The Ace of Skulls

Thirty-Six

The crew of the Ketty Jay stood in a line facing the grey morning, hands tied behind their backs and nooses round their necks. Side by side, as they’d always been.

Frey watched the sky as the judge droned on in the background, listing crimes real and imagined, filling up time with dreary accusations and pompous legalese. A biting chill was in the air. Clouds hung dark and heavy, muffling the weak winter sun. A flurry of thin sleet blew across the courtyard, leaving cold droplets on his skin.

There was a storm coming. He’d never been more certain of anything.

The witnesses assembled before the gallows platform were mainly soldiers, but there were familiar faces too. Samandra Bree, for one. She was handcuffed; it was the only way they’d let her stay after she went berserk at the sight of her lover at the end of a rope. She’d begged them in the end. Now she was quiet and pale, her face locked in an expression of abject fear, her eyes fixed only on Crake. There was something terrible in seeing a woman like that defanged.

Drave was there, of course, his arms folded beneath his broad chest, stern-faced and grim as rock. Grudge and Kyne were present, but under guard, as Samandra was. Their weapons had been taken from them until their reputations could be repaired. If it was shown that they’d been taken in by traitors, they’d be disciplined. Not that Frey much cared about that, given the circumstances.

He looked down at his feet with detached interest. Only a bolt kept the trapdoor he was standing on in place. Only that between him and oblivion. Seemed a precarious place to be.

‘. . and so it has been decreed that your loyalty to the Coalition and his Grace, the Archduke Monterick Arken, shall be determined on this day by such evidence as shall present itself, and on such evidence shall you be judged and your sentence carried out with all immediacy, or otherwise shall it commuted and judgement deferred to another day, for in such instance. .’

Frey tuned out again. That was the nub of it, anyway. They were getting the formalities out of the way now, so the executioner could do his job once Drave gave the word. Drave had explained it to them in more straightforward terms.

‘You’re going to be up there just long enough to see the Awakener fleet destroyed, Frey,’ he’d said. ‘Just long enough to prove you’re a liar. You can thank Kyne and Miss Bree that you’ve got even that much of a courtesy. I’d have seen you swinging by dawn.’

Unless the Awakener fleet wasn’t destroyed, of course. Unless the Coalition fleet fell out of the sky. Then Frey would be proved right. Except then he’d be stuck in the middle of Thesk as the Awakener army invaded with overwhelming force, and they’d all likely end up killed in the carnage anyway.

Lose-lose, then. Still, it’d be worth it to see Drave’s face.

The judge, a hangdog scarecrow of a man, snapped his book shut and stepped back. ‘Anything to say?’ Drave asked them.

‘It’s not too late, Drave!’ Crake called out. He was sweating and trembling and looked like he was about to be sick, but he still found his voice. ‘Tell the generals! Keep the fleet away! The Awakeners have a device that will destroy them all!’

Frey pitied his friend. There was something wide-eyed and hurt about him, the shock of a slapped child. He still wanted to believe in order and authority and the powers that be. He thought of the world as an upright, sensible place, where righteousness would prevail if only everyone tried hard enough. Frey knew otherwise. His only regret was that he hadn’t been strong enough to deny Crake the chance to find out for himself.

‘We know about the device, just like we know about the attack,’ said Drave. ‘We’ve known for some time. We have very good spies in the Century Knights; some of the best in the world. We know the Samarlans sold the device to the Awakeners, and that they smuggled it to the Barabac Delta and hid it there. And we know something else as well. It doesn’t work!’

It was said with such damning conviction that Frey began to doubt it himself. Had they actually seen that particular device in action? No. They’d only heard what the scientists said to the Lord High Cryptographer, scientists who were just blowing smoke up the boss’s arse to save their own necks. Hadn’t they been griping about how it hadn’t been tested enough? He’d assumed at the time that they were just being pernickety, crossing the ‘t’s and dotting the ‘i’s, but now their lives were on the line, he wasn’t so sure. Had it been tested at all? What had they actually said? He couldn’t remember exactly.

‘It does work!’ Crake insisted. ‘They got to your spies somehow. With Imperators, maybe. They want you to think it doesn’t work so you’ll bring the whole fleet to bear!’

