for that kind of shit!”
“D’Angelus will set snipers on anyone who goes up top and tries to free the craft,” said Hellequin. He pursed his lips. They hadn’t much of an alternative. The closer they got to the ground, the greater the likelihood that D’Angelus’s men could pin down the ship.
“You need an athlete to navigate the exterior while avoiding sniper fire.” Hellequin stepped inside of himself a moment, to the night he had been tasked with removing the civilian contingent from the goods’ store at the township of Graymo. Tucked in behind a shot-out truck tyre, he’d sketched out his manoeuvres in the dust. He would send in men from the rooftop. He would cover them – that was the purpose of the HawkEye soldier. To see what was coming before others did. To be one step ahead. To volunteer the lives of those more disposable than his own.
His mind snapped back to the present. “Lulu should do it.”
The surprise on the faces of the pitch crew gave way to a dawning inevitability and murmurs of “The ladyboy should do it,” “Only one with the skills,” and “Whaddaya say, Jeridian?”
“My name is Asenath,” the woman emphasised coldly. She scrutinised Hellequin with her dark green eyes. “And how do we persuade Lulu to do it?”
“Let me handle Lulu,” said Hellequin.
“Drag them in! Drag them in!” hollered D’Angelus.
Jaxx drove the giant winch by its handle, stretching onto tiptoe each time the wheel moved around to its highest axis. The sleeves of his kurta shirt strained across his tensed muscles. The brimless white kufi hat he wore grew dark with sweat.
Das was at his elbow. Crossing his wiry brown arms, the navigator squinted up and gave a low whistle. “Now that is one strange critter you’ve harpooned there, Jaxx. Oh, yessy yes. Oh, yessy yes,” he repeated softly.
All around the burrower, D’Angelus’s men were drinking in the fresh air after the hours in the hold, stretching their legs, sharing jokes and occasionally shadowing their eyes with the flat of a hand and staring up at their catch.
You think it’s all over, thought Jaxx of each, including the saloon owner. His Spirit belief system led him to consider another path though. One that allowed for a small seed-like shape flickflacking down the side of Cyber Circus’s tarpaulin.
Lulu took to his ass and slid down one panel of the tent’s roof at speed. The bowed fabric at the bottom formed a makeshift trampoline. The instant his feet made contact with it, Lulu softened his knees, absorbed the tremor, and kicked off. He knew all about tumbling through space inside the tent, where the spotlights burnt down from above like balled fire. But this was a different degree of vastness. Arms pinioned to his sides, feet pointed out of habit, he imagined himself catapulted up to the heights of the tent’s twin peaks. Except, there was an endless stretch of blue sky above him this time. Nothing to cling onto. No net below.
He tucked his fear beneath his breastbone. He was Lulu – tantalising, mesmerising, the marchioness of flight! There was nothing new about this performance. It was simply an alternative venue. And a tougher crowd, he realised as a couple of rock ammo shots fell short of him.
The attack brought his latent testosterone to the fore. Soaring over the first peak of the tent, propulsion hollowing his cheeks, he found a new motivation to succeed. Yes, he’d extracted a promise from the HawkEye in exchange for his help, but it was reward enough to spit in the eye of the bad men below. Men who’d take a prize like Nim and scratch their initials into her. Men who’d abuse gentler souls and leave them fit only for the circus, he reminded himself, pushing darker memories of his own misuse aside.
His toes made contact with the far side of the tent. He somersaulted sideways and down, nimbly avoiding the snipers’ pot shots. Beneath him, the tent billowed and sighed with each wound.
A clot of the parasitic silk clung to the brass rod that ran around the edge of the tent roof. Lulu tucked his feet under the warm metal and leant back against the canvas to make himself invisible to the snipers. Reaching over a shoulder, he extended a corrugated hose from the small fuel case strapped to his back, aimed it between his feet and squeezed the trigger. Flames splurged from the mouth. The knot of silk melted back in layers, but still the fibres tried to re-knit. Lulu kept up the outpour of flames, narrowly avoiding scorching the more delicate tarpaulin as he fell sideways suddenly when that particular grip on the ship released. He let go of the trigger. The fire rescinded instantly.
“Oh, my sweet heart!” He patted the spot above one set of ribs.
The craft lurched, the bridge tipping skyward. Just as suddenly it rocked back. The ship was being towed towards the ground again.
“What the devil is Lulu doing up there?” Herb wrestled the ship’s wheel at full lock, his squat hands moulding with its frills. Cyber Circus bucked, objecting to her restraints. The ringmaster was momentarily thrown against the chart coil to the left of the wheel, a navigation system worked via a foot pump and which drew a calico cartography strip through twin brass winders. He steadied himself, stepped up onto a foothold in the stalk of the wheel and tried to manipulate the pulley system overhead.
“Got to get us some leverage here.”
Nestled in the viewing pit, Nim pressed her face to the grimy window. The bridge was a pustule of ribs and glass, located at the front of the ship and accessed via a gangplank above the head crest of the calliope. To the rear of the room was the ship’s wheel and associated apparatus. To the fore, a cushioned viewing pit.
Nim peered up and saw a fresh glob of silk arrive alongside the shredded remains of the first.
“They’ve got a replacement gripline attached,” she called back.
“Shit me backwards. That nimby, Lulu, better hurry his ass up and cut us loose already,” spat Herb, voice strained with the effort to keep the wheel from spinning.
“We need someone else up there.”
Hellequin stood at the entrance to the bridge, holding back the muscle sheet of a curtain. The whir of his internal clockwork made him just another part of the craft.
“Go!” Herb cried enthusiastically. “Any of you, go!”
Nim pressed her hands to the glass and stared down. She saw D’Angelus, the motherfucker, in his signature trekker’s hat. His men swarmed below. Like fire ants, they deserved to have boiling water poured over them.
She turned around sharply. “I’ll do it.”
Hellequin parted his lips to speak. The red hot magma of her eyes was enough to torch his objections.
D’Angelus tucked behind one of the burrower’s giant spinnerets; sooner or later the circus crew would get in range to start using their rock rifles. He squinted up to see a second figure emerge at one of the peaks of the circus tent. While the first had proven a slippery little sucker, flickflacking to avoid his snipers’ best shots, the newcomer had a fluid elegance.
“Like a dancer,” murmured the salon owner. He nipped at his smoke stick and savoured its aroma. “You!” He addressed the nearest of his dust handler grunts. “Give me your binoculars.”
The man removed a pair of field binoculars from around his neck and handed them over. D’Angelus shook back the strap and brought the device to his eyes. One lens was pitted, the result of exposure to Humock’s torrential dust storms, no doubt.
“How’d you see through these damn things,” he muttered, adjusting the zoom to admire his prey in detail as she opened her black umbrella, brought it under her and leapt inside. Nim set the umbrella spinning in her descent. The snipers were forced to weave their barrels every which way in an effort to sight her.
“Fighting back, Nim? Well, I never.” He flicked up the rim of his trekker’s hat to get a better view.
Nim slid down to the fat brass vein running around the circumference of the roof. She stepped out of the moving umbrella and twirled it up over one shoulder.
“Lulu!”
“Miss Nim?” called the ladyboy from below. He appeared over the edge, face blackened by the backdraft off the flame hose. “The devils sent you out here to do a pitchman’s job? The yellow-bellied stink swines!” Lulu pulled
