by Arnot, C. S.
“Tell me,” he said between mouthfuls of nuts and fruit, “is this what it feels like to have a proper job?”
Fredrick took a swig of the flask that was ever-present in the cockpit. “Close,” he said. “I think most employers would need us to do some actual work, though.”
“Nah,” dismissed Aiden, frowning. “Being good at looking busy is the key.”
His friend snorted, looking at him slouching in the reclined chair, scratching his balls. “Well you certainly have that down.”
“I’ll have you know that I am ever vigilant in that gun turret,” retorted Aiden, indignantly. “At present, I am on what we working fellows call a smoko.”
“A cigarette break, you mean? You don’t even smoke.”
“Smoking is not necessary for a smoko.”
“I suppose your union won you that?” laughed Fredrick.
Aiden smiled, continuing the play. “My union is the highly regarded North Atlantic variety, I’ll have you know. It failed to win anything.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Fredrick, doing so.
The pair sat in amicable silence for a little while, watching the bustle of the airport from the cockpit.
“How’s the arm?” Fredrick asked.
Aiden looked down at it then, lifting his short sleeve and flexing. He’d almost forgotten about it, somehow.
“It was fine till you asked,” he replied, only half joking. A dull throb that he hadn’t been aware of started niggling at him.
At least the arm looked okay, he supposed. The glue dressing had been changed in Tbilisi by Teimuraz’ doctor. The man had told him it was clean and healing well, but that he should avoid heavy exercise with that arm for a couple of weeks. It looked bruised around the edges of the dressing, but that was apparently normal.
“How often do you need to change the dressing?”
“Every three days or so,” he said. Teimuraz had restocked their aid box. The fat dock master had thought of everything.
Fredrick looked uncomfortable. He was glancing at Aiden, fidgeting with the cap of his flask.
“What?” said Aiden.
“How are you?”
Aiden took a moment to answer. The question caught him off-guard. In honesty, it was like the arm. It hadn’t bothered him till he was asked about it.
“Fine,” he said, simply.
Fredrick looked relieved. Aiden made himself smile. Unwillingly, his mind was rolling back to the previous week. It felt like he had missed a step, tripping and sliding back down the stairs to where the memories lay.
It was the faces that lingered with him, mostly. That, and stupid things that shouldn’t bother him, like the clothes they were wearing. His mind somehow had catalogued all of it, every detail, from the slaver with his boots on the wrong feet to Magar in his faded jacket or Malkasar’s blood-soaked cotton shirt. He would find himself wondering what their last meal had been; things like that. Little things. Tragic things.
People had told him it wasn’t his fault. He wanted to believe them… but for almost every death he could find a way he’d caused it, not even counting the ones he’d killed personally. And he knew now that it would eat at him for the rest of the journey. His appetite left him.
Not long after, he found himself sitting in his turret. Vika and Solomon had returned from whatever errands they had run, and the Iolaire was checked and ready to go. Aiden went through the procedures mindlessly, focusing on the dull pain in his arm. When he concentrated on it, the faces went away. He didn’t have to remember. He flexed the arm to make the muscles twinge. The fresh pain filled his mind, and he welcomed it.
Finally the Iolaire lifted off. The airport receded below them and Fredrick hover-taxied to the take-off corridor. Then they were flying, the wings folded out and the engines horizontal, heading west and north so that Aiden faced east and south. The sun shone from a bright point on the ground, gone as quick as it had come, as the Iolaire passed through a reflection. Aiden squinted to see what it was that had reflected it, but whatever it had been was so far away that he couldn’t make it out. Probably just a glass windscreen on a car in the city, but the gunner in Aiden was watchful for glints like that. He knew that sometimes that would be all he’d ever see of an attacker.
He flashed the ranging laser at where he thought the glint was, just out of habit. Out of range was the message on the HUD.