‘Now, there you’re mistaken,’ said Drave. ‘They want us to think it does work so we won’t. It took our best operatives months to dig out the date of the attack and uncover the news that the Azryx device wasn’t working. But over the past week we’ve been getting all kinds of reports. Informants everywhere are saying the same thing: the device is operational. Awakeners have been defecting and giving themselves up just to bring us the news. Everyone has the same message: keep the fleet away from Thesk, or it’ll be destroyed. Now doesn’t that seem strange to you? News was so hard to come by, but all of a sudden it’s so very easy. Almost as if the Awakeners wanted us to know it.’

Frey felt a grudging and bitter smile touch the edge of his mouth. The Awakeners had changed their tune a week ago. Just after the crew of the Ketty Jay escaped the Barabac Delta. Well played, you slithery bastards.

The Awakeners had tricked the Coalition into believing that their device didn’t work. Then, when someone threatened to expose them, they flooded their information networks to make it seem they were desperate to convince their enemies of the opposite. The Coalition thought the Awakeners were bluffing them, but it was a double bluff. By the time Frey and his crew arrived with the truth, the Awakeners had already discredited it.

Add that to the fact that Drave had seen Frey fighting on the Awakener side with his own eyes, and Frey’s frankly patchy history with the Coalition, and Frey could understand why they never had a hope of being believed. As far as Drave was concerned, they were just another bunch of pirates in the employ of the Awakeners, peddling false information so that Thesk would be undefended when the fleet arrived.

And maybe he was right. Maybe Frey and his crew had become unwitting patsies of the Awakeners, rushing to deliver their lies. Patriotic stupidity at its finest. And if so, the Coalition fleet would shoot the Awakeners down and they’d all hang.

He faced death with resignation. Despair had robbed him of will and energy. Failure had crushed him. It didn’t even feel like he was really there, standing on the gallows. He felt disconnected from his own body. The immediacy of the danger didn’t touch him.

Once, freedom was the most important thing to him, but he was a prisoner now. Later he’d come to care about his crew, but now he’d led one of them to her death and the rest to the noose. Only Pinn, the idiot, had got out in time. Lastly, he’d come to realise the depth of his feelings for Trinica. But he’d lost her too, and with her the chance to make amends for the death of their child and everything else he’d put her through.

Even if he survived to see another day, the idea of picking himself up again and going on with his life seemed an insurmountable effort. Better to end it here and now, perhaps. Better to let fortune wash him down whichever path it saw fit. He was done trying.

There was a commotion near the gates of the courtyard. A man in ducal livery stepped through, and announced loudly: ‘His Grace, the Archduke Monterick Arken, Her Grace the Archduchess Eloithe, and the Lady Alixia!’

Even with nooses round their necks, Malvery, Harkins and Crake stood up straighter. He could see the hope in their eyes. The most powerful man in the land: surely he would set things to rights? Surely he wouldn’t be so blind?

Stop hoping, Frey thought. It only makes it worse.

The crowd of soldiers moved aside, and the Archduke and his family came to stand before the gallows. Drave moved protectively to their side.

The Archduke wore a high-collared uniform and a heavy cloak of fur that rippled in the icy wind. He was tall and straight-backed, with dark red hair and a close-cropped beard. His wife was small, but her eyes were bright and fierce. Her dark hair blew about her face as she looked up at them, the baby Alixia swaddled in her arms.

The Archduke swept his gaze along the length of the platform, taking in each of the prisoners. Malvery, Harkins and Crake, standing to attention. Silo, statuesque, showing nothing as he stared straight ahead. Ashua, trying to stay strong but barely keeping it together. And finally Frey, who just gazed back at him blandly, unimpressed.

‘This is him?’ said the Archduke, in a rich and resonant bass voice.

‘That’s him,’ said Drave.

The Archduke looked at Frey a long time. Frey returned the gaze insolently. The Archduke’s face twitched with suppressed rage, and his eyes were hateful.

Finally the Archduke turned to Drave and nodded. Drave gave a tiny bow. The Archduke laid his hand on Eloithe’s shoulder. She gave Frey a look of pure loathing and then allowed herself to be turned. Together they walked back towards the gate.

‘Your Grace!’ Crake called, his voice breaking as he did so. But the Archduke didn’t stop, and the gates boomed closed behind him.

So that was what they’d come for. To look upon the face of the man who’d killed their son. They’d been cheated of their retribution the first time around, but they wouldn’t be denied a second time.

Frey stared bleakly into the middle distance. Their pain was nothing to him. He’d pain enough of his own.

