Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

The cadets filed out onto the battlements, a panoramic view of the Jahan Palace sparkling in the afternoon sunlight below them while the white roofs of the city stretched out for miles, encircled by the dazzle of sun towers. A distant rumble of fireworks drifted up towards the fortress, strings of explosives hung between the palm trees, detonating and shaking the streets; sheets of dust filling the spaces between the domes and towers.

‘Oh, this is bad,’ said Boulous.

It appeared to Omar that the retainer also possessed a naturally pessimistic bent — especially given that his status as a jahani , a slave raised from childhood to imperial service, meant he had about as much responsibility to concern him as the birds that made their nests in the cliffs below the fortress walls.

‘What is the trouble now?’ asked Omar.

‘This is the first year that the order has not been required to fly in formation over the city. Instead we can only stand and watch.’

‘Watch what?’

Boulous unsheathed the scimitar and passed it hilt-first to Omar as the command to present swords in a salute echoed down the battlements.

‘That …’

By the prophets!

Omar stared down the length of killing metal he had raised above the fortress parapet, catching sight of the first of hundreds of cigar-shaped silhouettes riding out of the sun, light reflecting off silver writing engraved across their hulls. They were like the narwhales that dipped in and out of the waters off Haffa, but a school of titans that had taken to the air, long glinting rams made of steel mounted on their nose domes. The drone of engine cars and the blur of propellers vibrated across the curtain wall. Great ribbons of silk had been tied to the crafts’ cruciform tails, rippling behind the armada of airships as though rainbow lines were being drawn across the perfectly clear sky above the capital.

‘Do you feel pride, Cadet Barir, at this great new show of force?’ said Farris Uddin from behind Omar. ‘Or do you feel shame that command of the imperial Aerial Squadron was given to the admirals of the caliph’s navy, rather than those who already had true mastery of the heavens under god?’

‘I believe I may feel both, master.’

‘You may indeed feel both,’ said Uddin. ‘For while nothing may stand against the empire and the new range of our ambitions, I fear that you see before you the ruin of the guardsmen’s fortunes. For centuries we trained to fight such machines when only our heathen neighbour possessed them, splashed grenade fire against their canvas and carried propeller snarls crafted for their engine cars. Now we have our own fleet and at best we are cursed to ride in their shadows as mere scouts. What do you see, Boulous?’

‘I see a man,’ said the retainer, looking towards the grand marshal’s place on the battlements with a tear in his eye, ‘made old before his time.’

‘You are a good and true servant of the Caliph Eternal,’ said Uddin, kindly. ‘But watch whose ears hear you say that.’ He raised his scimitar and shouted, ‘Remember Cann-Khali!’

All down the curtain wall the cry was taken up. The greatest battle of the order, where fifty draks and their riders had held off an army of ten thousand Seyadi levies for a week in a lonely mountain gorge.

Their greatest battle, thought Omar, mouthing the cry, their greatest triumph. But still an eventual defeat that had left every guardsman who fought in it a corpse.

It took every ounce of willpower for Jack to stop himself glancing behind his back. The shouts and grunts of the Cassarabian boarding party intermingled with the war cries of their two brave Benzari stokers and the thunder of pistols as John Oldcastle calmly discharged one after another across the transaction-engine pit. Concentrate on the punch card he was composing, not allow himself to be distracted by the screams of dying men, or Coss Shaftcrank shouting his tinny curses, or the thud of swords against flesh and the explosions of guns. Concentrate on the punch cards, where Jack was used to bending the calculation drums on transaction engines to his will. And where they wouldn’t bend, you could always roll with the drums and see where they took you.

Another yell, closer. The master cardsharp swore and tossed an empty pistol down onto the deck, but Jack couldn’t spare the seconds to look around. Not with the door on the mortar-loading station still locked tight against their gunnery deck crew.

A rifle ball ricocheted off the hull near Jack’s head, but he was focusing on writing the lines of code for the loading arms that had been decommissioned three years ago: the automated loading arms, with a dumb waiter system that still ran into the magazine buried in the well-protected heart of the Iron Partridge . The original repair crew who had refitted her had locked the automated systems down tight. But they hadn’t counted on Jack Keats and his clever fingers overwriting their work. Luckily for him, they had done their job in a rush, the ship’s ability to automatically fire and load constrained by some basic and strikingly obvious safeguards. Delete, delete, delete. He was almost there, the automation almost back online. He ignored the yell of the stoker being pushed down into the pit, impaled on the bayonets of three Cassarabian marines. Ignored the sounds, as Jack trusted the crewmen in the magazine would be ignoring the live shells being drawn into the dumb waiter system, lifted up and pushed into the breech of their mortars. Don’t you pay those shells any mind, boys. You just let them slide on past without anyone reaching for the manual overrides. The automated mortars that according to the notes in Jack’s manual couldn’t hit the side of a barn door, unless, please , the enemy’s barn door happened to be drifting feet above their mortar barrels. Sometimes, you just had to roll with the drums and see where they took you.

There was a series of hollow metallic thuds as the mortars erupted along the length of their airship’s spine, followed by a trembling whine as the tubes back-filled with the cold air from outside, then an answering series of explosions from above them, a line of fire stitched along the belly of the Cassarabian airship hanging above their vessel. Seconds later Jack clung onto his station as a wrenching impact slammed him forward, the remains of a decapitated enemy engine car spinning down on top of the Iron Partridge , the rest of the ruined airship just visible through the crack in the skylight. It glanced off their armoured hull with another harsh jolt before continuing downwards on its fiery descent.

From the doorway there came a second explosion. Not a debris strike, but a blast of tumbling Cassarabian marines as Henry Tempest, their recently released captain of marines, erupted into the transaction-engine chamber. His rifle now discharged and empty, the giant soldier was using the weapon like a fighting staff, its butt lashing out and caving in skulls and ribs. The black and silver figures wearing Cassarabian marines’ uniforms were sent flying around him, as though they were kites launched into the air, while Tempest’s crimson features were distorted into a yell. ‘Get off my ship! Get off my perishing ship!’

There were others fighting in the corridor outside, its confines echoing to the clash of hatchets, knives, bayonets and cutlasses. Firearms took too long to reload at close quarters and Jack caught a glimpse of First Lieutenant Westwick entangled in the deadly melee of Cassarabian marines and short Benzari tribesmen.

One of the Cassarabian marines came at Jack from the edge of the tumult and Jack grabbed the empty bandolier from the station at his side, swinging it like a whip and catching the Cassarabian marine in the face, dislodging the man’s beak-like mask. Propelled by fear and fury, Jack ran at the marine and shoved him over the rail, watching him crumple onto the machinery of the transaction-engine pit below. As Jack turned, a rifle butt slammed into his gut and winded him. He collapsed back; the rifle’s barrel fell across his throat and forced him choking down against the rail. It was Henry Tempest, his eyes glinting like tiny marbles as his sweating face bore down on Jack. ‘Get off my ship!’