Painkiller

by Aeryn Leigh

  Gunnery Sergeant Griffin turned to Merrion. "It's a bit more complex than that," he said. "Most of the ammunition on board the Purity was fired after it ran aground, even though we jammed all its turrets axis of rotation and elevation with wooden timbers. It's a hard process making new shells that explode at a certain height, getting the fuses right."

  "You're the newcomers," said Merrion, "aren't you supposed to be familiar with how all this works?"

  Griffin gave him a long, cool stare. "If you say so." He turned to the anti-aircraft crew. "All right guys, let's try these new shells again." And to himself he added, hope they damn well don't explode in the barrels.

  Over in the command bunker, Marietta peered out over the Bay and the approaching Inquisition bombers. This is the tenth day in a row, she thought, and all they do is drop those pamphlets. She turned to the wireless operator. "Confirm the same amount of aircraft and type again?"

  The wireless operator spoke into the headset, and the forward observation post centre came back with the reply. "Yes," said the operator, a kid currently in their late teens. Marietta scratched the back of her head, and thought about the Emperor's lair.

  At the aerodrome, Rob and Thorfinn scratched their own heads at the latest rotary engine in front of them to catastrophically fail.

  "I'm positive it's something to do with the casting process," said Rob. "At least it's a break from working on the Cat."

  "It's bloody infuriating," said Thorfinn, hearing the warning horn blasts. "The kids are starting to get nasty looks and comments when they're in town, I noticed yesterday. They are supposed to be the aerial defenders of Fairholm and yet all they seem to be doing is twiddling their thumbs. We know that they're working just as hard as we are, and just as frustrated, but the city folk don't know that. It's just like Dunkirk."

  "What happened in Dunkirk?" said Rob, removing a bolt off the broken engine with a torque wrench.

  "Oh, when the British Army evacuated from France in early 1940, with what was at the time an unstoppable German army right behind them, mate. The whole army, waiting at the beach for ships to take them across the channel to safety — damn a lot of war material got left behind. Steamers, rowboats, fishing trawlers, basically every Pommy civilian ship came across and helped with the evacuation, and the whole time the beach and evacuating ships were under shellfire from the advancing German armies and strafing attacks by the Luftwaffe."

  Rob grimaced, and put down the wrench.

  Thorfinn removed the slivers of broken metal and wiped the threaded hole clean with an oily rag. "Where was the RAF? Everybody kept on asking that, soldiers and civilians, but the trouble was, the RAF was doing everything we could over the beaches of Dunkirk, but we were so damn high up in the air we weren't seen by the soldiers down on the beach and sea. It wasn't until the Battle of Britain before faith in the RAF was restored. It wasn't a fun time to be a member of the air force, I can tell you. Was rather disheartening."

  "Sounds like it," said Rob. "Pass me the hammer, will ya?"

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Test Flight

  "Okay gentlemen, let's see how this kitten flies." The surf waves broke gently against the sides of the aircraft hull, the full moon shining bright overhead. It was hours after the suns had gone down over the horizon, and the Cat, as now it had been nicknamed, had been towed down the river by a Viking longship, to the mouth of the Bay, under cover of darkness.

  Laurie, with the help of Rob and Magnus, had folded each wing out in turn and locked it into position with a solid ker-thunk. The Viking returned to his longship, and cut loose the towing rope. The seaplane bobbed up and down in the water, facing the Bay's entrance. Inside the Cat, Laurie returned to his co-pilot’s dickie seat, and Rob stood behind them facing a small console of dials.

  Ella consulted the notepad in front of her, a written down list of the start-up procedures of the B-17 engine Lucius had written down for them.

  It was the short version.

  "Laurie, Rob? Let's do this by the numbers."

  All three of them went through the procedures, and started the port radial engine. The engine, so very far from home itself, struggled to start, but after the third attempt, fired up into an ear-numbing roar. The starboard engine fired on the first attempt, both engines making the entire airframe shudder.

