Herb scratched his bald head with fat little fingers. “I’m not saying I’m against it. So long as we keep the flaps laced tight any crawlers out there should find it hard to get inside. But my problem’s this. It’d take our last slurp of water to get airborne again. And what then, when we run outta steam in the belly of this place?”
“I’m suggesting we send out scouts to look for water before it gets to that.” Hellequin eased the dirigible over the last of the jagged spikes and into a second smaller cavern. Something about the way the rock formed here gave it an obsidian sheen. Reflected in its element, Cyber Circus’s luminescence magnified. Now Nim and Herb saw out into the cavern, a goblin hall of crystals and glossy rock folds.
Nim slid back down into the viewing pit and pressed her hands to the glass. Herb huffed and puffed like an old tin kettle.
“Scouts? Out there? Where you gonna find folk willing?”
Hellequin noticed a flat outcrop of rock. He snapped a lock bar to the wheel to hold them steady and worked a series of pulley straps located above his head. They set down in a soft puff of dust.
The soldier wiggled his wrists, cracked a couple of finger bones. “We got to look to those most suited to the task. Those who can protect themselves from the swarm, who can look through cracks in places normal folk can’t reach. I’m thinking we send the Scuttlers.”
Nim broke away from the glass and stared at both men, appalled. “You want to send children out to do our dirty work?”
Herb narrowed his eyes. “It’s not a bad idea.” When Nim attempted to interrupt, he held up his hands in appeal. “Whaddya wanna go against the say so of a trained soldier for, Nim? HawkEye to boot. This guy has got more strategy going on behind that clockwork eye of his than I could hope for in a lifetime! And it ain’t like the Scuttlers are your average rug rats. Hides like rhinohorns. Great sharp pincers. And a way of manipulating themselves into any nook and cranny. The HawkEye’s right. We gotta send them out.”
Nim gave her attention back to the weird world beyond the glass. “And hope that they come back again,” she whispered.
“Where are those scab balls?” Herb strutted across the bare rock surface in the centre of the tent, kicking up dust as he went. “Any of you slackers seen the Scuttlers?” he hollered out to the pitch crew who had crawled down off the bones of the circus to explore the peculiar ground underfoot.
“Little fuckers got a habit of tucking themselves away,” Herb muttered. “You!” He pointed a stubby finger at a young boy who was employed in smoothing oil over a freshly patched area of the tent wall. “Go peek behind the calliope. They hide away there sometimes.”
The kid ran off to the gilt staircase spiralling up to the calliope.
“Craggy little blighters,” Herb muttered.
“Another hour should see the canvas patched,” Pig Heart shouted down from one of the gangways overhead.
“Dirty warthog. Scragglewort children.” Herb kept up his huffing until a cry of “No sign here, boss!” came from the balcony of the calliope. The boy shimmied down the brass banister of the staircase and landed roughly. He smirked as he slumped back off to his oiling task.
“No Scuttlers means no scouts.” Herb put his hands behind his head and circled on the spot, a spinning top in the form of a fat little man. As he did so, he glimpsed something out of step with the circus – a grotesque figure to the fore of the platform dedicated to his own living quarters. The vision brought bile to his throat, it was so unexpected. But the ringmaster in him shouted, “Hi there! What’s that devil?” He pointed, directing the pitch crew’s attention just as the figure scrabbled down the wires of the lift rig and disappeared onto the scaffold behind the dressing rooms.
“Get me that motherfucker!” screeched Herb, spinning on the spot again.
No longer required at the ship’s wheel, Hellequin was stepping out onto the gangway above the calliope when he saw the stranger. The ghoulish appearance of the figure aroused instinctual revulsion in the soldier. The feeling was fleeting; his Daxware kicked in and rationalised the enemy. A Zen monk aboard Cyber Circus? The notion was nonsensical, but Hellequin didn’t question the fact, or delay his pursuit. With fluid strides, he ran to the far end of the gangway and leapt off, using his long arms to propel his flight. He landed in a crouch at the edge of the canteen platform; the gridded floor rattled at the impact. Pushing off, he charged across the empty room, passing the spot where the monk had stood seconds earlier.
