there’s no one here to collect, that’s not our problem.’
‘You certain?’ said Martley, uncertainly.
‘If there’s been a screw-up here, it’s someone else’s fault,’ said Frey. He took another swig of rum. ‘We’re paid to deliver to the co-ordinates they give us. We’re not paid to think. They’ve told us that enough times.’
‘Bloody Navy,’ Rabby muttered.
Frey lowered the Ketty Jay down onto a relatively unscarred patch of land next to the village. Impatient and drunk, he dumped the aerium from the tanks too fast and slammed them down hard enough to jar his coccyx and knock Martley to his knees. Martley and Rabby exchanged a worried glance they thought he didn’t see.
‘Come on,’ he said, suppressing a wince as he got out of his seat. ‘Quicker we get unloaded, quicker we can go home.’
Kenham and Jodd were down in the cargo hold when they arrived, disentangling the crates from their webbing. They were a pair of ugly bruisers, ex-dock workers drafted in for labour by the Navy. The only people on the crew they respected were each other; everyone else was slightly scared of them.
Jodd was smoking a roll-up. Frey couldn’t remember ever seeing him without a cigarette smouldering in his mouth, even when handling crates of live ammunition, as he was now. As captain, he took an executive decision to say nothing. Jodd had never blown them all to pieces before. With a track record like that, it seemed sensible to let it ride.
Frey lowered the cargo ramp and they began hauling the crates out. The sun hammered them as they emerged from the cool shadow of the Ketty Jay. The air was moist and smelled of wet clay, and there was a lingering scent of gunpowder.
‘Where do you want ’em?’ Kenham called to Frey. Frey vaguely waved at a clear spot some way downhill, close to the trenches. He didn’t want those boxes of ammo too near the Ketty Jay when he took off. Kenham rolled his eyes - all the way over there? - but he didn’t protest.
Frey leaned against the Ketty Jay’s landing strut with the bottle of rum in his hand, and watched the rest of his crew do the work. Since it took two men to a box, a fifth worker would only get in the way, he reasoned. Besides, it was captain’s privilege to be lazy. He swigged from the bottle and surveyed the empty site. For the first time he noted that there were some signs of conflict: burn marks on the walls of the red stone houses; sections where the earthworks had been blasted and soil scattered.
Old wounds? This place had probably seen a lot of action. But then, there was that smell of gunpowder. Weapons had been fired, and recently.
He cast a bleary eye over his crew, to be sure they were getting on with their job, and then pushed off from the landing strut and wandered away from the Ketty Jay. He headed towards the village.
The houses were poor Samarlan peasant dwellings, bare and abandoned. Wooden chicken runs and pig pens had fallen into ruin. The windows were just square holes in the wall, some of them with their shutters hanging unevenly, drifting back and forth in the faint breeze. As Frey got closer he could see more obvious signs of recent attacks. Some walls were riddled with bullet holes.
His skin began to prickle with sweat. He drained the last of the rum and tossed the bottle aside.
The dwellings were built around a central clearing that once had been grassy but was now churned into rapidly drying mud. Frey peered around the corner of the nearest house. Despite the racket from the forest birds, it was unnervingly quiet.
He looked through the window, into the house. The furniture had long gone, leaving a mean, bare shell, dense with hot shadow. The sun outside was so bright that it was hard to see. It took him a few seconds to spot the man in the corner.
He was slumped, motionless, beneath a window on the other side of the house. Frey could hear flies, and smell blood.
