Jack Cloudie

system that still ran into the magazine buried in the well-protected heart of the Iron Partridge. The original repair crew who had refitted her had locked the automated systems down tight. But they hadn’t counted on Jack Keats and his clever fingers overwriting their work. Luckily for him, they had done their job in a rush, the ship’s ability to automatically fire and load constrained by some basic and strikingly obvious safeguards. Delete, delete, delete. He was almost there, the automation almost back online. He ignored the yell of the stoker being pushed down into the pit, impaled on the bayonets of three Cassarabian marines. Ignored the sounds, as Jack trusted the crewmen in the magazine would be ignoring the live shells being drawn into the dumb waiter system, lifted up and pushed into the breech of their mortars. Don’t you pay those shells any mind, boys. You just let them slide on past without anyone reaching for the manual overrides. The automated mortars that according to the notes in Jack’s manual couldn’t hit the side of a barn door, unless, please, the enemy’s barn door happened to be drifting feet above their mortar barrels. Sometimes, you just had to roll with the drums and see where they took you.

There was a series of hollow metallic thuds as the mortars erupted along the length of their airship’s spine, followed by a trembling whine as the tubes back-filled with the cold air from outside, then an answering series of explosions from above them, a line of fire stitched along the belly of the Cassarabian airship hanging above their vessel. Seconds later Jack clung onto his station as a wrenching impact slammed him forward, the remains of a decapitated enemy engine car spinning down on top of the Iron Partridge, the rest of the ruined airship just visible through the crack in the skylight. It glanced off their armoured hull with another harsh jolt before continuing downwards on its fiery descent.

From the doorway there came a second explosion. Not a debris strike, but a blast of tumbling Cassarabian marines as Henry Tempest, their recently released captain of marines, erupted into the transaction-engine chamber. His rifle now discharged and empty, the giant soldier was using the weapon like a fighting staff, its butt lashing out and caving in skulls and ribs. The black and silver figures wearing Cassarabian marines’ uniforms were sent flying around him, as though they were kites launched into the air, while Tempest’s crimson features were distorted into a yell. ‘Get off my ship! Get off my perishing ship!’

There were others fighting in the corridor outside, its confines echoing to the clash of hatchets, knives, bayonets and cutlasses. Firearms took too long to reload at close quarters and Jack caught a glimpse of First Lieutenant Westwick entangled in the deadly melee of Cassarabian marines and short Benzari tribesmen.

One of the Cassarabian marines came at Jack from the edge of the tumult and Jack grabbed the empty bandolier from the station at his side, swinging it like a whip and catching the Cassarabian marine in the face, dislodging the man’s beak-like mask. Propelled by fear and fury, Jack ran at the marine and shoved him over the rail, watching him crumple onto the machinery of the transaction-engine pit below. As Jack turned, a rifle butt slammed into his gut and winded him. He collapsed back; the rifle’s barrel fell across his throat and forced him choking down against the rail. It was Henry Tempest, his eyes glinting like tiny marbles as his sweating face bore down on Jack. ‘Get off my ship!’

Jack could only snort, his fingers trying to find purchase on the rifle as the seemingly unstoppable force of the soldier crushed his larynx. It was true, then, what the sailors had been whispering about Tempest: that he had been left half-deranged by an addiction to opiate poppies. That he had to regularly slake his thirst on a mixture of drugs and rum just to stay sane.

‘He’s one of ours, Henry,’ the female voice spun out of the darkness that was beginning to envelop Jack.

Jack croaked desperately for air as the pressure eased.

‘Drink from your green flask, Henry.’

There was a grunting like a pig feeding and Jack focused on a green-lidded canteen being slugged back by the marine officer before being clipped down on his belt next to an identical red-lidded canteen. And there, next to him, was First Lieutenant Westwick, severe and proud, a pair of blooded cutlasses gripped tight in her hands.

‘Sorry, boy,’ said the brute, extending a giant hand and enveloping Jack’s trembling arm. ‘I was stuck in one of my rising rages, so I was.’

