The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [103]
If Harkins had been an optimist, he might have thought himself a lucky man. He’d survived dozens of dogfights and got out of scrapes that left his companions dead in his wake. But he was no optimist. Instead, he fretted about how much luck he could possibly have left and when it was finally going to run out.
Not tonight, though. Not tonight.
Flying was all he knew how to do, but if he had his way, he’d never fight again. All he wanted was an aircraft of his own and the wide blue sky to fly in. Just to soar forever. There would be no one to make him feel small. Just him and the sun and the air. He wouldn’t ask for anything more.
Well, maybe one thing more. Maybe someone to share it with. Someone he trusted to be kind to him.
Jez, he thought. I wonder what she’s doing now?
“JEZ?” SAID FREY TENTATIVELY.
She wasn’t moving. She lay on the ground next to the decapitated corpse of the Imperator, facedown, her hair across her cheek. Frey crept up to her and gave her a poke with the toe of his boot.
“She’s not going to bite you, Cap’n,” said Malvery, in the tone of someone who didn’t much fancy finding out the truth of that statement for himself.
“How do you know?” Frey asked. “You saw what happened! She ripped the Imperator’s head off with her bare damn hands! One moment she was there, the next she was somewhere else! What was that?”
“That was Jez, and she saved our lives,” said Silo. “Ain’t the first time neither.”
“That,” said Frey, pointing at her, “wasn’t Jez.”
“Ain’t the time nor the place, Cap’n,” said Silo. He picked up the navigator’s limp body and slung her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. “Let’s get done here and go.”
But Frey couldn’t shake the memory of her, feral and snarling, that terrifying look in her eyes. That wasn’t anyone he recognized. She’d changed.
Crake was at Bess’s side. The golem was stirring, to Crake’s evident relief. He was tearing up, and not just from the smoke. Well, at least they hadn’t lost anyone. At least there was that.
But could Frey ever look at Jez in the same way again? Would he be able to fly, knowing she was at the navigator’s station behind him?
The Imperator’s head lay a short distance away. The smooth mask had come loose and was hanging off. Frey walked over to it. “Keep an eye out for any more Sentinels,” he told his crew.
“Cap’n,” said Malvery, a warning in his voice.
“I’ve dealt with these Imperator bastards before,” Frey said, as if that was an explanation. The truth was, he was angry. This was the second time he’d been unmanned by an Imperator, forced to cower in fear like a whipped dog. He wanted to see the face under the mask. Somehow, he thought it would lessen his fear of them.
He was wrong. When he pushed the mask aside with the barrel of his revolver, the face beneath was enough to make him recoil with a shout. The cheeks and eyes were sunken, irises yellow like a bird of prey. The mouth was stretched open as if in a scream, showing sharp, uneven teeth in receding gums. White, dry skin; the septum of the nose rotted away. It looked like something you’d uncover in a grave.
“Blimey,” said Malvery. “Someone needs to eat their greens.”
Frey screwed up his face in disgust and looked closer. A stump of a tongue, cut out at the root, showed between cracked lips. There was only a spotting of blood on the floor, despite the brutal nature of the Imperator’s death.
“That,” said Frey, “is not natural.” He turned away and looked at Jez, who was hanging over Silo’s shoulder. “Can anyone enlighten me as to what in buggery just happened to my navigator, by the way?”
“She’s a Mane,” said Crake, coughing. “Partly, anyway. I suppose she wasn’t fully infected.”
“You knew?”
“I guessed. Not long after she first came on board. No heartbeat, no need to eat, all of that. There’ve been other half-Manes, you know. They’ve come up in daemonist texts. Like I told you, there’s always been a school of thought that said Manes were daemons. And, really, what other explanation was there?”
“I was trying not to think about it too much,