Jack Cloudie

airship sailor’s life depended on. Pasco’s teaching methods, however, seemed rather more direct than those of his fellow officers.

The gloves swung closer and Jack did as he was bid, discovering a handle inside each of the leather mittens just as the fingers holding his ankles released their grip. Jack screamed in panic, sliding head first down the outside of the Iron Partridge until he swung around on the gloves, gravity and the winds tugging his boots as he found himself miraculously clinging onto the side of the massive craft’s iron plates. The gloves are magnetic! When his hands had contracted inside the gloves, the gauntlets had activated — and releasing the handle inside loosened the invisible bond between man and the airship’s hull. Hair blowing in the crosswinds, Jack glanced up at the jeering faces, shouting abuse — or possibly encouragement — from the safety of their gun port.

Down below, the transmission belt running out to the engine car underneath growled at Jack, as if the engine moulded as a lion’s head was actually alive; its rapidly turning rotor waiting to carve him into pieces if he lost his hold. He could hardly hear the engine over the sound of his own heart hammering inside his chest. Crying in an unholy blend of rage and fear, Jack released the magnet’s activator on his left hand and threw his arm up to fix his glove on the metal plating above his head. Repeating the manoeuvre, using the rivets on the plates below him as barely functional footholds, Jack steadily, desperately, clanged his way back up the airship’s outer metal skin and towards the open gun port. There were thieves back in the capital who specialized in running the labyrinthine maze of rooftops and towers in Middlesteel, experts in rattling skylights. Jack was not one of them. Don’t look down. One hand in front of the other and whatever you do, don’t look down.

The young sailor cursed his tormentors with every freezing yard he climbed. Finally, Jack got near enough to the gun deck to hear a commotion inside — which explained where the jeering sailors who had just been observing his progress had disappeared to. Grasping the inside of the gun port, Jack tumbled back onto the airship’s deck and fell into the middle of a brawl.

John Oldcastle was wielding one of the flat-headed rammers the gunners used to load cartridge wad and shot as a stave. Two sailors had been laid out cold with its blunt end, and the large officer had Pasco, the master engineer, pressed down on the neck of a thirty-two pounder. His makeshift weapon was held tight against Pasco’s throat, choking the man. Coss Shaftcrank was also threatening some of the master engineer’s men with a wad hook, his voicebox sounding a warning in case they tried to save their chief.

Coss was still wearing the harness the sailors had used to dangle him out over the hull, none of the cowards wanting to risk the creature of the metal’s weight dragging them over the side during his brutal initiation ceremony.

‘Ah, there you are lad,’ said Oldcastle. ‘Me and the master engineer were just having a lively little debate about the use of a safety line during the kissing of the ship.’

‘What loss is that thief going to be?’ choked Pasco. ‘Fresh out of Bonegate jail. Another pressed man. Better the bastard drops now before one of his mistakes kills a real cloudie.’

‘I can find a blessed use for him on the upper deck,’ said Oldcastle, easing up the pressure on the master engineer’s neck. ‘And if you try to nobble the lad again, I’m going to take the harness off this old steamer and see if it’s long enough to swing you down onto the rotors of one of your own engine cars.’

‘You’re just a warrant sky officer, the same as me,’ said Pasco, angrily rubbing his sore throat. ‘You don’t get to decide who has the new signings. Maybe the thief’ll end up in my engine room, and then he’ll know what it is to serve in the Royal Aerostatical Navy.’

‘The first lieutenant has already given me these two,’ said Oldcastle, indicating Jack and Coss Shaftcrank. ‘And we’ve got our own initiation ceremony up top.’

‘You and the first lieutenant,’ spat Pasco. ‘You’ve got your tongue so far up her arse it’s a wonder you can talk. She’s as much a greenhorn as these two. What’s this to her? First voyage for some lady noble with more connections at Admiralty House than sense? You and me, Oldcastle, we’ll settle this proper when we’re back on shore.’

‘Well you’d better be prepared to wait a good long while, then.’

Jack saw a dangerous look cross Pasco’s face as the engineer realized that the old sailor knew how long they were going to be in the air. ‘You know where we’re going, fat man? You know what the captain’s orders are?’

