Chris Wooding - The Black Lung Captain

Frey shoved the man away, having evidently decided he was telling the truth. 'Get out of here,' he said. The prisoner needed no second invitation.

Jez looked around the corner at the barricade, then back at her captain. 'Full frontal assault?' she suggested cheerily.

Frey sighed. 'Why not?' He slapped Bess on the shoulder. 'You first, old girl.'

Bess thundered off with a roar. Bullets and screams greeted her as she piled into the barricade like a battering ram.

'That's stirred 'em up,' Malvery grinned.

'You have to admit, she's effective,' Frey said, loading his revolver.

'Are we going to help her at all?' Jez asked.

Frey snapped the drum closed. 'Let her mop up a bit first.' He counted off a few seconds, listening to the wails of Bess's unfortunate victims. 'Now.'

They ran for the barricade, cloaked by the smoke. Crake stayed low, slipping along the side of the wide corridor, mouth dry and throat tight. He was worse than useless in a firefight, but he couldn't leave Bess to do it alone.

Bess was already over the barricade by the time Frey and the others reached it. They scrambled between the twisted girders and plates of ripped metal, shooting at anyone the golem had missed. Crake heard more guns on the other side. He came across a man who'd been impaled by Bess, a spike through his guts, still horribly alive. Silo pushed past and put him out of his misery with a shotgun.

He saw Jez, aiming and firing up the barricade through the smoke. A figure at the top jerked like a marionette and fell backwards. Bess was roaring somewhere out of sight, and men shrieked and swore. Blood pounded in Crake's head. He saw a figure scrambling along the barricade, aimed, and almost fired before Silo grabbed his hand and pushed it down.

'It's the Doc,' he grunted, and then headed up the slope.

Crake squinted, and saw that Silo was right. He slumped against a girder, overwhelmed with relief. Stupid! Stupid! He'd almost shot a friend.

Then he saw a movement, behind them, someone hiding in the rubble that they'd passed. He was squatting, his eye to a rifle, aiming upslope.

Crake couldn't see well enough to know who it was, but the rifle gave them away. None of his companions carried rifles. He thrust out his arm with a yell and emptied his revolver in their general direction. The Sentinel flinched as bullets sparked off the barricade all around him. Then, rather surprised at finding himself unhurt, he switched his aim towards Crake.

A shotgun blast, deafeningly close to Crake's ear. The Sentinel flailed and disappeared.

Silo emerged through the murk, eyes bright in his narrow, beak-nosed face. He gave Crake a strange look, then grabbed him by the arm and propelled him up the slope to the crest.

Beyond the barricade was another barricade. The corridor had compressed like a concertina, leaving a narrow, junk-strewn battlefield between. Corpses lay here and there. Bess was busy making more. Frey, Malvery and Jez hid among the debris, picking off the Sentinels as they fled from the golem's wrath. Beyond the second barricade, the red glow of flames could be seen. Thick black smoke roiled along the ceiling.

Silo pushed Crake down as bullets came their way, and they began to creep through the forest of tangled metal. The heat and smoke at the crest were too much to stand for more than a few seconds. Crake tried to shoot at a fleeing Sentinel, but his gun clicked empty. He found a sheltered spot and fumbled some more bullets into the drum while Silo blasted away.

Then, all at once, the fear hit.

It came from nowhere, overwhelming, clawing at his throat, robbing him of breath. It was thick enough that it seemed like a physical weight, crushing him to the floor. He wanted to scream and run, but he couldn't move. He stared this way and that, eyes wide and desperate. filled with primal dread. To his right, he saw that Silo had been similarly affected. He was huddled down like a rabbit in the shadow of a hawk.

What's happening to us?

The makeshift battlefield had gone silent. Crake folded trembling fingers round the edge of his shelter and peered out.

There was a figure standing on the crest of the second set of battlements, backlit by the restless glow of the fire. It was cloaked, hooded and masked, dressed head to toe in close-fitting black leather. Crake felt his stomach knot into a ball at the sight.

An Imperator. One of the Awakeners' deadly elite. Men who could read your thoughts, who could scour a mind clean with their terrible gaze. The ultimate inquisitors.

Spit and blood. We're all dead meat.

The Imperator came walking unhurriedly down the slope of the barricade. The Sentinels were all gone now, dead at the hands of Bess or her allies, but the Imperator was not troubled at being outnumbered. No one dared to raise a gun to him. They were all afflicted with the same awful fear.

He was heading for the spot where Frey hid. Crake saw his captain go scrambling away on his hands and knees, shaking his head, begging incoherently. The Imperator drew a long black knife from his belt and walked relentlessly onward.

There was a screech of metal, and Crake's gaze went to Bess, who was pulling aside a girder that was in her way. She was not crippled by fear like the rest of them, it seemed, but only bewildered by the sudden end to the violence. Seeing the Imperator advancing on Frey, she went lumbering in to attack.

The Imperator held up a dismissive hand. Bess froze, mid-stride, and toppled over with a crash. She didn't move again.

The sight was like a punch in the chest to Crake. He wanted to scream her name, but no noise would come. What had been done to her? Why wasn't she moving? Had she been put to sleep, the way he put her to sleep with his thralled whistle? Or had she been extinguished, like a candle? The thought that he might forever lose the chance to save his niece, to atone for his crime - it was more than he could possibly suffer. If that was the case, he'd rather die now.

The Imperator turned his black gaze to Frey, pinning him like an insect. Frey rolled over on his back, whimpering. The Imperator put his boot to Frey's chest and shoved him down. He leaned over his victim, knife raised.

A gunshot made Crake jump. The Imperator staggered sideways, clutching his shoulder. Another, knocking the black-clad figure back further.

Jez, getting to her feet, pistol in her hand. Jez, and yet not Jez. There was a strange look to her now. Her usually pale face had gone paler still. Her hair hung lank, eyes dark, lips skinned back over her teeth, a snarl on her face. Something animal in the way she moved, slightly crouched. Feral.

The Imperator straightened. The bullets hadn't harmed him. Jez pulled the trigger again, but the gun was empty. She tossed it aside, and as she did so, she flickered. One moment she was there, the next she was half a metre to her left, and the next she was back again. Quick enough to be a trick of the eye. But Crake saw it.

I knew it, he thought. I knew it all along.

The Imperator's grip on Crake's mind had weakened. The paranoia, the nameless horror, receded to bearable levels. In some distant, rational part of his mind, he found he recognised this feeling of horror that the Imperator inspired. In a strange way, it was familiar to him. He'd come across it before, to a lesser degree, in his experiments. It was the feeling of being close to something wrong. The body's instinctive reaction to something not of this world.

What manner of man is this?

The Imperator backed away from Jez, blade in his hand. Frey scrambled off gratefully to cringe in a new hiding place. Jez prowled closer to the Imperator, her gaze fixed on him. Nothing physical had changed about her, but her aspect was different. Where once there had been a petite woman in a baggy jumpsuit, now there was something fearful. Something inhuman, alien. A creature that wore the shape of their navigator.