The Black Lung Captain

Fifteen

Artis Pinn lay on his bunk, fingers laced behind his head, and stared at the metal ceiling. It was possible to see shapes in the ancient grime, if you looked hard enough. But today he wasn't playing his usual game. Today, he was thinking.

The quarters he shared with Harkins were narrow, cluttered and dirty. He had the top bunk, due to Harkins' unfortunate tendency to spasm out of bed several times a night. A square vent high up on one wall let in cool air from outside, wafting away the stench of unwashed bedding. There was a small storage cupboard crammed with their meagre possessions, but space for little else. The Ketty Jay wasn't built for luxury.

Pinn had lain there for hours now, trying to make sense of things. He didn't know what this empty, listless sensation was, but he didn't like it much. He didn't want to get up. Didn't want to sleep. Didn't want to do anything, actually. The thought of flying his Skylance failed to excite him. Even the prospect of booze had lost its charm, and he'd often said that when that day came, he'd eat a bullet. But he didn't feel much like shooting himself, either.

Lisinda, he thought. My sweetheart is marrying another man.

Was it even possible? He wasn't sure. After all, she'd said she loved him. Hadn't that meant anything to her? It had certainly meant something to him. It had inspired him to be a hero. It made him want to be a better man. It even made him want to stop cheating on her, although the gap between the desire and the reality was vast indeed.

How could she do it?

A sudden thought struck him, that hadn't occurred until now, even after hours of contemplation. If she was marrying another man, that must mean she'd been fooling around with him for at least a couple of months. Maybe longer. A flood of rage swept through him, and he gritted his teeth. How he'd like to get his hands round that other bloke's throat! Messing with another man's woman! Didn't he know she was taken? She'd already made her choice. Hadn't she said she loved him?

But killing her husband-to-be would surely make Lisinda a bit sad. He'd never do anything to make her cry, and yet honour demanded he stamp his rival's face into the ground. How to solve a problem like that? It was all very confusing. He wished he had half the Cap'n's brains. The Cap'n would have known what to do.

No matter how he turned it over in his head, he couldn't conceive how Lisinda would want to marry anyone else. It just wasn't possible. She must be an innocent victim in all this, somehow. Her heart had been swayed by some sleazy charmer from out of town. Women couldn't help themselves sometimes, that was just a fact. She couldn't be blamed. She was powerless to resist his influence.

Or maybe she was being forced into it. Yes, that was it! She'd said in her letter that she was very happy, but that clearly couldn't be true. Not when her heart was with her absent hero.

His blood boiled at the thought. His Lisinda, married off to some scheming aristocrat three times her age! The kind of man who coveted her beauty because he was too old to win her by fair means. He'd bought her like an ornament to wear on his arm, no doubt.

What if she'd been kidnapped? What if the letter was her coded cry for help? She must have known he'd never believe she would leave him. It was too ridiculous. Had her kidnapper allowed her to send this letter, thinking it innocent? Had she cleverly concealed a message within the message?

He pulled the letter out from under his pillow and began frantically scanning it, searching for codes or clues. Halfway through, he froze as another possibility occurred to him.

Could it be that this was all a plan by some love rival? Perhaps they had written the letter, hoping that Pinn would come racing home prematurely. Then Lisinda would see that he hadn't yet become the strong, honourable and, most importantly, rich man he'd promised he'd be. She'd turn away from him then, disappointed. Right into the arms of another.

He studied the letter furiously, searching for signs of forgery. What did Lisinda's handwriting look like, anyway? She'd never written him a letter before. Neither of them were much for reading or writing. Eventually he gave up. He'd never recognise a forgery if he didn't know the genuine article.

It all made his head hurt. What did the letter mean? And what was this strange, aching feeling in his guts, this heaviness in his limbs, this lack of appetite? He supposed that all this thinking was making him ill.

He heard a noise by the door and stuffed the letter back under the pillow just as Harkins peeped in. He was carrying a large butterfly net. His eyes roamed the room nervously.

'Pinn. Er . . . you wouldn't happen to ... I mean, have you seen the cat?'

Harkins' eyes widened as he saw that the grille had been taken off the air vent and was lying on the floor. No matter how many times he fixed it back, Pinn always took it off again, complaining that it made the room stuffy. It also allowed Slag to creep into the room and suffocate Harkins, which was part of the fun.

'You took the grille off,' Harkins accused.

'Yeah,' said Pinn.

Harkin's lip quivered. A determined look crept into his gaze. Pinn could see him visibly plucking up his courage. Allsoul's balls, was the twitchy old freak actually going to try to stand up to him?

'Now you listen!' Harkins said sternly. 'I've had enough of this! This is my room as much as yours, and I—'

'Piss off, Harkins, I'm thinking,' Pinn snapped.

Harkins flinched at the tone of his voice and scurried out. Pinn sighed, settled himself back on his bunk and stared at the ceiling again.

