looked around at the laughing faces of the men who drank with him: Malvery, Pinn, even Harkins, who had loosened up and joined them after a little bullying. Jez was in her quarters, keeping to herself as usual, deciphering the charts they’d stolen from Dracken’s cabin. Crake and Silo were nearby, tending to the damage that Bess had suffered. Nobody wanted to sleep. They were all either too fired up or, in Crake’s case, too anxious. He was fretting about his precious golem.
But Frey couldn’t worry about Crake for the moment. Right now, he was basking in the satisfaction of a job well done. His plan had worked. His crew had triumphed against all the odds. Despite that cold bitch’s condescending words, her cruel pity, he’d screwed her over like a master. He imagined her face when she got back to find her crew in disarray and her precious charts missing. He imagined how she’d smoulder when she heard of the heroic last-minute rescue in the Ketty Jay. He imagined her rage when she realised how badly she’d misjudged him.
You thought you knew me, he gloated. You said I was predictable. Bet you didn’t predict that.
And the best thing was that none of his people had got hurt. Well, except for Crake’s little pet and the scratch on Pinn’s leg, but that didn’t really count. All in all, it was a brilliant operation.
If this was what success tasted like, he wanted more of it.
The bottle of grog came round to him and he swigged from it deeply. Malvery was telling some ribald story about a high-class whore he used to treat back when he was a big-city doctor. Pinn was already in stitches, long before the punchline. Harkins spluttered and grinned, showing his browned teeth. Their faces glowed warmly, flushed in the firelight and the colours of the breaking dawn. Frey felt a surge of alcohol-fuelled affection for them all. He was proud of them. He was proud of himself.
It hadn’t been an easy thing, to entrust Jez with the ignition code to the Ketty Jay. The code was set during the manufacture of the aircraft, and because it relied on various complex mechanisms it couldn’t ever be changed without lengthy and expensive engineering procedures. Jez would forever have the power to activate and fly the Ketty Jay. Even now, Frey had to fight the suspicion that Jez might be creeping towards the cockpit, intending to punch in the numbers and run off with his aircraft before anyone could stop her.
It’s done now, he thought. Live with it.
It had been absolutely necessary for the completion of his plan that someone else fly the Ketty Jay. Jez had assured him she could, having grown up flying many types of aircraft. But he’d still found himself unable to give away the code at first. Like marriage, it felt like sacrificing too much of himself to a stranger.
In the end, he’d convinced himself by making an analogy to Rake. He found that most things in life could be related to cards, if only you thought hard enough.
In Rake, it was possible to play too carefully. If you waited and waited for the perfect hand, then the obligatory minimum bets each round would gradually whittle you down. You’d run out of time and money waiting for an opportunity that never came. Sooner or later, you had to take a risk.
So he’d bet on Jez, and thankfully he’d won big. She was an odd fish, but he liked her, and he knew she was competent. He even had to admit to a slight sense of relief at the sharing of the secret code, although he wasn’t exactly sure why. It felt like he’d let out the pressure a little.
Malvery reached the punchline of his story, and they howled with laughter. Frey hadn’t been paying attention, but he laughed anyway, caught up in the swell. He passed on the bottle, and Malvery gulped from it. Later, Frey would think of other things: the task they still had ahead of them, the bitter sting that came from seeing Trinica’s face again. But for now, drinking with his men, he was happy, and that was enough.
Crake was anything but happy. Their narrow escape hadn’t invigorated him with a sense of triumph, but depressed him instead. He was acutely aware that they’d only made it out because Jez had arrived early. She’d been forced to take off sooner than planned, driven back to the Ketty Jay by far superior numbers, and had then headed directly to their pick-up point at the hangar. Once there, she’d spotted the disturbance inside and realised there
