Flying the Storm

by Arnot, C. S.

  The sun beat down on Aiden’s neck. He could feel its burn, even with the cooling wind that blew past him. His mouth was very dry, and he had no water, but it wasn’t enough to make him stop. He had to put as many dusty kilometres between himself and Ashtarak as possible.

  It was some time later as the road reached hills once more that Aiden started to worry about fuel. There was no gauge on the car that he could see, so short of stopping and checking there was no way for him to know how much was left. Stopping was not something Aiden wanted to do. As well as the obvious dangers, he wasn’t even sure he could get the car started again.

  He kept driving, hoping that the fuel would at least get him to the Greater Caucasus. The mountains couldn’t have been much further, surely.

  Eventually he reached a fork in the road: the left road led to the north, climbing into a valley. Aiden knew enough Cyrillic to decipher the right-hand sign as Vanadzor. It looked to him like the beginnings of a large town, shattered and crumbling like all the others he had passed. The left road seemed the best choice. He doubted the Iolaire would have set down somewhere like this; it was still too close to Ashtarak.

  The mountains to either side of the valley were coated in trees, though their tops were bare grass and rock. The air was becoming cooler the further into the hills he drove, and his thoughts began to drift to his warm coat, stashed under his bunk on the Iolaire. A fairly intact road sign said Stepanavan next to a shrapnel-hole where the distance used to be. Though he’d never heard of it, it seemed as good a place as any to aim for.

  The road kept climbing into the valley, until at its head it reached a wide tunnel, the entrance of which had collapsed. Aiden swore and stopped the car. The tunnel looked as if it had been ruined for some time.

  On the slopes above the tunnel, though, he could see a track zigzagging its way up the hill. It looked steep, but if he wanted to keep heading north, it was his only choice. He turned the car around and began climbing the hill, one hairpin bend at a time.

  Finally, the road crested a rise and before him was a wide ridge between peaks. Four huge wind turbines still stood atop it, though they were just as wrecked as every other building he’d seen. Blades were bent or missing and the great towers were punched through with shell holes. The white paint that had once coated them was mostly gone; the only evidence that they had ever been painted was the small patches and flakes that still clung to the grey steel.

  The track continued along the ridge past the old turbines, before skirting around the base of one of the peaks and making its winding way off down the northern slope. As he approached the peak, a dark shape caught Aiden’s eye. It was near the summit, and looked an awful lot like the silhouette of a person. Except it was huge.

  Curiosity gnawed at Aiden. A statue? It seemed an odd place to put it. Reluctantly, he stopped the car and trustingly turned off the engine. Pushing his pistol behind his belt, he set off up the hill. He told himself that he could get a better view from the top of where he was heading, but in truth he knew it was plain curiosity.

  The slope was steeper than it had appeared, and before long his legs were aching. When he stooped to use his hands his injured arm began to twinge, so he tucked it against his chest and relied on his right arm. His stomach growled loudly as he climbed: he hadn’t eaten since the night before. Aiden was beginning to regret having left the car.

  Finally the summit appeared. It was covered in rough grass and strewn with a few boulders. His mouth was drier than ever.

  And there it was. A huge suit of armour, kneeling with a hand outstretched in the grass before it. Even on one knee, it was almost twice Aiden’s height. The gaps in the armour showed a black sub-structure to the suit, which looked melted and fused in place. As he walked around to its front, he saw that the chest was pierced by a hole as wide as his fist: a killing shot. The edges of the armour plates were warped as if by great heat, and the cavity of the chest was black and rippled like tar. Something had burned it from the inside out. In the grass before it lay a gun the size of Aiden. An autocannon, fallen from the suit’s hands.

  The head of the suit was not humanoid. Though the rest of the armour was more or less proportionate, the head was too small. It was faced with a series of lenses, and an antenna stuck like a feather from its top. It was looking off down the hill, to the winding road that led down the north side of the ridge.

