The Black Lung Captain - By Chris Wooding Page 0,91

up this way.

The cargo ramp was opening, squealing gently on its hydraulics. Cold wind blew in, stirring his hair and clothes. Tarpaulins flapped on the crates stacked nearby. Between the booming of the thunder and the shudder of lightning, there was the quieter sound of distant cannon fire and machine guns.

Silo, Jez and Malvery were keyed up, fidgeting with anticipation. Frey was loading his revolver, his cutlass dangling from his belt. He'd taken out his earcuff. unable to stand listening to Harkins and Pinn babble any longer. Jez would be their contact with the pilots.

Bess stood next to Crake, shifting restlessly. She smelt of old leather and machine grease. A thrumming noise came from her chest, a sign of tension and unease. She knew what was coming. He laid a hand on her mailed elbow to calm her.

I'll fix you, Bess, he thought. I'll make this better somehow. For now, we have to get through this.

He just hoped she wouldn't get hurt. Even though he knew she was all but invulnerable to anything short of high explosives, he hated himself every7 time he allowed her to be sent into battle. But how could he explain his reluctance to the Cap'n without also confessing his crime? To the rest of the crew, Bess was just a dumb lump of metal. Only Jez knew the truth.

I'll be with you, he told the golem silently. Don't worry.

The ramp thumped down. Frey raised his pistol in the air, looked back at his crew and yelled, 'Board 'em!'

They ran down the ramp and out. Wind and rain assaulted them. The hardy moor grass whipped around their legs. A dozen kloms away, the flashing of cannons and the slow lines of tracer fire lit up the Storm Dog and the Delirium Trigger, caught in their own private war. Lightning flickered, scarring jagged paths through the night. The air was charged with it.

Before them, like some vast, slain creature of the deep, was the crumpled hulk of the Awakener barque. They were close enough now to see the name painted along the buckled hull: All Our Yesterdays. Smoke leaked from vents near its stern end. It lay in a trench that stretched away out of sight, the earth rucked up in piles all around it.

'The entrance will be over there,' said Jez, pointing. Jez, the craftbuilder's daughter. She knew her aircraft better than any of them.

They sallied across the gap between the aircraft and located the door that Jez had promised. There was no sign of anybody coming out of the All Our Yesterdays. The door had been bent and twisted in the impact, and was half-buried by the banked-up soil. Bess dug it out with her hands, took hold of the edge, and tore it off.

Frey peered inside. 'We don't want any trouble!' he yelled. 'Put down your weapons, and you won't be—'

He was interrupted by a volley of gunfire, and jumped back sharply. 'Well, I tried,' he said with a shrug. 'Get 'em, Bess.'

Bess roared and charged in through the door. There was a brief salvo of bullets, dissolving into screams and cries of alarm.

'Let's get in there,' Frey said, motioning to his crew. Then he plunged through the door, firing his revolver. The others piled in after him. Crake was not ashamed to be last.

Inside, it was chaos. Crake found himself in an assembly area, with a high ceiling and a gantry that ran around the edge of the chamber. The roof had split in the crash, shedding debris from the room above on to the floor. Cables hung in thick clusters like vines; exposed girders were bent and snapped off; cracked pipes leaked and hissed. A thin, poisonous pall of smoke hazed the air. Emergency lights provided a sinister twilight.

Hiding among the ruination were Sentinels, wearing grey, high-collared cassocks and carrying rifles. The Sentinels were Awakeners who didn't have the talent or the intelligence to become Speakers -those who preached and practised the Awakeners' craft - so they expressed their faith in other ways, by taking up weapons in defence of their organisation. Crake thought them mindless, brainwashed fools, but he supposed a bullet from a fool's gun hurt just as much as any other, so he kept his head down and ran for cover.

Bullets clipped through the air, but nobody was shooting at him: all attention was on Bess. The Sentinels scurried away or took frightened potshots from a distance as she ploughed into the room. Bullets bounced from her scratched and