Chapters (41)
- Title
- Indicia
- Steel Frame
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Acknowledgements
- About The Author
- 'Ironclads' by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- 'NineFox Gambit' by Yoon Ha Lee
- 'Grunt Life' by Weston Ochse
I nod, but Andrade doesn’t follow the look. Out below, a Decatur raises our inherited blade, and Avery waves it into the locks across our back.
“We do.”
Twenty-Eight
TWENTY-EIGHT
HAIL AND SALT are there when Andrade waves me in, keeping to the shadows near the back of the room. I can’t help smiling when I see them, can’t help leaning together when I catch up. It’s good to feel their weight, the solid muscle in their frames. They both look about as ragged as I feel, but they’ve got space for me.
Andrade stands near the middle of it all. He’s the one who called us together. Jockeys, knuckledraggers, soldiers, survivors all. This place is his doing as well; he stands with hands on a table in the middle of an improvised nerve-centre, assembled from a couple of NorCol command-and-control systems. The systems come in kits, designed to be dropped from orbit and snapped together by hand. In the chaos, they’re nearly all that survived. Tangled cable runs along the floor and interface-blisters hang from the walls, soft-lit by the glow of ancient displays.
The crew is his as well. Some wear Wolf-issue black; not Werewolves themselves, but the fixers and operators and soldiers he’s collected over time. There are others too, but most of them look like salvage, recovered from departments all over the ship: pilots and ’draggers, for the most part. They ignore us, too busy listening to incoming comms and whispering across the narrowband, guiding survivors toward us.
Another Werewolf watches Andrade from the other side of the room, her arms crossed and jaw set. She’s a con like the rest of us; colonial, judging by the marks on her skin, but from a different branch to Salt. She’s just as tall as he is—most of a head higher than anyone else in this place—but instead of Salt’s slabs and cliffsides, she was built for speed and sharp edges. Her name is Locke, I think, and it sounds like she has a crew of her own out there somewhere, a handful of marines and a couple of shells making a nuisance of themselves somewhere further up the ship. Her eyes found me the moment I cleared the door, and she hasn’t looked away since.
There’s a NorCol lifer next to her, called King if the tab on his chest is right. He’s wrapped in a ground-pounder’s coat, and has thick skin worn by actual sunlight. You can see he used to be full-time, but the company stripped the silverware from his chest and shoulders, left shadows on his sleeves. Decorations like that and the company would have him down for a grave in Auveron’s fields, but now he’s just a plain old con, destined for burial at sea. Andrade has King running boots and security.