  Ella and Laurie looked through Plexiglas windows straight from the Damage Inc., and confirmed all the control surfaces were responding.

  Ella grinned at Laurie. Her eyes were wide, and all her upper teeth were showing. Laurie nodded, and pushed the throttles to one-tenth power. The seaplane moved forward, and satisfied everything was going okay, Ella and Laurie pushed the throttles forward a little more.

  "Everything is looking good," said Rob, shouting at them. He gave them the thumbs up. The Cat cut faster through the ocean waves now, and with another thumbs up from Rob, they approached the objective of the flight test. They opened the throttles wider, searching for the limits where takeoff would be possible, that beautiful, ethereal moment where gravity, earth contact, and flight, met, and in that instant, you were free.

  The Wright-Cyclones roared their power.

  The Cat started to jump just a little bit higher from the crest of each passing wave. Any more throttle and the seaplane felt it would leap into the air.

  Ella gave the okay signal to Laurie. Just as her hand went to pull back the lever throttle, the entire airframe shook violently, and a moaning, keening mechanical wail sounded above them. Cutting the power, a control wire snapped, looping wildly around the cockpit. The steel cable whipped around, hacking through the back of Laurie's leather glove and slicing through Ella's right cheek.

  "Fuck," said Ella, only now able to put a hand to her cheek as the seaplane came to a stop on the ocean water, the longship rolling toward them.

  In the distance, a great cheer came from the dreadnought run aground.

  "What's that?" said Rob. "Are they cheering us?"

  Blood ran through Ella's gloved fingers. "I don't think so. Maybe the last holdout's surrendered?" The three peered out through the Plexiglas. Vikings danced on the foredeck.

  "Seems that way," said Laurie.

  It all went white. The forward magazine of the Purity exploded in such sudden brilliance their retinas glazed over, the shock wave buffeting their seaplane and the longship pulling alongside. Massive balls of fire streamed up into the sky, secondary explosions as what remained of unspent artillery shells ignited, a terrible light show, fountaining into the air, then slowly sinking toward the earth.

  The front-third of the metal dreadnought, a maelstrom of twisted metal and fire, cast its reflections across the waters of the Bay and off the low-flying clouds above.

  No Vikings could be seen on the ship.

  Nothing alive.

  The three said nothing, on the slow journey back.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  No Turning Back

  The fires burned all night, and were still burning in the morning, black fumes rising far into the skies, the toxic smoke hazardous to health. Three figures stood on the nearby sand dune, two hours after dawn and regarded the Republic operation to extinguish the flames.

  "Do we have further casualty reports, Merrion?" said General Versetti. She coughed, as the wind changed, and blew smoke right over them.

  "Not at this stage. The explosion happened right between shifts. It couldn't have been a worse time. Eighty-five dead, fourteen missing."

  "Beowulf?"

  "Fifteen kin dead. Snorri is a little singed, but alive. I am sending him back to Odinsgate on the next blockade run." And he thought, I might have left a power vacuum just a little too long being here. He hadn't heard from Odinsgate in over a week. If only there were more of those wireless radios, or pigeon hawks for that matter.

  The high tide lapped against the front hull of the dreadnought, the dry dock now broken unable to hold it back, the wooden and concrete walls tipped over like bucket castles in a sandpit by a wayw
ard toddler.

  "All that effort for nothing," she said.

  "It was a risk," said Beowulf. "We all knew that. But consider your options now. The battleship is not going anywhere. You now have, in effect, a very large shore defence battery."

  "I'm aware of that, Beowulf. I am in your debt. Far more than I'd like."

  "In more positive news," said Merrion hurriedly, "the seaplane test did go well. More or less. Both assault gliders are finished and awaiting trials this week."

  "That is correct," said Beowulf. "Their attendant transport ships are nearly finished and so is Hellsbaene."

  "Good," she said. "We could do with some good luck."

  From the mouth of the bay, the air-raid horns blew, rolling over the waves.

