was a short and dirty conflict. People were demoralised and tired on all sides. By the end - an abrupt and unsatisfying truce that left everyone but the Sammies feeling cheated - Harkins was out of it. He’d had too many near misses, lucked out a little too often, seen death’s face more than any man should have to. He was a trembling shell. They discharged him two weeks before the end of the war, after fourteen years in the service. The meagre pension they gave him was all the Navy could afford after such a ruinous decade.
Those years were the worst years of all.
Harkins had come to realise that the world changed fast these days, and it wasn’t kind to those who weren’t adaptable. He had no skills other than those he’d learned as a fighter pilot, and nobody wanted a pilot without a plane. A bleak, grey time followed, working in factories, doing odd jobs, picking up a pittance. Scraping a living.
It wasn’t Navy life that he missed, with its discipline and structure. It wasn’t the camaraderie - that had soured after enough of his friends had died. It was the loss of the Firecrow that truly ached.
Though he’d flown almost a dozen different Firecrows, with minor variations and improvements as time went on, they were all the same in his mind. The sound of the thrusters, the throb of the aerium engines pumping gas into the ballast tanks, the enclosing, unyielding hardness of the cockpit. The Firecrow had been the setting for all his glories and all his tragedies. It had carried him into the wondrous sky, it had seen him through the most desperate dogfights, and occasionally it had failed him when it had no more to give. Everything truly important that had ever happened in his life, the moments of purest joy and sheer, naked terror, had happened inside a Firecrow.
Then in his darkest hour, there came a light. It was almost enough to make him believe in the Allsoul and the incomprehensible jabber of the Awakeners. Almost, but not quite.
His overseer at the factory knew about Harkins’ past as a pilot for the Coalition Navy. It was all Harkins talked about, when he talked at all. So when the overseer met a man in a bar who was selling a Firecrow, he mentioned it to Harkins.
That was how Harkins met Darian Frey, who had won a Caybery Firecrow on an improbably lucky hand of Rake and now had no idea what to do with it. Harkins had barely enough money to keep a roof over his head, but he went to Frey to beg. He’d have sold his soul if it got him back into the cockpit. Frey didn’t think his soul was worth much, so he suggested a deal instead.
Harkins would fly the Firecrow on his behalf. The pay would be lousy, the life unpredictable, probably dangerous and usually illegal. Harkins would do exactly as he said, and if he didn’t, Frey would take his craft back.
Harkins had agreed before Frey had even finished laying out the terms. The same day, he left port as an outflyer for the Ketty Jay. It was the happiest day of his life.
It had been a long journey from that Navy frigate to here, flying over the Hookhollow Mountains under Darian Frey. He’d never again have the kind of steel in his spine he had as a young pilot. He’d never have the obscene courage of Pinn, who laughed at death because he was too dim to comprehend it. But he’d tasted what life was like trapped on the ground, unable to rise above the clouds to the sun. He was never going back to that.
He glanced around apprehensively, as if someone, somewhere might be watching him. Then he settled back into the hard seat of the Firecrow and allowed himself a broad, contented smile.
For Crake, there was no such contentment. Listless, he wandered the tight confines of the Ketty Jay. There was a strange void in his belly, as if the wind had been knocked out of him. He drifted about, a spectre of bewildered sadness.
At first he’d confined himself to the near-vacant cargo hold, until the space began to oppress him and his mood started to make Bess uneasy. After that he went to the mess and drank a few mugs of strong coffee while sitting at the small communal table. But the mess felt bleak with no one to share it with.
So he climbed up the ladder from the mess to the passageway that linked the cockpit at the fore of the craft to engineering in the aft.
