‘What good will that do?’ Jez asked. ‘We still blew up the Ace of Skulls.’
‘You think they’re going to care about the trigger-man if they’ve got the mastermind?’ Frey asked. ‘Look, I’m not saying they’ll necessarily forgive, but they might forget. If the Archduke gets his hands on them, he won’t worry about us. We’re small-time. And without Duke Grephen putting up that huge reward, Dracken’s not going to waste her time chasing us either.’
‘You think we can actually get ourselves out of this?’ Malvery rumbled. He was standing behind Frey, at the stove. He’d stopped stirring and was staring at the pot of dessert.
‘Yes!’ Frey said, firmly. ‘We play this right, we can do it.’
The crew were exchanging glances, as if looking for support from each other. Did their companions feel the same? Were they being foolish, to believe that they could win out against all the odds?
‘Whatever’s going on at this hideout is something to do with all of this,’ Frey said. ‘The answers are there, I’m sure of it. There’s a way out. But we need to hang on, we need to go a little deeper first. We need to take the risk. Because I’m not spending the rest of my life on the run, and neither are any of you.’
‘You said we’ll lure Dracken into a port,’ said Jez. ‘How are we gonna do that?’
‘Parley,’ he said. ‘I’ll invite her to talk on neutral turf. Face to face. I’ll pretend I want to cut a deal.’
‘And you think she’ll agree?’
‘She’ll agree.’ Frey was horribly certain of that.
Nobody spoke for a few moments. Slag looked up, puzzled by the pregnant pause in the conversation, then went back to snacking on his rat.
Frey felt the weight of Malvery’s hand on his shoulder. ‘Tell us the rest of the plan, Cap’n.’
Frey stepped off the iron ladder that ran from the mess up to the main passageway of the Ketty Jay. He stopped there for a moment and took a breath. Explaining his plan had been unusually nerve-wracking. For the first time he could remember, he’d actually worried about what his crew thought. There were a few good suggestions, mostly from Jez. Outright shock as he revealed the final part. But they’d liked it. He saw it on their faces.
Well, it was done. Until now he hadn’t really been sure they’d go with it. It was frightening to have it all seem so suddenly real.
Because he really, really didn’t want a meeting with Trinica Dracken.
Slag scampered up the ladder behind him and thumped down into the passageway, obviously in the mood for some company. He followed Frey into the captain’s quarters and waited while Frey shut the door and dug out the small bottle of Shine from the locked drawer in the cabinet. He sat patiently while Frey administered a drop to each eye and lay back on the bed. Then, once he’d determined that Frey was liable to be motionless for a while, he hopped onto the captain’s chest, curled up and fell asleep.
Frey drifted on the edge of consciousness, dimly aware of the warm, crushing weight of the cat on his ribs. He was scared of what was to come. He hated being forced into this position. He hated having to be brave. But in the soothing narcotic haze he felt nothing but peace, and gradually he fell asleep.
In seeking to block out one thing he’d rather forget, he ended up dreaming of another.
The north-western coast of Samarla was a beautiful place. The plunging valleys and majestic mountains were kept lush and green by frequent rains off Silver Bay, and the sun shone all year round this close to the equator. It was a land of sweeping vistas, mighty rivers and uncountable trees, all green and gold and red.
It was also swarming with Sammies. Or, to be more accurate, it was swarming with their Dakkadian and Murthian troops. Sammies didn’t dirty themselves with hand-to-hand combat. They had two whole races of slaves to do that kind of thing.
Frey looked down from the cockpit of the Ketty Jay at the verdant swells beneath him. His navigator, Rabby, was squeezed up close, peering about for landmarks by which to calculate their position. He was a scrawny sort with a chicken neck and a ponytail. Frey didn’t much like him, but he didn’t have much choice in the matter. The Coalition Navy had commandeered his craft and his services, and since the rest of his crew had deserted rather than fight the Sammies, the Navy had assigned him a new one.
‘They’re sitting pretty, ain’t they? Bloody Sammies,’ Rabby muttered. ‘Wish we had two sets of bitches to do our fighting for us.’
Frey ignored him. Rabby was always fishing for someone to agree with, constantly probing to find the crew’s likes and dislikes so he could marvel at how similar their opinions were.
