Iron Jackal (25 page)

‘Get off my back, you damn Yort sack of shit!’ Harkins yelled, spittle flecking his chin. The Airbat seemed to have been chasing him since the race began. He couldn’t help feeling persecuted.

After the second marker, the gorge fractured into a maze. Harkins chose the same route he had on the first lap. He had to take risks if he wanted to get ahead of Sleen, and he knew this way was fast. Sleen and the Blackbird took different routes. The Airbat followed Harkins. He might have known it would.

The walls closed in on them. There was barely space to evade the Airbat’s guns now, but the hammering wind and the rain meant that the pilot was busy trying to keep stable. He sent a few speculative bursts up the gorge after Harkins, but nothing hit.

The gorge swung to the left. Harkins remembered it from the first time: a steep S-bend. He slowed and hit the corner tight, skimming the edge of the gorge. Hanging vines reached out after him as he passed. The world rolled outside his cockpit as he banked hard to starboard, accelerating out of the S-bend into the curve beyond. He wanted to put distance between him and the Airbat, which would have to slow for the bend. It couldn’t turn as sharply as a Firecrow.

But despite his efforts, the Yort was soon close enough to start harrying him again. Harkins vaguely hoped that he would forget about the projection of rock at the end of the curve, but there was no such luck. Both pilots raced past the obstacle with ease, taking the high route over the top.

The route split into three. Harkins had had time to think about his choice this time. The Airbat was going to score some real hits on him sooner or later. He’d been unable to shake him off so far. That left only one real option, if he wanted to win.

He shot down the central route, into the dead end. The Yort had chosen a different path at this point on the last lap. This time, he didn’t.

‘Alright,’ muttered Harkins. ‘Let’s see you follow
this
.’

He dived hard. The pitch of the engine rose steadily as he plunged towards the river at the bottom of the gorge. The Airbat was slow to follow, perhaps unsure what he was doing, but when he did he came down fast. Harkins levelled out sharply just above the river, blasting a V of spray in his wake as he tore towards the gaping tunnel mouth. The Yort, coming in above him, suddenly found his vision clouded by the heavy mist. Harkins approached the tunnel at reckless speed, forcing the Airbat to keep up. At the last moment he hit the airbrakes hard, turned on his floods, and then he was inside.

The second time was different to the first. Instead of terror there was a steely calm. It was as if he’d been pulled out of the world, into a temporary interlude in reality, thirty dream-seconds of rock and darkness. He travelled in a bubble of electric light, surrounded by an echoing roar of mindless sound, and his only purpose, his only reason to exist, was to fly a steady path through the chaos and not touch the sides.

Distantly, he was aware of the Airbat coming up fast behind him,
too
fast, because the pilot hadn’t seen him brake and had been overeager to stay on his tail. All it would take was one twitch of the trigger finger and Harkins would be done. But taking out Harkins was probably the last thing on the Yort’s mind at the moment.

This time, Harkins was ready for the dip in the tunnel, and rode it when it came. The Airbat wasn’t. Harkins was on the level stretch, with the end of the tunnel in sight, when he heard an impact: a wing or a stabiliser, clipped by the stone. Then the sound of rending metal, terrifyingly close, as the Airbat ploughed into the wall behind him.

The craft detonated, concussion shoving at his tail. Flame billowed up the tunnel to meet him. Harkins burst out into the open, soaring through a cloud of roiling fire to freedom. An exultant howl escaped his lips as the pennants of the third marker flickered past him.

Gunfire. Harkins’ triumph turned to alarm as the rain came alive with blazing tracers. He twisted in his seat, trying to spot his attacker.

Not just one.
Two
of them. The Nimbus and the Blackbird, neck and neck. He’d come out of the tunnel ahead of them.

He remembered thinking the first time round how dangerous the long, wide curve between the third and fourth marker would be when weapons were active. He was about to find out just how dangerous it was.

Harkins dived, banked and swooped, sacrificing speed in favour of making himself a hard target. But his pursuers were laying down a heavy curtain of fire. Glancing bullets pinged and spanged from the flanks of the Firecrow.

