Evade. Evade. Evade.
He swung the Firecrow to starboard, climbing as he did so. Evasion patterns came naturally to him. He’d always been hard to hit, slippery in the sky. Shells swatted at his aircraft. The Firecrow shuddered and jerked. Harkins barrel-rolled and banked, g-forces wrenching him around in his seat.
Still the explosions came, near at hand and then far away, immense firecrackers ripping across the night. Harkins flew between them, his hangdog face set, eyes sharp and fixed. He couldn’t see the shells coming, so he couldn’t avoid them if they landed on target. All he could do was keep dodging about, and make sure they didn’t. His body knew what to do.
Evade. Evade. Evade.
But this wasn’t the frantic panic he was used to feeling. This wasn’t hysterical fear. This was cold, sharp-edged, efficient. Death was all around him. He couldn’t control it. He didn’t recoil from it. He just had to negotiate it.
And then, all at once, he was through. The explosions fell away, scattering, random blooms of flame in the distance. They were too high up now, too hard to see, the light of their thrusters pinpricks of blue against the stars. The anti-aircraft gunners had lost their range.
The Ketty Jay was there too. He could just about make it out, not far off, beneath him and to port. So they’d escaped too.
He dropped back so as to see the Ketty Jay’s thrusters. They’d be the beacons he’d follow. They kept climbing until they were high above the earth, and then Frey tacked northeast and they headed back towards the centre of Vardia, out of the Barabac Delta.
Harkins was calm, so very calm as he floated in the dark, cradled by his cockpit amid the warm roar of the Firecrow’s thrusters. Something had changed inside him, in the crucible of the anti-aircraft barrage. He felt it. Perhaps it had been coming for a long time. Perhaps it had begun when he tried to ram a Mane dreadnought in the skies above Sakkan; perhaps when he’d beat Gidley Sleen in a pointless and near-suicidal race in the Rushes, just because he was damned if he’d lose. Or maybe it had begun even further back than that.
Once, he’d been a warrior, until the pressures of war had cracked him. He’d flown with the greatest Navy in the world and he’d fought in battles of such savagery that even the history books shunned them. Death had been at his shoulder every time he flew into combat. But one day, Harkins had turned around and seen him, caught a glimpse of what waited, and his frayed nerves had snapped.
Since then, he’d brushed past death several times. Always unwillingly, sometimes accidentally, but on the Ketty Jay’s crew he’d been hard pressed to avoid it.
None of it was like today, though. Today he looked into a man’s eyes as he died. A man that Harkins had killed, at point-blank range. Today he looked death in the face again. Square in the face. He’d seen it there as he pulled the trigger.
And it wasn’t much. Wasn’t much at all.
Harkins stared fixedly into the middle distance, and thought about that.
Twenty-Four
Ashua stuffed her hands into her pockets and walked up the slope to join Malvery. He was sitting on a black crag, bundled up in a voluminous coat. Behind her, the Ketty Jay and Harkins’ Firecrow rested silently among stony hills. They’d left the sun behind in the south, and flown back into winter. An icy wind blew around them, whistling through the rocks.
She climbed up alongside Malvery and sat. He passed her a flask of coffee. She took a swig. It was fifty per cent sugar, and forty per cent alcohol.
‘Cap’n could’ve picked a better spot,’ he grumbled.
She had to agree. Before them the hills petered out into bleak moorland, scarred with dry stone walls and clusters of skeletal trees. The sky was overcast and grey. A few desultory sheep roamed the pastures, and here and there a grim cottage sent up a twist of smoke. There was a village in the far distance with a tiny landing pad.
‘In his defence, he is a bit of a mess,’ she said after a time.
‘That ain’t news,’ said Malvery. He sat back and rolled his shoulders. ‘Still glad you signed on?’
‘Don’t remember signing anything.’
‘You know what I mean.’
She looked into the distance. ‘It’s better than where I was,’ she said.
Malvery gave her a pat on the leg. She shuffled up closer to him and laid her head on his shoulder. He encircled her with his arm. They sat there for a long time like that, gazing out over the land.
She’d never known this comfort, never known male warmth without the expectation of something more. Maddeus, the closest thing she’d ever had to a father, hadn’t been a very tactile man. Affection embarrassed him. She’d been held by lovers, of course, but that wasn’t the same. Malvery reassured her, in a way she hadn’t known she needed. He was trusty and weighty and solid.
‘Is this crew gonna be alright?’ she asked. ‘Crake gone, and now Pinn. Are you sticking around?’
‘Reckon so,’ he said. ‘Depends on the Cap’n, though. Depends what he wants to do with what we found out.’
‘You want to tell the Coalition.’
‘Course I do.’
‘You reckon they’ll believe you?’
He let her go and looked at her in surprise, as if that was the first time he’d thought of that.
‘They think we’re traitors,’ she said. ‘We haven’t any proof. If you were them, what would you do? Launch an assault on the Barabac Delta on the word of a few random pirates? The Awakeners are dug in. Casualties would be huge.’ She pulled her coat tighter around her. ‘More likely they’d just hang us.’
The wind blew around them, mournful and ghostly. Malvery coughed. ‘What they do with the information ain’t my business. They gotta know. That’s all.’
She sighed. Her warning hadn’t penetrated. Malvery had faith in the system, that justice would be done and the truth would out. One way or another he was going to do the right thing. Even if it did no good. Even if it got him dead.
Malvery swigged his coffee. ‘This waiting ain’t solving anything,’ he said. ‘We need a plan.’
‘Give him a bit of time, huh? He just saw the woman he loves suffer a fate worse than death. Don’t tell me that wouldn’t knock you on your arse for a while.’
‘Bigger things than that bloody woman in the world,’ he said, but by his tone she could tell he was chastened and a little ashamed.
‘I’ll go check on him,’ she said. ‘See how he’s doing.’
Malvery just grunted.
She made her way back down to the Ketty Jay. Nearby, she could see Harkins in a hooded coat and heavy gloves, working on patching up his Firecrow. Lost in concentration, he didn’t notice her.
The reassurance she’d sought was already giving way to worry. She felt the crew unravelling, and what would happen to her then? She knew nobody in Vardia. Would she go back to Rabban, pick up the threads of her past, get back in the gangs? No, she was beyond that now, and likely a new generation would have already replaced those of her youth.
Back to Samarla, then? To Shasiith? Not a good option. She knew people there, but was still wanted by the authorities. She could go to Maddeus, if he was still alive, but that would be the worst thing she could do. A betrayal and a defeat all in one. He wanted her gone so she wouldn’t see him deteriorate, poisoned by the drugs in his blood. She wanted to prove that she didn’t need him.
Then there was the issue of the civil war. Now she knew there was the very real possibility that the Awakeners might win. And if they didn’t, there would inevitably be retribution against the Sammies for their part in it, and then all foreigners in the Free Trade Zone would be in deadly peril. So how best to handle this? Where to stand to avoid the fallout?