John Brosnan - The Sky Lords

So much killing , thought Jan bleakly, but there had been no choice. “Right,” she said. “Now let’s go and deal with the Perfumed Breeze .”

The commander of the Perfumed Breeze , on witnessing the fate of the Lord Pangloth , had turned his ship around and fled at top speed. But the Sky Angel, with the advantage of a full complement of working thrusters, caught up with it easily. Its commander, a Japanese, spoke no English but Carl was able to broadcast Jan’s demands for surrender in perfect Japanese. The commander refused at first, and fired off a few shells in the Sky Angel’s direction in a token show of resistance. But when the Sky Angel’s lasers incinerated the first of the irreplaceable thrusters the Japanese commander quickly gave in.

Accompanied by an escort of ten of the metal spiders, Jan went on board the Perfumed Breeze . She expected trouble, but there was none at all. The commander and his men were surprisingly submissive, and everywhere she went she was met with bowed heads and samurai offering her their swords. But the Americano captives from the Lord Pangloth , she quickly saw, had been living in terrible conditions under the Japanese; conditions that made her own period of slavery seem humane by comparison.

As she visited yet another stinking room that served as the living quarters for up to thirty starved-looking Americanos, she was surprised when a tall scarecrow of a man covered in sagging flesh pushed his way forward and fell on his knees in front of her. “My dear girl, save me, I beg you, from this living hell!” he cried, wringing his hands. “Remember how I helped you? How I fed and sheltered you … ?”

With a shock, she realized that the man before her was Guild Master Bannion. She touched the brand on her cheek. “Yes, I remember all right. And in gratitude for all you did for me I won’t order my metal friends here to dismember you on the spot.” Then she strode from the room. A teacher had told her once that getting one’s revenge on someone was always an unsatisfactory experience, but she discovered that it actually felt quite pleasant. …

She searched on and on through the Lord Pangloth , looking at the thin and drawn faces and asking the same question endlessly. Then finally, in the fiftieth or hundredth stinking, over-crowded room, she found her.

Physically, the warlord was sitting in his throne room, but his mind was elsewhere, lost in some mental cul-de-sac deep within his skull. The floor of the throne room was tilted both forward and to the starboard. The Lord Pangloth was listing badly and still losing altitude. It had first been carried in an easterly direction; then the wind had changed, and it was now drifting over the ocean. If the warlord had been aware of his surroundings he could have turned on his throne and seen, through the great slanted windows of the bow, the grey and choppy surface of the sea getting closer by the minute.

Equally ignored was the body of his chief pilot, which had slid, leaving a trail of lubricating blood, several feet from the spot in front of the throne where the warlord had carried out a crude trepanning operation on him with his long sword.

The pilot had had the unfortunate task of informing the warlord that there was no hope of saving the Lord Pangloth . Without the thrusters or the elevators there was no way of maintaining a safe altitude. The lift provided by the gas in the cells wasn’t sufficient, mainly because Cell number Seven had never been able to function at full capacity again. Everything that could be thrown overboard had been, including—on the warlord’s orders—three hundred ‘expendable’ people.

From that point on the warlord had retreated within himself and ignored all subsequent, nervous approaches from his anxious officers and servants. They had given up now, and waited for the inevitable with their customary stoicism. None of them even contemplated the dishonourable idea of making an escape from the doomed airship by means of their gliders.

The bow of the Lord Pangloth finally made contact with the surface of the sea. It was a brief encounter; nothing more than a kiss, though it shattered windows and ruptured the hull in several places. The next encounter was longer; the third one was for keeps.

Very slowly, the Lord Pangloth settled the length of its mile-long body upon the ocean. Its space-born girders screamed at having to endure strains they were not designed to take. Water rushed in through shattered windows and hatches that had not been designed to resist the weight of the sea.

Within its honeycombed lower hull, the Japanese fled the rising waters, which carried not only the threat of death by drowning but other dangers as well, as the first sighting of a long and sinewy tentacle probing its way down a corridor had made only too clear. …

The surface of the sea was slowly creeping up along the great windows of the throne room. Water began to spill along the floor, but the warlord still remained oblivious of everything. Even when one of the windows behind him imploded to admit a mass of water, he didn’t react. His throne, and his body, were sent hurtling forward. Then the shock of the icy water dragged him, screaming, out of his mental refuge. Automatic survival responses were too strong to resist; he fought and struggled in the churning black water. Then something below its surface took hold of him.

Jan woke early again, and lay there feeling the weight of the future pressing down on her. So much to do; so many responsibilities. … Her plans were still vague but the basic idea, which she had discussed with Ceri, Ashley and Carl, was to defeat all the other Sky Lords and bring them under her control in the same way as she had with the Perfumed Breeze . Carl had produced a copy of his and Ashley’s programs which had been introduced into the Perfumed Breeze’s computer system. Carl had already brought the other airship’s system back up to full working capacity using the robots and spare electronic parts stored in the Sky Angel. The Americanos and the Japanese on board had no way at all of regaining control of the airship.

She had told the two groups they had the choice of living together in peace on the Perfumed Breeze or being deposited on the ground. The Americanos, who outnumbered the Japanese, naturally wanted their revenge on their former tormentors, and Jan had been obliged to leave many of the spiders on board as a temporary measure to keep the two sides apart. A delegation of Americanos had asked why they couldn’t move on board the Sky Angel, where there was plenty of living space. Jan told them that she would accept some of the women and their children, to relieve the pressure in the crowded Perfumed Breeze , but no men would be permitted on board the Sky Angel, with the exception of the two Minervan men she had discovered, to her surprise and joy, still alive on the Japanese airship.

Conquering all the Sky Lords would probably take years, and after that Jan’s plans became even vaguer. She had hopes of somehow harnessing the laser power of the whole fleet of tamed Sky Lords to scour the blight lands surrounding the remaining ground settlements. The Sky Angel contained stores of frozen seeds and animal embryos—it might be possible, with the sky people and the ground dwellers working together under Jan’s control, aided by the invaluable Carl, to start reclaiming large areas of land back from the blight.

Her other central concern was how to re-establish a Minervan society. It was vital to preserve and pass on the precious Minervan genes. She would have a baby each from the two Minervan men, but then what? Have the men breed with ordinary women? It would dilute the Minervan genetic mix, but perhaps it would be better than nothing. Minervan genes would be spread.