In the distance, a bell began to ring. More bells picked up the sound, until it spread across the city, a discordant clanging that rose from the streets to fill the air. The soldiers stirred.

‘They’re coming,’ said Drave.

Pinn sang to himself over the sound of the engines, loud and off key and entirely without rhythm. He pumped his fist and swung his free arm around as if conducting himself. ‘Arrr-tis Pinn! Hero of the skies! Ar-tis Pi-iiiiiin! Heeeee-ro of the skiiiiiiies!’

All in all, Pinn was pretty happy about going to war.

The Awakener fleet seemed vast from close up. Pinn estimated its size as hundreds, possibly billions, of aircraft, though he allowed there might be some margin for error as he couldn’t count very high at the best of times. There were patched-up rustbuckets and shining new fighter craft. There were crop-dusters and ex-military models, cargo haulers and thundering frigates and sleek high-end luxury liners. Anything that could fly — and some only barely could — had been pressed into service. Anything that could handle a gun had been fitted with one. Every scrap of might that the Awakeners had been able to muster was focused here, in one enormous convoy.

‘Heeeeeee-ro ooooooooof. . THE SKIES!’ he finished with a flourish, and slumped back in his seat, out of breath and sweaty. He grinned at the ferrotype of Lisinda stuck to the dash. It had been creased and crumpled so thoroughly that he could barely make her out any more, but that didn’t bother him. She’d always been prettier in real life anyway.

If only she could see him now. She’d dump that no-good husband of hers right there and then, and fly off with him into the sunset. That’d be a worthy ending to the book they’d write about his adventures. There wouldn’t be a dry eye in Vardia.

Pinn had wanted to go to war ever since he was a boy. It was one of the great tragedies of his life that the Sammies called a truce to the Second Aerium War just days before he was old enough to enlist. He’d been in some pretty big scraps since then, but nothing like this. This was the real thing. This was properly epic.

The fact that he was fighting on the side of the Awakeners didn’t much concern him. He wasn’t the kind of person who thought about things like that. He’d abandoned the faith with the same speed and enthusiasm as he’d taken it up; in the end, he just wanted a scrap. Every chance to prove his superiority as a pilot was to be seized upon. And he reckoned you’d have to be a real idiot to be a pilot on the Coalition side today.

Unless you believed the rumours, of course. Over the last few days, word had leaked out about a secret weapon. Well, that was no news to Pinn — in fact, he may or may not have started the rumour himself while drunk — but more worrying were the new rumours that it didn’t actually work. That troubled Pinn a little. He wasn’t entirely sure who to believe: the high-ranking Awakeners who assured them that they’d seen victory in all their readings, or the grumbling mercs who’d suddenly realised they’d signed on to fight a Coalition Navy three times their size.

As the day of the attack got closer, dissent in the camp had grown. Tales were told by scared crews, of how their captains had gone off into the swamps and come back changed. Some captains, fearing they’d be next, tried to make a run for it. But the Awakeners were especially vigilant after the Ketty Jay’s escape, and the turncoats didn’t get far.

An atmosphere of dread had begun to pervade the camp in its final days. Not least aboard the Delirium Trigger.

Pinn had found an unexpected drinking companion in Balomon Crund. The bosun of the Delirium Trigger was a dour and maudlin sort, not much given to conversation, but that was fine. Pinn would much rather talk at someone than to them, anyway. The few times Crund did have something to say, it was always on the same subject. The same woman Frey had been banging on about since Pinn could remember. Damn, it was tiresome listening to people talk about their sweethearts.

Pinn couldn’t conceive of a relationship with a woman that didn’t involve wanting to sleep with them. He’d even have given Jez a go, before he found out she was some bloody awful horror from beyond infinity. The same couldn’t be said for Crund, though. The way he talked about his Cap’n, Pinn could tell. He was still devoted to her, even after what had happened, and it had left him broken-hearted.

Trinica had returned from the swamp a changed woman. She looked little different: ghastly white make-up, hair chopped, irises huge as coins and black as the void. But now it was more than a show. She’d become the part she’d played for her crew all these years. At last she was the terrible goddess they wanted.

Her mere presence in the room was enough to make the skin crawl. Nobody could argue with her: she reduced strong men to whimpering children. Her eyes had always been unnerving, but now nobody could stand her gaze. It bored into a man, stripped him to his core, dragged his secrets into the light.

