“Lizanne.”
She raised her head as a pair of soft hands met her cheeks, looking up to find herself confronted by a familiar, doll-like countenance, albeit one that seemed to have suddenly become much more womanly in expression if not form. “It is very good to see you again, miss,” Lizanne said with a tired smile.
Tekela’s face blossomed into a smile of her own, tears welling in her eyes, and she pressed a kiss to Lizanne’s forehead before pulling her into a tight embrace. Lizanne swallowed, her throat hard and tight. “My aunt?”
Tekela drew back, tears falling as she shook her head. “I’m sorry. It was horrible . . .” She trailed off, face clouded with confusion and unwanted memories. “Sirus . . . Sirus was there.”
“What?”
“He was there. Changed, Spoiled. But it was him. He saved me.”
The resurrection of a youth Lizanne had last seen strapped into a chair and apparently dead in a Corvantine torture-chamber was a singular mystery, but one that would have to wait. As would her grief.
“The box,” Lizanne said. “Do you still have the box?”
Tekela had deposited two bulky objects on the deck of the launch. One was wrapped in waxed canvas against the damp but Lizanne could make out a familiar if much-reduced shape under the covering. Jermayah’s been busy, I see. She turned to the other object, also concealed in canvas. Tekela crouched and pulled the wrapping away to reveal a familiar, shiny, box-shaped device of numerous cogs and gears.
“Good,” Lizanne said. “Keep it close.”
Tekela’s eyes widened in surprise. “You want me to look after it?”
“You seem to have done a fair job so far. I assume that thing works,” she added, nudging the other object with her toe.
“Six hundred rounds a minute on the slowest setting,” Tekela replied, face suddenly grim with no doubt ugly remembrance. “It works very well.”
“No, young man, I will not abandon this craft.” Her father’s voice tore her gaze from Tekela. Jermayah had already clambered onto the launch but the esteemed Professor Graysen Lethridge stood resolute on the rapidly descending deck of his latest invention. “Do you have any notion of the import of this device?” he demanded of the ensign. “I insist you see to its salvage.”
Lizanne stood, moving on unsteady legs to slump against the side of the boat, staring at her father until he met her gaze, not without some reluctance. She saw his resolve falter, but not completely. “It’s important,” he said, a faint pleading note in his voice. “Surely you can see that.”
Lizanne gave an involuntary roll of her eyes which she knew must have made her resemble a sulky adolescent, but found herself too weary to care. “He’s right,” she told the ensign. “Lash the launch to it then use your flags to signal the Profitable for more boats.” He began to protest but she waved a dismissive hand. “Exceptional Initiatives. Just get on with it, unless you’d like to be posted to a research station in the northern polar region.”
* * *
• • •
She assumed either Verricks put a great deal more weight on her authority than she really deserved or Director Thriftmor intervened again. In either case the Profitable Venture soon came to an almost complete stop, raising flags and blasting her sirens to order the rest of the convoy to follow suit. Within minutes the cruiser’s twenty-foot steam-powered pinnace had been lowered over the side and was making a steady progress towards the floundering aerostat.
Her father and Jermayah used a valve on the balloon’s underside to vent the remaining gas, provoking a worried question from Lizanne as the pinnace drew alongside. “Isn’t it flammable?”
“Helium,” Jermayah said. “Take more than a spark to set it off. Tried a few experiments with hydrogen but they nearly burned the shop down.”
“Helium is more plentiful in any case,” her father added. “And cheaper.”
Soon the balloon was just a flaccid sprawl of wet silk on the water. Professor Lethridge ordered it gathered up whilst Jermayah oversaw the recovery of the gondola. “Not so much the carriage we need,” he said, slapping a hand to a bulky cylindrical apparatus at the rear of the gondola, “it’s the engine.”
“Thermoplasmic?” Lizanne asked, recognising the tell-tale pipe-work visible through a gap in the engine’s carapace.
