Johannes Cabal the Detective (34 page)

The third bomb was mounted in No. 2 Etheric Line Guide, at the ship’s forward starboard quarter. This was also, incidentally, the line guide they were closest to. The explosive force was not great—it was not required to be—but it was loud, flamboyant, and unexpected even by its creator.

Miss Barrow leapt sideways onto the deck with a scream of surprise, and so was in a good position to reach into one of the grooves running laterally across the deck and hang on to the arrestor cable that lay there. This was to prove advantageous when the ship dipped its prow thirty degrees.

Thirty degrees does not seem a great deal when drawn on paper during a geometry lesson. When hanging on to the side of an entomopter, the deck angles down by such an amount, and the entomopter—brakes or no—starts to slide forward, it seems a very great deal indeed. Cabal looked down and saw the entomopter’s wheels
squeeeeing
urgently across the rubberised surface, leaving white burrs as the machine slid sideways towards the deck edge. He ran rapidly through the various options. If he lost the entomopter, he would lose the only way off the
Princess Hortense
before she belly-flopped into the forest. To use the entomopter, he needed to open the cockpit. The cockpit canopy was being difficult. Once inside, he needed to start the engine, and bring the wings up to operational speed before the entomopter fell, or very shortly after it started to fall. He was not familiar with the cockpit layout. The canopy was still being difficult. He was running out of deck to scrape across. The
verdammt
cockpit canopy was still—

It opened suddenly under his hand, just as he felt the machine angle up under him as it started to topple off the edge. He had no choice; he threw himself backwards and twisted partially in the air to land on his side. He flattened his hands across the deck surface in an attempt to stop sliding off himself, as the entomopter flipped over the edge and plunged into the treetops a hundred metres below. He was only partially successful. He wasn’t moving as rapidly as the entomopter had, but he was still sliding relentlessly towards the edge. He saw Miss Barrow some ten feet away, hanging on for her life with one hand. Her expression was fearful but determined, and—astonishingly—her free hand was reaching out towards Cabal, as if somehow she could extend her grasp beyond the length of her arm by pure force of will. It was a hopeless endeavour, but Cabal appreciated the sentiment. He raised his eyebrows at her in a “Heigh-ho, here we go again,” sort of way, as if plummeting from aeroships was something he did as a hobby.

Somebody at the helm presumably didn’t appreciate the idea of the
Princess Hortense
ploughing into the forest quite so soon, either. Finding power from somewhere in the ship’s dwindling resources, her prow was brought up vigorously. While Miss Barrow held on to her cable despite being hurled vertically as if performing a one-handed stand, Cabal was flipped into the air like an especially sociopathic pancake, only to crumple heavily onto the deck a moment later, driving the breath from him in an explosive exhalation.

He did not rise or react, but simply lay there on his back, his arms slowly moving from the elbow. Miss Barrow feared that he might have been knocked unconscious, and half rising to walk in a crouch, her fingertips low in case the deck moved again, she went to him. “Cabal! Cabal? Are you all right?” She saw that his eyes were open, and he was looking straight up. He spoke quietly, and she half made out what he said, and managed to half translate that from what little German she knew. From the quarter sense she thus derived, she made an educated guess that he was commenting on how blue the sky was and how pretty. When Cabal touched upon the purely aesthetic, it was time for extreme measures.

A few stinging slaps later, and he was more or less composed. “Did I say anything?” he muttered, sweeping his hair back in a distracted fashion.

She considered Cabal’s fiercely guarded dignity, and that it would be kind for her to preserve it. Then again …

“You were raving about how pretty and blue the sky was.” Then she wilfully added, “I think you also said something about gathering flowers and dancing.”

Cabal’s eyebrows rose in baffled astonishment, before lowering again into a suspicious stare. “I’m sure I didn’t,” he said, albeit not quite as self-assuredly as usual. He climbed to his feet and walked away from the ship’s leading edge in a crouch; being quite that close to imminent extinction had lost its allure.

“Now what shall we do?” asked Miss Barrow, as he walked by her. He stopped and considered. They had only a few more minutes of flying time left before the inevitable crash, and every plan he could think of required more time, more materials, and a great deal more altitude. Meanwhile, the ship was performing the wide clockwise circle he had predicted, which was currently bringing it into the mouth of a wide tree-lined valley. Through the trees he could make out rocky escarpments that, while very scenic, boded ill for a painless crash landing.

