Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

‘You’re just a warrant sky officer, the same as me,’ said Pasco, angrily rubbing his sore throat. ‘You don’t get to decide who has the new signings. Maybe the thief’ll end up in my engine room, and then he’ll know what it is to serve in the Royal Aerostatical Navy.’

‘The first lieutenant has already given me these two,’ said Oldcastle, indicating Jack and Coss Shaftcrank. ‘And we’ve got our own initiation ceremony up top.’

‘You and the first lieutenant,’ spat Pasco. ‘You’ve got your tongue so far up her arse it’s a wonder you can talk. She’s as much a greenhorn as these two. What’s this to her? First voyage for some lady noble with more connections at Admiralty House than sense? You and me, Oldcastle, we’ll settle this proper when we’re back on shore.’

‘Well you’d better be prepared to wait a good long while, then.’

Jack saw a dangerous look cross Pasco’s face as the engineer realized that the old sailor knew how long they were going to be in the air. ‘You know where we’re going, fat man? You know what the captain’s orders are?’

‘I know your rotors are going to need to keep on turning to get us there, Master Engineer Pasco. And that’s as much as you need to understand to do your mortal job.’

Jack followed Oldcastle and the steamman as they warily withdrew from the gun deck and headed for the upper lifting chamber — one of two on the airship — its vast space filled with thousands of spherical gas bags secured by netting. The ironically named crew of idlers were busily checking pressure and looking for rodent-teeth tears and leaks that needed patching. Metal ladders fixed inside pipework frames connected the Iron Partridge ’s upper deck and lifting chamber, but Jack was relieved when John Oldcastle led them to the frame that held the lifting belt — a privilege, he had been warned, usually reserved for officers. After the ordeal of kissing the ship, Jack didn’t think he could stand to climb by hand up one of the lifting chamber’s vertigo-inducing ladders.

Waiting for one of the wooden steps fixed onto the rotating leather belt to come around, Oldcastle appraisingly looked over Jack and the steamman. ‘Master Engineer Pasco knows his engines well enough, lads, but he’s a rabble-rouser who’s spent time in a stockade for trying to organize the RAN’s engineers into a workers’ union.’

‘And we’re the only ship that would have him,’ said Jack, remembering the first lieutenant’s confrontation with the vice-admiral the evening before the airship launched.

‘All we could mortal get,’ said Oldcastle, grabbing a hand-hold on the belt as he swung his boots out onto its wooden step. Jack followed after Coss Shaftcrank stepped on, watching the floor of the lifting chamber drop away as he was carried nearly eighty feet up towards the highest of their airship’s seven levels, the upper deck.

‘Like our ship herself, perhaps?’ said Coss. ‘Due to be scrapped, but rescued at the last minute …’

‘A flying albatross right enough,’ said John Oldcastle. ‘And when we get to my kingdom under the crow’s nest, you’ll see quick enough why.’

‘I understand the Iron Partridge was a proving craft,’ said the steamman. ‘Built in the air yards of the House of Quest.’

Oldcastle stepped off the belt as they passed through to the upper deck, ignoring the smells and sounds coming from an open door down the corridor where the airship’s stock of pigs and sheep were housed. ‘Aye, I can see you’ve done your research before signing on with us, Mister Shaftcrank. But all she proved was that the great industrial lord that built her wasn’t quite as clever as he believed he was.’

Jack saw why once the warrant sky officer had led them through a series of narrow corridors past several doors labelled as stores. Nestled between the wooden walls, a short companionway led up to the last thing Jack had expected to see on board an airship — transaction engines! They looked down into a long deep pit filled with the massive calculating machines, and not in any design that Jack was familiar with. Multiple banks of transaction-engine drums slowly turned as steam hissed out of a labyrinth of copper pipes. At the far end of the transaction-engine room was a series of globe-shaped boilers. Two stokers were feeding the furnace, the sweat-soaked skin of their bare chests glowing orange against the flames.

‘Sweet Circle,’ swore Jack, stretching over the railing to look down at unfamiliar symbols turning on the thinking machines’ drums. This is nothing like the antiquated standard equipment I trained on back in the guild. ‘I’ve never seen the like — what’s it doing here?’

‘A folly, Mister Keats,’ said Oldcastle. ‘A folly that has never worked. And the other reason, besides our blessed armour plating, why the Iron Partridge handles like a whale of the air, large and slow-like.’

‘The softbody designers intended for these thinking machines to control the airship,’ said Coss. ‘Using a crew a tenth of the size of a normal ship of the line.’

‘Not just the airship, old steamer,’ said Oldcastle, pointing up to a rubber-sealed skylight in the ceiling from where the frill of massive mortar tubes was visible outside, stretching like a spine of chimneys across the top of the ship. ‘But all the gunnery on this wicked organ of death we’re lugging about on our backs, too.’

‘And it never worked?’ asked Jack.

‘Over-engineered,’ said Oldcastle. ‘Much like the mind of the fool who designed it — too clever for his own mortal good. When the navy realized the vessel’s automation couldn’t cope, they spent a second fortune redesigning the Iron Partridge to work manually with a full crew — and the airship still didn’t fly well enough. Our main job here is to make sure that the transaction engines don’t get in the way of the crew. The systems still try and come back fully online every now and then, working their automated mischief. These transaction engines were buried too wicked deep into the fabric of the ship for us to allow the boilers to run cold and still their drums altogether. Just enough power to let her tick over and no more, that’s what we must be about.’ He pointed to a line of hammocks hung up behind the spherical boilers, the sailors’ wooden air chests sitting beneath. ‘You can bed down there. You’ll be glad of the boilers when we’re running high and cold. Warmest place on the Iron Partridge , so it is. The watch in the crow’s-nest dome down the corridor come in here after they’ve stood a duty, to toast their gloves against our plates.’

Better than the cramped confines of the crew’s quarters on the lower deck where Jack had been camped until now, he supposed. Blanket Bay, as the airship’s sailors referred to the long swathe of hammocks.

‘Is it only us up here?’ asked Jack.

Oldcastle nodded sadly, gesturing to the rows of empty punch-card writers and injection desks opposite the boilers. ‘There’s not many trained enginemen and cardsharps with a taste for the navy’s foul food and parliament’s meagre pay. Even our two stokers are on loan from the captain of marines.’

Jack nodded. So, was this pit of broken thinking machines the reason the RAN had been so eager to rescue him from the gallows? But then there had been the man in court. Jack knew his face from somewhere. But where?

‘We might have been the pride of the fleet,’ said Oldcastle with a melancholy expression pinching his cheeks. ‘Gliding over the battlefield like an eagle and letting enemy cannon fire bounce off our hull while our mortar shells found the foe’s helmets as if the very steel in our guns were bewitched. But here we are instead, on another desperate voyage, with cruel fate carrying us far from home. Damn my unlucky stars.’ He looked at the curious faces of Jack and Coss. ‘But I mustn’t say too much about that. The first lieutenant’s orders are the first lieutenant’s to keep.’