The Black Lung Captain - By Chris Wooding Page 0,190

the daemon inside her.

There were voices on the wind. Some called out, some screamed in pain, others murmured as they went about their industry. Drowning them all out was the alarm, the cry of the sphere, pulsing at her mind. It drew her with a primal urgency, like the wail of a newborn draws its mother. Its distress was her distress. Her brethren needed aid. She wanted to help.

The dreadnoughts were beginning to evacuate the Manes from Sakkan. She knew that, without knowing how. They covered for one another, beating back the beleaguered Navy, and let down their ropes for their crew to climb, bringing the newly Invited with them. The sphere was no longer in Sakkan, so they were gathering their people and preparing to give chase.

Even with her best efforts, the Ketty Jay's passage through the clouds was violent. She couldn't react fast enough to account for every variation in the vortex. The craft shivered and whined as she was pummelled from all sides.

But gradually, the chaos eased, and the jolts came less often. Finally they reached still air, a featureless blank of grey cloud. Jez sat back in her seat, her expression vacant.

'You did it,' said Crake, after he'd swallowed a few times to get some moisture back into his throat.

'Nice work, Jez,' said Frey. 'Bloody nice work.' He got out of the navigator's seat and slapped the bulkhead. 'She's a tough old boot, the Ketty Jay!'

'Cap'n,' said Jez, her eyes distant. 'Cloud's thinning out.'

A light was growing ahead of them, and the temperature had dropped noticeably. Frey and Crake pulled their coats closer around them and crowded up behind Jez. Their breath steamed the air, despite the Ketty Jay's internal heating system.

The picture faded in gradually, until at last the land opened up before their eyes.

'Oh, my,' whispered Crake.

The haze in the air had diminished but not disappeared, giving the panorama a bleary, dreamlike quality. The sun shone, weak and distant, forcing the barest illumination through the shroud. Beneath them, a dim white world was laid out, an ocean of ice and snow as far as they could see. Cliffs surged abruptly into the sky at steep angles, as if they'd exploded up violently from beneath. Some lay splintered against one another, smashed by epic, millennia-long conflicts. The plains were rippled with sastrugi, great breaking waves, flash-frozen. Distant mountains loomed high and bleak. At their feet was a wide, low shadow, all curves and angles, glowing a faint shade of green.

'By damn,' said Crake. 'Is that what I think it is?'

'Yes,' said Jez. 'It's a city.'

Even Jez couldn't believe what she was seeing. A city of Manes, here in the arctic. To the others, it was barely visible, but Jez's vision was far superior to theirs. The city was all circles and arcs, built from black granite without much thought for human ideas of symmetry.

The majority of the buildings were low and round, stacked in uneven layers, half-circles and crescents and S-shaped curves. Among them stood sharp towers of shiny, glassy black, slender stalagmites that thinned unevenly towards their pinnacles.

The stacks and towers were linked by a complicated sequence of curving, covered boulevards that fractured and split in all directions. The buildings were like points on a diagram, the boulevards a web of connections between them. A seething green light soaked upward from the ground around the city, but Jez couldn't see what was making it. It was too far, even for her.

'Where are we?' asked Frey.

'We're at the North Pole,' said Jez. 'On the far side of the Wrack.'

Crake licked his lips nervously. 'Cap'n . . . what we're seeing here ... no one's ever been here.'

'No one's ever been here and come back alive,' Frey corrected. 'I'll bet the second part's the trickier of the two.' He scanned the sky and pointed. 'There they are.'

The Storm Dog was a few dozen kloms distant, hanging in the air, her thrusters dark. A dreadnought lay alongside, firmly attached to Grist's frigate by a half-dozen magnetic grapples. There was no sign of life or movement on either craft.

'They've been boarded,' said Jez.

'Get us over there, fast,' Frey told her. 'Crake, with me. Let's get tooled up.'

Crake held up his bandaged hand. 'I might sit this one out, Cap'n. I can't fire a gun. I'd be dead weight out there.'

'We can't bring Bess,' Jez added. 'That kind of craft, she'd barely get through the corridors.'

Frey cursed under his breath. 'Alright, Crake. You and Bess make sure the Ketty