an unseen foe or obliterated by a shell from above. But the stronghold was quiet, and the sounds of destruction had retreated temporarily into the distance.
‘I don’t see anyone, Cap’n,’ Malvery said at his shoulder.
Frey didn’t like the idea of rushing up to the entrance. There were too many windows facing inward on either side. Anyone up there with a gun could pick off attackers with ease.
‘We’ll make our own way in,’ he said. He turned to Bess. Her eyes glimmered behind her face-grille. ‘Can you get through this wall?’
Bess could.
There was a pirate standing in the doorway of the room on the other side. The sight of the hulking figure crashing through the wall in a cloud of dust and rubble scared him witless. As with anything that scared him, his first reaction was to shoot it. Bess pushed her way through the debris as bullets ricocheted from her armoured torso. She tore a chunk of stone from the wall and flung it at her attacker. It hit him in the forehead hard enough to take his head off. The remains of the pirate staggered a few steps before tipping over.
‘Damn good shot!’ Malvery exclaimed, climbing through the hole in the wall.
Frey climbed in after him. ‘Our treasure’s in this building somewhere, ’ he said. ‘Let’s get looking.’
Pinn yowled and whooped like an over-excited monkey as he dodged between swaying trails of tracer fire. The Skylance screamed happily along with him, obedient to his every command, banking and rolling through the chaos of a packed sky. Pinn was fling the fight of his life and the Skylance was in the best shape she’d ever been, with her tanks full of the finest prothane and aerium, courtesy of the Coalition Navy. Together, nothing could touch them.
It was almost too easy. The pirates never saw him coming. Their eyes were all on the Navy Windblades; they considered Pinn’s Skylance as one of their own. The last thing they expected was a fellow pirate to turn against them. Those few seconds of confusion were usually all it took.
He glanced down at the ferrotype of Lisinda that swung on a chain from his dash, and grinned fiercely. ‘You should see me now!’ he cried. ‘Sweetness, you should see me now!’
This was what his world might have been like, day after day, if only those Sammies hadn’t pulled out of the Second Aerium War just as he was about to join in. This was living.
His machine guns rattled as he drew a line of puncture-marks across the flank of a pirate corvette. He darted away before anyone could see who had done it. The corvette - a medium-sized attack craft with two sets of wings and a fearsome battery of guns - was too busy dealing with Windblades to pay him any mind.
‘Pinn!’ Harkins squealed in his ear, at a pitch high enough to make him wince. ‘Pinn, where are you? There’s three of them on me!’
Pinn scanned the melee frantically, but he could find no sign of Harkins amid the swooping tangle of fighters that surrounded him. Belatedly he remembered that Frey had instructed them to look out for each other. The object was survival, not kill-count.
‘I can’t see you!’
‘Pinn! Bloody help me!’ Harkins yelled.
‘I can’t help you if I can’t see you!’ Pinn yelled back. Then, in a rare and remarkable moment, he had an idea. ‘Climb up! Climb out of the pack! I’ll find you up there!’
He pulled the Skylance into a steep climb, making his way free of the main mass of combat. The higher they got, the fewer aircraft would be in their way to complicate things.