Scaffolding branched off either side. Hellequin levered up onto the bars to the left of the canteen where they disappeared behind the dressing rooms. The last time he’d navigated the narrow bars was to observe Nim’s assault by D’Angelus’s men and quite literally leap to her defence. Now he pursued a different, unquantifiable threat in the form of the figure threading between the crisscrossed bars. Hellequin did not have the acrobatic skills of Lulu or Nim, but he was highly adept at using his own assets. His legs were fatless but muscular; he cramped them to step under the scaffold braces then lengthened out. His HawkEye clicked in sharp rotation, focusing on the monk at the same time that it allowed him to see where to scramble next.
He drew up suddenly. The monk had stopped in between two upright bars, a wilted thing in a gilded cage. Hellequin magnified the finer details of the figure. The sackcloth mask with its slashed mouth, running stitch nose and eyeholes. Small hands that protruded from the long sleeves of the cassock... a young man’s? No, a woman’s, Hellequin rationalised, and felt no less committed in his pursuit of her.
She leapt then, clearing the scaffold and dropping down to the kited silk of the dressing rooms below. Unlike when Hellequin had tried the same trick, the fabric held under the woman’s lesser weight. She slid down; Hellequin used the grid across his steel eye to plot her trajectory. Calculating the drop off point, he shinned down the nearest vertical pole, hit the floor backstage, ran forward and plucked the woman out of the air as she skidded off the roof.
His arm locked in around her waist. His bowie knife sat tight to her throat. She gulped in air. Hellequin felt the quick pace of her heart where his upper arm grazed her ribs.
“Queer how that Zen monk up and abandoned us in the middle of the doggone dessert!” D’Angelus sucked his cheeks against his teeth and looked even more sharp-boned. The burrower rattled in its ribs and gave off occasional spurts of thick smoke. It unnerved D’Angelus. He tugged at his neck tie, loosening it in an effort to ward off the sweat. His palms were clammy and he couldn’t help wishing the monk was back in the cab with them, a charm as crucial to the miners as a song bird in a cage.
“Whaddya you say, Jaxx? You think its queer how that monk went about it?”
The Sirinese nodded. He didn’t speak though. D’Angelus wondered if the man was not a fan of journeying below ground either and said, “Not natural for men to be poking about in the dark like this.” But Jaxx gave no indication that he believed it unnatural, but just stayed inert, eyes fixed on the plethora of grit, streaming water and rock fragments assaulting the windscreen.
“Nope, nothin’ right about a man being this far underground.” D’Angelus’ gaze darted about the cab. The confined space reverberated while the apparatus in the dash became increasingly complex to his eyes. A single kerosene lantern lent his surroundings a spectral green glow.
“We’re almost through to the caverns.” The mechanic glanced back at D’Angelus, eyes magnified by his goggles as if he belonged out amongst the swarm rather than riding in the cab. “I’m bringing us in at an angle. If we wanna avoid the locusts, we’ve got to use common sense. They’re gonna want heat, which means bedding down in one of the deeper caverns. They’re gonna want water. Steam off one of the underground hot springs. Throwback to that whole air plant genesis. My thinking is we tunnel in clear of any water source. Thing is...” Das lent forward and rapped one of the large brass dials in the dash. “I got a way of avoiding the wet stuff thanks to this here Diviner gauge.”
“Hold up, fella!” D’Angelus took off his hat and laid it on his lap. Without the hat, he looked older. “What’s the one thing we can guarantee the circus will have to seek out? What makes that flying freak pit stay up in the sky?” D’Angelus smiled, tic teeth dazzling in the gloom of the cab. “Hot air! And they generate it with steam-driven apparatus. Without water, Cyber Circus is just a big old tent stuck underground.”
“If we seek out water, we’re going to have to deal with the swarm too.” Jaxx’s butting plate reflected the sickly glow off the kerosene lantern.
D’Angelus gestured sharply over one shoulder with a thumb. “You’re forgetting we got a whole load of
