by Arnot, C. S.
Aiden laughed. “No, friend, I think I’ll pass.”
“Father, should we use Balaur?” asked Ileana.
“Yes I think we should.” He nodded at Aiden. “You use it. You are a gunner, after all!”
Aiden looked from Malkasar to Ileana. The girl was grinning slyly at him. “I will help you load it, Jura,” she said.
Aiden sat for a moment, trying to think of an excuse. His mind was blank. Who else could do it? Malkasar was driving, and he didn’t want to think of the cannon exploding in Ileana’s face. She was still young, and no matter how much grime she covered herself with, it wouldn’t protect her. He would do it. He nodded to the old merchant and clambered through to the back of the cab again.
With his head and shoulders clear of the hatch, the sound of the raid was much louder. One of the private merchant trucks swerved suddenly out of line, a bandit fighting with the driver in the cab, before jackknifing and toppling onto its side, spilling crates and barrels across the four lanes of highway. The following vehicles ploughed straight through, heedless. The gunfire had intensified.
Aiden grasped the pistol grip of the Balaur, and cranked a lever that looked like a cocking handle. He mashed the catch labelled “SAFETY” with his thumb, and eyed along the length of the stumpy barrel. Dragging the gun around on its oily track, he chose the raider vehicle closest to him and started to squeeze the trigger. He screwed up his face and squinted his eyes, shying away from what he half-expected to be a misfire.
Then a bandit’s arm appeared over the end of the wagon’s cargo trailer. Aiden spun the Balaur to point at the new threat, and just as the man’s torso appeared over the lip he gave the trigger its pull.
The gun jumped hard against its track with the most ear-splitting explosion and a flash nearly the width of the wagon. The bandit disappeared in a mist of red scraps, pulverised by the load of shrapnel.
Aiden stared, horrified. The adrenaline of earlier was still there, but it seemed to pale now before the revulsion of what he’d just done.
Swallowing dryly, he shouted for Ileana below, and felt a fresh shell press into his hand. His voice sounded muffled and distant, and even the sounds of fighting had become dulled. He wondered if his ears were bleeding.
With surprisingly steady hands Aiden reloaded the Balaur, and this time took aim at the lead raider. Well, aim was maybe a strong word.
The shot blew a hundred holes in the bandit vehicle and riddled the occupants with pieces of metal. Engine dead, the car listed driverless into the side of one of the convoy trucks. The driver of the truck nudged it away with a slight swerve, and the punctured tires did the rest. The car rolled to a sharp halt and the following raiders had to swerve out of the way.
Realising the threat, many of the bandits turned their attention to Aiden. Shots hissed and snapped through the air around him, and a few whined from the armour. He ducked into the hatch, shouting for another shell.
Instead of a shell, Aiden felt Ileana’s hand pull him away from the hatch.
“Too dangerous!” she cried. She was right. The sound of bullets overhead was terrifying. He hadn’t noticed.
Aiden clambered off the ladder and went back through to the cab. Through the windscreen he could see the two scout vehicles on the road ahead, driving at full speed towards the convoy.
As they drew closer, the scouts opened fire. Orange flashes strobed; the heavy machinegun on one of the vehicles thumped a stream of lead and phosphorous past Malkasar’s wagon.
They passed by braking, tyres screaming, still firing with every gun they had. Craning to look, Aiden saw a couple of the raider vehicles shredded by the fusillade. The others, though, were shooting back.
The firing only intensified as the scouts and the raiders passed each other: the fight became briefly, brutally close range. Then, as they slowed, the scouts turned around and came chasing after the raiders from behind.
For a moment, it looked as if the fight was turning. It looked as if the raiders were breaking and about to run.
Then there was an explosion, and the scout vehicle with the machinegun disappeared in a filthy ball of flame and twisted metal. The only scout vehicle now was the little unarmoured car that Aiden had given Malkasar.
“Shit,” he said. “Malkasar…”
“I saw in the mirror,” said Malkasar. “They must have a big gun somewhere. I don’t understand. Why don’t they break?”
“They do seem fairly determined,” agreed Aiden, looking out of the window at the carnage following the convoy. He began reloading his pistol magazine.