  "This is the last time we will go over this," said Captain John, to the thirty-one warriors, men and women, huddled into the large wooden shack, deep in the forest of the Pit. "Once we leave this building, we won't step foot in it again."

  The room at sunset smelled richly of earth, sweat, steel, leather, and fur after one final day of training.

  In the sunken middle of the room, rested two trestle tables. Lying on top of these, a scale model of mountains and buildings. The model of the Emperor’s Lair, based upon Merrion’s memory. How he knew, why he knew, Merrion still refused to say.

  Laurie had been into toy trains as a kid, staring for hours through the display window at the General Store down in the Main Street of that small country town, on those rare trips he’d leave the farm with his mother, and here, and now, every time he looked at it, Laurie half expected to see a little train carriage chugging around the mountain issuing white puffs of smoke.

  Andrew and Merrion had built the three-dimension model fortress, using bits and pieces taken from Fairholm's one and only toyshop. The only other person in the room to have seen it took over from the captain.

  "I'm rather proud of this model," said Merrion. I'm going to be sad to see it go. "The fortress is built into the side of the mountain, at the top of the valley's cleft that runs down via the mountain river and interconnected water locks all the way to the ocean below. At each lock, is a wall." He pointed to the sets of concentric crescent walls, like an onion cut into thirds, each ring going down the valley getting wider and wider as the cleft widened along the slope. "In between each perimeter wall, the buildings are arranged in according strategic importance. Most of the barracks are in between the first and second circular walls, down at the main gate. The oil pumping works are between the fifth and sixth."

  He grinned.

  "It would take an army, the same size army currently sitting outside our shores, to take this mountain stronghold by direct force, via the ocean. I know you have to take my word for it," he continued, "but once you see it, you'll understand what I mean. After speaking to Andrew, this mountain range that sits behind it is equivalent to your Himalayas. Maybe taller. On the other side of the range, is open ocean. The technology, or sheer, brute military power, has yet to exist to access the mountain stronghold via a full-frontal assault."

  "But now we do," said Ella Gruder.

  "Now we do," said Merrion. "Weapons and armaments factories are halfway up the valley, between the third, fourth, and fifth concentric walls. Taking and holding those would do our first objectives wonders. But our main target is here." He picked up a long, thin black stick, and gently tapped its end against the last two perimeter rings, right at the cut onion’s centre, the entrance to the mountain fortress.

  "We need to take and hold these, ladies and gentlemen. These are where the Inquisition laboratories are, and the brains trust to boot."

  "You don't know what's inside the fortress itself, do you?" said Laurie.

  "Unfortunately," said Merrion, "no we don't. There are rumours of a mining operation, there are rumours of prisoners. They would have to be dungeons."

  "Or a whole battalion of Inquisition Marines in full battle armour, itching for war," said Ella. She noticed the stares. "What? Why are you looking at me like that?"

  "Our illustrious test pilot is right," said Laurie. "Anything could be in there. Which is why our primary objective remains the same. Hellsbaene conducts a diversionary attack, launches a flare or suitable signal one hour after we launch. We then begin the airborne assault. Capture those inner defences, take and hold the citadel entrance, and hopefully block it, so whatever is inside can't get outside, if need be. Then find what we need, take it, retreat down the hill, blow the armaments factories, set everything on fire between us and the ocean using the oil refinery's output as accelerant, and make it in one piece to the rendezvous."

  Just like a certain bombing run to Nuremberg

  Straightforward.

  Christ.

  He reached down between his legs, picked up a small wooden barrel. In the crook of his right arm, he unplugged the cork with his left hand. "Thank you, Merrion. And thank you, everyone." There was the sharp stench of low octane aviation fuel. "Merrion, grab those toy models? No use burning them." He then carefully poured the contents over the scale landscape diorama. "We leave tomorrow night, weather permitting. Dismissed." And lit the Emperor's Lair with a nearby torch, which became an inferno, an omen perhaps of things to come, and when the building emptied of living things, that went up too, leaving nothing but charcoal and ash in the cold light of day.