“It’s a hybrid,” Jermayah replied and she saw the glimmer of professional pride in his eyes. “Kerosene or blood. Both burn in the same combustion chamber. She’ll give out more power if you feed her Red, of course, but kerosene is fine for basic manoeuvring.”
“Speed?” Lizanne enquired receiving a reply from an unexpected source.
“I had her up to thirty miles per hour using kerosene,” Tekela said. “We hadn’t yet managed to conduct a trial with blood.”
Lizanne scowled at Jermayah. “You let her fly this thing?”
“She’s our test pilot,” he answered with a grin far too lacking in contrition for Lizanne’s liking. “We weren’t too sure about the lifting properties at first, needed someone who wouldn’t weigh her down. Tekela volunteered. Got a right good feel for the controls too.”
Lizanne shifted her baleful gaze to her father. “I told you to find her a decent school, not subject her to your experiments.”
“We did,” Professor Lethridge replied. “Miss Hisselwyck’s Finishing Academy. She wouldn’t go. Your aunt tried to march her there but she fought her off, then threatened to run off and live in the refugee camp.”
Lizanne rounded on Tekela, who met her angry visage with a shrug and a purse of her lips. “I’m too old for school anyway.”
“And too young to be careening around the sky in one of his mad contraptions.”
“Well, you gave him the plans.” A small vestige of the old Tekela appeared then, pouty and defiant in the face of legitimate concern. At this juncture Lizanne wasn’t sure if she preferred that Tekela to this one. At least the brat had been predictable, up to a point.
Lizanne took a calming breath and turned back to her father as he helped drag the last of the depleted balloon onto the fore-deck of the pinnace. “If you’re quite finished we need to return,” she said. “You’ll also have to provide a full account of Feros’s fall to Captain Verricks and Director Thriftmor. It seems we have some more hard decisions to make.”
Soon the pinnace had closed to within about a hundred yards of the Profitable. The helmsman steered hard to port to bring the craft alongside as a group of sailors gathered at the lower-deck rail, ready to cast off their securing lines. It was then that Lizanne felt a small hand clutch at her arm and turned to see Tekela, face pale and eyes wide as she pointed at something in the sky.
The drake was high enough to be out of range of the Profitable’s guns, but the angle of the sun drew a faint red glitter from its scales as it banked and turned for the east. Lizanne went to the junior lieutenant commanding the pinnace and demanded his spy-glass before training it on the eastern horizon. An “enemy in sight” signal was already blasting from the Profitable’s sirens by the time she picked out the tell-tale silhouettes resolving through the morning mist. Warships. There were five of them, all either frigate or sloop class. She saw what at first appeared to be a thick pall of smoke rising from each of the ships then realised it to be a swarm of drakes.
“Change of orders,” Lizanne said, returning the spy-glass to the lieutenant. “Make for the Viable Opportunity. Tell Captain Trumane to head east at best possible speed and signal the rest of the fleet to follow. He is not to linger for any reason.”
She stared at his blanched, near-panicked features until he gave a nod of assent. “What are you doing?” her father asked as she moved to the prow of the pinnace.
“I left something behind.”
Lizanne climbed onto the prow and took out her wallet, extracting a vial of Green and exchanging it for the exhausted one in the Spider before injectin
g all of it along with a quarter vial of Red. She would need it to ward off the chill. She glanced back, seeing Tekela struggling in Jermayah’s grip as she sought to follow. “Take care of her,” Lizanne said before diving into the sea.
* * *
• • •
The Profitable’s main batteries were firing as she scaled the stern anchor mounting and vaulted onto the lower deck. The cruiser’s guns fired according to a pre-set sequence so as not to buckle the ship’s structure with the release of so much energy at once. The resultant roar was therefore continuous and deafening, drowning out the cacophony of shouted orders as the crew scrambled to their battle stations. The Profitable’s blood-burners came on-line when she made her way onto the mid-deck, the ship lurching into accelerated motion as Mr. and Mrs. Griffan lit the product in her dual engines. Apart from their brief and distressing sojourn through the revolution-torn streets of Corvus, neither of the Griffans had been in battle before and Lizanne had to suppress a pang of sympathy for what they were about to experience. They are not your mission.
