Flying the Storm (38 page)

“What should I do?”

“Keep flying straight and fast. If you turn, they’ll catch up with us. I’m going to force them to manoeuvre.”

Aiden heard the engines rise ever so slightly in pitch. Fredrick was giving everything the
Iolaire
had.

He took aim at the lead drone, carefully placing the ranged crosshair on it. If it hadn’t been for the turbulence it would have been too easy, since it was flying so straight and level.
He squeezed the trigger. The gun roared out a short burst and a fiery red beam raced towards the drones.

At the last moment, the drone pulled up and the shots passed harmlessly underneath to shred the surface of the sea.
Without hesitating, Aiden fired another longer burst, spraying it a little from side to side for good measure.

It
almost had the desired effect. The formation split up, each drone flying a different direction. But they dodged his fire perfectly, flicking out of its way almost effortlessly.

The
Iolaire probably couldn’t outrun them, not with the dribble of fuel they had left. He knew that he would have to let them get close.

“Fred, I need you to bank south.”

“Bank? But you said-”

“I know.”

Fredrick banked the
Iolaire
then, and Aiden’s world tipped to the left. They were no longer fleeing the middle of the dogfight. Now they were running alongside it, but Aiden did his best to ignore it and keep his gun trained on the four drones that had followed them through the turn. They were closing rapidly.

Aiden and the lead drone fired simultaneously.
The blue and the red tracer passed each other so close it looked like they would collide.

“Break!” shouted Aiden.

The
Iolaire
pulled up hard, a moment too late. A handful of rounds impacted along the spine of the aircraft. Flashes of white light and horrendous bangs filled the air as the shells tore great holes in the fuselage behind Aiden. He swore and kept firing, desperately trying to track the drone as he was thrown against his straps by the g-forces.

The ammunition counter was dropping quickly and the gun temperature was climbing. The bullets were a great rope of fire that flicked and coiled as it chased the little black drone across the grey sky. And then he hit it. The red bullets ripped the compact little aircraft to shreds, but to Aiden’s disappointment there was no fire or even a satisfying explosion. It just pulled to pieces, flipped and tumbled to the rocky shore below. The
Iolaire
was over the land once more.

Aiden had lost the other three drones.

“Well I got one...” he said. He frantically threw the turret about, searching for the others.
Shit
.

This was worryingly like the flight from Azerbaijan.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as he expected the
Iolaire
to be hit again at any second.

Like smoke from a campfire the battle seemed to have followed them. Without meaning to
, they had somehow found themselves in the heart of the spiralling madness. Aircraft spun and howled through the air all around them, having fought all the way down to the
Iolaire
’s altitude, and the three drones could have been anywhere amongst the carnage. Maybe they’d choose new targets now and harass some other poor bastards.

Then the armoured glass of the turret opened in five thumb-sized holes. The gun-sight assembly
disappeared before Aiden, and something hit him like a slap to the face. His eyes shut and wouldn’t open.

He was blind.

Something, and Vika didn’t quite understand what, had cut two holes in her cabin: one high in the corner of the ceiling, and the other through the door monitor that had been refusing to let her out.
The patronising female voice was gone. The screen was gone. All that remained was a perfectly round, smouldering hole that she could see the outside corridor through.

She’d been at the little sink in the corner, driven there by t
he ship’s juddering and bucking. As she’d bent to vomit there was a deafening bang that had scared her lunch right back down into her stomach. Her ears were still ringing from it.

The air smelled of smoke and had a metallic tang
, and Vika could see that something had definitely passed right through the cabin. The slight outwards bend of the metal and ceramic around the ceiling-hole suggested that. Her sickness had saved her. A line between the two holes would have most definitely passed through where she’d previously stood by the door, thumping the little screen and arguing with the woman’s voice.

Without hesitating
long enough to let that worry her, she went to the door and found that it slid open quite easily now when she pushed on it.

She was in the corridor
. Something small, noisy and made of metal zoomed along the corridor to the hole in the floor, where whatever had passed through her cabin had apparently kept going, and began spraying the glowing edges with water. Then it stopped spraying water and started spraying some kind of foam into the hole, filling it and sealing it over.
A repair drone
, she thought. Solomon had said that the
Enkidu
could repair itself.

The drone scurried into her room then and climbed the wall to the ceiling hole, going through the same process as in the corridor.
Vika watched it for a moment. She turned to the hole in the floor then and prodded the foam with her foot. It was spongy on top, but beneath it she could feel more resistance. Gingerly she pressed some more of her weight down on it, and found that it didn’t budge. It was solid.

She started heading
back along the corridor the way she’d come. The ship rolled again and Vika stumbled into the wall, but she kept going. She had a purpose.