  Well there's no turning back now. Laurie finished the rest of the bottle, laid back down in damp sheets, awoken from yet another nightmare, and stared at the ceiling, wondering about life, as Skippy’s rough tongue licked his hand.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Lost In Translation

  The child's footsteps thudded down the polished floorboards, all the way along the hall, where a door slammed.

  "Verdammt," said Ella.

  "You hadn't told her you're leaving?" said Griffin, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. "You asked us not to tell her we were going away, until you had first. I asked you if you had last month. You said yes, but to wait until we had final confirmation, and your go ahead."

  "I kept meaning to," said Ella. "There never seemed to be the right moment."

  The logs crackled in the firepit. Griffin stared at the cigar-smoking bunny up high on the far wall. "Jesus woman. Damn you're incredible. Do you have any idea what you still have? What you got right there?"

  Ella said nothing, and sat in the high-backed sofa, in a room full of men who'd lost and left loved ones far, far behind. She slouched back in the grey linen chair, and rubbed her temples with slender, scarred hands.

  Griffin snorted, shook his head, and went over to the bar. Veins formed on his own temples, slamming a fresh mug onto the serving wood, cracking the timber in the process. From the corner of the hall room, Laurie exchanged looks with Mick, who in turn eyeballed Lucius and Andrew, until everyone was watching everyone else around their nightly card game.

  The storm clouds grew, the air electric now. The puddle of dogs in the centre pricked ears up, alert.

  "That girl thinks you are the centre of the whole world. She adores you. Even with all the bullshit you pull, you're the rock of her Universe. And you lied to her. Lied to us." Hands reached out, and gripped the counter top, knuckles white.

  "I made a promise, yes. I told her I'd never leave her again. But this is war, Griffin. There's no one experienced with prototypes enough to fly the Cat. Lucius cannot. Laurie is piloting one assault glider. Maybe he could fly the Catalina. You still need the extraction however."

  "There's always a bloody reason, isn't there?"

  Now Ella jumped up, blood rising. "Yes."

  "So why lie? Huh?"

  "I wanted to maximise the amount of good memories before we left. Make them count, you know. She was going to take it badly regardless."

  "Fucking Germans and their logic."

  "Of course. I'm a pilot. This is what I do. Why do I have to stay behind whilst the men go off to war? That's right, because that's my job as a woman? Like yours? Staying at home with
your kids when you enlisted in the USAF?" Ah, thought Ella, that didn't translate right. Scheisse.

  The timber snapped.

  "Easy, big man," said Mick, slowly rising from his bench.

  "Don't go there," said Griffin, advancing toward Ella, a piece of broken timber in each hand. "Not another word." He seemed to notice his hands for the first time, unclenching his fingers, the wood pieces dropping to the floor. "I don't like being lied to, and neither does Amelia. I'd do anything for that kid." He walked right up to Ella, who held her ground, defiant, until they were only barely apart. His chin loomed a foot over the top of her head. "And what I especially don't like, is being tricked into lying for others. That damn child is my family now. Our family. By her choice. And yours. So, get your fucking ass down to that bedroom, for God’s sake and make amends."

  Ella met his gaze, held it for a few seconds, then nodded. "I'm sorry."

  Griffin waited until he heard her knock upon Amelia's door, and the door close behind her, before he put his left fist through a half-inch of solid hardwood.

  "Amelia, it's me."

  "Go away."

  Ella sighed, and opened the door. Amelia lay buried under her covers, the room lit by a single candle on her shelf. Zia curled up on the bed covers, purring. She closed the door behind her, and moments later, something smashed out in the front hall. Griffin. She'd have to think of a way to apologise. What sounded right in her native tongue just came out wrong in translation, right at the worst time. Another sigh.

  She padded across the floor, covered in clothes, and pulled up the small side chair. Her butt just fitted.

  "I'm sorry, Amelia."

  Silence.

  "If it makes you feel any better, Griffin is upset with me too."

  Still nothing.

  "I was going to tell you. Then I decided not to, to make the most of each moment we had together."