He drew in his attention closer, to the ship itself. Three of the line guides were blackened and smoking from the impromptu bombs he had planted inside convenient maintenance hatches. The devices had been small, merely intended to damage a few components and cripple the line guide. Instead, the great louvred casings were smoke-blacked and buckled. He
knew
the strength of the explosive mixture he had used, and there was no earthly way he had miscalculated to this degree. It was possible—No, it was likely there was something inside the guides—probably some sort of coolant or oil reserve—that had proved unexpectedly excitable when blown up. The guide at the ship’s forward starboard quarter had detonated so spectacularly that its pylon was bent, the guide itself waggling slowly back and forth in the slipstream a few feet like the tail of an uncertain dog, creaking ominously. Cabal looked at it and made a decision. It wasn’t much of a plan, but assuming the rest of the ship carried the same flammable fluid, then staying where they were and hoping for the best seemed even less likely as a strategy for survival.

“Follow me,” he ordered Miss Barrow peremptorily, and set off for the line guide.

“Where are we going?” she asked, carrying her shoes as she ran beside him.

“That thing,” replied Cabal with a nod of his head. “It will probably come off as soon as we hit the valley wall. The plan, if I can dignify it so, is that we climb onto it and hang on. With a little luck—I misspeak … with a great deal of luck it will take the majority of the impact, tear loose, and get us down to the ground relatively unscathed. Provided the impetus doesn’t throw us off and dash us against the ground just before the line guide rolls over us. As you can see, the aft guide on this side is mounted closer to the hull, so at least we shall fall outside its path, and won’t have to worry about being crushed into paste by it.”

Miss Barrow’s pace faltered. “It’s one less thing to worry about,” he offered.

“This is your plan?”

“The alternative is to stay aboard when the ship crashes and probably bursts into flames. Between the crew and all the vegetables aboard, I imagine the smell will be something akin to bacon pie.”

They had reached the base of the pylon. “So,” Miss Barrow recapped, “we can either die suddenly on that thing or be burnt to death if we stay here. Is that it?”

“Yes. With a footling chance of survival if we go the former route.”

Miss Barrow grimaced, hitched up her skirt, and tested one foot on the base of the pylon. “Cabal? If we should live through this, please, promise me—” She stepped forward, falling to all fours as she did so to grab the pylon edges.

“Yes?”

“Promise me that you’ll never become a motivational speaker.” And, so saying, she crawled rapidly across the pylon in a few sharp, deliberate movements, her concentration completely on the metal beneath her and pointedly not on the hundred yards or so beneath it, all that separated them from perdition. The treetops ran by in a blur of hard greens variegated with black shadow, the lack of distinction in her peripheral vision giving the impression of a great sea, waiting to drown them. She reached the other side and used the louvred vents to hold on to as she climbed up on to the line guide’s top, getting covered in carbon black in the process. Once she was more or less secure, she turned to see if Cabal was following.

He was, and exhibiting no sign of enjoying the experience. Down on all fours and with a face like the wrath of Jove, he crept slowly forwards onto the pylon, his gaze focused entirely upon it. Miss Barrow made one halfhearted and unconvincing attempt at saying something encouraging, but Cabal shot her such a testy glance that she decided to leave him to it. He was about a third of the way across when his unreliable luck failed him once again.

Somewhere in the labouring innards of the
Princess Hortense
, a tortured relay finally overloaded, and failed in a spray of sparks to a chorus of swearing engineers. Three gyroscopic levitators in the fore starboard array died, their constant reassuring hums diminishing
al niente
. Like a puppet with a string cut, the corner of the aeroship where Miss Barrow clung and Cabal crawled dipped sharply.

Anyone who has ever ridden quickly over a humpbacked bridge or experienced the first descent of a roller coaster will know the sudden sense of falling while the stomach seems to carry on rising. It is a thrilling sensation when enjoyed in safety, but, as this was not the case with Cabal at the moment, the sudden horrid sense of helplessness created by the pylon’s moving quickly away from him, momentarily causing him to fall, made him cry out. The pylon stopped, even swung up a little, and Cabal smashed heavily into it and rolled off the edge.

