Ketty Jay 04 - The Ace of Skulls (65 page)

‘Later, Doc,’ Silo said, motioning towards to the retreating troops. ‘We need your gun now.’

‘There’s people here I can help . . .’ Malvery said, though his protest was weak.

‘Can’t save everyone,’ said Silo.

Then Ashua screamed.

Silo knew it was bad before he even saw it. Ashua wasn’t one to scream. He looked round, and the world decelerated, everything moving in slow motion.

Not just bad. Worse than that.

He’d been so caught up in the battle on the ground that he’d virtually forgotten about the fight overhead. But now the sound of engines was suddenly loud in his ears. Looming in his vision, filling up the sky, the blazing prow of a frigate rushed down towards them, trailing fire. Like a colossal meteor, like the fist of a god.

It crashed into the city a dozen streets away, hitting at a shallow angle. Flame blasted up into the air. It ploughed through stone and steel, carving a vast trench through the buildings, getting louder and louder as it bore down on Silo. A gargantuan beast of smoke and dust and screaming metal and crashing stone, charging him.

Too massive for any of them to avoid. Too fast to do anything about it. All they could do was stand there, locked in a single moment of terror and resignation.

Mother
, he thought.
I’m comin’ home.

His thoughts were lost in a deafening hurricane of wind and sound, and a wave of heat and force hit him.

After that, nothing.

The dark metal corridors of the
Delirium Trigger
rang with the shouts of men and the sound of combat. Frey pushed through the press of soldiers, his face a grim mask lit starkly by the muzzle flash of his pistol as he fired. There was momentum in him now. His bridges had burned. Going back would be pointless. There was nothing to go back to.

Sammies. Manes. Awakeners. Treason. All the rack and ruin of his life. And one chance to set things right.

It was too close down here for golems. The
Delirium Trigger
’s upper decks were a maze of narrow passageways, barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast. The air was stifling, and it reeked of cordite and sweat and blood and the shit in dead men’s pants. Frey shot a pirate through the lung as he came running out of a doorway, and stepped over his gurgling body without even looking down.

He pulled open a sliding door, thrust his gun inside and found only silence. Soldiers shoved past him down the corridor. He stepped inside to get out of the way. His ears had been hammered by the reports of shotguns and pistols; this was a place of relative peace, with the distant detonations and the screams of the wounded muffled by thick bulkheads.

It was Trinica’s cabin, where he’d been heading all along. Once he’d thought it oppressive, with its dark wood panels, brass and iron fixtures and overwrought frowning sconces. A grave and serious room. Now he drank it in with his eyes. In all the world, this was the only place she’d put her mark on. The only place that bore anything of her spirit.

There was her bookshelf, full of academic tomes and literature in both Vardic and Samarlan. There was her chair, and her massive desk next to the sloping window. Light from explosions outside flickered across charts that had been laid out there, and the book that lay across them. A beautifully embossed book.

A book he recognised.

‘Cap’n!’ said Crake. He was standing in the doorway, encumbered by his heavy pack. Frey held up a hand to silence him. He was aware of the need to hurry. This was more important.

He moved slowly across the room. When he got to the desk, he reached out and turned the book over so that he could see the title. It was in Samarlan, but it didn’t matter. He recognised it anyway.

The Silent Tide.

So it was true. Balomon Crund hadn’t been lying to him. Trinica had been carrying this book with her, reading it. In spite of the daemon that controlled her, she’d managed this. A cry for help. A message in a bottle.

‘Cap’n?’ Crake asked again, uncertainly.

He left the book, turned, and hurried back out. Crake moved aside as he pushed through. ‘Come on,’ he said sharply. ‘She needs me.’

They made their way onward, catching up with Kyne and Samandra, who’d hung back to wait for them. The other soldiers had moved up the corridor and were engaged in a new battle. They were about to follow when a blast rocked the
Delirium Trigger
, sending Crake tottering into the wall.

‘Not Samarlan,’ said Kyne. ‘Must be the Manes getting through. Seems it’s the Awakener convoy they’re after. I doubt it’ll hold for long.’

‘Sounds like the end of the world out there,’ said Crake.

‘Might well turn out to be the case,’ Samandra commented.

