‘Get those bastards above us!’ Frey yelled. He backed out of cover, aiming upward at the guards crouched overhead. The others did as he did, unleashing a volley of gunfire. Harkins stayed where he was. Two bodies fell through the air and landed in broken heaps in front of him. He covered his ears and shut his eyes and yelled.
When he took his hands away, the shooting had stopped. Malvery hauled him roughly to his feet.
‘Come on, you. Ain’t no time for lying about.’
‘What about him?’ Harkins whined, pointing accusingly at the unconscious Pinn.
‘Never mind about him,’ said Malvery. ‘Go help the Cap’n.’ He knelt down and began to examine the fallen pilot.
Harkins backed away awkwardly. His wet trousers were chafing his leg. He looked around for signs of the daemon-Jez-thing, but he couldn’t hear it. All he could hear were distant explosions and gunfire from the frigates fighting in the world outside, somewhere beyond the oppressive poison haze that enshrouded them.
Not knowing what else to do, he went over to the Cap’n. Frey was standing among the scattered remains of Jez’s victims. He was looking over the edge at the wreckage of the bulldozer, dimly illuminated by its own lights.
‘Er,’ said Harkins.
The daemon shrieked from somewhere down below. Rifles fired. Frey raised his head and looked at Harkins. ‘Reckon we’ll leave her to it for a while. Let her burn off some energy.’
Harkins swallowed. ‘Right.’
‘Can someone get Bess over here?’ Malvery called. ‘Pinn’s alright, but he ain’t looking like waking up anytime soon. And I’m buggered if I’m hauling this lard-arse all the way down the quarry.’
Ehri left Griffden in charge of the battle around the slave pen gates. She instructed him to dig in tight, to clear out the surrounding areas of stray Daks, and to keep the guards on the gate pinned down. On no account were they to try and charge it. Griffden, an infantry veteran of the Second Aerium War, didn’t didn amp;rsqneed telling.
That done, Silo, Ehri and Fal slipped away from the gate, retreating to a safe distance from the machine guns. They skirted the open ground, sticking to the paths between the buildings, making their way closer to the gun. Silo led the way, and the others fell in behind him, just like old times. It felt like the natural thing to do.
There were still Daks about, who hadn’t managed to fall back to the gate before the Murthians got there. Some were hiding and trying to wait out the firefight. Others did their best to ambush the attackers when they could. Silo only saw two, who emerged from behind a building. He fired on them, along with Ehri and Fal, but they fled back the way they came. Silo crept up to the corner, listened, and eventually peeped round. The Daks were gone.
Just like Daks, he thought scornfully. Ain’t never been the types to stand and fight.
The buildings ended at the base of the rise where the anti-aircraft gun emplacement was positioned. It was surrounded by a wall of sandbags. Within were five guards. Two of them were operating the gun. The other three were crouched behind the sandbags, watching for attackers.
Silo scanned the area, careful to keep himself hidden.
We cannot get up the slope without being shot, said Fal, at his shoulder.
Ehri was huddled behind him, her rifle held upright like a staff. ~ I could hit them from here.
You may hit one, said Fal. ~ But once they know where we are, they will focus their fire on us. You will not have another chance to aim.
Silo frowned for a moment, then his brow cleared. ~ That is exactly what we must do, he said. ~ Draw their fire. There are only three of them to defend the emplacement.
I don’t understand, said Fal.
You have a pocket watch?
Neither of them did. Silo gave his to Fal. ~ Wait five minutes. Then start shooting. Stay in cover. Kill them if you can.
And you? asked Ehri. There was still suspicion in her voice. She didn’t trust him yet. She probably never would.
While they are looking at you, they will not see me, he said. He tapped the face of the watch. ~ Five minutes.
Then he was moving, heading back among the buildings, circling the rise in the land to get around the other side of the anti-aircraft emplacement. He could see the outer wall of Gagriisk ahead of him. Many of the guards in the watchtowers had abandoned their posts, having moved to different positions that allowed them to fire down on the enemy. Beyond the wall, he could see the Samarlan frigate in the distanin the dce, barely visible in the murk. It was listing heavily in the air, belching smoke and flame from its flank. As he watched, it was hit by another volley from the Delirium Trigger, and began to sink out of the sky. Dracken had demolished her opponent; now there were only the fighters left to mop up.
He was looking up when a Dak ran out from the doorway of a building just in front of him. Neither of them saw or heard the other until a split second before collision, and by then it was too late to react. They went down, tangled together, struggling instinctively even before they’d realised what had happened. The Dak rolled on top of him and punched wildly at his shoulders and head. Silo’s hands found a forearm and used it as leverage to shove the guard off him. There was an instant of scrabbling and thrashing as they fought on the ground, before Silo got the advantage. Still gripping the forearm, he brought it hard up the enemy’s back, making him yell, driving him face-down into the earth. The Dak scrabbled for his weapon with his free hand; the gun lay a metre away. Silo got onto his back and reached an arm round his throat, making a vice of the crook of his elbow. He gritted his teeth, braced himself, and with one quick jerk he broke the guard’s neck.
He rolled off and knelt in the dirt for a moment, panting. Been a while since he’d killed a man with his bare hands. It was a whole different sort of killing than shooting somebody.
No time to stop. Time was ticking. He got back to his feet, picked up his shotgun, and ran again. On his way, he heard a distant sound like a slow avalanche of metal, followed by an explosion that shook the earth and rattled the windglass seals of the buildings around him. Out in the poisoned wasteland, the frigate had crashed.
He stopped when he came up against the outer wall of the compound, and followed it till he came to the bare rise surrounding the anti-aircraft gun. Hidden by the angle of a wall, he watched the guards behind the sandbags. They’d positioned themselves to have a good view all around. He wasn’t exactly on the far side of it from Ehri and Fal – he reckoned a hundred and twenty degrees rather than a hundred and eighty – but it would have to do. The expanse of open ground seemed daunting, now that he came to it, but it was too late to back out now.
He’d lost track of the time. Hadn’t it been five minutes yet? He checked his shotgun was fully loaded. Perhaps he’d been quicker getting here than he thought. Perhaps Ehri and Fal had decided not to go ahead with it. Perhaps Ehri believed he was trying to pull some kind of trick, that his loyalty to the cause of freedom had been forever compromised by living among the foreigners.
Then there was the sharp bark of a rifle, and one of the guards in the emplacement flew back from the sandbags and fell in a heap.
More shots came. The other two guards found their source and returned fire, moving around the sandbags until they were facing away from Silo. The men operating the anti-aircraft gun seemed oblivious, focused on the Equalisers that were chasing the last of the Samarlan fighters through the yellow sky.
Silo broke cover and ran up the rise towards thse toware emplacement. A copper adrenaline tang on his tongue. If they saw him, they would shoot him, and there was nowhere to hide as he sprinted up the slope.