Ketty Jay 04 - The Ace of Skulls (56 page)

And still they ploughed onward.

Deadly projectiles flew in all directions. Pinn climbed to get above the convoy and out of the way. The sight below him was not encouraging. The aircraft on the convoy’s flanks were being torn apart. He saw another of the Awakeners’ big freighters go down. Awakener outflyers battled with the Windblades in the sky all around him, but they were getting decimated.

Doubt began to nibble at Pinn’s confidence. When were the Awakeners going to hit the button? When would the secret weapon come into play? Was it possible that the rumours were true? Was it possible that it really
didn’t
work, that this whole thing had been a massive bluff, and the convoy was only slogging onward to its doom?

Then a Windblade shot across his flight path, and he was after it like a dog after a rabbit. It took him back into the thick of the fray. He dodged through the smoke of fresh kills, was showered in shrapnel. Explosions rocked him, setting him shuddering in his seat, pushing his craft this way and that. Two Awakener craft collided off his starboard wing, smashing head-on into each other in the confusion.

He hung on to the Windblade’s tail as long as he could, but in the end he lost it. He banged the dash in frustration. The Coalition fighter was faster and more manoeuvrable. He wasn’t used to being outclassed by an enemy’s aircraft, and it made him petulant. He looked for another Windblade to destroy, to make himself feel better.

A detonation nearby rocked him. The Coalition frigates were alarmingly close now. He swung back towards the convoy. The Awakeners had put most of their junk freighters on the edges of the convoy to soak up the damage, but they weren’t well armoured and didn’t last long. It seemed like the whole outer layer of aircraft was ablaze. The convoy was getting shredded.

Pinn began to feel uneasy about this whole affair. Bad odds he could handle, but no one liked to be on the wrong end of a whipping. They were getting smashed from three sides and were barely even fighting back. He saw a few of the mid-sized craft trying to peel away from the Awakeners, intent on making a run for it. They didn’t believe in the Awakeners’ secret weapon. Maybe Pinn didn’t, either. Maybe
he
should do what they were doing.

Bullets lashed through the air before his nose. He rolled and dived to avoid the attack. A couple of bullets punched his fuselage, but it was just a scratch. He levelled out and looked over his shoulder. A Windblade, coming in on his tail. No,
three
Windblades. The bastards were hunting in packs.

Alright
, he thought.
If that’s how you want it. Let’s see you catch me.

He threw his craft to starboard. And in that instant, something changed.

It felt like a ghost had passed through him. For the span of a heartbeat, time slowed and everything went silent. There was a huge sense of peace in his breast. His eyes found Lisinda’s picture on his dash, and looked upon her fondly, as if she might be the last thing he ever saw.

Then the sensation was gone, and even though it was no longer inside him, he imagined he could feel it rippling outwards in a great sphere, with the convoy at its centre. Up into the sky, down towards the ground, spreading to encompass the combatants in the air and the city in the hills. There was nothing to be seen of it with the naked eye, except for its effects. Where it went, pandemonium followed.

The Azryx device had been activated. And it worked exactly as it was meant to.

The Windblades went first. They were already travelling at speed when their controls went haywire. One moment they were carving graceful paths through the air, the next they were corkscrewing wildly. In the crowded sky, they collided with one another and with Awakener fighters, or swatted themselves against the flanks of huge freighters.

Pinn evaded frantically as Windblades flew every which way and blazing pieces of aircraft rained down all around him. He ran a chicane of explosions, then hauled on his flight stick to get up above the carnage before he was taken down. G-forces pulled at him, crushing him into his seat, making his head light. A fighter plunged past his nose close enough that he almost stalled, but he rode it out, and then suddenly there was nothing around him but sky. He levelled out, high above the plane of the battle, and then looked down on the Coalition fleet.

There were no guns any more. Thesk’s artillery had gone quiet. The Navy frigates dipped towards the earth in eerie, graceful silence as their aerium tanks vented, or ploughed into one another with stately momentum. The fighters, in contrast, were like fireflies, looping crazily, flashing where they exploded. A slow rain of burning metal was falling towards the hills and the city below, in thin fiery streams or colossal blazing chunks.

