Ketty Jay 04 - The Ace of Skulls (60 page)

He gazed out with dull eyes at the cloudy morning. The storm was behind them now; the skies were calm and sunless. Less than half an hour ago, he’d been at the end of a rope. This particular day seemed a poor reward for survival, but he’d take what he could get.

Survival. That was what it was all about now. Survival, and nothing more.

Yortland would suit his mood: icy, empty and cruel, a hard place populated by hard people. He had a vague plan to track down Ugrik, the batshit insane son of the High Clan Chief who’d helped them find the Azryx city in Samarla a few months back. Ugrik ought to be able to set him up with some work. After that, well, he’d do what he’d always done. He’d get by.

Once Vardia was in the Awakeners’ hands, Yortland would be the only safe place left. No point heading for Thace; even if they let him in, it would be first on the invasion list once the Sammies got the aerium they craved. Maybe he’d make the run to New Vardia if the Great Storm Belt wasn’t too bad. He’d find himself a quiet place with a game of Rake and a few suckers to fleece. That’d do him.

Trinica . . . Well, he wouldn’t think of Trinica. She was lost in some hell where he couldn’t reach her, and that was all there was to it. It took a lot for Frey to admit he was beaten, but that was the fact of the matter. Suck it up and move on.

There’d been a time when he had no aspirations and no possibility of disappointment, but these past few years he’d taken to fooling himself with delusions of grandeur and the pursuit of fame, riches and love. People said it was better to try and fail than to never try, but those people obviously hadn’t failed hard enough. Hope had raised him higher than he’d ever have believed possible, but the fall from there was crippling.

You’ll find another crew
, he told himself.
There’ll be other women
.

He said the words again in his head, to convince himself.

Silo, by the bulkhead, stirred and straightened. ‘You’re gonna want to hear this, Cap’n.’

‘Hear what?’ said Frey, who couldn’t hear anything outside of the workings of the
Ketty Jay
.

Silo walked over, pulled the silver earcuff from his ear and held it out. Frey looked from the earcuff to his first mate and back again.

‘Took it off the dash,’ said Silo by way of explanation. ‘Seemed you weren’t usin’ it.’

Frey was angered, for no reason he could understand. Silo had been listening for the voices of the crew as they departed, drawing out the connection to the very last. He wanted to know how they were faring. But the anger lasted only a moment before it was washed away by guilt. Frey knew how much it had cost Silo to come with him, how much faith and loyalty this man had shown by leaving the others behind. If Frey had been capable of love right then, he’d have loved him for that.

With some trepidation, he took the earcuff and clipped it on to his ear.

‘—nyone listening? Cap’n? Can you hear us?’

‘
Oi! Cap’n!
’

‘It doesn’t make it go further if you shout louder, you quarter-wit!’

‘Ah, shut your clam trap. You don’t know how these things work.’

Frey frowned in disbelief. Was that
Pinn
? Pinn and Harkins, bickering away like always? It didn’t seem real. He listened to them yell at each other for a short while more. It was strangely comforting.

‘I’m here,’ he said at last.

‘Cap’n!’ they both cried together, and the joy in their voices made something twist in his chest.

‘You decided to come with me, then?’ he asked. Their presence felt like an endorsement. He’d made the right choice.

‘What?’ said Harkins. ‘No, Cap’n, we came to bring you back.’

Frey’s brief good feeling withered. ‘I’m leaving, Harkins,’ he said. ‘I told you that.’

‘Something I’ve got to tell you first,’ said Pinn. ‘A message from Balomon Crund.’

Crund? What did
he
want? The man had always hated him, jealous of Trinica’s affection.

‘He made me promise, Cap’n. If I could find you, I had to tell you. He said you’re the only one outside the crew who ever gave a shit about Trinica. The only one who might be able to do something about it.’

‘Just spill it, Pinn.’

‘
Trinica’s not gone
,’ said Pinn. ‘That’s what he told me. He said he knows. The old Trinica’s still in there, under the daemon.’

The words piled like stones onto Frey’s heart. The dreadful weight of responsibility, expectation, obligation. Of all people, Balomon Crund was reaching out to him, asking him to save Trinica. He’d persuaded himself that there was no chance, that his love was a lost cause, and now here was Pinn to shatter that certainty and let in the vile, deceitful light of hope.