Absent-mindedly, he noticed his hands weren’t shaking. In fact, the whole situation felt almost… normal.
Suddenly there was an almighty bang. Aiden, Malkasar and Ileana were pitched a few centimetres into the air by the jolt, and the engine beneath their feet howled like a wounded animal.
Malkasar stamped on the accelerator. The engine didn’t respond; its howl was falling in pitch, and the wagon was gradually slowing. He began to curse in his mother tongue, whatever that was. Ileana grabbed her shotgun and leaned out of the window to fire a couple of shots at the raiders. They responded in kind, as bullets rattled from the armoured door. She ducked back in, racking in another round.
Now, with the lead vehicle dying, the surviving private merchant vehicles and Malkasar’s other two wagons overtook it. They passed, one by one, fleeing as best they could. Malkasar was shouting insults at them as they passed.
“Cowards!” he said, finally, as the wagon ground to a halt. A couple of raider vehicles chased after the fleeing merchants, but the majority braked and swerved to stop in a ring around the wagon. Aiden counted five raider cars. Two had roof-mounted machine guns. One truck carried a bandit with a brutal anti-materiel rifle in the back. The bandit was grinning beneath his mucky goggles. He cycled the bolt of his rifle.
The last scout car drew up beside Malkasar’s wagon. The two guards were holding their hands up, weapons tossed down. One was bleeding from the abdomen. The exposed engine hissed and ticked.
Aiden and the other two dropped from their seats, huddling in cover.
A megaphone squealed and the amplified voice that followed was horribly familiar. “Come out, Aiden. Come out and the rest are free to go.”
Malkasar and Ileana turned to look at Aiden then, confused.
“This was for you?” asked Malkasar, no anger in his voice, just incomprehension.
Aiden didn’t say anything. It couldn’t be… he’d left that bastard and his marines to die in Ashtarak. They couldn’t have – they shouldn’t have been able to get away. Koikov or Tovmas’ men would have killed them all, surely.
And yet, as he glanced out of the cracked windscreen, the fair haired head of Elias Prosper stared back from the passenger seat of one of the trucks.
“Come out peacefully, Aiden. There’s a good fellow.”
Aiden shut his eyes and tried to think of a way out. There was none, other than that offered by the bounty hunter. Not if he wanted Malkasar and his daughter to live.
He swore under his breath as he got to his feet, his pistol dropped on the floor. He went to the door of the wagon and opened it. Before he left he looked back at Ileana, crouched in the corner with her shotgun. Her eyes were brown like Sona’s. Pretty eyes.
He climbed down out of the wagon, half expecting to be filled with bullets before his feet landed on the dusty highway. All that met him, though, was silence.
And then the megaphone. “Good lad.”
Two bandits came forward, pushed him to the ground and grabbed his wrists, twisting them behind his back. There was a sting as a cable tie was yanked tight. Then they patted him down as he lay on the road, pulling him to his feet as they finished. He was shoved roughly into the back of one of the trucks.
Across from him was a bandit, bleeding great glugs of blood from his mouth, hands clutching fumblingly at his chest. He looked at Aiden, unreadable. The man was dying, surely he knew that. He was probably in shock, hi
s brain slowly shutting down. But still he looked at Aiden. Aiden stared back.
Somewhere in the man’s body, something finally gave. He choked a little, his eyes rolled, and his neck went slowly limp like a deflating bag. Finally, his head hung loose, the last of the blood pooling in his lap.
It was one more person who had died on Aiden’s account. Oddly though, Aiden didn’t care much. He’d seen so much death, now. The thing across from him was just a corpse, nobody he’d ever known. Nobody worth mourning.
The truck he’d been bundled in started to move. The windows were covered in flaps of steel as crude armour plating, so Aiden couldn’t see out.
Then, as the truck gathered speed, he heard the guns start again. It was fierce, automatic fire. Under it all was the regular bark of a shotgun, and though it was so faint he might just have imagined it, he could hear a high, terrified scream.
Aiden howled in pure incoherent rage. He pounded against the walls of the truck with his feet and fought his restraints so hard his wrists were slick with blood.