Pinn stared down in wonder, the flames reflected in his eyes as he drank in the sight greedily. From on high, the sheer scale of it was magnificent. He felt godlike. He’d never seen such beautiful destruction in all his born days.

‘We won,’ he whispered to himself. Then, louder: ‘We won!’

The Coalition Navy fell into disorder and ruin behind them, and the Awakener convoy ploughed on towards the capital.

Crake watched from the gallows with tears in his eyes. All around him, soldiers were shouting, and there were cries of despair. But all he felt was terrible, terrible sadness.

Hundreds of aircraft. Thousands of lives. And we couldn’t stop it.

The wind blew around the crag that the palace stood upon, bringing the sound of distant detonations as Coalition craft smashed into the earth. In the streets surrounding the palace, fires had begun. The battle had been fought to the east of the city, and most of the aircraft fell on the hills, but there had been a few flying overhead when the Azryx device was activated, and others had strayed from the battlefield. He watched as a light passenger craft made a shallow dive into a row of houses. It disappeared from view, and flame bloomed where it hit.

Rain began to fall. It came quick and heavy, as if someone had turned on a shower. Cold, stinging rain, falling on his face and shoulders, soaking him.

‘
Drave!
’ Malvery screamed in rage. ‘
Do you bloody well believe us now
?’

But Drave wasn’t listening to him. He was shouting at the soldiers. ‘To your positions! We have a city to defend!’

‘Get me out of these shackles, Drave, you idiot son of a bitch!’ Samandra yelled at him.

Drave motioned at a soldier, who ran over with the key and freed her. ‘You three!’ he said, motioning towards the Century Knights. ‘With me! Protect the Archduke!’

Samandra ignored him. She shook off her shackles and ran up to the gallows, where she tugged the noose from around Crake’s neck. He looked at her, shock and bewilderment in his eyes.

She read his thoughts. ‘Hey!’ she shouted. ‘It ain’t over! You hear? It ain’t over till it’s done!’ And she kissed him, hard enough to hurt.

‘Little help for the rest of us?’ Malvery cried in exasperation, struggling to get his head out of his own noose.

Grudge and Kyne pushed past their guards and hurried to the gallows, where they took the nooses from around the necks of the
Ketty Jay
’s crew and untied the ropes that bound their hands.

‘Century Knights!’ Drave bellowed from the doorway, his face running with rain. ‘Have you forgotten the oaths you swore?’

Grudge and Kyne looked at one another, then at Samandra. She was still staring into Crake’s eyes, her hands on his cheeks. He saw her face in front of him, but he couldn’t make sense of it all. Everything seemed dull and dreamlike to him. It couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t be. The fall of the Coalition. The end of everything he’d known.

‘I gotta go,’ she said to him. ‘Sorry, honey. I gotta go. I swore an oath.’

‘
Samandra Bree
!’ Drave yelled. ‘Are you a Century Knight or aren’t you?’

She bit her lip. Tears welled, but didn’t fall. ‘I gotta go,’ she said, and she ran. Crake reached for her, from instinct more than reason, but she was gone. By the time he looked around, the four Century Knights were on their way out of the courtyard. The soldiers had poured out with them. Only the crew were left, standing on the gallows, drenched by the hissing rain. None of them knew quite what to do with their newfound freedom.

‘Well?’ snapped Silo. ‘Ain’t none of us dead today. Get movin’!’

Malvery rounded on Ashua, who was standing a little way apart from the group. ‘Her too?’ he said. She flinched slightly at his tone.

‘Ain’t the time, Doc. She one of us till the Cap’n says otherwise.’

Malvery turned to Frey. ‘Cap’n?’

Frey looked back at him, and his eyes were dead. ‘Right now there’s only one single thing in this world I give a shit about, and she’s waiting on the landing pad.’ He looked up into the grey, oppressive sky, and at the convoy of Awakener craft coming closer. ‘Let’s get out of this damn rain.’

Thirty-Seven

Vard Against Vard – The End of the Fairytale – Harkins the Soldier – A Secret Weapon

B
y the time they reached the landing pad, the Awakeners were bombing the city.