  It was a myrmidon. It had to be, if the stories Aiden had heard were anything to go by. Veteran’s stories, told over jars of spirits in seedy dives all across the West. Myrmidons were the stuff of infantry legends. Avenging angels, dropped from the sky into the fiercest battles to break and rout the enemy. Small wonder then, that among the poorly educated conscripts on the frontline they became more than just sophisticated war machines. They became gods.

  The huge carcass of the myrmidon clearly had an occupant, at one point. Why else would there be so much empty space in the ruined torso? That meant it had a pilot. A human pilot, not a god. But the stories only ever talked of the huge machines, as tall as three men, carrying the weaponry of a tank but moving as fluidly as a dancer, fighting as ferociously as they were precise. Nobody ever mentioned the pilots. Could be the infantry never saw them.

  Could be the brass wanted it that way.

  Then Aiden noticed something on the flattish boulder by the fallen autocannon. There was writing there, carved crudely into the rock.

  The Angel of Pushkin Pass

  Always remembered

  The 43rd

  At the foot of the boulder were a few dried-up pieces of fruit, some blue copper coins and a grimy bottle of what looked like alcohol. Offerings to the angel. Veterans had made the pilgrimage.

  Aiden sat down in the grass by the armour and looked to the wide plain to the north. A large town sat there, probably Stepanavan, before the green mountains started again, marching northwards. Squinting into the far distance, he thought he could see white tops, though it could just have been a trick of the haze. There was still a long way to go before the Caucasus Mountains really started.

  It was disheartening, seeing them so far off when he had already driven for so long. It looked like he was going to have to stop in Stepanavan, whether he wanted to or not, just to find fuel. If it was anything like Ashtarak, that wasn’t going to be easy. He didn’t even have any money.

  Aiden patted the myrmidon’s armoured knee on his way past, and clambered back down the slope to the car. To his relief, it started first time, and with a belch of grit and fumes it launched off down the hill, along the road to Stepanavan.

  The road passed through dense green forest as it descended to the plain, past the northern mouth of the tunnel Aiden had bypassed. The air on this side of the ridge was noticeably cooler than to the south, and the loamy smell of vegetation was a welcome change to the dust and dry heat. Before long, the forest opened up to fields and scrub, but the air stayed cool. The ruins of a small town rushed past, uninhabited like all the others.

  The road rounded a gentle bend, and then ran almost perfectly straight all the way to Stepanavan ahead. As Aiden got closer he could make out a barrier across the road: a checkpoint, manned by a few figures around a small shed.

  Aiden slowed right down. It was probably just local militia, but they’d without doubt be armed. He didn’t want to give them any reason to shoot him. He took the pistol from his belt and tucked it in the footwell, out of sight. There was a barricade of rubble and sandbags on one side of the road, in front of the little guard shed. A flaking red and white bar blocked the road: not substantial enough to stop a determined driver, but Aiden reckoned the machine gun on the sandbags probably was. Aiden brought the car to a halt a few metres from the barrier.

  There were three guards. Two came forward to the car: one with his rifle slung and the other with it menacingly in his hands. The third sat behind the sandbags, smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee from a tin mug.

  The man with the slung weapon stood by Aiden. He was tall and stro
ng-looking, with a large bushy moustache. He asked Aiden something in Armenian. Aiden looked at the man blankly. The other guard, a wiry man, was slowly making his way round the car, kicking the tyres and glancing underneath it.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Armenian,” said Aiden, unnerved by the circling guard.

  The moustached guard sighed. “What business here?” he said haltingly.

  “I’m… I’m looking for an aircraft,” Aiden answered. He said it slowly, spreading his arms to imitate wings.

  “Why in Stepanavan?”

  “My friends came this way, I think,” Aiden said, taking his time.

  “First you say aircraft, now you say friends. What business here?” demanded the guard.

  Aiden felt a flutter of panic. They weren’t going to let him past. He glanced at the man behind the sandbags. He was grinning: he set his mug down and grasped the machinegun.

  This was what these bastards lived for, Aiden realised. Bored out of their minds sitting at a checkpoint all day, waiting for a chance to shoot someone. Better yet, a foreigner who doesn’t know the language. They’d probably get a medal, dragging in the corpse of a westerner.

