Chris Wooding: The Ace of Skulls

Even knowing their target’s route, it had taken a lot of searching before Jez picked up the trace. But now they were on the hunt, and closing in fast.

The Ketty Jay began to shake gently as the winds picked up again. Frey readied himself for another fight with the flight stick, but the battle he expected didn’t come. Instead, the shaking grew steadily more pronounced. He peered through his own reflection, willing the clouds to part. They refused. And still the shaking grew.

‘Jez? Is one of the thrusters coming loose or something?’ he asked. A vibrating aircraft was never good, in his experience.

Jez didn’t reply. He swore under his breath, turned round in his seat and found her gazing emptily at the wall again. She’d never been as bad as this before.

‘Jez, damn it!’ he barked. ‘Wake up!’

She jolted out of her trance, looked at him, looked past him. Her expression turned to horror as light washed into the cockpit.

‘ Frey! ’ she shrieked.

He twisted back, saw the black cloud ahead turn to bright fog, a dozen burning suns lighting it from the inside. ‘Oh, bollocks,’ he muttered.

Floodlights.

He shoved the flight stick forward and wrenched the lever to execute an emergency vent of the aerium tanks. The Ketty Jay plunged as the clouds finally parted and the vast blunt snout of the freighter pushed through, bearing down on them like some titanic god of the storm. Frey yelled as he saw it and leaned on the stick, putting every ounce of his strength into the dive.

Not like this, he couldn’t die like this, not till he’d done what he had to do, what he’d sworn he’d do!

A wall of black metal roared towards him. The engines screamed as they forced the Ketty Jay downward. Malvery added his own bellow of incoherent fear from the cupola.

Come on come on come on!

And then they were beneath it, the freighter’s belly thundering overhead, shaking the Ketty Jay hard. Faster craft shot past them, tiny lights in the cloud, whipping by like fireflies.

In seconds, they were gone, swallowed up by the murk.

Gasping, Frey fed aerium gas back into the tanks, levelled the Ketty Jay out and then began to climb. No way he was staying in this damned cloud a moment longer. The gauges went momentarily dark and the engines stuttered as they were struck by lightning. He paid no attention; he didn’t even flinch when the thunder hit. He didn’t stop till they broke through the top of the thunderhead, and out into clear sky.

‘Cap’n,’ said Jez, her voice weak. ‘Cap’n, I’m sorry, I-’

‘Stow it, Jez. We’ve got a job to do.’ He was angry, and scared, but mostly he was determined. They’d seen the freighter. They couldn’t let it get away now.

He raised his voice and called up to the cupola. ‘Doc? What’s the situation?’

‘Situation is I ain’t drunk enough for this bullshit!’ Malvery called back. ‘And we got fighters breaking cloud behind us. Escort’s giving chase. There’s one. . two. . ah, bugger it, I’m just gonna shoot at ’em.’ Any further conversation was prevented by the steady thumping of the autocannon as Malvery got to work.

So the escorts had abandoned the freighter to take care of the danger. Good. That was exactly what Frey wanted. Out here in the open, he could deal with them.

‘Looks like we scared them as much as they scared us,’ said Frey, feeling a little bravado returning. ‘Pinn! Harkins! Get down here!’

He listened, but there was no reply. ‘Harkins! Pinn! Is anyone on this crew awake?’

‘Earcuff,’ Jez reminded him.

Frey looked down and saw the earcuff lying in the hollow of the dash where he’d thrown it. He cursed and clipped it back on his ear. ‘Pinn! Harkins! Get here now!’

‘On our. . er. . I mean. . Coming!’ Harkins babbled.

Frey glanced at the silver ring on his little finger. It was thralled with a daemonist trick, linked invisibly to a compass in Harkins’ cockpit. The needle of the compass always pointed towards the ring. That was how the outflyers would find him in the storm.

He tried not to think about who was supposed to be wearing that ring. Now wasn’t the time.

The Awakeners opened up with machine guns and Frey threw the Ketty Jay into evasive manoeuvres. Even if they were as green as the whispermonger had promised, five or six pilots on his tail was no laughing matter. He couldn’t see behind him; the Ketty Jay was too big for that. All he could do was to make himself a hard target till help arrived.

His aircraft was more agile than her bulk suggested, but even so he couldn’t avoid the barrage entirely. Bullets ripped across the hull and Frey banked hard in the other direction. Tracer fire burned away into the distance and was lost to the night.

‘Doc!’ he shouted, during a pause in the firing. ‘How many?’

‘Five!’

‘Right,’ said Frey. ‘Let’s see if we can’t improve our situation a little. Hang on!’

Frey hit a flurry of pedals, levers and valves, venting aerium gas and opening the airbrakes to maximum. The sudden increase in weight made the Ketty Jay sink hard just as the airbrakes killed her speed. Wind roared past them, as if they’d run into a hurricane. Frey was thrown forward towards his dash, but his restraining straps held him back. Jez scrabbled to keep her charts pinned on the desk before her.

There was a howl of engines, and three of the five fighter craft shot overhead, caught out by their target’s sudden deceleration.

Frey disengaged the airbrakes, boosted the thrusters and fed aerium gas back into the tanks. The Ketty Jay surged forward. He pressed down the trigger on the flight stick, and her underslung machine-guns clattered. His aim was good. The tail assembly of his nearest target was hammered into shreds, before a bullet hit the fuel tank and the explosion tore the craft apart.

The remaining fighters panicked and swerved off in two different directions. As they banked, he saw insignia on their wings and fuselages. A cluster of small circles connected by a complex series of lines. The Cipher, symbol of the Awakeners.

Frey couldn’t chase both, so he picked the biggest one, a battered old Kedson Stormfox, and went after it. At least he only had three behind him to worry about now. Maybe they’d be a bit more wary from here on in.

‘Pinn! Harkins! Where are you?’ he demanded.

‘Cap’n,’ said Jez from behind him. ‘They’re lining up on you. Pull left when I say. . Now! ’

Frey banked to port, and a salvo of machine-gun fire ripped through the air where he’d been a moment ago. He glanced over his shoulder at her. ‘How’d you know?’ he asked, almost afraid of the answer.

She grinned. Her teeth looked ever so slightly sharper than normal human teeth. ‘Woman’s intuition,’ she replied.

‘ Ya-hoo! ’ Pinn yelled in his ear as he and Harkins came swooping down from overhead, machine-guns rattling. ‘It’s dying time, boys!’

Frey winced. Pinn had a habit of delivering lines like that on his way into combat. Presumably he thought it made him sound like some kind of action hero from a pulp novel, but really it was just embarrassing.

Frey opened up with his guns on the Stormfox. The pilot swerved, but only into the path of Harkins. The Firecrow’s guns raked across the Stormfox’s flank and shattered the cockpit canopy. It went into a dive, leaving behind it the awful ascending whine of an aircraft heading uncontrollably earthward. Then it disappeared into the storm and was gone.

‘Pursuit is scattering, Cap’n!’ Malvery reported.

‘We can deal with this lot,’ Pinn told him through the earcuff. ‘Go get the freighter.’