Chris Wooding - Retribution Falls

Kenham and Jodd were down in the cargo hold when they arrived, disentangling the crates from their webbing. They were a pair of ugly bruisers, ex-dock workers drafted in for labour by the Navy. The only people on the crew they respected were each other; everyone else was slightly scared of them.

Jodd was smoking a roll-up. Frey couldn’t remember ever seeing him without a cigarette smouldering in his mouth, even when handling crates of live ammunition, as he was now. As captain, he took an executive decision to say nothing. Jodd had never blown them all to pieces before. With a track record like that, it seemed sensible to let it ride.

Frey lowered the cargo ramp and they began hauling the crates out. The sun hammered them as they emerged from the cool shadow of the Ketty Jay. The air was moist and smelled of wet clay, and there was a lingering scent of gunpowder.

‘Where do you want ’em?’ Kenham called to Frey. Frey vaguely waved at a clear spot some way downhill, close to the trenches. He didn’t want those boxes of ammo too near the Ketty Jay when he took off. Kenham rolled his eyes—all the way over there?—but he didn’t protest.

Frey leaned against the Ketty Jay’s landing strut with the bottle of rum in his hand, and watched the rest of his crew do the work. Since it took two men to a box, a fifth worker would only get in the way, he reasoned. Besides, it was captain’s privilege to be lazy. He swigged from the bottle and surveyed the empty site. For the first time he noted that there were some signs of conflict: burn marks on the walls of the red stone houses; sections where the earthworks had been blasted and soil scattered.

Old wounds? This place had probably seen a lot of action. But then, there was that smell of gunpowder. Weapons had been fired, and recently.

He cast a bleary eye over his crew, to be sure they were getting on with their job, and then pushed off from the landing strut and wandered away from the Ketty Jay. He headed towards the village.

The houses were poor Samarlan peasant dwellings, bare and abandoned. Wooden chicken runs and pig pens had fallen into ruin. The windows were just square holes in the wall, some of them with their shutters hanging unevenly, drifting back and forth in the faint breeze. As Frey got closer he could see more obvious signs of recent attacks. Some walls were riddled with bullet holes.

His skin began to prickle with sweat. He drained the last of the rum and tossed the bottle aside.

The dwellings were built around a central clearing that once had been grassy but was now churned into rapidly drying mud. Frey peered around the corner of the nearest house. Despite the racket from the forest birds, it was unnervingly quiet.

He looked through the window, into the house. The furniture had long gone, leaving a mean, bare shell, dense with hot shadow. The sun outside was so bright that it was hard to see. It took him a few seconds to spot the man in the corner.

He was slumped, motionless, beneath a window on the other side of the house. Frey could hear flies, and smell blood.

By now his eyes had adjusted to the gloom. Enough to see that the man was dead, shot through the cheek, his jaw hanging askew and pasted onto his face with dried gore. Enough to see that he was wearing a Vardic uniform. Enough to see that he was one of theirs.

He heard a sound: sharp and hard, like someone stepping on a branch. The voices of his crew, suddenly raised in a clamour.

With a cold flood of nausea, he realised what was happening. Panic plunged in on him, and he bolted, running for the only safety he knew. Running for the Ketty Jay.

As he rounded the corner of the house, he saw Kenham lying face down next to a sundered crate. Jodd was backing away from the trenches, firing his revolver at the men that were clambering out of them. Rifle-wielding Dakkadians: two dozen or more. Small, blond-haired, faces broad and eyes narrow. They’d hidden when they heard the Ketty Jay approaching. Perhaps they’d even had time to throw the bodies of the dead Vards into the trenches. Now they were springing their ambush.

Rabby and Martley were fleeing headlong towards the Ketty Jay, as Frey was. There was fear on their faces.

One of the Dakkadians fell back into the trench with a howl as Jodd scored a hit, but their numbers were overwhelming. Three others sighted and shot him dead.

Frey barely registered Jodd’s fate. The world was a bouncing, jolting agony of moment after moment, each one bringing him a fraction closer to the gaping mouth of the Ketty Jay’s cargo ramp. His only chance was to get inside. His only chance to live.

Dakkadian rifles cracked and snapped. Their targets were Rabby and Martley. Several of the soldiers had broken into a sprint, chasing after them. A shout went up in their native tongue as someone spotted Frey, racing towards the Ketty Jay from the far side. Frey didn’t listen. He’d blocked out the rest of the world, tightened himself to a single purpose. Nothing else mattered but getting to that ramp.

Bullets chipped the turf around them. Martley stumbled and rolled hard, clutching his upper leg, screaming. Rabby hesitated, broke stride for the briefest moment, then ran on. The Dakkadians pulled Martley down as he tried to get up, then began stabbing him with the double-bladed bayonets on the end of their rifles. Martley’s shrieks turned to gurgles.

The cargo ramp drew closer. Frey felt the sinister brush of air as a bullet barely missed his throat. Rabby was running up the hill, yelling as he came. Two Dakkadians were close behind him.

Frey’s foot hit the ramp. He fled up to the top and pulled the lever to raise it. The hydraulic struts hummed into life.

Outside, he heard Rabby’s voice. ‘Lower the ramp! Cap’n! Lower the bloody ramp!’

But Frey wasn’t going to lower the ramp. Rabby was too far away. Rabby wasn’t going to make it in time. Rabby wasn’t getting anywhere near this aircraft with those soldiers hot on his heels.

‘Cap’n!’ he screamed. ‘Don’t you leave me here!’

Frey tapped in the code that would lock the ramp, preventing it from being opened from the keypad on the outside. That done, he drew his revolver and aimed it at the steadily closing gap at the end of the ramp. He backed up until he bumped against one of the supply crates that hadn’t yet been unloaded. The rectangle of burning sunlight shining through the gap thinned to a line.

‘Cap’n! ’

The line disappeared as the cargo ramp thumped closed, and Frey was alone in the quiet darkness of the cargo hold, safe in the cold metal womb of the Ketty Jay.

The Dakkadians had overrun this position. Navy intelligence had screwed up, and now his crew was dead. Those bastards! Those rotting bastards!

He turned to run, to race up the access stairs, through the passageway, into the cockpit. He was getting out of here.

He ran right into the bayonet of the Dakkadian creeping up behind him.

Pain exploded in his guts, shocking him, driving the breath from his lungs. He gaped at the soldier before him. A boy, no more than sixteen. Blond hair spilling out from beneath his cap. Blue eyes wide. He was trembling, almost as stunned as Frey.

Frey looked down at the twin blades of the Dakkadian bayonet, side by side, sticking out of his abdomen. Blood, black in the darkness, slid thinly along the blades and dripped to the floor.

The boy was scared. Hadn’t meant to stab him. When he snuck aboard the Ketty Jay, he probably thought only to capture a crewman for his fellows. He hadn’t killed anyone before. He had that look.

As if in a trance, Frey raised his revolver and aimed it point-blank at the boy’s chest. As if in a trance, the boy let him.

Frey squeezed the trigger. The bayonet was wrenched from his body as the boy fell backwards. The pain sent him to the edge of unconsciousness, but no further.