The Ace of Skulls totkj-4

by Chris Wooding

  Samandra appeared next to him, her eyes alight. ‘Might not be such a bad idea at that,’ she said. She tugged his arm and they made off after Malvery.

  As the dizziness of the moment subsided, Crake suffered a moment of mild disappointment. The Cap’n’s appearance had meant his own heroics had gone virtually unnoticed. But then, that was a daemonist’s lot, he supposed: most of his triumphs happened in secret. Anyway, he’d never wanted for glory. All that mattered to him was that the woman he loved, the lusty, brash Samandra, was back as if she’d never gone.

  Then she gave him a sidelong look and a smile of thanks. An acknowledgement, as from one comrade in battle to another. And that was enough.

  ‘Cease fire!’ Kedmund Drave was yelling, as Malvery burst into the courtyard. ‘Cease fire!’

  The soldiers put up their rifles uncertainly. Their bullets had done little good against the Ketty Jay’s armoured underbelly anyway, although they’d shot out a few of her floods. Now that he was no longer under attack, Frey began to descend. The soldiers watched with wary eyes as an aircraft painted with Awakener decals lowered itself into the heart of the palace grounds. Two aircraft hovered overhead. One was undoubtedly Harkins’ Firecrow, which was incredible enough. The other. .

  Could that be Pinn?

  Samandra came striding past Malvery and through the soldiers towards Drave. ‘Convinced they’re on our side yet?’ she snapped at him scornfully. Drave just gave her a look and motioned at someone behind him. Morben Kyne appeared at the doorway to the courtyard, with the Archduke and his family. They waited at a safe distance as the Ketty Jay settled on her struts.

  ‘That’s the Cap’n! He’ll always come back for his own!’ Malvery declared to Ashua, as if it was something he’d said all along. He felt glad enough to forget Ashua’s trespasses for the moment, and favoured her with grin. The grin she gave him in return warmed his heart more than he’d expected.

  Suddenly, beyond all expectation, they were all back together again. Even Jez, in a way.

  The cargo ramp came down. Forty soldiers and a half dozen Century Knights primed their weapons. It seemed a bit much for the lone figure that came walking out onto the rain-wet flagstones. But Frey walked taller than when he’d left, and there was something in his eye that hadn’t been there before.

  The thunder overhead had gone silent. The storm had moved on, and only the driving rain was left. Beyond the courtyard, battles still raged, bombs still dropped and dark frigates ploughed the dreary sky. But here was a hush deep enough that Frey’s boot heels could be heard scraping on the stone as he came to a halt.

  Drave took a step forward, glaring imperiously at the newcomer. ‘Captain Frey!’ he said. ‘In the name of the Archduke, I’m commandeering your aircraft. The Archduke and his family must be taken to safety. That’s the highest priori-’

  Frey spat on the ground at his feet. It was a blunt enough display of disrespect to render even Drave speechless.

  ‘This is my aircraft, and she goes where I take her,’ he said. ‘So unless you’ve got a spare couple of hours to torture the ignition codes out of me — and the way this battle’s going, I don’t reckon you do — you’d best shut your mouth and listen up.’

  Drave visibly expanded with rage. He sucked in a breath, and seemed like he was about to lunge; but Samandra slapped an open hand against his breastplate.

  ‘Drave,’ she said. ‘Enough being an arsehole for one day, eh?’

  Drave’s eyes bulged. His face reddened. A vein at his temple pulsed. But though she was half a foot shorter than him, she stared him down. And Drave swallowed his fury and stepped back.

  Frey gave him a look of disgust, then turned his head away dismissively, addressing the crowd. ‘The Azryx device is on board the Delirium Trigger,’ he said, his voice ringing out over the silent courtyard. ‘That’s where I’m going. If I can storm that frigate and take out the Azryx device, Thesk’s anti-aircraft guns will be operational again. I figure with the entire Awakener convoy sitting over the city as they are, we’ll be able to wipe them out with a surprise attack before they can get away. After that, there’ll just be the troops on the ground to deal with, and I think we can handle them. What I need from you lot is one thing: take back the anti-aircraft emplacements, and be ready when they come back on. We’ll get one shot at this. Don’t screw it up.’ He swept the assembled soldiers with a commanding gaze. ‘Any questions?’