She was obliged to struggle past a throng of rushing sailors to get to the officers’ quarters, opening the door of Tinkerer’s cabin to find him lying on the deck just as she had instructed. He stared up at her with bright eyes, though his face was typically lacking in animation. She noticed he also had a small bottle clutched in his hand. “I stole it from the ship’s medical bay,” he explained, following her gaze. “Potassium chloride. You said to seek out the most efficient means.”
“Best hold on to it for now,” she said. “Get up. We’re leaving.”
She led him to Makario’s cabin where she found the musician playing a surprisingly jaunty tune on his flute. “Thought I’d prefer my death to be accompanied by something cheerful,” he said.
“It’ll have to wait. Follow me, and don’t dawdle.”
She led them both to the corridor leading to the middle of the ship where they could scale a ladder all the way to the lower deck. They were halfway down the ladder when the ship gave a sudden, violent shudder. A loud high-pitched groan of protesting metal echoed all around.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Makario observed, holding on to the ladder with a white-knuckled grip.
“She’s been hit,” Lizanne said, continuing to climb down. “And it won’t be for the last time. Keep going.”
On descending to the lower deck she started for the stern, dodging around sailors laden with equipment and ammunition. The ship heaved several times as they made their way aft, Lizanne deducing that Captain Verricks had thrown the Profitable into a series of evasive manoeuvres. Even through the thick iron bulkheads and continuing roar of the main batteries she could hear a familiar rapid percussive thump and growl. Secondary armament, she realised. The drakes must be close.
The pale rectangle of an open hatch appeared ahead and she started forward at a run, then came to a sudden halt as the ceiling buckled, the metal tearing open to flood the corridor with smoke and flame. Thanks to the Green in her veins Lizanne recovered quickly, the ringing in her ears and blurred vision subsiding after only seconds. Makario and Tinkerer were not so lucky. The musician required several hard slaps before he regained enough sensibility to stand whilst Tinkerer remained unconscious, though mercifully free of injury.
“Did you have to bring him?” Makario enquired as Lizanne hauled the artificer’s slight form onto her shoulders.
“Just be grateful I brought you.”
She was obliged to step over the mangled remains of several sailors before reaching the hatch, stepping out into the open air to find the stern of the Profitable Venture in shambles. It appeared the cruiser had been hit by at least four shells from a salvo of five. One of the rear batteries was a complete wreck, the armoured housing shattered and the gun-crew transformed into charred lumps of flesh. Two large holes had been punched into the deck from which smoke issued forth in copious amounts. The surrounding ironwork glowed a deep red as the inferno beneath raged unchecked. It was clear that her original plan to make for the aft life-boats was now out of the question.
“By the souls of all the emperors,” Makario breathed as a large winged form soared through the smoke. The Red gave a brief squawk before opening its talons, allowing something to tumble free of its grip, a man-sized, man-shaped something.
The Spoiled landed directly in front of Lizanne, no more than three feet away. Time seemed to slow then, thanks to the Green, which had a tendency to increase perception in times of great stress. Therefore, Lizanne was able to discern a great deal about the Spoiled in the space of the next few heart-beats. She saw that it was male, stood an inch or two over six feet in height and appeared to be wearing a greatly modified version of a uniform normally worn by Protectorate infantry. Various trinkets had been sewn into the uniform’s tunic, cap badges from Protectorate and Corvantine regiments along with what were unmistakably human teeth and other more fleshy tokens. It also carried a .35 Dessinger long-barrel service revolver in one clawed hand and a tribal war-club of some kind in the other. She even had time to look into its eyes and be left with absolutely no doubt that it was about to do its best to kill her.
“Catch,” Lizanne told the Spoiled and threw Tinkerer’s unconscious body at it. Doing the utterly unexpected was a tactic that had worked for her in the past and so it proved now. The Spoiled nimbly caught Tinkerer in its arms then wasted a few precious seconds staring at Lizanne, its spined brow creasing in bafflement. She drew her revolver from her skirt pocket and shot it in the eye.
