The world altered. The dark was still dark, but it didn’t obscure her vision any more. She sensed them now: eighteen men, two women. Their thoughts were a hiss, like the rushing of the waves along the coast.
Panic swelled and consumed her. She was out of control. Her senses had sharpened to an impossible degree. She smelled them out there. She heard their footsteps. And in the distance, far beyond the range of physical hearing, she heard something else. A cacophony of cries. The engines of a dreadful craft. And its crew, calling her. Calling in one wordless, discordant chorus.
Come with us. Come to the Wrack.
She recoiled from them, trying to focus her thoughts on anything other than the beckoning of that nightmarish crew. But instead of snapping out of that strange state, her mind veered away and fixed on something else. She felt herself sucked in, as she had been in Yortland watching predators stalking snow-hogs. But this time it was no animal she joined with: it was a man.
She felt his tension, the sweat of him, the thrill of the moment. Comfort and satisfaction at being on the winning side. He knew they had the advantage. Don’t slip up, though, you old dog. Plenty of graves full of the overconfident (pleased with that line, use it on the boys). Seems like they’re keeping their heads down, now. That dynamite scared ’em good.
Need to get closer. Get a good shot on ’em then. Cap’n (respect awe protectiveness admiration) would love it if you bagged one for her. Come on. Just over there.
Run for it!
Suddenly Jez was moving, rising, sighting down her rifle. She was in him and she was herself, two places at once. She knew where he was; she saw through his eyes; she felt his legs pumping as they carried him.
Her finger squeezed the trigger, and she shot him through the head at forty metres in the dark.
His thoughts stopped. All sense of him was gone. He was blanked, leaving only a hole. And Jez was thrust back into herself, her senses all her own again, curled in a foetal ball behind her barricade as she tried to understand what had just happened to her.
What am I? What am I becoming?
But she knew what she was becoming. She was becoming one of them. One of the nightmare crew. One of the creatures that lived in the wastes behind the impenetrable cloud-wall of the Wrack.
I have to run, she told herself, as a fresh volley of gunfire was unleashed. Bullets ricocheted off the side of the Ketty Jay. Another stick of dynamite fell close enough to knock over some of the barrels at the end of a barricade.
‘We can’t hold out no more!’ screeched Harkins.
No, she thought grimly. We can’t.
The deck of the Delirium Trigger was all but deserted. Most of the skeleton crew were in the guts of the aircraft, anxiously listening to the silence coming from the cargo hold. Others had gone to summon the militia. In the face of such alarm, nobody was loading cargo or swabbing the decks. When Malvery, Pinn and Crake emerged from the captain’s cabin with their plunder, there were no crew to stop them.
They raced across to the winch, now unmanned. A loaded palette was dangling over the cavernous hatch that led to the cargo hold. Pinn flustered around the controls for a few moments before finding something that he assumed would lower the winch. As it turned out, he was right. There was a loud screech and the palette began to rattle downwards.
Crake scanned the craft nervously. A crowd of dock workers had gathered around the Delirium Trigger on the hangar deck, but nobody dared cross the gangplank. They’d heard men talking about a monster aboard. Now they followed the activity of the newcomers with keen interest, assuming them to be crew.
