Chris Wooding - Retribution Falls

‘One day a messenger from the surgery turned up at my house. There was a friend of mine, been brought in gravely ill. His appendix, was what it was. It was early in the morning, and I hadn’t gone to bed from the night before. Been drinking the whole time.’

Crake noted that the light-hearted tone was draining out of Malvery’s voice. He realised suddenly that he was in the midst of something serious. But Malvery kept going, forcing himself to sound casual.

‘Well, I knew I was drunk but I also knew it was my friend and I believed I was the best damn surgeon for the job, drunk or sober. I’d got so used to being good that I thought I couldn’t do no wrong. Wouldn’t trust it to anyone else. Some junior doc tried to stop me but I just shrugged him off. Wish he’d tried harder now.’

Malvery stopped suddenly. He heaved a great sigh, as if expelling something from deep in his lungs. When he spoke again it was with a deep resignation in his tone. What had been done had been done, and could never be undone.

‘It should have been easy, but I got careless. Slipped with the scalpel, went right through an artery. He bled out right in front of me, on the table, while I was trying to fix him up.’

Even obsessed with his own misery, Crake felt some sympathy for the big man. He knew exactly how he felt. Perhaps that was why they’d instinctively liked each other when they first met. Each sensed in the other a tragic victim of their own arrogance.

Malvery cleared his throat. ‘I lost it all after that,’ he said. ‘Lost my licence. Lost my wife. Spent my money. Didn’t care. And I drank. I drank and drank and drank, and the money got less and less, and one day I didn’t have nothing left. I think that was about when the Cap’n found me.’

‘Frey?’

Malvery pushed back the round, green-lensed spectacles on his broad nose. ‘Right. We met in some port, I forget which. He bought me some drinks. Said he could use a doctor. I said I wasn’t much of a doctor, and he said that was okay, ’cause he wasn’t gonna pay me much anyway.’ He guffawed suddenly. ‘Ain’t that just like him?’

Crake cracked a smile. ‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

‘I ain’t never picked up a scalpel since that day when I killed my friend. I don’t think I could. I keep those instruments polished in the infirmary, but I’ll never use ’em. I’m good for patching you up and a bit of stitching, but I’d never trust myself to open you up. Not any more. You wanna know the truth, I’m half a doctor. But that’s okay. ’Cause I found a home on the Ketty Jay, and I’ve got the Cap’n to thank for it.’ He paused as Frey screamed from down the corridor. A spasm of anger crossed his face, but was gone again in an instant. ‘He’s a good man, whatever faults he’s got. Been a good friend to me.’

Crake remembered how Trinica had put a gun to his head, and how Frey had given up the codes to his beloved aircraft rather than see the daemonist shot.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘To me, too.’

Crake knotted his fingers behind his head and leaned back against the wall of the cell. Silo, Harkins, and now Malvery: Frey certainly had a thing for picking up refugees. Granted, they were all useful to him in some way, but all owed a debt of gratitude and loyalty to their captain that Crake hadn’t detected until recently. Perhaps Frey’s intentions had been entirely mercenary—it could be that he just liked cheap crew—but at least half his men viewed him as a saviour of sorts. Maybe Frey didn’t need them, but they certainly needed him. Without their captain, Silo would end up lynched or sent back to slavery in Samarla, Harkins would be forced to face a life without wings, and Malvery would be a destitute alcoholic once again.

And what of the rest of them? He himself had found a place to hide while he stayed ahead of the Shacklemores. Pinn had found a place that would tolerate him, where he could forever avoid the reality of his sweetheart in his doomed search for riches and fame. And Jez? Well, maybe Jez just wanted to be in a place where nobody asked any questions.

Like it or not, Frey gave them all something they needed. He gave them the Ketty Jay.

‘We’re all running from something,’ Crake said wryly. Malvery’s words, spoken weeks ago, before they’d shot down the Ace of Skulls and all this had begun. Malvery bellowed with laughter, recognising the quote.

Crake looked up at the ceiling of the cell. ‘I deserve to be here,’ he said.

Malvery shrugged. ‘Then so do I.’

‘Ain’t no deserving, or otherwise,’ Silo said, his bass voice rolling out from deep in his chest. ‘There’s what is, and what ain’t, and there’s what you do about it. Regret’s just a way to make you feel okay that you’re not makin’ amends. A man can waste a life with regrets.’

‘Wise words,’ said Malvery, tipping the Murthian a salute. ‘Wise words.’

Distantly, Frey screamed again.

Frey had been shot twice in his life, beaten up multiple times by members of both sexes, bitten by dogs and impaled through the gut by a Dakkadian bayonet, but until today he’d always been of the opinion that the worst pain in the world was cramp.

There was nothing quite so dreadful to Frey as waking up in the middle of the night with that tell-tale sense of tightness running like a blade down the length of his calf. It usually happened after a night on the rum or when he’d taken too many drops of Shine, but on the cramped bunk in his quarters he often lay awkwardly and cut off the circulation to one leg or the other, even when dead sober.

The worst moments were those few seconds before the agony hit. There was always time enough to try and twist out of it in such a way that the pain wouldn’t come. It never worked. The inevitable seizure that followed would leave him whooping breathlessly, writhing around in his bunk and clutching his leg. It invariably ended with him knocking multiple items of luggage from the hammock overhead, which crashed down onto him in a tumble of cases and dirty clothes.

Finally, after the chaos of bewildering, undeserved pain, would come a relief so sweet that it was almost worth going through the preceding trauma to get there. He’d lie half-buried in the luggage, gasping and thanking whoever was listening that he was still alive.

Frey had learned long ago that the violent clenching of the muscles in his lower leg could send him wild with agony. Today, his torturer had introduced him to the joys of electrocution. Instead of just his leg seizing up, now it happened to his entire body at once.

If he survived this, Frey decided, he’d have to rethink his definition of pain.

Blinding, shocking torment; his back arching involuntarily; muscles tensed so hard they could break bone; teeth gritted and jaw pulled back in a grimace.

And then the pain was gone. The joy was enough to make him want to break down and weep. He slumped forward in the chair as much as his restraints would allow, sweat dripping off his brow, chest heaving.

‘Do you want to be hurt? Is that it?’ the torturer asked.

Frey raised his head with some difficulty. The torturer was looking at him earnestly, wide grey eyes sympathetic and understanding. He was a handsome fellow, square-jawed and neat, wearing a carefully pressed light blue uniform in the ducal colours of Lapin.

‘You should have a go at this,’ Frey said, forcing out a fierce grin. ‘Gives you quite a kick.’

The guard standing by the door—a burly man in an identical uniform to the torturer—smiled at that for a moment, before realising he wasn’t supposed to. The torturer tutted and shook his head. He moved over to the machine that stood next to Frey’s chair. It was a forbidding metal contraption, the size of a cabinet, with a face of dials and semicircular gauges.