Unlike the others, Vika had spent a large part of the few days in Tbilisi studying every document Solomon had on that little monitor of his. One of them had been a full three-dimensional schematic of the insides of the warship, so she knew exactly where she
had to go. Her destination was right ahead of her at the end of the main crew corridor.

Getting there, when the ship itself seemed to be throwing itself around just to spite her, was going to be harder than it had looked in those drawings.
Part of her wanted to run back to the little sink in her cabin, throw up and then strap herself into the bunk and wait for it all to be over.

But that wasn’t an option. Whatever Solomon was doing with the
Enkidu
was damaging it. It was damaging
her
ship. She had to stop that.

Somehow she had fought her way to the bridge door without vomiting. More repair drones scuttled past her along the corridor, and a series of shuddering bangs reverberated throughout the ship. She dreaded to think what the noise was.

The little panel by the door showed green: it was unlocked. Tapping it with her finger slid the door silently open. Then she was inside, at the foot of a short stairway. The tall seat at the top wasn’t facing her, but it didn’t have to be for her to know who was in it.

Quietly Vika crept up the stairs, pulling her pistol out from behind her trousers’ waistband. The bridge was the inside of a huge ball, the walls of which were filled with blurred images that moved and flashed uncomfortably.
She blinked them away and focused on the back of the chair.

“Commodore, the
Gilgamesh
appears to be turning to the north. It is likely that it is attempting to bring its broadside batteries to bear.” It was the same woman’s voice that Vika had heard in her cabin, telling her that the door was locked and that she should brace for ‘manoeuvres’. It was the voice of the
Enkidu
.

“Thank you,
Enkidu
,” replied Solomon. His voice sounded strained, like he was forcing himself to be calm. “Hold fire until I say.”

“Yes, Commodore.”

“When the
Gilgamesh
fires its full broadside, wait until the last possible opportunity to evade.”

“Yes, Commodore.”

The Enkidu was flying fairly smoothly now. The swaying and jolting had stopped for the moment, but the ship must have been accelerating because the stairs suddenly seemed to stretch away from her. Carefully finding her balance, Vika climbed the last few steps to the back of the chair. She reached around the headrest and pressed the pistol to Solomon’s temple. She felt him jump.

“Tell it that
I
am Commodore, too.” She’d heard it call him that. She needed it to listen to her.

“Vika, it doesn’t work like-”

“
Tell it
,” she hissed, pressing the gun hard into his skull.

Solomon hesitated for a moment.
“All right, okay.
Enkidu
, this is... Commander Veronika Naroyan. She has... auxiliary command of the ship.”

‘Commander’ sounded like ‘commodore’. Maybe she had misheard the voice...

“Yes, Commodore.” Then, “The
Gilgamesh
is firing, Commodore.”

No, it was definitely ‘commodore’.

“You rat. You gave me a different rank!”

“No I didn’t!”

She was angry. She had the power here, with a gun to his head, and yet he still defied her.

“Yes you did! I heard-”

The ship seemed to fall away beneath her and she slammed into the ceiling of the bridge, pinned there for a moment. Huge bangs, much louder than before, rocked the ship. Then she fell. She missed the podium and the domed floor below came rushing up to meet her, flickering with nonsense images. She hit it hard, the pistol skittering from her grip to lie in the shadows by the foot of the podium.

She was dazed and everything hurt.
She reached for the pistol, but drew her arm back at the stab of pain in her ribs. She rolled painfully on to her side to look back up towards the podium.

“Fire,” said Solomon.
The warship juddered and the walls of the bridge flashed white for a moment before returning to a blurred mess of colours. How could Solomon see anything in it? She tried to sit up, but found she couldn’t, and instead lay on her back on the curved floor trying to get her breath back. Frustration seeped into her then. She had been so close. It had all seemed so easy.

“Secondary propulsion ready, Commodore.”

“Take us east, then.”

“Yes, Commodore.”

Suddenly there was a high-pitched howl that seemed to ring from the structure of the ship. Just as it passed out of range of hearing it turned to a deep roar, and the ship seemed to lurch forwards, throwing Vika hard against the rear wall of the bridge. It was as if the direction of
down
had changed, now somewhere behind her towards the stern, and her own weight pinned her helplessly against the wall. It was crushing her, she was sure. It was so hard to breathe. She managed to lift her hand a pathetic few centimetres before her arm collapsed again.

Vika closed her eyes
and waited for it to be over.

It seemed like forever
before the weight disappeared. Minutes or hours, she couldn’t tell. In the painful haze left by her fall she could have passed out for all she knew.