At least they die like a human, she thought, bending to retrieve Tinkerer’s body. “Take that,” she told Makario, nodding at the Spoiled’s fallen revolver.
“I . . .” Makario was blinking rapidly, face white with shock. It seemed even the depredations of Scorazin hadn’t prepared him for this. “I don’t like guns.”
“Just pick it up.”
She turned and carried Tinkerer towards midships, keeping to the walkway that fringed the lower starboard deck. She passed several Thumper and Growler batteries, the crews casting a flaming torrent of tracer into the sky at the Reds that now seemed to be everywhere. She had the satisfaction of seeing one drake torn apart by a concentrated blast from a Thumper before it could deposit the two Spoiled in its claws on the deck. Sadly, the Thumper crew’s cheers were short-lived as another much larger Red swooped down through the cloud of gore left by its fallen brother and doused the jubilant sailors in a thick stream of fire. Lizanne closed her ears to the screams and ran on.
On reaching the ladder that led to the starboard life-boat derricks they were confronted by the sight of a vicious hand-to-hand mêlée between sailors and Spoiled. At least twenty were assailing each other, rifle-butts and bayonets against war-clubs and hatchets. Lizanne was struck by the unnaturally coordinated movements of the Spoiled as they fought, one ducking a swinging rifle-butt whilst its comrade stepped forward to dispatch the sailor who had delivered it, whereupon they both stepped aside in unison to dodge a bayonet charge. It was like some form of dreadful murderous dance and proved dishearteningly effective. Within what seemed like seconds all the sailors lay dead or dying whilst the Spoiled had only lost three of their number.
Lizanne heard Makario let out a shocked gasp as the Spoiled all turned to regard the pair of them. There were a dozen, uniform in their silence if not their appearance, but betraying slight head movements that indicated inner thoughts. Not thoughts, Lizanne decided, seeing the Spoiled suddenly take on a more purposeful stance as if some unspoken decision had been reached. Communication.
“What do we do now?” Makario asked as the Spoiled started forward.
“Fight. What else?” Lizanne shrugged Tinkerer from her shoulder and pushed him into Makario’s arms. “Guard him.”
She had time to inject half a vial of Red and Black before the Spoiled closed, fanning out with pistols raised. Lizanne released most of her Black at once, blasting t
he Spoiled off their feet, then rushed forward to methodically shoot five of them in the head in quick succession as they lay on the deck. The remaining seven were up quickly and immediately began their deadly dance, circling her with frustrating speed and loosing off shots with their revolvers that forced her into a leap. She tumbled in mid air over the head of one of the Spoiled, unleashing Red as she did so. The Spoiled’s mismatched garb of Corvantine uniform and Island tribal gear caught light immediately, though his scaly hide proved more resistant to the flames. He swung his war-club at her as she landed, forcing her to back-pedal and use all her remaining Black to propel his flaming body over the side and into the sea.
Another Spoiled loomed out of the smoke left by his comrade’s departure, pistol levelled at her head, too close to dodge. Something boomed behind Lizanne and a hole appeared between the Spoiled’s eyes as a crimson plume exploded from the back of his skull. Lizanne darted forward to retrieve the fallen Spoiled’s revolver, then turned to see Makario hunched against the bulkhead, flaming pistol in hand. The musician held Tinkerer’s inert form to his chest in the manner of a human shield, meeting Lizanne’s gaze with a tremulous grin.
“I said I didn’t like them,” he told her. “Not that I couldn’t use them.”
Lizanne whirled away, feeling the whoosh of a war-club as it passed close to her head. Sending her assailant reeling with a blast of Red at his eyes, she followed up with a quick shot to his chest then leapt again. Bullets buzzed around her as she twisted in mid air, Green-enhanced reflexes given full rein as she targeted each of the remaining Spoiled, felling them all with single shots to the head before her feet met the deck.