No. He wouldn’t believe it. ‘What does Crund know?’ he said bitterly. ‘What in damnation makes
him
so sure? What is it, a
feeling
he’s got? Some bloody
intuition
? Why’s he trying to lay this on me?’

Pinn seemed confused by Frey’s tone. Perhaps he’d expected gratitude instead of scorn. ‘Er . . .’ he said. ‘I don’t know. He just said to tell you she’s been carrying a book around.’

That caught him. ‘What?’

‘Yeah,’ said Pinn. ‘Some book you gave her. He says she started carrying it about after she got turned. Reading it sometimes.’

Frey went cold. There was only one book he could possibly mean.
The Silent Tide
. He’d given it to her in Samarla as a present over dinner, a token of love back before he’d even admitted his feelings to himself. And for a moment he was there again, on the veranda of the most expensive restaurant he’d ever sat in, with the river in the background and the city lights reflecting in its dark waters.

‘What’s it about?
’ he heard himself ask her, for he hadn’t known himself. He couldn’t even read the title; it was in Samarlan.

‘It’s a classic romance
,’ she replied, her eyes shining.

‘Do they get it together at the end?
’

‘No,
’ she said. ‘
They die. It’s a tragedy
.’

Frey’s breath grew short. What would a daemon be doing reading a classic romance in Samarlan? There was only one explanation Frey could think of. Trinica, the
real
Trinica, had somehow exerted enough control to make it happen. Maybe she’d disguised its significance from the daemon; maybe the daemon thought it didn’t matter. Or maybe it was just some old instinct, a last act of tough and stubborn love.

However he looked at it, it meant only one thing. A cry for help. Not from Crund, but from Trinica. A signal that had reached him, against all the odds, across thousands of miles, across the frontier of a war.

Tears welled in Frey’s eyes, blurring his vision. She was alive in there, a prisoner in her own body. It was too awful to bear.

‘That’s not all, Cap’n!’ Harkins enthused, oblivious to his reaction. ‘Listen to this!’

‘Oh, right,’ said Pinn. ‘Yeah! The Azryx device, the one that took out the Coalition Navy? Guess who’s carrying it.’

‘The
Delirium Trigger
!’ Harkins cried gleefully.

‘Oi! He was meant to
guess
!’

Frey pulled off the earcuff and cut their voices to silence. Now all he could hear was the
Ketty Jay
, the one precious constant all through his adult life. He stared out at the empty sky ahead.

Yes, of course, it made sense. Turn the captains of the biggest frigates into Imperators to keep them loyal, and then have them carry the Azryx device. The
Delirium Trigger
was the most formidable craft in the fleet, even more than the flagship. Naturally they’d put it there.

Frey felt the walls of the cockpit closing in on him. All he wanted was to be free. To fly off into nothingness and never to have to deal with pain or misery or suffering ever again. To cut his losses and fold his hand while he still could.

But life wouldn’t let him. The same tides of fate that had brought him to this point were now trying to suck him back. As much as he tried to suppress it, a plan was forming in his mind. A way to save Trinica, and incidentally to save Thesk and the Coalition as well. A plan that only he could carry out.

It’s not my responsibility
, he thought. Then, with gritted teeth, he hit the dashboard with his fist. ‘It’s not my
responsibility!
’

Silo, standing by, said nothing.

But the crack that Pinn had made in his shell of denial was widening. Everything he’d stuffed inside came spilling out in a flood, filling him with breathless hope, panic, joy and resentment. He wanted to burst into tears; he wanted to kill somebody; he wanted to dance and rage all at the same time.

Was loving Trinica worth his death? Would a life not loving her be worth anything? Everything,
everything
rested on him. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to force him to a choice like that.

‘Do you think we can do it, Silo?’ he said quietly.

Silo could not have heard half the conversation that he’d had with Pinn and Harkins, but it didn’t matter. He knew what Frey was talking about.

Frey waited. If he detected even a hint of doubt, the merest shred of uncertainty, then he was determined to hit the throttle and never look back. If he thought the man at his side had anything less than absolute faith, it wouldn’t be enough to give him the courage he needed to do this. It wasn’t the danger that frightened him; he’d faced danger plenty. It was the thought of getting back on the horse that had thrown him. It was the possibility of failure.

