Chris Wooding - The Black Lung Captain

'Some days I don't, either,' Frey admitted.

'But you keep goin' back, don't you?' Grist laughed. 'The things a man does to make himself feel alive.'

Frey looked at the man next to him. He liked Grist. There was something solid and impressive about him, a grizzled heartiness in his manner. He had a way of including people that made them feel almost grateful for it. He reminded Frey of Malvery, except he apparently didn't spend his whole life arseholed on grog.

'I've been thinking about that lately,' he said. 'Don't you sometimes wish you didn't need to? Like, you felt alright without all the smoke and the booze and the cards and everything else? Seems like some people manage okay.'

Grist's brow furrowed. 'Men like you an' me, Frey, it don't do us no good to be thinkin' that way,' he said. 'We live for today. The past don't mean nothin', and the future ain't worth a damn. We could all be dead by sunrise.' His dark eyes found Frey's. 'Ain't that how it is?'

Frey stared at the ground. 'Yeah. That's how it is.'

'Anyway, what's wrong with a little fun? You want to live for ever or somethin'?'

'Actually,' said Frey, 'I kinda do.'

Grist bellowed with laughter, which set off another coughing fit. 'Me, too!' he wheezed, slapping his leg, coughing and laughing fit to burst. 'Me, too!'

The rain lessened slightly as night fell, but the clouds stayed in the sky, and there was no light from the moon. Under Hodd's direction, they pitched camp on a patch of high ground, and stretched a tarpaulin between several trees to act as a roof. Hodd arranged stones to make a raised platform and somehow managed to get a fire going on it.

Jez had to admit, the man knew his survival skills. And he still appeared confident of the route. His manner and his history inspired mistrust, perhaps, but a man didn't spend a lifetime as an explorer without picking up a few things.

The rainforest came alive at night. The treetops were busy with shrieks and wails. Insects clattered and hummed all around them. Bats flitted through the air. Repulsive things slunk and crept.

Jez was among the volunteers for first watch, but she intended to take second and third as well. Her eyesight was better than anyone else's in the dark, and she had no need of rest. Usually she took pains to disguise her condition from strangers. She went through the motions of eating and sleeping so as not to arouse suspicion. But, just this once, she'd plead insomnia. The afternoon and evening had passed without incident, but she didn't trust their luck to hold. She didn't want anything sneaking up on them tonight.

She stood with her back to the camp, her head bare to the elements, black hair plastered to her forehead. The hood of her coat was down, so as not to block her peripheral vision. Behind her, the men were cooking up the last of the soup. Some were huddled close to the fire. Others had already crawled into their sleeping bags, exhausted.

Standing there in the rain, she tried to bring on the trance. When she slipped into that strange state of hyper-awareness, she'd feel the forest instead of merely seeing it. She'd be able to sense the animals and identify' any threats. In the past, she'd even shared their thoughts. Once, during a gunfight, she'd read a man's mind, just before she shot him.

In the chaos of sounds from the forest, she fancied she could hear the cries of the Manes. But no trance came. She couldn't make it happen. They took her without rhyme or reason, and she didn't have the trick of controlling them. Perhaps she never would.

She heard someone approaching from the direction of the fire. Looking over her shoulder, she saw Silo. Only his beak-like nose showed from the shadow of his hood. Without a word, he sat down on a rock next to Jez. He drew a shotgun from under his coat and stared out into the forest.

They watched the forest together in comfortable silence for a time.

Some of the crew found Silo awkward to be around, but Jez rather enjoyed his company. Everyone else talked a lot, usually about nothing important. Silo talked hardly at all, but she had the impression that he made up the difference by thinking.

'There's rage in my family,' he said, out of nowhere. Jez didn't know what to say to that, so she didn't say anything.

'My papa had it,' he went on. 'And his brother. And their papa, and my brother. All them dead now, but they had rage. It'd just come explodin' out o' them, and you better not be in their way when it did.'

Jez was mildly surprised that he'd volunteered the information. She didn't even know he had a brother. She'd been aboard the Ketty Jay more than a year, but she still knew hardly anything about him. Neither did anyone else, as far as she was aware.

Silo propped his shotgun against a tree and began making a roll-up, hunching forward to shield it from the rain. Jez wondered if that was the end of the conversation, but then he spoke again.

'My brother, one time, he got the rage when we was all chained up in the pens. Broke his ankle against the manacles, tryin' to get at some feller. Weren't fit for work for a long while after, but he was a strong 'un, so they wanted to see if it'd heal.' He licked the paper and sealed the roll-up. 'Didn't. Bones knitted bad, gave him a limp, so they killed him.'

There was a hiss of phosphorus as he struck a match, then the smell of acrid smoke.

'Papa died the same. Picked a fight with some feller, Murthian like him, while they was haulin' rubble in a quarry. Smashed his head in with a rock. Sammies took him away and he didn't never come back.'

Jez hadn't heard Silo talk at such length before. She was reluctant to speak in case she interrupted his flow, but she felt the moment demanded something.

'Sorry about that,' she said.

'Nothin' to be sorry about. There's what is, and what ain't.'

Jez wished she'd kept her mouth shut. For a while, there was only the sounds of the forest and the rain. Then:

'I got the rage, too.'

Really? she thought. You? I've never seen you anything but calm. But she didn't say a word.

'Used to be proud of it,' he said. 'They was afraid of me when I was young. I'd take on kids twice my age and give 'em worse than I got. Every day, I was angry. Angry that they kept us in chains 'n' pens 'n' camps. Murthians ain't like the Daks. Five hundred years and they still ain't tamed us.' He took a drag and blew it out. 'Lately, I got to thinkin' maybe that's the problem. We're so damn proud of defyin' the Sammies, they'll never let us out from them chains. Bit more smarts and a bit less angry, and they'd think we was tame. We'd be like the Daks, in their homes, runnin' their businesses, lookin' after their children.' A pause. 'That's when we'd kill 'em.'

Jez kept her eyes on the forest. She'd always felt a faint bond with the Murthian. Both of them, in their own way, were exiles from their own race. She'd always suspected he felt the same. He spoke to her most out of all the crew, though usually about matters of engineering. Machinery was their common ground.

Now it occurred to her that Silo was reaching out to her. Offering something. Making a connection.

'There was a woman, once,' he said. 'We was both young, but old enough. I hadn't seen anythin' like her. Thought there weren't no finer thing in the world. And she thought likewise about me. That's what she said.' He shook his head, blew out a jet of smoke. 'Hard-headed woman. Loved her fierce but she drove me crazy. We'd fight and make up, over and over. Harsh 'n' sweet, harsh 'n' sweet. She had a temper, too.'

Jez had a horrible feeling she knew where this was going.

'One time we both went too far. The rage got me. Only for a second, but that was plenty. Won't never forget the look on her face, her holdin' her cheek like that. Saw it in her eyes. I'd lost her, right then. Didn't matter how I begged nor pleaded, she wouldn't look at me again. Never.'