‘They will release their demon’s breath again when they have recharged their tanks. This is our only chance, girl-child. Close with them, ATTACK!’
Charlotte had covered half the distance to the Purity Queen ’s wreckage, the seanores nearer still, close enough for the initial acceleration of their rotor-spears to detonate on impact now. The nearest of the darkships above the dead Jackelian submarine juddered with a wave of flowering explosions, the wash of shockwaves rattling Charlotte’s helmet and throwing her back in the water. Damage had been taken along the closest darkship, although it was nothing like the destruction the two craft had visited on the Purity Queen. Black folds fluttered along the invader’s ebony surface as though in torment, oily globules vomiting out of the rips. Its hull flexed and writhed close to the impact strikes.
Charlotte had difficulty concentrating this close to the darkships, the throb of pain in her head intensifying with every foot she swam nearer. Not just the pain, their proximity was setting her nerves on edge, an almost superstitious dread tunnelling into her deepest, darkest fears. Every iota of Charlotte’s being screamed at her to flee, to swim away from these underwater terrors and keep on going. She was breathing hard, the visor of her diving helmet misting up on the inside. Her bones vibrated with panic, shaking in terror.
‘The darkships sing their own song,’ Elizica’s voice warned. ‘They seek out the frequency of fear within your heart.’
Both darkships had returned to their pear-like configuration and pulled up from the Purity Queen ’s belly, the craft further away lifting and using the hull of the damaged darkship as a shield. From one of the rents near the Purity Queen ’s amidships a figure emerged pulling another, both in diving suits. One of them was Maeva. The prone form; the commodore’s. But was he alive? No sign of King Jude’s sceptre; that must still be inside the wreck.
These cursed things; these were part of the conspiracy that had set Charlotte up to steal the sceptre, before coldly attempting to slaughter her as they had murdered poor old Damson Robinson. They had hounded her from her home and were hunting her still, hungry for retribution. With a yell Charlotte cast the rotor-spear, the rush of water activating the gas charge inside the staff, its small motor accelerating the projectile towards the damaged darkship. It struck exactly where she’d aimed, the top of the craft’s bulbous bow, the intuition — supplied by the ancient spirit haunting her mind — that this was where the pilot was succoured by the foul black substance. Her shaft’s explosion was one of many. The seanore didn’t need to follow Charlotte’s example to press home their advantage against an obviously wounded party. The damaged darkship reversed erratically, its surface breaking up and threading away as if it were a lump of lard melting in the pan. Tilting forward, the surviving craft had learnt the danger of ignoring these attackers, its bow reforming into a lance. With a flash of strangely dark light, the cutting force of the craft was unleashed against the attacking seanores. To Charlotte’s right, one of the human nomads was cleaved from head to groin in a broiling second, his two halves split and simultaneously cauterized into a bloodless death, drifting apart in a frozen rictus agony. There seemed no limit of range to the weapon; when it fired, the sea boiled and everything in its path was carved into slices.
Charlotte yelled in alarm as the beam punched past her, the sound echoing in the confines of her helmet, flinging her down towards the seabed. Close enough to sear the skin beneath her diving suit. A handful of seanore were swimming in above the kelp forest, using their rotor-spears set low to carry them in before launching the weapons — literally riding the projectiles down onto their foe. The undamaged darkship pivoted, the cutting beam moving with it, ploughing through the forest — ground erupting like the fault line of an earthquake with its violence — before bursting through the raiding party.
Charlotte crawled through the kelp towards the broken hull of the Purity Queen. Maeva was in the lee of a rent, oxygen from the crippled craft streaming out behind her as she held onto the prostrate form of Commodore Black. The surface of the old u-boat man’s suit appeared burnt and there was no way to tell if she was cradling a corpse or not.
‘Just like when we first met,’ Maeva’s murmurs carried across to Charlotte’s helmet. ‘Always pulling you out of the wreckage of your mishaps.’
‘Leave them, girl-child. Find the sceptre,’ ordered Elizica.
‘Shut up.’ Charlotte banged her helmet’s side as if that was enough to silence the bodiless ghost.
