Chris Wooding - The Black Lung Captain

'Oh, now you've found your morals?'

'You've seen how they are! If we kill one of 'em, they'll never leave us alone.'

'Cap'n, we should—'

His reply was cut short by a heavy thump from above, that shook the whole aircraft. Frey felt the Ketty Jay plunge a few metres.

'You've got to be joking,' he muttered to himself.

'Cap'n!' Malvery, slightly hysterical this time. 'He's trying to land on us!'

The Ketty Jay rocked again. Frey swore under his breath. The pilot wasn't trying to land on them. He was trying to force them down, bumping them from above with his undercarriage wheels. What kind of crazed idiot did anything half that dangerous?

'Can we please just shoot them?' Pinn cried.

'I've just robbed a bunch of orphans!' Frey snapped. 'I don't want anything else on my conscience today!'

'I thought you said you were an orphan?' Pinn said. 'Doesn't that make it alright?'

Frey bit his lip and sent the Ketty Jay into a dive, venting aerium gas from the tanks to add speed to his descent. The dust had sloughed off the windglass, smearing as it went. It was enough to see through, barely.

'Lose 'em in the valleys?' Jez suggested.

'Lose 'em in the valleys,' Frey agreed.

Frey was getting angry, and when he got angry he got reckless. He dearly wanted to machine-gun the villagers out of the sky, but he was too afraid of the consequences. His specialties were minor smuggling, petty theft, a gentle bit of piracy where nobody got shot and not too much was taken. They were soft crimes which the Navy were far too busy to concern themselves with. Once in a while somebody died, but usually it was a guard too stupid to drop his weapon or a criminal who xprobably deserved it anyway. People who accepted the risks and were paid to take them.

Frey didn't count himself in that category, of course. In some vague, ill-defined way, he thought himself more noble than that.

Innocent folk, however, were another matter. These villagers only wanted their money back. Their dogged persistence made him feel guilty, and he was mad at them for that. Theft was only fun if you didn't have to think about the consequences. He didn't actually want the orphanage to close or those children to starve. He'd sort of assumed that the villagers would stump up to cover the shortfall. But since they were so desperate to get it back, he began to wonder whether they could actually afford it.

Bloody yokels. They were ruining his first successful escapade in months.

The valleys in this part of the Vardenwood were deep and narrow. A complex river system snaked through trenches between the hills, banked by sheer, rocky slopes. Down on the valley floor the walls pressed in tight. The waters thundered through, swollen by the spring floods, glittering silver-grey in the moonlight.

Frey knew the Ketty Jay was operating well below par, but he could still fly better than any amateur could. It took nerve to race through enclosed spaces in an aircraft at night. Nerve that he was betting his pursuers didn't have.

'They're taking potshots at us, Cap'n,' Pinn said in his ear.

'Follow me down into the valleys. Buzz them when you can. Just keep them occupied.'

Pinn muttered something Frey didn't quite catch and then shut up again.

Frey rubbed at his earcuff absently. The early versions of the daemon-powered communicators had leached energy from their users, tiring them out the more they talked to each other. Crake had refined them since, giving them better range and minimising the draining effect. Now they could gabble on to their heart's content, but that only meant they argued and bitched more. Frey wondered if he hadn't preferred the way it was before.

'How's that cropduster, Malvery?' he called.

'Falling behind,' the doctor replied from the cupola.

Frey smiled. The Ketty Jay had finally built up some speed. Not enough to outstrip the villagers' craft, but enough to make them work to keep up. Still, it was going to be difficult flying through the valleys in her condition. Since the Ketty Jay took so long to accelerate, he couldn't use his air brakes. He'd be forced to take every turn at speed.

Just be extra careful , he told himself, knowing that he wouldn't be.

The Ketty Jay swooped into a valley. Slopes of grass and rock blurred by on either side, punctuated by scrawny trees hanging on at unlikely angles. Frey boosted the aerium engines - at least they worked fine - and pulled back on the flight stick to level out a few dozen metres above the river. The valley floor was wide here, and there were small, isolated farming communities on the banks, their windows dark. The Ketty Jay roared past them, kicking up spray and panicking their sleepy herds. Frey took a small, malicious pleasure in that.

'Malvery? The cropduster?'

'He's gone. Pulled off. Can't see him now. Others are coming in though.'

Well, at least we've scared one of them off. Let's see how long the rest of them last in the valleys.

Frey looked up and saw several of the villagers' rustbucket aircraft angling down towards him. Harkins and Pinn were doing their best to harass them, but the villagers' resolve was unshakable.

Jez was rustling charts at her station. 'Valley branches right up ahead, Cap'n. That one's narrower.'

'We'll take it,' said Frey.

The villagers intercepted them before they got to the fork, descending from above to surround the Ketty Jay. Suddenly Frey found himself in the midst of a swarm of small aircraft that buzzed around him like clumsy bees. He wiped at the inside of the cockpit windglass in a futile attempt to clear the dust that stubbornly clung to the other side. He didn't dare take evasive action. The villagers were flying too close.

He heard the sharp tap of a bullet hitting the Ketty Jay. 'They're shooting at us,' Malvery called, sounding unconcerned.

'Let 'em, if it makes 'em happy,' said Frey. The Ketty Jay' s armour plating could take a good deal more than that.

'Turn coming up,' Jez warned him.

Frey flexed his hand on the flight stick. 'Pinn! Harkins! Keep going straight on. Take as many with you as you can. I'm going right.'

'Got it, Cap'n!' said Harkins. Then he screamed.

'What? What?' Frey demanded.

'Something hit me!'

Frey searched for Harkins among the planes that surrounded them, and located the Firecrow. It appeared to be undamaged. Then his eye fell on a nearby villager, who was riding shotgun in an ancient open-top biplane, above and to the left of Harkins. As Frey watched, the man lobbed a small object out of the cockpit. It dropped through the air and bounced off the Firecrow's wing. Harkins screamed again and banked in panic. He almost collided with a one-man flyer that was hard on his tail.

'It happened again!'

'They're throwing stuff at you,' Frey informed him. 'With pretty extraordinary accuracy. I think the last one was a wrench.'

'A wrench ?!' Harkins shrieked. 'What . . . how ... I mean, what kind of madmen are these? I don't have to take this! Cap'n, I've got a bad feeling ... I mean to say . . . It's just . . . Allsoul's balls, I'd rather fight the Navy than these lot!'

'Turning coming up now!' Jez said.

Frey saw it. The branching valley was a lot narrower.

'Everyone, get out of the way!' Frey yelled at the craft around him. 'I'm coming through, like it or not!' With that, he wrenched the flight stick to the right. Planes scattered as the Ketty Jay slewed away. Frey and Jez were pressed into their seats. There was a raucous series of crashes as every unsecured object on the Ketty Jay tipped over. The artificial horizon on Frey's dash tipped sideways.