Ketty Jay 04 - The Ace of Skulls (16 page)

‘This is your only chance!’ Drave shouted. ‘There won’t be another!’

A gunshot ran out, followed quickly by a second. Two shooters on the Awakener side, trying their luck. Drave thrust out his open hand, palm first. The first bullet sparked off his armoured glove, his hand moved with incredible speed, and the second one whined away too. His pistol came up, he fired twice, and the two shooters went down dead.

Thralled
, Frey thought.
His gloves have been thralled by a daemonist, just like my cutlass. No wonder the Century Knights seem superhuman, with tricks like that.

As quickly as it had stopped, the gunfire kicked up again. Drave ducked away into cover: even
he
couldn’t deflect that many bullets. Frey hunched down near the dead body of the Sentinel, shots flying all around him. He was getting desperate now. Maybe he could make that gap. Better than ending up in Drave’s hands. But it seemed an awfully long way between here and there.

He holstered his pistol, took a deep breath. Then he took another.

Ready
, he told himself unconvincingly.

Then, from further along the fountain, came a sound that brought hope to his heart. The harsh rattle of a gatling gun. The Awakeners had got their shit together at last.

The Coalition forces retreated into cover as the gatling gun sprayed rounds across the square. Frey squeezed his hands into fists. This was the best chance he was going to have. Now, while their heads were down.

Now!

He scrambled to his feet, ran low around the fountain and vaulted over the lip before any of the Awakeners could react. Now he was out in the open, his feet pounding the flagstones, arms pumping, wild-eyed and afraid. It would only take him seconds to reach cover, but they were long, long seconds, and he could only hope that everyone was too preoccupied to notice him.

‘Frey!’ roared Drave. Frey looked over his shoulder in terror to see the Century Knight rising out of cover, heedless of the bullets flying all around him. He was sighting down the barrel of his pistol at Frey, and Century Knights didn’t miss.

Frey didn’t stop running. His hand went to his belt and his cutlass leaped into it. It guided his arm, moving faster than he ever could. He twisted in mid-stride just as Drave’s pistol fired, and threw the blade up between them.

The cutlass absorbed most of the impact, but not all. There was a jolt up his arm, a shower of sparks in front of his eyes, and he tumbled. But he tucked into a roll, shoulder-first, and came back up on to his feet. He sprinted the last few metres into cover before Drave could work out why his target wasn’t dead.

You’re not the only one who can deflect bullets,
he thought.

Sheltered now from the Coalition forces, ignored by the Awakeners who had their own concerns, Frey went scrambling through the gap in the rubble towards the street beyond.

‘Frey!’ Drave yelled from somewhere behind him. ‘I’ll see you dead for this! You damned
traitor
!’

‘Hold still,’ said Malvery to his patient. ‘This is gonna hurt like buggery.’

Abley nodded, his face pale and sweaty. He lay on his belly on the operating table of the
Ketty Jay
’s grubby infirmary, a folded belt gripped between his teeth. A bloody trouser leg had been thrown on the floor nearby.

The bullet had gone into his calf and lodged in the muscle there. It wasn’t as bad as it must have felt, but Malvery had been telling the truth when he said it would fester without attention. He aimed with his forceps, gripped Abley’s ankle, and dug in. Abley screamed and passed out.

‘Ain’t so delicate as I used to be,’ Malvery muttered apologetically, as he dropped the bullet into a pan. He cleaned the wound of fabric shreds, swabbed it with antiseptic and put in a couple of stitches. Abley came back to consciousness and started murmuring nonsense as Malvery was wrapping his dressing with gauze.

‘Easy there,’ said Malvery. ‘Done in a jiffy, son.’

Abley took the belt from his mouth and swallowed to wet his throat. ‘Thanks, Doc,’ he croaked. ‘Thanks for not leaving me there.’

‘You just be sure to thank the Cap’n by giving him that code you promised,’ said Malvery sternly.

‘Aye, I will. I ain’t stupid,’ Abley said weakly. ‘This craft gets shot down, so do I.’

Malvery said nothing more as he finished up. There was a familiar sensation in his chest, a strange mix of pride and sadness that he used to feel when stitching up young soldiers on the battlefield. Pride that those big hands of his could help to save a life or a limb. Sadness that they needed to at all.

