Flying the Storm

35.





Between the Devil and the Deep

Aiden stumbled out from under the rock to what sounded like thunder. But the sky was blue and clear, and though there were dark clouds in the west they were still far away. The source of the sound was hidden from him: it seemed to come from the mountains themselves, echoing and booming back and forth between the slopes. What it was he dreaded to think.

The Iolaire was right where he’d left it. So was the Gilgamesh’s aircraft. The sight of it made him look for his new companion, Hammit. The boy had been following him back out through the twisting and winding tunnels, and was currently clambering from under the rock, looking around for the source of the noise. He didn’t seem to speak much, but then Aiden hadn’t spoken a great deal either. The only thing he’d managed to glean was that the boy had been with the Gilgamesh’s team, had somehow avoided being shot by the turrets and had hidden away in the dark for God knew how long, terrified of moving.

But Aiden hadn’t taken the time to ask the boy anything more than that. He’d been rushing to get back to the surface to tell Fredrick of Solomon and Vika’s betrayal. He wasn’t entirely sure why, though, since there wasn’t anything Fredrick could have done about it anyway.

He hoped that the sound of explosions was the Enkidu having some kind of catastrophic failure. Something to wipe the smirk off of Solomon’s smug face. Oh how he would laugh at that.

The Iolaire’s cargo ramp was down. Aiden ran across the saddle as fast as the lumpy ground allowed, with the scrawny boy not far behind.

“Fredrick!” he shouted as he got closer, but the sound of detonations drowned him out. He spotted the pilot clambering onto the wing to reach the starboard engine. That’s not good.

“Fredrick!” he shouted again as he reached the aircraft. “What’s happening?”

His friend turned to him then, glancing only for a moment at the boy. “It’s the warship!” he shouted back, pointing to the north-west. “The Enkidu! Something’s attacking it!” He bent down to open a maintenance panel, hurriedly reaching into it to feel for something.

Aiden spun around to look where Fredrick had pointed. He could see nothing. The mountain was in the way. What on earth would attack the Enkidu…?

“What are you doing?”

Fredrick swore and drew his hand back out of the hatch. “The bloody engine won’t start!”

Shit.

“Why the hell not?” cried Aiden.

“I think… I think it’s a coolant valve…but-”

“Let me look at it,” said the boy, suddenly. Aiden turned to face him. He was looking him hard in the eye. “I’m an engineer.”

Aiden looked to Fredrick, who just shrugged. “Go on then,” he said.


Fredrick stooped down to give the boy a hand up onto the fuselage. The oversized flight suit hung ridiculously from his skinny frame, getting in the way of his climbing.

Aiden turned to the sky again, to the north-west. Then, as if it knew he was watching, the Enkidu backed into sight, several kilometres distant, just cresting the ridge before Aiden. The air around it was filled with flashes and long, conical clouds of smoke almost as long as the warship. They reminded him of something. His heart seemed to stop when he remembered what.

“It’s the Gilgamesh!” he yelled, watching as the Enkidu ducked and weaved, little thrusters firing from its sides. “It has to be the Gilgamesh!” The barrage of explosions continued, clearer and louder now that the ridge no longer blocked the sound. How they weren’t hitting the warship he couldn’t tell. It was diving and swerving randomly, but surely one of them would get lucky.

Slowly but surely, the Enkidu was being fought backwards. Through all its small bursts of speed, its general motion was westwards; out to sea. Then it seemed to raise its nose, becoming still for a moment.

A massive blue flash erupted from under its bow, like a bolt of lightning that disappeared suddenly in a shower of sparks. Two bright white lances, as thin as needles, streaked off into the blue sky unbelievably fast. Impossibly fast. All that remained visible of their passing were twin lines of smoke and steam; white tracks on a blue field. Aiden stood gaping at them.

He forgot to expect the sound. He stood there watching slack-jawed, not even noticing when the shock crossed the slopes in a pale wave of grass.

Then hit the most shattering explosion he’d ever heard. It sounded like the air itself had burst. He’d never heard anything so loud in all his years. He jumped, losing his balance for a second, stumbling backwards with his hands clasped to his ears. Fredrick fell off of the wing, landing amongst the tussocks in a startled heap.

“For fanden!” Aiden heard through muffled ears. He went to help his friend to his feet.

“I shit myself the last two times as well,” shouted Fredrick, wiping grass and mud from his front.

Hammit seemed unperturbed by the Enkidu’s shot. He seemed to find what he was looking for, and swung down from the wing to where the two airmen stood.

“It’s the coolant valve, right enough,” said the boy-engineer. “Something’s ate it right through. It’ll need replacin’.”

“Replacing?”

“Replacin’, aye. A new one. Might be I’ve got just the thing… only, I’m not rightly meant to take bits from Commander Petrus’ craft…” The boy went sheepish all of a sudden, wringing his hands and eyeing the aircraft just across the meadow.

Aiden tried to reassure the boy. “Hammit, I don’t think the Commander will mind much, given his current state.”

The boy looked at him. Aiden could see the argument behind his eyes. It could have been loyalty to his masters… or maybe just fear. He pitied him, then.

“Go on, mate,” he said gently. “We need your help.”

That seemed to settle it. The boy nodded and set off at an ungainly lope across the grass to the other aircraft.

Aiden watched him go for a moment before turning to the east. The saddle had a fairly uninterrupted view that way, he saw, but even so he couldn’t see what the Enkidu had been shooting at. Neither could he see where the constant barrage of shells was coming from. It had to be incredibly far away. But there, near the horizon where the blue haze turned to white, he thought he could see little specks of cloud maybe… or maybe smoke. Something was happening over there.

