Read Ketty Jay 04 - The Ace of Skulls Online
Authors: Chris Wooding
Ketty Jay 04 - The Ace of Skulls
THE ACE OF SKULLS
A Tale of the
Ketty Jay
Chris Wooding
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
Contents
The Optimist – Stormriding – Jez is Distracted – Women’s Intuition – A Majestic Decline
C
aptain Darian Frey was accustomed to long odds; his whole life, he’d been an outside chance. Lacking the ability to win in a fair fight, he survived instead by guile and the illogical optimism favoured by gamblers and drunks, which made the riskiest of plans seem like a good idea at the time.
That was how he found himself flying through the heart of a thunderstorm, on the trail of a target he couldn’t even see.
The
Ketty Jay
shuddered and bucked, shoved this way and that by crosswinds as Frey wrestled with the flight stick. Bulkheads groaned, fixtures rattled, thrusters clawed the air. Tatters of cloud flapped at the windglass like angry black ghosts.
Frey bullied the
Ketty Jay
onward, teeth gritted. Lightning flickered somewhere, a dull flare muted by the intervening murk, briefly illuminating the darkened cockpit. Frey winced in anticipation of the thunder, and cringed when it hit. His ears were still ringing when he felt his stomach plunge and the
Ketty Jay
was sucked down into an air pocket.
Ordinarily, he’d have left this kind of flying to Jez. She had uncanny night vision and a way of reading the wind that was nothing short of eerie. But that was before. These days, he didn’t trust her to fly at all.
‘Will you just
give it up
?’ he yelled at the storm in exasperation, as he hauled back on the flight stick hard enough to pop a shoulder joint.
As if at his command, the cloud flurried away and the
Ketty Jay
broke out into clear sky. The last light of dusk painted the night soft and bloody. A full moon shone down on a mountainous world of looming thunderheads, piled masses sliding past, borne on an invisible current.
Frey eased off on the flight stick and listened suspiciously as the thrusters settled back to their usual tone. The peace had come so suddenly that he suspected it was a trick.
When no immediate disaster occurred, he slumped back in his seat and allowed himself to relax for a moment. These last few hours had been hard on his nerves. He knew he shouldn’t be out in the open, but he needed the respite.
His eyes roamed the massive shelves and canyons of cloud, looking for a sign of their target. As expected, he found none. They’d be hiding deep in the storm, riding it as far as it would take them. Lightning lit up a distant cloud; a crackling grumble rolled across the sky.
He searched for Pinn and Harkins, but he couldn’t see them either. ‘You fellers alright up there?’ he asked.
‘Bored,’ said Pinn immediately, the pilot’s voice transmitted to Frey’s ear via his silver earcuff. ‘Haven’t you found it yet?’
‘I . . . er . . . actually I like it up here,’ said Harkins timidly. ‘It’s . . . er . . . well, it’s sort of nice. Quiet.’
‘
Quiet
?’ Pinn scoffed.
‘I’m just saying . . . I mean, why shouldn’t I—’
Frey pulled off the earcuff before they could get to bickering, cutting the connection to his outflyers. ‘Jez. What can you hear? Jez?’
When there was no reply, he leaned round to look over his shoulder. The only other occupant of the cockpit was his navigator, sitting at her station in shadow. A small woman in shapeless overalls, black hair tied back from her face. She was staring at a set of charts on the metal desk in front of her, but she wasn’t seeing them.
‘
Jez!
’ he snapped.
Her head jerked up and she fixed her gaze on him. Moonlight reflected from wide pupils, discs of bright white like the eyes of a night predator. Wolf’s eyes. Frey felt an icy chill pass through him. Ever since Samarla, just being around her made him uneasy. She’d changed. Sometimes he dreaded being alone with her in the cockpit.
‘Can you hear it?’ he asked her, keeping his voice firm.
She looked at him blankly. He ran out of patience. ‘The freighter, Jez! What’s wrong with you?’
Realisation crossed her face, and she looked momentarily ashamed. ‘I’m sorry, Cap’n, I . . .’ She shook her head, waved it away. ‘Hang on a moment.’ She closed her eyes and listened. ‘We’re close now, but we’ve drifted. Drop to nine thousand, heading oh-fifteen. They’re about twenty kloms from us.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I can hear the engines,’ she said. ‘Cargo freighter and . . . five or six outflyers running escort. They shouldn’t be flying through this kind of chop with craft that small but . . .’ She shrugged.
‘But they’re Awakeners,’ Frey finished for her. She managed a wan smile at that. A joke among the crew: the Awakeners were crazy. You had to be, with a maniac for a messiah.
Jez rapidly checked her calculations. ‘We’ll be over the wetlands in a couple of minutes,’ she said. ‘Time to make our move.’
‘I need you here on this, Jez,’ he told her. ‘Concentrate.’
She gave him a look that he couldn’t read, then a resolute nod. He hoped his reminder would be enough to keep her mind on the job.
She could hear the engines. At twenty kloms, in a storm, over the bellow of the
Ketty Jay
’s thrusters. She’d always had good ears, but this was something else.
What else do you hear when you go away like that?
Frey thought.
What’s happened to you, Jez? What are you listening to?
