Ketty Jay 04 - The Ace of Skulls (55 page)

And maybe he was right. Maybe Frey and his crew had become unwitting patsies of the Awakeners, rushing to deliver their lies. Patriotic stupidity at its finest. And if so, the Coalition fleet would shoot the Awakeners down and they’d all hang.

He faced death with resignation. Despair had robbed him of will and energy. Failure had crushed him. It didn’t even feel like he was really there, standing on the gallows. He felt disconnected from his own body. The immediacy of the danger didn’t touch him.

Once, freedom was the most important thing to him, but he was a prisoner now. Later he’d come to care about his crew, but now he’d led one of them to her death and the rest to the noose. Only Pinn, the idiot, had got out in time. Lastly, he’d come to realise the depth of his feelings for Trinica. But he’d lost her too, and with her the chance to make amends for the death of their child and everything else he’d put her through.

Even if he survived to see another day, the idea of picking himself up again and going on with his life seemed an insurmountable effort. Better to end it here and now, perhaps. Better to let fortune wash him down whichever path it saw fit. He was done trying.

There was a commotion near the gates of the courtyard. A man in ducal livery stepped through, and announced loudly: ‘His Grace, the Archduke Monterick Arken, Her Grace the Archduchess Eloithe, and the Lady Alixia!’

Even with nooses round their necks, Malvery, Harkins and Crake stood up straighter. He could see the hope in their eyes. The most powerful man in the land: surely
he
would set things to rights? Surely
he
wouldn’t be so blind?

Stop hoping
, Frey thought.
It only makes it worse
.

The crowd of soldiers moved aside, and the Archduke and his family came to stand before the gallows. Drave moved protectively to their side.

The Archduke wore a high-collared uniform and a heavy cloak of fur that rippled in the icy wind. He was tall and straight-backed, with dark red hair and a close-cropped beard. His wife was small, but her eyes were bright and fierce. Her dark hair blew about her face as she looked up at them, the baby Alixia swaddled in her arms.

The Archduke swept his gaze along the length of the platform, taking in each of the prisoners. Malvery, Harkins and Crake, standing to attention. Silo, statuesque, showing nothing as he stared straight ahead. Ashua, trying to stay strong but barely keeping it together. And finally Frey, who just gazed back at him blandly, unimpressed.

‘This is him?’ said the Archduke, in a rich and resonant bass voice.

‘That’s him,’ said Drave.

The Archduke looked at Frey a long time. Frey returned the gaze insolently. The Archduke’s face twitched with suppressed rage, and his eyes were hateful.

Finally the Archduke turned to Drave and nodded. Drave gave a tiny bow. The Archduke laid his hand on Eloithe’s shoulder. She gave Frey a look of pure loathing and then allowed herself to be turned. Together they walked back towards the gate.

‘Your Grace!’ Crake called, his voice breaking as he did so. But the Archduke didn’t stop, and the gates boomed closed behind him.

So that was what they’d come for. To look upon the face of the man who’d killed their son. They’d been cheated of their retribution the first time around, but they wouldn’t be denied a second time.

Frey stared bleakly into the middle distance. Their pain was nothing to him. He’d pain enough of his own.

In the distance, a bell began to ring. More bells picked up the sound, until it spread across the city, a discordant clanging that rose from the streets to fill the air. The soldiers stirred.

‘They’re coming,’ said Drave.

Pinn sang to himself over the sound of the engines, loud and off key and entirely without rhythm. He pumped his fist and swung his free arm around as if conducting himself.
‘Arrr-tis Pinn! Hero of the skies! Ar-tis Pi-iiiiiin! Heeeee-ro of the skiiiiiiies!’

All in all, Pinn was pretty happy about going to war.

The Awakener fleet seemed vast from close up. Pinn estimated its size as hundreds, possibly billions, of aircraft, though he allowed there might be some margin for error as he couldn’t count very high at the best of times. There were patched-up rustbuckets and shining new fighter craft. There were crop-dusters and ex-military models, cargo haulers and thundering frigates and sleek high-end luxury liners. Anything that could fly – and some only barely could – had been pressed into service. Anything that could handle a gun had been fitted with one. Every scrap of might that the Awakeners had been able to muster was focused here, in one enormous convoy.

