The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [100]
Crake saw Jez aiming and firing up the barricade through the smoke. A figure at the top jerked like a marionette and fell backward. Bess was roaring somewhere out of sight, and men shrieked and swore. Blood pounded in Crake’s head. He saw a figure scrambling along the barricade, aimed, and almost fired before Silo grabbed his hand and pushed it down.
“It’s the doc,” he grunted, and then headed up the slope.
Crake squinted and saw that Silo was right. He slumped against a girder, overwhelmed with relief. Stupid! Stupid! He’d almost shot a friend.
Then he saw a movement behind them—someone hiding in the rubble that they’d passed. He was squatting, his eye to a rifle, aiming upslope.
Crake couldn’t see well enough to know who it was, but the rifle gave the Sentinel away. None of Crake’s companions carried rifles. He thrust out his arm with a yell and emptied his revolver in that general direction. The Sentinel flinched as bullets sparked off the barricade all around him. Then, rather surprised at finding himself unhurt, he switched his aim toward Crake.
A shotgun blast, deafeningly close to Crake’s ear. The Sentinel flailed and disappeared.
Silo emerged through the murk, eyes bright in his narrow, beak-nosed face. He gave Crake a strange look, then grabbed him by the arm and propelled him up the slope to the crest.
Beyond the barricade was another barricade. The corridor had compressed like a concertina, leaving a narrow, junk-strewn battlefield between. Corpses lay here and there. Bess was busy making more. Frey, Malvery, and Jez hid among the debris, picking off the Sentinels as they fled from the golem’s wrath. Beyond the second barricade, the red glow of flames could be seen. Thick black smoke roiled along the ceiling.
Silo pushed Crake down as bullets came their way, and they began to creep through the forest of tangled metal. The heat and smoke at the crest were too much to stand for more than a few seconds. Crake tried to shoot at a fleeing Sentinel, but his gun clicked empty. He found a sheltered spot and fumbled some more bullets into the drum while Silo blasted away.
Then, all at once, the fear hit.
It came from nowhere, overwhelming, clawing at Crake’s throat, robbing him of breath. It was thick enough that it seemed like a physical weight, crushing him to the floor. He wanted to scream and run, but he couldn’t move. He stared this way and that, eyes wide and desperate, filled with primal dread. To his right, he saw that Silo had been similarly affected. He was huddled down like a rabbit in the shadow of a hawk.
What’s happening to us?
The makeshift battlefield had gone silent. Crake folded trembling fingers round the edge of his shelter and peered out.
There was a figure standing on the crest of the second set of battlements, backlit by the restless glow of the fire. The figure was cloaked, hooded, and masked, dressed head to toe in closefitting black leather. Crake felt his stomach knot into a ball at the sight.
An Imperator. One of the Awakeners’ deadly elite. Men who could read your thoughts, who could scour a mind clean with their terrible gaze. The ultimate inquisitors.
Spit and blood. We’re all dead meat.
The Imperator came walking unhurriedly down the slope of the barricade. The Sentinels were all gone now, dead at the hands of Bess or her allies, but the Imperator was not troubled at being outnumbered. No one dared to raise a gun to him. They were all afflicted with the same awful fear.
He was heading for the spot where Frey hid. Crake saw his captain go scrambling away on his hands and knees, shaking his head, begging incoherently. The Imperator drew a long black knife from his belt and walked relentlessly