She glanced down the corridor. There were screams and shouts coming up from the lower decks as the crew realized what was happening, all thoughts of silent running abandoned as they began to panic. Amelia turned around. Cooky was reaching for the holster of the sailor she had killed. ‘Don’t do it, cooky. I’ll shoot you if I have to, I swear I will …’
He continued to fumble with the flap and slid the pistol out. ‘Save the last shell for yourself.’
Amelia sighted her carbine before she realized what cooky was doing. The pistol barrel slid into his mouth and he exchanged a luckless look with the professor before he pressed the trigger and whipped into the wall of the corridor, the explosion taking off the rear of his head. Amelia felt like being sick. She had made Billy Snow promise she wouldn’t end up like those poor soul-scrubbed zombies swaying empty on the block of Rapalaw Junction’s comfort auction; but Billy Snow wasn’t here. Whatever death in the jungle was awaiting the officers of the expedition who had been marooned, it was looking like they had got the best of the bargain. She pointed the carbine at her own heart and willed herself to squeeze the trigger. Just a small squeeze, that was all that was needed. Tighter, tighter. As she tried to find the resolve to do it, a weight seemed to press down on the weapon, lowering the barrel away from her body.
‘
‘Father!’ Amelia called into the empty corridor, but there were only the dead bodies of the sailor and cooky to hear her. She was going mad, justifying her gutlessness with echoes from the past.
Above Amelia the hissing grew louder. The mindless drones of the Daggish Empire were cutting their way into the u-boat.
They needed fresh flesh for the hive.
It was sweltering work, hacking through the green deeps of Liongeli, avoiding the trails favoured by the land’s lumbering predators. Ironflanks led the way, his four arms cutting back the vegetation. The others quickly realized that his habit of whistling in mimicry of the jungle’s creatures was born out of his stacks overheating — better to release pressure in a way that sounded natural, rather than announcing his presence with a full piercing lift of his boiler’s whistle.
‘Can we not rest?’ wheezed the commodore. ‘We’ve been an age breaking our way through these infernal green halls.’
‘An age?’ said Ironflanks. ‘We have hardly started our journey, Jared softbody.’
‘There was a call from the rear of the line. Billy had found something, his fingers tearing a scrap of canvas from a bush by his side. ‘This is not a creeper.’
T’ricola took the cloth from the blind sonar man and sniffed it through the three olfactory holes in her head armour. ‘It’s burnt and it looks like — no, it cannot be …’
The others gathered around to examine it.
‘It’s a piece of catenary curtain,’ said T’ricola. ‘Burnt off from an airship hull.’
‘The RAN do not fly missions this deep into the interior,’ said Ironflanks. ‘Rapalaw Junction counts itself lucky if Jackals’ aerostats answer the garrison’s siege alarm.’
‘Yet here it is,’ said T’ricola.
Commodore Black pushed his head between the trees behind them. ‘There is more through here, and a terrible sight it is to behold, too.’
Bearing the officers’ pistols, Gabriel McCabe and Veryann pressed through the bush, emerging into a clearing where the jungle was growing back over hacked-down trees and felled ferns. The others came through after them.
‘It’s the remains of a camp,’ said Gabriel.
‘Not just a camp,’ said the commodore. He pointed at a wall of unopened crates lying buried by Liongeli’s green mass. ‘I recognize those blessed things: it’s a mobile fortress. They didn’t even have enough time to bolt it together.’
Ironflanks cleared the vegetation back. White bones lay amid the debris, picked totally clean by legions of scavengers. ‘I don’t believe I am familiar with the term.’
‘That’s because your people have been fighting the brigades of Quatershift and not the red-coated devils of Jackals,’ said the commodore. ‘And count yourself lucky for it.’
‘It is a conceit of their parliament’s new pattern army,’ said Veryann. ‘A modular construction system Jackelian regiments use on campaign. A walled fort that can be raised or dismantled in a period of hours; a ridiculous toy that encourages defensive thinking and belies the very name, “mobile”, that it sports.’
Billy Snow rapped one of the boxes with his cane. ‘The wood on these crates hasn’t rotted through. They’ve been here less than a year I would say.’
T’ricola pulled out more catenary curtain sheeting from the vegetation, blackened and brittle. ‘So an airship came down here and the survivors were trying to build a camp? But celgas is not flammable, so why would the hull end up so burnt?’
‘Celgas may not be flammable,’ said Ironflanks. ‘But an airship will burn all the same if it tries to pass low over Daggish territory. Their flame cannons would scratch one from the sky for daring to pass over the nest.’
‘Perhaps the stat’s navigation and steering were wrecked?’ mused T’ricola. ‘They could have drifted over the greenmesh by accident and been brought down. The RAN fleet was pretty well scuppered when Quatershift attacked Jackals; this could have happened during the war.’
‘I saw the fleet brought down over the hills of Rivermarsh,’ said the commodore, ‘when the wicked shifties were given a drubbing in the skies true and clear by King Steam’s forces, assisted in no small part by my own genius. I don’t recall seeing any Daggish there, nor any airships making a run for it towards Liongeli.’
‘It was a big battle,’ said Veryann. ‘It was said that the shroud of cannon fire remained over the downs like a mist for a week afterwards. You can’t have seen all the action.’
‘Aye, it was thick work,’ agreed the commodore. ‘There was the rebel leader’s army of demons, the treacherous shifties and half our own people fighting against us. A hard pounding, that day, for poor old Blacky, wading through the blood of our brave boys with a sabre in one hand and a pistol in the other. But the steammen knights boarded the fleet when it was turned against us and cut the airships up from inside, using King Steam’s fighters as cannonballs and boarding parties both.’
‘Well, there you are,’ said Veryann. ‘No doubt this is the remains of one of those RAN vessels. Broken during the war and left to drift on the winds of fortune.’
‘And drift a rare long way it did,’ said the commodore. He looked at Veryann with a knowing glint in his eye. ‘And where were you and our expedition’s beloved benefactor during the invasion of 1596?’
‘On a paddle steamer halfway between Jackals and the colonies. We were tending to the house’s business in Concorzia.’
‘You were lucky, then,’ said the commodore. ‘Safe on a boat is where I would have liked to have been during that wicked conflict. But curse my unlucky stars, fate was not so kind to me that year.’
T’ricola bent over the trailing creepers, picking at the debris. ‘I see no Quatershiftian uniforms here.’
‘I see no uniforms left at all,’ said Ironflanks. ‘And that is what I find the most disturbing fact of all. Let us quit this place now, back to the trail.’
Ironflanks had taken only a single step back into the dense press of the jungle when the cry echoed through the trees. ‘
‘Tell me that is not what I think it is,’ said the commodore.
‘You know the answer to that question,’ said Ironflanks.
Gabriel McCabe glanced down sadly at the pathetic pistol in his hand. ‘I thought we had lost the thunder lizard.’
‘Queen Three-eyes knows enough to be able to follow the river upstream,’ said Ironflanks. ‘And it is the scent of my stacks she is following now.’
‘We have about a quarter of an hour,’ said Billy Snow, ‘judging by the strength of her cry, before she is on top of us.’
‘Not on top of us,’ said Ironflanks. ‘On top of
‘We won’t last a day in the Liongeli deeps without you,’ said the commodore.
Veryann took her knife out and threw it across the clearing, embedding it in the skull of a giant python that was slipping down a branch towards T’ricola. ‘Survival is a secondary concern to the success of our mission, and
