Chris Wooding - The Black Lung Captain

Malvery opened one eye. 'Did we escape?' he asked.

'Silo!' Frey yelled. 'Get up here!'

But it was too late. The cockpit flooded with blinding whiteness. Three Equalisers hove into view, their machine guns trained on him, lights shining.

'I think they've got us covered, Cap'n,' said Malvery.

'I think so too,' said Frey. He vented aerium until the Ketty Jay was heavier than air again. She stopped rising and began to sink gently to the ground.

In the distance he could see the Storm Dog lumbering away towards the rumbling clouds. The Delirium Trigger was harrying her the whole way, but it wasn't enough to stop her. He watched the Storm Dog disappear into the storm. With her went the sphere he'd worked so hard to obtain. Stolen from him. Again.

'Bugger,' said Malvery.

'Bugger,' Frey agreed, and they came down to earth with a bump.

'Darian, Darian, Darian,' said Trinica Dracken, as if to a wayward child. 'What am I going to do with you?'

She was wearing a slight, contemplative smile. Lightning flickered outside: sharp shadows lunged across her ghost-white face.

Frey leaned back in his chair and took an idle survey of her cabin. Brass and dark wood. Electric lights, set low. A bookcase with novels and manuals and maps. Foreign tides were mixed in among them. Trinica had been schooled in Samarlan and Thacian from a young age. The advantages of a privileged upbringing, Frey supposed.

'You could start by giving me back all the money you stole from me outside Retribution Falls,' he suggested. Then he grinned. 'On second thoughts, keep it. It'll just about cover the damage to your aircraft.'

Trinica sat behind her desk, next to a cracked window of reinforced windglass. The cabin had been tidied and cleaned before his arrival -Trinica liked to be neat - but she couldn't disguise all the evidence of the pounding the Delirium Trigger had taken. Outside in the corridor there were the sounds of running feet, and the air smelled of burnt oil.

'You shouldn't have robbed me,' said Frey. 'I let you off the first time, on account of our previous good feeling towards each other. But twice? Not a chance.'

She gave a derisive snort. 'Yes, Darian. Grist has run off with your treasure and your crew is languishing in my brig. You've certainly come out on top this time.'

'You didn't do so well yourself.'

'I'll survive.'

'So will I.'

'Ah, but that's my decision now, isn't it?' she said. Her black eyes hardened. 'You've inconvenienced me greatly.'

Frey made a do-I-look-like-I-care face. 'I didn't ask you to get involved. Actually, I seem to recall I had the sphere first.'

'You've cost me men and fighter craft. Good men, some of them.'

'Oh, piss off with your threats, Trinica,' Frey snapped. He was suddenly irritated at her. Just the sight of her wound him up. 'What would you have done? You robbed me again.''

'I rather expected you to chalk it up to experience and move on,' she said.

'Well, you expected wrong,' he said sullenly. 'I thought you'd have learned by now: you don't know me half as well as you think you do.'

He tapped his fingers on the arm of his seat. Impatient, agitated. It was hard to keep his cool around her. She had a way of making him lose his temper. It frustrated him. He could be the soul of charm around other women, but her mere presence was enough to have him behaving like a surly adolescent.

'I wish you'd scrape that shit off your face,' he said at length. 'You always had great skin.'

Trinica made a distracted noise of agreement. 'I did take very good care of myself, back then. You remember my dressing table, I'm sure. Groaning under the weight of my cosmetics.'

'You'd spend an hour making yourself look like you weren't wearing make-up.'

'It's easy to become obsessed with the unimportant, when nothing you do means anything.'

Frey made a sweeping gesture to indicate the Delirium Trigger. 'And this does?'

'Oh yes. The power of life and death. I'm very important to you right now.'

Frey couldn't argue with that, but he didn't like to concede the point. He was still bitter about the way she'd snubbed him back on Kurg.

Trinica was watching the rain pouring down the outside of the window. The storm had eased and the sky had lightened a fraction. It was nearing dawn. Frey had spent hours in the brig, awaiting an audience. The second night he'd had without sleep. He needed a big dose of Shine and a day-long nap.

'The Awakeners are baying for your blood,' she said. 'They're not at all happy about what you did to their aircraft. I gather your golem notched up quite a bodycount in there.'

Frey shrugged, picking at the arm of his seat with a fingernail. 'I gave them a chance to surrender,' he said. Then he looked up. 'What are you doing working for the Awakeners again? Don't tell me you're starting to believe that junk about the Allsoul?'

Trinica laughed: a cold, humourless cascade. 'Please, Darian. Me, a warrior of the Allsoul? It was money. Just money. They pay extraordinarily well for someone reliable and discreet. And they were very impressed with the work I did for Duke Grephen on their behalf.'

'As I recall, that didn't work out too well for Grephen.'

Trinica tilted her head, staring at him curiously, as if she'd only just noticed him. 'He paid me to catch you. I caught you. What happened afterwards was no concern of mine.'

Frey didn't want to hash out the past any more than he had to. 'So the Awakeners hired you again. Presumably so they wouldn't get their hands dirty?'

'They were very keen that their involvement was known to nobody except me.'

'What's their interest in the sphere?'

'I didn't ask,' she said.

Frey waited expectantly. When she said nothing more, he prompted her. 'Come on. You must know something. Indulge my curiosity. It's not like it makes any difference now.'

Trinica considered that for a moment, and evidently decided he was right. 'They told me an explorer named Hodd had approached one of their faithful, a rich patron called Jethin Mame. He came begging money for an expedition to Kurg to find a crashed aircraft. Mame sent him away, but eventually it was mentioned to someone important at a party somewhere, and the Awakeners suddenly became interested.'

'Enter Trinica,' said Frey.

'I admit, I didn't think much of it. Sounded like a fool's errand to me, and they were only offering to pay on delivery. I didn't think I'd find anything, so I wasn't prepared to waste my time.'

'What changed your mind?'

'You, my dear Darian,' she said. 'The Awakeners had their spies hard at work. By the time they contacted me, they'd already heard of Grist. They knew Hodd was with him, and they knew he'd been asking about for you.'

'And you just couldn't resist.'

'I do like to be a torment,' she admitted. 'And it really was very easy. Hodd had told Mame where the landing site was. When I arrived, you were already there. So I thought I'd wait and let you do the work.'

Frey had to restrain himself from picking a book off the shelf and flinging it at her. A heavy one, with sharp corners.

'Haven't you had enough of revenge yet?' he asked.

'Not while you're alive,' she said. 'Speaking of which: give me one reason why I shouldn't kill you.'

Frey recognised that line. He'd asked her that very same question in Mortengrace, Duke Grephen's stronghold, with a sword at her throat. Part of him wished he'd done her in then, but another part - some absurd, ridiculous part - was glad he hadn't.

Damn, he hated her. But damn, how he loved to do it.