by Arnot, C. S.
Everybody’d heard of the Gilgamesh, and everybody knew the same few things about it: it was more than a klick from bow to stern, bristled with more guns than was worth thinking about and harboured its own fleet of aircraft. Some said it had flown for decades without refuelling, though exactly how it had was something of a mystery.
He could understand, however, why its crew had turned to piracy after the Eurasian War, when the superpower that had built it collapsed on itself. The crew had been left with nothing but the Gilgamesh, but someone had seen the profit in it: with a craft like that, they could be gods. Maybe once, they’d been the crew of the glorious flagship of the North Atlantic Union; now they were nothing but an army of renegades and pirates. World-infamous pirates. And Aiden had quite possibly just killed two of them.
“He’s lining up on us, Aiden,” said Fredrick.
Aiden groaned. Make that three. “Let him have it then.”
“Right.” There was a pause before Fredrick opened fire. Aiden felt it through his feet as the heavy gun hammered out its opening salvo, hopefully mostly into the pursuing patrol craft. Then it stopped.
“You get him?”
A hesitation. “I did hit him, the gun’s jammed though.” Fredrick sounded remarkably calm.
“Can’t you un-jam it?”
“For fanden, Aiden! Do you never clean this thing?!” Fredrick’s calm had left in a hurry. “Lort, lort, lort, lort, lort!”
“What the hell’s jamming it?” Aiden demanded.
Fredrick yelled back something Aiden didn’t understand.
“Say it in English, you son-of-a-bitch!”
“I said I’ll be damned if I know!” yelled Fredrick. “Don’t fly straight you idiot! Break! Break!”
“Alright, alright!” Aiden shouted back as he swung the flight stick to the left, rolling the craft and banking high. A ripple of tracer bullets shot under the Iolaire’s belly; right where it should have been. He swung the craft back to the right and watched as the orange streaks slapped into the sea ahead, sending up plumes of white spray.
He tipped the nose down slightly, hoping that hugging the surface would make the Iolaire harder to hit. He knew his prop wash would be kicking up spray, but manoeuvring at such a height was incredibly dangerous.
“How do I un-jam this piece of shit?!” cried Fredrick.
“The crank handle in front of you, pump it backwards!”
“It won’t move!”
“Of course it’ll move! Yank it!”
“OK!” said Fredrick. “Lort, why won’t it shoot?!”
“What does it say on the HUD?”
“It doesn’t say anything! Break, Aiden!”
Aiden wrenched the Iolaire to starboard, narrowly avoiding another burst of tracer fire. The sea hurtled past, nerve-shreddingly close.
“On the console, push the reset button!”
“Which one is that?”
“The red button that says ‘reset’, you daft prick, push it!”
“Right.” Fredrick paused. “It’s running a diagnostic. How long will that take?”
“I don’t know, thirty seconds?”
“Great, so what am I supposed to do until then? Scare him off with curse words?”
“You can try!” replied Aiden. “Tell me what it says when it’s done!”
Aiden executed a series of course changes, keeping the Iolaire a hard target, while Fredrick hurled vicious Danish abuse at the aircraft following them.
“OK, it says that there’s a stoppage,” said Fredrick finally.
“Well we already bloody knew that!”
“It says to pull the cocking lever. Is that the-”
“Yes, that’s the crank I told you to pull earlier! Yank it as hard as you can!”
Fredrick let out a string of guttural curses as he tried the handle. “Yes! It moved! A shell fell out, I saw it!”
“Now shoot at that bastard behind us!”
A rattling burst from the gun. Fredrick whooped.
Aiden let himself breathe. “You hit him?”
“Yeah, he’s struggling! Hold it steady, I don’t think…” Fredrick trailed off as he loosed another blast. “I got him! I shot the bastard down!” There was a dull thud that shook the Iolaire as the stricken pursuer plunged into the sea.