‘Doc!’ he shouted over his shoulder, through the open door of the cockpit. ‘We’re getting close! Stay sharp!’
‘Right-o!’ Malvery called. He was up in the autocannon cupola, a blister on the
Ketty Jay
’s humped back, set above the main passageway which ran along her spine. Probably keeping himself warm with a bottle of rum. The doc reckoned his aim got better when he was drunk, but Frey had never known him to shoot sober, so he had nothing to compare it with.
Frey vented a little of the ultralight aerium gas from the ballast tanks to bring the altitude down. An anvil-shaped thunderhead loomed over him. He steered the
Ketty Jay
towards it and let it consume them.
Back in the dark, Frey felt the tension take hold of him again. His fingers flexed nervously on the flight stick. All he could see ahead was his own face reflected in the windglass, underlit by the glow of the dash gauges. Black hair, a stubbled jaw, handsome features that he counted as his only blessing of birth. Frey was not a man unfamiliar with his own reflection, but tonight it surprised him. He looked lean and hard. Haunted.
You can do this
, he told himself.
One freighter and a few shabby outflyers. Not even professional pilots. And rich pickings when we’re done.
He’d coughed up a lot of money for the information, buying from a reputable whispermonger who told him the target’s route and cargo. This time, he was determined there would be no surprises. He was doing things right these days. No more shady tips or jobs that seemed too good to be true. No more corner-cutting, no more screw-ups.
And he had reason to be confident. The last two operations had gone like clockwork. It didn’t matter that they were simple takes, small vessels with minimum escort caught sneaking through the volcanic passes over the Hookhollows. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t been carrying much, and most of what Frey stole he’d used to buy the information for this run. What mattered was how they’d executed their plans. His crew had been disciplined, efficient, and despite their bitching they’d worked as a team.
Encouraged by that, he’d decided it was time to step up to bigger prey.
The Awakeners had been stormriding ever since the civil war became official and the Archduke declared open season on their aircraft. For most freebooters, it took great persistence and a healthy dose of luck to catch a freighter in the winter storm channels over Vardia. But most freebooters didn’t have a half-daemon navigator on their side.
Even knowing their target’s route, it had taken a lot of searching before Jez picked up the trace. But now they were on the hunt, and closing in fast.
The
Ketty Jay
began to shake gently as the winds picked up again. Frey readied himself for another fight with the flight stick, but the battle he expected didn’t come. Instead, the shaking grew steadily more pronounced. He peered through his own reflection, willing the clouds to part. They refused. And still the shaking grew.
‘Jez? Is one of the thrusters coming loose or something?’ he asked. A vibrating aircraft was never good, in his experience.
Jez didn’t reply. He swore under his breath, turned round in his seat and found her gazing emptily at the wall again. She’d never been as bad as this before.
‘Jez, damn it!’ he barked. ‘Wake up!’
She jolted out of her trance, looked at him, looked
past
him. Her expression turned to horror as light washed into the cockpit.
‘
Frey!
’ she shrieked.
He twisted back, saw the black cloud ahead turn to bright fog, a dozen burning suns lighting it from the inside. ‘Oh, bollocks,’ he muttered.
Floodlights.
He shoved the flight stick forward and wrenched the lever to execute an emergency vent of the aerium tanks. The
Ketty Jay
plunged as the clouds finally parted and the vast blunt snout of the freighter pushed through, bearing down on them like some titanic god of the storm. Frey yelled as he saw it and leaned on the stick, putting every ounce of his strength into the dive.
Not like this, he couldn’t die like this, not till he’d done what he had to do, what he’d
sworn
he’d do!
A wall of black metal roared towards him. The engines screamed as they forced the
Ketty Jay
downward. Malvery added his own bellow of incoherent fear from the cupola.
Come on come on come on!
And then they were beneath it, the freighter’s belly thundering overhead, shaking the
Ketty Jay
hard. Faster craft shot past them, tiny lights in the cloud, whipping by like fireflies.
In seconds, they were gone, swallowed up by the murk.
Gasping, Frey fed aerium gas back into the tanks, levelled the
Ketty Jay
out and then began to climb. No way he was staying in this damned cloud a moment longer. The gauges went momentarily dark and the engines stuttered as they were struck by lightning. He paid no attention; he didn’t even flinch when the thunder hit. He didn’t stop till they broke through the top of the thunderhead, and out into clear sky.
‘Cap’n,’ said Jez, her voice weak. ‘Cap’n, I’m sorry, I—’
‘Stow it, Jez. We’ve got a job to do.’ He was angry, and scared, but mostly he was determined. They’d seen the freighter. They couldn’t let it get away now.
He raised his voice and called up to the cupola. ‘Doc? What’s the situation?’
‘Situation is I ain’t drunk enough for this bullshit!’ Malvery called back. ‘And we got fighters breaking cloud behind us. Escort’s giving chase. There’s one . . . two . . . ah, bugger it, I’m just gonna shoot at ’em.’ Any further conversation was prevented by the steady thumping of the autocannon as Malvery got to work.
So the escorts had abandoned the freighter to take care of the danger. Good. That was exactly what Frey wanted. Out here in the open, he could deal with them.