pickings.
'Steady,' he muttered to himself. 'Steady.'
A stutter of lightning lit up his target.
Not yet . . . not yet. . .
He pressed down on his guns, and at the same moment, the night exploded.
It was like being swatted by a giant. The Ketty Jay was thrown sideways, machine guns raking wildly along the flank of the barque. Frey was flung about in his seat and Jez almost fell out of hers. Pipes shrieked and burst out in the corridor, spraying gas and fluid everywhere. There was the sound of shattering glass and Malvery came tumbling down the ladder that led to the cupola. He crashed in a heap at the bottom, accompanied by a squall of wind and rain.
Frey had just about enough sense to pull the Ketty Jay aside in time to avoid ramming the side of the barque. They shot past on the aft side, passing through the backwash of the engines. The Ketty Jay was lifted and blasted aside, rolling crazily, engines coughing as they threatened to stall.
Don't die on me, girl! Frey begged his aircraft as he wrestled to stop her flipping entirely. Jez hung on to her seat for dear life. Malvery was sent skidding down the corridor on his back, bellowing like a bewildered walrus. Frey could hear distant machine guns, and saw tracer fire gliding past him in the night from the direction of the barque. A moment later, a dozen sharp, punching impacts echoed through the Ketty Jay.
'You never told me the damn thing was armed!' Frey screamed at Jez.
'I didn't think I needed to!' she screamed back. 'I thought you'd be expecting a little resistance!'
'Well, you thought wrong!'
'Well, you're an idiot!' she replied. Then, respectfully, 'Cap'n.'
By now Frey had fought the Ketty Jay level, and the engines were settling down. They raced away from the barque and the Delirium Trigger, slipping safely out of range. Frey's hands were trembling. A freezing hurricane was blowing through the cockpit from the corridor. The cupola was smashed, and rain from outside lashed the passageway.
'Doc! Are you alright?' Frey called through the door of the cockpit.
Malvery was piled against the engine room door in a position that had to be painful. 'Just about, Cap'n,' he wheezed.
'Damage report,' Frey ordered.
'Cuts and bruises. Bashed my knee pretty bad. I've felt better.'
'Not you. The aircraft.'
'Oh. Right-o,' said Malvery. 'I'll ask Silo, shall I?'
'Would you?'
Malvery' untangled himself and headed into the engine room while Frey turned the Ketty Jay.
'Delirium Trigger's putting out her fighters, Cap'n,' said Pinn in his ear. 'Storm Dog too.'
'Get in there,' said Frey. 'Make sure none of them come after me.' He turned to look at Jez, who was arranging herself in her seat again. 'Okay. This time we do it right.'
The aerial battlefield swung into sight as he brought the Ketty Jay around for a second run at the barque. The Delirium Trigger and Storm Dog glided past each other in different directions, slow leviathans, their cannon batteries flashing. Gouts of yellow flame erupted from their hulls; slabs of armour buckled and wheeled away into the storm. The Delirium Trigger's outflyers - Norbury Equalisers, fast and deadly - were spraying from her hangars, emerging to meet the Storm Dog's ragtag squadron of heavier fighter craft. Lightning flickered and thunder shattered the air.
Frey couldn't see Harkins or Pinn in the mix. They'd be waiting for their moment to dart in and hit the Equalisers. Satisfied that the Delirium Trigger and her outflyers were fully occupied, Frey turned his attention back to the barque.
The Awakeners, foolishly, were making a run for it. Perhaps frightened by the sudden appearance of the Storm Dog, they'd boosted their thrusters and opened up distance between themselves and the Delirium Trigger. Maybe they believed they could lose themselves in the storm and escape, leaving their escort behind. But all it did was rob them of their best defence.
Frey closed in on them. This time, he took an evasive pattern, rolling and diving as he approached. A blast of artillery rattled the Ketty Jay, but it didn't come close enough to trouble them. The heavy machine guns fared little better. Tracer fire slipped out of the dark from the turrets on the back of the barque, but it waved about wildly and never got a fix. Now that he was moving around instead of coming in straight, they couldn't draw a bead on him.
'Engines weren't hit, Cap'n!' Malvery shouted from down the passageway. 'Rot knows where we took the bullets, but if you can't feel it in the controls then Silo says not to worry. We probably won't know until we explode.'
Frey barely heard him. He was focused only on his target.
Gunfire came at him from several turrets, but he slipped between it. He headed for the aerium tank at the end of the barque's port prong. With the autocannon out of commission, he only had the nose-mounted machine guns to work with. The trick was to graze the tank, causing a slow leak that would force the pilot to land the craft. But Frey was angry and shaken up, and not in the mood to be subtle. He squeezed the trigger hard, and kept it down. His machine guns didn't so much graze the tank as rip it apart.
The Ketty Jay dove underneath the barque as it vented a pungent cloud of aerium gas. Frey smelt it on the cold wind that whipped around the cockpit and blew his hair against his face. The barque slid through the sky overhead, metal groaning as it tilted. The sudden weight on its port side was pulling it down.
Malvery stumbled into the cockpit, holding on to his glasses with one hand. 'Silo says go easy! Don't tax the engines too much!'
'She'll hold,' Frey said, through gritted teeth. 'Shut the door.'
Malvery hauled the door to the cockpit shut, closing out the wind from outside. Sporadic machine-gun fire followed the Ketty Jay as Frey pulled her around for another pass. The battle between the frigates was in full swing. Their fleets were dogfighting in the space between and around them. Frey caught flickering glimpses of combat, punctuated by occasional explosions that pushed back the blackness for a moment. He heard Pinn's whoops in his ear, and Harkins' cowardly gibbering. They were still in one piece, then. He took heart from that.
The barque was in trouble. It was still moving at full speed, kloms away from its escort, but it couldn't pull itself level and was flying aslant. At this distance, there would be no help from the Delirium Trigger. Its guns were having trouble aiming at anything as the pilot fought to correct the uneven weight of the twin hulls. Tracer fire burned away in all directions, but the artillery cannon had gone silent. Its operator knew that accuracy was impossible until the craft was under control, and had decided not to waste the ammo.
'Got you now, you son of a bitch,' Frey murmured. He raced in, heedless of the gunfire, aiming for the starboard bow tank. A small voice of caution told him that he was supposed to be bringing this craft down gently, but he'd been scared by the barque's surprise attack and he wanted it out of commission, fast. He closed in and yawed to starboard, his machine guns clattering as they punched holes all along the barque's hull. His touch was lighter this time, but not by much.
Frey couldn't see the gas that spewed from the rupture, but he could see the effect. The barque's bow tilted downwards, the push of its thrusters driving it towards the ground. The pilot fought to compensate, but to no avail. The craft was too big and too clumsy.
The pilot airbraked as much as they could on the way down. Somehow they got the bow almost level, so it came in low and flat, like a skimmed stone. Lightened by all the aerium in its stern tanks, the impact wasn't as hard as its size would suggest, but it was still catastrophic. It hit the ground with a wail of metal, ploughing through the soft earth, rending a trench across the moors. Its double bow buckled and split. One of the prongs snapped off altogether. Its underside came away in shreds. An explosion tore through its flank, sending girders and armour plate wheeling through the night.
Finally, after what seemed an age, it came to a halt in the shadow of a rocky outcrop. Crippled, wrecked, but mostly whole.
Malvery whistled. 'Nice one. Cap'n!' he exclaimed, amazed by the scale of the destruction.
'I'm just glad he left enough of it for us to rob,' Jez said.
'I brought it down, didn't I?' Frey said. He looked at Malvery. 'Go get Crake and Silo and tool up. We're