He couldn’t survive this kind of barrage for long. It would only be a matter of seconds before they took him down. They were already catching up to him fast. He could hit the brakes and let them pass, but that would mean sacrificing first place.

No. He wouldn’t do that. It was victory or nothing.

Then he saw it. The ravine, the thin slit in the land that cut off the hump of the curve and went straight to the fourth marker. A ten-metre-wide alley of rock that only an idiot would ever attempt to fly through.

Harkins’ mouth twitched into a smile. There was an expression on his face that none of the crew of the
Ketty Jay
would have recognised. The grim assuredness of a man who had survived two wars and countless battles, who had seen death over and over again, and who had gone beyond caring.

He cut left and banked towards the ravine. A storm of gunfire followed him. He felt hard impacts along the fuselage, the sharp punch of bullets on metal. No glancing blows this time: serious hits. But it was too late now, too late to do anything but tip his wings to vertical and hope.

The walls of the ravine were his floor and ceiling. They thundered past, so horrifyingly close that he felt he could reach out and touch them. There was a steadily ascending scream coming from behind the cockpit. Something damaged in the internals. The Firecrow felt like it was going to shake itself apart. It was shivering and juddering so violently that it was all he could do to keep the flight stick straight. His gaze was fixed forward, on the long slice of dull light at the other end of the ravine. He made a tunnel of his will and wouldn’t look beyond it. There was nothing in his mind but now. No fear. Just this moment.

He couldn’t hold it. Something was wrong with the Firecrow. Something was wrong, wrong, wrong and it was starting to wobble. But there was the end of the ravine, coming at him fast, and he could
make
it, he could make it, just a little further—

There was a loud bang from behind him, the mechanical scream cut out, and the Firecrow’s wings tipped from the vertical. But it was a half second too late to stop him bursting out of the ravine, past the fourth marker, and into the final stretch of the race well ahead of the others.

Smoke poured from a hole in the fuselage. He was losing the handling on the Firecrow. Somewhere, a hydraulic leak was increasing the response time to the flight stick, making her lazier as the seconds ticked past.

But he was a creature of pure momentum now. Unstoppable. He was too close to the finish to give up. He’d have seen this through even if his wings were on fire.

Sleen and the fat man were coming up the straight, driving their engines as hard as they’d go. Ahead was the muddy tumble of waterfalls and colossal rocks that rose up steeply to the finish line.

He went for it.

Pillars and bridges and waterfalls, rearing up and flashing past him. The rain and mist blinded him, reducing the world to a blur of green and grey. Harkins was utterly lost to his aircraft. He was in a place he hadn’t been since the last war.

His eyes were staring and wild. His lips were skinned back in a horrible rictus, a mad grin of exhilaration. He was the Firecrow, and the Firecrow was him. He sensed the slow death of his aircraft and compensated, taking his turns earlier and earlier, until it seemed that he was guessing which way to turn before he’d even seen the obstacle. He flew like a swallow, slipping through the deadly ruin, up and up while his aircraft became slower and heavier and then—

The Firecrow was hammered with a shocking barrage of gunfire. Bullets stitched it from behind and below, a metallic tattoo on the fuselage and wings. Harkins shuddered and yelled as the cockpit hood exploded, tiny shards slashing his cheek and bouncing off his goggles. Now the howling, tormented wind and the lashing rain were in the cockpit with him, shoving and bullying him, soaking his bloodied face.

He didn’t know where his attackers were, and he didn’t care. A steep waterfall loomed ahead of him. He pulled back on the stick with all his strength and did an emergency flood of the aerium tanks. But the craft was getting heavier by the instant, and he could tell by the sharp, acrid smell in his nostrils that the tanks had been holed.

The Firecrow’s nose came up, too slow, too slow, and the waterfall was rushing towards him too fast. Then something gave, and the craft suddenly lurched upwards and blasted over the lip of the waterfall with inches to spare, and there were no more waterfalls but only the final short straight to the line.