‘Hey,’ said Frey. ‘Stairs.’ He pointed down a cross-corridor, where a set of stairs were just about visible halfway along.

‘We should stay with the soldiers, Cap’n,’ Crake said nervously.

‘Soldiers are too damn slow,’ said Frey, starting up the corridor. He glanced over his shoulder at Kyne and Samandra. ‘You’re Century Knights, aren’t you?’

Samandra looked at Crake and shrugged. ‘I’m all good with reckless.’

Frey touched his hand against his chest as they descended. The amulet that Crake had given him was cold against his skin. It seemed a pretty poor defence against what was to come. He didn’t have a great deal of faith in daemonism at the best of times, but Crake’s skills had served him well in the past, and he’d put his trust in worse things before.

He had to believe. That was all there was to it.

The lower decks had wider corridors than the ones above. There was nobody in sight when they emerged, and it was eerily still. It seemed that the majority of the pirates had gone to fight off the boarders. Frey looked left and right suspiciously, his pistol in one hand and his cutlass in the other, listening. The lights here were dim, and the seething gloom was a hot threat.

The daemon
, he thought. He could sense it, warping the edges of his consciousness, tingeing the scene with paranoia. She was close.

He looked back at Crake, who nodded in confirmation. He felt it too.

They moved on warily, heading for the hold. The
Delirium Trigger
seemed to breathe like some vast beast. He heard the clanking of her iron heart, the hiss of her vents, felt her shudder as another shell exploded close by. At any moment, he expected an attack. Yet for all the gunfire and explosions that echoed through the hollow corridors, nothing came for them. Nothing until—

‘Frey!’

He whirled, his arm outstretched and his pistol aimed. As he fired, he caught a glimpse of an ugly face ducking back from a doorway, framed by a dirty mop of black hair. The sound of the gun bounced away down the passageway, and the darkness in the corners seemed to blacken, as if some terrible thing had just turned its attention their way.

‘It’s me, you fool!’ growled a voice from the doorway. ‘Balomon Crund!’

Frey was breathing hard. He was more keyed up than he’d realised. ‘What do you want?’ he said.

Crund showed an empty hand, then poked his head out again. ‘It’s this way!’ he said. He looked up the corridor. ‘Quick, they’ll have heard you! They’re waiting by the door to the hold!’

Frey hesitated. He’d never been liked by Crund, and they’d been enemies more than allies. He didn’t trust him as far as he could throw him.

‘I brought you here, didn’t I?’ he snarled, angry that Frey should doubt him. ‘There’s another way in! A side door!’

There were running footsteps coming from up the corridor. ‘Reckon he ain’t lyin’ about his mates, at least,’ said Samandra. She spun her shotguns around in her hands; they crunched as they were primed. ‘Sounds like a lot of ’em.’

Still Frey didn’t move. Still he wasn’t sure. He’d been betrayed too many times by Trinica and her crew.

‘You
can
save her, can’t you?’ Crund asked, and there was something imploring in his eyes, something desperate. It was that look that decided Frey in the end. He saw himself in that: a man caught up in his devotion, helpless against it. A man like that would do anything. He might even betray his mistress for her own good.

‘Yeah,’ said Frey. ‘I can save her.’ And he went after Crund through the doorway, with Crake and Kyne on his tail, their packs clanking and clattering. Samandra followed them through.

‘They seen us,’ she said. ‘Be quick.’

They ran through narrow, dark chambers full of steaming pipes. Orange lights gave glimpses of deeply shadowed faces, eyes fierce and intent. Bullets skipped off the metalwork, forcing them to duck. Samandra, bringing up the rear, dropped into a crouch behind the cover of a pipe and started shooting back at their pursuers.

‘Keep goin’!’ she called over the gunfire. ‘I’ll take care of this lot!’

‘Samandra!’ Crake cried. He came to a halt, reluctant to leave her behind. She spared him a moment, and the two of them locked eyes across the room.

‘This is your show now, honey,’ she said. ‘Do your stuff.’

Kyne grabbed his arm and pulled him onward. They heard Samandra’s shotguns blasting away as they left.

‘She’s a Century Knight,’ said Kyne as they ran. ‘Don’t worry about her. Worry about what’s ahead.’

