Ketty Jay 04 - The Ace of Skulls (2 page)

‘Looks like we scared them as much as they scared us,’ said Frey, feeling a little bravado returning. ‘Pinn! Harkins! Get down here!’

He listened, but there was no reply. ‘Harkins! Pinn! Is
anyone
on this crew awake?’

‘Earcuff,’ Jez reminded him.

Frey looked down and saw the earcuff lying in the hollow of the dash where he’d thrown it. He cursed and clipped it back on his ear. ‘Pinn! Harkins! Get here now!’

‘On our . . . er . . . I mean . . . Coming!’ Harkins babbled.

Frey glanced at the silver ring on his little finger. It was thralled with a daemonist trick, linked invisibly to a compass in Harkins’ cockpit. The needle of the compass always pointed towards the ring. That was how the outflyers would find him in the storm.

He tried not to think about who was supposed to be wearing that ring. Now wasn’t the time.

The Awakeners opened up with machine guns and Frey threw the
Ketty Jay
into evasive manoeuvres. Even if they were as green as the whispermonger had promised, five or six pilots on his tail was no laughing matter. He couldn’t see behind him; the
Ketty Jay
was too big for that. All he could do was to make himself a hard target till help arrived.

His aircraft was more agile than her bulk suggested, but even so he couldn’t avoid the barrage entirely. Bullets ripped across the hull and Frey banked hard in the other direction. Tracer fire burned away into the distance and was lost to the night.

‘Doc!’ he shouted, during a pause in the firing. ‘How many?’

‘Five!’

‘Right,’ said Frey. ‘Let’s see if we can’t improve our situation a little. Hang on!’

Frey hit a flurry of pedals, levers and valves, venting aerium gas and opening the airbrakes to maximum. The sudden increase in weight made the
Ketty Jay
sink hard just as the airbrakes killed her speed. Wind roared past them, as if they’d run into a hurricane. Frey was thrown forward towards his dash, but his restraining straps held him back. Jez scrabbled to keep her charts pinned on the desk before her.

There was a howl of engines, and three of the five fighter craft shot overhead, caught out by their target’s sudden deceleration.

Frey disengaged the airbrakes, boosted the thrusters and fed aerium gas back into the tanks. The
Ketty Jay
surged forward. He pressed down the trigger on the flight stick, and her underslung machine-guns clattered. His aim was good. The tail assembly of his nearest target was hammered into shreds, before a bullet hit the fuel tank and the explosion tore the craft apart.

The remaining fighters panicked and swerved off in two different directions. As they banked, he saw insignia on their wings and fuselages. A cluster of small circles connected by a complex series of lines. The Cipher, symbol of the Awakeners.

Frey couldn’t chase both, so he picked the biggest one, a battered old Kedson Stormfox, and went after it. At least he only had three behind him to worry about now. Maybe they’d be a bit more wary from here on in.

‘Pinn! Harkins! Where
are
you?’ he demanded.

‘Cap’n,’ said Jez from behind him. ‘They’re lining up on you. Pull left when I say . . .
Now!
’

Frey banked to port, and a salvo of machine-gun fire ripped through the air where he’d been a moment ago. He glanced over his shoulder at her. ‘How’d you know?’ he asked, almost afraid of the answer.

She grinned. Her teeth looked ever so slightly sharper than normal human teeth. ‘Woman’s intuition,’ she replied.

‘
Ya-hoo!
’ Pinn yelled in his ear as he and Harkins came swooping down from overhead, machine-guns rattling. ‘It’s dying time, boys!’

Frey winced. Pinn had a habit of delivering lines like that on his way into combat. Presumably he thought it made him sound like some kind of action hero from a pulp novel, but really it was just embarrassing.

Frey opened up with his guns on the Stormfox. The pilot swerved, but only into the path of Harkins. The Firecrow’s guns raked across the Stormfox’s flank and shattered the cockpit canopy. It went into a dive, leaving behind it the awful ascending whine of an aircraft heading uncontrollably earthward. Then it disappeared into the storm and was gone.

‘Pursuit is scattering, Cap’n!’ Malvery reported.

‘We can deal with this lot,’ Pinn told him through the earcuff. ‘Go get the freighter.’

‘On it,’ said Frey. He pushed the
Ketty Jay
’s nose down and looped around to head back the other way. Above him, his outflyers were chasing the freighter’s escort all over the place. Pinn in his gull-winged Skylance, Harkins in his new-but-second-hand Firecrow that Frey bought him after he thrashed the last one to extinction. Mentally unstable as they were, they were both exceptional pilots. Given the quality of their opposition, four to two wouldn’t give them much trouble.

