Chris Wooding - The Iron jackal

Frey was a man accustomed to riding his luck. But this time, the stakes were so, so high.

‘Cap’n, we got to go,’ said Silo, his voice low and hard.

‘Not yet!’ he replied stubbornly.

‘He ain’t comin’.’

Frey bit back a retort. Whatever he said would sound childish. He knew the doc wasn’t coming. He just wanted to believe that he would.

The Juggernaut stamped onward, crushing the rubble of the shattered city beneath its feet. Its blank face was a mask of dispassionate brutality. How could Frey stand up to that?

They had to go. Waiting longer would be suicide. Frey opened his mouth to say it, but other words appeared in their place.

‘Will someone bloody help me?’

If Frey had believed in any kind of god, he’d have fallen to his knees and thanked them then. But damned if that wasn’t Malvery ’s tortured bellowing.

The doctor appeared at the top of the stairs, rising step by clumping step, with Colden Grudge slung across his back. His face and pate were bright red, giving him the appearance of a tomato with a moustache. He took one last step, tipped the Century Knight off his back and collapsed.

Frey and Silo ran to them. Malvery was wheezing so hard that Frey seriously thought he was having an attack of something. ‘Stairs…’ he whispered, with a noise like a deflating tyre.

There was no time for sympathy. Silo picked up Grudge and Frey dragged Malvery to his feet. ‘The box…’ Malvery gasped, pointing down at a small metal box the size of a book that he’d dropped when he fell. Frey picked it up without really looking at it, and then they carried their casualties as fast as they could towards the cargo hold.

A shrill sound drifted through the night. An ascending squeal. In the distance, the Juggernaut was powering up.

They were met at the cargo ramp by Ashua, who had left Samandra with Pinn, and by Crake, who had evidently thought better of facing her right now. ‘Move it, Jez!’ Frey yelled as soon as his feet touched the ramp. ‘Move it now!’

The Ketty Jay lurched forward, screeching on its skids. The thrusters kicked in before the aerium lift could get it off the ground. Frey shoved Malvery into the waiting arms of Ashua and Crake; the three of them staggered into the hold and fell flat. Silo, unbalanced by the sudden movement of the aircraft, dumped Grudge to the ground and then fell over as well. Frey tottered and clutched one of the ramp’s hydraulic struts to stabilise himself.

The floor tipped as the Ketty Jay rose, pushed forward and banked all at the same time. The inert bulk of Colden Grudge slid up against one wall and stayed there. Silo got his arm through one of the restraining straps they’d used for the Rattletraps. Ashua and Crake were pulling the gasping doctor to safety as best they could.

Beyond the ramp, the world tilted and swayed. The landing pad disappeared behind them, swinging out of view. Suddenly Frey was standing on the edge of a dizzying drop.

He couldn’t reach the lever to close the ramp. Jez could have closed it from the cockpit, but he didn’t want to distract her. And besides, despite the danger, he didn’t want it closed. There was something unbearable about the thought of shutting himself in and waiting in the gloom to be destroyed. If they were going to die, he’d rather see it coming, and end it with his eyes open.

The Juggernaut slid into view, behind and beneath them. Frey couldn’t hear it over the roar of the thrusters, but he could see the sparkling aura around its tube of a mouth as it sucked i n that deadly energy.

He could see when the lights went out.

‘Jez!’ he cried. ‘Now!’

The Ketty Jay banked hard, and Frey’s sight was filled with the blinding white of the beam weapon. It scorched past aft of them, missing them by mere metres. He clung on for his life as the Ketty Jay accelerated and climbed. As the dazzle faded from his vision he saw the excavated zone spreading out below him, and the dark city beyond it. The Juggernaut scraped the night sky with its beam, chasing after them like a searchlight, but the Ketty Jay was too fast and the creature couldn’t sustain it for more than a few seconds. As suddenly as it came, the beam was gone, and they were out of the Juggernaut’s reach.

The wind rushed around him, flapping his hair against his face as the buildings dwindled. He saw that one of the hourglass towers of the power station was collapsing, tumbling in slow motion. Lightning forked out from it in great crooked fingers, darting across the oasis, a wild barrage striking everywhere. He sensed what was coming, and braced himself.

A few more seconds. Just a few more seconds.

And now he could see the whole of the oasis, the excavated zone a patch of light and flame in the dark, and all of it surrounded by the endless moonlit desert.

That was the last he saw of the city before the power station exploded.

The detonation was silent. There was no shockwave, no debris flying this way and that. A great blue sphere of lightning swelled up from a single point to encompass the whole of the oasis, sending fizzing arcs writhing across the desert in all directions. It dissipated as it expanded, fading faster the larger it grew, until its outer edge was only an afterimage burned on Frey’s retinas.

It was a peaceful, deadly obliteration.

When the lightning had reduced to crawling sparks, all that was left was a blackened crater in the desert. The oasis and everything in it had entirely disintegrated.

Sensing that the danger had passed, Jez eased off on the thrusters, and the wind calmed a little as they slowed to cruising speed. Frey gazed down at the crater, and he was taken with a huge sense of calm. It was over. It was finally over.

Crake stumbled across the hold and joined him, hanging on to another hydraulic strut. He, too, stared down into the crater, but there were tears glittering in his eyes.

‘Did we just destroy a ten-thousand-year-old Azryx city?’ he asked, with a wobble in his voice.

‘Yeah,’ said Frey proudly. ‘I think we just did.’

T he moon looked down on them from a sky full of stars, benevolent now. It washed the desert with a serene light. Frey stood on the softly whispering sand, Silo by his side, and let his eyes roam the maze of cracks on its surface, the great dark rift that crossed it aslant like a wound.

The Ketty Jay was behind him, her tail towards him, cargo ramp open. Nearby was the Tabington Wrath that the Century Knights had arrived in, a state of the art heavy fighter craft that didn’t look quite so impressive when it was half buried in a dune. Between them, his crew had built a campfire and lit it with the remainder of Professor Pinn’s Incredible Flame-Slime. Malvery, Pinn and Ashua were singing lustily, passing a bottle, already drunk off their arses. Ashua and Malvery were leaning on each other like old comrades. Crake sat with them, taking a sullen swig now and then, sunk in gloom. He’d taken the annihilation of the Azryx city rather hard.

It probably wasn’t the wisest thingullen swig to do to light a fire out here where it could be seen for kloms in any direction, but he reckoned they deserved to blow off steam. The Sammie patrols surely knew to stay well clear of this place in case they dropped out of the air. Besides, if they hadn’t seen the city go up, they certainly wouldn’t spot a little fire.

As to the others: Jez was nowhere to be found, Harkins was in the infirmary recovering from a mysterious knock to the head, Bess had gone to sleep in the sanctum, and Ugrik was wandering about arguing with himself. They were all safe and more or less alive. Relief soaked into him slowly, easing his tired body and tired mind. If just one of his crew had died on his behalf, he’d have been a lesser man for it. He was glad to have avoided that grief.