The Enkidu was giving as good as it got.

He found that the noise was starting to get to him. Every shell burst thumped in his chest like a blow, and alarmed him more and more each time. He looked then for Hammit, seeing him working away at one of the Gilgamesh’s aircraft’s engines. The sooner he found that part, the sooner they could get into the air and out of there.

But maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe they were actually safer on the ground. It wasn’t the Enkidu he feared: if Solomon had wanted him dead he would have pulled that trigger. If they were in the air when the Gilgamesh arrived… But then, how would it be any better to be on the ground?

“Who the hell is he, anyway?” asked Fredrick, over the noise of the blasts.

“He was with the team the Gilgamesh sent. They were all killed by the factory’s defences, all except him.”

“Lucky guy. What… what happened in there?”

With everything that was happening outside, Aiden had forgotten his hurry to tell Fredrick about Vika and Solomon. Now the urgency had gone, it seemed a bit foolish. What would it actually change?

“There’s a bloody factory inside that mountain, Fred,” said Aiden. “A whole bloody automated factory. I got to see the warship… But Solomon chased me out of there with a gun. Told me the Enkidu was his, and nobody would tell him what to do with it.”

“So his intentions weren’t entirely noble then?” He sounded unsurprised.

Aiden shook his head. “I should have seen it coming. We handed it to him, man. We just handed it to him…”

“If it hadn’t been us, he’d have found others to take him.”

There was truth in that. Aiden tried to take some solace from it. “Fred, there’s something else. Vika-”

“Is f*cking Solomon,” completed Fredrick. “Yeah, I’d noticed.” He spat in the grass and took a swig from his hip flask. “I have two theories about that. Either she likes the guy with the biggest aircraft, or she has daddy issues and wants an older man.”

Daddy issues. That might have held some water… “Maybe she’s looking for help for her father’s cause.”

“Or that,” nodded Fredrick reluctantly, in a way that suggested he already knew. Maybe he preferred to hold on to the bitter reasons. Maybe they made it easier to swallow.

Vika is aboard that warship, Aiden thought suddenly. He’d known it all along, only now he’d realised the consequences of that. If the Enkidu went down, so would Vika. Though she’d played them false it still bothered Aiden. If she was really just trying to help her father and her people, then who was he to judge her? He’d done worse things just in the past week than she had by abandoning them for Solomon.

In truth, he doubted that Solomon would fall for her in the way she probably hoped he would. He was definitely a man with big plans, and those almost certainly did not involve uniting a fragmented Armenia. She was fighting a losing battle if she thought she could persuade him to do that.

But then, that begged another question. What did Solomon want her for? He reckoned he could have a good guess at that. She’d be strung along for as long as he wanted her, baited with vague promises and hope. That poor girl.

Aiden felt helpless, stuck on the ground while a growing battle filled the air above. The noise was intensifying, and the Enkidu launched a pair of missiles from hidden ports in its sides. They howled off up into the blue sky, arcing towards the little cluster of dark shapes above the horizon. The barrage of shells continued.

He was trying to find something good to salvage from the situation. The engineer, maybe. He was only a boy, and yet he had been crew on the Gilgamesh. Did they recruit children for the menial tasks? It would make sense. Children would be easier to control; children would be cheaper. Aiden already knew that the warship didn’t operate on the same moral compass as everybody else.


Whatever his reasons, the boy had made it clear he didn’t want to go back. Take me with you, he’d said. Don’t leave me here. He could have just meant the stinking, death-filled tunnels, but Aiden had thought that there was more behind the words. He’d been given a chance that surely not many engineers on the Gilgamesh got.

That was another unsettling thought. Children aboard the Gilgamesh: young boys and girls working away in its depths, oblivious to its actions and motives. And the Enkidu was shooting its monstrous guns at it, trying to bring it down. If the crew had been thousands of grown adults knowingly doing wrong, it would have been different. But now Aiden had the horrible feeling that there might be hundreds, if not thousands of children aboard.

He ran to the Gilgamesh’s aircraft. “Hammit!” he shouted, seeing the boy poke his head up from behind an engine cowling. “Are all the engineers like you? Your age, I mean?”

Hammit looked at him like he’d asked a stupid question. “I’m one year away from senior rating. About half are younger than me, half older.”

“How many engineers are there?”

The boy shrugged. “A couple of thousand.” He ducked back behind the cowling then.

There could be two thousand adolescents and children keeping that monstrosity in the air. Several thousand more adults, he knew, for the rest of the crew and the marines. And all of them would die, if what Solomon had told them of the Enkidu was true.

The warship fired again, but this time Aiden barely noticed the blast. Two thousand children.

Jet fighters stitched white trails in the sky high above Aiden now. They were swooping and diving, releasing little white missiles that would swarm and twist before bursting into flame where the Enkidu shot them down. Then a fighter screamed low through the gap in the mountains, pulling up suddenly to launch a missile. The Enkidu hadn’t seen it coming.

For a moment, it looked as if the missile would hit, but at the last it exploded not a hundred metres from the side of the warship. The fighter pulled up hard, great cones of flame howling from its afterburners, vapour shearing from its wings and fuselage. The Enkidu opened fire with autocannons, spraying great streams of tracer after it. Somehow the fighter was untouched. It climbed high into the blue until it was almost invisible, re-joining its squadron at altitude.

Aiden’s neck hurt from looking up. He turned back to Hammit, who had stopped to watch too.

“Hammit, we need that part now.”