Chris Wooding - The Ace of Skulls

Crake stared, unable to believe his eyes.

‘No!’ Frey cried, his voice bubbling with blood. He spat and hauled in a breath. ‘Nobody shoot!’ he yelled with as much volume as he could manage.

‘Put them guns down!’ Samandra shouted, with considerably more.

The soldiers didn’t put their guns down, but they didn’t fire either. They fell back, moving aside for the stranger. Some of them scrambled to get away. Crake could feel the fear emanating from her even at this distance. Not like the focused power of the Imperators, just the instinctive terror caused by the presence of a daemon.

Onward she came, looking to her left and right, staring curiously at the people around her as if she wasn’t quite sure what they were all doing there. As she advanced, pieces fell from her, great burned scabs peeling away from her face and limbs, leaving her moist and raw beneath. She walked hunched over, like a wounded animal, and as more of her flaked away Crake saw more of what lay beneath.

A gaunt body in ragged overalls. Sallow skin, stretched taut like parchment over her bones. Teeth long and pointed. Fingernails like talons. Eyes a mix of yellow and red. A ghoul of the skies. A Mane.

Jez, and yet not Jez. Not any more.

Then the soldiers cried out and cringed down, and even Samandra stepped back and swore under her breath. As the wreck of a nearby Awakener frigate dipped out of sight, a great black prow broke through the smoke with a bellow of engines. A colossal mass of dirty metal and spikes and rivets, ploughing towards them through a hole in the convoy, ignoring the explosions all around it. Thick chains trailed in its wake like great tendrils, dangling behind and beneath it. The sight of it oppressed them, robbed their courage, nailed them to the spot.

A Mane Dreadnought. And it was coming right for them.

At the sight of it, Jez began staggering forward faster, heading towards the aft end of the Delirium Trigger ’s deck. She’d found strength from somewhere; her limp hampered her less. She let out a screech as she went, something inhuman, which cut through the air and froze Crake’s blood.

She’s turned. She’s really turned at last .

As if she’d heard his thoughts, she stumbled to a halt, and turned her head and stared right at him. She looked from him to the Cap’n and back again. And horrible though it was, her face softened a little, and for a moment Crake saw in her the old Jez he’d known. His friend and companion. The woman he’d shared his darkest secret with.

He raised an arm in farewell. She just gazed at him, her head tilted slightly to the side. But though she gave him no more sign than that, he thought he read a farewell in her eyes all the same.

Then she turned and sprinted across the deck. The soldiers cowered as the dreadnought swooped across the Delirium Trigger , its keel roaring by mere metres overhead. A foul-smelling wind whipped around them, stinking of oil and decay. Crake saw a nightmarish blur of faces gathered at the gunwale, and heard the howling and shrieking of the Manes as they pawed the air with sharp-fingered hands. Then the chains that dragged behind the dreadnought smashed into the deck, lashing across the Delirium Trigger ’s back like whips, ploughing her with furrows. Jez sprang, and for a moment was lost within the forest of whirling chains; then the dreadnought was past, flying away into the sky, and Jez was clinging on to one of them. Crake watched in awe as she climbed, scampering up the links towards the Manes above, who reached down with long scrawny arms to help her on board.

She was lost to sight behind another frigate, and the dreadnought carried her away.

‘Can someone explain what exactly happened just then?’ asked Celerity, her eyes wide.

‘She’s gone to be with her people,’ said Crake, sadly.

The explosion that tore through the Delirium Trigger knocked them all off their feet. Crake fell beneath Frey; the Cap’n screamed with the pain of the impact. Quickly Crake pulled him up, no time for sympathy, dragging him towards the Ketty Jay . The Delirium Trigger was beginning to list. A hit in the aerium tanks from the anti-aircraft guns. She wouldn’t be in the air much longer. If the Azryx device didn’t take her out, her impact with the ground would.

The soldiers were running for the Ketty Jay with a kind of controlled panic. Samandra ran ahead of them into the craft, while Kyne took Frey’s other arm and helped to haul him across the deck. The Cap’n was dazed with pain, eyes swimming in and out of focus. Behind them came Crund, carrying his mistress.

Another blast shook the deck as they were hurrying up the cargo ramp. Crake stumbled into a hydraulic strut, but he kept his feet this time. On into the hold they went, where the soldiers were securing themselves to anything they could grab. He saw Grissom in there, Bess too, but he didn’t have time to stop.

‘Shut that ramp!’ he called over his shoulder at Celerity, who was the last one inside. The Ketty Jay was tilting with the Delirium Trigger , locked to the deck by its magnetic skids. Anything not tied down had started to slide across the hold.

They found Samandra in the cockpit, in the pilot’s seat, frantically hitting buttons. ‘What’s the damn ignition code?’ she cried.

Frey pushed Crake and Kyne off him, stumbled to the pilot’s seat and hauled her out of it. ‘Nobody flies the Ketty Jay but me,’ he snarled through bloody lips. Then he lowered himself into the seat, punched in the code and hit the controls to flood the aerium tanks. The Ketty Jay began lifting up on her struts, metal groaning and creaking. Frey disengaged the magnetic skids, and she floated free.

‘Hang on,’ he said, and he hit the thrusters.

Crake wasn’t hanging on. He tripped out through the door of the cockpit and sprawled full-length into the corridor. Samandra called after him, but Crake didn’t answer. Instead, he got to his feet and clambered up the ladder to the cupola. The Azryx device was going to blow at any moment. He didn’t want to be hit by something and never see it coming. He was compelled to look, as if by looking he could somehow avoid it.

At the top, he clambered into the gunner’s seat amid the acrid debris of empty rum bottles and the musty smell of Malvery. The violence outside was staggering, the detonations without end. The whole sky was exploding; tracer bullets stitched the air. As they pulled away from the Awakener convoy, he could see Samarlan frigates being ripped apart, their weak armour no match for the city’s guns. The Ketty Jay was battered, shaken this way and that.

He looked out in terror. How could anything survive this? How could they possibly live through it?

Because of the frigates. Because they’re shooting at the big craft. Not at us.

He clung to that thought.

A flash caught his eye. The Delirium Trigger was shrinking behind them, diminishing amidst the pandemonium, but as he looked he saw an arc of strange lightning flash across its surface. A jagged streak shot out and hit another frigate nearby, crawling along its surface. Crake flinched as the frigate exploded, tearing itself apart from nose to stern.

Now there was more lightning coming from the Delirium Trigger , questing fingers reaching out, crackling over its body and jumping to other craft, catching passing fighters and obliterating them. The Awakeners’ flagship began to pull away, its pilot having seen the danger. As its long, ungainly shape began to turn in the air, lightning jumped from the Delirium Trigger , striking it once, twice, and then with a sustained burst that crawled and writhed up its flank. Explosions ripped along the craft, unzipping it from stern to bow, and then it broke apart in the centre and went toppling earthward like two blazing halves of a snapped stick.