“We have reached propulsion cut-out, Commodore.
Altitude sixty-seven kilometres, ground-speed six kilometres per second. Repulsion envelope has exceeded maximum altitude: repulsor is set to idle.”

“Thank you
Enkidu
.”

Vika heard Solomon unbuckle himself from his chair.

She pushed gently from the wall then and
her head swam at the sudden feeling of freefall. She floated there, not falling, just gently drifting away from the back wall of the dome. It was horribly disorientating. Before, the direction of down had changed: now there was no down, no up. She clenched her throat tightly against the wave of nausea that washed over her.

What is happenin
g?

Her trousers
rustled against the bottom of the dome where she’d landed after the fall. She tried to bring herself to rest by thrusting her knee down into the floor, but instead of stopping she managed to knock herself into a tumbling spin along her length. She flailed her hands out and slowed the spin, eventually managing to plant them far apart and firmly enough on the cool wall to come to rest. Then, slowly getting her bearings back, she turned to look back at the captain’s chair.

Solomon was clinging to a railing, looking at her. His legs floated ridiculously above his head.
With a smile he pushed off of the railing, legs first, towards what used to be the top of the dome.

He kicked from the top of the dome and
came flying straight at Vika.

Even as he hurtled towards her, she could see the murder in his eyes. He wanted her
dead. There would be no negotiations now.

Panicking she kicked out with both her legs. The
y found something solid and she slid across the floor of the dome, stopping herself with her hands once she was sure he would miss. Solomon landed in a crouch as if he’d expected to stop. Instead he just bounced, and finding nothing to grab hold of flailed back into the air.

The smile was gone. Now he snarled as he kicked off from the bottom of the podium, coming for Vika again.

Vika curled her legs underneath her body. She knew Solomon was too strong for her. She couldn’t let him get close. Her best hope was the pistol she had dropped, which now floated from the shadows beneath the podium. Waiting until the last moment, she kicked off.

Solomon flew past her, his outstretched hand missing her ankle by only centimetres. He collided
hard with the wall, swearing.

All around Vika on the walls the confusing images still played
. They were softer and steadier now, and seemed to either be deep black above or blue-green below near the bottom of the podium. Still they made no sense, too blurry and shifting to show anything recognisable. But there, hovering in the blue-green light was the pistol. Its muzzle was pointed towards her, so she caught it as carefully as she could, making sure to keep her fingers far from the trigger. She knew it was cocked and loaded.

Though she couldn’t see what Solomon was doing behind her, she kicked from the floor anyway, not wanting to stay still in case he was already onto her.
As she pushed she twisted too, coming around to face backwards while she flew towards the black ceiling. There was Solomon, crouched and ready to push off after her. She aimed and started to squeeze the trigger.

The nausea came back just as she finished the trigger pull.
The pistol barked and kicked but she saw the bullet went wide, ricocheting from the curved floor with a puff of dust. The kick had pushed her even faster towards the wall, so much so that when she hit it back-first she cried out at the sudden winding pain. It felt like somebody had driven a knife between her ribs. They must have been broken by the fall.

Fighting to clear the nausea and pain from her head, she aimed the pistol at Solomon again. He pushed himself sideways, ducking into the cover of the podium.

He was too slow. The second bullet caught him in his lower leg. Blood fountained from the wound, spreading out into a mass of shimmering round droplets that reflected the light of the wall-images. The sound of the shot echoed madly around the bridge, but Vika heard Solomon make no noise. He was hidden from her now, beneath the podium. She didn’t dare move to get a better view.

Then she saw Solomon’s own pistol floating in the air at the far side of the bridge
, half-hidden by the blackness of the wall. He must have tucked it away under the chair or something, but now it was loose. It was closer to him than it was to her. She would have had to get very close to him to reach it. She stayed put, preferring to cover the second pistol and Solomon’s hiding place from where she was. Vika didn’t think she could face hurting her ribs like that again, either.

“It looks like you have me,” said Solomon, as if through gritted teeth.
“Congratulations.”

“Come out slowly and I’ll let you live,” Vika found herself saying, though she didn’t rightly know how she would manage that. To simply kill him and be done with it would be much simpler.

“Vika, we both know that can’t happen.”

“It’s your choice,” she said, her voice steadier than she felt.

“Yes,” his laugh was threaded with pain, “I do believe it is.
Enkidu
, zenith evasive
now
!”

There was a loud, sharp bang and then Vika was falling to the floor again, fast.
As she fell she saw the other pistol fall too, straight down into Solomon’s waiting hand. It all happened so quickly and yet Vika found herself pointing her own pistol and firing, again and again, her shots battling with the louder bark of Solomon’s pistol. Something white-hot sliced the side of her thigh just before she hit the floor and all went black.