Abley was just a lad. Strong, handsome, an honest look about him. He probably radiated an aura of robust health when he wasn’t half in shock. He ought to be charming the girls in some rustic village, getting up to no good in the old watermill, eating half his weight at some harvest festival somewhere. Wasn’t right that he’d been dragged into this.

Malvery didn’t much care what anyone believed, as long as it didn’t get in anyone else’s face. But he cared about Vardia and her people. This lad never wanted to fight. Despite his protests, that was plain as day. He just wanted to believe in something that made a bit of sense out of a chaotic world. But war had been forced upon him by the Awakeners. Him and hundreds of thousands like him. He was lucky he’d ended up in such merciful hands.

Malvery wasn’t sure if Frey would really have left Abley in the pumping house. The Cap’n could bluff with the best of them. But Malvery wouldn’t have left him. And if the Cap’n had tried to make him, he’d have quit the crew right there and then. Because while the Cap’n and most of the others seemed to believe that the civil war wasn’t their fight, Malvery was quite sure that it was.

He heard the whine of hydraulics as the cargo ramp closed, hurrying feet and voices in the corridor. Silo and Ashua.

‘Cap’n’s back,’ he told her.

‘Is Crake with him?’ she asked.

Malvery occupied himself with making Abley comfortable as he listened to the hubbub outside. He should check in on Jez, who was lying in her quarters. Wouldn’t do any good, though. He didn’t know how to treat her when she dropped into one of her comas. Best thing he could do was to leave her and hope she woke up.

Frey came up the stairs, barking orders while Ashua asked questions. They were leaving right now. No, he didn’t find Crake. No, they weren’t going back to look. Because Kedmund Drave was on his tail.

‘Kedmund Drave!’ cried Ashua. ‘
Now
what’ve you done?’

‘Well, he sort of got the idea that we joined the Awakeners for real.’

‘He
what
? How?’

‘Never mind. Tell the doc to get on the autocannon. I’ll need eyes behind me if we’re going up there.’

Frey hurried off towards the cockpit. Ashua appeared in the doorway of the infirmary.

‘I heard,’ said Malvery. He waved at the patient. ‘Keep an eye on him, will you? Give him two of those pills on the table, too. Wound might go septic otherwise.’ He headed out past her before she could argue. A few metres down the corridor was a ladder bolted to the wall. He pulled himself up it.

The cupola was cramped for a man his size. A battered leather chair hung in a metal cradle that sat at the butt end of a large autocannon. The cannon barrel poked through a hemisphere of windglass within a reinforced steel frame. The whole assembly could pivot and tilt to give a field of fire covering everywhere but directly above. Mechanical locks prevented the trigger being pressed when the cannon was in certain positions, to prevent him accidentally blowing the
Ketty Jay
’s tail off.

He climbed into the seat and settled himself. This small space was his domain, perhaps more so than the infirmary, since no one ever came up here. It was chilly and musty and smelt of him. Partly empty rum bottles, old broadsheets and battered books were stuffed into spaces in the bulkhead. He rummaged around till he found a bottle that was quarter full, pulled the stopper and raised it to the night sky, which was flashing and thundering with anti-aircraft fire.

‘Stay safe, mate,’ he said to Crake, and drank deeply.

A maudlin mood settled on him. Crake was gone. Just like that. No doubt he was capable of taking care of himself, but still. Stalking off that way. Wasn’t like him. And now they’d been forced to leave him behind.

Still, you had to admire the feller. Man took a stand for what he believed. That was more than Malvery had done. And now Malvery was off to join the Awakeners, the bloody
Awakeners
, and as far as the Coalition were concerned he was a genuine turncoat, too. All he’d wanted to do was join the war on the Coalition side, but it was too late for that now. Bridges had been burned. They’d never let him join up even if he asked them, and what did they want with a fat old alcoholic anyway, Duke’s Cross or not?

The thought of it curdled the rum in his stomach. He drank some more to wash away the taste.

Should’ve done something
, he told himself.
Should’ve taken a stand
.

But Abley had needed him, and by the time he’d seen to his patient the chance had gone. His fit of pique back at the underground chasm seemed churlish now, an act of defiance that only served to make him feel better. He might have protested, but in the end he hadn’t mustered the wherewithal to do anything about it. He always did go with the flow a bit more than was good for him.

He took another swig of rum. It helped take his mind off it.

