The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [23]
Pinn went pale. Nobody had spoken for so long, he’d forgotten half the crew could hear him through Crake’s daemonic communicators. He ripped his earcuff off and threw it angrily in the footwell, cutting off Frey’s gales of mirth. The captain was laughing so hard he’d begun to choke.
“Bastards!” he snarled. Then he shook his head and started to chuckle himself.
JEZ SAT IN HER seat at the navigator’s station, listening to the sounds of the Ketty Jay. The ticks and groans and creaks were familiar to her now. Silo’s repairs on the engines were holding up, but she was bothered by the tone of the thrusters, which was slightly lower than usual. Frey had noticed it too, and it niggled at him.
Flying in a straight line through calm skies, there was little for a navigator or a pilot to do. Frey yawned. Jez felt like yawning too, but she couldn’t. She hadn’t been able to since the day she died.
She’d been thinking about that day ever since their meeting with Grist. Perhaps it was the talk of the Azryx and Professor Malstrom that brought it all back. If not for the Professor and his quest to unearth their lost civilization, she’d never have gone to that blizzard-lashed settlement in the frozen North. How different things might have been then.
They came in their black dreadnoughts and their ragged clothes. The Manes. Feral ghouls from beyond the Wrack, the great cloud cap that shrouded Atalon’s northern pole. They captured those they wanted, turning them into Manes, and killed those they didn’t. Jez was one of the captured, but the process of transformation was interrupted. Jez escaped, only to freeze to death in the night.
But by then the damage had been done. She wasn’t fully a Mane, but she was Mane enough. Though her heart had stopped beating, she lived. Or perhaps existed was a better word. She wandered for years, moving from place to place, until she found somewhere that would accept her. On the Ketty Jay, they didn’t ask questions. They didn’t know what had happened to her, they didn’t want to, and she’d never told them.
Probably best that way. Manes struck fear into even the most reckless of men. The crew could deal with the fact that she was different, but she wondered how well they’d take the news that they had someone who was part Mane on board.
“How we doing, Jez?” asked Frey from the pilot seat.
Jez checked her charts. “Coming up on Kurg now, Cap’n. Be at the landing site in six hours at this speed.”
Frey groaned and shifted his butt around to get comfortable. “Six hours. Right.”
Jez smiled to herself. The truth was it was more like four, but it would give her captain a pleasant surprise when they got in early. Frey wouldn’t mind the deception. He knew she could be pinpoint accurate if she wanted, which was more than he could say for any of her predecessors.
“Land, ho,” Frey said, without much interest.
Jez got up and went to stand by the pilot’s seat to watch the coast approaching. A wall of black rock rose up out of the sea, as far as the eye could see. Waves smashed at its base. Thick forest crawled away from the clifftops toward barren mountain peaks. Smoke billowed from the mouth of a volcano in the distance, joining the misty clouds that hung over the vast island.
Even from high above, Jez thought there was something forbidding and dreadful about it. What would they find in there? What was waiting for them?
A prickling sensation swept over her skin. Here we go, she thought, and then the world flexed and everything became different.
A twilight had fallen, yet to her eyes everything seemed sharper than before. An unearthly clarity had come upon the world. She could see the hairs on the back of Frey’s hand and sense their movement as they trembled. She could hear the Ketty Jay’s engines and pick out the sound of each individual part. Rats scurried in the hold. Crake snored drunkenly in his quarters. Slag dozed in an air vent, his heart thumping slowly.
Beyond the windglass of the cockpit, she could read the wind. The stirrings of the clouds and the ripples in the treetops told a tale that Jez, in her