Chris Wooding - Retribution Falls

‘Don’t fire till they’re close enough to hit! We’ve not got much ammo for that cannon!’

‘Right-o!’

He turned to his navigator. ‘I need a plan, Jez.’

She was plotting frantically with a pair of compasses. ‘This craft has Blackmore P-12s, right?’

‘Uh?’

‘The thrusters. P-12s.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Okay.’ She looked up from her chart. ‘I have an idea.’

Pinn’s mouth tasted like decomposing mushrooms and his peripheral vision was a swarming haze. He felt like there wasn’t a drop of moisture in his body and yet his bladder throbbed insistently. He was utterly detached from the world. Reality was somewhere else. He was cocooned in his own private suffering.

And yet, some faint part of him was alarmed to find that he was in the cockpit of his Skylance, racing over the Highlands, pursued by four fighter craft intent on shooting him down. That part was urging him to sharpen up pretty quickly and pay attention. Eventually, he began to listen to it.

With some difficulty, he craned around and looked over his shoulder. The enemy craft were close enough to make out now. He recognised the distinctive shape of Norbury Equalisers: their bulbous, rounded cockpits right up front; their straight, thick wings, cut off at the ends; their narrow, slightly arched bodies. Norburys were a pain in the arse. Speedy and highly manoeuvrable. They were like flies: annoyingly hard to swat. And when you got frustrated, you made mistakes, and that was when they took you out.

He could outrun them, for sure. He could outrun just about anything in his modified Skylance. But an outflyer’s job wasn’t to save his own neck. He had to protect the Ketty Jay. Besides, running was for pussies.

The Ketty Jay was to starboard. He saw her change tack, swinging towards the west, and he banked to match. The horizon became uneven as the edge of the Eastern Plateau came into view, a hundred kloms ahead of them. Beyond it, invisible, the land fell away in the steep, sheer cliffs and jagged, crushed peaks of the Hookhollows.

Pinn frowned. Where did they think they were going? They might be able to make it to the mountains, where there would be ravines and defiles to use as cover, but there was still no way the Ketty Jay could outmanoeuvre an Equaliser.

He glanced to port. The Delirium Trigger was safely out of the race, but the Equalisers were banking to intercept the Ketty Jay on her new course, and they were closing the gap even faster than before.

Minutes ticked by. The slow, excruciating minutes of the long-distance chase. Pinn’s world shrank back to the pulsing of his hangover, the low roar of the thrusters, the shudder and tremble of the Skylance. But every time he looked around, the Equalisers were closer. One thing was clear: whatever the Ketty Jay was heading for, she wouldn’t make it before the Equalisers reached her.

Then, in the far distance, he saw an indistinct fuzz in the air. Gradually the fuzz darkened, until there could be no question as to what it was. Just beyond the lip of the Eastern Plateau was a line of threatening clouds. The clear blue of the sky ended abruptly in a piled black bank of gathering thunderheads.

The Ketty Jay was running for the storm.

‘How’d you know that was there, you clever bitch?’ he murmured, out of grudging respect for Jez. He naturally assumed it wasn’t the captain’s doing.

He checked where the Equalisers were. Behind him now, but closer still, flying in tight formation. Organised. Disciplined. Soon they’d be within firing range.

He shook his head and spat into the footwell. ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he snarled. He was bored with the chase and angry at his nagging headache. The fact that the enemy were flying in such neat formation inexplicably annoyed him. If someone didn’t do something soon, those Equalisers would start taking shots at them, and Pinn was damned if he was going to present his tail to four sets of machine guns.

‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Let’s play.’

He broke away from the Ketty Jay in a high, curving loop. At its apex, he rolled the craft to bring him right-side up again. The pursuing fighters were below and ahead of him now. They’d seen the threat but were slow to react, unsure if he was fleeing or fighting. Nobody expected a single craft to take on four: it was suicidal.

But death was a concept that Pinn wasn’t really smart enough to understand. He didn’t have the imagination to envisage eternity. Oblivion was unfathomable. How could he be scared of something when he only had the vaguest notion of it? So he dived down towards the pursuing fighters with a whoop of joy, and opened up with his machine guns.

The Equalisers scattered as he plunged among them like a cat among birds. They banked and rolled and dived, darting out of his line of fire as he cut through the formation and out the other side. Lesser craft would have been tagged, but the Equalisers were just quick enough to evade him.

Pinn pulled the Skylance into a climb, rolling and banking as he did, making himself a difficult target. G-forces wrenched at him. His hangover throbbed in protest at the abuse, but the adrenaline was kicking in now, clearing away the cobwebs. He fought to keep track of the Equalisers as they wheeled through the sky. Three of them were reorganising, continuing their pursuit of the Ketty Jay. One had peeled off and was angling for a shot at Pinn.

One? One? Pinn was insulted. Ignoring the fighter that was trying to engage him, he flew towards the main formation. They’d streaked ahead, dismissing him. They thought they’d got too much of a head start while he was turning around. They thought he had no chance of catching them.

They were wrong.

Pinn hit the thrusters and left his pursuer aiming at empty sky. The Skylance howled gleefully as it accelerated, eating up the distance between Pinn and his targets. He came in from directly behind, growing in their blind spot. He was forced to fly straight to avoid notice, but he was acutely aware that by doing so he was allowing the fourth Equaliser to line up on his tail. He held steady for a dangerous moment, then loosed off a fusillade at the nearest plane.

Whether it was luck, instinct, or skill, the pilot spotted him an instant before he fired. The Equaliser banked hard and the bullets chipped across its flank and underwing, instead of hitting the tail assembly. Pinn cursed and rolled away just as the Equaliser on his tail sent a volley of tracer fire his way. The Skylance danced between the bullets and dived out of the line of fire.

Pinn jinked left and right, keeping his movements unpredictable.

He twisted his neck round, trying to get a fix on his opponents. The most important factor in aerial combat was knowing where your enemies were. He kept up a frantic evasion pattern until he spotted two of the Equalisers dwindling in the distance, continuing their pursuit of the Ketty Jay. The plane he’d damaged was still in the air and still a threat, though it was trailing a thin line of smoke that made it easy to find. Burned by his sneak attack, that pilot had decided to deal with Pinn.

He felt better once he’d located the fourth Equaliser. He had two of them on his tail now. They respected him enough that they couldn’t turn their backs on him. Now all he had to do was keep them busy awhile.

He launched into a new sequence of evasions, leading them away from the Ketty Jay as he corkscrewed and twisted and rolled. The Equalisers homed in on him from different angles, doing their best to trap him, but he could see their tactics and refused to play along. The one he’d damaged was limping slightly, a little slow and clumsy, and its pilot couldn’t lock in with his companion. Their manoeuvres were pretty but came to nothing. Sporadic machine-gun fire chattered behind him, but it was more hopeful than effective.