Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [88]
“I didn’t do it for you, I did it for me,” she interrupted. “I’m not being taken in by any damn Shacklemore. Not when half the world still wants us dead.” There was a weary disgust in her voice. “Besides, you still haven’t told me what you learned in there. The Cap’n will want to hear that, no doubt.”
She wasn’t the same Jez who had accompanied him to this party. The change was sudden and wrenching. Everything that had happened before, every shared joke and kind word, meant nothing in the face of the crime he’d committed. Crake wished there was something to say, some way he could explain, but he knew that she wouldn’t listen. Not now.
“It’s better that we don’t speak about what happened here tonight,” she said, still brushing herself down. She stopped and gave him a pointed look. “Ever.”
Crake nodded.
“Right, then,” she said, having arranged herself as best she could. “Let’s get out of here.”
She walked down the path toward the landing pad. Crake cast one last glance into the trees, where Cordwain’s body lay, and then followed her.
Chapter Twenty-one
FREY CALLS A MEETING—HOPE—A CAPTAIN’S MEMORIES OF SAMARLA—THE BAYONET
ou want to take on the Delirium Trigger?” shrieked Harkins.
Pinn choked on his food, spraying stew across the table and all over Crake’s face. Malvery gleefully pounded Pinn on the back, much harder than was necessary, until his coughing fit subsided.
“Thanks,” he snarled at the grinning doctor.
“Another day, another life saved,” Malvery replied, returning to his position by the stove, where he was working on an artery-clogging dessert made mostly of sugar. Crake dabbed at his beard with a pocket handkerchief.
“So?” prompted Jez. “How do you plan to do it?” Frey surveyed his crew, gathered around the table in the Ketty Jay’s mess hall, and wondered again if he was doing the right thing. His plan had seemed inspired when he came up with it a few hours ago, but now that he was faced with the reality of his situation, he was much less certain. It was fine to imagine a crack squad of experts carrying out their assigned missions with clinical precision, but it was hardly a well-oiled machine he was dealing with here.
There was Harkins, reduced to a gibbering wreck by the mere mention of the Delirium Trigger. Malvery, lacing the dessert with rum and taking a couple of swigs for himself as he did so. Pinn, too stupid to even swallow his food properly.
Jez and Crake were trustworthy, as far as he could tell, but they’d barely been able to meet each other’s eyes throughout the meal. Something had happened between them at the Winter Ball—perhaps Crake had made an unwelcome move?—and now Jez’s loathing for him was obvious, as was his shame.
That left Silo, silently spooning stew into his mouth, unknowable as always. Silo, who had been Frey’s constant companion for seven years, about whom he knew nothing. Frey had never asked about his past, because he didn’t care. Silo never asked about anything. He was just there. Did he have thoughts like normal men did?
Frey tried to summon up some warm feelings of camaraderie and couldn’t.
Oh, well, damn it all, let’s go for it anyway.
“We all know we can’t take on the Delirium Trigger in the air,” he said, to an audible sigh of relief from Harkins. “So what we do is we get her on the ground. We lure Dracken into port, and when she’s down …” He slapped the table. “That’s when we do it.”
Pinn raised a hand. When Pinn raised a hand, it was only for effect. If he had something to say, he usually just blurted it out.
“Question,” he said. “Why?”
“Because she won’t be expecting it.”
Pinn lowered his hand halfway, then raised it again as if struck by a new idea. “Yes?” Frey said wearily.
“Why don’t we do something else she isn’t expecting?”
“I liked the running-away plan,” said Harkins. “I mean, we’ve been doing pretty good so far with the running away. Maybe we should, you know, keep on doing it. Just an idea, though, I mean, you’re the Cap’n. Only seems to me that, well, if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t need fixing. Just my opinion. You’re