Poland passed beneath them, green with farms and forests. Small towns sat in hollows or straddled rivers, with vein-like roads linking them all together. Not much traffic was travelling on the roads, Aiden noted. Maybe they were as unsafe as in Armenia. From the air, the country didn’t look as ruined as Armenia had, though. But it was hard to tell for sure from so high up. Could be that all the little villages were deserted. It wouldn’t be the only country like that.
Within an hour of Warsaw, Aiden could see sea again to the Iolaire’s starboard. The southern edge of the Baltic, he guessed. Soon they would be over Denmark, and no doubt Fredrick would notify them when they were. The pilot had an attachment to his country that Aiden seemed to be free of. When he thought of Scotland, the memories were not the good, warm memories of home that Fredrick would sometimes talk about. In truth he felt more excited to see Denmark again. It was the place he’d first met the Iolaire, after all.
He did a wide sweep of the sky above and the ground below. Absolutely nothing; not even another freighter. That was good. He let himself relax. For no particular reason he swivelled his chair slightly and looked behind him, down into the hold.
There were Vika and Solomon, standing in the middle of the hold. It took Aiden a moment to register what they were doing.
They were kissing.
Not just kissing, but properly going for it. Hips pressed together, arms locked around neck and waist. They started to pull apart. Aiden panicked and spun back to face the rear.
What the hell…
She was supposed to be with Fredrick. She was supposed to be with Fredrick, not Solomon. Was she stringing his friend along? Or had they ended whatever it was they had?
Did he know?
Aiden sat awkwardly in his turret, gripping the control sticks, not knowing what to do. Maybe it was all above-board. After all, there was never really anything official, was there? It was entirely up to her who she got off on. None of Aiden’s business. But then…
“Fredrick,” he said, over the intercom. “I think there’s… something you should know.”
“What is it?”
Aiden paused. How could he say it? What was the best way to put it?
And then another voice sounded in his headphones.
“Alright folks, where to?” It was Solomon, laughing to himself. He must have just gone to the cockpit.
“Nothing, never mind,” Aiden said, directed at Fredrick. He couldn’t tell him now. He wouldn’t get a chance to say anything until they reached their destination, now. He swore under his breath.
He had an uneasy feeling about it all. Something about what he’d just seen rang as sinister. He couldn’t say why, especially not when he thought about it logically. He was just protective of his friend. If they were going behind his back with this…
What else aren’t they sharing?
Aiden couldn’t leave his turret, not while they were in flight. He couldn’t go down and confront Vika in the hold. And if he did, he wasn’t sure how wise it would be anyway. If they really were up to something, it might just blow up in Aiden’s and Fredrick’s faces sooner.
Frustrated, he held his tongue.
“And there’s Denmark!” announced Fredrick, proudly.
“So it is,” said Solomon. “Not long now.”
Not long indeed.
33.
Bealach
“We should be right on it,” said Solomon, frustratedly.
“I don’t see anything,” said Fredrick.
Aiden squinted down at the slowly rotating landscape below. Big mountains, green with summer, hunched around the head
of a sea loch. Looked pretty untouched to him. This landscape probably hadn’t seen much change since the last ice age.
“Nothing out here, either,” reported Aiden. He wasn’t going to admit it, but he was actually enjoying flying over Scotland. He’d never done it before. It was much more beautiful than he remembered.
“No roads,” Solomon muttered, “nothing.”
It didn’t seem too promising. It wasn’t the kind of place you would normally expect a warship to be built. No infrastructure, no workforce. Like Solomon said, nothing. The place looked pristine. Aiden would have been very surprised to learn that anything of any importance ever happened here.
“What if it’s hidden?” said Vika, on the spare headset.
“It will be hidden,” answered Solomon, as patiently as he could manage. “But you can’t hide everything with a project like this. There has to be something showing…”
The Iolaire’s four passengers sat in silence for a moment, watching the scenery. Aiden was conscious of the fact that they were wasting fuel quite heavily now, making wide circles around the head of the loch. He was sure Fredrick was aware of that as well.