  Malvery felt his chest swell with pride, and he wasn’t ashamed to find a tear gathering in his eye. ‘That’s the Cap’n,’ he said again.

  The soldiers stirred uneasily, exchanging glances with one another. The silence gathered and became oppressive. Then the crowd parted, and the Archduke walked through to stand next to Drave and Samandra in the rain, his flame-red hair plastered to his skull and his neat beard dripping. He gave Frey a long look. Frey looked back at him.

  ‘Your Grace,’ said Drave. ‘This could all still be a trick to divide our forces. You and your family need to get to safety. The continuation of the Arken line is paramount.’

  But the Archduke laid his hand on Drave’s shoulder, and never took his eyes from Frey. ‘No, old friend,’ he said. ‘If we lose here, we lose everything. I’ll not leave my people to the mercy of daemons.’

  He stepped forward, raised his voice, and spoke to Frey. ‘Take what men and golems you need. Some of my Knights will accompany you. We will take care of matters on the ground.’ Then he turned and addressed his troops, his voice becoming louder still. ‘The battle is not yet lost! There is still hope to turn the tide! Will you fight now with us? Will you fight for Thesk, and the Coalition, and your mothers and brothers and friends?’

  The cheer that went up at that shook the windows of the palace. Malvery, overwhelmed by the moment, gathered Ashua in his arms and hugged her. She gave a surprised little squeak as she was crushed and dumped breathlessly back to earth.

  ‘I’ll go with you!’ called Samandra to Frey.

  ‘You’ll need me!’ said Crake, hurrying out of the crowd. ‘And Bess! And one of these!’ He held up a tarnished brass amulet. ‘My equipment’s all still inside, right?’

  ‘You’re taking on Trinica, you’ll need me too,’ said Kyne. ‘We’ll bring golems.’

  Others were volunteering now, more than they’d even need. Frey left Silo to sort them out. He embraced first Crake and then Malvery, who gave him a broad grin and laughed as he swept him up in a bear hug.

  ‘Steady on, mate!’ Frey said. ‘Need all my ribs.’ When Malvery had put him back down, he said: ‘You coming too?’

  Malvery gave him an apologetic shake of the head. ‘Love to, Cap’n. But I’m gonna be more use down here. Gonna be a lot of wounded to tend to. We’ll see about them guns.’

  Frey seemed to understand. ‘What about you?’ he said to Ashua.

  ‘Reckon I’ll stick with this ox,’ she said.

  Frey looked at Malvery. ‘She alright?’ he asked.

  ‘Aye,’ Malvery said. ‘She’s alright.’

  Frey nodded. ‘Silo!’ he called. The Murthian came over. ‘I’ve got Century Knights, golems and daemonists coming up there with me. Need you to keep an eye on these two. Bring ’em back to me safe.’ There was a question in Silo’s eyes, but Frey was resolute. ‘They’re my crew,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t trust ’em to anyone else’s command but yours.’

  Silo dipped his head gravely. ‘Understood, Cap’n.’

  ‘Who’s got that other earcuff?’ Frey asked.

  Malvery dug it out of his pocket and handed it to Silo. ‘Reckon you ought to hold on to this,’ he said. ‘Let’s all of us try not to lose touch again, eh?’

  A cry went up from the south side of the courtyard. Soldiers pointed at the sky. Malvery hurried over as others gathered. Above the wall, near the horizon, a dark line could be seen against the clouds.

  One of the soldiers had a spyglass to his eye. ‘Aircraft!’ he yelled. ‘Hundreds of aircraft!’

  ‘The rest of the Navy
?’ someone asked. ‘We can’t have had every craft here!’ ‘There ain’t enough left of the Navy for that.’

  ‘It’s the Awakeners! They’re bringing reinforcements!’

  ‘Where did they get that many?’

  But Morben Kyne stepped forward, peering into the sky with his mechanical eyes. ‘It’s not the Navy, and it’s not the Awakeners either,’ he said, his voice humming with strange harmonics. He lowered his head, and his hood fell across his face. ‘It’s the Samarlans.’

  Forty-One

  Dream Come True — A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing — The Casket — Fighting on Deck — Bad Memories

  ‘Cap’n,’ said Pinn. ‘Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’

  ‘I see ’em, Pinn,’ Frey said in his ear. ‘Stay where you are, we’ll be airborne in a sec.’

