Johannes Cabal the Detective (35 page)

Gushing coolant, hydraulic fluid, and root vegetables from her dreadful wound like a gut-shot haemophiliac, the
Princess Hortense
crashed downwards, spearing her belly on the great trees in that rarely travelled deep forest. But her momentum was massive, and she tore trees up by the roots in her headlong charge down the hillside; those that wouldn’t be uprooted were ripped atwain.

Miss Barrow had followed Cabal’s glance and was already securing her grip on the line-guide housing as he’d run for the landing strip. She saw Cabal hang on for his life and, just momentarily, thought he glanced up at her, but then she had to put her own face down against the metal of the line guide and brace herself. She closed her eyes, cherishing and fearing every second to come.

The incredible roar of destruction battered her, the dreadful tones of disintegration buffeting through her like a fierce, endless beat upon a bass drum, the resonations pouring through her, making her stomach and her heart feel as if they would explode in sympathetic vibration, and that she would welcome such a rapid release. Beside her, the aeroship lost its first and last battle, fought against an implacable and invincible foe. The
Princess Hortense
died screaming her last, as the earth itself tore out her guts and smeared them across the hillside.

When it suddenly became quieter, Leonie Barrow assumed she had been fatally injured, life and senses ebbing from her. She couldn’t bring herself to lift her head for the longest time, afraid of what she might see. But even fear can be defeated by curiosity or, failing that, boredom, and she looked.

Almost a mile ahead of her, the
Hortense
was still sliding, but slowly, so slowly. She would smash into a tree and start to roll up it until her immense weight cracked the trunk, and the ship lurched on again, with small shreds of rediscovered momentum, until she struck the next. She was alight, angry orange flames boiling out from rolling circular clouds of evil black smoke that moiled and hovered in the air like the Devil’s fingerprints. Amidst the smoke, Miss Barrow thought she once saw the figure of a man standing at the forward end of the flight deck, black jacket fluttering about him, but then the black clouds closed around him and she wasn’t sure she had seen anybody there at all.

Then the aeroship hit several trees simultaneously, and this time they bent, but they did not break. The ship lay still, and burned.

Leonie Barrow stood atop the shattered remains of the line guide, lying where a tree had interceded between the hull and the guide itself and neatly bisected the supporting pylon. She stood, and she watched the ship burn. She chose to ignore the bodies she could see scattered along the path of crushed trees, bark and branches stripped upwards by the passage of the aeroship over them.

She was still standing there an hour later when a flight of Senzan combat entomopters flew overhead and started circling. One sighted her and flew low, dropping the pilot’s pack of survival supplies by her with a hastily scribbled note that the terrain was too difficult for the fighters to land, but that help was on its way. Miss Barrow did not react, even when the rescue mission arrived. They could get little sense from her, but this was only to be expected; a wreck is a traumatic event, an air wreck doubly so. She was drugged and removed from the site of such carnage, and flown back to Pa rila in the company of doctors while the search for other survivors continued.

But they found only corpses.

M
iss Leonie Barrow, a British national, was the only known survivor of the catastrophe. In the two days of bed rest she had before her doctors declared that she could be questioned for short periods, the investigators at the crash site had already begun to have grave suspicions that the
Princess Hortense
was not what she appeared to be. Senzan mechanics and engineers would not be fooled as customs officers might be: they studied the line guides and levitators, and found them to be of military grade; they examined the aeroship’s skeleton, exposed by collision and fire, and noted the concealed frames and hard points where armour could be welded and weapons mounted. So when Miss Barrow told them of Marechal’s subterfuge, it came as no great surprise to them. When she told them of his death, it came as no great sorrow.

They had found Marechal’s remains—“body” was altogether too composed a description—and tentatively made an identification based on clothing and artefacts. It was good to have his unexpected presence and death confirmed. Now all they required was an explanation. Some useful data had come from the man Roborovski, but when it was realised how deeply he was involved in the Mirkarvian armament programme he was spirited away by Senzan Intelligence, and the crash investigation saw no more of him. The Ambersleigh woman had been even less helpful, saying that she wasn’t interested in local politics, crossing her arms, and demanding to be taken to the British Consulate in increasingly strident terms until the investigators acquiesced for no better reason than to be rid of her.

This left Miss Barrow, and even she was evasive, pleading that shock had affected her memory. She asked to see a list of casualties, which they were reluctant to give her at first, until she suggested that it might help her recall. It turned out to be a very short list; the
Princess Hortense
had burned fiercely and consumed flesh and bone. Marechal, whose body had fallen from the ruined salon windows before the conflagration and been left in the ship’s shattered wake, was one of the few that they had been more or less sure of.

Miss Barrow read the few names and the short physical descriptions and effects of those still unidentified, and she bit her lip. “He may still be alive,” she said quietly to herself.

Not quite quietly enough to escape the attention of the police officer assigned to her; a chit of a girl barely out of the academy, but who burned with an intelligence and perceptivity that would either see her to the top of the force, or resigned within a year. “Alive, signorina?” she prompted. “Who may be alive?”

Miss Barrow started, and then relaxed. It would be a relief to tell somebody, she realised. The only consideration was how much to tell. “It’s time,” she began slowly. “It’s time to tell you what happened. Time for you to know. I think I’ve put it all together properly in my mind now.” The officer had already produced her notebook and flipped it open. She sat, pencil hovering and eyes intent upon her charge. Miss Barrow hesitated a moment longer, unsure if she was being wise. Then, trusting to fate and judgement, she began.

“There’s a man central to all this. He may still be alive. You have to find him. Dead or alive, you have to find him.” And, with Officer Frasca’s shorthand flowing, Leonie Barrow told her story.

T
hrough the forest, he walked alone. His jacket still stank of smoke, and it reminded him of another time, not so long ago, when he had been walking home smelling much the same, albeit with a more sulphurous note to it. He hoped this wasn’t going to become a recurring feature of his life.

His escape from the stricken
Princess Hortense
had been so pathetically simple that he felt faintly ashamed that he had placed Miss Barrow on the line guide. She was probably dead now, he thought, and that was his fault. His conscience prickled him and, for once, he did not chide it into silence. To be fair to himself, he had thought the aeroship would explode on impact, but instead it had burned and that had given him time. Time, as the ship ground along the hillside at little more than a fast walking pace, to take up station at the end of the pylon at the shattered tip where once Miss Barrow’s line guide had been, time to wait for a likely tree bough to approach, and time to grab it as it passed. That part of the operation had been no more difficult than boarding an escalator or a paternoster; descending the tree after all of its branches beneath him had been torn away by the passage of the aeroship proved more exercising. He had finally managed it by going back to the trunk and clambering gracelessly around to the undamaged side of the tree, before making an inelegant descent that left him sweaty, swearing, and bruised.

Once on the ground, he had contemplated going in search of the missing line guide to check whether Miss Barrow had survived, but the arrival of a flight of Senzan entomopters had dissuaded him. By the time he worked his way back up the hillside, he decided, rescuers would be arriving in force, and he had no desire to answer their questions. Besides, if she was dead, she was dead. That didn’t put her beyond his particular brand of help, but he doubted that she would appreciate anything he could do for her. Well, then. Her fate was her fate, and his was his.

His looked as if it would involve a lot of walking.

Through the towering trees, dismaying the wildlife by his very presence and never pausing to apologise, went a pale man. Johannes Cabal was walking home.