‘I mean, you’ve got your Murthians, right, to do all your hard labour and stuff. Big strong lot for hauling all those bricks around and working in the factories and what. Good cannon-fodder too, if you don’t mind the surly buggers trying to mutiny all the time.’
Frey reached into the footwell of the cockpit and pulled out a near-empty bottle of rum. He took a long swig. Rabby eyed the booze thirstily. Frey pretended not to notice and put it back.
‘And then you’ve got your Dakkadians,’ Rabby babbled on, ‘who are even worse, ’cause they bloody like being slaves! They’ve, what do you say, assistimated.’
‘Assimilated,’ said Frey, before he could stop himself.
‘Assimilated,’ Rabby agreed. ‘You always know the right word, Cap’n. I bet you read a lot. Do you read a lot? I like to read, too.’
Frey kept his eyes fixed on the landscape. Rabby coughed and went on.
‘So these Dakkadians, they’re all dealing with the day-to-day stuff, administration or what, and flying the planes and commanding all the dumb grunt Murthians. Then what do the actual Sammies do, eh?’ He waited for a response that wasn’t going to come. ‘Sit around eating grapes and fanning their arses, that’s what! Calling the bloody shots and not doing a lick of work. They’ve got it sweet, they have. Really sweet.’
‘Can you just tell me where I’m setting down, and we can get this over with?’
‘Right you are, right you are,’ Rabby said hastily, scanning the ground. Suddenly he pointed. ‘Drop point is a few kloms south of there.’
Frey looked in the direction that he was pointing, and saw a ruined temple complex in the distance. The central ziggurat of red stone had caved in on one side and the surrounding dwellings, once grand, had been flattened into rubble by bombs.
‘How many kloms?’
‘We’ll see it,’ Rabby assured him.
Frey took another hit from the rum.
‘Can I have some of that?’ Rabby asked.
‘No.’
They came in over the landing zone not long afterwards. The hilltop was bald, and where there used to be fields there were now earthworks, with narrow trenches running behind them. Battered stone buildings clustered at the crest of the hill. It was a tiny village, with simple houses built in the low, flat-topped style common in these parts. The trees and grass glistened and steamed as the morning rain evaporated under the fierce sun.
Nothing moved on the hilltop.
Frey slowed the Ketty Jay to a hover. He was surly drunk, and his first reaction was disgust. Couldn’t the Coalition even organise someone to meet their own supply craft? Did they want to run out of ammo? Did they think he enjoyed hauling himself all over enemy territory, risking enemy patrols, just so they could eat?
Martley, the engineer, came bounding up the passageway from the engine room and into the cockpit. ‘Are we there?’ he asked eagerly.
He was a wiry young carrot-top, his cheeks and dungarees permanently smeared in grease as if it was combat camouflage. He had too much energy, that was his problem. He wore Frey out.
Rabby examined the earthworks uncertainly. ‘Looks deserted, Cap’n.’
‘These are the right co-ordinates?’
‘Hey!’ Rabby sounded offended. ‘Have I ever failed to get us to our target?’
‘I suppose we usually get there in the end,’ Frey conceded.
‘
Did the Navy tell us anything about this place?’ Martley chirped. ‘Like maybe why it’s so deserted?’
‘It’s just a drop point,’ Frey said impatiently. ‘Like all the others.’
Frey hadn’t asked. He never asked. Over the past few months Frey simply took whichever jobs paid the most. When the Navy began conscripting cargo haulers into minimum-wage service, the Merchant Guild responded by demanding danger bonuses. Those employed by the big cargo companies were happy to sit out the war ferrying supplies within the borders of Vardia. Freelancers like Frey saw an opportunity.
By taking the most dangerous missions, Frey had all but paid off the loan on the Ketty Jay. They’d had some close scrapes, and the crew complained like buggery and kept applying for transfers, but Frey couldn’t have cared less. After seven years, she was almost his. That was all that counted. Once he had her, he’d be free. He could ride out the rest of the war doing shuttle runs between Thesk and Marduk, and he’d never again have to worry about the loan companies freezing his accounts and hunting him down. He’d be out on his own, a master of the skies.