  Pinn watched the approaching fleet from his vantage point above the palace, his forehead creased in a frown. He and Harkins were making slow circles while the Cap’n loaded up men in the courtyard below. They could have simply hovered, but it was too dangerous to hang still in the air. There were Awakener craft flying about, and frigates cruising nearby.

  The sight of the Samarlan fleet was faintly dizzying. He’d seen Sammie craft before, over the Free Trade Zone, but never more than a few at a time. The aerium shortage in Samarla meant they couldn’t afford to keep too many in the air. But how many were out there now? A thousand? More? They must have squeezed every last drop out of their reserves to raise this many craft.

  ‘Why are the Sammies here?’ he asked.

  ‘That,’ said Frey, ‘is a bloody good question.’

  He could make out the shape of the bigger craft now. They were smooth-sided, with sleek lines and pointed ends, and they slipped through the sky like sharks. The Sammies built their craft for beauty first and practicality second, and their elegant designs came at the expense of armour and aerodynamics. Theirs was an aesthetic culture; even their war-making was pretty.

  The Awakeners had seen them too. The electroheliograph masts of their frigates were flashing. Pinn had never troubled to learn EHG code to any proficient degree, but every pilot understood the basic signals. From what he could make out, the Awakeners were just as puzzled as he was.

  Pinn wasn’t much for politics, but he dimly understood that the Sammies and the Awakeners were working together. The Sammies had sold the Azryx device to the Awakeners, after all. They wanted the Coalition gone so the new rulers would sell them aerium again.

  Which was why it all came as a bit of a surprise when the Sammies opened fire.

  Pinn stared in amazement as a row of silent flashes rippled along the length of the Sammie line, and the battered cargo freighters that guarded the flank of the Awakeners’ convoy lit up in great blasts of flame. The Awakeners barely had time to register the attack before another salvo ripped into them, this one reaching deeper, hammering the frigates further in. Fighters went spinning away in pieces, blasted apart by the concussion of the heavy guns.

  ‘Will someone tell me what in the name of buggery is going on?’ Harkins yelled.

  By the time the third salvo reached them, the Awakeners were reacting at last, but there was no organisation in their response. They had no plan for this, and no way to communicate orders fast enough. Some frigates broke formation, angling themselves to return fire. Other craft — those whose captains hadn’t been turned into Imperators — made a break for escape. The fighters and bombers who’d been attacking the city swooped and swung about, their pilots confused and panicked.

  ‘Are the Samarlans on our side now, or what?’ Pinn asked.

  ‘They’re on their own side,’ said Frey in exasperation. The Ketty Jay was lifting off from the courtyard now. ‘And you two need to keep them off my back till I get to the Delirium Trigger.’

  ‘What have they got against us? We’re not even Awakeners!’ Harkins cried.

  ‘You’ve got Ciphers painted on your wings. Think they’ll be able to tell the difference?’

  But Pinn was hardly listening now. A sense of mounting excitement was building up within him. He could see a mass of Samarlan fighters racing towards the edge of the convoy, flying ahead of the big frigates, deadly darts shot at the heart of the Awakener ranks. He didn’t care about the why and the what, or who was allied with who. All he cared about was one thing.

  Once, there’d been a young man who wanted to go to war. He’d played with planes till he was old enough to fly them. He’d fantasised about being a hero. He’d dreamed of shooting the enemy out of the sky. But then the war had ended too soon, the enemy called it off, and that young man’s dreams had been shattered.

  And now at last, after all this time, the enemy had come to make amends.

  A huge grin split his pudgy face. His piggy eyes twinkled. A hysterical cackle bubbled up out of his guts, and he threw back his head and let it out. Then he hit the throttle and yanked the flight stick, swinging his aircraft away from the palace and off through the rain.

  Finally, finally, Pinn was going to get to kill him some Sammies.

  ‘On the left! On the left!’

  Frey threw the Ketty Jay to starboard, banking hard as a Sammie fighter swept past him, machine guns blazing. Samandra, who’d given the warning, went skidding across the cockpit and almost fetched up underneath the navigator’s desk. She clambered back to her feet as Frey levelled up. The thumping of an autocannon sounded from above and behind them, and something exploded nearby. There was a Coalition soldier in the cupola, a trained gunner whose accuracy put Malvery and Samandra to shame. Frey never thought he’d see the day when he’d let Coalition hands touch any of the Ketty Jay’s controls, but these were strange times.

