Trent Jamieson - Night's engines

He leant back in his chair, in the airship office where he had spent much of his last few weeks, organising the great logistical nightmare that was his people’s journey north. He knew it could be worse — that he could be down on the ground.

Stade considered his maps. Another week at least, and still no radio contact from the Underground, but he had to think of that as nothing more than a problem with their transmission tower, it had never worked reliably. The journey had been a long one. Of course the airships could have made it to the Underground in a couple of days, even against the headwinds, but they had a city’s population to protect. A city forced to travel by foot. They had avoided the worst of the Margin, travelling east, then north, but still there were patches of that contaminated forest that had to be crossed.

People disappeared into the night, and some reappeared briefly, drawing others away. The last gondola affected had been clean, but stank of blood. After that, Stade had ordered all airships to keep at least a mile clear of the Margin, and the airship itself was burned.

A small rearguard had stayed behind in Mirrlees; they’d lost contact with them two days ago. The reports up until that point had been one of a city falling frantically into chaos. Their cessation had been abrupt. He had been expecting it, but not so soon.

Stade felt the diminishment of his network with every passing hour. No more could he claim to know every movement of every enemy between Chapman and Hardacre. He was beginning to wonder if he had ever really known anything at all.

A knock at the cabin door startled him.

“What is it?” he growled.

“A problem, sir.” It was Moffel, the closest thing he had to a trusted advisor these days.

“I will be right out.”

He got up, slid a lozenge of Chill into his mouth.

“And the problem?” Stade said.

Moffel said, “One of the engines isn’t operating as it should be. They want your advice on it.”

Fair enough, he’d designed the engines after all.

At the outer edge of the airship, Stade, met two men, engines rumbling nearby.

“You called me here because?” he said.

“We thought you should see this.”

The Witmoths flew from their mouths towards him. He lifted his arms and sprayed the air with cold, from tubes beneath his jacket sleeves, blistering his wrists as he did so. The moths fell, and Stade yanked free his pistols and fired; both shots went true and the Roilings tumbled over the deck. “Do not take me for such a fool that I do not come prepared,” he said to their tumbling corpses.

Though he had been fool enough to come out here. He needed more sleep.

He walked back to the door. It was locked. Stade sighed, pulled the key from his pocket and opened the door.

Moffel was waiting by the door. Stade shot him dead, too.

They found two more Roilings in the crew. Both were thrown overboard. Stade returned to his rooms all rage and fear. He took a lozenge of Chill, just to be safe, and his hands shaking, grabbed the machine.

He let the mechanism fold over his face, felt its spikes slide through the plate of his skull, and into his brain. There was no pain, just a sick-making sensation, as though all this could go so badly, that his sanity, his personality lay on the thinnest, frailest sort of knife-edge.

He’d used this device to control the spiders under Downing Bridge. Ah, that bridge; briefly he was there, back in the city that he had fled, and that hurt him more than Stade had expected — after all, the flight from the city had always been part of his plan to lead his people to sanctuary. However, the gap between his plans and reality had grown wide.

He concentrated, brought his mind under control, shifted it from the city to the belly of his airship, and the airships around them. This fleet was the vestige of the Grand Defeat, and he’d filled the ballast of each with his spiders.

Already thousands of them had released thread to the air, and now he concentrated on them, gaining an image in bursts, and drifts, of the sky from horizon to horizon and beyond.

A drop of blood ran across his chin.

He couldn’t do this for too long, or it would tear him apart. But he needed to know what was happening. Stade just had to see where the Cuttlefolk were, if they were a threat, if they were following him, or merely flying towards the Roil- as the first cloud of them had proven to be doing.

And there they were.

There they were.

Not heading towards the Roil or to Mirrlees, but north. Flying north towards his great exodus: a cloud intent on shattering his plans for good.

The sound of Cuttle messengers in flight and en masse was terror scratched out of the air. It was as hard as the wind was hard, the sky had become solid and killing. A thunderous beating of wings and mandibles, and spiked limbs: a storm which had grown brittle and clawed. Such a storm was bearing down on him, and though he had been expecting it, Stade could not avoid the terror of the Cuttlemen's approach.

As a young man, Stade had fought in the Cuttle Wars. So many of his generation had. They'd been men and women fighting a war of cultures — of misunderstandings driven to blood and death. His service and heroism in those wars had led to his election. Heroism, all he'd remembered was the horror. He’d seen troops stripped of their flesh almost before they could fire their guns. Aerokin devoured in the sky, their great cannon useless. He wasn’t the only one of his crew to remember such things, but none of them had ever witnessed anything like that which flew towards them.

“How can there be so many?” Captain Jones said.

“Because we didn’t do it right the first time,” Stade muttered, though he knew that was wrong, that these Cuttlefolk flew with a purpose that wasn’t their own.

Witmoths covered their flesh, and fell from them like an inky rain.

“Engage the cannons,” he said, and if his voice cracked with the fear of it, no one noticed. “It’s time we made the sky bleed.”

He reached in his pocket for a cigar, lit it, and unsheathed the knife at his belt, the same blade with which he had severed the fool Medicine Paul's fingers.

“Now, fire the damn things! Fire and fire and fire.” The airship bucked and shuddered, and the sky bled.

And still they came. Cannons were never enough. Of course, Cuttlefolk made it onto the ship, and cold-suited Vergers met them with ice guns and frozen blades of the Tate design.

Even Stade himself couldn't avoid the fighting. A Cuttleman broke through the gondola window, and it was Stade that struck off its head, the mayor grinning madly, teeth biting down hard on a lozenge of Chill. He folded his arms around the still twitching corpse and hurled it out in the sky.

Cannons fired. Ships fell in flame and smoke and detonations, but the Cuttle messengers took casualties too, and theirs were in far greater numbers. The battle was over within half an hour. Two ships gone down, plus another slowly sinking, and one without radio contact.

The slowly sinking airship veered to the west. The silent one followed. Stade had another airship pull alongside it, and it too grew silent. There had been five Vergers on that ship and none of them called back in. The three airships pulled away.

Stade took no chances on another ship, he had all three shot down. He sent out a directive for all crew to have Chill at the ready. He could not afford to lose more ships.

Nor was he prepared to abandon the masses that the airships themselves were protecting.

Two days at most and they would reach the Undergound. Stade only hoped that it was still there. Despite the lack of radio contact, he had no other destination. There was no other hope. They reached the Underground or they all died.