There had been talk of mutiny before. Grumblings among the men. The Cap’n wasn’t strong enough. She was sweet on that Frey feller, and it was making her soft. The first thing Trinica had done on her return was summon the head of those prospective mutineers to her cabin. The screams began soon after, and didn’t stop for an hour. Nobody dared go in. They were not screams of pain: they were sounds beyond sanity.

When she was done, there was no more talk of mutiny.

Crund did his duties aboard the Delirium Trigger, but he could hardly bear to be there after that. It hurt too much to be around Trinica. She wasn’t the woman he’d known any more. So he escaped at every opportunity, and found Pinn in the bar more often than not, and together they drank to forget lost loves.

That first night, once they were good and hammered, Crund had charged Pinn with a task, and Pinn had made him a promise. He knew it was something important, except he couldn’t quite remember what it was. Something to do with Frey. Something. .

Lights began flashing all around, drawing him from his reverie. The electroheliographs on the surrounding aircraft were going crazy. He sat up, excited. That was the signal! The Coalition fleet was in sight!

Pinn was flying in the vanguard of the convoy, and he had a good view even through the clutter of aircraft surrounding him. Ahead of them, Thesk rose out of the hills beneath the louring clouds. A wide calm river flowed in from the east and then split and forked, dividing the city into three. It was deceptively calm from this distance, but the pilots had all been warned about the anti-aircraft batteries dotted around the city.

The Coalition fleet were not coming from the city, however. They were coming in from the sides. A pincer movement, designed to catch the enemy in the flanks, where they expected them to be weakest. It would be impossible to rearrange the convoy in time to respond.

But then, the Awakeners didn’t intend to.

Pinn saw the fighters first, sleek, sharp Windblades swarming ahead of the bigger craft. The frigates came dipping down through the cloud behind them, vast slow ships of the air, bulky and bristling with cannons. In between were heavy assault craft, thickly armoured and deadly.

They came, and they kept coming, and when the horizon was dark with aircraft they kept coming still. The convoy, that had seemed so mighty, was dwarfed by its opposition. The entirety of the Coalition Navy, or near enough as made no difference; probably they still had skeleton forces elsewhere. The enemy pilots were highly trained and equipped with the best technology money could buy. The Awakeners were more than three-quarters volunteers.

But Pinn didn’t care about the odds. That wasn’t the kind of thing heroes worried over.

The formation started coming apart around him as fighters broke off to intercept the enemy. The plan was simple: stay near the convoy and defend it. Pinn could just about cope with remembering that. As soon as his way was clear, he peeled off to port and made his way out of the crowd and into open air. He’d need a bit of room for the fight.

Ahead of him, the Windblades were closing in. The Awakener fighters arrowed towards them. Pinn hunched over his flight stick, the cockpit rattling, thrusters roaring as he pushed them to their limits. A smile spread over his chubby face.

‘Alright fellers,’ he muttered. ‘Who wants to be the first to feel Uncle Artis’s toecap up their arse?’

One of the Windblades opened fire early, sending out a burst of tracers. It didn’t get near Pinn, but it was enough to draw his attention.

‘Think you just volunteered, mate,’ he said. He angled his craft towards the overenthusiastic pilot, his finger hovering over the trigger.

The two clouds of fighters rushed towards each other, the gap closing rapidly with every second. Suddenly the air was full of gunfire as everyone let loose at once. Bullets whined and whipped past the cockpit. An aircraft to his right exploded.

Pinn kept his cool and held his course, waited that extra second, and pressed down on his guns. A trail of bullets scored across the nosecone of his target, shattered the canopy, raked up its back. The Windblade erupted in a ball of smoke and fire.

The two fronts of fighters met. Suddenly it wasn’t bullets but aircraft lashing past him, engines screaming. Pinn screamed with them, mindless with joy. He banked and swooped, diving in among the enemy. Combat became a muddle, Awakener and Coalition craft all mixed together, dodging and shooting.

Pinn cackled with glee as he was slammed here and there by g-forces. He took down another Windblade, and another. The enemy barely noticed him in the confusion. His craft was frustratingly sluggish — too much time rotting in the swamp air, probably — but Pinn rose above it. He’d run rings round these losers even if he was flying one of those cannon-fodder junkers. He could fly anything!

He lost himself in the combat. Time slipped out of his grasp. He was action and reaction, riding adrenaline, hyper-alert. His senses were overcome by the noise of the engines, the flash of explosions, movement everywhere.