The Iolaire was climbing steadily, accelerating further. Aiden knew for sure that they’d killed at least one person now and he felt a little sickened. It didn’t upset him on a moral level so much: all of those men were trying to kill them. No, in the space of twenty minutes, they’d made themselves wanted fugitives. They’d have to scrap their aircraft ID and keep checking over their shoulders for the next few months at least. He doubted the Gilgamesh’s commanders would allow such an insult to slide.
They certainly couldn’t trade within a thousand kilometres of the warship any more, and Sevastopol was the best port on the Black Sea. Aiden was furious. He’d lost his new home.
“So, where to?” he asked Fredrick.
“Need to keep a straight course away from the Gilgamesh for a couple of hundred kilometres or so, just until that radar detector shuts up. Then we should take a new heading, so they can’t just join up the dots and find us.”
Aiden saw the sense in that. Once the Gilgamesh couldn’t track them anymore, they could head where they wanted. Until then it’d be a fast, straight course to the west, high-tailing it away from the Crimea.
He hoped that the Gilgamesh didn’t send a fighter. The Iolaire wouldn’t stand a chance. It was fast, with a top speed of around eight hundred kilometres per hour at the right altitude, but it was no match for a jet. On the plus side, he doubted that either Fredrick or himself would know anything about it if a jet did have a pop at them. They’d be intact and healthy one second, then probably a very hot, pink, supersonic mist the next. There were worse ways to die, he supposed.
They had only been climbing for a few moments when a thunderous explosion shook the Iolaire. Aiden jumped against his straps. The game was up. He assumed he was dead.
Somehow, he wasn’t, and the Iolaire seemed to be fine. Craning to look, he saw a thin vapour trail ending in a huge puff of grey smoke, and far ahead of him a swathe of the sea was thrown up in shimmering towers of white spray.
“The bloody hell was that?” he cried.
“Vinger…I think that’s flak from the Gilgamesh!” replied Fredrick.
“But she’s got to be more than twenty kilometres away!” Aiden was incredulous. Missiles he could have accepted, but guns?
“Rail-guns or something,” said Fredrick, “Weave, Aiden! They won’t miss a second time!”
Aiden still couldn’t believe it.
“Break now, Aiden!”
Aiden complied automatically, pulling back hard on the flight stick, rearing the Iolaire up and climbing hard. A moment later, a second thunderclap erupted beneath them, precisely where they should have been. Rolling the craft over, he once again saw where the pieces of shrapnel had smashed into the sea a kilometre ahead. He swore softly to himself.
“Whatever that was, it’s bloody fast,” said Fredrick, “I only just caught a little trail against the sky.”
“I reckon we should hug the surface, the quicker we disappear over the horizon, the better.”
“It’ll waste fuel.”
“I’d rather waste a little fuel than get shot down. God knows what range they have on that thing,” replied Aiden.
“All right then.”
Aiden pushed the Iolaire low, and as the Crimea faded into the distance behind him, no more shots came from the Gilgamesh.
And when the little red radar notification light winked out on the control console, the Iolaire made a long banking turn to the east.
3.
Ashtarak
The Armenian barman stared at them blankly with his one good eye: the other was milky white and half closed by the scar tissue on his brow. His face was a gnarled mess of scars, and the right side of his skull was hairless and mottled with
a hideous old burn. His right ear was a just a fleshy stub protruding from the cauterised skin. ‘Ugly’ wouldn’t have quite done him justice.
It didn’t get much easier to spot a veteran, Aiden was sure.
“Yes?” His voice was a hoarse, eastern growl.
“Two beers, please,” said Fredrick, regaining his composure first.
“No beer,” said the barman, his eye not leaving Fredrick.
“What do you have, then?”
“I have aragh,” he jabbed his thumb at a stack of bottles behind the bar. “Is all.”
Aiden squinted at the stack. The bottles looked exactly like the ones they had just sold to the town merchants. In fact, Aiden was fairly sure it was just that: Crimean vodka. And, he realised that for possibly the first time since the pair had taken up the air-trade business, they had forgotten to cut a few bottles from the shipment.
