Chris Wooding - The Black Lung Captain

But then he'd heard the hangar doors slamming. Jez's voice. 'It's a trap!' And he knew they were betrayed.

After that, there was little more than a garble. The earcuffs had been taken off them, it seemed. The signal, weak at this distance, became weaker still. Sounds were muffled. It was hard to tell what was going on. Once in a while, he heard voices he knew. The Captain's, for one. And Jez. Sweet Jez.

She was still alive. She was in trouble. And he was the only one who could help her.

The past month had been hard on him. He'd spent the majority of it in the Firecrow's cockpit. It would have been easier if they hadn't been hopping around towns in the arctic, but the Firecrow had no heating when the engines weren't running, so he spent his nights cocooned in blankets, shivering. Harkins wasn't a reader - in fact, he didn't do much of anything except fly - so a large proportion of his time had been spent staring into space and thinking of nothing. The need to relieve himself drove him out now and then. He'd head into whatever town was nearby and use what facilities he could find. His contact with the crew was minimal. The only person he saw with any regularity was Jez, who brought him his meals.

He'd looked forward to those visits with a mixture of anticipation and dread. He loved to see her. She'd usually inquire how he was doing, even though she was often distracted. He'd babble something, and his tongue would run away with him, and eventually he'd stumble to a stop. It was embarrassing that she should see him that way. She knew why he was hiding. He was afraid of the cat. He thought that maybe she seemed a little less kind to him nowadays, and wondered if it was something to do with that. Had he failed her? Or did she have other things on her mind? After all, it must be a burden being a Mane.

Pinn had told him the news, gleefully, during one of the rare moments when he wasn't depressed about his own sorry love life. 'Your girlfriend's a Mane!' he crowed. 'She's the walking dead! How'd that be, eh? Humping a dead one!' He leered horribly and made a pumping motion with his hips. 'I always pegged you as a necromofelliac.'

Harkins had never heard of one of those before, but it didn't sound like something he wanted to be. Still, he wasn't particularly concerned by the news. Alive or dead or some combination of the two, she was the same old Jez to him. What did concern him was how the rest of the crew began to talk about her after it became known that she was a Mane. They were mistrustful and uncertain. She didn't deserve that.

He tried to keep her spirits up when she came to visit him, but he always got tongue-tied. Did she think he was like the others, muttering behind her back? He hoped not, but it was hard to tell. Damn, why couldn't he just make his mouth say what his heart felt? Why was he born with a knot between his brain and his voicebox?

Well, actions spoke louder than words anyway. And he needed to be brave. That fat fool Pinn had deserted them good and proper, so there was no one left but him. He needed to be strong for Jez. Somehow, he was going to save her.

He wondered how he'd possibly find the courage to single-handedly defeat Grist's gang of smugglers, if he couldn't deal with one elderly cat.

He hurried down the stairs, across the cargo hold and down the ramp. The Cap'n would have chewed him out for leaving it open, but he needed his escape route clear. He'd left the hood of his cockpit up as well, just to be extra sure. If he spotted Slag, it would only take him seconds to reach the safety of the Firecrow.

He scampered off the Ketty Jay and came to a halt with a sigh of relief. The cat wouldn't follow him out here. Stupid animal. He closed up the ramp and locked it by punching in a code on the exterior control panel, located on one of the Ketty Jay' s rear landing struts.

That was when he saw what was happening to the sky.

The morning had been chilly and grey when he entered the Ketty Jay in search of the weapons locker. A shapeless haze of cloud had hung overhead, and the sun had been low on the horizon, shining with a sharp, glittering light.

But things were different now. The sky had curdled and darkened. The wispy, inoffensive sheet of cloud had turned thick and black. Pulses of light flickered in its depths. A strong, icy wind had struck up, blowing the ear flaps of Harkins' cap against his cheeks. Despite the gathering storm, the sun was still visible in the east, between the cloud and the horizon: a shining pupil in a slitted eye. It cast a spectral light over the bleak vista.

Harkins didn't like this. Not at all. There was an eerie, oppressive quality to the atmosphere. He had keen senses when it came to detecting threats. He'd had a lot of practice at being scared, and he was good at it.

This was no ordinary storm.

The clouds were moving, but it wasn't the wind that was pushing them. They were swirling, slowly at first but getting faster, as if stirred by a spoon. Gathering, becoming dense, drawing inward towards a single spot. At that point, the pulses of light had reached a frenzy. The cloud roiled and turned. Silent lightning threw out giant sparks.

Harkins became aware that he was making a low, distressed moan. His feet were rooted to the tarmac. The crewmen of nearby craft had stopped their work and were looking up. Tractors sputtered to a halt as their drivers tipped back their caps and squinted skyward.

This was bad. Somehow, he knew this was very, very bad.

The pulses of light at the point where the clouds were gathering became faster and more frequent. They accelerated to a flickering strobe, and finally to a dazzling burst of whiteness that bleached the city below. The observers shielded their eyes and turned away.

The cloud had collapsed in on itself, and was being sucked away like water down a drain. It was as if the very sky was being consumed, eaten up by the hungry maelstrom.

And out of this sky, through the tunnel of the great, swirling vortex, came the dreadnoughts.

Frey blinked. For a few seconds, all he could see was white. Then darkness began to soak into the picture, giving form to the shapes around him. Fuzzy shapes and blurred colours made themselves known.

Uh? he thought, which was pretty much the best description he could come up with for his mental state at the time.

His body was pins and needles all over, numb and painfully a-tingle at the same time. His tongue lolled in his mouth, barely under his control. There was a loud whistle in his ears.

Gradually he came back to the world, as his overloaded senses restored themselves.

He was in the ancient sanctum somewhere beneath Grist's compound. People were picking themselves up off the ground. Grist was nearby, shaking his head, dazed. Trinica was getting to her feet, leaning heavily on a table in case her legs betrayed her. Jez lay on her side, eyes open, staring into space. The metal sphere was no longer in her hands.

Then he heard something. A rapid thump, growing louder. Like someone running. Someone very heavy.

He looked up.

Bess.

The sanctum doors were set horizontally in the roof of the sanctum. The golem plunged through them like a cannonball, crashing on to the stairs with a roar. Her tiny eyes glimmered behind her face-grille, bright in the gloom.

Bess was in a rare fury this morning.

Panic seized the room. Grist's men scrambled to their feet, flailing and disoriented, desperate to escape the terror that had descended on them. But there was no way out except past Bess.

She thundered down the steps and backhanded the nearest man into the wall with enough force to shatter the brickwork. Her charge brought two more men within her reach, who were too slow to get out of the way. She snatched them up by their necks and smashed their heads together, splattering herself in blood, bone and brain matter. Frey winced. That had to hurt.