It was only when he heard the first of the anti-aircraft guns that he realised how near they’d got to Thesk. The convoy had been ploughing onward while the fighters scrapped around them; now they were close enough for the city’s weapons to be deployed.

Pinn jumped in his seat as a freighter near the front of the convoy was ripped in half, belching flame as it fell away in pieces. Shells flew up from below and burst among the Awakener’s heavy craft. The air filled with explosions.

The attacks were not all from below, either. The Coalition frigates had come within range now, and their guns began to smash into the convoy’s flanks. The convoy fired back, but the distance was too extreme for accuracy, and the Navy had the better of it. Squeezed between the two halves of the fleet, battered by the city’s weapons, the Awakeners began to take heavy losses.

And still they ploughed onward.

Deadly projectiles flew in all directions. Pinn climbed to get above the convoy and out of the way. The sight below him was not encouraging. The aircraft on the convoy’s flanks were being torn apart. He saw another of the Awakeners’ big freighters go down. Awakener outflyers battled with the Windblades in the sky all around him, but they were getting decimated.

Doubt began to nibble at Pinn’s confidence. When were the Awakeners going to hit the button? When would the secret weapon come into play? Was it possible that the rumours were true? Was it possible that it really didn’t work, that this whole thing had been a massive bluff, and the convoy was only slogging onward to its doom?

Then a Windblade shot across his flight path, and he was after it like a dog after a rabbit. It took him back into the thick of the fray. He dodged through the smoke of fresh kills, was showered in shrapnel. Explosions rocked him, setting him shuddering in his seat, pushing his craft this way and that. Two Awakener craft collided off his starboard wing, smashing head-on into each other in the confusion.

He hung on to the Windblade’s tail as long as he could, but in the end he lost it. He banged the dash in frustration. The Coalition fighter was faster and more manoeuvrable. He wasn’t used to being outclassed by an enemy’s aircraft, and it made him petulant. He looked for another Windblade to destroy, to make himself feel better.

A detonation nearby rocked him. The Coalition frigates were alarmingly close now. He swung back towards the convoy. The Awakeners had put most of their junk freighters on the edges of the convoy to soak up the damage, but they weren’t well armoured and didn’t last long. It seemed like the whole outer layer of aircraft was ablaze. The convoy was getting shredded.

Pinn began to feel uneasy about this whole affair. Bad odds he could handle, but no one liked to be on the wrong end of a whipping. They were getting smashed from three sides and were barely even fighting back. He saw a few of the mid-sized craft trying to peel away from the Awakeners, intent on making a run for it. They didn’t believe in the Awakeners’ secret weapon. Maybe Pinn didn’t, either. Maybe he should do what they were doing.

Bullets lashed through the air before his nose. He rolled and dived to avoid the attack. A couple of bullets punched his fuselage, but it was just a scratch. He levelled out and looked over his shoulder. A Windblade, coming in on his tail. No, three Windblades. The bastards were hunting in packs.

Alright, he thought. If that’s how you want it. Let’s see you catch me.

He threw his craft to starboard. And in that instant, something changed.

It felt like a ghost had passed through him. For the span of a heartbeat, time slowed and everything went silent. There was a huge sense of peace in his breast. His eyes found Lisinda’s picture on his dash, and looked upon her fondly, as if she might be the last thing he ever saw.

Then the sensation was gone, and even though it was no longer inside him, he imagined he could feel it rippling outwards in a great sphere, with the convoy at its centre. Up into the sky, down towards the ground, spreading to encompass the combatants in the air and the city in the hills. There was nothing to be seen of it with the naked eye, except for its effects. Where it went, pandemonium followed.

The Azryx device had been activated. And it worked exactly as it was meant to.

The Windblades went first. They were already travelling at speed when their controls went haywire. One moment they were carving graceful paths through the air, the next they were corkscrewing wildly. In the crowded sky, they collided with one another and with Awakener fighters, or swatted themselves against the flanks of huge freighters.

Pinn evaded frantically as Windblades flew every which way and blazing pieces of aircraft rained down all around him. He ran a chicane of explosions, then hauled on his flight stick to get up above the carnage before he was taken down. G-forces pulled at him, crushing him into his seat, making his head light. A fighter plunged past his nose close enough that he almost stalled, but he rode it out, and then suddenly there was nothing around him but sky. He levelled out, high above the plane of the battle, and then looked down on the Coalition fleet.

