Free Iron Jackal by Chris Wooding Page B

worry so damn much.
    He applied himself to climbing the ladder. Once on the roof, he pulled himself up and shakily got to his feet. The wind and heat pushed at him as he rose. It took him a few moments to find his balance.
    Well, here I am, he thought, and a smile crept across his face.
    He was on top of the train, the Samarlan desert spread all around him. The sun glared from a cloudless sky, sharp as a jewel, beating on his skin. From up here, he was master of the cracked red earth, the mysterious buttes, the ghostly mountains. He’d tamed the iron beast that had threatened him. He’d earned this moment of triumph.
    Silo was peeling away towards Ashua, who was a long way off to the right. Explosions followed him as the autocannons started up again, throwing up plumes of dust which were quickly snatched away as the train thundered onward. Frey saw that the shells were missing Silo by some considerable margin. They’d seemed to be landing much closer when he was in the buggy. He waited until he was sure Silo was out of danger, then turned his attention to his own situation.
    His first thought was to get off the roof of the train and drop down into a carriage. His second thought was that they were full of guards, and he didn’t much fancy taking dozens of them on single-handed. The only option was the roof, then, all the way to the engine carriage. Nobody seemed to have seen him climb up, but they’d surely hear him running overhead. Once he started, he’d have to move fast.
    The carriages all had large vents in the roof. He peered in to the nearest, and saw nothing but darkness. Carefully, he made his way to the front end of the carriage. The distance between this one and the next was an easy jump. Then he looked down. There was a ladder down to a door, and beneath it, the raging clatter of the tracks.
    He suddenly recalled what had happened in Shasiith, while he’d been chasing Ashua. His ribs and back still hurt from that.
    Don’t mess it up.
    He backed away. He’d be running into a ferocious wind, so he reckoned he needed to jump as long as he could manage, just to be safe.
    He took a breath, let it out, and ran.
    It was an easy jump, in the end. It was the landing that was the hard part. He cleared the gap by a good two metres, but his ankle turned on the gently curving roof and suddenly he was tumbling and sliding, pulled to the side, towards the edge. He scrabbled frantically for purchase before his hand snapped out and found the lip of a vent. He pulled himself back to safety.
    Ahead of him, the train snaked away. He counted the carriages between him and the engine.
    Two horribly distressing brushes with death down, six more to go, he thought. Frey, what were you thinking when you took this job?
    Oh yes. Now he remembered. He was thinking about Trinica.
    Bess was too big to fit through the door of the carriage, but that didn’t stop her.
    The guards who manned the rearmost autocannon were watching Ashua and Silo pursuing the last of the Dakkadian Rattletraps. The first they knew they’d been boarded by a homicidal golem was when a roaring mountain of metal and fury ploughed through the wall. She snatched up the nearest guard and pitched him out into the sunlight, then proceeded to rampage up the carriage, swatting men aside like flies. The men on the autocannon fought to traverse the gun, but Jez had slipped in behind Bess and she took them out with neat rifle shots. Bess ripped the autocannon from its moorings and lobbed it down the carriage, mangling several men who had been unwise enough to stand and fight.
    After that, all that was left was the screaming. The Dakkadians crammed through the exit at the far end of the carriage. Some, in their panic, jumped over the side rather than let Bess get her hands on them. The carriage was clear in less than a minute.
    Crake skulked in through the hole Bess had left, as she ripped her way through the far side of the carriage in search of more victims. He picked his