‘Let’s just load out the cargo and get paid,’ he said. ‘If there’s no one here to collect, that’s not our problem.’
‘You certain?’ said Martley, uncertainly.
‘If there’s been a screw-up here, it’s someone else’s fault,’ said Frey. He took another swig of rum. ‘We’re paid to deliver to the co-ordinates they give us. We’re not paid to think. They’ve told us that enough times.’
‘Bloody Navy,’ Rabby muttered.
Frey lowered the Ketty Jay down onto a relatively unscarred patch of land next to the village. Impatient and drunk, he dumped the aerium from the tanks too fast and slammed them down hard enough to jar his coccyx and knock Martley to his knees. Martley and Rabby exchanged a worried glance they thought he didn’t see.
‘Come on,’ he said, suppressing a wince as he got out of his seat. ‘Quicker we get unloaded, quicker we can go home.’
Kenham and Jodd were down in the cargo hold when they arrived, disentangling the crates from their webbing. They were a pair of ugly bruisers, ex-dock workers drafted in for labour by the Navy. The only people on the crew they respected were each other; everyone else was slightly scared of them.
Jodd was smoking a roll-up. Frey couldn’t remember ever seeing him without a cigarette smouldering in his mouth, even when handling crates of live ammunition, as he was now. As captain, he took an executive decision to say nothing. Jodd had never blown them all to pieces before. With a track record like that, it seemed sensible to let it ride.
Frey lowered the cargo ramp and they began hauling the crates out. The sun hammered them as they emerged from the cool shadow of the Ketty Jay. The air was moist and smelled of wet clay, and there was a lingering scent of gunpowder.
‘Where do you want ’em?’ Kenham called to Frey. Frey vaguely waved at a clear spot some way downhill, close to the trenches. He didn’t want those boxes of ammo too near the Ketty Jay when he took off. Kenham rolled his eyes—all the way over there?—but he didn’t protest.
Frey leaned against the Ketty Jay’s landing strut with the bottle of rum in his hand, and watched the rest of his crew do the work. Since it took two men to a box, a fifth worker would only get in the way, he reasoned. Besides, it was captain’s privilege to be lazy. He swigged from the bottle and surveyed the empty site. For the first time he noted that there were some signs of conflict: burn marks on the walls of the red stone houses; sections where the earthworks had been blasted and soil scattered.
Old wounds? This place had probably seen a lot of action. But then, there was that smell of gunpowder. Weapons had been fired, and recently.
He cast a bleary eye over his crew, to be sure they were getting on with their job, and then pushed off from the landing strut and wandered away from the Ketty Jay. He headed towards the village.
The houses were poor Samarlan peasant dwellings, bare and abandoned. Wooden chicken runs and pig pens had fallen into ruin. The windows were just square holes in the wall, some of them with their shutters hanging unevenly, drifting back and forth in the faint breeze. As Frey got closer he could see more obvious signs of recent attacks. Some walls were riddled with bullet holes.
His skin began to prickle with sweat. He drained the last of the rum and tossed the bottle aside.
The dwellings were built around a central clearing that once had been grassy but was now churned into rapidly drying mud. Frey peered around the corner of the nearest house. Despite the racket from the forest birds, it was unnervingly quiet.
He looked through the window, into the house. The furniture had long gone, leaving a mean, bare shell, dense with hot shadow. The sun outside was so bright that it was hard to see. It took him a few seconds to spot the man in the corner.
He was slumped, motionless, beneath a window on the other side of the house. Frey could hear flies, and smell blood.
By now his eyes had adjusted to the gloom. Enough to see that the man was dead, shot through the cheek, his jaw hanging askew and pasted onto his face with dried gore. Enough to see that he was wearing a Vardic uniform. Enough to see that he was one of theirs.
He heard a sound: sharp and hard, like someone stepping on a branch. The voices of his crew, suddenly raised in a clamour.
With a cold flood of nausea, he realised what was happening. Panic plunged in on him, and he bolted, running for the only safety he knew. Running for the Ketty Jay.
As he rounded the corner of the house, he saw Kenham lying face down next to a sundered crate. Jodd was backing away from the trenches, firing his revolver at the men that were clambering out of them. Rifle-wielding Dakkadians: two dozen or more. Small, blond-haired, faces broad and eyes narrow. They’d hidden when they heard the Ketty Jay approaching. Perhaps they’d even had time to throw the bodies of the dead Vards into the trenches. Now they were springing their ambush.