“Two please,” said Fredrick. He slid a few copper coins across the bar. The barman used the usual water-and-scales method. His good eye glazed over for a moment as he consulted a pinned-up paper list on the wall. Then he grunted, satisfied that it was copper, and poured the drinks.
“Skaal,”said Fredrick, raising his glass.
“Slàinte,”responded Aiden, doing the same. He swallowed it in one.
“Can’t believe we flogged them this crap,” he said, scraping his tongue with his teeth. “I thought it was quality stuff.”
“It’s not bad,” rasped Fredrick. “Really kicks the shit out of you.” He paused, considering the glass that the barkeeper was refilling. “I wonder if there’s work here for us,” he said.
“You really want to hang about?”
Fredrick just shrugged.
Aiden sighed. “Do you know of anyone who needs an aircraft?” he asked the barman. The barman looked at him strangely. At least, he assumed it was a strange look. It was hard to tell through the mangled features.
Seeming to entirely ignore the question, the man wandered slowly off down the bar, resuming wiping a cup as he talked in a murmured voice to a couple of patrons at the far end. “Alright then,” said Aiden. “Guess that’s a no.”
He burped, and his nostrils stung like a nosebleed. This Ashtarak town was not selling itself to him. Hell, Armenia really wasn’t selling itself to him.
He supposed, at least, that they’d probably made enough gold to move on with. Though it had taken the entire day, they’d managed to empty the hold of the booze and cigarettes. Prices hadn’t been great though. The locals were sharp.
Not only that, but Aiden could tell already that fuel was going to be an issue. Nobody seemed able to tell him where they could find some. And the Iolaire really needed fuel; it was running on fumes to get them this far to the east. Fredrick had said there wasn’t much more than a minute left in the tanks, so leaving was really not an option yet. This was irritating. Aiden was already itching to move.
He knew prospects would be better to the east. They had to be. The Caspian Sea was supposed to be criss-crossed with trading routes. It was the gateway to Asia. Aiden reasoned it was a good bet that somebody would be looking for something to be hauled by air, or that they’d at least be able to buy something worth trading. Sea-ports were the best places for it. Better than this sleepy little Armenian town, anyway. It looked like Ashtarak hadn’t seen an aircraft in a very long time, the way folks were so wary of it.
As they’d landed, they’d been confronted by a twitchy troop of local militia, armed to the teeth and nervous as hell. He didn’t understand it. Air trade was the norm just about everywhere now; it had boomed after the war. Ex-military aircraft were as cheap as you like and as governments collapsed and disorder spread, landside routes became prone to raids and piracy. Ports turtled up and became independent city-states, passing goods from sea to air for carriage inland, profiting from the tolls. The air became the surest way to move goods around. So why had the militia been so jumpy?
Of course, there were other ways to trade. Some freight was carried across the land by foolhardy bastards, who in Aiden’s opinion either had a screw loose or a death wish. Or maybe just a violent disposition. There was certainly something not quite right about the folks who wanted to do that for a living.
He hated the thought of it, crawling across the land in a mechanised herd. It reminded him of the old videos he’d seen of crowds of beasts thundering across the grassland, flanked by lions watching for a weak link. Sure, you had horns, but without the herd you were an easy target. And when they got you -the lions always got one- the herd didn’t much care.
“Could be this isn’t vodka at all. Could be fuel grade,” said Aiden finally. He was joking, of course, but it certainly tasted bad enough. Maybe the barman had mixed something special into it, just for the westerners. Get them hammered on ‘nol, then steal their aircraft. Aiden wouldn’t have put it past the folks in this town.
He grinned to himself as he imagined the thieves trying to open the cargo ramp. Tamper with the lock and you get a face-full of piss and muck from the bilge. Week-old urine was a powerful deterrent, they’d found.
Aiden looked around the bar. For the number of people there, it was very quiet. Folks didn’t seem very talkative. Sullen, almost. Surely life here couldn’t have been that bad.
“This place is, how do I say, ‘swinging’?” muttered Fredrick over the rim of his glass.