“How are we for fuel?” Aiden asked.
“Two tonnes left.”
With two tonnes and an empty hold they could fly several hundred kilometres. It wasn’t quite time to worry, yet. It was the Scottish price of ‘nol he dreaded. The longer they loitered, the more it would end up costing them. Aiden had long since learned the value of being frugal.
“Try to the south,” suggested Solomon. Fredrick complied and the Iolaire levelled out heading south across the narrow loch. Aiden faced north now. He watched the mountains as they passed by beneath him. The sky was bright blue above him, but a humid haze blurred the mountains on the horizon. Why had there not been more weather like this when he’d lived here?
“Anything?” asked Fredrick.
“Not a thing,” replied Solomon. He didn’t sound angry, just disappointed.
Then something caught Aiden’s eye, to the north of the loch, where the layers of hills folded into one another. A little grey speck, lighter coloured than the rest of the landscape. Could have been nothing: a boulder or a ruined croft or something, but he was too far away to tell.
“I see something back to the north,” he reported. “Might just be a pile of rocks, though.”
Fredrick banked the Iolaire back around. Aiden unbuckled himself from his turret, clambered down into the hold and ran to the cockpit.
He squeezed past Vika at the door and pointed out of the glass. Fredrick and Solomon followed his finger. Fredrick gave him a thumbs-up and pointed the Iolaire at the tiny grey object.
Aiden headed back to his turret.
“It’s an aircraft,” Fredrick said.
Aiden could imagine Solomon sitting forwards in his seat. Someone got here before you. He wanted to laugh. It would serve the bastard right for going behind Fredrick’s back with Vika.
Though it would mean the chance of stopping the Gilgamesh had slipped away, Aiden might have liked it if the Enkidu wasn’t to be found. Let the bastard taste some disappointment. But then an uncomfortable thought crept up on him. Was he truly just angry for his friend, or was this still jealousy over Vika?
When he put it like that, he didn’t know.
The Iolaire reared and slowed, its engines vectoring upwards. “Bring us down tail-first so I can watch the bealach,” said Aiden.
“English, please,” returned Fredrick. He always enjoyed catching Aiden’s little slips.
“Sorry,” said Aiden. Maybe it was just something about being back in Scotland. “Bring us down so I can cover the aircraft in the pass.”
The Iolaire yawed about as it came to a hover, a few hundred metres above the aircraft sitting on the high saddle between two peaks. The Iolaire dropped below the level of the peaks then, and slowly, gently lowered itself to the saddle.
Aiden watched the aircraft closely all the way down. His crosshair did not leave its cockpit. It was a twin-engine transport, smaller than the Iolaire, repurposed from an old counter-insurgency strike craft. Aiden vaguely recognised the model. Something unmistakeable, however, was its markings.
“It belongs to the Gilgamesh,” he announced.
“I feared as much.” Solomon no longer sounded disappointed, only impatient. “At least this may mean we have the right place.”
“They know about the Enkidu?”
“Well, if I was able to work it out by myself, I’m sure with a big enough team even the bone-headed brass on the Gilgamesh could have.”
“But why right now?” asked Aiden. Twenty years the Enkidu had sat since the war, presumably with nobody uncovering it.
“Well…” started Solomon. “It may have something to do with a burst communication I sent recently. I had to find a working satellite and repurpose it for the transmission, broadcasting the command regularly as it orbited… status requests using old acceptance codes… but I got a response. A packet of data… telemetry, housekeeping… meaningless really. That wasn’t important. What was important was that I could pinpoint its source. Here. Within an error of a few kilometres.”
“So you got it to broadcast its location? To the whole bloody world?”
“Well yes, but… only if you were listening for it. I was listening for it.”
“And so was the bloody Gilgamesh, by the look of it!” Aiden was going to lose his temper. This was not good. The Gilgamesh knew where the Enkidu was. They’d sent a team to find it.
