Iron Jackal (24 page)

He felt panic climbing up his ribcage towards his heart. Why didn’t he pull up now? Pull up, back out. The Cap’n had said he could. Even
Jez
said he could!

But he didn’t. The racers split up as they reached the end of the straight. There, a churning wash of colliding rivers carved new, thin slices through the earth. Walls had collapsed in old earthquakes, slumping into crude new forms that solidified over time, making dark gaps, protrusions and pillars.

Harkins let off the throttle a little. Taking those corners at high speed would be suicide. Here was where his heavier, broader Firecrow would have the advantage over the racing craft, but it would still be a game of reactions in there.

Luckily, Harkins’ reactions had been trained by years of living on the knife-edge of fight-or-flight. There were advantages to being afraid of everything.

Occupied with his map, he didn’t see which route Sleen took, so he picked one at random and went for it. The walls closed in on him fast, an alley of brutal rock overgrown with green vines. A thin waterfall spewed from the cliffs high above, dropping like a hazy white ribbon towards the floor of the gorge. The wind turned to thunder, blasting against the Firecrow. He concentrated on keeping the wings level, fighting the craft’s inclination to roll. The bubble of windglass in the Firecrow’s nose gave him a horribly good view of what lay below him.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw that the Yort in the Airbat was on his tail. It caused him a moment’s alarm – a fighter pilot’s reflex – before he remembered that no weapons were allowed till the last lap of the race.

The alley swung left. He took it wide, in case there was something unexpected on the other side. There was: a sharp kink to the right. He yelped, hit the air brakes and slewed hard, losing speed as he did so. The Airbat, seeing what he’d done, took the corner tight and nosed past him as they came out of the turn into a long, uneven curve. Harkins pushed the thrusters a little harder, and they took the curve neck-and-neck, banking in perfect sync.

A drop of rain hit the windglass. Then another, and another.

‘Oh, that’s just great,’ Harkins complained. ‘That’s all I bloody needed.’

The Airbat, which was on the outside of the curve, with a better view down the gorge, suddenly pulled up hard. It gave Harkins a fraction of a second’s warning before he saw the danger himself: a diagonal arm of rock reaching across his path.

Instinct chose for him. He dived instead of climbing, plunging beneath the arm, where the river had tunnelled through it and left a precarious arch hung with straggling foliage. He blasted past it with a boom of thrusters, close enough to make the vines thrash.

He wasn’t allowed even a moment to recover. The gorge fractured again. Three routes to take, no time to decide, so he took the most obvious. He was flying too fast from trying to keep up with the Airbat, and as he climbed and banked out of his dive, he barely missed clipping the wall.

Keep it together!
he told himself, as he plunged into a new gorge. He throttled back a little. If he so much as sneezed at this speed, he’d be dead before he opened his eyes again. The walls were even tighter here. The Firecrow rattled and shook, buffeted by the wind. At least the sound of the Airbat’s thrusters had faded: the Yort had taken a different route.

Then he saw what was coming, and his heart stopped. A rough, sheer wall, charging towards him. This gorge was a dead end. No wonder the Yort hadn’t followed.

No! Impossible! There were no dead ends on the map, he was sure of it!

Pull up now. Pull up, give up, before it’s too late!

He looked down through the nose-bubble of the Firecrow. There was a
river
down there! Where was the river going, if it was a dead end?

Then he saw. The wide, gaping dark. A massive tunnel, a rough and broken maw, swallowing the river.

‘Oh, no,’ he moaned to himself. ‘No, no, no.’

But the momentum of the race had taken over, and he was swept along with it. Before he knew what he was doing, he’d dumped aerium and was diving towards the tunnel. By the time his cowardice caught up, it was too late to climb out of the gorge, and he was committed.

‘Harkins, what in rot’s name are you
doiiiing
?’ he screamed, his high, thin voice lost in the titanic bellow of the river as it rushed up to meet him. He just had the presence of mind to hit the Firecrow’s bank of lights before the tunnel consumed him.

