Chris Wooding - Retribution Falls

‘It kept you alive,’ he pointed out.

‘That wasn’t living,’ she returned.

He had no answer to that.

‘So that’s the story,’ she said. ‘That’s what it takes to be a captain. Patience. Ruthlessness. Sacrifice. You’re too selfish to make that crew respect you, Darian. You surprised me once, but it won’t happen again.’

There was a knock at the door. A spasm of irritation crossed her face. ‘I gave orders that I wasn’t to be disturbed!’ she snapped.

‘It’s urgent, Cap’n!’ came a voice from the other side. ‘The Ketty Jay has gone!’

‘What?’ she cried, surging to her feet. She tore open the door to the cabin. A crewman was outside, obscured from Frey’s view by the door.

‘She were following us with her lights on,’ came the breathless report. ‘All of a sudden, the lights go out. By the time we got a spotlight over there, she were nowhere to be seen. She could’ve gone anywhere in the dark. She’s disappeared, Cap’n. Nobody knows where.’

Trinica’s head swivelled and she fixed Frey with a glare of utter malice.

Frey grinned. ‘Surprise!’

Jez, in the pilot’s seat of the Ketty Jay, flew on into the night. The craft was dark, inside and out. The light of the moon edged her face in brittle silver. It fell also onto the two bodies on the cockpit floor, and glittered in their blood. Dracken’s men. The iron pipe that had stoved in their heads lay between them.

Jez’s jaw was set hard. Navigation charts were spread on the dashboard next to her. She stared through the windglass at the world below, eyes fixed. The Ketty Jay slid through the darkness, high above the clouded mountains, a speck in the vast sky.

She could see the lights of other craft, visible at great distance. A flotilla of fighters surrounded a long, rectangular freighter. A prickle of shining dots signified a Navy corvette, cruising the horizon. And in between, there were the invisible vessels, like the Ketty Jay, that had reason to stay hidden and wanted to move unobserved. Stealthy shadows in the moonlight. A pilot wouldn’t see them unless they were very close, but Jez saw them all.

Even hours later, she was still trembling with the aftershocks of murder. Had there been a gun to hand she might have used it to threaten the men, then tied them up and kept them prisoner. But they had the guns, and she only had a length of pipe. She crept into the cockpit and brained the navigator before he even knew she was there. The pilot turned in his seat in time to receive the second blow across his forehead.

She’d told herself that she was only going to knock them out; but as with Fredger Cordwain, the Shacklemore man, it only took one blow to kill them. She was far stronger than her small frame suggested. Just another aspect of the change, along with her penetrating vision, her ability to heal bullet wounds in hours and the frightening hallucinations.

And the voices. The dissonant voices, the crew of that terrible craft, which loomed out of the endless fog of the Wrack. She could hear them now, their faint cries blowing on the wind that rushed past the hull of the Ketty Jay. Calling her. Calling her home.

Why not? Why not just go to them? Turn this crate to the north and get it all over with.

She was tired of this life. The last three years had been spent discarding one crew and joining up with another, never putting down roots. She kept her distance from the men and women she worked with because she knew, sooner or later, they’d find her out. It had been the same with the crew of the Ketty Jay. Eventually, she always had to run. Now that moment had come again.

Why stay in a world where you’re not wanted?

Every day, it got a little harder to resist the call of the Wrack. Every day eroded her willpower a little more. Was it only stubbornness that made her stay among people who would kill her if they knew what she was? Was it simply fear that prevented her from going to the north, where they lamented her absence, where she’d belong? Like the distant howl of a wolf pack, their cries stirred her, and she ached to go to them.

What’s stopping you, Jez? What’s stopping you?

What, indeed? Where else could she go from here? Did she imagine she could effect some kind of daring rescue in the Ketty Jay? No, that would be suicide. She wasn’t even very good at flying her. It would take a long time to get used to the many quirks of a craft as patched together as this. And even if she did somehow save Frey and the others, what then? How would she explain how she’d convinced Dracken’s crewman that she was dead?

It was just like all the times before, with all the other crews. The small things were adding up: her fantastically sharp eyesight; the way she never seemed to need sleep or food; how animals reacted around her; the uncanny healing after she got shot in Scarwater; the way she’d been unaffected by the fumes in Rook’s Boneyard.

And now there was this new ability to convincingly imitate a corpse. The first time, only Crake had seen it, and he hadn’t said a word. It could have been passed off as the Shacklemore man’s mistake. But twice?

Now the suspicious glances would begin. She’d start to hear that wary, mistrustful tone in their voices. Even on the Ketty Jay, where you didn’t ask about a person’s past, questions would be raised. They could accept a daemonist, but could they accept her? How long before Malvery insisted on giving her a check-up to solve the mystery? How long before they found her out?

The reason Fredger Cordwain thought she had no pulse was because she had no pulse.

The reason Dracken’s man thought she was dead was because she was.

It had happened three years ago.

The first Jez knew of the attack was when she heard the explosion. It was a dull, muffled roar that shook the ground and spilled the soup she was eating, scalding her fingers. A second explosion sent her scurrying to grab her thick fur-and-hide coat. She pulled up the hood, affixed the mask and goggles, and headed out of the warmth of the inn, up the stairs and into the blizzard.

She emerged onto the main thoroughfare of the tiny, remote town in Yortland that had been her home for a month. The dwellings to either side were low domes, built mostly underground, barely visible. The light from the small windows and the smoke from their chimneys pushed through the whirling snow.

There were others already outside: some were Yort locals, others were the Vard scientists who used this town as a base while they worked on the excavation nearby. All eyes were on the bright bloom of fire rising from the far side of the town. From the landing pad.

Her immediate thought was that a terrible accident had occurred, some tragic rupture in the fuel lines. Even before she wondered how many might have died, her stomach sank at the thought of being stranded in this place. The aircraft were their only link to the rest of the world. Here, on the northern tip of Yortland, civilisation was scattered and hard to find. There was no other settlement for a hundred kloms in any direction.

She felt a gloved hand on her upper arm and turned. She knew it was Riss, the expedition’s pilot, even though his face was hidden behind a fur-lined hood, mask and goggles. Nobody else touched her arm like that.

‘Are you alright?’ he shouted over the whistling wind. His voice was muffled.

‘Of course I’m alright. The explosion was over there.’

But then someone pointed to a dark shape approaching through the grey chaos in the sky, and the cries of alarm began. Jez felt the strength drain out of her as it took on form, huge and ragged and black. The drone of its engines was drowned out by the piercing, unearthly howling coming from its decks. It was a mass of dirty iron, oil and smoke, all spikes and rivets and shredded black pennants. A dreadnought, come from the Wrack, across the Poleward Sea to the shores of Yortland.