Well, that makes everything okay then.

Jack’s eyes slipped across the transaction-engine chamber, dead bodies littering the deck. Benzari tribesmen moved across the room with their short curved swords out, checking for any in the enemy boarding party that might be faking their demise.

‘Your leg,’ said Jack, pointing to a knife embedded in the captain of marine’s limb.

‘It’s not mine,’ said the brute, as if that explained everything, pulling the knife out as though removing an inconvenient thorn.

By his side, First Lieutenant Westwick turned at the sound of Coss Shaftcrank’s voicebox, the steamman kneeling over the corpses while he chanted prayers to his ancestors and the Steamo Loas. ‘Belay that racket. Pile them up and roll them out the nearest hatch.’

‘Wreck my relays, but their people have established burial rites,’ protested Coss.

‘Those are my rites, and those are your orders, skyman. Their god can clean them up from the ground below using the vultures as his divine instrument.’ First Lieutenant Westwick angrily spun Jack around, jabbing one of her fingers at his face. ‘That was a synchronized volley from our mortars. An automated volley.’

‘The mortars weren’t accepting manual control,’ protested Jack.

‘Do you know how many sailors died in the last voyage this malfunctioning metal hulk made under full automation? If those mortar shells had been loaded fin up and warhead down, you would have caused a full salvo detonating right above the ship’s magazine! You, sir, would have blown our bloody remains all the way back to the Kingdom.’

‘The lad saved the ship, first lieutenant,’ called John Oldcastle, still checking his pistols. ‘The Cassarabians were swarming over our top side like ants across a blessed picnic blanket.’

‘He gambled our ship and our mission and he got lucky,’ spat the woman.

Outside the ship a ripple of fire sounded — not the oak-sawing sound of their cannons, but the whoosh of landing rockets blasting out and the rattle of anchor lines running behind them, then the Iron Partridge started to shake from stem to stern.

‘Ah,’ said John Oldcastle admiringly. ‘There’s the wild genius of Jericho at work. He’s fired our anchors straight into the Cassarabian airship. That one’s not in the admiralty rulebook. He’s pulling them in. You’ve got your ship, Maya, if you’ve got the taste for another game of tickle-my-sabre with their crew.’

‘Open the hatches along the engine car repair gantry,’ Westwick ordered her hulking captain of marines. ‘We’ll board them at the broadside.’ She seized Jack by the scruff of his striped navy shirt, wiping off the blood on one of her cutlasses against his shoulder. ‘I’ll deal with you later, Mister Keats.’

‘You did the right thing, lad,’ said John Oldcastle, watching the first lieutenant sprint out with her Benzari warriors in tow. ‘Remember that. Not by the book, but the right thing, nevertheless.’

Jack felt a knot of fear tightening in his stomach.

Back in the unforgiving slums of Middlesteel, doing the right thing was often as costly a mistake as you could make. You only looked out for yourself, and at a push, for your family. Jack’s decision, would, he expected, end just as badly. In his world, no good deed went unpunished.

Jack watched the binds being tightened around his wrists, his face pressed between the frame of a fin-bomb rack, the closed bomb-bay doors locked beneath his boots.

‘For disobeying a standing order when pressed by the enemy,’ intoned the first lieutenant as she read out the charges. ‘For cowardice in the face of enemy fire and imperilling the Royal Aerostatical Navy vessel Iron Partridge while on active duty.’

‘Take this lad,’ said John Oldcastle from behind Jack, pressing a cloth-wrapped wooden handle between his teeth. ‘Bite down on it, it’ll help save your tongue.’

‘Skyman Jack Keats is sentenced to ninety lashes.’

‘What is this?’ the voice boomed from behind the crewmen lined up along the side of the bomb bay, Captain Jericho pushing his way through the press of sailors.

‘The maintaining of discipline,’ said First Lieutenant Westwick.

‘I did not order this!’

‘Under the articles of war, I have the authority to-’

‘It is customary to inform the captain before ordering a flogging,’ barked Jericho. ‘And those articles you are