There was no space for thought any more. He was lost in the thunderous black. The river was mere metres below him, spray blasting up in great fins behind the Firecrow. The walls and ceiling, illuminated in cruel relief, waited to smash his fragile craft to flaming ruin. His lights lit up the tunnel in an arc, stone upon stone plunging towards and past him, and beyond that was a void. He flew into it, every muscle taut, a thin and constant squeal slipping unnoticed through his clenched teeth.

Then the void was filled with rock.

His reactions saved him again. His instincts knew what he had to do before his conscious mind had worked out what it was seeing. He put the Firecrow into a shallow dive, following the curve of the river as it went over a ridge and sloped down. The tunnel roof sloped down with it for a few dozen metres, then levelled. And there, ahead, was a tight arch of grey light, getting brighter and closer until suddenly Harkins was out, the world expanding around him, and he was in a spacious gorge hung with pennants bearing the number ‘3’.

He laughed wildly as he turned into the gorge. Behind him, the river burst from the tunnel mouth and plunged a hundred metres to join another river at the floor of the gorge. It was raining in earnest now, splattering across the hood of his cockpit, but Harkins didn’t care. He felt invincible. He’d reached a pitch of fear that was indistinguishable from mania.

The span between the third and fourth markers was wide and curved, and a great relief to Harkins. At first he suspected some kind of trick, but then he realised that a long, open stretch would be perfect for the second lap, when the pilots would be using their guns. He also realised, when he saw Sleed coming up behind him in his Nimbus, that he was ahead of the pack. The tunnel had been a considerable shortcut.

He passed a ravine on his left, a narrow slash in the land. Glancing at his map, he saw that it cut across the curve he was flying on, and came out directly at the fourth marker. It was another big shortcut, if anyone was crazy enough to take it, but it was barely ten metres wide.

The chasing pack had caught him up, and Sleed was back in front, by the time they passed the fourth marker. The sky had darkened, and rain slid off the hood of the cockpit, driven away by the Firecrow’s speed.

The final stretch was the worst.

The gorge had evidently collapsed at some point in the distant past, then been bored through by the river. The floor rose up by steep, uneven steps in a jumble of stone and waterfalls. Precarious stone bridges soared overhead. Crooked pillars leaned against bulky protrusions of stone. The water found its way through everywhere, joining and dividing, gushing through tiny gaps and leaping off cliffs. Thick foliage hung wherever it could get purchase. It was an upward-sloping obstacle course to the finish, shrouded in a thin water mist.

Harkins airbraked off the straight and took the rise as fast as he dared. The mesh of rock bridges near the top of the gorge made it easier to stay low and cut through the pillars. He weaved left and right, climbing all the time, the Firecrow responding eagerly to every twitch of the flight stick. Huge formations of stone flashed past him with a
whumph
of air. The mist and rain made it impossible to make out detail, but he saw shapes, and that was enough.

Up and over a spidery limb of rock; shooting beneath a ragged arch; rolling his wings to vertical as he screeched past a pillar. Ahead of him, a dirty cough of flame. Another flyer down. Five left, including himself. Harkins scarcely noticed. All he knew was the sound of engines and the sheer panic of the moment.

He burst out on to the straight in third place. Sleen was in front, the fat man in the Blackbird hard on his tail. Harkins was panting and laughing at the same time. It felt like he was losing his mind. The stress of it all was unbearable, and yet somehow he was still flying, and he took a savage joy in that as the starting line approached, and with it the second and final lap. He could see the crowd gathered along the edge of the gorge, hands raised as they cheered.

It seemed impossible that he’d made it this far. And now he had to do it again. This time with guns.

‘Harkins!’ It was the Cap’n, through the earcuff. ‘I can see you. Thank spit you’re alright. Listen, Harkins, there’s been a development. I reckon Crickslint’s gonna stiff us. Pull out. Take the disqualification. Don’t risk yourself on my account.’

‘Oh, er . . .’ he said. ‘I think I’ll finish if you don’t mind. I think I can win this.’ It sounded like someone else’s voice coming from his mouth.