Malvery huffed and puffed and cursed when he had the breath to do so. If only he was a younger man; younger and fitter and not so fond of drink. But the city needed him now. His country needed him. He pulled up his belt and staggered on in the wake of the others.

The landing pad was in chaos. Rain lashed the scene. Aircraft crew ran here and there, sodden grey ghosts in the downpour. Many hadn’t been privy to the news of the Awakeners’ secret weapon, and they had no idea why the Navy had fallen from the sky. Now they swarmed frantically over their aircraft, worrying at maintenance panels or stabbing buttons, unable to understand why the engines wouldn’t start.

Beyond the high walls that surrounded the landing pad, past a squat tower with wrought-iron balconies and a copper dome, Malvery could see the Awakener fleet spreading over the city like a vast black hand. And he saw the bombs, little pellets of death tumbling from the bellies of the frigates towards the streets below.

They’re bombing us!
he thought in outrage.
Bombing their own people!

The dull
crump
of distant explosions came to him, and made his blood boil. Vard against Vard. Countryman versus countryman, who so recently had fought side by side against the Sammies. He couldn’t wrap his head around it. Not since the Ducal Rebellion had such a thing happened, one hundred and fifty years ago. And yet even as that civil war ended, the seeds were being sown for a new one. For it was the followers of the deposed king who became the first Awakeners, turning his mad scrawlings into prophecy. And that had brought them to this.

Malvery was a man who let life happen to him rather than imposing himself upon it. Yet this was too much, even for him. Good men and women, in their ignorance, were fighting on the side of daemons to depose their Archduke. It was madness, and it had to be stopped.

They ran across the landing pad towards the
Ketty Jay
. No one paid them any attention. He caught Ashua’s eye as she ran alongside him, and there was fear of him in her gaze, and something like hope. She was puppyish in her shame, desperate for his forgiveness. But he looked away. She’d hurt him too much for that.

He’d begun to think of her as a daughter. He couldn’t help it. Even that tattoo all over the side of her face looked to Malvery like the mark of an insecure adolescent staking her place in the world. He’d hugged her to his breast, and she’d bitten him.

Did you know what you were doing?
he thought.
Were you working for the Sammies all along?

He could hardly bear the sight of her. And yet each time he wounded her with his scorn, it stung him just as badly. What a damned soft-hearted old fool he was.

Frey ran up to a panel on one of the
Ketty Jay
’s landing struts and punched in a code. The cargo ramp hissed open, and they hurried in out of the rain. Malvery came last. He was halfway up the ramp when a flash of lightning flickered behind the clouds, illuminating a black frigate sliding through the sky in the distance. A rolling grumble of thunder passed overhead.

He knew that craft. The
Delirium Trigger
.

‘Malvery! Get up here!’ Frey called.

Malvery wiped the rain from his wet moustache and hurried inside.

Bess was standing immobile in the corner of the hold; Crake had put her to sleep during the journey to Thesk, and nothing but Crake’s whistle would wake her up again. Silo had gone to a chest and was handing out weapons. They’d stashed their guns before arrival in order to indicate their peaceful intentions.

Frey was on the metal stairway leading to the main deck. ‘Forget about them,’ he told Silo. ‘Doc, I need you on the autocannon.’

It took Malvery a moment to catch up. He’d assumed the
Ketty Jay
was out of commission, and they were just coming back for their weapons.

‘We’re taking off, Doc!’ Frey said impatiently. ‘Those things the Awakeners fitted to our engines back in the camp? They cancel out the Azryx device. That’s how the Awakeners are still up in the air.’

‘Where are we going?’ Harkins asked.

Frey looked surprised that he even had to answer that question. ‘Away,’ he said.

Malvery was again slow to take Frey’s meaning, but this time it was for a different reason. He just couldn’t conceive of running away from something as important as was happening here in Thesk.

‘Cap’n,’ he said. ‘If the
Ketty Jay
can fly . . . Cap’n, we can’t just take her and go! We have to—’

‘We don’t have to do a bloody thing!’ Frey snapped. ‘We tried to warn ’em and they tried to kill us. The Archduke, the generals, every overprivileged arseburp in this whole damn city can drown in their own shit for all I care. Present company excepted,’ he added, nodding at Crake.