There was a crackle of exploding speaker boxes behind her. The darkship was looping back, passing over the human nomads of the seanore, felling them with the proximity of its ear-bursting shields. The seanore didn’t have any rotor-spears left, all their projectiles spent in the initial attack. A couple of shock-spears fired licks of energy at the darkship, too far away, their foe moving too fast. Close enough to hit it with their hand weapons was near enough to be cooked by its mere proximity.
In front of the ship, a party of five seanores emerged from ambush among the underwater forest’s fronds, flinging themselves towards the darkship in a suicidal frontal assault. Korda was among them. The leader of the Clan Coudama diving forward with a crystal-bladed harpoon, raising it to impale the supernatural vessel. They rushed the enemy vessel despite the agony they must be undergoing, its hymn of fear rupturing their eardrums, but the darkship and whatever agency propelled it into battle cared not a fig for their bravery. The evil craft accelerated through the war party, running them down, its surface briefly spiking out into a thousand small spines like a bloating pufferfish, a terrible cloud of floating limbs and skewered pieces of the fighters left behind.
Ignoring the roar of static from her speaker box, Charlotte fell back as the darkship’s central weapon extended and carved the Purity Queen ’s remains in half, riding through the boiling, bubbling water of the discharge. The darkship closed on her position. Charlotte’s helmet phones squealed with all the distress of a swine feeling its throat slit, her helmet’s machinery overloading under the fury of the vessel’s dark radiations.
Daunt broke away from Sadly’s grip as the first of the shallow-draft boats hit the beach, sprinting around a tiger crab’s abandoned shell and vaulting the boat’s gunwale. He was seizing one of the spare capacitor packs in the stern as Sadly and Morris caught up with him.
‘We need that to return to the submarine,’ one of the sailors in the rescue party yelled at Daunt. ‘My battery’s almost spent.’
Pulling the pack onto his back, Daunt twisted the trident off a side-clip connected to egg-scented chemical batteries by a dangling cable. ‘Don’t worry good fellow, I have an intuition that the tiger crabs won’t be in the water on our return journey.’
Dick Tull was retreating backward, firing his rifle and reloading from the satchel of charges, bursts of sands and spouts of sea water all around him as the camp guards divided their fire between Boxiron’s suicidal assault and the escaping prisoners. Sadly blocked Daunt’s way, the Court of the Air agent’s face incredulous as he saw the ex- parson trying to delay their departure. ‘Are you cracked? You can’t fight half the bleeding camp’s guards with that!’
‘There’s too many of ’em, amateur.’ Dick agreed.
‘I don’t intend to fight the gill-necks,’ Daunt said, slipping past the hobbling agent. ‘But I don’t intend to leave Boxiron behind either.’
Not today. Not ever.
Sadly cursed the ex-parson, the cane that had contained the tracking isotope suddenly pressed into service to push him after Daunt’s retreating form. He turned to the sailor in the prow of the first rescue boat as the second craft slid in under fire. ‘Get these two men to safety. Tell the sub commander to hold steady.’ He pointed at a sailor on the front of the second boat. ‘You, wait for me.’
Using the cover of the abandoned shells, Daunt circled around the heart of the skirmish. Daunt gained the top of the grassy bank just as Sadly caught up with him. Hiding in the line of the everglades, the camp guards had realized their small-bore rifles were having minimal effect against the steamman. Now they were concentrating their fire on Boxiron with their heavy guns. The steamman’s chest armour had been torn up, gaping holes in the iron revealing his innards, coiled pipes and crystal boards crudely cobbled together in the human mills that turned out artificial servants. Unfortunately for his attackers, their heavy weapons had also chewed chunks out of the power limiter they had fitted to his boiler heart. Its original function had been reduced to so much scrap metal, and now Boxiron was powering up, the warrior’s stacks pouring ugly black spears of smoke into the air above him as he slipped through his gears. Boxiron lurched through their midst, fighting at close quarters, his twin machetes a dervish dance of death, lumbering, brutal, hacking and chopping. Breaking gill-neck bones with every contact of his body. If the guards had been concentrated in a single formation, Boxiron might have been able to overcome the gill-necks in the melee, but they were scattered up and down the beach. Their heavy guns boomed straight through their own ranks as they recognized that this was the only way to bring the steamman down. Before he turned his fury on them too. Boxiron’s chest crumpled under the volley of fire, the plating he’d been fitted out with by the
