Chris Wooding - The Black Lung Captain

Harkin's lip quivered. A determined look crept into his gaze. Pinn could see him visibly plucking up his courage. Allsoul's balls, was the twitchy old freak actually going to try to stand up to him?

'Now you listen!' Harkins said sternly. 'I've had enough of this! This is my room as much as yours, and I—'

'Piss off, Harkins, I'm thinking,' Pinn snapped.

Harkins flinched at the tone of his voice and scurried out. Pinn sighed, settled himself back on his bunk and stared at the ceiling again.

Lisinda. Sweetheart. What are you trying to say to me?

Jez clambered up the ladder to the upper gantry of the engine room, trying not to spill the mug of coffee in her hand. The engine assembly was quiet, but it still radiated a faint warmth. A sleeping monster of pipes and black iron.

Silo had a panel off and was poking around with a screwdriver. She squatted down next to him and put the coffee by his side.

'Made it just short of lethal, the way you like it.'

He grunted in thanks and kept poking.

'How's it going?' she asked, trying to peer past him.

'Same as before,' he said. 'Can't do nothin' without the parts. She could hold up for weeks. She could give out any minute. No tellin'.' He found something loose and tightened it. 'You thought about what I said?'

Jez remembered their surprising conversation in the rainforest of Kurg. 'I have. I am.'

'Talked to Crake?'

'Not yet,' she said. It seemed hard to find the right moment. 'You know he hasn't had a drink since last night?'

'He tell you that?'

'I can smell it on him.'

'Huh.'

Sensing that nothing else would be forthcoming, Jez ducked away and headed back down the ladder. The truth was, she'd been thinking a lot about Crake of late. She was becoming more and more convinced that he was the only one who could help her. Who better to deal with a daemon than a daemonist?

But it wasn't quite as simple as just walking up and asking. There had always been a distance between them. Crake seemed to resent her a little for being the one he'd confessed his crime to. Jez, for her part, had found it hard to entirely forgive him for what he'd done. Then there had been the drinking, and his gradual deterioration of late. He'd become bitter and unapproachable.

Jez was never the kind who was comfortable opening up to others. She was afraid they might one day use her vulnerabilities against her. And she was still afraid of what would happen if she admitted the whole truth about her condition. What if Crake reacted with fear and panic? What if he felt he had to tell the Cap'n? No matter how much the crew liked her or how useful she was, having a Mane on board would make anyone nervous. She could be shunned and ejected from the Ketty Jay , and she couldn't face that. She couldn't go back to that life of wandering, moving from crew to crew, never putting down roots.

But she had a daemon inside her. And the longer it stayed the more power it would have over her. Sooner or later she'd be forced to take action. Even if it cost her her place on the Ketty Jay.

She went out into the passageway. She could see Malvery through the open door of the infirmary, asleep on the surgical table, snoring. Ahead of her, Harkins was stalking down the corridor on tiptoe, a butterfly net in his hand. He flushed beetroot red as he saw her.

'Jez! Um . . . I . . . you see, I picked this up in Tarlock Cove and I . . . er . . .'

'I don't think I want to know,' said Jez.

'Right. Hm. Yes. Probably best.'

She went down to the cargo hold and outside. The Ketty Jay sat in a grassy mountain dell, high up in the Splinters. A broken, bald peak thrust up ahead of her. Frey and Crake were somewhere on the other side, with Grist and his bosun. Scouting out the location that Crake's daemon had identified, the place where Grist's mysterious sphere was being kept. Nearby was the Storm Dog. A few of Grist's crew lounged about, enjoying the bright, cool morning. Jez walked past them, towards the trees that fringed the dell.

She still had deep misgivings about this whole affair, but she was loyal to her Cap'n. He'd given her a home, and she had a way to go before she paid him back for that, even if she'd already saved his life more than once. She felt included here, and needed.

Just as she'd felt when that Mane was trying to turn her, on that snowy night in Yortland. The moment when she'd seen into their world, and felt the connections between them.

She understood why that crew on the crashed Mane craft had lain down and died. She'd only had a taste of what could have been. Having that, living with it and then giving it up would have been unthinkably terrible. A mutilation of the senses.

And yet they did it anyway. They made that choice. So maybe they're individuals, rather than slaves to a collective mind. Maybe I wouldn't lose myself if I joined them.

Dangerous thinking. A temptation like that would be too easy to give in to. It was no easy thing to resist the call, day after day, night after night. The need to belong had always been a part of her. And no one belonged like a Mane did.

Jez had spent her whole life looking for her place. For as long as she could remember, she'd been unable to fit in. She'd always had friends, but somehow it never seemed like the friendships she read about in books. She liked them, and they liked her, and it went no deeper. If she never saw them again, she wouldn't have shed a tear. Nobody said so, but she knew they felt the same about her.

Her childhood was spent watching her companions with secret envy. She was always the last to be involved. The cog in the gears that didn't quite mesh.

When she was a little older, she began to blame her father. Him and his obsession with trying to improve her position in life. He was a craftbuilder, an artisan, more respected than the peasantry but still a world away from the scholars, officials and aristocrats.

Once he'd been content with his lot; but after the sickness took her mother, he changed. Suddenly, a craftbuilder's life wasn't good enough for his daughter any more. He forced her to study when she wasn't helping him in the workshop. He saved up for a tutor who'd knock the common edges off her accent. By the time Jez reached the age where she just wanted to be the same as everyone else, she was already different in a thousand little ways.

Her apologetic displays of knowledge intimidated her friends. She found herself frustrated by their lack of ambition. Her horizons had been expanded through literature, but theirs hadn't, and she couldn't understand how they could think so small. They were still friends, as they'd always been; but no matter how she tried, she was faintly alien to them now.

There was no help among the educated, either. They spotted her immediately, and despised her as a try-hard attempting to rise above her station. A few small friendships blossomed, but they could only survive in isolation, and circumstances eventually put an end to them.

She hardened herself to rejection. She embarked on adolescent romances, and found them as unsatisfying as her friendships had been. She always broke them off before her partner could.

Her father talked of university, but it was his dream and not hers. Someone like her didn't get into places like that. And even if she did, she'd never escape her birth. It would be just another round of being on the outside. So when the time came, she broke her father's heart and went off to see the world in the little A-18 he'd built for her sixteenth birthday. Out there, she'd find her place. Or if not, at least she'd be alone on her own terms.

Funny, how things turned out.

She walked out of sight of the men in the dell and picked her way through the trees to a likely looking rock, where she sat down. There, she pulled out a book and opened it. The writing was all circles and arcs. It still smelled of the captain's cabin in the dreadnought.