Planesrunner (Everness Book One) (25 page)

“Two more,” Everett said. Mchynlyth nodded. They climbed the catwalk, using the handrails as rungs. Every muscle in Everett's shoulders, upper arms, forearms, hands, thumbs screamed in pain. He clung. He climbed. He cut. He could do nothing else. To admit the pain, to relax, meant the long fall to sharp steel death on the containers below. But it hurt; it hurt like nothing had ever hurt before. With the last of his strength he dragged the skin-ripper down through the net. With the pressure of three gas cells piled behind it, the net gave way. The net gave way and dropped Everett on the end of a three-metre strip of webbing. He swung out across
Arthur P
's interior. The catwalk and safety were out of his reach. He tried to swing, but he no longer had the strength. He couldn't hold it. He must hold it. And every second,
Arthur P
swung towards ninety degrees. Forty-five degrees, sixty degrees. Eighty degrees…

“Oh the dear God,” Mchynlyth shouted down from his handhold up on the catwalk. There was pure awe in his voice.
Arthur P
was vertical. The piled containers finally spilled free in a booming, clanging roar of steel. They smashed into the steering gear, tearing away walkways and gantries, rebounding from ribs and spars.

“Mchynlyth!” Everett shouted. “I can't—”

Then a figure dropped from between the wedged gas cells overhead, a man on a drop line, coattails flying, a jaunty hat on his head.

“'Out of the depths I have cried unto thee, O Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy and with him there is plenteous redemption,'” Sharkey cried. He dropped down level with Everett, grabbed a fistful of net and started to swing. “Hold on with every fibre of your being, sir.” With each swing Sharkey brought Everett closer and closer to the catwalk. “Now!” Everett loosed a hand and grabbed the railing. “The bonder, use the bonder,” Sharkey said. Everett understood at once. He looped the dangling tail of the strip of netting around the railing, slid the trigger on the skin-ripper down and with the last of his strength sealed the loop onto itself. Secure, tied to the catwalk, which had become a vertical ladder. Mchynlyth had climbed down and extended a hand to Everett. As he took it the skin-ripper fell from his fingers. He watched it tumble down through the huge cylindrical pit
Arthur P
had become.

“I'm impressed, Everett Singh,” Mchynlyth said. “You have rightly buggered this wee ship.”

“Did you see the captain?” Everett asked Sharkey.

“She can look after herself.” He released the brake drop line and sailed down to the crosswalk, now turned ninety degrees on its side.

“And that's our ticket out of here,” Mchynlyth said. “Right sunshine, down and out.”

They climbed down the handrails. It was an easy climb, but Everett's muscles were trembling with strain and fatigue. He wasn't safe yet. Put one foot beneath the other, one hand beneath the other.
Don't look down
, Sen, Queen of the Rooftops of old Hackney, had said. He looked out, at the world-turned-sideways inner architecture of the capsized
Arthur P
. Sharkey was waiting for them down on the crosswalk. Mchynlyth took out the walkie-talkie.

“
Everness, Everness
. Our job is done.”

“Fantabulosa,” Sen crackled on the radio. “Oh man, you should have seen it.”

“We saw quite enough,” Mchynlyth said. “You've young Mr. Singh to thank for all that. Ready for pickup, port-side gallery.” He passed the walkie-talkie to Everett.

“Tottenham Hotspur,” Everett said.

They made slow but steady progress out along the crosswalk, stepping carefully from rung to rung, holding onto the stanchions overhead, a monkey-walk over the big drop to the smashed tail section below. Mchynlyth opened the hatch. The wind howled in, blinding Everett with snow and cold. The gallery was turned on its side, the gap between the hull and the far railing enough to be intimidating. But then the snow parted and out of it came
Everness
, dead ahead. Everett could see Sen in the lighted strip of the control room, her hands feathering the controls, dancing
Everness
in on its damaged impellers. Nearer. Everett clung onto the gallery rail, blinded by snow, buffeted by wind, aching and shivering. Behind him the hull of the upended
Arthur P
rose like the tower of a dark lord. Sen swivelled the engine pods and gently dropped the airship until its nose was level with the gallery. The nose hatch undogged; the boarding ramp extended. It came to within a metre of the gallery. No farther. Two jumps then—one to the rail, then the other, over open sky, onto the boarding ramp.

“Come on, Everett,” Mchynlyth said. “It's a doddle, see?” He went from hatch to gallery rail to boarding ramp. He beckoned Everett on.