The murk closed in over the
Ketty Jay
, and the wind began to shake her again. ‘Some directions would be good,’ Frey suggested.

‘They’re above us,’ said Jez from behind him. ‘Oh-thirty-five.’ She was frowning, a faraway look in her eyes, listening to something he couldn’t hear. ‘They’ve broken cloud, heading for another thunderhead.’ She focused again, and became excited. ‘Boost it, Cap’n. We can catch them in the open if we’re quick.’

‘How in damnation can you tell that from—’ Frey began, then stopped himself. ‘Never mind. Woman’s intuition.’

He opened up the thrusters and the
Ketty Jay
drove onward and out into clear air. They found themselves in a canyon in the sky formed by the sides of two clouds, with the night above them and the ground far below. The shallow lakes and waterways of the Ossia wetlands shone in the moonlight.

Ahead and slightly above the
Ketty Jay
was the freighter, a dark slab in the storm, its thrusters aglow as it pushed across the canyon towards the slowly swirling wall on the other side.

‘Where are the aerium tanks on a thing like that?’ Frey asked Jez, as the
Ketty Jay
powered towards its target. She was the daughter of a craftbuilder: she tended to know these things.

‘On the underside, set central, one ten metres fore of the tail assembly and one just aft of the nose.’

Frey gauged the distance between him and his target. ‘Only gonna get one shot at this before we lose it in the cloud again,’ he muttered.

‘Then don’t miss it,’ said Jez, helpfully. A smile touched the corner of Frey’s mouth. That was more like the navigator he knew.

The trick to bringing down a freighter was to hole the ballast tanks. Once it was leaking aerium, it would become too heavy to stay in the sky. As long as the leak was slow enough, the pilot would be forced to land. But if the hole was too big, they’d drop too fast, and there wouldn’t be much left to salvage afterward. Frey didn’t have more than a passing concern for the people on board – they’d signed up with the enemy, after all – but he was very keen on keeping the cargo intact.

The gap between them closed up fast as he came at it from below. Either the freighter crew didn’t see him, or it didn’t have any guns worth firing. The Awakeners must have been stretched thin on resources to trust their treasures to such a light convoy.

Doubt brushed him. Too easy?
Too late now.

Frey picked his spot, zeroing in on the aft tanks. There was nothing there to suggest a vulnerable point; it was only Jez’s knowledge of aircraft that guided him.

Closer, closer, and the freighter’s nose had almost reached the cloud.

Now.

The
Ketty Jay
’s machine guns rattled and a barrage of tracer fire whipped away through the night. Bullets scored the underside of the freighter. Then it slid into the cloud, and was lost to sight.

Frey throttled back and pulled away. He wasn’t chasing that thing in there, not after the scare he’d got last time. ‘Did I get it?’ he asked Jez.

She held up a hand to shut him up while she listened. Frey waited impatiently. Pinn’s triumphant whooping in his earcuff told him that his outflyers had polished off the escort.

‘Jez?’ he said again, when he could stand it no longer.

‘She’s losing altitude,’ Jez said, and gave him that ever-so-slightly frightening grin again. ‘She’s going down!’

Frey let out a little laugh, half of triumph, half of amazement at their triumph. ‘She’s heading for the deck, fellers,’ he said to his outflyers. ‘Come and watch the show.’ And he put the
Ketty Jay
into a shallow dive, thankful to be heading out of the storm at last.

Below the clouds, the Ossia wetlands spread out beneath them, a glittering muddle of weeds and water, of wide, shallow streams and islands shaggy with trees. Far to the east was the shore of Lake Atten, barely visible, stretching from horizon to horizon. Overhead, the procession of clouds following the storm channels flashed and grumbled. Lightning jabbed at the ground in the distance.

The freighter sank through the floor of the storm and kept sinking. It was a huge, ungainly thing, without wings, only stumpy ailerons for steerage. Something more like a whale than an aircraft, something that didn’t look like it belonged in the sky at all. Frey watched its grand, slow trajectory towards the earth. There was something majestic in its decline.

‘Will you look at that?’ said Frey. He felt expansive in the aftermath of the battle, taken by a new appreciation of the world. ‘That’s kinda beautiful.’

