The Black Lung Captain - By Chris Wooding Page 0,201

between the Wrack and Sakkan.

No.

Then the wind hit them, and this time there was no way to ride it. The Ketty Jay was flung hard, throwing Frey off his feet. He crashed into Trinica and they went down together, sliding along the floor to fetch up against a bank of instruments. Crake was thrown against the navigator's station. He cracked his head on the side of the desk and fell senseless to the floor, papers scattering all around him.

Jez stabbed at the ignition frantically. The thrusters didn't respond. Frey tried to get to his feet, but the Ketty Jay plunged, and he was lifted from the floor and slammed down hard. Jez wrestled with the controls, but her efforts were futile.

Everything was futile.

They were shaken like a rag in a dog's mouth. Without thrust, they had no control. Everything not fixed down went flying about the cockpit. There was the squeal of tearing metal from the corridor. The jolts came fast and from all directions, making it impossible to find their feet. Something snapped and crashed down in the cargo hold. The windglass cracked.

The craft was breaking up. And there was nothing any of them could do about it.

Frey crawled across the floor towards Trinica. One of her black contact lenses had fallen out in the chaos, revealing the green eye he knew. That eye was the one he focused on. The eye of the woman he'd loved. There was the woman he'd risked it all to save. And she was scared; he could see it. Frightened of the end. She didn't want it to be over.

He reached out a hand to her. She snatched it and clutched it hard.

Her hand in his. He could think of worse ways to die.

At least he'd tried, he thought. It was reckless, headstrong and stupid, but it was real and it was worth it. With a little more luck, he'd have made a story that every freebooter, raconteur and drunk would have told for a decade. The man who went into the Wrack, rescued the dread pirate Dracken, and came back to tell the tale. They'd all know the name of the Ketty Jay then. If he never did anything else, at least he'd have done that, and made a tale worth telling of his life.

He just needed a little more luck. But everyone's luck ran out sometime.

'Cap'n!' Jez cried. 'Cap'n, look!'

The tone of her voice drove him to his feet. He pulled Trinica up with him, and they staggered a few steps to clutch the back of Jez's seat.

Bleary lights in the mist. Electric lights, and a huge shadow behind them. Another dreadnought? No, dreadnoughts flew without lights. Then what?

'It's the Delirium Trigger!' said Jez, an amazed smile breaking out over her face. 'It's the bloody Delirium Trigger!'

And it was. Vast, ugly, brutal, looming from the cloud. The wind couldn't threaten a frigate of her size. Thick snakes uncoiled from her shadowy decks and slammed into the hull of the Ketty Jay. Magnetic grapples, clamping on. The lines went taut, and the Ketty Jay began to move through the storm, hauled inexorably forward by the Delirium Trigger's massive engines. They were pulled towards the mouth of the vortex, and the safety of the world they knew.

Frey couldn't believe it. It didn't seem possible. Jez was cheering in her seat, but he just stared, gaping, unable to credit their reprieve.

'How did they find us?' he asked. 'In all this mist, how did they find us?'

Trinica held up her left hand before him. On her finger was the silver ring he'd given her. The ring that was linked to a compass, which Trinica had given to her bosun when she took it from Jez, back in Grist's hangar.

He looked from the hand to her. She smiled at him. A genuine, beautiful smile, that filled him with such happiness it made tears prickle at his eyes.

Forty-Three

Spit And Polish —

Malvery's Joke — Farewell

The Yort engineer led the way up the Ketty Jay's cargo ramp. Frey and his crew followed him in, looking around curiously, as if they'd never seen their own aircraft before. A blast of icy air and a flurry of snow chased past them. Beyond, in the grey glare from outside, there were tractors and hangars, and Yorts walking back and forth. They were in dock at Iktak, where the Delirium Trigger had recently been repaired, and the Ketty Jay more recently still.

'We had to put in a whole new engine assembly,' the engineer