‘I wasn’t laughing at your story,’ said Jack. ‘It’s just that if you had left school a couple of years later and hadn’t got into the RAN, you might have signed up with the Cassarabian navy!’
‘Most amusing. I much prefer an allied multiracial society such as that of the Kingdom,’ said Coss, pointing to the iron clock above the entrance to their chamber. ‘The master cardsharp asked to be interrupted from his game before six-bells sounds. He also left a parcel that he wants you to deliver below decks, although I suspect he intended its delivery to be made during daylight hours.’
Jack retrieved the heavy waxpaper-wrapped parcel from the stool in front of his punch-card writing station. There was a scribbled note slipped below the string sealing the parcel, its instructions read: ‘For the cabin at the end of the middle deck’s main passage.’
‘I’ll fetch the master cardsharp,’ said Jack. ‘And see if I can drop this off too.’ Better that than listening to those two Benzari stokers snoring away. Perhaps the long climb down the lifting chamber ladder will bring some peace to my nerves. Coss might have dreamed of sailing thousands of feet across the world like one of his birds, but Jack was just happy to have avoided the six-foot drop that was to have been his courtesy of the hangman back home.
After clambering down the ladder, Jack considered the route, his new recruit’s training spinning around his mind. The easiest way to the surgeon’s ward in the middle of the airship was to head down the upper lifting chamber’s main gantry, then into the gun deck, another climb through the lower lifting chamber, before threading through the corridors of the middle deck.
Jack walked down the central catwalk that cut through the twelve-hundred foot length of the upper lifting chamber, the thin strip of metal bouncing underfoot, its handrail preventing him from slipping into the thousands of ballonets and their network of bracing wires. He was halfway down the gangway when he almost stumbled into the officer, a tattered well-worn cloak half-hidden by the shadow of one of the airship’s regassing towers. Jack caught a breath as he recognized the face of the man from the courtroom. Close up, his skin was pockmarked with smallpox scars, but there were the same intense eyes, the same mop of ginger hair. Yes, this was the RAN officer who had so annoyed the judge in the middle-court by saving Jack from dancing the Bonegate jig.
‘Mister Keats,’ said the half-familiar man.
‘Sir.’ Jack still felt awkward saluting, every raise of his hand an acknowledgment he was now reluctantly part of something larger than just his own life and survival, with very little choice in the matter.
The officer’s cloak was pulled tight like a poncho, so Jack couldn’t get a clear look at the man’s uniform. Was he one of their ship’s seven lieutenants?
‘You are up early I see,’ said the man.
‘The storm was rattling our skylight, sir.’
‘Ah yes, all bedded down in the transaction-engine chamber. Never draw a berth on the keel deck or the upper deck, Mister Keats.’ He pointed to one of the aluminium spokes radiating out like a wheel, giving the vast upper lifting chamber its strength. ‘The noise is passed to the decks at the top and bottom of a vessel through the supports. And we’re worse than most airships, the plates on our hull rattling around as if we’re some damn armoured knight riding off to battle.’ The officer walked briskly along, his swagger stick striking each of the gantry railings. ‘A strange bird, this metal partridge of ours, eh, m’boy? A cloud-borne ironclad – don’t seem natural. Everything different for difference’s sake alone.’ The officer pointed at the thousands of spherical gas cells corded together under the lifting chamber’s netting. ‘Even our celgas is bagged up inside some strange composite rather than plain honest canvas. The genius that cooked this vessel up was off with the fairies when they laid their pencils on the draughting board, alright. I understand that some call that progress.’ He spotted the package under Jack’s arm. ‘Ah, I believe that would be the parcel the commodore promised me.’
‘The commodore?’ said Jack, confused. ‘Don’t you mean the master cardsharp, sir?’
‘Indeed, indeed. That’s just a nickname some of the officers have for him – his manner, d’you see? Although I wouldn’t advise using it around the fellow, he wouldn’t thank you for it.’
Jack held the package out. ‘You have the cabin at the end of middle deck, then, I presume? Do you serve under First Lieutenant Westwick, sir?’
‘I think it would be fair to say that ultimately, we both owe our positions on the ship to her, Mister Keats.’ The officer took the parcel and removed the string and the waxpaper, revealing a pile of books with a receipt from the stationer’s stall where they had been purchased. ‘Capital. Just the stuff for a cold evening’s reading.’
The tomes in the officer’s hand weren’t the cheap penny-dreadfuls and lurid fiction that Jack favoured, but rather dry, leather-bound books of military strategy with titles such as Aerostatical Theory: Classical Practices, Principles and Historical Perspectives.
‘Our civil war, that’s the only time we’ve seen airships raking each other in the clouds. It seems we have to look back to history for a fresh perspective on how to take on the Cassarabians. All our tactics, all our weapons, are predicated on placing us in the sky and the enemy firmly on the ground. With the exception of warding off the odd mutineer or the occasional science pirate who has managed to cook up some mad scheme to get into the air, our sailors’ experience is completely sky-to-ground. Dangerous thinking for these modern times we find ourselves in. Keep up, m’boy,’ he said, half a command, half a booming laugh. ‘Twelve times around the ship is four miles. That’s what a sailor requires every day to keep his mind fresh and clear, d’you see?’
It was the laugh that did it. Deep and boisterous, resounding through the upper lifting chamber just as it had at the – debtors’ prison! That’s where he knew this man from. He had been one of the patients in the fever room of the debtors’ prison. Jack’s father had led the collection to try to buy medicines and food when the sickness had struck the Five Stones district of Middlesteel where the debtors’ prison squatted down by the river. Another of his father’s foolish, over-generous impulses in the prison to help everyone except those who really should have mattered to him. The last time Jack had seen this face was when he’d been doling out carrot broth to the inmates who had been separated off into quarantine. Then it had been blotchy and sweating under a coarse charity blanket, but capable of booming out a note of thanks even so. So, the ill man had been a navy officer? Well, they were as likely to be declared bankrupt as anyone else. Someone must have taken care of the officer’s debts for him, though, for him to be able to re-enter service with the navy. Jack’s recollection was shattered by a savage whistling from a stove pipe-like tube hanging above the gantry, the noise rising and falling like the scream of a banshee.
Jack covered his ears. ‘Are we crashing into Jackals?’
‘We haven’t been travelling the Kingdom’s skies for days,’ said the man. ‘We’re sailing over Benzari territory, and that, Mister Keats, is the general-quarters being sounded. Propellers ho! m’boy. The enemy’s been sighted.’
‘Are we at war, sir?’
‘Benzaral is disputed territory, Mister Keats. The caliph thinks it is his, but we have a couple of hundred marines on board that will swear it is independent and belongs to the free Benzari tribes. And they are our nation’s allies. The perfect place for us to do a little fishing.’
‘What are we hoping to catch?’
The stocky man reached out and slapped Jack’s shoulder. ‘An airship, Mister Keats. A nice fat Cassarabian airship, d’you see?’
Men from the night watch were swinging down onto the gantry, stowing their gas-bag patching tools in secure boxes and pulling the lifting chamber netting taut for action.
‘You know what to do, gentlemen,’ the ginger-haired officer called to them. ‘Back to your post, Mister Keats. Keep your transaction