business, but it made him feel a little better to hear a familiar voice.
Ahead, the fleet was beginning to break up and spread out as visibility improved and they dipped below the mist into clear air. Harkins’ heart thumped against his thin ribs as craft started to accelerate around him. Beneath them was a river, running along the canyon floor. The last stage of the journey. The moment was imminent. He wanted to curl up and hide.
Then at last the canyon gave out and the river plunged away down the sheer wall of the sinkhole. They’d arrived at Retribution Falls.
It lay as the Ketty Jay had left it, a shabby assemblage of scaffolded platforms and ramshackle buildings, steeped in the rancid marsh air. The great sinkhole, many kloms across, was ribboned in slicks of metallic ooze. Where the earth broke through the water, rotting dwellings grew like scabs.
But Harkins wasn’t looking at the town. He was looking at the aircraft. Hundreds of aircraft.
The fleet had grown in their absence. The landing pads were choked with fighters and heavy attack craft. Battered frigates floated at anchor; clusters of caravels and corvettes hung pensively over the town; shuttles and small personal craft hummed through the air.
There must have been three hundred, at least. Harkins felt his stomach clench and his gorge rise. He was suddenly glad he hadn’t eaten anything that morning.
A swarm of fighters was already scrambling to meet them as Harkins came out of the canyon. They’d been alerted by the sight of the first Navy craft at the head of the convoy. Retribution Falls kept a standing defence force, it seemed, ready to go at a moment’s notice. But those few craft aside, the pirate army had been caught completely by surprise.
The guns of the Navy frigates bellowed in a deafening cascade, making Harkins shriek inside his cockpit. Their opening salvo ripped a flaming scar across the sprawling town.
The primary target was the main landing pad, where the greatest number of smaller craft were clustered. It was obliterated in a cataclysm of fire. The other, more temporary landing pads that floated on the marsh were also struck. Those that weren’t destroyed outright began to list as their aerium tanks were holed, sending dozens of craft sliding into the sucking bog beneath.
Two of the nearest pirate frigates, anchored close to one another, were smashed with explosive shells. One of them split along its keel in a smoky red bloom, and sank to the ground in two halves. There were enough unpunctured aerium tanks to make the descent slow and terrible, like a ship being pulled to the bottom of the sea.
After the initial assault there was a pause to reload, and the Navy fighters came racing out of the cover of the fleet. Harkins saw the sleek Windblades shoot past him like darts, heading to meet the fighters rising from Retribution Falls. He gritted his teeth. He wanted, more than anything, to stay concealed behind the flanks of the enormous frigates. This wasn’t his fight, after all: the pirates weren’t his enemies.
But the heavy guns of the pirate craft would start up soon, blasting at the fleet, and a tiny craft like his would be dashed to pieces in the shellfire.
The safest thing to do was attack.
He heard Pinn whoop in his ear, and cursed him for his absurd courage. He could already picture that moron racing ahead of the pack, desperate for the first kill, heedless of the danger. He was the kind that would evade death for ever, simply because he didn’t realise it was there. The fearless always survived. It was one of the great unfairnesses of life, in Harkins’ opinion.
Well, he was damned if he’d let Pinn mock him for being the last one into the battle. The thought of that chubby-cheeked face screwed up in laughter made his blood boil. He hit the throttle and plunged out of the flotilla, pursuing the Navy Windblades into the fray.
The pirate fighters were a motley of different models from different workshops, representing the last thirty years of aviation technology.
