk, she was inside their skins: her friends, the Daks, the Murthians, all at once.
And suddenly it was too much, this overwhelming tide, but it kept on coming, relentless. Terror surged within her as she realised she was out of control, losing her grip. She fought against the pandemonium and madness but she was no longer sure who she was or if she was a she at all.
She was a Murthian, shot and killed; she was the triumphant Dak marksman. She was the Cap’n, frightened; she was the guards overhead, grim, predatory, waiting for the moment when their targets would break cover. She was a slave in the pens, watching the fighters battling in the sky, daring to wonder if long-dreamed freedom had finally come. She was—
She was—
She was lost.
Harkins, as a veteran of being afraid, could identify the fine distinctions between different states of terror in a way that non-cowards couldn’t. The stock phrases that people used to express how scared they were seemed woefully imprecise to him. He may not have had the smarts to put his wisdom into words, but he knew what he knew.
The creepy silence of the fogbound quarry had been a slow, constant kind of fear, like a child waiting for a monster to push open the wardrobe door in a darkened bedroom. The sharp alarm of the gunfight was different to that, a barrage of shocks that unmanned him and made him want to cringe and gibber. But the thought of Jez’s scorn pushed him to courage. He’d recovered himself enough to send a few wild shots in the direction of the enemy. Maybe it was his imagination, but he fancied he was getting a bit braver lately.
Fear came in many forms for Harkins. But nothing came close to this moment. The moment he heard an unearthly blood-freezing screech, from right by his ear, as he crouched behind the metal bulk of Bess. A sound that issued from the blackest hell of his subconscious. And even that came a distant second to the moment which followed, when he looked over his shoulder and saw what had made the sound. It was Jez.
&nbs
p; Jez, and yet not Jez.
She’d changed. Not physically, but in some other way that Harkins couldn’t understand. Where there had once been a woman he adored was a creature of inexplicable horror, something that wore Jez’s shape but which radiated the cold dread of a nightmare. There was a senseless savagery in her eyes that he’d never seen before; her teeth were bared in a crooked snarl; she was coiled in the tight hunch of a hunting cat.
Her face was inches from his.
Harkins’ throat closed up. His heart stopped. His eyes bulged.
Then she leaped past him in a blur, the wind making the ears of his pilot cap flap against his head.
He stared at the empty space where she’d been. Then something unjammed inside him and he screamed, because it was impossible not to.
‘GaaaaaAAAAAAAH!’
Wet heat spread down his inside leg. He’d pissed himself. He didn’t care.
‘GAAAAAHHAAHHHHHH!!!’
She was a daemon and she’d been right there in his face!
‘GAAHHAARRRGHHAHAHAHHHH—’
He was interrupted by a brutal impact that knocked his head sideways.
‘Better?’ asked Malvery, raising a meaty hand to give him another slap.
Harkins whimpered and nodded, holding his cheek.
‘S’pose you weren’t there the last couple of times she flipped out, eh?’
Harkins shook his head, still making wounded eyes at the doctor.
‘Well, she’s sure as spit flipped out now,’ said the Cap’n, who was peeking out over Bess’s shoulder.
The screams of the guards were terrible to hear, but Harkins couldn’t help looking, if only to make sure that thing didn’t come back towards them.
The bulldozer was very close now, and he could see silhouettes in the backwash of its lights. Guards flailed about, frantic, aiming their weapons every which way. Darting among them, almost too fast to follow, was the small figure of Jez. If not for her ponytail, he wouldn’t have known it was her. She leaped and sprung and seemed to flicker, although that could have been a trick of the fog. Where she landed, the guards crumpled, or were flung away. Frey ducked as a forearm, torn off at the elbow, went wheeling past him, end over end. A Dak staggered out of the gloom, tripped, and went under the bulldozer’s plough with a wail.