Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

‘That’s luck,’ said an old white-haired man with a wooden leg, waiting ahead of Jack. He rubbed a finger on Jack’s dirty torn jacket, his hand clutching a punch card, presumably his state work record. ‘Give me some of it, boy. You’re in.’

‘Yes, but into what?’ said Jack.

‘The service,’ rumbled an odd-sounding voice behind Jack. Turning, Jack saw it was a steamman, one of the foreign machine creatures queuing behind him. ‘Into the Royal Aerostatical Navy.’

The people of the metal tended to keep to their own quarter of the capital. Why would one of them want to sign up for military service? Did King Steam permit the citizens of the Steamman Free State to sign up in their neighbour’s aerial navy, even if the Jackelians were their ally of longest standing?

‘You’re going to join the RAN?’ asked Jack.

‘He’ll get in today,’ croaked the wooden-legged man. ‘We all will. Nobody else wants to fly in the Iron Partridge .’ He pointed to the colossal hangar doors that had started opening in front of them. ‘An unlucky ship, aye. That’s all anyone has ever said of her.’

Jack looked at what was beginning to emerge from the hangar with astonishment. The vessel had the basic cigar-shaped lines of an airship, but there her similarities with the other airships on the naval field ended. For a start, her hull appeared to be riveted over with metal plates from stem to stern. The top of her hull was decorated with a frill of massive pipes, as if some lunatic had inserted an oversized organ along her spine. Her lower hull wasn’t painted with the black and yellow chequerboard of a Jackelian man-of-war either, but streaked with grey and blue angular shapes. The only standard thing about her was the figurehead on her bow dome, a sharp-beaked partridge with a pair of iron fin-bombs wrapped by lightning bolts clutched in its claws. Jack had to cover his ears as the engine cars — double rows of eight along each side — burst into life, the propellers giving her an extra push out of the hangar.

‘How can she even fly?’ shouted Jack over the noise.

‘She flew out of the breaker’s yard right enough,’ said the old sailor in front of Jack. ‘Slow and easy, only a day before they were due to scrap her.’

‘Curse my valves, but I will serve aboard her,’ the steamman’s voicebox vibrated. ‘If it means I can fly, I will take her.’

‘She looks like she was designed by King Steam,’ said Jack. ‘She looks like one of your people with fins.’

‘You are closer to the truth than you realize, my softbody friend,’ said the steamman.

‘Listen to Coss Shaftcrank, he knows,’ laughed the wooden-legged man. ‘Haven’t we been in the signing-on line for months together, waiting for a berth. Me and the old steamer here, every day, without a single skipper in the high fleet willing to give either of us a chance.’

What is going on here? Jack gazed with shock at the unwieldy metal-plated whale bumping out of the hangar. Nobody in their right mind was going to climb inside that monstrosity and risk heaven’s command in her. Then the realization struck. Nobody who had a choice in the matter.

They had reached the head of the queue and the officer behind the table, his uniform half-hidden by a portable transaction engine set up to process the recruits, took in all three of them with a sober glance. ‘Pete Guns. Has the navy, by chance, stopped paying you your pension, that I have to see you back here in the signing line again?’

‘Nobody can tie a fuse as well as I, Lieutenant McGillivray,’ insisted the old man, ‘as you should well remember.’

‘And I have now reduced my weight to within navy board guidelines,’ added Coss Shaftcrank. The steamman pointed to the massive craft drawing up behind the desk. ‘The final requirement, as you stipulated to me at the start of the week. And kiss my condensers, but you will need engineers with an affinity with machines on board the Iron Partridge to fly her through the clouds.’

‘Aye, with machines,’ said the lieutenant, sounding resigned. ‘Not a machine.’ He stared at Jack. ‘And John Oldcastle’s wee thief. Well, it takes one to know one. You steal from a fellow cloudie’s chest on board my ship, laddie, and you’ll wish they had given you the rope, you will. Have you got your letters?’

Jack nodded and caught the card that was tossed at him with the oath to parliament printed on it. ‘I don’t suppose the judge furnished you with a state work record, laddie? No. Too much to ask. These two lubbers have the oath memorized already. Come on, laddie, let’s hear it from you, or you can go back to your courtroom and choose the knot for your noose.’

And just like that, Jack found he had a half-honest trade at last. For as long as his strange airship stayed aloft.

Jack stole past the back of the red-coated marine walking down the airship’s corridor, slipping into the keel deck’s loading station, and, exactly as he had hoped, found the Iron Partridge ’s hatches still open. Peering through, Jack saw bales of supplies left on the grass of the airship field below. He shinned down one of the crane cables on the lifting gear. Touching down on the grass, which felt slightly damp in the evening air, Jack heard a cough and he spun around.

It was John Oldcastle, his borrowed marine’s crimson jacket swapped for the better-fitting but still untidy fabric of a warrant sky officer. The large man was rubbing the side of his dark salt-peppered beard with a mumbleweed pipe and didn’t look surprised in the slightest to see Jack trying to go absent without leave.

‘The locks I had put on your cabin were the best the navy had to offer, lad,’ said Oldcastle.

Jack shrugged.

‘But that’s not much for a mortal clever fellow like you, I suppose.’

‘The cipher on the lock’s transaction engine wasn’t random,’ said Jack. ‘It repeats itself every few minutes, if you look hard enough.’

‘They always do,’ sighed the warrant officer. ‘I know you have family in the care of Sungate Board of the Poor. Two brothers is it?’

‘They’re not old enough to leave the workhouse,’ said Jack. ‘And I wouldn’t have them run from it.’

‘It’s a hard place,’ said Oldcastle.

‘You don’t even know the half of it,’ said Jack. ‘Don’t try and stop me from leaving.’

Oldcastle slid a heavy bell-mouthed sailor’s pistol across the bale he was sitting on. ‘It’ll pain me to shoot you, lad. But I’ll do it for your own blessed good.’

Jack’s eyes flicked across the space between the pistol and the old sailor’s plump fingers. Calculating the chances he would be able to draw an accurate bead on Jack as he was dodging between the supplies waiting underneath the airship’s belly.

‘They’ll find you,’ said Oldcastle, ‘if you run. Navy provosts will come after you. They’ll stretch your neck, Jack Keats, and then what good will you be to your family? A dead man is no good to anyone but the worms.’

Well, what good have I ever been to my family anyway? What good would he be lying dead in the wreckage of the flying metal folly he had been sentenced to serve on board?

Oldcastle struck a match on the side of a crate and relit his pipe, puffing contentedly with the simple pleasure of sweet smoke. ‘I have a friend back in the capital. A Sungate girl herself, once, not that you’d know it to see the fine trim of her bonnet now. She’ll look in on your two lads and make sure they don’t starve on that poorhouse gruel.’

‘I’m nothing to you,’ said Jack. ‘Why would you do that for me? I don’t trust you or your friend First Lieutenant Westwick.’

‘She’s a spiky one, isn’t she?’ said Oldcastle. ‘As fair a face as ever graced a ship of the line, but don’t let that fool you; she’s a steel rose, with the petals of a cutting razor. And you’re right not to trust me, lad. For I’m aiming to get you killed. But not this evening. And not in front of a Bonegate gallows-day crowd. And my word’s gold for your two brothers in the workhouse, and that’s as good an offer as you’re receiving tonight.’