Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [93]
Bullets chipped the turf around them. Martley stumbled and rolled hard, clutching his upper leg, screaming. Rabby hesitated, broke stride for the briefest moment, then ran on. The Dakkadians pulled Martley down as he tried to get up, then began stabbing him with the double-bladed bayonets on the end of their rifles. Martley’s shrieks turned to gurgles.
The cargo ramp drew closer. Frey felt the sinister brush of air as a bullet barely missed his throat. Rabby was running up the hill, yelling as he came. Two Dakkadians were close behind him.
Frey’s foot hit the ramp. He fled up to the top and pulled the lever to raise it. The hydraulic struts hummed into life.
Outside, he heard Rabby’s voice. “Lower the ramp! Cap’n! Lower the bloody ramp!”
But Frey wasn’t going to lower the ramp. Rabby was too far away. Rabby wasn’t going to make it in time. Rabby wasn’t getting anywhere near this aircraft with those soldiers hot on his heels.
“Cap’n!” he screamed. “Don’t you leave me here!”
Frey tapped in the code that would lock the ramp, preventing it from being opened from the keypad on the outside. That done, he drew his revolver and aimed it at the steadily closing gap at the end of the ramp. He backed up until he bumped against one of the supply crates that hadn’t yet been unloaded. The rectangle of burning sunlight shining through the gap thinned to a line.
“Cap’n!”
The line disappeared as the cargo ramp thumped closed, and Frey was alone in the quiet darkness of the cargo hold, safe in the cold metal womb of the Ketty Jay.
The Dakkadians had overrun this position. Navy intelligence had screwed up, and now his crew was dead. Those bastards! Those rotting bastards!
He turned to run, to race up the access stairs, through the passageway, into the cockpit. He was getting out of here.
He ran right into the bayonet of the Dakkadian who’d been creeping up behind him.
Pain exploded in his guts, shocking him, driving the breath from his lungs. He gaped at the soldier before him. A boy, no more than sixteen. Blond hair spilling out from beneath his cap. Blue eyes wide. He was trembling, almost as stunned as Frey.
Frey looked down at the twin blades of the Dakkadian bayonet, side by side, sticking out of his abdomen. Blood, black in the darkness, slid thinly along the blades and dripped to the floor.
The boy was scared. Hadn’t meant to stab him. When he snuck aboard the Ketty Jay, he probably thought only to capture a crewman for his fellows. He hadn’t killed anyone before. He had that look.
As if in a trance, Frey raised his revolver and aimed it point-blank at the boy’s chest. As if in a trance, the boy let him.
Frey squeezed the trigger. The bayonet was wrenched from his body as the boy fell backward. The pain sent him to the edge of unconsciousness, but no further.
He staggered through the cargo hold. Up the metal stairs, through the passageway, into the cockpit, leaving smears and dribbles of himself as he went. He slumped into the pilot’s seat, barely aware of the sound of gunfire against the hull, and punched in the ignition code—the code that only he knew, that he’d never told anyone and never would. The aerium engines throbbed as the electromagnets pulverized refined aerium into gas, filling the ballast tanks. The soldiers and their guns fell away as the Ketty Jay lifted into the sky.
Frey would never make it back to Vardia. He was going to die. He knew that and accepted it with a strange and awful calm.
But he wasn’t dead yet.
He hit the thrusters, and the Ketty Jay flew. North, toward the coast, toward the sea.
Chapter Twenty-two
SHARKA’S DEN—TWO CAPTAINS—A STRANGE DELIVERY—RECRIMINATIONS
he slums of Rabban were not somewhere