Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [109]
Frey was unperturbed. Trinica noted his lack of reaction.
“Obviously you guessed I’d do something like this,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. How many men do you have, Frey? Five? Six? Can you afford to keep that many?” She looked around the room; he bored her now. “I sent twenty.”
Twenty, thought Frey, keeping his face carefully neutral, the way he’d learned to at the card table. Oh, shit.
“What if I did the same?” he said. “What if my men are on your craft right now?”
Trinica rolled her eyes. “Please, Darian. You never could bluff well. You’re too much the coward. You always give in first.”
She sighed and looked down at him, as if pitying a dumb animal. “I know you,” she said. “You’re predictable. That’s why I almost caught you at the hermitage. Once Thade told me about you and his daughter, I realized that was the first place you’d go. You always did think with the wrong organ.”
Frey didn’t reply. She had him there.
“You want to know why I’m a good captain and you’re not? Because you don’t trust your people. I’ve earned my men’s respect and they’ve earned mine. But you? You can’t keep a crew, Darian. You go through navigators like whores.”
Frey kept his mouth shut. He couldn’t argue. There was nothing to say.
“And because I know you, I know you’d never trust anyone with your aircraft,” she continued, walking past him toward the door. “The Ketty Jay is your life. You’d rather die than give the ignition code to someone who might fly off with her. That means your crew are outnumbered, outgunned, and trapped, defending an aircraft that’s nothing more than an armored tomb.” She cocked her head. “Perhaps you were thinking of some clever flanking maneuver. Perhaps you’re going to bring in reinforcements behind my men. Whatever you try, it makes no difference. You just don’t have the numbers.”
Frey’s shoulders slumped. Twenty men. How long could Jez, Silo, and Harkins hold out against twenty men? Everything had relied on timing, but it was only now he truly realized how desperate the situation was. The plan had sounded so fine coming out of his mouth. But he was the only one not risking his life here.
Trinica saw how it hit him like a hammer. She touched his shoulder in false sympathy and leaned down to whisper in his ear, her lips brushing his lobe. “By now they’ll be dead, and my men will have filled the Ketty Jay with so much dynamite, the explosion will be heard in Yortland.”
She opened the door and looked back at him. “This will be the second time your crew died because of your hang-ups, Darian. Let’s see how far and fast you run without your aircraft.”
Then she was gone, leaving the door open behind her. Frey sat at the table, looking down at the mess of cards before him, feeling pummeled and raw and slashed to ribbons. She’d taken him apart with nothing more than words.
That woman. That bloody woman.
Chapter Twenty-five
FLIGHT—“PICK YOUR TARGETS”—NO WAY OUT
rake ran hard. His lungs were burning in his chest and his head felt light, but his legs were tireless, filled with strength lent by adrenaline. Bess lumbered ahead, Malvery and Pinn hot on her heels. Bullets scored the air around them.
But they were only delaying the inevitable. There was nowhere left to go.
The hangar deck was crowded with cranes, portable fuel tanks, and piled cargo. Massive cogs rose out of the floor, part of a mechanism that clamped aircraft in their berths and prevented heavy freighters from drifting. In the distance, elevated platforms for spotlights and a narrow controller’s tower rose almost to the roof of the hangar.
They used these obstacles as cover, darting past and around them, blocking the aim of the Delirium Trigger’s crew. Nobody attempted to stop them with Bess leading the way. Dockworkers fled for cover, frightened by the wild gunplay of their