Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [25]
Harkins and Pinn had the Swordwings occupied, chasing them around the sky, leaving the way clear for him. He hunched forward in his seat, frowning intently at his target. Jez and Crake stood behind him, hanging on as best they could as the Ketty Jay rocked and swayed.
The freighter swam higher, thrusters pushing as hard as they were able, but she was a lumbering thing and she couldn’t get a steep enough angle without tearing herself apart under her own weight. Frey would get only one chance, but one chance was all he needed. The aerium tanks on a craft like that were an enormous target. Though there was nothing on the outer skin to indicate their location, Frey knew his aircraft. It would be hard to miss.
Just graze the tanks with your guns, he reminded himself. Holed tanks would vent aerium gas, and the steady loss of lift would force the pilot to either land the craft or have her drop out of the sky. A landing might be a bit violent in this kind of terrain, but Frey didn’t much care as long as the cargo was intact. The prothane tanks—the dangerous part—were well armored and buried deep within the craft. It would take a really bad landing to make them go up.
The Ace of Skulls swelled in his view, growing larger as he approached. In attempting to escape, she’d exposed her belly. He zeroed in on the spot just under her stubby, finlike wings.
Closer … closer …
He squeezed the trigger on his flight stick. The Ketty Jay’s front-mounted machine guns clattered, punching a pattern of holes across the freighter’s side.
And the Ace of Skulls exploded.
The windglass of the cockpit filled with a terrible bloom of fire, lighting up Frey’s astonished face for a split second. Then the impact hit them.
The detonation was ear-shattering. A concussion wave swamped the Ketty Jay, making her roll sharply and sending Jez and Crake slamming into the navigator’s station. Frey wrestled with the controls, yanking on the flight stick with one hand, hitting switches with the other. The engines groaned and stuttered, but Frey had flown this craft for more than a decade and he knew her inside out. Teeth gritted, he gentled her through the chaos, and in seconds they were level again.
Frey looked out of the cockpit. He felt sick and faint. An oily black cloud of smoke, blistering with red-and-white flame, roiled in the air. The Ace of Skulls’s enormous bow was plummeting into the pass far below; her tail assembly crashed against the side of a mountain and broke into pieces. A cloud of lesser debris spun lazily away, thrown out by the colossal force of the explosion.
And in among the debris, charred limp things fell toward the earth. Some of them were still almost whole.
Bodies. Dozens of bodies.
HARKINS STARED AT THE slow cascade of wreckage as it tumbled from the sky. He wasn’t sure he’d exactly grasped the full implications of what had just happened, but he knew this was bad. This was very, very bad. And not only because they’d screwed up yet another attempt at sky piracy.
Then, suddenly, the Swordwing he’d been chasing broke left and dived. Harkins’s attention switched back to his target.
He’s running! Harkins thought. A glance told him that the second Swordwing was doing the same, spearing up toward the clouds. Pinn was hot on its tail, spraying tracer fire. Smoke trailed from one of its wings.
Harkins threw the Firecrow into a dive. Whatever had just happened, Harkins was certain of one thing. They were in trouble.
But only if someone lived to tell about it.
The Swordwing was dropping hard toward the layer of mist that had hidden the Ketty Jay. Harkins rattled off a short burst from his guns, but he was still too far away. He opened the Firecrow’s throttle and screamed after the Swordwing as it was swallowed up by the mist.
Oh, no,