  “Bloody hell! Look, I’m just passing through, I don’t want any trouble! No trouble! Please!”

  The moustached guard unslung his rifle. He pointed the muzzle at Aiden’s face and started shouting. Aiden recoiled in his seat, shouting back at the man, hands held out before him.

  Then the muzzle dropped, and behind it was a sly grin. The guard at the sandbags was laughing so hard he dropped his cigarette and clutched at his ribs. Aiden looked around at the wiry guard, who was also hooting. The moustached guard’s smile opened into a barking laugh, loud and hearty.

  “You bastards,” muttered Aiden, wiping spit from his cheek. “You bastards.”

  “My friend,” said the moustached man as he gasped for breath, “welcome to Stepanavan.”

  The machine gunner, still chuckling, stood up and walked to the barrier. “It is too rare that we find someone new around here,” he said, winding the crank that slowly raised the barrier.

  “Yes, the south checkpoint doesn’t get much action really,” said the moustached guard. He was very fluent in English all of a sudden. “It is a different story to the north, though! You’d better watch out for those Georgians!” He clapped Aiden on the shoulder and waved him through.

  As he drove past them and off towards the town, Aiden started to laugh, too. It felt good. Maybe it was relief.

  Stepanavan seemed quite different to Ashtarak. It was more bustling, more prosperous. There were more vehicles in the rebuilt streets, and it seemed that the day’s market was in full swing. People were flocking to the middle of the town, pushing animals and handcarts and children before them, where there stood stalls and shops selling everything from meat to machineguns. He had to drive slowly to avoid running anyone over.

  Then an aircraft passed overhead, disappearing from sight to the north-west. It was small, twin-engine, maybe an old SABA. But the type didn’t matter: an aircraft had flown low and slow over the town. That could mean there was an airfield.

  Aiden rushed to get out of the town, following the main road north. Finally he left the buildings behind and was waved through another checkpoint. It seemed like the guards at the south checkpoint had been telling the truth about the north being more dangerous. There were twice as many guards and much heavier fortifications on this side of town.

  The road continued to the north west, following the wide plain and avoiding the mountains that pressed in from the north. Not far from the town, to the left of the road, sat an airfield.

  But the Iolaire wasn’t there.

  22.

  Offer

  At Tbilisi, the Iolaire was called down. It was mandatory that aircraft stopped if they were flying through Tbilisi airspace, or so the tower said. A standard ‘shake-down or shoot-down’ policy. Most cities around Europe did the same thing, and it wasn’t normally a problem: the big airports had fuel and facilities, so landing was normally useful. But perhaps more importantly they had the surface-to-air missiles to force you to land. Fredrick had heard it explained that all the old highways, before the war, had service stations and truck stops for refuelling and so on, sort of like the airports nowadays.

  The difference was that they didn’t blow you up if you refused to stop and buy something from the gift shop.

  It didn’t matter this time, Fredrick had little choice. Alarms were screaming at him about empty fuel tanks and combat damage. He had to land.

  He had done so quickly, not wanting to be in vertical mode when the fuel ran out. His craft was battered and limping from the chase, but she’d gotten away. The city seemed well defended, well ordered. Koikov wouldn’t dare to follow them here.

  Docking fees paid, Fredrick had requested an engineer to inspect the aircraft. Refuelling would wait until both wing tanks were operational. As he returned to the craft, Fredrick found Vika sitting on the cargo ramp, staring across the tarmac at nothing in particular.

  “They say the engineers will be here in a couple of hours,” he said, sitting down next to her. “I should have enough gold for the repairs.”

  Vika nodded absently. Fredrick looked at her. “You did great back there, you know. Saved my arse.”

  She just nodded, still staring.

  “I’m sure your father is fine,” he said. “Tough old bastard.”

  “Yes,” said Vika. “I am not worried for my father.”

  It was Fredrick who was silent now. What was bothering her then?

