Chris Wooding - Retribution Falls

Frey added aerium at seven hundred metres to halt their descent, and pushed onward along the length of the chasm. Visibility was better now. The mist offered hints of their surroundings. It was possible to see the gloomy immensity of the mountains around them, if only as smudged impressions. To descend a few dozen metres more would bring the lava river into detail: the rolling, sludgy torrent of black and red and yellow. The heat down there would be unimaginable.

‘Contacts,’ said Crake again. ‘Ahead and to the left a little. We—oh, wait. There’s another. Two of them. Three. Three of them.’

‘There’s three?’

‘Four,’ Crake corrected. He showed Frey the compass. The needles were in a fan, all pointing roughly ahead. Frey frowned as he looked at it, and for a moment his vision wavered out of focus. He blinked, and the feeling passed. He swore to himself that he’d never again drink excessively the night before doing anything life-threatening.

‘Any of them directly in front of us?’

‘One’s pretty close. Twenty metres below. Oh!’

‘Don’t just say “oh!” ’ Frey snapped. ‘Oh, what?’

‘One of the needles moved . . . now it’s changed back . . . now it’s gone back again.’

‘What you mean, it changed?’ Frey demanded. He wiped sweat from his brow. All this tension was making him feel sick.

‘It moved! What do you think I mean?’ Crake replied in exasperation. ‘Can you stop a moment?’

‘Well, why’s it changing? Is there something there or not?’ Frey was getting flustered now. He felt a fluttering sensation of panic come over him.

‘There’s more than four of those things out there,’ said Jez, who had got up from her station and was looking at the compass. ‘I’d guess it keeps changing the needles to show us the nearest four.’

‘There’s one thirty metres ahead!’ Crake cried.

‘But is it above us or below us?’ Frey said.

‘Forty metres above.’

‘Then why tell me?’ he shouted.

‘Because you told me to! ’ Crake shouted back. ‘Will you stop this damn craft?’

But Frey didn’t want to. He wanted to get this over with. He wanted to be past these invisible enemies and away from this place. There was a terrible feeling of wrongness stealing over him, a numbness prickling up from his toes. He felt flustered and harassed.

‘What the bloody shit is going on, Crake?’ he snarled, leaning forward to try and see what, if anything, was above them. ‘Someone talk to me! Where are they?’

‘There’s one, there’s three in front of us, one behind us now . . . umm . . . two above, thirty and twenty metres, there’s . . .’ Crake swore. ‘The numbers keep changing because you’re moving! How am I supposed to read them out fast enough?’

‘Just tell me if we’re going to hit anything, Crake! It’s pretty damn simple!’

Jez was staring in bewilderment. ‘Will you two calm down? You’re acting like a pair of—’

But then Frey recoiled from the window with a yell. ‘There’s something out there!’

‘What was it?’ Jez asked.

‘We’ve got one twenty . . . ten metres ahead . . . it’s below us though . . .’ Crake was saying.

‘It looked like . . . I don’t know, it looked like it had a face,’ Frey was babbling. His stomach griped and roiled. He could smell his own sweat, and he felt filthy. He wiped at the back of his hands to try and clean them a little, but all it did was smear more dirt into his skin. ‘The ghosts!’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s the ghosts of Rook’s Boneyard!’

‘There aren’t any ghosts, Cap’n,’ Jez said, but her face was red in the lava-light and her voice sounded strange and echoey. Her plain features seemed sly. Did she know something he didn’t? A blast of maniacal laughter came from the mess, Pinn laughing hysterically at something. It sounded like the cackle of a conspirator.

‘Of course there are ghosts!’ Frey turned his attention back to the windglass, trying to will the mist aside. ‘Everyone says.’

‘Two of them are behind us now,’ Crake droned in the background. ‘One ahead, one passing to the side.’

‘Which side?’

‘Does it matter?’

Something swept past the windglass, a stir in the mist. Frey saw the stretched shape of a human form and distorted, ghastly features. He shied back from the windglass with a gasp.

‘What is it?’

‘Didn’t you see it?’

‘I didn’t see anything!’

Frey’s vision was slipping in and out of focus, and refused to stay steady. He burped in his throat, and tasted acid and rotten eggs.

‘Cap’n . . .’ said Crake.

‘I think something’s wrong,’ Frey murmured.

‘Cap’n . . . the second set of numbers . . .’

‘What second set of—’

‘The numbers! They’re counting up from minus twenty towards zero! It’s coming at us from below!’

‘Cap’n! You’re drifting off altitude! You’re diving!’ Jez cried.

Frey saw the altimeter sliding down and grabbed the controls, pulling the Ketty Jay level.

‘It’s still coming!’ Crake shrieked.

‘Move!’ Jez cried, and Frey boosted the engines. The Ketty Jay surged forward, and a split second later there was a deafening explosion outside, slamming against the hull and throwing Crake and Jez across the cabin. The craft heeled hard, swinging to starboard, and Frey fought with the controls as they were propelled blindly into the red murk. The Ketty Jay felt sluggish and wounded. Frey caught a glimpse of the compass on the floor, its needles spinning and switching crazily.

They’re all around us!

Crake started shrieking. ‘Daemons! There are daemons at the windows!’ Frey’s vision blurred and stayed blurred. There seemed to be no strength in his limbs.

‘Cap’n! Above and to starboard!’ Jez shouted.

Frey looked, and saw a round shadow in the mist. Growing, darkening as it approached. A ghost. A great black ghost.

No. A sphere. A metal sphere studded with spikes.

A floating mine.

Jez grabbed the flight stick and wrenched the Ketty Jay to port. Frey fell bonelessly out of his seat. Crake screamed.

There was another explosion. Then blackness, and silence.

Frey came to a kind of bleary awareness some time later, to find himself crumpled on the floor of the Ketty Jay’s cockpit. His cheek was pressed to the metal, wet with drool. His head pounded as if his brain was trying to kick its way out of his skull.

He groaned and stirred. Jez was sitting in the pilot’s seat. She looked down at him.

‘You’re back,’ she said. ‘How do you feel?’

He swore a few times to give her an idea. Crake was collapsed in the opposite corner, contorted uncomfortably beneath the navigator’s desk.

Frey tried to remember how he’d got in this state. He was tempted to blame it on alcohol, but he was certain that he hadn’t been drinking since last night. The last thing he remembered was flying through the fog and fretting about the numbers on the compass.

‘What just happened?’ he asked, pulling himself into a sitting position.

Jez had the compass and the charts spread out untidily on the dash. She consulted both before replying. ‘You all went crazy. Fumes from the lava river, I suppose. It would explain all the ghosts and hallucinations and paranoia.’ She tapped the compass with a fingernail. ‘Turns out this thing is to warn us where the magnetic floating mines are. Someone’s gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure this secret hideout stays secret.’

Frey fought down a swell of nausea. He felt like he’d been poisoned.