‘I bet the hundred or so people panicking inside it don’t think it’s so beautiful,’ Jez observed.

‘Hey, we gave them a soft landing,’ Frey protested, pointing at the wetlands below. ‘Besides, it’s their fault for being Awakeners. There’s a civil war on, y’know.’

‘A civil war that we kind of, er, started.’

Frey didn’t need reminding of that. ‘It was going to happen anyway,’ he said, as he’d said to himself many times over the past three months. ‘We just made sure the good guys didn’t get taken by surprise.’

‘Get your retaliation in first,’ Jez said, quoting one of Frey’s favourite maxims.

‘Damn right.’

Pinn and Harkins joined them as they descended, following the freighter down, predators tracking their wounded prey. The Awakener pilot managed to keep his craft mostly level right until the last moment. Frey held his breath in anticipation as they reached the ground.

Bring her in safe
, he told the pilot.

The freighter touched down, landing on its belly and skimming across water and turf, raising huge fins of spray to either side. As its weight gathered, it ploughed deeper into the earth, the back end fishtailing out, a colossal slow-motion skid accompanied by the hiss of water and the screech of tortured metal. Even from up high, and far removed from the chaos, it was awe-inspiring.

When the water settled, the freighter lay still. Partly submerged, missing a few parts, but almost entirely intact.

It had worked. Their plan had worked. Frey could scarcely believe it.

‘Alright, boys and girls,’ he said. ‘Time for the hand-to-hand. Let’s get down there and rob the shit out of ’em.’ He flopped back in his seat. ‘Somebody wake up Bess.’

Two

The Intruder – Sentinels – Crowd Control – Marinda – Pinn Receives a Prophecy

F
rom the darkness, a monster emerged.

It loomed into sight, filling up the passageway: a shadowy hulk, hunched and massive. The crash had shorted out the lights of the Awakener freighter, but emergency backups flickered fitfully, providing horrific glimpses of the intruder.

It was an ogre of tarnished metal and chainmail, standing eight feet high and five broad. Its face – if it
had
a face – was set low between its enormous shoulders and hidden behind a circular grille. Two malevolent and inhuman eyes peered out, cold chips of light shining in a void.

The Sentinels crouched in doorways or took what cover they could find. They were the guardians of the Awakeners, soldiers for the cause. They wore grey cassocks with high collars and the emblem of the Cipher emblazoned in black on the breast.

They aimed their rifles and let fly. Bullets sparked off the creature’s armour. It flinched, bellowed, then came stamping onward with a roar. The foremost of the Sentinels broke cover and ran. Seeing him falter, others followed, backing away in fear. One man, full of the zeal of the faithful, stepped bravely out into the centre of the corridor.

‘Stand your ground!’ he cried. ‘For the Allsoul!’ And he fired his rifle at point-blank range through a gap in the creature’s face-grille, right between its eyes.

He hit nothing. There was a series of sharp, metallic echoes as the bullet ricocheted about inside the monster’s body. The Sentinel had only an instant to wonder how an empty armoured suit was storming an Awakener freighter, before he was backhanded into the wall with the force of a steam train. The other Sentinels lost all taste for the fight then, and they fled shrieking. The monster thundered off in pursuit.

When the coast was clear, Frey and his crew stepped into the passageway, revolvers and shotguns in their hands. They followed warily in the monster’s wake, pausing only for the captain to examine the spread-eagled form of the dead man, who was still embedded in the wall in the midst of an artistic splatter-pattern. He was wearing a startled expression, as if surprised to find that he was a corpse.

‘Good ol’ Bess,’ Frey said approvingly.

‘She ain’t subtle, but she gets the job done,’ Malvery agreed.

Grayther Crake, the
Ketty Jay
’s daemonist and the man behind the monster, felt vaguely sick. Bess’s rampages never failed to distress him. It wasn’t the sheer ferocity with which she maimed and crushed her opponents. It was because she took such childish glee in the carnage.

The whole crew was here, with the exception of Harkins, who was even more useless with a gun than Crake was. Leading the way was the Cap’n, sporting a daemon-thralled cutlass and a surplus of charm to hide his many and varied flaws. Next to him was Malvery, a man of great size and enormous mirth, with a ring of white hair and round, green-lensed glasses perched on his wide nose. Silo, the
Ketty Jay
’s Murthian first mate, walked alongside. Bringing up the rear was Jez. Jez, half Mane and getting more so every day, in Crake’s opinion.