“'But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint,'” Sharkey said. And Everett leaped. He caught the rail, caught his breath, caught his courage. He had battled the Bromleys and beaten them. He had wrecked their flagship. He had crossed universes. A metre of air was just that; air. He swung around the edge of the rail, positioned himself, and jumped. He landed soft as a cat on the ramp, and in twenty steps he was in
Everness's
docking lobby. Sen was backing
Everness
away from the stricken Bromley airship when he made it up onto the bridge.

“The captain?”

“Annie's all right,” Sen said. She nodded at the window.

Arthur P
stood upright in the air, equilibrium fatally disrupted, as tall as a skyscraper. Her docking ramp was extended from her nose like a radio aerial. And there was a figure climbing that spike, a figure in tan breeches and boots and a white shirt, hauling itself up the rungs, lashed by storm winds and ice but dauntless. Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth saw her ship appear out of the blizzard and waved.

“Mchynlyth, open the cargo bay doors,” Sen said into the intercom.

“Aye, ma'am,” came the reply. Sen looked at Everett.

“You hear that?
Ma'am
. Bonaroo.”

Captain Anastasia had made it to the end of the boarding ramp. She stood upright, daring the wind and the winter, arms spread wide, welcoming in her ship. And Sen brought
Everness
in so sweet, so light and gentle and precise, that all she had to do was step from ramp to cargo bay.

“Captain on the deck!” Sharkey cried as Captain Anastasia strode onto the bridge. She was grazed, bruised; her white shirt was bloody. Sen almost skipped with delight.

“Miss Sixsmyth, I relieve you of command. Stand by for orders. Mr. Mchynlyth, make her airworthy. Mr. Sharkey, hail
Arthur P
. Inform her commander that she is to be taken in tow as lawful salvage. Those Bromleys owe me a coat.”

T
he snow came in from the east. It drove across Kent, dropped ten centimetres of white on the promenades and piers of Deal and the towers of Canterbury Cathedral, the towns and villages of the Medway, the commuter trains flashing along their lines carrying office workers and civil servants and shoppers to home and hearth. It sent flakes whirling round the vortices and thermals that boiled up from the stacks and vents of the Smoke Ring; it sent forerunners out to dust the Albert Docks and the Isle of Dogs with silver and a promise of whiteness to come.

In the heart of the snowstorm
Everness
was coming home. A slow passage it was, limping on four of her eight engines. She towed a heavy burden. Half a kilometre astern lay the hulk of the
Arthur P
, ghostly in the storm; sometimes visible, like a skyscraper at the end of a fishing line, sometimes hidden so that
Everness's
tow cables seemed to dip into nothingness. The Bromleys' shame could not be hidden from radar. Air-traffic control picked up the anomaly coming in from the Channel instantly and within seconds it had gone out across the Airish community, from Paris to Copenhagen, Aberdeen to Amsterdam. Even the snooty and superior passenger liners, who never soiled themselves with the doings of the disreputable merchant fleet, heard the news and threw their smart caps into the air. Anastasia Sixsmyth had defeated the mighty Bromleys. Not just defeated. Wrecked ruined crushed humiliated the Bromleys. Hackney Great Port readied fireworks and train hooters and loud music to welcome back
Everness
. There would be the mother of parties. Until engineers restored equilibrium,
Arthur P
would hang tail-down over Hackney like a giant exclamation mark. The custom was that the crew of a defeated ship be hosted by the victor. Ma Bromley spat at the very idea. They would stay with their ship, in discomfort, turned ninety degrees, and be damned.

The airwaves crackled with the deed of Anastasia Sixsmyth, but she was not celebrating. She sat in her ready-room, a cup of chilli-warmed hot chocolate to hand. Her face was grim and heavy as the storm outside her window. She was marked, darker bruises on dark skin. Her ear was stuck all over with bright yellow plasters where two of her earrings had been torn away in the fight. She had refused to say anything about her hand-to-hand duel with Kyle Bromley. All she had said was, “I did not disgrace the ship.” Kyle Bromley would certainly never speak of it. Fought to a standstill by a woman. That was the greatest shame of their shameful defeat. The wounds, visible and invisible, the heavy damage her ship had sustained, were not the causes of her grim face. The cause was Everett Singh, standing before her, more nervous than he had ever been in his life.

“So this Madam Villiers is holding your father prisoner in the Tyrone Tower,” Captain Anastasia said.

“Yes.”

“A plenipotentiary of the Plenitude.”

“Yes.”

“With almost limitless authority and access to resources.”

“Yes.”

“And a jumpgun.”

“I saw it myself. Ask Sen….”

