Iron Jackal by Chris Wooding Read Free Book Online Page A

of nerves by now. Jez could hear it in his heartbeat and smell it on his sweat. ‘Malvery!’ he yelled. ‘Will you get those fighters off our tail ?’
    ‘If you think it’s so easy, come up here and do it yourself!’ Malvery yelled back. He fired another burst, a dull thump-thump-thump of artillery, then guffawed triumphantly. ‘There you go! Happy now?’
    One of the Samarlan fighters went screaming overhead, close enough to make Jez duck in fright. It corkscrewed through the air, trailing flames from the stump of a wing, and smashed into the side of the outcrop in a smoky cough of fire.
    ‘Here we go,’ Jez shouted over the roar of the engine and the sound of distant machine guns. ‘Malvery, quit firing when I say!’
    ‘I just got bloody started!’ he cried indignantly.
    Jez ignored him. ‘Everyone hang on to something! Malvery, now!’
    The autocannon fell silent. The outcrop was to starboard now, mere metres off their wing-tip. She took it as close as she dared, knowing her pursuers wouldn’t match her. They pulled away, intending to catch her on the far side. But instead of flying past it, she banked hard to starboard, swinging around the back of the outcrop. The Ketty Jay ’s thrusters screamed as she powered through the air. Her frame shook with the stress. Jez heard a string of bumps and crashes from the depths of the aircraft, as everything that wasn’t secured went sliding and clattering across the floor. Malvery began spluttering a string of frightened curses as the aircraft tipped to almost ninety degrees, bringing him face-to-face with the sides of the outcrop, only a dome of windglass between him and a thundering wall of rock.
    And then the lights disappeared. The outcrop stood between the Ketty Jay and her pursuers, and for a few seconds they flew in utter darkness.
    Jez did an emergency kill on the thrusters and boosted the aerium engines to maximum, pulling the Ketty Jay ’s nose up as she did. The aerium engines hummed as electromagnets pulverised liquid aerium into gas, filling the ballast tanks, making the Ketty Jay lighter than air. Jez rode the momentum that they already had and took the Ketty Jay up into the night, her thrusters now dark, invisible against the background of the sky.
    Nobody saw them go.
    As the Ketty Jay became lighter, the air resistance slowed them down. Jez airbraked until they were stationary and then let them rise like a balloon, straight up into the atmosphere. The frigate glided past like a shark to starboard, dwindling beneath them, its floods trained on the outcrop where its quarry had disappeared. The fighters swooped and banked, searching for the telltale glow of thrusters. But they were all looking in the wrong place.
    When they’d gone high enough, Jez vented aerium to equalise the weight and the Ketty Jay stopped rising. The Samarlans were still looking fruitlessly for them, a klom below. Jez slumped back in her seat, then turned around and grinned.
    ‘That was a good idea, Cap’n.’
    ‘I’m impressed, anyway,’ said Ashua, rubbing her arm where it had been bruised by the bulkhead.
    Frey unbuckled himself, rolling his shoulder, and reached over to give Jez a pat on the shoulder. ‘Don’t know what I’d do without you.’
    Jez retied her ponytail to disguise the flush of pleasure she felt at that. Sometimes, she decided, being half-daemon was not so bad at all.

Four
     
    The Train – Frey Rallies the Crew – Rattletraps – Harkins Fumbles
     
    ‘T here it is.’
    Frey wiped sweat from his brow with his shirt sleeve, then took the spyglass from Ashua and put it to his eye. Before him, a scorched and blasted land lurched away towards a broken horizon. Scattered buttes and mesas faded hauntingly into the distance. Shallow hills of scree nursed hardy scrub grass and gnarled bushes. It was a cooked, cracked vista of dusty orange and red, split by narrow, branching fissures.
    He followed the curved line of the tracks till he found the train, which