‘I know your rotors are going to need to keep on turning to get us there, Master Engineer Pasco. And that’s as much as you need to understand to do your mortal job.’

Jack followed Oldcastle and the steamman as they warily withdrew from the gun deck and headed for the upper lifting chamber — one of two on the airship — its vast space filled with thousands of spherical gas bags secured by netting. The ironically named crew of idlers were busily checking pressure and looking for rodent-teeth tears and leaks that needed patching. Metal ladders fixed inside pipework frames connected the Iron Partridge’s upper deck and lifting chamber, but Jack was relieved when John Oldcastle led them to the frame that held the lifting belt — a privilege, he had been warned, usually reserved for officers. After the ordeal of kissing the ship, Jack didn’t think he could stand to climb by hand up one of the lifting chamber’s vertigo-inducing ladders.

Waiting for one of the wooden steps fixed onto the rotating leather belt to come around, Oldcastle appraisingly looked over Jack and the steamman. ‘Master Engineer Pasco knows his engines well enough, lads, but he’s a rabble-rouser who’s spent time in a stockade for trying to organize the RAN’s engineers into a workers’ union.’

‘And we’re the only ship that would have him,’ said Jack, remembering the first lieutenant’s confrontation with the vice-admiral the evening before the airship launched.

‘All we could mortal get,’ said Oldcastle, grabbing a hand-hold on the belt as he swung his boots out onto its wooden step. Jack followed after Coss Shaftcrank stepped on, watching the floor of the lifting chamber drop away as he was carried nearly eighty feet up towards the highest of their airship’s seven levels, the upper deck.

‘Like our ship herself, perhaps?’ said Coss. ‘Due to be scrapped, but rescued at the last minute …’

‘A flying albatross right enough,’ said John Oldcastle. ‘And when we get to my kingdom under the crow’s nest, you’ll see quick enough why.’

‘I understand the Iron Partridge was a proving craft,’ said the steamman. ‘Built in the air yards of the House of Quest.’

Oldcastle stepped off the belt as they passed through to the upper deck, ignoring the smells and sounds coming from an open door down the corridor where the airship’s stock of pigs and sheep were housed. ‘Aye, I can see you’ve done your research before signing on with us, Mister Shaftcrank. But all she proved was that the great industrial lord that built her wasn’t quite as clever as he believed he was.’

Jack saw why once the warrant sky officer had led them through a series of narrow corridors past several doors labelled as stores. Nestled between the wooden walls, a short companionway led up to the last thing Jack had expected to see on board an airship — transaction engines! They looked down into a long deep pit filled with the massive calculating machines, and not in any design that Jack was familiar with. Multiple banks of transaction- engine drums slowly turned as steam hissed out of a labyrinth of copper pipes. At the far end of the transaction- engine room was a series of globe-shaped boilers. Two stokers were feeding the furnace, the sweat-soaked skin of their bare chests glowing orange against the flames.

‘Sweet Circle,’ swore Jack, stretching over the railing to look down at unfamiliar symbols turning on the thinking machines’ drums. This is nothing like the antiquated standard equipment I trained on back in the guild. ‘I’ve never seen the like — what’s it doing here?’

‘A folly, Mister Keats,’ said Oldcastle. ‘A folly that has never worked. And the other reason, besides our blessed armour plating, why the Iron Partridge handles like a whale of the air, large and slow-like.’

‘The softbody designers intended for these thinking machines to control the airship,’ said Coss. ‘Using a crew a tenth of the size of a normal ship of the line.’

‘Not just the airship, old steamer,’ said Oldcastle, pointing up to a rubber-sealed skylight in the ceiling from where the frill of massive mortar tubes was visible outside, stretching like a spine of chimneys across the top of the ship. ‘But all the gunnery on this wicked organ of death we’re lugging about on our backs, too.’

‘And it never worked?’ asked Jack.

‘Over-engineered,’ said Oldcastle. ‘Much like the mind of the fool who designed it — too clever for his own mortal good. When the navy realized the vessel’s automation couldn’t cope, they spent a second fortune