‘Heeeeeee-ro ooooooooof . . . THE SKIES!’
he finished with a flourish, and slumped back in his seat, out of breath and sweaty. He grinned at the ferrotype of Lisinda stuck to the dash. It had been creased and crumpled so thoroughly that he could barely make her out any more, but that didn’t bother him. She’d always been prettier in real life anyway.

If only she could see him now. She’d dump that no-good husband of hers right there and then, and fly off with him into the sunset. That’d be a worthy ending to the book they’d write about his adventures. There wouldn’t be a dry eye in Vardia.

Pinn had wanted to go to war ever since he was a boy. It was one of the great tragedies of his life that the Sammies called a truce to the Second Aerium War just days before he was old enough to enlist. He’d been in some pretty big scraps since then, but nothing like this. This was the real thing. This was properly epic.

The fact that he was fighting on the side of the Awakeners didn’t much concern him. He wasn’t the kind of person who thought about things like that. He’d abandoned the faith with the same speed and enthusiasm as he’d taken it up; in the end, he just wanted a scrap. Every chance to prove his superiority as a pilot was to be seized upon. And he reckoned you’d have to be a real idiot to be a pilot on the Coalition side today.

Unless you believed the rumours, of course. Over the last few days, word had leaked out about a secret weapon. Well, that was no news to Pinn – in fact, he may or may not have started the rumour himself while drunk – but more worrying were the new rumours that it didn’t actually work. That troubled Pinn a little. He wasn’t entirely sure who to believe: the high-ranking Awakeners who assured them that they’d seen victory in all their readings, or the grumbling mercs who’d suddenly realised they’d signed on to fight a Coalition Navy three times their size.

As the day of the attack got closer, dissent in the camp had grown. Tales were told by scared crews, of how their captains had gone off into the swamps and come back changed. Some captains, fearing they’d be next, tried to make a run for it. But the Awakeners were especially vigilant after the
Ketty Jay
’s escape, and the turncoats didn’t get far.

An atmosphere of dread had begun to pervade the camp in its final days. Not least aboard the
Delirium Trigger
.

Pinn had found an unexpected drinking companion in Balomon Crund. The bosun of the
Delirium Trigger
was a dour and maudlin sort, not much given to conversation, but that was fine. Pinn would much rather talk
at
someone than
to
them, anyway. The few times Crund did have something to say, it was always on the same subject. The same woman Frey had been banging on about since Pinn could remember. Damn, it was tiresome listening to people talk about their sweethearts.

Pinn couldn’t conceive of a relationship with a woman that didn’t involve wanting to sleep with them. He’d even have given Jez a go, before he found out she was some bloody awful horror from beyond infinity. The same couldn’t be said for Crund, though. The way he talked about his Cap’n, Pinn could tell. He was still devoted to her, even after what had happened, and it had left him broken-hearted.

Trinica had returned from the swamp a changed woman. She looked little different: ghastly white make-up, hair chopped, irises huge as coins and black as the void. But now it was more than a show. She’d become the part she’d played for her crew all these years. At last she was the terrible goddess they wanted.

Her mere presence in the room was enough to make the skin crawl. Nobody could argue with her: she reduced strong men to whimpering children. Her eyes had always been unnerving, but now nobody could stand her gaze. It bored into a man, stripped him to his core, dragged his secrets into the light.

There had been talk of mutiny before. Grumblings among the men. The Cap’n wasn’t strong enough. She was sweet on that Frey feller, and it was making her soft. The first thing Trinica had done on her return was summon the head of those prospective mutineers to her cabin. The screams began soon after, and didn’t stop for an hour. Nobody dared go in. They were not screams of pain: they were sounds beyond sanity.

When she was done, there was no more talk of mutiny.

Crund did his duties aboard the
Delirium Trigger
, but he could hardly bear to be there after that. It hurt too much to be around Trinica. She wasn’t the woman he’d known any more. So he escaped at every opportunity, and found Pinn in the bar more often than not, and together they drank to forget lost loves.

That first night, once they were good and hammered, Crund had charged Pinn with a task, and Pinn had made him a promise. He knew it was something important, except he couldn’t quite remember what it was. Something to do with Frey. Something . . .