For the second time in his life, he found himself dangling by one hand from an aeroship. Miss Barrow was shouting, no,
screaming
at him, telling him to hang on, to pull himself up, to do all the obvious things that he intended to do anyway if only he could. He looked down and was surprised to see the treetops so close below. He wondered briefly if a fall would be survivable, but then saw in a gap amongst the trees how tall they stood and decided against it. Then he realised that Miss Barrow was screaming about a tree, too. He was just thinking what a coincidence it was that they were both so concerned with trees when the particular specimen Miss Barrow was talking about—a monarch of the forest, growing well above its neighbours—struck.

There was the great sound of glass smashing as the treetop dealt the starboard flying bridge position a fearsome blow. A moment later, it hit the pylon. Cabal heard the collision at the same moment that he felt it, the tree smashing into the pylon halfway along its length. Suddenly, he was swung forwards to bang harshly against the pylon’s underside as a mass of pine fronds whipped against his back. The
Hortense
, massive and imperturbable, was not to be slowed by such a thing and was in the process of sheering off as much of the treetop as possible, and bending back the rest. It was not a one-way act of destruction, however. Cabal grabbed a second handhold and hugged himself as close to the ship’s hull as he could, as the tree tore away the pylon’s skin and much of the girder work beneath it. Miss Barrow cried out in terror as the line guide sagged on the pylon tip and lurched backwards on the ruined pivoting mechanism that connected it to the pylon.

With a loud crack, the tree was behind them, leaving only shredded fronds hanging from the ripped metal, and a pleasantly fresh scent. A rapidly diminishing series of crashes sounded as the trunk scraped along the starboard promenade, shattering every surviving pane of glass as it went.

The collision had done Cabal a little good; where before he had been able to reach nothing but smooth steel, snapped and bent girders now jutted out of the pylon just behind him. He tested one before trusting his weight to it, pushed his foot into the bend at the torn end, and slid back towards the upper surface and relative safety. Miss Barrow, fingers driven deep into the line guide’s uppermost louvred slot, was surprised to see him emerge, and then even more surprised to feel relief. She watched him heave himself onto the pylon top and roll back onto the deck edge. He lay there, breathing heavily and watching the sky for several long seconds as he recovered his strength and his composure.

“Cabal?” she called. “Cabal? Are you all right?”

He turned his head to look at her. “Never been better,” he said, too exhausted to put even a whit of the sarcasm he would usually have employed into it. “Give me a moment to catch my breath, and I’ll join you.”

“Yes, about that … I was thinking, actually, maybe if I came back.” Something bent and snapped in the line guide’s swivel mount, making it swing and tilt by a few more degrees from the horizontal. Miss Barrow suppressed a cry, and tightened her grip until the metal edges dug painfully into her fingers. “It’s just … I don’t think I feel very safe over here.”

“You shouldn’t feel safe anywhere aboard,” replied Cabal, truthfully if undiplomatically. “Stay where you are.”

“I think … it’s going to fall off,” she said in a very careful and moderated tone, as if the line guide might hear her and fall off in spite.

“That is the idea,” said Cabal. He got painfully to his feet, grunting at his sprains and bruises. “It will come off easily on impact, not before. It is our best chance to survive this. Stay where you are and—” He paused as he glanced forwards. “
Ach, Scheiße
,” he snapped. With seconds to spare, he glanced at the shattered pylon with the line guide wagging slowly at its tip and decided he would never make it in time. Instead, he ran forwards onto the landing strip and threw himself full length at the nearest arrestor-cable slot. He hooked his fingers around the cable, pressed his face against the deck, and hoped for the best.

The rocky outcrop Cabal had seen jutting proudly out of the hillside, like a glacier awaiting the next unsinkable ship, smashed into the forward dining-room windows and tore through the structure, rupturing the next deck up. The sound of the smash of rock, metal, and glass meeting in a cacophonic orgy was visceral in its force. Cabal gripped the arrestor cable with the fierce determination of a man who knows that there is no second chance. His head was jerked down as his body snapped straight behind him, and for long, long seconds, the roar of destruction and the black rubberised decking were his entire world.