Chris Wooding - The Black Lung Captain

Malvery stumbled into the cockpit, holding on to his glasses with one hand. 'Silo says go easy! Don't tax the engines too much!'

'She'll hold,' Frey said, through gritted teeth. 'Shut the door.'

Malvery hauled the door to the cockpit shut, closing out the wind from outside. Sporadic machine-gun fire followed the Ketty Jay as Frey pulled her around for another pass. The battle between the frigates was in full swing. Their fleets were dogfighting in the space between and around them. Frey caught flickering glimpses of combat, punctuated by occasional explosions that pushed back the blackness for a moment. He heard Pinn's whoops in his ear, and Harkins' cowardly gibbering. They were still in one piece, then. He took heart from that.

The barque was in trouble. It was still moving at full speed, kloms away from its escort, but it couldn't pull itself level and was flying aslant. At this distance, there would be no help from the Delirium Trigger. Its guns were having trouble aiming at anything as the pilot fought to correct the uneven weight of the twin hulls. Tracer fire burned away in all directions, but the artillery cannon had gone silent. Its operator knew that accuracy was impossible until the craft was under control, and had decided not to waste the ammo.

'Got you now, you son of a bitch,' Frey murmured. He raced in, heedless of the gunfire, aiming for the starboard bow tank. A small voice of caution told him that he was supposed to be bringing this craft down gently, but he'd been scared by the barque's surprise attack and he wanted it out of commission, fast. He closed in and yawed to starboard, his machine guns clattering as they punched holes all along the barque's hull. His touch was lighter this time, but not by much.

Frey couldn't see the gas that spewed from the rupture, but he could see the effect. The barque's bow tilted downwards, the push of its thrusters driving it towards the ground. The pilot fought to compensate, but to no avail. The craft was too big and too clumsy.

The pilot airbraked as much as they could on the way down. Somehow they got the bow almost level, so it came in low and flat, like a skimmed stone. Lightened by all the aerium in its stern tanks, the impact wasn't as hard as its size would suggest, but it was still catastrophic. It hit the ground with a wail of metal, ploughing through the soft earth, rending a trench across the moors. Its double bow buckled and split. One of the prongs snapped off altogether. Its underside came away in shreds. An explosion tore through its flank, sending girders and armour plate wheeling through the night.

Finally, after what seemed an age, it came to a halt in the shadow of a rocky outcrop. Crippled, wrecked, but mostly whole.

Malvery whistled. 'Nice one. Cap'n!" he exclaimed, amazed by the scale of the destruction.

'I'm just glad he left enough of it for us to rob,' Jez said.

'I brought it down, didn't I?' Frey said. He looked at Malvery. 'Go get Crake and Silo and tool up. We're boarding that thing. I want that sphere.'

'Right-o,' said Malvery. He made for the door, but Frey stopped him.

'Oh, Malvery? One more thing. Tell Crake to wake up Bess. We're gonna need her good and angry.'

Pinn was having a rare old time.

He swooped and rolled and plunged, laughing maniacally.

He sprayed tracer fire into the night, chasing half-seen phantoms through the rain. He yelled with joy whenever thunder boomed around him.

Visibility was terrible. The other fighters were flying well below full speed, afraid of a mid-air collision. Pinn concluded, therefore, that they were all pussies. He screamed through the skies at a speed that bordered on suicidal. Pinn was a man who lived without fear of death, because he was too dim to imagine it. For him, this was a happy hunting ground.

The fighters orbited their massive parent craft, which were locked in a deadly slugfest. Cannons blazed along their flanks. Turrets boomed and heavy machine guns tracked targets through the sky. Tactics had been all but abandoned as the two leviathans blasted chunks out of each other. It was all about who was the toughest, who could load and fire the fastest, who had the biggest guns. But the Storm Dog's surprise attack had put the Delirium Trigger on the back foot, and she was fighting for her survival.

Something shot out in front of Pinn, right to left, slashing through the storm. Too fast to see whether it was an ally or an enemy, but he felt the cockpit shudder as it passed. It had been mere metres from taking the nose off his aircraft and sending them both to a fiery grave.

He banked hard and set off in pursuit. Before him was only rain and darkness, but he knew that craft had to be out there somewhere. Then, a burst of machine guns, and his target was lit in the muzzle flash of its own weapon. He saw the telltale shape of a Norbury Equaliser: a rounded, bulbous bow end; straight wings, clipped at the end: a lean, narrow profile with a kinked back. Pinn grinned at the sight. He opened up the throttle and closed in.

Another craft raced past, close enough to make the Skylance shimmy in the turbulence. In this storm and at this speed, by the time he saw something in his path it would be far too late to evade. If he was going to hit something, he'd hit it. No point worrying, then. Pinn ignored the danger and concentrated on his target.

Tracer lire floated eerily through the blackness ahead of him. Some invisible conflict in the storm. For every blazing bullet he could see, there were five, just as deadly, that he couldn't. Harkins used to talk about them all the time, those unseen bullets in tracer fire. They were the ones that would get you, he said. But Pinn preferred to believe that if you couldn't see them, they weren't there.

He spotted his target as it fired again, and lined up on its tail. Harkins was yammering something in his ear, but he wasn't paying any attention. He'd learned to tune out his fellow outflyer's near-constant state of panic in a firefight. Instead he flexed his finger over the trigger on his flight stick and waited for the right moment.

'Here it comes, you son of a bitch,' he muttered.

Lightning flashed and thunder roared. Pinn squeezed the trigger, but the Equaliser banked suddenly. The pilot had spotted him in the lightning flash. Bullets tore through the air around the Equaliser, smacking into its rear end. It dodged away, trailing smoke from its thruster. Pinn shot past, banked hard, came back around; but by then his target had disappeared.

'Did I get him?' he said to himself, searching the storm. 'Did I get him?'

In the distance, there was a dull explosion, and an aircraft was consumed by flames, heading earthwards like a meteor. His quarry, or someone else's? He didn't know. He'd claim it anyway, but it would have been nice to be sure.

Pinn had become detached from the fray, so he turned the Skylance back towards it, seeking new targets. The Storm Dog and the Delirium Trigger fought at the heart of the battlefield, high above the moors, flashing monsters of iron and steel. The smaller fighters hung close by, preying on each other.

His eyes flickered over the instrument panel on his dash, then settled on the ferrotype of Lisinda that hung from it. It was dangling and spinning on its chain, showing her face in teasing glimpses. He saddened at the sight of her. For a short time, lost in the thrill of combat, he'd forgotten the empty ache in his guts, the sad, grey feeling that had settled on him lately. But one glimpse was enough to bring it all back.

What was she doing now? There was no date on that letter, no telling when it was sent. A month ago? Three? Was her new husband already enjoying her, this imposter who'd taken his place? Was she with him now, all creamy thighs and soft breasts, surging blankets and sighs? He'd never known her that way. She was too sacred, too pure to be sullied by anyone but a hero. But this newcomer had tricked her somehow, maybe even forced her into yielding to him.