Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [13]
“I’ll be fine,” Jez protested.
“You just had a bullet put through your shoulder!” Malvery cried.
“It’ll heal.”
“Will you two get on that damn aircraft?” Frey said. “Crake! Bring Bess. We’re leaving ten minutes ago!”
Frey followed Malvery and Jez up the ramp and into the Ketty Jay. Once they were out of sight, Crake stepped gingerly through the wreckage and laid a hand on the golem’s arm. She turned toward him with a quiet rustle of chain mail and leather. He reached up and stroked the side of her face grille, tenderness in his gaze.
“Well done, Bess,” he murmured. “That’s my girl.”
Chapter Four
A PILOT’S LIFE—CRAKE IS LISTLESS—MALVERY PRESCRIBES A DRINK
here were very few moments in Jandrew Harkins’s life when he could be said to be truly relaxed. Even in his sleep he’d jitter and writhe, tormented by dreams of the wars or, occasionally, dreams of suffocation brought on by Slag, the Ketty Jay’s cat, who had a malicious habit of using Harkins’s face as a bed.
But here, nestled in the cramped cockpit of a Firecrow with the furnace roar of prothane thrusters in his ears, here was peace.
It was a calm day in the light of a late autumn sun. Hard to believe that only a few hours earlier they were in the middle of a gunfight on the docks at Scarwater. Now they were heading north, following the line of the Hookhollow Mountains, heading for Marklin’s Reach, where the Cap’n had business.
The Ketty Jay was above him and half a mile to starboard. Pinn’s Skylance droned alongside. There was nothing else in the sky except a Navy frigate lumbering across the horizon to the west and a freighter out of Aulenfay, surfacing from the sea of cloud that had submerged all but the highest peaks. To the east it was possible to see the steep wall of the Eastern Plateau, tracing the edge of the Hookhollows. Farther south, the cloud was murky with volcanic ash, drifting toward the Blackendraft flats.
He looked up, through the windglass of his cockpit canopy. The sky was a perfect, clear, deep blue. Never-ending.
Harkins sighed happily. He checked his gauges, flexed his gloved hand on the control stick, and rolled his shoulders. Outside this tight metal womb, the world was strange. People were strange. Men were frighteningly unpredictable and women more so, full of strange insinuations and cloaked hunger. Loud noises made him jump; crowds made him claustrophobic; smart people made him feel stupid.
But the cockpit of a Caybery Firecrow was his sanctuary, and had been for twenty years. No awkwardness or embarrassment could touch him while he was encased in this armor. Nobody laughed at him here. The craft was his mute servant, and he, for once, was master.
He watched the distant Navy frigate for a time, remembering. Once, as a younger man, he’d traveled in craft like that. Waiting for the call to clamber into his Firecrow and burst out into the sky. He remembered with fondness the pilots he’d trained with. He’d never been popular, but he’d been accepted. Part of the team. Those were good days.
But the good days had ended when the Aerium Wars began. Five years fighting the Sammies. Five years when every sortie could be the one from which you never came back. Five years of nerve-shredding dogfights, during which he was downed three times. He survived. Many of his friends weren’t so fortunate.
Then there was the peace, although the term was relative. Instead of Sammies, the Navy was after the pirates and freebooters who had prospered during the war, running a black-market economy. Harkins fought the smugglers in his own lands. The enemy wasn’t so well equipped, but they were more desperate, more savage. Turf wars became grudge matches, and things got even uglier.
Then, unbelievably, came the Second Aerium War, a mere four years after the first, and Harkins was back fighting alongside the Thacians against the Sammies and their subjects. After all they’d done the first time, all the lives that were lost, it was the politicians who let them down. Little had been done to defang the Samarlan threat, and the enemy came back with