Lights began flashing all around, drawing him from his reverie. The electroheliographs on the surrounding aircraft were going crazy. He sat up, excited. That was the signal! The Coalition fleet was in sight!

Pinn was flying in the vanguard of the convoy, and he had a good view even through the clutter of aircraft surrounding him. Ahead of them, Thesk rose out of the hills beneath the louring clouds. A wide calm river flowed in from the east and then split and forked, dividing the city into three. It was deceptively calm from this distance, but the pilots had all been warned about the anti-aircraft batteries dotted around the city.

The Coalition fleet were not coming from the city, however. They were coming in from the sides. A pincer movement, designed to catch the enemy in the flanks, where they expected them to be weakest. It would be impossible to rearrange the convoy in time to respond.

But then, the Awakeners didn’t intend to.

Pinn saw the fighters first, sleek, sharp Windblades swarming ahead of the bigger craft. The frigates came dipping down through the cloud behind them, vast slow ships of the air, bulky and bristling with cannons. In between were heavy assault craft, thickly armoured and deadly.

They came, and they kept coming, and when the horizon was dark with aircraft they kept coming still. The convoy, that had seemed so mighty, was dwarfed by its opposition. The entirety of the Coalition Navy, or near enough as made no difference; probably they still had skeleton forces elsewhere. The enemy pilots were highly trained and equipped with the best technology money could buy. The Awakeners were more than three-quarters volunteers.

But Pinn didn’t care about the odds. That wasn’t the kind of thing heroes worried over.

The formation started coming apart around him as fighters broke off to intercept the enemy. The plan was simple: stay near the convoy and defend it. Pinn could just about cope with remembering that. As soon as his way was clear, he peeled off to port and made his way out of the crowd and into open air. He’d need a bit of room for the fight.

Ahead of him, the Windblades were closing in. The Awakener fighters arrowed towards them. Pinn hunched over his flight stick, the cockpit rattling, thrusters roaring as he pushed them to their limits. A smile spread over his chubby face.

‘Alright fellers,’ he muttered. ‘Who wants to be the first to feel Uncle Artis’s toecap up their arse?’

One of the Windblades opened fire early, sending out a burst of tracers. It didn’t get near Pinn, but it was enough to draw his attention.

‘Think you just volunteered, mate,’ he said. He angled his craft towards the overenthusiastic pilot, his finger hovering over the trigger.

The two clouds of fighters rushed towards each other, the gap closing rapidly with every second. Suddenly the air was full of gunfire as everyone let loose at once. Bullets whined and whipped past the cockpit. An aircraft to his right exploded.

Pinn kept his cool and held his course, waited that extra second, and pressed down on his guns. A trail of bullets scored across the nosecone of his target, shattered the canopy, raked up its back. The Windblade erupted in a ball of smoke and fire.

The two fronts of fighters met. Suddenly it wasn’t bullets but aircraft lashing past him, engines screaming. Pinn screamed with them, mindless with joy. He banked and swooped, diving in among the enemy. Combat became a muddle, Awakener and Coalition craft all mixed together, dodging and shooting.

Pinn cackled with glee as he was slammed here and there by g-forces. He took down another Windblade, and another. The enemy barely noticed him in the confusion. His craft was frustratingly sluggish – too much time rotting in the swamp air, probably – but Pinn rose above it. He’d run rings round these losers even if he was flying one of those cannon-fodder junkers. He could fly anything!

He lost himself in the combat. Time slipped out of his grasp. He was action and reaction, riding adrenaline, hyper-alert. His senses were overcome by the noise of the engines, the flash of explosions, movement everywhere.

It was only when he heard the first of the anti-aircraft guns that he realised how near they’d got to Thesk. The convoy had been ploughing onward while the fighters scrapped around them; now they were close enough for the city’s weapons to be deployed.

Pinn jumped in his seat as a freighter near the front of the convoy was ripped in half, belching flame as it fell away in pieces. Shells flew up from below and burst among the Awakener’s heavy craft. The air filled with explosions.

The attacks were not all from below, either. The Coalition frigates had come within range now, and their guns began to smash into the convoy’s flanks. The convoy fired back, but the distance was too extreme for accuracy, and the Navy had the better of it. Squeezed between the two halves of the fleet, battered by the city’s weapons, the Awakeners began to take heavy losses.