“Who went into the Tyrone Tower.”

“She volunteered.”

“And now this Charlotte Villiers has traced you back to this ship, and she will stop at nothing to get her hands on your comptator—your Infundibulum.”

“Yes.”

“So I am involved whether I wish to be or not.”

There was no answer Everett could give to that. Captain Anastasia continued.

“And now you ask me to risk my ship, my crew, and my daughter to help you get your father back.”

“Yes.”

“And you go off with your dad and your family to some plane far far away and live happily ever after while we're left in this world facing the anger of the Plenitude.”

“Yes,” Everett said. It was a terrible deal.

“I could hand you over. I could take you down to the Tyrone Tower and tell the man on the desk who you are and what you've got. I could do that, and my ship would be safe and I would be safe and Sen would be safe. Why shouldn't I do that?”

“There is no reason in the world.”

“Sit down, Mr. Singh. I'm going to tell you a story. It's a good story, and a true one.”

Everett unfolded a seat from the wall and sat down.

“Long ago, or not so long ago, in the blue yondering, I was pilot on a ship called the
Fairchild
, as bona a ship as ever lifted out of Hackney Great Port. Her captain was Matts Hustveit, a second-generation Norwegian; his people came over during the Russo-Swedish War. His wife Corrie was the weighmaster; she was proper
so
—Hackney Airish back all the way to when they first put gas in a bag and flew. They were like family to me. They
were
family to me. My own family…well let's say that family is what works. I'm not from here, I'm not a Hackney polone; I'm Western Airish; I was born in Bristol Great Port, within the sound of the bells of St. Mary Redcliffe. You should see the ships, lined up nose to nose along the Floating Harbour, all the Transatlantic Fleet. Quebec, Boston, Atlanta, Miami; Havana and Caracas and Recife and Rio; Montevideo and Buenos Aires. I knew what ship flew where, and who flew her. My dad was the flyer, a pilot on the Montevideo run. My mum, she worked in the Gas Office, but she was proper Airish. My dad, he always promised he'd take me up, take me flying down to New York or Savannah or Salvador. But he walked away, so I walked away. What it's like to find someone not there, to not know why, to know that what you're being told isn't the truth and maybe wasn't the truth for a long time—I know that, Mr. Singh. I left them, so I could fly. I'm not proud of it; it was what I had to do.

“So there I was, fresh out three years at Skysail House—the piloting academy—looking for a job on the ships. I owed. I owed a lot. I still do. Piloting jobs are few and far between; it's like dead men's shoes. The ships are close. Like family. Captain Matts had just lost his pilot—Hugh Bom Jesus. Hackney mother, Lisbon father. Good pilot but terrible drinker.
Fairchild
was due to lift for Dresden, but Hugh had been on a three-day bender. Someone, thank the Dear, locked him in the cellar at the Knights and refused to let him fly. He'd have wrecked that ship. But Captain Matts had a consignment; and in I walked. Luck? No such thing, Mr. Singh. You see patterns, opportunities, moments, you take them. And you make them. I took the commission and weighed in. I'll always remember it: one hundred and twelve pounds three ounces of ballast. I took the helm, we lifted and we made Dresden quick-smart.

“I was pilot of
Fairchild
now, and I was hot, Mr. Singh. I was the talk and toast of Hackney. There wasn't a sinner wouldn't buy me a drink; there wasn't an omi in Hackney, and a fair few polones, didn't want me. And it was good; we were a tight crew. Captain Matts and Corrie had a daughter—I'm sure you can guess who she is. She was six when I came onto
Fairchild
—even more of a spoiled little brat than she is now. She could wrap anyone round her finger then as well—buy and sell the whole of Hackney, could Sen Hustveit. Good tight crew. Family.

“I'd been piloting two years when we made the Sargasso run. We were primarily a Baltic line ship—Deutschland, Polska, the Empire of All the Russias, what was left of Scandinavia. But this was a government contract; they needed it done quick-smart and airship-shape. The regular ship was in for an overhaul. We were being touted for the Royal Mail, and I think they wanted to see how we could handle a tight deadline and a government contract. It was fast and simple, a resupply to a Royal Geographical Society Oceanography survey ship out in the blue Sargasso Sea. Fly drop, back home again. We wouldn't even have to wait around for a return consignment.