Lisinda. Sweetheart. What are you trying to say to me?

Jez clambered up the ladder to the upper gantry of the engine room, trying not to spill the mug of coffee in her hand. The engine assembly was quiet, but it still radiated a faint warmth. A sleeping monster of pipes and black iron.

Silo had a panel off and was poking around with a screwdriver. She squatted down next to him and put the coffee by his side.

'Made it just short of lethal, the way you like it.'

He grunted in thanks and kept poking.

'How's it going?' she asked, trying to peer past him.

'Same as before,' he said. 'Can't do nothin' without the parts. She could hold up for weeks. She could give out any minute. No tellin'.' He found something loose and tightened it. 'You thought about what I said?'

Jez remembered their surprising conversation in the rainforest of Kurg. 'I have. I am.'

'Talked to Crake?'

'Not yet,' she said. It seemed hard to find the right moment. 'You know he hasn't had a drink since last night?'

'He tell you that?'

'I can smell it on him.'

'Huh.'

Sensing that nothing else would be forthcoming, Jez ducked away and headed back down the ladder. The truth was, she'd been thinking a lot about Crake of late. She was becoming more and more convinced that he was the only one who could help her. Who better to deal with a daemon than a daemonist?

But it wasn't quite as simple as just walking up and asking. There had always been a distance between them. Crake seemed to resent her a little for being the one he'd confessed his crime to. Jez, for her part, had found it hard to entirely forgive him for what he'd done. Then there had been the drinking, and his gradual deterioration of late. He'd become bitter and unapproachable.

Jez was never the kind who was comfortable opening up to others. She was afraid they might one day use her vulnerabilities against her. And she was still afraid of what would happen if she admitted the whole truth about her condition. What if Crake reacted with fear and panic? What if he felt he had to tell the Cap'n? No matter how much the crew liked her or how useful she was, having a Mane on board would make anyone nervous. She could be shunned and ejected from the Ketty Jay, and she couldn't face that. She couldn't go back to that life of wandering, moving from crew to crew, never putting down roots.

But she had a daemon inside her. And the longer it stayed the more power it would have over her. Sooner or later she'd be forced to take action. Even if it cost her her place on the Ketty Jay.

She went out into the passageway. She could see Malvery through the open door of the infirmary, asleep on the surgical table, snoring. Ahead of her, Harkins was stalking down the corridor on tiptoe, a butterfly net in his hand. He flushed beetroot red as he saw her.

'Jez! Um . . . I . . . you see, I picked this up in Tarlock Cove and I . . . er . . .'

'I don't think I want to know,' said Jez.

'Right. Hm. Yes. Probably best.'

She went down to the cargo hold and outside. The Ketty Jay sat in a grassy mountain dell, high up in the Splinters. A broken, bald peak thrust up ahead of her. Frey and Crake were somewhere on the other side, with Grist and his bosun. Scouting out the location that Crake's daemon had identified, the place where Grist's mysterious sphere was being kept. Nearby was the Storm Dog. A few of Grist's crew lounged about, enjoying the bright, cool morning. Jez walked past them, towards the trees that fringed the dell.

She still had deep misgivings about this whole affair, but she was loyal to her Cap'n. He'd given her a home, and she had a way to go before she paid him back for that, even if she'd already saved his life more than once. She felt included here, and needed.

Just as she'd felt when that Mane was trying to turn her, on that snowy night in Yortland. The moment when she'd seen into their world, and felt the connections between them.

She understood why that crew on the crashed Mane craft had lain down and died. She'd only had a taste of what could have been. Having that, living with it and then giving it up would have been unthinkably terrible. A mutilation of the senses.

And yet they did it anyway. They made that choice. So maybe they're individuals, rather than slaves to a collective mind. Maybe I wouldn't lose myself if I joined them.

Dangerous thinking. A temptation like that would be too easy to give in to. It was no easy thing to resist the call, day after day, night after night. The need to belong had always been a part of her. And no one belonged like a Mane did.

Jez had spent her whole life looking for her place. For as long as she could remember, she'd been unable to fit in. She'd always had friends, but somehow it never seemed like the friendships she read about in books. She liked them, and they liked her, and it went no deeper. If she never saw them again, she wouldn't have shed a tear. Nobody said so, but she knew they felt the same about her.

Her childhood was spent watching her companions with secret envy. She was always the last to be involved. The cog in the gears that didn't quite mesh.

When she was a little older, she began to blame her father. Him and his obsession with trying to improve her position in life. He was a craftbuilder, an artisan, more respected than the peasantry but still a world away from the scholars, officials and aristocrats.

Once he'd been content with his lot; but after the sickness took her mother, he changed. Suddenly, a craftbuilder's life wasn't good enough for his daughter any more. He forced her to study when she wasn't helping him in the workshop. He saved up for a tutor who'd knock the common edges off her accent. By the time Jez reached the age where she just wanted to be the same as everyone else, she was already different in a thousand little ways.

