The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [7]
“He dumped his tanks on you!” Pinn told Frey. “All his firefighting dusty stuff. Can hardly see you in the cloud! Ah, there’s more of them coming in now!”
Frey banked again. He heard Malvery open up with the autocannon above him. “Malvery! I said no!”
“Oh, now you’ve found your morals?”
“You’ve seen how they are! If we kill one of ’em, they’ll never leave us alone.”
“Cap’n, we should—”
His reply was cut short by a heavy thump from above that shook the whole aircraft. Frey felt the Ketty Jay plunge a few meters.
“You’ve got to be joking,” he muttered to himself.
“Cap’n!” Malvery cried, slightly hysterical this time. “He’s trying to land on us!”
The Ketty Jay rocked again. Frey swore under his breath. The pilot wasn’t trying to land on them. He was trying to force them down, bumping them from above with his undercarriage wheels. What kind of crazed idiot did anything half that dangerous?
“Can we please shoot them?” Pinn cried.
“I’ve just robbed a bunch of orphans!” Frey snapped. “I don’t want anything else on my conscience today!”
“I thought you said you were an orphan?” Pinn said. “Doesn’t that make it alright?”
Frey bit his lip and sent the Ketty Jay into a dive, venting aerium gas from the tanks to add speed to his descent. The dust had sloughed off the windglass, smearing as it went. It was enough to see through, barely.
“Lose ’em in the valleys?” Jez suggested.
“Lose ’em in the valleys,” Frey agreed.
Frey was getting angry, and when he got angry he got reckless. He dearly wanted to machine-gun the villagers out of the sky, but he was too afraid of the consequences. His specialties were minor smuggling, petty theft, a gentle bit of piracy, where nobody got shot and not too much was taken. They were soft crimes that the Navy was far too busy to concern themselves with. Once in a while somebody died, but usually it was a guard too stupid to drop his weapon or a criminal who probably deserved it anyway. People who accepted the risks and were paid to take them.
Frey didn’t count himself in that category, of course. In some vague, ill-defined way, he thought himself more noble than that.
Innocent folk, however, were another matter. These villagers only wanted their money back. Their dogged persistence made him feel guilty, and he was mad at them for that. Theft was only fun if you didn’t have to think about the consequences. He didn’t want the orphanage to close or those children to starve. He’d sort of assumed that the villagers would stump up to cover the shortfall. But since they were so desperate to get it back, he began to wonder whether they could actually afford it.
Bloody yokels. They were ruining his first successful escapade in months.
The valleys in this part of the Vardenwood were deep and narrow. A complex river system snaked through trenches between the hills, banked by sheer, rocky slopes. Down on the valley floor, the walls pressed in tight. The waters thundered through, swollen by the spring floods, glittering silver-gray in the moonlight.
Frey knew the Ketty Jay was operating well below par, but he could still fly better than any amateur could. It took nerve to race through enclosed spaces in an aircraft at night. Nerve that he was betting his pursuers didn’t have.
“They’re taking potshots at us, Cap’n,” Pinn said in his ear.
“Follow me down into the valleys. Buzz them when you can. Just keep them occupied.”
Pinn muttered something Frey didn’t quite catch and then shut up again.
Frey rubbed at his earcuff absently. The early versions of the daemon-powered communicators had leeched energy from their users, tiring them out the more they talked to one another. Crake had refined them since, giving them better range and minimizing the draining effect. Now they could gabble on to their heart’s content, but that only meant they argued and bitched more. Frey wondered if he hadn’t preferred the way it was before.