The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [168]
Trinica’s scouts had been on the money. The hangar was cluttered with piles of supplies and crisscrossed with gantries. In their midst, looming over everything, was the colossal prow of the Storm Dog. Frey felt an angry sense of triumph at the sight.
Gotcha, you thieving, psychotic son of a bitch.
The hangar appeared to be empty, but Frey didn’t like the look of the loading bay. Before them was a clear space where the tractors entered the building to pick up and deposit cargo. Stacks of crates were piled up on three sides. Perfect territory for an ambush. He hesitated at the door.
“What are you doing? Get inside!” Trinica cried, as she slammed up against the wall next to him. Bullets pocked the brickwork nearby: another group of guards, heading their way from the far side of the compound.
“I don’t trust it!” he said. “It’s too easy! Grist’s smarter than this!”
“Don’t be stupid, Darian! How could there be an ambush waiting for us? He doesn’t know we’re coming!”
She was right. It was a surprise attack. Grist wouldn’t have had time to organize an ambush. Frey was giving him too much credit. They were outside, exposed, and more guards were coming. There was no more time to deliberate.
“Move it!” he shouted, waving them through. Bess went first, closely followed by the rest of the crew. He ran after them. Trinica and her men loosed a few potshots at their attackers and followed.
Jez was only a few meters in when she skidded to a stop. The look in her eyes as she turned back told Frey all he needed to know. She’d detected something with her heightened Mane senses that Frey had missed. “Cap’n!” she cried. “Go back! It’s a—”
The loading-bay door slammed down, shutting them in. Two dozen men sprang up from behind the crates, weapons leveled. The invaders’ assault came to a stumbling halt.
“—trap,” Jez finished belatedly.
There was the sound of weapons being primed behind them. Frey’s heart sank and kept on sinking. He squeezed his eyes closed.
“Yes,” said Trinica. “I’m afraid it is.”
FREY FELT LIKE HE was tipping into a yawning void. Her voice seemed to come from far away. It didn’t belong to the woman he’d known. It was a creature incalculably more terrible, the dark goddess that the men of the Delirium Trigger worshipped.
No. No, no, no. Not her. Not again!
Frey was no stranger to betrayal, whether suffering it or committing it himself. But this time, this single moment of utter, damnable loss … this one beat them all.
“Put down your weapons,” he heard himself say. His voice was flat. “Crake, take care of Bess.”
He surveyed the faces of the men behind the crates. The men of the Storm Dog. He recognized the bald head and bulbous eyes of Grist’s bosun, Crattle. He heard the clatter of weapons being thrown down and threw down his own. Crake was muttering soothing words to the golem, who was making threatening movements toward the men.
Frey looked over his shoulder. Trinica was there, her pistol trained on his back. He might have been looking at a statue, for all the emotion she showed.
None of it had been real. None. All this time he’d been fooling himself. He should have listened to sense. He should have learned his lesson on Kurg, when she stole the sphere and dismissed him with barely a word. She was a fake, a ghost, a wreck. The ruined husk of the woman he’d almost married. Just because she knew how to act the way she once had, it didn’t mean the emotions were real.
But he’d fallen for it. He’d neglected his crew, he’d ignored their protests, and he’d let her into their lives. All because he thought there was something there still worth fighting for. Some remnant of the past that he could kindle into life. A relic of the time before he’d run out on her, when things seemed honest and straightforward. When he’d loved with