‘Cap’n,’ said Silo at length. ‘I known you a long time now. And I ain’t never met nobody so good at screwin’ up a winnin’ hand as you are.’

Frey blinked. He hadn’t expected that.

‘But I also ain’t never met nobody so good at turnin’ a losin’ hand to winnin’,’ Silo continued. ‘You took this crew o’ outcasts and misfits, people who didn’t have no place in the world, and you made us into somethin’. Don’t you remember, Cap’n? We took down the Awakeners once already, back at Retribution Falls. Saved the Archduke’s hide that time.’ His voice became unexpectedly passionate as he went on; it wasn’t something Frey was used to hearing from his first mate. ‘We took on the
Manes
, Cap’n! We flew behind the Wrack and we looked ’em in the eye and we came back to tell about it. And after that, what d’you reckon we did? This team o’ alcoholics and layabouts and shit knows what else that you pulled together? We found a damn
Azryx city
right in the heart of Samarla! We saw a Juggernaut! And what we brought back, it pretty much set off this whole war they all fightin’ back there! None of us weren’t nothin’ on our own, but ’cause of you, we shook the damn world!’

He put his hand on Frey’s shoulder. Frey felt the warm strength of it through his coat.

‘We a losin’ hand, Cap’n,’ he said. ‘But you the Ace of Skulls. Anyone can turn us to winnin’, you can.’

Frey stared out through the windglass a long time. His face was grim, but there was something new in his eyes. Something that hadn’t been there since they’d left the Awakener camp in the Barabac Delta.

Determination. Cold, hard purpose.

‘Reckon some things are worth risking everything for,’ said Frey.

‘You damn right about that,’ said Silo, as Frey began to turn the
Ketty Jay
around.

Forty

The Root of Courage – The Gate – An Unsung Hero – Orders – New Arrivals

‘T
he gate! They’ve opened the gate!’

The cry echoed along the streets, punctuated by gunfire. The narrow lanes and courtyards which surrounded the Archduke’s palace were aswarm with men and things other than men. Massive shapes lunged through the rain, metal limbs screeching. Frigates hung close overhead, their enormous hulls filling the grey sky, trailing ropes like catfish tendrils. They wouldn’t bomb the palace; its contents were too valuable. But they could drop Sentinels behind the defenders’ positions.

‘This way!’ someone shouted, and the Coalition soldiers surged in that direction. Crake hurried along an alley with men jostling him on either side. The world seemed to have become very small. He was surrounded by a tiny bubble of reality; beyond it, everything was muffled and suspect. Samandra, Malvery and Ashua appeared at his side now and then, but he’d lose them just as quickly in the tide of soldiers. He spotted Grudge more often, and sometimes Celerity Blane, her blonde ringlets sodden, eyes narrow in a leonine face.

Gunfire pulled him up short at the corner. He pressed himself against the wet stone and peered round into a courtyard. Sentinels were dug in at one end, shooting out from behind a statue of Kendrick Arken, the first of the Archdukes. More of them were pouring in through an arch. The Century Knights didn’t break stride; they raced out into the courtyard, heading for cover of their own. He saw his lover running, rolling, coming up with shotguns blasting. He saw Celerity Blane, astonishingly fast, rotary pistols chattering as they ate up bullets from her gunbelt. Colden Grudge came last with his great autocannon booming, tearing holes through the charging mob.

He wanted to be brave. He wanted to run out there, to fight by Samandra’s side, to protect her. But something had rooted him to the corner. He couldn’t go out into the open with all those bullets flying about. He wasn’t a fighter, not this way. That was her department.

He looked over his shoulder, alerted by the thump and clank of a golem. Not Bess, though. This golem was larger even than her, a hulking armoured brute all rivets and plates. Its head was small and oval and smooth, without mouth or nose or ears. Mechanical eyes glared out from beneath a brow that had been fashioned in a menacing scowl.

It stamped past him, followed by another, and charged into the courtyard, heedless of the bullets. One of the golems headed for the archway, the other for the men behind the statue. The Awakeners tried to run, but the golems ploughed into them like cannonballs. Bones cracked beneath their huge flat feet; they shattered men left and right with their enormous fists. The leg of the statue was smashed away by one wild swing, and the stern figure of Kendrick Arken toppled to the ground in pieces. By the time the dust cleared, the Awakeners had fled.