Rabby and Martley were fleeing headlong towards the Ketty Jay, as Frey was. There was fear on their faces.
One of the Dakkadians fell back into the trench with a howl as Jodd scored a hit, but their numbers were overwhelming. Three others sighted and shot him dead.
Frey barely registered Jodd’s fate. The world was a bouncing, jolting agony of moment after moment, each one bringing him a fraction closer to the gaping mouth of the Ketty Jay’s cargo ramp. His only chance was to get inside. His only chance to live.
Dakkadian rifles cracked and snapped. Their targets were Rabby and Martley. Several of the soldiers had broken into a sprint, chasing after them. A shout went up in their native tongue as someone spotted Frey, racing towards the Ketty Jay from the far side. Frey didn’t listen. He’d blocked out the rest of the world, tightened himself to a single purpose. Nothing else mattered but getting to that ramp.
Bullets chipped the turf around them. Martley stumbled and rolled hard, clutching his upper leg, screaming. Rabby hesitated, broke stride for the briefest moment, then ran on. The Dakkadians pulled Martley down as he tried to get up, then began stabbing him with the double-bladed bayonets on the end of their rifles. Martley’s shrieks turned to gurgles.
The cargo ramp drew closer. Frey felt the sinister brush of air as a bullet barely missed his throat. Rabby was running up the hill, yelling as he came. Two Dakkadians were close behind him.
Frey’s foot hit the ramp. He fled up to the top and pulled the lever to raise it. The hydraulic struts hummed into life.
Outside, he heard Rabby’s voice. ‘Lower the ramp! Cap’n! Lower the bloody ramp!’
But Frey wasn’t going to lower the ramp. Rabby was too far away. Rabby wasn’t going to make it in time. Rabby wasn’t getting anywhere near this aircraft with those soldiers hot on his heels.
‘Cap’n!’ he screamed. ‘Don’t you leave me here!’
Frey tapped in the code that would lock the ramp, preventing it from being opened from the keypad on the outside. That done, he drew his revolver and aimed it at the steadily closing gap at
the end of the ramp. He backed up until he bumped against one of the supply crates that hadn’t yet been unloaded. The rectangle of burning sunlight shining through the gap thinned to a line.
‘Cap’n! ’
The line disappeared as the cargo ramp thumped closed, and Frey was alone in the quiet darkness of the cargo hold, safe in the cold metal womb of the Ketty Jay.
The Dakkadians had overrun this position. Navy intelligence had screwed up, and now his crew was dead. Those bastards! Those rotting bastards!
He turned to run, to race up the access stairs, through the passageway, into the cockpit. He was getting out of here.
He ran right into the bayonet of the Dakkadian creeping up behind him.
Pain exploded in his guts, shocking him, driving the breath from his lungs. He gaped at the soldier before him. A boy, no more than sixteen. Blond hair spilling out from beneath his cap. Blue eyes wide. He was trembling, almost as stunned as Frey.
Frey looked down at the twin blades of the Dakkadian bayonet, side by side, sticking out of his abdomen. Blood, black in the darkness, slid thinly along the blades and dripped to the floor.
The boy was scared. Hadn’t meant to stab him. When he snuck aboard the Ketty Jay, he probably thought only to capture a crewman for his fellows. He hadn’t killed anyone before. He had that look.
As if in a trance, Frey raised his revolver and aimed it point-blank at the boy’s chest. As if in a trance, the boy let him.
Frey squeezed the trigger. The bayonet was wrenched from his body as the boy fell backwards. The pain sent him to the edge of unconsciousness, but no further.
He staggered through the cargo hold. Up the metal stairs, through the passageway, into the cockpit, leaving smears and dribbles of himself as he went. He slumped into the pilot’s seat, barely aware of the sound of gunfire against the hull, and punched in the ignition code—the code that only he knew, that he’d never told anyone and never would. The aerium engines throbbed as the electromagnets pulverised refined aerium into gas, filling the ballast tanks. The soldiers and their guns fell away as the Ketty Jay lifted into the sky.
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