Through the aircraft in front of him he saw that the gorge split in two, divided by a thin spine of land down its centre. He decided to take whichever side Gidley Sleen took. The group split neatly in half, and Sleen, who was an early leader, pulled left. Harkins followed, along with two others.
The gorge was uncomfortably narrow now, but Harkins had flown in much tighter spots than this, and he concentrated on keeping out of the backwash of the aircraft ahead. They were all pulling away from him at a steady rate. It was obvious he wasn’t going to be able to beat them in a straight race. But there were areas where the Firecrow’s greater manoeuvrability would be an advantage.
Cold sweat crawled beneath his pilot’s cap. Fear swarmed at him with the intensity of a nightmare. He’d volunteered for this. He’d actually volunteered.
Every firefight he’d been in since the war was the same. A howling torment of primal, animal terror. But still he flew, because if he couldn’t fly, he was nothing at alclass="underline" a joke of a man. And those awful times were the price he paid for the precious hours of peace, the hours when he soared through a clear sky on the wing of the Ketty Jay , only him and his aircraft and the endless blue.
The gorge narrowed at the point where the divide ended. It was one thing he remembered from studying the crude map on his dash. As they approached, it suddenly occurred to him that he couldn’t see the pilots on the other side of the divide, and that he wouldn’t until the very last moment. The pilots in his group had all kept roughly the same altitude, and there wasn’t much between them in terms of speed. So that meant…
His eyes widened in realisation. Quickly he dumped some aerium, dropping away from the others. It was going to cost him a little velocity, but it would be worth it if- ghtQuic
The two groups swept together from either side of the divide at the same time, forced together by the narrowing walls. Sleen was out in front, but everyone behind him swerved and swooped as they were shuffled together like a pack of cards, crossing each other’s paths. Two craft collided and their wings sheared away with a shriek of metal. Harkins, who was some distance below them, boosted the thrusters and shot past as they came spinning down towards him, trailing smoke. They smashed into the bottom of the gorge and were swept away by the torrent.
Six left, including himself. A slightly hysterical grin split his face. Flying under the pack meant he hadn’t had to slow himself down with evasive manoeuvres. Sleed was out in front, but Harkins had grabbed second place back while the others fought to sort out their racing lines again.
The gorge curved hard left, and Harkins swept round to see a short, straight stretch hung with more pennants, this time marked ‘2’. He swallowed and hunched forward in his seat. Up ahead, the gorge dissolved into a shattered mess of smaller gorges, much tighter than they’d faced so far.
Now things got really dangerous.
I shouldn’t have let him go, Frey thought.
He peered over the edge of the crude barrier that had been hammered into place along the lip of the gorge. There was a crowd of several hundred here at the finish line. The racers had disappeared out of sight, and the spectators waited eagerly for them to come back around.
But even if they couldn’t see it, they’d heard the crash, and seen the thin line of smoke rising into the overcast sky. They knew that someone had bought it. Frey wanted to say something, to ask if Harkins was alright, how things were going, and so on. But he’d taken his earcuff off, at Jez’s suggestion. Talking to Harkins would only distract him. He’d just have to wait, and hope. The rest of the crew, gathered around him, could only do the same.
This whole thing seemed like such a bad idea now. If Harkins died in there, Frey would have no one to blame but himself.
You offered him the chance to pull out, and he didn’t take it, he thought, but it didn’t convince him. That would have washed with the old Frey, but he was a captain now, and he knew a little more about the responsibility that carried. He hated that Harkins had to take a risk like this, alone. All because Frey was too damn stupid to resist Ashua’s goading, or to listen to Trinica. He should have just left the relic alone. His hard-wired instinct to show off in front of a woman had got him cursed, and it might yet get Harkins killed.
Silo slipped his way through the crowd, carrying something wrapped up in a piece of dirty cloth. A Murthian attracted strange and sometimes hostile looks in Vardia, but at least he could move with more freedom than in his home country.
‘You fixed the problem?’ Frey asked.
Silo stood close to him, shielding the object in his hand from the crowd. He turned back a flap of the cloth. ‘Yuh. Found this in the aerium vent. Reckon the maintenance crew put it there when they did that last-minute check.’
Frey’s face darkened. He stared at the object, his eyes hard.
Malvery looked over, saw it, and swore under his breath. ‘That what I think it is?’
Frey didn’t answer. He reached down, adjusted a knob by a fraction, and folded the cloth back over it.
‘You know what to do with that, don’t you?’ he said.
Silo nodded and turned away, making his way out of the crowd. Frey turned his attention to Malvery. ‘Don’t tell the others,’ he said quietly.
The doctor closed his eyes slowly and shook his head, in regret or despair. ‘This ain’t gonna turn out well,’ he said.
Frey was grim. ‘Does it ever?’
Harkins snatched glances at his map as the black and white pennants of the second marker flickered past him like the jerky images from a kinetoscope. He should have studied it harder before he took off. He could have picked the shortest route through the gorges and drawn it in with a pencil. But there was no time now, so it would have to be blind luck.
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 ncrotheose 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.