“Leave them alone!” he screamed. “Leave them alone!” His scream broke into racking sobs, and his pounding became weaker.
They’re killing them. The bastards are killing them.
The driver of the truck cared as little as the corpse across from him.
26.
Enkidu
Fredrick flipped slowly through the pages on the monitor. It certainly looked like Solomon was telling the truth.
In all honesty though, he wasn’t reading the documents thoroughly. He was hoping that there’d be some pictures somewhere, since if he could just see it he told himself he’d have a better chance at understanding it. Words like ‘radiation-hardened circuitry’, ‘specific impulse in atmosphere’ and ‘Medon armour with spall countermeasures’ meant very little to Fredrick. Though he didn’t understand them, the words were still working to convince him that maybe – just maybe – Solomon knew what he was talking about, and that his story was credible.
He quite possibly had been an engineer for the Union, back in the war. Maybe he had indeed worked on a classified project; one that might just prove useful in downsizing the Gilgamesh’s absolute power. But it was hard to tell. It all seemed a bit too good to be true. A little bit far-fetched.
“So you see what it is?” encouraged Solomon, sitting across the table from Fredrick. The bar was fairly quiet in the middle of the afternoon. Solomon didn’t seem too worried about people overhearing their conversation.
“Oh yeah,” Fredrick lied, taking a swig of his beer and doing his best to look academic.
Solomon leaned on the table with his elbows. “The Gilgamesh was only the first. This, my friend,” he said, tapping the monitor with a calloused finger, “this was, and still is, the state of the art. This is a second-generation aerial warship.”
Fredrick looked up from the monitor then. A second Gilgamesh. That didn’t sound like a good idea at all.
Solomon took the monitor from Fredrick. He flipped pages across the screen, looking for something. “Here,” he said, and handed the monitor back to Fredrick.
On the monitor was a picture – a technical drawing. The object was long, roughly rectangular, and would have been almost unidentifiable as a warship if not for the engine nozzles at the stern. The next few pages were different aspects of the ship: from behind, above, at an angle. It had four small engines around a single large nozzle in the centre of the stern. Fredrick wondered what that was for. The Gilgamesh certainly had nothing that huge.
Then he zoomed in on one of the images, at a detail on the hull. It was a gun turret, one of several, faceted for radar-deflection. Assuming the craft was as large as the Gilgamesh, this gun was massive. Its barrel would be almost fifty metres long. That didn’t make sense.
This lead Fredrick to realise that it must actually be much smaller than the Gilgamesh. A tinier, more compact ship. In the corner of the drawing was some text. Some meaningless numbers and a single word. Or, at least, some letters.
“Enkidu,” said Fredrick. “Is that its name?”
Solomon grinned then. “That’s right. You see the theme?”
Fredrick didn’t get it, but he nodded anyway. Enkidu. It suited it.
“And you’re going to what? Build this?” He was still sceptical.
Solomon laughed. “No, it already exists. People say it was the Gilgamesh that bankrupted the Union, but they are wrong. It was this.”
“So where is it? Who has it?” And why hadn’t Fredrick heard about it?
“Nobody has it. It was never launched. As far as I can tell, it was finished two days before the Armistice. Then the money ran out, and you know what happened. Everybody for themselves. It was abandoned in its hangar.”
“Which is where?”
“Now that is the ultimate question,” said Solomon, sitting back. “I’ve been working on that one for a long time.”
Fredrick’s curiosity had been kindled. “I thought you said you worked on this project?”
“I did. Control algorithms, mostly. But that didn’t involve me actually seeing the thing, or even being anywhere near it. I’ve been tracing old communications to and from the build site for years now, following the trail of crumbs. And now I think I know where it is. At least, I’ve narrowed it down to a few dozen square kilometres.”
The beer bottle was empty, but Fredrick took a swig anyway, absorbed. “Where?”
“It’s in the west of Scotland.”
Fredrick snorted. “My gunner won’t be happy about that,” he said, indicating to the barmaid that he’d like another bottle.
Solomon looked at him, his eyes narrowing a millimetre. “Why’s that?”
