Jack Cloudie

‘Masks?’

‘No,’ Omar called back, flicking the long reins up to the drak’s vicious muzzle. ‘Enemy airships — running — semi-pressurized. Breach board will — be — our advantage.’

Our advantage. Jack was grateful they weren’t facing a fighting Jackelian crew — an experienced crew who would try to tire an attacking wing of draks by climbing further. Instead, it was the guardsmen who had taken up position at a higher altitude and, ready for a dive. Did the Imperial Aerial Squadron’s airships have their own version of a crow’s-nest dome topside and an h-dome on the bow, manned by experienced spotters with telescopes? And how diligent would they be flying over ‘safe’, friendly territory?

Then, there they were, below and ahead, two airships — the familiar glinting silhouette of the Iron Partridge, and to her port, the profile of a Cassarabian ’stat, matching the tortoise- like speed of the heavy prize vessel.

Red smoke fanned out from the head of the flight — the sight that every Jackelian sailor dreaded. Omar shouted something to Jack, just before the drak turned downwards and drew in its wings. As their monstrous steed plummeted, Jack realized he had called for ‘snarls’ — propeller snarls. He reached down to the middle of the saddle, where the long weapons were dangling — sticky white fronds like hundreds of pieces of string bound in the middle by a leather circlet. RAN lore had it that the material was secreted from human-hybrid spiders kept scuttling about in some womb mage’s dungeon — but whether that was true or not was irrelevant to the effect they would have when impacting upon an airship’s rotors.

‘Port, forward!’ yelled Omar as the drak’s velocity increased still further, pointing to the Iron Partridge’s front engine, which grew larger with each second they plunged. ‘Throw — on the — brake.’

The wind was whipping the propeller snarl in Jack’s hand, the dull metal hull of the Iron Partridge rising up fast — a trick of the angle, as if the drak was stationary and it was the airship and ground being hurled up at them.

They began banking left, Jack’s spare hand clutching the saddle pommel tight as he pushed down into the stirrups with his boots, struggling to keep the propeller snarl level enough to hurl. Seconds away from the engine car and the drak’s wings cracked open, slowing and throwing them to one side. Jack hurled the propeller snarl and let the velocity of their fall carry it into the blurred disk of the engine car’s blades. Jack hardly caught the explosion of white chords in his wake, another drak’s flank coming close enough to theirs that he could have struck a match on the beast’s scales. They were manoeuvring through the diving press of the rest of the talon wing so fast that it felt as if his body had turned to lead, his weight doubled. As another drak banked off, clearing his view, Jack saw they were wheeling under the iron belly of the Iron Partridge. Her guns were silent, as were her engine cars, the lion-headed motors trailing oily smoke as their traction belts tried vainly to rotate her badly jammed blades.

Then the drak was out from under the airship’s shadow, and Jack saw that the Cassarabian aerostat was putting up more of a fight; a few puffs of cannon fire from the rubber-hooded ordnance along the hull aimed at the cloud of draks corkscrewing around her length. Riding a thermal, their drak soared up past the starboard plating of the Iron Partridge, angling around to pass the crow’s-nest dome.

There were fighters atop the hull and their drak angled itself to swoop down and trace a hull-scratching landing in the lee of the frill of mortar tubes. Just as agreed. Jack dismounted, landing heavily on the top plates as Omar cut the saddlebags containing the boarding gear to slide down next to him. As soon as its baggage was cut, the drak went scrabbling off the side of the airship to catch another thermal, clearing the space for the next landing.

It wasn’t easy to see the boarding party scurrying around the top of the airship with the sun floating directly astern, but there was one figure Jack would know anywhere — the commodore with his rolling mariner’s gait. He bustled over to Jack, a tinted pair of guardsman’s brass goggles strapped over his salt and pepper hair. ‘Tell me you’ve got the fuses, lad?’

‘I have,’ confirmed Jack, hefting the saddlebags.

