The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [198]
“Heading for that great big bloody rip in the sky. Don’t ask me why. I’m going back to ’em now.”
“Back?” Harkins was appalled. He’d left them?
“I had to draw off a few Blackhawks … er … Wait a minute.”
The tone of Pinn’s voice alarmed him. “What do you mean, wait a minute?” He flashed at full throttle through the battlefield, ascending hard. “What’s wrong?”
“The Cap’n’s playing chicken with a dreadnought.”
“He’s whaaaaat?” Harkins screamed. He came out of the main body of the battle, up into clearer sky, and spotted them immediately. The Ketty Jay was heading right into the center of the vortex. A dreadnought, many times its size, was lumbering out of it. And neither looked at all like getting out of the way.
Jez!
He angled the Firecrow toward them and put on all the speed he had.
“SHRAPNEL IN THE TAIL assembly!” Malvery called from the cupola. “I can see it! It looks like it’s coming loose! Waggle the flaps more!”
“I’m waggling as hard as I bloody can!” said Frey, waggling.
“Dump out the aerium tanks,” Jez advised. “We’ll sink underneath her.”
“We dump those tanks, we’ll go off course.”
“Isn’t that the idea?”
“We go off course, we’ll miss the vortex. We miss the vortex, we might not be able to get back to it. There’s no telling when or if we’ll have steering again.”
“You want to chase the Storm Dog with no steering?” Crake cried in disbelief.
“We are going into that vortex!” said Frey.
“There’s half a million tons of metal in the way!” Jez shouted.
“They’ll move,” he insisted.
“No, they won’t!”
Frey’s hand hovered above the valve that would execute an emergency purge of the aerium tanks. The Ketty Jay would dip out of the dreadnought’s path, but he’d never get her bow up again if he did. Not with that shrapnel in the tail assembly.
Hitting that valve meant giving up on Trinica forever. Not hitting it meant that he and his crew would end up splattered across the keel of that dreadnought.
He took his hand away.
“They’ll move,” he said.
“THEY WON’T MOVE!” HARKINS shouted at his captain, as if Frey could hear him. He didn’t know what the Cap’n was thinking, but he was furious at him for gambling with Jez’s life like that. Either the dreadnought hadn’t noticed them or whoever commanded it had decided to run them down rather than waste ammunition. The Ketty Jay would crumple like tinfoil against that armored keel.
Why doesn’t the Cap’n pull out of the way?
Maybe they were in trouble. Maybe they couldn’t move aside. In that case, a collision was inevitable. In that case …
He raced toward them at full throttle. He wasn’t sure what he could do about the situation when he got there, but a fierce determination blazed in him nonetheless. He was heady from defeating Slag, and he felt invincible. Somehow, he’d save them. He’d save her.
Pinn was farther away, approaching from another angle, yelling pointlessly at the Cap’n. He was as alarmed as Harkins and just as powerless to intervene.
Then an idea slipped into Harkins’s head. Powerless? Him? Not anymore. After all, he’d punched out a cat. Taking on a dreadnought seemed like the next logical step.
There was no time to think about it, anyway. No time to listen to the voice in his head that screamed, What are you doing?!!? He felt a hard calm overtake him. The kind of calm he’d once possessed in battle, before all those crashes and lost comrades broke his nerve. A colder, more dispassionate part of himself seized control, quelling the panic that beat at his mind. His brow creased into a stern frown, and, for the first time in years, he felt like someone to be reckoned with.
He slowed as he matched the Ketty Jay’s course, flying in a few dozen meters above them. Ahead was the dark metal landscape of the dreadnought. The Ketty Jay was heading dead into its keel, but Harkins was approaching above the level of the deck.
He could see the Manes emerging from hatches in the deck, swarming out like cockroaches. No wonder there had been nobody firing the guns. Presumably it was too dangerous to be up