Jack Cloudie. Stephen Hunt

of our hair, greenhorn.’ One of the lifting chamber crew pushed Jack back towards the ladder. ‘You heard the captain. Sharp to it.’

      Jack gawped. ‘Captain!’

      ‘The honourable Donald Lawrence Jericho himself, lad. Now return to your post before I dirty the sole of my boot on the arse of your fine regulation breeches.’

      Jack had barely cleared the climb back to the upper deck when the airship started trembling. Not the crack of a storm, but a different sort of thunder. The Iron Partridge’s guns were speaking, and then the airship shook as the enemy’s reply sounded in kind.

      By the time Jack had stumbled back to his station, the transaction-engine room was a scene of organized chaos, the two Benzari stokers grunting as they shovelled coal into the furnace, John Oldcastle, chased back by the screech of the general-quarters, helping Coss down in the pit of noisy thinking machines.

      ‘Where have you been, lad?’ called Oldcastle over a booming sound echoing off the ship’s plates outside. Was that the sound of an enemy shell bouncing off their armour? ‘We need you on the punch-card writer up there.’

      ‘I was with the captain, master cardsharp.’

      ‘On one of his early morning walks, lad, to help keep the black dog at bay? A great one for walks, is old Jericho. Well, he’ll have his blessed exercise now, running around the Cassarabians!’

      Jack sprinted to the nearest punch-card writer, keeping his footing as the deck trembled with the roar of the Iron Partridge’s massive thirty-two pounders.

      ‘I have an automated system activating,’ shouted Coss, his voicebox on maximum amplification as he read the symbols off one of the engine’s rotating calculation drums. ‘Kiss my condensers, it’s the gas compression on the ballonets. Lower lifting chamber.’

      Oldcastle pointed up at Jack. ‘Shut it down. If the lifting room crew apply extra pressure to a gas cell that’s already been compressed, it’ll explode like a wicked volcano under our feet.’

      Taking a blank punch card from the tray, Jack bashed out an instruction set to kill the airship’s automated system, pushing it into the injection tube and watching as it was sucked out of his fingers.

      ‘It’s back under manual control now,’ shouted Jack. ‘How long is our engagement against the Cassarabian airship going to last?’

      ‘Damned if I know, lad,’ said Oldcastle, pointing towards the porthole above the punch-card desk. ‘And it’s airships. There are two of the blessed things flying out there hammering away at us.’

      Jack stood up on his toes to stare out of the porthole. He could see an enemy airship banking to broadside, just a silhouette against the dark backdrop of dawn’s first gleaming, spouts of angry orange light and smoke coming from the line of her gun deck as she exchanged fire with the Iron Partridge. Where was the other airship? Ah, there she was, a second shadow rising, the stern crossing the upper corner of Jack’s porthole.