Chris Wooding - The Black Lung Captain

'Harkins! Pull up, you stupid bugger! You're going down!' Pinn yelled in his ear.

'I know!' Harkins yelled back. ' Don't you think I know?'

The Firecrow began pulling up. He was still braking hard, but not hard enough. He thumped the valve to flood the tanks with aerium, lightening the craft so the brakes would work better. He was close enough to see the people running in the streets below, and the Manes chasing after them.

'Come on! Come on!' he yelled at his craft. The nose was coming up level . . . slowly . . . slowly . . . too slowly . . .

'Come on!'

The Firecrow screamed down the length of one of Sakkan's main streets, its underbelly scraping the ground with the slightest of touches, sending a fountain of sparks out behind it. Then it was up, up, up, soaring over the rooftops and back into the blessed sky.

Harkins closed his eyes and breathed out.

'Harkins?' It was Pinn. 'You okay?'

'I'm okay,' he said quietly. His mind had gone blank, so he said the only thing he could think of. 'I just punched out the cat.'

There was a long pause from the other pilot. 'You did what?'

The Ketty Jay rocked and trembled, pushed by the concussive forces of the artillery exploding all around them. Frey's shoulders were hunched, as if by making himself smaller he could somehow shrink the Ketty Jay and present a harder target. His gaze was fixed on the stormy vortex ahead of them, a vast, flashing swirl of heaving cloud. Shells flitted across his path to smash into the flanks of Navy frigates that loomed on his port side. Windblades darted past them, with squads of Blackhawks in pursuit.

Frey powered through the crossfire, and hoped.

Crake's eyes were wide as he stared at the flickering, churning maw in the sky, waiting to swallow them up, as it had swallowed the Storm Dog.

'Captain,' he said. 'This might very possibly be a stupid idea.'

'Very possibly,' Frey agreed. But his determination was unshakable. He hadn't felt this certain about anything for a long time.

Grist might have been the wrong side of sane, but he wasn't suicidal. On the contrary, he was desperate to live. Frey had to believe that the other captain knew what he was doing when he plunged into that vortex. And where the Storm Dog went, the Ketty Jay could follow.

Probably.

Pinn was on his wing, nipping and harrying the Blackhawks, drawing them away as best he could. Malvery was firing at any that came near, without much success. He never had been a brilliant shot with the autocannon. Harkins was nowhere to be seen. They'd lost sight of him a few minutes ago, when he suddenly dived away from them.

The Ketty Jay's thrusters were labouring. There was a distressing knocking noise coming from deep in her guts. The freezing temperatures she'd endured of late had done nothing to improve the precarious state of her prothane engine. It was a testament to Silo's skill that it was still operating at all.

He pushed them hard anyway, climbing out of the plane of conflict where the dreadnoughts and frigates were slugging it out. Gradually the explosions fell behind them and the sky became less crowded. He focused only on his goal, ignoring the dangers all around him as if he could bring them through unharmed by sheer force of will.

Come on, girl , he told his beloved aircraft. You can make it. I know you can.

'Cap'n!' called Malvery. 'Stray Blackhawk! Coming in on our tail!'

'Where's Pinn?'

'He's run off the others! I reckon—' The rest of his reply was drowned out by the autocannon. Then: 'I got him, Cap'n! I—'

He was interrupted by a huge explosion, terrifyingly close. The Ketty Jay's stern end was shoved hard. Multiple impacts peppered the craft, ringing through the hull. Frey reached for the controls to correct, but the Ketty Jay was still on course. Instead, he turned in his seat and yelled up to the cupola.

'Doc? Doc, you okay?' He looked at Crake, who was hanging on to the doorway. 'Crake, see if he's okay.'

Crake leaned out into the passageway and looked up the ladder that led to the gunnery cupola. 'Malvery?'

'I'm alright,' he said. 'Bit deaf. The awkward bugger blew up a few metres off our tail.'

Frey didn't have time for relief. Jez grabbed his shoulder and pointed. 'Cap'n!'

The vortex had grown huge now, as they sped up and out of the conflict. Emerging through the cloud, right in their path, was the scarred bow of a dreadnought. It dwarfed them, like a cargo ship bearing down on a rowboat.

Frey pulled the flight stick to the left. Nothing happened. He tried again, then moved to the right, then shoved it desperately in every direction. Still nothing happened.

He couldn't steer.

His pupils dilated to tiny points as he stared at the enormous aircraft bearing down on them.

'Uh-oh.'

*

Harkins spared a moment to check that his unconscious stowaway was in no danger of waking up, then headed back towards the Ketty Jay as fast as he could. 'Pinn! Where are you?'

'What happened to—'

'Never mind what happened to me. Where's - um - where's the Ketty Jay?'

'Heading for that great big bloody rip in the sky. Don't ask me why. I'm going back to 'em now.'

'Back?' Harkins was appalled. He'd left them? 'I had to draw off a few Blackhawks . . . er . . . wait a minute.' The tone of Pinn's voice alarmed him. 'What do you mean, wait a minute?' He flashed at full throttle through the battlefield, ascending hard. 'What's wrong?'

'The Cap'n's playing chicken with a dreadnought.'

'He's whaaaaat ?' Harkins screamed. He came out of the main body of the battle, up into clearer sky, and spotted them immediately. The Ketty Jay was heading right into the centre of the vortex. A dreadnought, many times their size, was lumbering out of it. And neither looked at all like getting out of the way.

Jez!

He angled the Firecrow towards them and put on all the speed he had.

'Shrapnel in the tail assembly!' Malvery called from the cupola. 'I can see it! It looks like it's coming loose! Waggle the flaps more!'

'I'm waggling as hard as I bloody can!' said Frey, waggling. 'Dump out the aerium tanks,' Jez advised. 'We'll sink underneath her.'

'We dump those tanks, we'll go off course.'

'Isn't that the idea?'

'We go off course, we'll miss the vortex. We miss the vortex, we might not be able to get back to it. There's no telling when or if we'll have steering again.'

'You want to chase the Storm Dog with no steering ?' Crake cried in disbelief.

'We are going into that vortex!' said Frey.

'There's half a million tons of metal in the way!' Jez shouted.

'They'll move,' he insisted.

'No, they won't!'

Frey's hand hovered above the valve that would execute an emergency purge of the aerium tanks. The Ketty Jay would dip out of the dreadnought's path, but he'd never get her bow up again if he did. Not with that shrapnel in the tail assembly.

Hitting that valve meant giving up on Trinica for ever. Not hitting it meant that he and his crew would end up splattered across the keel of that dreadnought.

He took his hand away.

'They'll move,' he said.

'They won't move!' Harkins shouted at his captain, as if Frey could hear him. He didn't know what the Cap'n was thinking, but he was furious at him for gambling with Jez's life like that. Either the dreadnought hadn't noticed them, or whoever commanded it had decided to run them down rather than waste ammunition. The Ketty Jay would crumple like tinfoil against that armoured keel.