Chris Wooding: Retribution Falls

She held out her hand. ‘Alright. Let’s see how it goes.’

‘Fine decision! You won’t regret it. Much.’ Malvery enfolded her hand in thick, meaty fingers and shook it enthusiastically. Jez couldn’t help wondering how he managed to button his coat with fingers like that, let alone perform complex surgery.

‘You really a doctor?’ she asked.

‘Certified and bona fide!’ he declared, and she smelled rum on his breath.

They heard a thump from within the belly of the craft. Malvery wandered round to the Ketty Jay’s stern, and Jez followed. The cargo ramp was down. Inside, someone was rolling a heavy steel canister along the floor in the gloom. The angle prevented Jez from seeing anything more than a pair of long legs clad in thick trousers and boots.

‘Might as well introduce you,’ said Malvery. ‘Hey there! Silo! Say hello to the new navvie.’

The figure in the cargo hold stopped and squatted on his haunches, peering out at them. He was tall and narrow-hipped, but his upper body was hefty with muscle, a thin cotton shirt pulled tight across his shoulders and chest. Sharp eyes peered out from a narrow face with a beaked nose, and his head was shaven. His skin was a dark yellow-brown, the colour of umber.

He regarded Jez silently, then got to his feet and resumed his labour.

‘That’s Silo. Engineer. Man of few words, you could say, but he keeps us all in the sky. Don’t mind his manner, he’s like that with everyone.’

‘He’s a Murthian,’ Jez observed.

‘That’s right. You have been around.’

‘Never seen one outside of Samarla. I thought they were all slaves.’

‘So did I,’ said Malvery.

‘So he belongs to the Cap’n?’

Malvery chuckled. ‘No, no. Silo, he ain’t no slave. They’re friends of a sort, I suppose, though you wouldn’t know it sometimes. His story . . . well, that’s between him and the Cap’n. They ain’t said, and we ain’t asked.’ He steered Jez away. ‘Come on, let’s go meet our flyboys. The Cap’n and Crake ain’t about right now. I expect they’ll be back once their hangovers clear up.’

‘Crake?’

‘He’s a daemonist.’

‘You have a daemonist on board?’

Malvery shrugged. ‘That a problem?’

‘Not for me,’ Jez replied. ‘It’s just . . . well, you know how people are about daemonists.’

Malvery made a rasping noise. ‘You’ll find we ain’t a very judge-mental lot. None of us are in much of a position to throw stones.’

Jez thought about that, and then smiled.

‘You’re not in with those Awakener fellers, are you?’ Malvery asked suspiciously. ‘If so, you can toddle off right now.’

Jez imitated Malvery’s rasp. ‘Not likely.’

Malvery beamed and slapped her on the back hard enough to dislodge some vertebrae. ‘Good to hear.’

They walked out of the Ketty Jay’s shadow and across the landing pad. The Scarwater docks were half-empty, scattered with small to medium-sized craft. Delivery vessels and scavengers, mostly. The activity was concentrated at the far end, where a bulbous cargo barque was easing itself down. Crews were hustling to meet the newcomer. A stiff breeze carried the metallic tang of aerium gas across the docks as the barque vented its ballast tanks and lowered itself gingerly onto its landing struts.

The docks had been built on a wide ledge of land that projected out over the still, black lake which filled the bottom of the barren mountain valley. It was a wild and desolate place, but then Jez had seen many like it. Remote little ports, hidden away from the world, inaccessible by any means but the air. There were thousands of towns like Scarwater, existing beneath the notice of the Navy. Through them moved honest traders and smugglers alike.

It had started as a rest stop or a postal station, no doubt. A dot on the map, sheltered from the treacherous local winds, with a ready source of water nearby. Slowly it grew, spreading and scabbing as word filtered out. Opportunists arrived, spotting a niche. Those travellers would need a bar to quench their thirst, someone thought. Those drunkards would need a doctor to see to their injuries when they fell off a wall. And they’d need someone to cook them a good breakfast when they woke up. Most major professions in the cities were harshly regulated by the Guilds, but out here a man could be a carpenter, or a baker, or a craftbuilder, and be beholden to nobody but himself.

But where there was money to be made, there were criminals. A place like Scarwater didn’t take long to rot out from the inside. Jez had only been here a week, since leaving her last commission, but she’d seen enough to know how it would end up. Soon, the honest people would start to go elsewhere, driven out by the gangs, and those who were left would consume each other and move on. They’d leave a ghost town behind, like all the other ghost towns, haunted by abandoned dreams and lost possibilities.

To her left, Scarwater crawled up the stony hillside from the lake. Narrow lanes and winding stairways curved between simple rectangular buildings set in clusters wherever the land would take them. Aerial pipe networks cut across the streets in strict lines, steaming gently in the chill morning air, forming a scaffold for the jumble beneath them. Huge black mugger-birds gathered on them in squads, watchful for prey.

This isn’t the place for me, she thought. But then, where was?

Ahead of them on the landing strip were two small fighter craft: a Caybery Firecrow and a converted F-class Skylance. Malvery led her to the Skylance, the closer of the two. Leaning against its flank, smoking a roll-up cigarette and looking decidedly the worse for wear, was a man Jez guessed was the pilot.

‘Pinn!’ Malvery bellowed. The pilot winced. ‘Someone you should meet.’

Pinn crushed out the cigarette as they approached and extended a hand for Jez to shake. He was short, stout and swarthy, with a shapeless thatch of black hair and chubby cheeks that overwhelmed his eyes when he managed a nauseous smile of greeting. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, young for a pilot.

‘Artis Pinn, meet Jezibeth Kyte,’ said Malvery. ‘She’s coming on as navigator.’

‘Jez,’ she corrected. ‘Never liked Jezibeth.’

Pinn looked her up and down. ‘Be nice to have a woman on board,’ he said, his voice deep and toneless.

‘Pinn isn’t firing on all cylinders this morning, are you, boy?’ Malvery said, slapping him roughly on the shoulder. Pinn went a shade greyer and held up his hand to ward off any more blows.

‘I’m an inch from losing my breakfast here,’ he murmured. ‘Lay off.’ Malvery guffawed and Pinn cringed, pummelled by the doctor’s enormous mirth.

‘You modified this yourself?’ Jez asked, running a hand over the Skylance’s flank. The F-class was a racer, a single-seater built for speed and manoeuvrability. It had long, smoothly curved gull-wings. The cockpit was set far back along the fuselage, to make space for the enormous turbine in its nose that fed to a thruster at the tail end. This one had been bulked out with armour plate and fitted with underslung machine guns.

‘Yeah.’ Pinn roused a little. ‘You know aircraft?’

‘Grew up around them. My dad was a craftbuilder. I used to fly everything I could get my hands on.’ She nodded towards the Ketty Jay. ‘I bet I could even fly that piece of crap.’

Malvery snorted. ‘Good luck getting the Cap’n to let you.’

‘What was your favourite?’ Pinn asked her.

‘He built me an A-18 for my sixteenth birthday. I loved that little bird.’

‘So what happened? You crash it?’

‘She gave up the ghost five years back. I put her down in some little port up near Yortland and she just never took off again. I didn’t have two shillies to bash together for repairs, so I took on with a crew as a navvie. Thought I could do long-haul navigation easy enough; I mean, I’d been doing it for myself all that time on the short-haul. That first trip I got us lost; we wandered into Navy airspace and a couple of Windblades nearly blew us out of the sky. Had to learn pretty quick after that.’