There were no guns any more. Thesk’s artillery had gone quiet. The Navy frigates dipped towards the earth in eerie, graceful silence as their aerium tanks vented, or ploughed into one another with stately momentum. The fighters, in contrast, were like fireflies, looping crazily, flashing where they exploded. A slow rain of burning metal was falling towards the hills and the city below, in thin fiery streams or colossal blazing chunks.

Pinn stared down in wonder, the flames reflected in his eyes as he drank in the sight greedily. From on high, the sheer scale of it was magnificent. He felt godlike. He’d never seen such beautiful destruction in all his born days.

‘We won,’ he whispered to himself. Then, louder: ‘We won!’

The Coalition Navy fell into disorder and ruin behind them, and the Awakener convoy ploughed on towards the capital.

Crake watched from the gallows with tears in his eyes. All around him, soldiers were shouting, and there were cries of despair. But all he felt was terrible, terrible sadness.

Hundreds of aircraft. Thousands of lives. And we couldn’t stop it.

The wind blew around the crag that the palace stood upon, bringing the sound of distant detonations as Coalition craft smashed into the earth. In the streets surrounding the palace, fires had begun. The battle had been fought to the east of the city, and most of the aircraft fell on the hills, but there had been a few flying overhead when the Azryx device was activated, and others had strayed from the battlefield. He watched as a light passenger craft made a shallow dive into a row of houses. It disappeared from view, and flame bloomed where it hit.

Rain began to fall. It came quick and heavy, as if someone had turned on a shower. Cold, stinging rain, falling on his face and shoulders, soaking him.

‘Drave!’ Malvery screamed in rage. ‘Do you bloody well believe us now?’

But Drave wasn’t listening to him. He was shouting at the soldiers. ‘To your positions! We have a city to defend!’

‘Get me out of these shackles, Drave, you idiot son of a bitch!’ Samandra yelled at him.

Drave motioned at a soldier, who ran over with the key and freed her. ‘You three!’ he said, motioning towards the Century Knights. ‘With me! Protect the Archduke!’

Samandra ignored him. She shook off her shackles and ran up to the gallows, where she tugged the noose from around Crake’s neck. He looked at her, shock and bewilderment in his eyes.

She read his thoughts. ‘Hey!’ she shouted. ‘It ain’t over! You hear? It ain’t over till it’s done!’ And she kissed him, hard enough to hurt.

‘Little help for the rest of us?’ Malvery cried in exasperation, struggling to get his head out of his own noose.

Grudge and Kyne pushed past their guards and hurried to the gallows, where they took the nooses from around the necks of the Ketty Jay’s crew and untied the ropes that bound their hands.

‘Century Knights!’ Drave bellowed from the doorway, his face running with rain. ‘Have you forgotten the oaths you swore?’

Grudge and Kyne looked at one another, then at Samandra. She was still staring into Crake’s eyes, her hands on his cheeks. He saw her face in front of him, but he couldn’t make sense of it all. Everything seemed dull and dreamlike to him. It couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t be. The fall of the Coalition. The end of everything he’d known.

‘I gotta go,’ she said to him. ‘Sorry, honey. I gotta go. I swore an oath.’

‘Samandra Bree!’ Drave yelled. ‘Are you a Century Knight or aren’t you?’

She bit her lip. Tears welled, but didn’t fall. ‘I gotta go,’ she said, and she ran. Crake reached for her, from instinct more than reason, but she was gone. By the time he looked around, the four Century Knights were on their way out of the courtyard. The soldiers had poured out with them. Only the crew were left, standing on the gallows, drenched by the hissing rain. None of them knew quite what to do with their newfound freedom.

‘Well?’ snapped Silo. ‘Ain’t none of us dead today. Get movin’!’

Malvery rounded on Ashua, who was standing a little way apart from the group. ‘Her too?’ he said. She flinched slightly at his tone.

‘Ain’t the time, Doc. She one of us till the Cap’n says otherwise.’

Malvery turned to Frey. ‘Cap’n?’

Frey looked back at him, and his eyes were dead. ‘Right now there’s only one single thing in this world I give a shit about, and she’s waiting on the landing pad.’ He looked up into the grey, oppressive sky, and at the convoy of Awakener craft coming closer. ‘Let’s get out of this damn rain.’