The Iolaire stopped descending. It hovered perfectly still, twenty metres or so above the wash-blasted grass.
“Do I land or not?” asked Fredrick.
“I don’t know,” answered Aiden. “There could be bloody marines around here for all we know. And if they’re within five klicks, they’ll have heard us coming.”
“Land and let me out,” said Solomon then. “I don’t expect anybody to come with me.”
Fredrick lowered the Iolaire the last little distance to the ground. The landing gear sank into the soft grass. Thankfully the wheels were oversized for just this kind of landing. The rotors started to spin down as Fredrick tested the surface, making sure the Iolaire didn’t sink in too far.
“How long do you reckon it’s been here?” Aiden asked as the engines stared to quieten. His gun still pointed at the aircraft a hundred metres across the saddle from them.
“Hard to say,” replied Solomon. “I don’t think they’ll have much of a head start on us… a week at most.”
“A week?” A week was a bloody long time. The Enkidu could be gone, off south to join the Gilgamesh. The consequences of that were hard to comprehend.
“Yes, I received the transmission not much longer than a week ago.”
“Well this just gets better and better.”
The cargo ramp opened, and Solomon went out. Vika followed behind him. They headed across the pass towards the other aircraft.
“I’m going with them,” said Aiden, standing at the door to the cockpit.
Fredrick looked at him then. He nodded finally. “I will stay with the Iolaire,” he said. He handed Aiden the portable radio. “Call if you need me.”
Aiden nodded to his friend, turned and left the cockpit. Into one pocket he stuffed the radio, switched off, and into the other he stuffed the silver pistol. He couldn’t say why he was going, exactly. Nobody would have blamed him if he stayed at the Iolaire. In fact, it would have been the sensible thing to do. Something in him, though, told him that he needed to see this thing through. He needed to finish this. He had to see if this Enkidu really existed. He had to know if it could really stop the Gilgamesh.
He caught the other two as they reached the Gilgamesh’s aircraft.
A crew hatch was open. Solomon poked his head inside and looked around, his large-calibre pistol in his hand. Vika stood with her own pistol out and ready. Aiden noted how she held it. Down and straight, probably just like her father had taught her.
Tog
ether, she and Aiden watched the surrounding slopes. They were strewn with boulders and scree: marines could have hidden anywhere. Aiden felt very exposed out on the pass.
A cool breeze was blowing up from the sea-loch side. Out to sea, dark clouds had formed on the horizon. The hazy, humid weather was brewing a storm out there, but above him the sky was blue and clear. He wished that he could have relaxed and appreciated the scenery just for a few minutes.
That would have been bloody nice.
“I don’t think it’s been here for very long,” said Solomon at last, ducking back out of the crew hatch.
Aiden just nodded, his eyes still on the slopes.
“Where is the crew?” asked Vika.
To that Solomon had no answer.
Aiden looked across the saddle to the opposite mountain. There were some truly massive boulders just where the saddle met the slope. A deer trail led its winding way across the saddle towards them.
It’s as good a bet as any.
“That way,” he said, pointing with his pistol. Solomon looked at the deer trail and the boulders then. They set off towards the rocks.
The rocks were larger close up. Some were bigger even than the Iolaire, wing tip to wing tip, Aiden reckoned. The deer trail ended at the base of one of the largest, where the rock seemed to overhang the slope a little. He squinted at it. Something about it didn’t look right.
Closer, he saw it. In at the back of the cave was a door. A bloody door in the mountain.
“I think I’ve found it,” he announced.
“Jesus Christ,” whispered Solomon when he saw. Vika grinned widely. She squeezed Aiden’s shoulders tightly. It felt good. Despite everything, it felt really good.
Solomon went first into the cave, ducking under the lip of the boulder so that his rucksack scraped against the rock. Vika went next, with Aiden last. He turned a final time before going under the rock, and took the radio from his pocket.