The
Ketty Jay
trembled as the engines powered up. There was a soft buzz through the hull as the electromagnets got to work, extracting gas from liquid aerium, pumping it into the ballast tanks. The
Ketty Jay
creaked as she became lighter. She stood up on her skids and floated uncertainly off the ground.

‘Doc? You in position?’ the Cap’n’s voice came faintly from below.

‘I’m here!’ called Malvery. Then, quieter and to himself: ‘Always here.’

The sky cracked and flared with explosions. Tracer fire slid up into the night. Coalition Windblades shot by overhead, chasing down Awakener craft that were lifting off from hidden places all over Korrene. To the right of the
Ketty Jay
, the Firecrow was rising. He saw Harkins in the cockpit, intent on the controls, his pilot’s cap jammed low on his head and his scarecrow legs visible through the bubble of windglass on the nose of his aircraft. Pinn was ascending alongside him, his pudgy face underlit by the dash of his sleek Skylance. Inside the cupola, Malvery felt insulated from it all, as if it were some show happening far away with no power to affect him, and which he was equally powerless to affect.

An explosion close overhead shook the
Ketty Jay
and made him spit his rum all over his crotch. Suddenly he felt a lot less detached.

The
Ketty Jay
’s thrusters kicked in, pushing her forward. Her outflyers kept pace alongside. Frey flew them low over the city to avoid the worst of the flak, but it still seemed uncomfortably near to Malvery.

Coalition forces were swarming now. They were determined to inflict some casualties on the scattering Awakeners. Now the
Ketty Jay
was airborne, Malvery could see that the anti-aircraft fire was much lighter than on their way in. In some areas, it had diminished to almost nothing, as the gunners joined the retreat.

‘Doc! How we doing back there? You still keeping your eyes out?’ Frey called. He had a tendency to nag during a battle. Not being able to see behind his craft made him anxious.

‘Apart from all this sodding flak?’ Malvery called back. ‘Just fine.’ He stopped as he caught sight of something moving in the dark, then bawled: ‘Eight o’ clock high, Cap’n! Fighter! Incoming fire!’

Frey reacted immediately. The world lurched and tilted outside Malvery’s cupola. A flurry of blazing tracers whipped past him and flew away earthwards to be swallowed by the streets. Malvery stuffed the bottle of rum into a gap in the bulkhead so as not to drop it into the corridor below.

‘Where is it now?’ Frey called, wrenching the
Ketty Jay
back and forth in an evasive pattern. Harkins and his Firecrow swung into view and away. Malvery craned his neck, trying to spot the fighter against the night. A flash of anti-aircraft fire lit it up just as it unleashed another barrage. This time gunfire lashed across the
Ketty Jay
’s hull, pocking the metal with bullet holes. Something deep inside the craft groaned. A pipe burst and steam hissed out into the corridor below him. He heard Silo come running to fix the leak.

‘It’s on our six, Cap’n! Still above us!’ he yelled over the noise.

‘Well bloody shoot it then!’ Frey yelled back.

‘It’s a Windblade!’ he protested.

‘
Do I sound like a man who gives a shit
?’ Frey screamed.

‘I ain’t shooting at Coalition!’

‘They’re attacking us! You want to die for your damned patriotism?’

‘Why not?’ Malvery roared. ‘You want us to die for your damned woman, don’t you?’

The Cap’n was momentarily defeated by that. There was silence from the cockpit as he formulated a comeback, but then a fresh salvo from the fighter put a few new holes in their wing, and Frey gave up trying to be witty.

‘Just do it
!’ he shrieked.

Exasperated, Malvery grabbed the handles of the autocannon. The cupola swivelled with the gun. ‘Keep her still, then!’ he shouted. Frey stopped jinking about, and Malvery brought the target into the centre of his crosshairs.

It was a peach of shot. The Windblade was lining up on them, encouraged by the lack of return fire. The pilot, thinking only of the kill, wasn’t even trying to dodge. Both of them were in each other’s sights.

‘Malvery!’ Frey yelled.

The first one to fire would destroy the other.

‘Malvery! Take the shot!’

Malvery’s finger hovered over the trigger. He thought of all the people on the
Ketty Jay
. Of the Cap’n and Silo and Ashua, especially, who he was inordinately fond of. All the people who’d likely die if he didn’t shoot.