The Age of Odin - James Lovegrove [171]
Nagelfar's fans started whirring and the ramps began to retract. Airborne dreadnought had just become refugee vessel. I leapt onto the nearest ramp as it rose and scurried up it like a rat up a drainpipe. The door ahead of me was closing, and I heard Freya shouting from the ground below, telling me to jump off, I wasn't going to make it. But I was. I fucking well was.
I reached the door. It had very nearly slid to. Elongating my body, I daggered through the narrow gap. The door clanged shut.
Nagelfar then gave a shudder and a lurch. Its entire frame shook mightily as it hoisted itself off from the permafrosted earth.
There was me aboard, its crew, and a handful of American mercenaries.
I wasn't bothered about any of them. They could live or die, I didn't give a shit.
There was only one person on that ship I cared about.
It was me and Cy now. I was going to find him and kill him, and God help any bastard who got in my way.
Seventy-Two
I headed forward to the bridge. It seemed the likeliest place to start looking.
By the time I got there I'd already run into a few of the bad guys. I couldn't recall precisely what had happened during these encounters. All I knew was that the ice knife was even bloodier than it had been before.
The bridge was a kind of gallery affair with a broad, curved windscreen overlooking Nagelfar's prow. The five-strong crew were busy arguing as I arrived. One man, clearly the captain, was demanding that a course be set for Svartalfheim. Two pilots, seated at computer-controlled flying stations, disagreed. They were in favour of attacking the people on the ground with Nagelfar's guns. It was too good an opportunity to pass up, they said. There'd never be a chance like this again.
Voices rose. The captain wasn't managing to assert his authority. The chain of command had broken down, a sure sign of a retreat turning into a shambles.
I slit the captain's throat in mid-sentence. He was so involved in the argument that he never heard me approach.
A navigator went next. By that point the two pilots had realised they were in the shit, and decided to go on the offensive with Nagelfar while they still could. Maybe they thought they could hold me to ransom by turning the ship's guns on my comrades. Maybe they thought this would deter me somehow.
When I was finished with them, I rounded on the fifth man. He was young, a subaltern or some such. Completely bricking it.
"Can you fly this thing?" I asked.
He shook his head. "N-no. I'm only a j-junior rating. You n-need two men anyway."
"So I've effectively crashed us then?"
He nodded. "Y-yes sir."
The blackness in me wasn't bothered. The blackness didn't have much interest in self-preservation. That wasn't the way it worked.
"Oops," I said.
Thwunk!
That was the sound of a punch coming out of nowhere, connecting with my skull. My head whiplashed sideways. Neck tendons cracked.
Thwunk!
A second punch, even harder than the first. The whole of my right cheek went numb, then suddenly seemed to expand like a piece of popcorn in the microwave, puffing out with pain. I said goodbye to another molar.
"Whoof!"
That was the breath being driven from my lungs by a fist ramming into my stomach with the force of a steam piston. The tooth was expelled along with it.
"Cunt."
That was Cy, looking down on me as I crawled on all fours at his feet. I was wheezing, and my head was a squall of sirens, my vision wavering as though I was underwater.
He booted me in the midriff, spinning me over onto my back. I tried to lift the knife. He stamped on my wrist, crushing it to the floor.
Alarms wailed on the bridge. Red lights whirled and flashed. The deck began tilting beneath us, and I could hear Nagelfar's engines churning asynchronously. The ship was fighting to keep itself in the air, and failing.
If Cy was at all worried that Nagelfar was going down, he didn't show it.
"I've been itching to give you a good going over,"