‘You’ve come on a fair wind, then,’ said the commodore, puffing for breath at the altitude. He took the saddlebags and rifled through its contents as he walked. ‘I nearly had to put a gun to the head of the guardsmen’s armourer to get him to part with enough of his precious explosives to force our hatch. I told him that Jericho had our ship reinforced and sealed down as tight as a drum after that pair of Cassarabian birds used the hatch to board us, but the fool wouldn’t listen to me.’

Guardsmen were tying up rappelling lines around the mortar tubes — another of the commodore’s ideas. ‘The guns, lad,’ he’d said back at the camp. ‘They’ll be expecting us to come through the top hatches, and we’ll give them some fireworks there to suit. No, the rubber hoods of our thirty-two pounders are where you’ll guarantee finding an empty deck — for what skipper would put his men to guarding prisoners who could touch off a broadside against their sister ship? Our gunners will be chained up on the Cassarabian transport, and the skeleton crew they’re keeping will be console men and engine-room stokers.’

The truth of the commodore’s conjectures was about to be proved in the field by an experiment in demolition. Jack stripped the fuses as the commodore got back to the job of shaping the putty-like explosive substance around the sealed maintenance hatch on the hull.

‘While there’s pleasure to be had teasing open a transaction-engine lock,’ the commodore wheezed to Jack as he worked, ‘this is the other side of a cracksman’s art. And look at the mortal cheap rubbish they’ve given us to work with. Sweating tears in the sun, volatile enough to split the drak that carried it here in half.’

‘I know locks,’ said Jack. I had enough practice back home. If I hadn’t, I might not have ended up here.

‘Nothing to learn from old Blacky, eh? If I’d been there with you in the vaults of Lords Bank we wouldn’t have come away empty handed. There’s a time for the cerebral game, and there’s a time for the physical game, and a little fun to be had combining the blessed two.’

‘They were pumping in dirt gas,’ said Jack, ‘and the bank’s guards were coming at us from above, with the police down in the sewers.’

‘That’s what this paste is for,’ said the commodore, running a finger down the explosives pushed into the wedge of the hatch beneath them. ‘Not too much. Not too little. Seal the vents and let the bank’s guards drink their own soup. Seal the sewer tunnels and make sure the only rats Middlesteel’s finest catch are the furry four-legged variety. That’s the problem with training just on transaction engines. Give a fellow a hammer and every problem starts to look like a nail.’

‘And what did I look like to you when Captain Jericho sent you to get me from prison?’ asked Jack.

‘Like a diamond in the rough, Mister Keats. In need of a little polishing.’ The commodore drew one of the matches he usually used to light his pipe. ‘And now let me show you what just enough looks like.’

He lit each of the four fuses pushed into the corners of the hatch and there was a dull thump as the hatch jumped up out of its hinges. ‘And that’s what you get when you ask that incompetent sod Mister Pasco to seal a hatch.’

At the sound of the hatch being blown, the guardsmen who’d fixed their lines to the mortar tubes began rappelling down both sides of the airship, the soldiers standing behind Jack and the commodore pulling at the broken hatch and lifting it out of the hull plates.

Drawing his pistol, Jack made to move forward, but the commodore laid a hand on his shoulder as the guardsmen piled past. ‘And here’s your last lesson, lad. Never be the first into the breach. That’s what the army calls the forlorn hope; you need a taste for death to accept that poisoned chalice.’

The dying followed quickly enough, the sounds of shouts and the rattle of pistol fire echoing around the enclosed corridors only seconds after the guardsmen stormed below.

‘Second wave, lad,’ said the commodore, making for the maintenance ladder revealed by his demolition art. ‘We don’t want our drak-riding allies thinking we’re yellow.’

As they had anticipated, resistance from the prize crew was as light as the numbers on board the vessel, a handful of corpses in the uniforms of the Imperial Aerial Squadron marked the deadly passage of the guardsmen. With their dark leather uniforms oiled against the elements, bandoliers of shells, grenades, knives and aviator goggles, the guardsmen looked like the aerial pirates from some cheap Jackelian penny-dreadful, their manners as fierce as the edges of their blades.

Jack felt like an impostor as he followed in their bloody wake — wearing the tattered Jackelian Royal