Harkins boosted the thrusters to maximum and didn’t let go of the stick. He was still rising as he thundered up the gorge. He looked over his shoulder to see the Nimbus eating up the space between them, but the distance was too great. The Firecrow was getting heavier and heavier as it spewed invisible aerium, but not enough to stop him. He screamed over the finish line a full twenty metres ahead of his nearest opponent, yelling at the top of his lungs, soaring higher and higher, above the lip of the gorge and the cheering crowds.

Until something blew up in the guts of the Firecrow and the thrusters cut out with a clunk.

The silence was terrible. Deeply, disturbingly wrong. As he hung in the air with the wind flapping his clothes and the rain pattering on his face and goggles, he came back to himself. The reckless courage of the race fell away into the quiet. The warrior soul, its job done, departed.

And he was left in mid-air, with no engines and a hole in his aerium tanks.

His thin, fearful wail drifted over the fractured land of the Rushes like the voice of a despairing spirit. Then the nose of the Firecrow began to tip downward.

He clung on to the flight stick for dear life. There was still enough forward momentum to keep him airborne, and the Firecrow had wide enough wings to glide on, but it was too heavy to stay up for long. He banked the craft gently, resisting the urge to wrench the stick. He had to get away from the gorge, to the flat ground where the crowds were.

The Firecrow was agonisingly sluggish in responding. Smoke was billowing from it now, seeping from every vent and several holes. Remembering his Navy training, he hit a sequence of switches and performed an emergency fuel dump to lighten the load and minimise the risk of explosion. The mechanisms still worked. Prothane spewed in a pressurised jet from the bottom of the craft.

Now all he had to do was land.

The gorge disappeared beneath him. The grassy, uneven plain that replaced it was awfully close and coming up awfully fast. Harkins felt like he was having the falling dream he had almost every night, except that this time there would be more than an unpleasant lurch and the sound of Pinn snoring at the end of it.

Gravity sucked him down harder and harder. He struggled to keep the nose of the Firecrow up. If he couldn’t land the craft level, he’d be killed for sure.

‘
Come on!
’ he screamed, and the Firecrow kept falling, faster and faster. The damn aircraft kept trying to tip but he wouldn’t let it, he
willed
it level, because he didn’t want to die, because death was even scarier than life, and what had he been
thinking
, flying that extra lap when he didn’t even have to? This is where bravery got a man! It got him dead!

He screamed again as the ground rushed up at him, and then the whole world was motion and noise. Metal shrieked and he was thrown about like a doll shaken by a giant, slamming against his seat belt over and again. The craft skidded in a semicircle; he felt it fishtail and turn. Chunks were ripped off it and went bouncing away. Smoke filled his mouth and blackened his goggles. Sparks flew.

Then he was slowing. Slowing. And finally, everything stopped.

Harkins just sat there, breathing. Dazed, he looked himself over. His whole body was a mass of hurt, and yet his fingers and toes wiggled when he wanted them to, and there didn’t seem to be any blood except for a few cuts on his face. Satisfied that he wasn’t in imminent danger of dying, he slumped back into his seat, took off his goggles, and let the rain fall on his face.

‘I won,’ he said quietly to himself. Then, louder, a broad grin breaking out. ‘I won! I
won
!’

There was a crowd running towards him. He undid his seat belt and clambered unsteadily out of the Firecrow, where he found himself surrounded by people, all of them congratulating him, patting him on the back, asking him if he was alright. He cringed and flinched, frightened by all these enthusiastic strangers. Finally a familiar face broke through. It was Crake, who swept him up in a warm and surprising embrace.

‘Spit and blood, you idiot, we thought you were dead out there!’ he cried. ‘That was damned amazing!’

‘Well, you know . . . Can’t keep a good pilot down, I suppose.’

He saw Jez and Pinn, pushing through the cheering spectators. A wry sort of smile on Jez’s face, and relief in her eyes. Seized by an impulse, he threw his arms around her, and hugged her to him. She laughed and hugged him back. ‘That was really something, Harkins.’