Jaxx glanced across. His eyes were slits of jet. “It’ll be dawn once we surface. Nowhere to hide in that dust bowl. For Cyber Circus or us.”
The farmhouse had long since run to ruin. A windmill that once pumped water for livestock stood motionless. The porch was crumpled in. The roof had sloughed most of its tiles; those that remained were the colour of rust.
Across the yard were a water tower and tumbledown barn. The water tower reservoir advertised ‘Soul Food’ in faded red lettering. The door to the barn stood ajar. Inside were a great many hessian sacks stored for the transport of the plant feed, now buried under dust.
The farm appeared hastily abandoned, with many remnants left in place to rot. Delivery trucks were still parked out back of the barn, tyres fallen in, the sun and wheat sheaf logo bleached across their bonnets. Out in the nearest field of dust, the traction reaper had seized mid-furrow, jaw craned wide, its scythe-like teeth blooded with rust. Chaff plates ran the length of the reaper’s spine. Two squat chimneys sprouted up back like testes. Other machines were scattered as far as the horizon: corrugated burrowers, steel Jack O’Lanterns with their eyes gone out, a stack of reserve trespass mines from the end of the farm’s operational life when it became necessary to guard against the protestors and those whose land had been destroyed.
Dawn brought with it a new intruder – a large dirigible drifting overhead. The unusual craft boasted a brightly striped hide, open skirts that frilled and ebbed like living fungus, and strings of coloured lights streaming from its twin masts. Smoke spilt off the backend, leaving a grey snail’s trail across the sky. As the sun rose over Soul Food Farm, the dirigible advanced with bursts of steamy engine sound and soft putt-putts of expelled air.
In the barren field below, dust started to bounce a centimetre above the ground. Moments later, the surface broke with an audible crack that echoed off the quiet landscape. A metal corkscrew wormed up, expelling dry dirt like sputum. It grew in circumference, revealing a huge titanium crest, faces behind glass and a scaled abdomen that tapered to a steam-sealed trapdoor.
Sledging up and out of its hole, the burrower propelled itself through the dust, belly flicking side-to-side to drive momentum.
“You can’t be serious about putting down.” Hellequin stared at the ringmaster.
“Someone explain why we’ve gotta land,” Herb threw out as he strode between the pitch crew, busy oiling the fleshy rigging either side of the gangplank.
“Need to refuel,” answered Asenath, the Jeridian with a penchant for severed heads and who now headed up the pitch crew.
“Precisely.” Herb stopped walking and rested his elbows on the brass safety rail. He peered down into the air-filled hull. “My girl here is running on dregs. She needs to suck on a water pipe.” He gave the rail an affectionate if begrudging pat.
Hellequin dragged a hand through his hair. “The pimp’s gonna have acquired a new chain gang of heavies.”
“It’ll take D’Angelus two days to navigate the dust trail to Haven Springs. Plenty of time to get a bellyful of water.” Herb kept his gaze on the grey landscape below. “Plenty of time to set up pitch and relieve the marks of their dollars too.”
“You want to put on a performance at Haven Springs?” The soldier’s steel eye tucked back into its socket, revolted at the fact.
Herb tutted. “Hellequin. I’ve been straight with you all the way since you and I first bumped gums. You need a way of life that’ll distract from the madness you know is coming. I need acts. Simple as. So when I tell ya Nim’s a nice girl, but in my eyes, just another asset, I’m guessing you gotta believe me. You keep guard outside your girlfriend’s dressing room if you want. But for the rest of us carnies, the show must go on!”
The ringmaster walked away, patting his belly and nodding knowledgeably as he inspected the handiwork of each crew member he passed.
Hellequin leant forward and draped his long arms over the railing, aware of the warmth of the metal through the sleeves of his frockcoat. Below, the open hull gave out onto the dust plains – or as he remembered them, fertile prairie until Soul Food sucked the life from it. He caught sight of something then, a silver dash in the desert. The HawkEye implant telescoped in, its twin rings performing alternating revolutions. He saw the tip of a vast metal nose cone, the splatter of dust mid-motion...
“And what if the pimp’s caught up with us already,” he called out.
Rubberised silk blasted up into the sky, propelled from spinnerets to the rear of the burrower, Wanda-Sue. Most fell short of Cyber Circus. Two threads struck home, one attaching to the stump end of a brass vein, the other to a kite line. Each gob of silk burst apart into hundreds of micro-fine threads that wound round and round their anchor points, securing purchase. The noise of the ship deepened as it buckled against the restraints. Far below, the burrower wormed its backend into the dust.
“They’re bedding down. Everyone grab a hold!” cried Asenath, abandoning her maintenance task to grip the rail alongside Herb and Hellequin.
“What in the name of the Saints does that mean?” Herb’s eyes widened with the sort of surprise that didn’t strike the ringmaster often.
“Means D’Angelus has got himself an ex-military burrower. Machine fitted with cannons capable of shooting rubber silk at the enemy.”
The Jeridian was right, Hellequin realised. Focusing on the feed jet at the base of one spinneret, he saw the flight of the silk bundles in fractured snapshots. He switched his attention to Asenath, steel eye retracting and refocusing.
“Who’d you serve with?”
The Jeridian batted a hand off her brow. “Ninth platoon. Home of buffoons, loons and idiots.”
“Ninth platoon?” Hellequin took in the ladder piercing at the woman’s throat, the rock ammo scars at her high forehead and a shoulder, the scar of a stab wound running from an inner elbow around to her collarbone, a dark blue symbol at one ear lobe. Tattoo of a sickle blade. Sign of one of Zan City’s gangs.
Hellequin kept the knowledge to himself. The woman was well versed in military technology, and, just then, that was all that mattered. She was also Cyber Circus’s newly appointed chief pitchman and all about giving orders.
“Herb. You’ll take the bridge, ya? Be ready to drive your lady hard once we’ve broken free of the tethers.”
“Hold it there.” Herb jiggled his generous belly with his hands, freshly agitated. “This is my ship and I don’t take kindly to being ordered about by a Jerdian bitch who’s newly elevated but who can just as speedily be removed from the post.”
“Yes, this is your ship. You speak to its heart and lungs. You’ve known this vessel the longest and have the most experience as its sailing master.”
There was a sudden jolt. Asenath’s dark green eyes acquired the same intensity as Hellequin’s metalmorphised gaze.
“They’re reeling us in. I am asking you to take the wheel for this hour only. After that, you can don your hat and order us around again.” A flash of silver and Asenath’s scimitar arrived just short of Herb’s throat. She grinned. “I’ll even let you keep your head.”
Herb considered his new chief pitchman with an appraising eye. “Uh huh.” The trace of a smile at his lips suggested the ringmaster was secretly pleased to be tasked with saving his ship. He strutted off in the direction of the bridge, knocking into the rail either side now and again as the circus struggled against its tethers.
Returning the scimitar to a black leather scabbard at her back, the Jeridian clapped her hands briskly. The pitchmen responded, apparently having already fallen in with her abrupt style of leadership.
“We need volunteers to climb out on top of the tent, locate the parasite ropes and cut us free. The devils have landed three shots last count,” she told them.
“You want some sucker to climb out on the rigging while Cyber Circus is in flight?” spat one pitchman, chowing down on a smoke stick as if it was his last taste of life and he intended to drain every bit of flavour. “We ain’t got a hope. The Saints alone know where the gobs landed,” said a second, and a third, “We ain’t paid enough
