The Black Lung Captain - By Chris Wooding Page 0,5

usually because he didn't have an answer. 'Well, they can't really do much. They don't have guns that can penetrate the Ketty Jay's hull. Pinn and Harkins can stay out of their range. We just need a bit of time to pick up speed, then we'll leave them behind.'

Jez returned to the navigator's station and began looking at her charts. Frey watched Harkins and Pinn drop back, behind the Ketty Jay, out of his line of vision.

'Er, one of them's coming up on us awfully fast, Cap'n,' said Malvery. 'Cropduster, by the looks.'

'Put a few warning shots across his bow,' Frey called. 'Warning shots, Malvery.'

'Got it, Cap'n.' The autocannon thumped out a short burst.

'Hey, how come Malvery gets to shoot?' Pinn complained in Frey's ear. Frey ignored him.

'Doesn't seem to have done much good, Cap'n,' said Malvery from the cupola.

Frey pulled the flight stick sharply left. The Ketty Jay responded with an unsettling laziness.

'That didn't do much, either,' Malvery said. 'He's gonna pass over us.'

'You see any guns?'

'No.'

Frey frowned. He wasn't quite sure what the pilot of that plane thought he was going to do to a craft the size of the Ketty Jay. He was still wondering when an avalanche of dust hit the windglass of the cockpit, and he found himself flying blind.

'Cap'n!' Malvery yelled. 'I can't see for buggery up here!'

'What in damnation just happened?' Frey panicked, wrestling with his flight stick. The thrusters were labouring. The Ketty Jay's Black-more P-12s could usually chew through anything, but in their present state, they were having trouble unclogging themselves.

'He dumped his tanks on you!' Pinn told Frey. 'All his fire-fighting dusty stuff. Can't hardly see you in the cloud! Ah, there's more of them coming in now!'

Frey banked again. He heard Malvery open up with the autocannon above him. 'Malvery! I said no!'

'Oh, now you've found your morals?'

'You've seen how they are! If we kill one of 'em, they'll never leave us alone.'

'Cap'n, we should—'

His reply was cut short by a heavy thump from above, that shook the whole aircraft. Frey felt the Ketty Jay plunge a few metres.

'You've got to be joking,' he muttered to himself.

'Cap'n!' Malvery, slightly hysterical this time. 'He's trying to land on us!'

The Ketty Jay rocked again. Frey swore under his breath. The pilot wasn't trying to land on them. He was trying to force them down, bumping them from above with his undercarriage wheels. What kind of crazed idiot did anything half that dangerous?

'Can we please just shoot them?' Pinn cried.

'I've just robbed a bunch of orphans!' Frey snapped. 'I don't want anything else on my conscience today!'

'I thought you said you were an orphan?' Pinn said. 'Doesn't that make it alright?'

Frey bit his lip and sent the Ketty Jay into a dive, venting aerium gas from the tanks to add speed to his descent. The dust had sloughed off the windglass, smearing as it went. It was enough to see through, barely.

'Lose 'em in the valleys?' Jez suggested.

'Lose 'em in the valleys,' Frey agreed.

Frey was getting angry, and when he got angry he got reckless. He dearly wanted to machine-gun the villagers out of the sky, but he was too afraid of the consequences. His specialties were minor smuggling, petty theft, a gentle bit of piracy where nobody got shot and not too much was taken. They were soft crimes which the Navy were far too busy to concern themselves with. Once in a while somebody died, but usually it was a guard too stupid to drop his weapon or a criminal who x probably deserved it anyway. People who accepted the risks and were paid to take them.

Frey didn't count himself in that category, of course. In some vague, ill-defined way, he thought himself more noble than that.

Innocent folk, however, were another matter. These villagers only wanted their money back. Their dogged persistence made him feel guilty, and he was mad at them for that. Theft was only fun if you didn't have to think about the consequences. He didn't actually want the orphanage to close or those children to starve. He'd sort of assumed that the villagers would stump up to cover the shortfall. But since they were so desperate to get it back, he began to wonder whether they could actually afford it.

Bloody yokels. They were ruining his first successful escapade in months.

The valleys in this part of the Vardenwood were deep and narrow. A complex river system snaked through trenches between the hills, banked by sheer, rocky slopes.