  “I am worried for my town,” she said, reading him. “It was tearing itself apart.”

  Fredrick tried to make light of it. “I don’t know. It kind of looked like they were giving those marines hell.”

  She snorted at this. “Yes, maybe. But how many will be hurt?”

  Fredrick couldn’t answer that. They sat for a moment, watching the airport around them.

  “Let’s go and find something to eat. There’s no point in sitting around here all day.” Fredrick got to his feet and offered a hand to Vika. Once the Iolaire was repaired and refuelled, he’d take her back to Ashtarak. As nice as it might have been, he knew he couldn’t keep her forever.

  And he had to find Aiden. He hoped he was still alive.

  Some time later, Fredrick and Vika returned to the Iolaire. Three men were standing by the Iolaire’s closed ramp: two engineers in stained overalls and another man. Fredrick let the engineers on board, where they began prodding and prying at the Iolaire’s damage while discussing it loudly in Georgian, arguing over various things as they worked. The third man slowly approached Fredrick.

  “Those are quite big holes,” he said, nodding at the Iolaire. He was a thin man, not young, with a broad face and flat nose. He wore faded cargo trousers and a buttoned shirt with a breast tag that said Deputy Dock Master in English below its Georgian counterpart. “You were in a bit of a fight, yes?”

  “You could say that,” replied Fredrick, wary of the man’s intent.

  “Yes.” He smoothed his shirt and peered into the hold at the engineers who had just begun lifting floor panels, still arguing loudly about something. “The Dock Master would like to see you,” he said, turning to watch as a large hauler flared for landing, its engines roaring.

  “What about?” asked Fredrick, trying to hide his worry.

  The man just shrugged and started walking away. He stopped after a few paces. “If you would follow me,” he said. Fredrick and Vika went with him across the hot tarmac.

  The interior of the administration building was cool, made so by big tortured conditioning units near the entrance. The Deputy Dock Master led them past open offices and busy staff, to an elevator at the end of the building. It took them to another office, just one floor beneath the control tower, where the Dock Master welcomed them warmly.

  “Good morning!” he said, standing over his desk to shake their hands, gesturing for them to take a seat. “Pleas
e. That will be all, Goga.” The Deputy turned and meandered out of the office silently.

  “That man…” said the Dock Master, shaking his head. “I sent him to get you as soon as you landed, over an hour ago. Sometimes I wonder what I pay him for.” Unlike his deputy, the Dock Master was not a thin man. Even in the cool conditioned office he was sweating profusely. “Anyway, welcome to Tbilisi! I hope your flight here was not too boring, eh?” he said with a wink.

  Fredrick was uneasy. He smiled politely. A man entered the office from a side room, carrying a mug of coffee. He nodded in acknowledgement at Fredrick and Vika.

  “Where are my manners? This is Solomon,” said the Dock Master, gesturing at the other man, “and I am Teimuraz.”

  “Vika and Fredrick,” said Fredrick.

  “Good names, good names,” he said, dabbing sweat from his brow with a stained handkerchief. “I suppose you would like to know why I have brought you here.”

  Fredrick nodded. “That would be useful, Dock Master.”

  “Teimuraz, please,” the fat man replied. He cleared his throat loudly. “Yesterday, a high-importance alert was raised on the network, concerning the Sederek Trading Centre in Baku.” Teimuraz paused, eyeing the pair in front of him. Fredrick kept his face very still, and he hoped Vika was doing the same.

  “The network?” he heard her ask.

  “Ah, my dear, the network connects all recognised hubs of trade: land, sea and air, major and minor. It allows us to communicate, to share supply and demand information; to compare prices. It is a merely a shadow of what existed before the war, of course, patched together from old cables and masts, but it does allow us to share warnings. Warnings, say, about certain individuals who have been causing trouble. Criminals.”

  He let that sink in for a moment. Fredrick knew about the network –he’d flown a few repair runs to relay stations himself- though he hadn’t realised it might be used against him. An alarm pealed at the back of his mind. The conversation was not heading somewhere he wanted it to go.