“We lifted. It was August. The weather was hot and fine and clear. A great anticyclone had settled over Europe; people remember it as one of the great summers. We flew through blue skies over blue seas and not once did we see a cloud until we had recharged at Madeira and headed out west into the open ocean. August there is hurricane season, and if there's a high over Europe, there's a low over the central Atlantic. Not any low either; three low-pressure systems were spiralling together into the mother of lows. But our weather radar was tracking it, and Captain Matts made sure we kept wide steerage from what was brewing out there. The barometer was dropping towards lows I'd never seen before; the horizon was black from edge to edge. Even two hundred miles out, we could feel the wind shake us. The headwinds were ferocious. We made our drop, turned and headed back to recharge at Madeira. But sometimes things, when they get big enough, they become monsters, things no one can predict and no one can prepare for. She deepened, that storm, she deepened and she deepened, feeding off the heat in the Sargasso Sea; she deepened into nothing anyone had ever seen before. The survey ship cut and ran before it. We turned. We ran—we tried to run. But we'd used too much power battling the headwinds. We'd didn't have enough power to make it back to the Isle of Madeira. Without power, without impellers, that storm would have tumbled us across the sky like a leaf.

“Matts made the decision. It was a terrible decision; it was the only decision he could make. So in the end there was no decision. He ordered me to turn the ship and head into the storm. It's not done often—but all ships come with the equipment: recharge from a thunderstorm. I turned the
Fairchild
. I set course for the heart of the hurricane.” Captain Anastasia glanced at her porthole, where wind-whipped snow was piling up. “You think this is a storm. This is not a storm. That was a storm. Renfield, our engineer, rigged the lightning-catchers. The sky looked burned and boiling; crazy with thunderbolts. Then the buffets caught us and I felt the steering yoke whip. I fought it. I fought that ship in among the lightning bolts. I held her steady, head-on into the eye of the storm. And we drew the lightning. When a ship hooks in the lightning, everything comes alive with electricity. Every rail and handle and lever sparks. Your hair stands on end. The glass crawls with St. Elmo's fire. Ball-lighting goes skittering across the decks. I held her there; I held her in the heart of the storm drinking down the lightning. When the meters read full charge, I turned her for Madeira.

“I still can't get rid of the idea that it was the turn that did it, that I was responsible. We'll never know. There was an arc from the dorsal lightning-catcher to the rudder, hot enough to ignite the carbon fibre. Nanocarbon doesn't burn easily, but when it does, it burns with an incredible heat and hunger. It consumes everything: skin, the struts, the skeleton. The very bones of the ship burn. We were on fire. You've never seen an airship burn. Few people have. Pray you never do. Have you ever seen a house burn? It's the most wrong thing in the world. It's someone's hopes and safety and all the things they love and cherish, burning up without any thought. The fire has no thought and no conscience. A ship's like that, but in the sky, like an angel burning.

“
Fairchild
was burning, and we were a hundred miles from land. Corrie put out a distress call to the RGS survey ship. Captain Matts gave me Sen and told me to take her to the escape pods. Get to the pod. Get out of here. She was only eight then. And she saw her home, her ship, burn.

“She burned from the tail. I picked Sen up and I was running with her, and ahead of me I could see the tail end a mass of white flame. Nanocarbon burns hot as magnesium, and it goes straight to soot, no ashes, no cinders. I saw the fire crawl along the hull, and the skin just vanished. It was like a disease or something, skin turning to gas and blowing away. I saw the ribs glow white-hot and then disappear.

“I didn't see another pod come off the ship. I think they had a desperate plan to vent the helium; it would have snuffed the fire out. But nothing else came off the
Fairchild
. I was terrified until the parachutes blew, and even then I was terrified because bits of burning ship-skin were whirling down, and if they caught the chutes, we were dead. I can still see her there, half-consumed by fire, in the sky, glowing from the inside as the ribs burned inside the skin. Then the skin would catch and vanish in flame. The wreck of the
Fairchild
must have been visible for hundreds of miles, if anyone but us had been insane enough to be out in that storm. Last of all the gas cells broke free. I saw them go bowling off, blazing, in the hurricane winds. Nothing else came off that ship. Then we splashed down and I had too much to do to think about what I'd seen. I blew the parachutes so we didn't get dragged, and deployed the sea-anchor and the emergency beacon. And we held on, tossed about in the middle of a storm in the middle of the ocean. Ocean scares me. It's bigger than anything. Even a great ship the size of the
Fairchild
is nothing compared to the ocean, a match struck in the dark. Poof. Gone. And ocean hates us. It always has. Maybe not hates us, but cares nothing for us and our achievements. It's not human. I stabilised the pod, got the radio working, and we ran with the storm all night. Just us, a young woman and a child, in an escape pod on the ocean.