Her apologetic displays of knowledge intimidated her friends. She found herself frustrated by their lack of ambition. Her horizons had been expanded through literature, but theirs hadn't, and she couldn't understand how they could think so small. They were still friends, as they'd always been; but no matter how she tried, she was faintly alien to them now.

There was no help among the educated, either. They spotted her immediately, and despised her as a try-hard attempting to rise above her station. A few small friendships blossomed, but they could only survive in isolation, and circumstances eventually put an end to them.

She hardened herself to rejection. She embarked on adolescent romances, and found them as unsatisfying as her friendships had been. She always broke them off before her partner could.

Her father talked of university, but it was his dream and not hers. Someone like her didn't get into places like that. And even if she did, she'd never escape her birth. It would be just another round of being on the outside. So when the time came, she broke her father's heart and went off to see the world in the little A-18 he'd built for her sixteenth birthday. Out there, she'd find her place. Or if not, at least she'd be alone on her own terms.

Funny, how things turned out.

She walked out of sight of the men in the dell and picked her way through the trees to a likely looking rock, where she sat down. There, she pulled out a book and opened it. The writing was all circles and arcs. It still smelled of the captain's cabin in the dreadnought.

The patterns made no sense to her, but she stared at them anyway.

'Awakeners,' said Crake. 'I hate Awakeners.'

Frey wasn't too fond of them himself. It was the Awakeners that had been behind the attempt to frame him and his crew for the murder of the Archduke's eldest son. And now, if Crake's daemon was to be believed, they were behind the theft of Grist's mysterious power source.

He shifted uncomfortably on the ridge and angled the spyglass down at the Awakener's compound. It was a collection of grand buildings, the size of a small town, with the look of a sprawling university or an ancient library complex. A high wall surrounded it, studded with guard posts, overlooked by a clock tower that rose from the central quad. It sat on a bare island in the midst of a deep blue lake that ran the length of the valley. Next to it was a landing pad, upon which several aircraft sat dormant. Hovering at anchor over the lake was the dirty black bulk of the Delirium Trigger, spoiling the sense of idyll entirely.

Frey felt a surge of irritation and anger. What was Trinica doing, working for the Awakeners again? Hadn't she learned her lesson last time, after the whole debacle with Duke Grephen? She was probably already under sentence of treason because of that little affair. But she just had to get involved, didn't she? She had to get in his way. Just to spite him.

There was a bigger question here than Trinica's involvement, however. What interest did the Awakeners have in a crashed Mane aircraft? Why had they sent anyone at all?

He scanned the outer wall. Sentinels walked there, armed with rifles. They wore grey, high-collared cassocks and carried twinned daggers in their belts. On their breasts was the Cipher, the emblem of their faith, a tangled design of small, linked circles.

Huge lamps like lighthouses had been built on every corner, no doubt powered by generators inside the compound. Approaching unseen across the lake and the barren island would be impossible, whether by day or night.

Grist lay next to him, smoking angrily. 'You see a way in?'

'There isn't a way in,' Frey said.

'There's always a way in,' Grist replied.

Frey put down the spyglass. 'Well, I don't much fancy assaulting a heavily fortified compound with a handful of men, if that's what you're thinking. Might as well shoot each other now, save everyone a bit of time.'

'Can't we sneak inside?' suggested Crattle, raising his head to look over his captain at Frey.

'Even if we could, which we probably can't, what happens then?' Frey asked. 'Follow the arrows to the treasure? Look how big that place is. We'd need days to search it.'

'In disguise, then?' Crattle persisted.

'You'd be caught,' said Crake, who lay on Frey's other side. 'Without even a basic knowledge of the Cryptonomicon, they'd identify you as a fraud before the end of your first conversation.'

Frey looked over at the daemonist. He certainly seemed brighter and sharper today than he had been of late. Frey had found him awake early, polishing Bess while Silo patched up rust spots on her armour and fixed broken rings in her chain mail. And Frey had to admit, Crake had stepped up when it came to do his part. He had no idea what the daemonist had gone through to find the whereabouts of the sphere, but he was sure it hadn't been easy.

Grist took a puff on his cigar and scowled. His good cheer had been almost entirely absent since Trinica had robbed them. Without it, he was an unpleasant man to be around.

'So if we can't get in, what do we do now?'

Frey rolled his shoulders, which were getting stiff from lying there. 'Now, we find out what the Awakeners are up to, why they're interested in the sphere at all, and why they went to the trouble of hiring a pirate to get it instead of doing it themselves. Once we know that, we'll have a better idea of how to get our hands on it.'

'And how d'you propose to do that?' Grist asked.

'I'm gonna do my best not to propose at all,' Frey said grimly.

Crake caught on. 'Amalicia Thade,' he said with a grin.

Frey had the look of a man facing a firing squad. 'Amalicia Thade.'

There was a long, grave and meaningful pause before Grist said:

'Who?'