‘Harkins!’ Now it was Jez. ‘There’s no
point
. He doesn’t think Crickslint’s going to give us the relic even if you
do
win!’

‘Still,’ said Harkins.

‘Harkins! Pull out! That’s an order from your captain, you hear?’ Frey barked.

‘Yes, Cap’n,’ he said. ‘I hear you.’ And he pulled off the earcuff and threw it in the footwell of the cockpit.

The finish line came flying towards him. He squared his shoulders and hunkered forward. The rain redoubled in fury, and thunder detonated overhead.

‘I can
win
this,’ he said to himself. He flashed across the starting line and opened up with his guns.

Sixteen

Pursuit – ‘Let’s See You Follow This’ – Firecrow Down – A Stand-Off

H
arkins abandoned himself to the race. He didn’t know what he was thinking – everything was moving too fast to stop and consider it – so he did what he felt. And what he felt was that he wanted to beat these other pilots. He was fiercely, angrily determined to beat them. Every humiliation that had been piled upon him – and he’d had a lifetime’s worth – he blamed on each and every one of those men. He was so
sick
of being pathetic.

Well, no more. Here, for this short time, he wasn’t scared any more. Inside the shell of his cockpit, driven beyond fear by the intolerable stress of so many near-misses one after the other, he felt powerful at last. And by damn, he was going to prove he wasn’t a loser. He’d prove it to himself. Not the Cap’n, not Jez. Himself.

In some dim and distant recess of his mind, a small cowardly voice wailed and ranted in terror. But it was drowned out in a white blaze of adrenaline, carried away by the roar of engines, the shrieking wind, and the clatter of machine guns.

Through the first marker, and into the second lap. Harkins was in the middle of the pack, third place of five. The pilots broke into evasive swoops as everyone let fly with their weapons. Harkins fired and was fired upon, but the opportunity was brief. The gorge split in two, divided down its length, and the pilots had to choose.

Harkins, conscious that he had two pilots on his tail, feinted to the right, where Sleen and the fat man were heading. At the last moment, he banked hard, cutting under the firing line of his pursuers and down the left-hand route.

Tracer bullets followed him as the walls closed in. He looked hurriedly over his shoulder. He’d lost one of his pursuers, but the Yort in the Airbat was on his tail again. Damn it, why didn’t that son of a bitch leave him alone?

The flanks of the gorge seemed to be subtly moving now, thick foliage nodding under the barrage of rain. Harkins dodged and dived as tracer bullets whipped past his cockpit and burned away into the grey gloom. The Airbat was faster, but the pilot wasn’t interested in getting in front of him at this point in the race. Harkins hissed a string of curses under his breath as he threw the flight stick left and right.

He could see the end of the divide approaching, where the pilots on either side would come together again. They would be wise to the danger this time, and would vary their altitude. Harkins, occupied with keeping away from the Airbat’s guns, pushed the throttle harder. The bellow of the Firecrow’s thrusters filled the cockpit. Water crawled past him in branching rivulets along the hood. Lightning flickered and thunder rolled across the sky.

The craft came together in a flurry at the bottleneck, huge, dark shapes swooping in and out of the rainy gloom. Harkins clamped his finger to the trigger and raked a stream of bullets along somebody’s tail. The racer’s stabiliser fins were shredded in the barrage. It went into an uncontrolled roll, corkscrewing wildly until it smashed into the wall in a bright streak of fire.

Harkins felt nothing about the man’s death. All he cared about was that one more competitor had been eliminated. There were four left now, including himself. Sleen in his Nimbus, the Yort in the Airbat, and the fat man in the Blackbird.

The second marker came quickly. This lap, driven by the threat of the guns, seemed so much faster than the first. The Blackbird fired on Sleen, Harkins fired on the Blackbird, and the Airbat fired on Harkins. Mostly they were shooting wild, since they were occupied with dodging and manoeuvring through the tight canyons. But the Yort, with nobody on his tail, was hounding Harkins mercilessly. A few stray bullets hit the Firecrow’s fuselage, but the armour turned them away. There were advantages to flying a fighter craft in a race like this.