bastards!
He turned to run, to race up the access stairs, through the passageway, into the cockpit. He was getting out of here.
He ran right into the bayonet of the Dakkadian creeping up behind him.
Pain exploded in his guts, shocking him, driving the breath from his lungs. He gaped at the soldier before him. A boy, no more than sixteen. Blond hair spilling out from beneath his cap. Blue eyes wide. He was trembling, almost as stunned as Frey.
Frey looked down at the twin blades of the Dakkadian bayonet, side by side, sticking out of his abdomen. Blood, black in the darkness, slid thinly along the blades and dripped to the floor.
The boy was scared. Hadn’t meant to stab him. When he snuck aboard the Ketty Jay, he probably thought only to capture a crewman for his fellows. He hadn’t killed anyone before. He had that look.
As if in a trance, Frey raised his revolver and aimed it point-blank at the boy’s chest. As if in a trance, the boy let him.
Frey squeezed the trigger. The bayonet was wrenched from his body as the boy fell backwards. The pain sent him to the edge of unconsciousness, but no further.
He staggered through the cargo hold. Up the metal stairs, through the passageway, into the cockpit, leaving smears and dribbles of himself as he went. He slumped into the pilot’s seat, barely aware of the sound of gunfire against the hull, and punched in the ignition code - the code that only he knew, that he’d never told anyone and never would. The aerium engines throbbed as the electromagnets pulverised refined aerium into gas, filling the ballast tanks. The soldiers and their guns fell away as the Ketty Jay lifted into the sky.
Frey would never make it back to Vardia. He was going to die. He knew that, and accepted it with a strange and awful calm.
But he wasn’t dead yet.
He hit the thrusters, and the Ketty Jay flew. North, towards the coast, towards the sea.
Twenty-Two
The slums of Rabban were not somewhere a casual traveller would stray. Bomb-lashed and tumbledown, they were a mass of junk-pits and rubble-fields, where naked girders slit the low sunset and the coastal wind smoothed a ceiling of iron-grey cloud over all. In the distance were new spires and domes, some of them still partially scaffolded: evidence of the reconstruction of the city. But here on the edges, there was no such reconstruction, and the population lived like rats on the debris of war.
Sharka’s Den had survived two wars and would likely survive two more. Hidden in an underground bunker, accessible only by tortuous, crumbling alleys and an equally tortuous process of recommendation, it was the best place in the city to find a game of Rake. Sharka paid no commission to any Guild, nor any tax to the Coalition. He offered a guarantee of safety and anonymity to his patrons, and promised fairness at his tables. Nobody knew exactly what else Sharka was into, to make the bigwigs so afraid of him; but they knew that if you wanted a straight game for the best stakes, you came to Sharka’s Den.
Frey knew this place well. He’d once picked up a Caybery Firecrow in a game here, on the tail end of a ridiculous winning streak that had nothing to do with skill and everything to do with luck. He’d also wiped himself out several times. As he stepped into the den, memories of triumph and despair sidled up to greet him.
Little had changed. There was the expansive floor with its many tables and barely lit bar. There were the seductive serving girls, chosen for their looks but well schooled in their art. Gas lanterns hung from the ceiling, run off a private supply (Sharka refused to go electric; his patrons wouldn’t stand for it). The myopic haze of cigarettes and cigars infused the air with a dozen kinds of burning leaf.
Frey felt a twinge of nostalgia. If he didn’t count the Ketty Jay, Sharka’s Den was the closest thing to a home he had.