Aiden nodded, sucking his teeth. It seemed like when the sun set and the big mountain behind the town disappeared in the darkness, so too did the energy of its people. They were still there, still awake mostly, just dead quiet. There was no music in the tavern. No laughter, no dancing. It was stagnant. It was boring.
Things couldn’t always have been so uneventful. The heavily armed militia was testament to that. Aiden was fairly sure the guns they carried weren’t purely ceremonial. The welcome they’d received on the landing pad smacked of a learned response. He wondered what had caused that.
Fuel, he knew, was definitely the key issue to be solved. Find some, move on. As much as they needed work, they needed ‘nol more.
It wasn’t difficult to see that upping sticks was the best course of action. Every drawn-out minute he spent in that dim, grimy tavern was serving only to convince him more.
After a while, the barman came back, standing uncomfortably close to the pair, silent, motionless. Aiden couldn’t tell if he wanted them to buy more drink or just to leave. He knew which he’d rather, but they ordered another round to be polite.
Well, what the hell, thought Aiden as he decided to ask.
“Is there a ‘nol depot in this town?”
The barman stared at him coolly. He took so long to answer that Aiden thought he wasn’t going to.
“For why?” he growled.
For drowning you in, you dumb ox.
“For our aircraft. Running a bit low, you see.”
“You have want fuel for aircraft?”
Getting there.
“Precisely.”
The barman squinted his good eye. “You no bring your own?”
Aiden had to stop himself from laughing in the man’s face. It wouldn’t have been altogether diplomatic, he knew. “Well, we did, see, but the funny thing about fuel is that it gets used up. Rather inconvenient, really.”
The man shrugged. “I no can help.” He made to wander back off along the bar.
“Well that generator out back must run on something!” said Aiden, a little more angrily than he’d intended. Some folks around the tavern were looking at him now. The big barman turned to face him again.
“And by the smell of it,” he continued, a bit quieter, “I’d bet a kilo on it being ‘nol.”
“There is none for you,” uttered the barman. His voice had somehow become deeper. More menacing. Just inside the range of human hearing, but not much more.
Both Fredrick and Aiden were staring at the barman. What did he mean none for you? Was the local ‘nol too good for foreigners?
“But where did you get yours
?” asked Fredrick, leaning forwards.
“Mine, not yours,” stated the barman as he folded his arms. The threat in his tone was hard to miss.
“Come on man, let’s go.” Aiden put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “We’re not going to get any sense out of this bastard.”
Outside, Fredrick was shaking his head. “This town…”
“I know. Reminds me more than a little of back home. Something about small communities, I think.”
“But we’d have paid them for it! We weren’t just going to, I don’t know, siphon it off and fly away.”
They started back up the dusty road to the landing patch. It was very dark now: no moon, only stars. So many stars, though. Aiden couldn’t stop himself looking up at the sky as they walked. He looked at the sky behind him, above the silhouette of the mountain. There was the Big Bear, and near it the Little Bear. Its uppermost star was Polaris, the North Star, Aiden knew. He liked being able to see it. Something about being able to find his way back north was important to him, though he didn’t know why. It wasn’t like he wanted to go back any time soon. There wasn’t anything for him there, not any more.
He could tell Fredrick was walking with his eyes down. His friend was too preoccupied with thoughts of fuel to look at the stars. It was a shame.
How much people must miss.
It was quite a long walk, really, out of the outskirts of town and up the gentle hill to the landing pad. The dark made it seem even further. The road out of town briefly joined an old highway –dark and silent like all the other roads around- before an off-ramp led up to the raised pad.
Well, they called it a pad, but it was really just a roughly level patch of turf where the grass was a little browner and shorter than everywhere else. It certainly hadn’t looked frequently used.
They were very close to the Iolaire before they could see it, it was so dark. Fredrick felt for the keypad and opened the ramp. Inside, he fumbled for the breaker that controlled the cargo hold lights. The internal lights came on; Aiden walked in and thumbed the ramp closed.