Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

Amelia made up her mind. The bathysphere attached to the Sprite’s hull. If they lost that as well as her knowledge of Camlantis, the expedition was as good as over — unless the slavers fancied blundering around the ruins on the lake bed in their diving suits, trying to distinguish ancient crystal-books from two-thousand-year-old rubble. She would scupper their chances and use the bathysphere as an escape capsule at the same time.

As Amelia stepped out of the commodore’s quarters, the corridor’s lights changed from the standard yellow to a muted crimson hue. Was this to do with her escape? There were no claxons, though. Unless the sudden surge of capacitor juice had thrown an alarm somewhere, drained the boat’s power, nobody outside of the thugs lying shocked in the skipper’s quarters should know she had activated Black’s secret switch.

Amelia crept through the corridors, as silent as the rest of the boat. The Sprite had stopped moving now, her engines stilled. Pulling herself up the cold steel of a ladder, Amelia climbed two decks, heading for the rear conning tower. At one point she passed the Sprite’s engineering bay and risked a glance through its slightly ajar hatch. The bay’s lathes and workbenches were at a halt, maintenance work quieted while the crewmen inside nervously held onto the ceiling pipes. It was as if by stunning Bull Kammerlan she had cut the marionette cords on the rest of his gang of slavers; they were just waiting there in the stale tinned air for their leader to awake kraken-like from his slumbers.

Her luck did not hold. Amelia dipped into the passage leading to the bathysphere and a sailor at the other end saw her, then did a double take as he realized she should be locked up below in the hold with the Catosians. He grabbed for a holster on his belt and Amelia let him have the round in her carbine, the sailor bouncing from the wall and collapsing in front of her — she had hit him square in the chest: he was dead before the crack of the stubby rifle had finished echoing down the boat. There goes caution, Amelia sighed. She teased another charge from her ammunition belt even as she ejected the broken crystal from the first onto the deck. Slid the new shell into her carbine.

Amelia found the entrance to the bathysphere barred to her — a simple rotating combination lock. With no hope of guessing the sequence she placed the muzzle of the carbine an inch from the metal and turned her head as the blast from the short rifle jounced off the hatch. Hot metal lanced her hand. The lock was mangled, but it still held. She beat the butt of the carbine on the hatch, exposing the locking mechanism. Curse the Sprite for being so well built by its long-dead royalist engineers. Desperation grew in Amelia as she heard stirrings from the lower decks. She smashed the rifle as hard as she could against the lock, shattering the wooden butt with the impact. On Amelia’s last blow the Sprite shook violently as if a fire squid had scooped up the u-boat from the river to rattle it around, a muffled detonation that knocked Amelia off her feet, and landed her across the dead sailor. Then all was still again, an unnatural silence tinted only by the eerie crimson light.

A head popped up through the floor hatch — it was cooky, the grizzled old chef still wearing his oil-spattered apron. He looked down the corridor, took in the dead sailor and the carbine still in Amelia’s grip, then pulled himself up, running terrified to the bathysphere hatch, practically sobbing when he saw the ruin that was all that was left of the locking system. Amelia got to her feet, covering him with the carbine, but he was so horrified that he showed no sign of even being aware of the weapon.

‘Did you not see the red light?’

Amelia glanced up at the illumination strips. ‘The red light?’

‘Silent bloody running,’ moaned the crewman. ‘There’s a pair of seed ships above us and your gunshots have blown us to them. They’ve depth-charged our engines, we’re dead in the water.’ He started pulling distraughtly at the door, but it was beyond use. There would be no escape that way. A hissing sound came from inside the rear conning tower.

Old cooky gave up, slumping to the deck in despair. ‘Jonah. Jonah. We never should have kept you here.’

She glanced down the corridor. There were screams and shouts coming up from the lower decks as the crew realized what was happening, all thoughts of silent running abandoned as they began to panic. Amelia turned around. Cooky was reaching for the holster of the sailor she had killed. ‘Don’t do it, cooky. I’ll shoot you if I have to, I swear I will …’

He continued to fumble with the flap and slid the pistol out. ‘Save the last shell for yourself.’

Amelia sighted her carbine before she realized what cooky was doing. The pistol barrel slid into his mouth and he exchanged a luckless look with the professor before he pressed the trigger and whipped into the wall of the corridor, the explosion taking off the rear of his head. Amelia felt like being sick. She had made Billy Snow promise she wouldn’t end up like those poor soul-scrubbed zombies swaying empty on the block of Rapalaw Junction’s comfort auction; but Billy Snow wasn’t here. Whatever death in the jungle was awaiting the officers of the expedition who had been marooned, it was looking like they had got the best of the bargain. She pointed the carbine at her own heart and willed herself to squeeze the trigger. Just a small squeeze, that was all that was needed. Tighter, tighter. As she tried to find the resolve to do it, a weight seemed to press down on the weapon, lowering the barrel away from her body.

‘ I took that way, and I was very wrong to do so .’

‘Father!’ Amelia called into the empty corridor, but there were only the dead bodies of the sailor and cooky to hear her. She was going mad, justifying her gutlessness with echoes from the past.

Above Amelia the hissing grew louder. The mindless drones of the Daggish Empire were cutting their way into the u-boat.

They needed fresh flesh for the hive.

It was sweltering work, hacking through the green deeps of Liongeli, avoiding the trails favoured by the land’s lumbering predators. Ironflanks led the way, his four arms cutting back the vegetation. The others quickly realized that his habit of whistling in mimicry of the jungle’s creatures was born out of his stacks overheating — better to release pressure in a way that sounded natural, rather than announcing his presence with a full piercing lift of his boiler’s whistle.

‘Can we not rest?’ wheezed the commodore. ‘We’ve been an age breaking our way through these infernal green halls.’

‘An age?’ said Ironflanks. ‘We have hardly started our journey, Jared softbody.’

‘There was a call from the rear of the line. Billy had found something, his fingers tearing a scrap of canvas from a bush by his side. ‘This is not a creeper.’

T’ricola took the cloth from the blind sonar man and sniffed it through the three olfactory holes in her head armour. ‘It’s burnt and it looks like — no, it cannot be …’

The others gathered around to examine it.

‘It’s a piece of catenary curtain,’ said T’ricola. ‘Burnt off from an airship hull.’

‘The RAN do not fly missions this deep into the interior,’ said Ironflanks. ‘Rapalaw Junction counts itself lucky if Jackals’ aerostats answer the garrison’s siege alarm.’

‘Yet here it is,’ said T’ricola.

Commodore Black pushed his head between the trees behind them. ‘There is more through here, and a terrible sight it is to behold, too.’

Bearing the officers’ pistols, Gabriel McCabe and Veryann pressed through the bush, emerging into a clearing where the jungle was growing back over hacked-down trees and felled ferns. The others came through after them.