  Fighter craft flitted about, whipping past like bullets. Sammies built their craft fragile but quick, and they were damned hard to get a bead on. The sky was dangerously crowded with big craft and little ones alike, everyone on their own trajectory, a panicked herd harassed by nimble predators. Aircraft smashed into each other. Shellfire detonated all around him.

  Frey kept his head down and concentrated on threading the Ketty Jay safely through the chaos. Sammies or Awakeners, his mission hadn’t changed. His object was the Delirium Trigger and Trinica. Let the world throw what obstacles it would in his path. He had one last chance to save her, and everyone else with her. His previous despair had fallen away; hope had lit a fire inside. Nothing was going to stop him now.

  The Samarlans’ betrayal was a master stroke. Their fleet was too precious to risk even a small part of it, their aerium too limited for even a short campaign in the air. So they’d sold the Azryx device to the Awakeners, and they’d let the Awakeners do all the work for them. The Awakeners had torn the country apart; the Awakeners had suffered the losses necessary to lure the Coalition Navy within range of the device.

  And now the Samarlans came in with a surprise attack, having travelled unopposed across Vardic skies. A fleet of well-armed, highly-trained pilots against a group of mercenaries and volunteers, their forces already damaged and weakened. The Sammies had the same countermeasures as the Awakeners and the Ketty Jay, so the Azryx device didn’t work on them. And if their timing seemed near-perfect, that was probably because someone on the inside had told them when and where the Awakener attack would occur.

  That would be Ashua, then.

  The Sammies weren’t going to give Vardia to the Awakeners. That was never their plan. They didn’t want to trade for their aerium any more. They were going to take it for themselves. And with the Coalition Navy out of the way, there wasn’t a lot anyone could do about it.

  If this was what future generations would call the Third Aerium War, it would be the shortest war in history.

  The Ketty Jay’s thrusters screamed as Frey drove her towards the heart of the convoy, where the Delirium Trigger hung like a spider at the centre of a web. Pinn and Harkins swept around him, now ahead and now behind, chasing off Sammies, shooting them down when they could. Pinn’s maniacal cackling was getting we
arisome, but Frey kept the earcuff in all the same. For once he was glad of the noise in his ear. He hadn’t realised what a comfort his crew were until he’d almost lost them.

  The other frigates had gathered around the flagship and the Delirium Trigger, a hard core of artillery to defend the Lord High Cryptographer and his Azryx device. Cannons boomed, machine guns spat and autocannons pounded, tracking Sammie fighters as they lashed past in the rain. The sheer noise of it was terrifying. The Ketty Jay shook and shuddered as Frey fought to see through the rain sliding off the windglass.

  Don’t worry about me, he told them silently. I’m an Awakener.

  And as far as they knew, he was. The Ketty Jay, with its Cipher decals showing proudly, slipped through the bombardment. The frigates had other targets.

  ‘Pinn! Harkins! You’ve done your bit! Get out of here!’ he said.

  ‘No, sir!’ said Harkins. ‘Not while there’s Sammies and Awakeners in the sky over Thesk!’

  ‘I’m not even halfway done killin’ these losers yet!’ Pinn cried, with an edge of happy delirium in his voice.

  ‘Alright,’ said Frey. ‘Stay safe. I want to see you both on the other side.’

  Now he was above the core of the convoy, and he tipped the Ketty Jay into a dive and plunged in. The gathered frigates were like dark metal islands, floating in the sky. He darted between them; their flanks thundered past in a blur. Other Awakener fighters were in here with him, buzzing about like flies, sheltering behind the bigger craft. They ignored him, and he ignored them.

  And then there she was, below him. A black shape in the rain, her huge bow emerging from behind another frigate, cannons roaring as she sent shells out towards the Sammies’ capital craft. He closed in with reckless speed, coming in aft of her, and hit the airbrakes hard while dumping aerium from his tanks. Samandra grabbed the navigator’s desk as the Ketty Jay decelerated, dropping down towards the Delirium’s main deck.