Balomon, who’d been lumbering in front of them like some shaggy troll, suddenly halted at a narrow metal door. ‘Through here,’ he said, and tapped a code into a keypad. The door slid open, and they stepped through.

The
Delirium Trigger
’s cargo hold was a cavern of dark, grimy metal, its roof supported by enormous girders that acted as pillars, running round the outside edge. It was cool here, and water dripped from the ceiling, where the outline of a loading hatch was faintly visible. Electric lamps shone weakly from the walls, but they struggled to illuminate such a large space.

Between and behind the pillars, a dizzying range of equipment and loot was stacked and lashed together. There were ammo crates, chests of ducats and tanks of liquid aerium. Shadowy vehicles lurked behind piles of spare parts. Near the back was an enormous bronze head as large as a man.

But it was what was in the centre of the hold that drew their eyes. There, a space had been cleared, and there stood the Azryx device that had destroyed the Coalition fleet.

Frey felt a crawling dread. Here in the belly of the
Delirium Trigger
, it was more sinister than the first time he’d seen it. An ill, mesmerising light washed out from the towering cylinder at its heart. The lightning that flickered inside the swirling gas suggested a pattern, some snickering code to mock him. The bone-like material that encased the cylinder seemed like a growth, some awful tumour crawling up the glass-like casement. The inscriptions on the brassy towers at its four corners were warnings in an ancient tongue.

The door they’d entered by slid shut behind them, muffling the sound of Samandra’s guns. They whirled; Crake raced to the door. ‘The code!’ he urged. Crund tapped in the code on the keypad. Nothing happened. ‘They’ve trapped us in here!’

The atmosphere in the room thickened, shadows swarmed and the temperature dropped. Frey slowly turned his head, looking over his shoulder. From behind the Azryx device, a lean figure stepped into view, half-lit by the bruised glow from the cylinder.

‘Hello, Trinica,’ he said.

Forty-Three

Back from the Dead – Silo’s Command – The Charge – A Pitiful Epitaph

S
ilo’s eyes flickered open.

He was face down on the ground. Cold, wet stone pushed into his cheek. His head rang like a struck bell, his neck was agonisingly stiff, and his limbs and torso blazed with pain.

He wasn’t sure where he was or what had happened to him. Automatically, he tried to rise. The pain made him grunt, but he pushed through it, and forced himself up onto his knees. The effort set off a pounding in his skull, which faded as quickly as it came.

Blinking, he looked about. He knelt amidst a broken landscape of stone and dust and flame. Hot winds blew smoke around him. People staggered here and there, like the wandering souls of the damned; vague blurred shadows, shouting things he couldn’t understand.

The frigate.

The memory of the enormous aircraft plunging towards him brought him another step closer to making sense of things. He was at the edge of a wide, shallow trench which had been scored through the city. Some way distant, a mountain of twisted metal smoked and flamed. In its wake, no building was left standing. The far side of the square had been entirely destroyed, but the near side, where Silo had been thrown, was still partially intact.

It had passed them by, then. But not by much. And it had taken a heavy toll.

He got to his feet, dazed. None of it seemed real. Bodies lay everywhere, red and black and twisted. Lipless jaws yawned, showing charred teeth. The air reeked of cooking flesh and prothane.

Malvery stumbled past him, moaning. The doctor didn’t even seem to see him. Instead he fell to his knees a few metres away, where a limp figure was lying beside the remains of a wall.

It took a few seconds for his stunned brain to slot her into place. Ashua.

Concern and alarm drove him to movement. He made his way over to Malvery on leaden legs. The distance exhausted him; he was forced to his knees again. There was no strength in his body. It had been knocked out of him along with his wits.

Malvery had Ashua in his arms, supporting her shoulders and head in the crook of his elbow while he felt for a pulse at her throat. Blood stained her short ginger hair and ran down her tattooed face; her skin was pallid and dirty.

‘Come on, come on, come on,’ Malvery was muttering frantically, broken glasses still hanging askew on his bulbous nose. He patted her face. ‘Don’t play games now. You ain’t dead. You ain’t!’

He looked around as if for help, and found Silo there. ‘I can’t see where she got hit,’ he said hoarsely, and he brushed back her hair to try to find a wound. There was something close to panic in his voice. He was as shell-shocked as Silo was. ‘I can’t find the wound!’