“Well, he’s from Scotland. As far as I can tell he doesn’t want to go back.” The barmaid brought over another cold bottle, opened it and set it in front of Fredrick. He gave her a few coppers. “Thanks,” he said, winking. She blushed a little, and smiled back.
Solomon turned down the offer of another drink. “If he is just your gunner… will he not follow your orders?”
Fredrick snorted. “It’s not that sort of arrangement. I might fly the Iolaire, but he won’t let me forget it’s half his.”
“You couldn’t convince him to do this?”
Fredrick considered that for a moment. “Well, I probably could, since there’s decent payment on offer. He won’t be keen on going back though, I warn you now. Family problems, I think.”
Fredrick was enjoying the conversation, despite its looming purpose. It was probably the beer.
“I met him in a bar in Esbjerg,” he continued, mostly just because he felt like talking, “where the fishing boat he was crewing had taken shelter from a storm. We got to talking about business, and I told him my plan to buy an aircraft and try my hand at freight-hauling. He decided that was a good idea. He sold his share of the fishing boat when they returned to Scotland, and caught a ship back to Esbjerg. Been working with him ever since.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
Solomon took a swig of his own drink. “Well, hopefully this expedition won’t take more than a few days. A week at most. Then he can go where he likes.”
Fredrick nodded. The beer was good. Cold and almost sweet.
He thought about how to convince Aiden. The money would go a long way towards that, without doubt, but whether it’d be enough… To him, it seemed like a fairly slim chance that they’d even find this thing, let alone find it in working order. Then they’d have to figure out how to use it to put an end to the Gilgamesh. Aiden would see these problems. It was a monstrous task carrying a lot of risk. Who was even going to fly the thing, even if they did find it?
If Fredrick was to convince Aiden to join in this, then he’d have to convince himself first. That, ironically, was the only thing he was absolutely sure of.
“As soon as the repairs are finished, I will go back to Armenia to pick him up,” said Fredrick.
If he’s still
alive, he thought.
The bastard had to be. Tovmas and his boys ought to have sorted out the last of the marines, surely. Aiden would hopefully be waiting patiently in Ashtarak for the Iolaire to return. He’d be keeping himself amused with the fine woman Fredrick saw him bag at the party.
But somehow that just didn’t fit. Aiden hated sitting on his hands. It’d be just like him to do something stupid, like try to follow the Iolaire.
“Well, I hope you can convince him,” said Solomon. “This really is our best hope.”
It was that, for sure. At least, it was if it was true. But if Solomon was paying them anyway, he supposed it didn’t matter much if it was all a pile of horse shit. Money up front, and he’d let the man do what he liked.
The sum offered was enough for the pair of them to live comfortably for a very long time. Either that, or expand their business a little. Another aircraft, maybe. Or a boat to carry bulk goods. Something like that.
Fredrick looked at the documents on the monitor again. It all looked official, authentic. But how on Earth would he know? He was only a pilot, not an academic.
“So once we have this Enkidu, what then?” he asked.
“Then I will use it to cripple the Gilgamesh.”
“How?”
Solomon took the monitor and chose a page, showing it to Fredrick. It was an extensive list, headed ‘Armament’. Topping the list was an ‘M-Gigajoule-class Lorentz (Rail) Gun’. Two of.
“Those babies will gut the Gilgamesh bow-to-stern. All it would take is a single hit to the reactor or the repulsor, and it’s gone. Each gun can manage three shots a minute, for a short period. That’s six chances a minute to hit a very big target.”
“But the Gilgamesh has rail guns too. I’ve seen them.”
“Not like this it doesn’t. The Gilgamesh’s guns are an order of magnitude smaller. It wasn’t built to deal with an enemy like this. Against dispersed, numerous hostiles armed with missiles and smaller electric weaponry, it absolutely dominates, just like it did against the ATC. But not against this. It won’t even see the Enkidu coming. See that ugly nose? It’s covered in superconducting cells, as close to black-body properties as it is possible to get, at IR wavelengths and longer. It catches radar and laser radiation and fires it from cells on other faces of the hull, reflecting virtually nothing. To the Gilgamesh, it’ll just look like empty sky. Until it gets close.”