Iron Jackal Read Online Free PDF

chance to recover, Pinn pounded his fist on the table, making them all jump.
    ‘I’ve made a . . . a decision!’ he slurred. He swept the table with a bleary gaze, for effect, then raised one finger. ‘I’m gonna be a famous . . . a famous inventor.’
    There was a pause, a perfect vacuum of incredulous shock, during which everyone stared at Pinn in amazement. Then, as one, they burst out laughing.
    Indignation roused him from his stupor. ‘I am!’ he protested, but nobody could hear him. Malvery was holding his belly, tears rolling down his face. Between his helpless guffaws he pleaded for everyone to stop laughing, because he was going to burst his appendix if they didn’t.
    It took a full minute for everyone to calm down, by which time Pinn was in a black sulk, with a face like a thunderhead. Crake leaned forward over the table, hands folded under his chin in an attitude of intense interest.
    ‘An inventor, you say?’ he inquired. ‘This wouldn’t have anything to do with your absent sweetheart, would it? Whichever sweetheart it is; I lose track.’
    ‘ ’S only one woman for me,’ Pinn said, narrowing his piggy eyes. But, since everyone was paying attention now, he drew something from his pocket and placed it delicately onto the table.
    It was a small chrome egg on a pedestal. He tapped it, and it opened out into four quarters. Inside was a tiny clockwork bird in a cage, which began spinning around and making a feeble cheeping noise.
    It was a trinket, a gewgaw from one of the local markets. The Samarlans loved their clockwork gadgets.
    Pinn was mesmerised by it. ‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘That’s amazing.’
    ‘What’s amazing is that you paid money for that piece of junk,’ said Malvery, still chuckling.
    Pinn closed it up and snatched it away resentfully. ‘Well, kicking around with you lot isn’t getting me rich, is it? Gotta get rich. Can’t go back to Lisinda till I do.’
    ‘Emanda,’ Crake reminded him.
    ‘Yeah, her,’ he waved in the air vaguely. ‘Anyway, reckon I’ll just invent something. Something . . . something no one’s thought of yet. You lot won’t be laughing then.’
    ‘Well,’ said Frey, ‘since you hijacked my toast, here’s to you. Professor Pinn, the inventor!’
    And they cheered, and drank, and Frey thought that all was well with the world.

Three
     
    Sightseeing – The Duchess and the Daisy - Chain – Ghosts at Her Shoulder – Floodlights – A Deception
     
    T he Ketty Jay groaned and shrieked as she lifted off her struts and began to rise above the landing pad. She was a solid, brutish thing with a humped back, short, downswept wings and a stumpy tail end: a hybrid cargo hauler and combat craft, built tough at the expense of beauty. With her belly lights shining, she ascended into the sultry night, her ballast tanks filling with ultralight aerium gas.
    Crake watched from the cockpit as the landing pad fell away beneath them. The aircraft on the ground were all Vard or Yort in design: this was a pad reserved for foreigners. Samarlan Navy craft glided through the sky, blade-sleek predators underlit by the city glow.
    Let’s hope we don’t have to tangle with any of them tonight , he thought.
    Jez was in the pilot’s seat. The Cap’n sat at the navigator’s station, bruised and battered and looking generally dejected. Crake knew how much he hated letting anyone else fly his beloved aircraft.
    It had been a few days since Frey’s introduction to Ashua’s boot, but his face had healed up quickly, although it was still a little lumpy and faintly discoloured. According to Malvery, the rest of him hadn’t done so well. His back and ribs were a mass of yellow and purple from the fall he took. He winced whenever he moved.
    Harkins hung by the door, pilot’s cap scrunched up in nervous hands, his hangdog face animated by some internal distress. No doubt he was feeling lost without his Firecrow. The two fighter craft that normally travelled with the Ketty