Skybreaker (27 page)

At the control panel, Nadira pushed her key into the lock. Turning it off was simpler than turning it on; all it took was a counter-clockwise half turn. Immediately the lights on the console faded; the overhead lamps that illuminated the engineerium blinked off, the gurgle of water petered out.

“Cruse, catch,” Hal said, and tossed me an unlit torch.

The heating coils all along the floor were clanking as they cooled. Already I could feel the temperature plunging. Now to find the message tubes.

“They’ll be somewhere against the wall,” I told Nadira. “I’ll check down this way.” We split up, keeping our torch beams low to the ground, lest the aerozoan sense the light.

Mercifully I did not have to look long, for they were not far from Grunel’s machine, half hidden behind a small desk. Above the incoming tube, I saw the little green flag raised.

“Found them!” I called softly to Nadira. I could see she was breathless, so I waved her towards Hal and Kate, who were about to head out with the gear. “Go on, I’ll be right there.”

I lifted the hatch and saw the end of the message capsule. As I reached for it, the ship jostled and slewed in the sky, and just before my fingers touched the capsule, it was sucked away from me.

“No!”

I bent down and shone my torch light into the tube, but the capsule was long gone, spirited away into the whistling maze of the pneumatics. The whole system was malfunctioning, the air flowing in all directions depending on the movements and mood of the ship.

I thumped at the wall. I pressed buttons and yanked the tassel pull, vainly hoping the capsule would come jetting into my hands. Kate was at my side, her rucksack slung over her shoulder.

“You all right?”

“It was here and then it got sucked back in. It could be anywhere!”

I looked over and saw Nadira and Hal halfway to the exit. He gestured impatiently for us to follow. I peered into the empty message tube once more, then turned to head out. After two steps I stopped.

“What’s wrong?” Kate asked.

“It’s not there.” I was staring at the place where we’d last seen the aerozoan.

“Oh, no,” Kate breathed.

Hal and Nadira were already safely through the doorway. I stood frozen with Kate, my eyes roaming everywhere, trying to find the aerozoan.

“Run,” Kate said, but I pulled her back.

“No,” I hissed. “Look.”

Dead ahead, some tentacles shifted among the cables and chains. My eyes lifted. The aerozoan’s body hung near the ceiling, cloaked in the shadows. I killed my torch, for fear it would act as a homing beacon.

I took Kate’s hand and started stepping backwards for the wall.

“Cruse!” Hal called from the doorway. “Come on!”

I pointed at the aerozoan, and he fell silent. I made a circle
with my hand, telling him we were going around. We were halfway to the door and the aerozoan still seemed unaware of our presence. Maybe it had noticed the draft from the catwalk and thought it might escape back to the sky. Maybe it was following the light of Hal’s torch.

A sound passed through the ship—the hammer of feet on ladder rungs. We were boarded. Hal heard it too. I saw him pull his pistol and take aim at the aerozoan.

“Hal, no,” I hissed. “They’ll hear!”

For a moment I thought he was going to fire anyway, but he stayed his trigger finger.

The aerozoan inched closer to the doorway, as if intentionally blocking our path.

The footsteps grew louder. I couldn’t tell which ladder they were coming down, fore or aft, but they would be at the keel catwalk soon and find Hal and Nadira in plain sight.

“Go!” I whispered to him. “Go! We’ll meet you up there.”

They disappeared. I looked at Kate.

“It’ll be all right,” I said.

Without warning one of the aerozoan’s tentacles silently retracted and whipped out in our direction. It snapped back not four feet from us. Kate gasped. The aerozoan tensed and glided towards us. For a split second I wondered if we should run for the door, but I did not like our chances. Those tentacles were long. I touched Kate’s arm and we stealthily moved back deeper into the room. I dared not make too sudden a movement.

From the catwalk I heard voices and looked around for a
place to hide. But the aerozoan seemed to have a pretty good idea of where we were and stalked us patiently. Maybe it was tracking our wake. Maybe it was tasting us. Its long tentacles nearly brushed the floor. As the tips passed close to metal, sparks flew.

The voices were getting louder. I realized the aerozoan was backing us into a corner. I looked over my shoulder and saw Grunel’s coffin. My decision was instant. Three more steps and I grabbed hold of the coffin lid and heaved it up.

“Get in!” I told Kate.

She hesitated for a split second only, and then we swung ourselves into the casket. I lowered the lid as gently and quietly as I could. We were in total darkness. The thickness of the coffin and its plush lining muffled all sound. We backed against opposite ends, legs touching. I could feel Kate’s rucksack against my feet.

I turned on the torch, illuminating the silky red interior. Over our heads we both heard a faint rasping noise.

“Tentacles,” I said, and with a shiver pictured them slithering over the wooden lid.

“This wasn’t a good idea,” Kate said.

“I just saved our lives!”

“How are we going to know when it’s safe to come out?”

“Well, we’ll just have to use Grunel’s nifty little grave signalling apparatus, won’t we.”

“Ah. You’re brilliant.”

“Can you hold the torch?”

As Kate aimed it at the ceiling, I lay flat on my back to
examine the controls. Maybe it was being in such confined quarters, but I felt rather flustered by the array of knobs and gears.

“Honestly,” I muttered, “look at all this! Do you think someone who’s just woken up in a coffin could figure this out?”

“You probably wouldn’t be in top form,” Kate agreed.

“It’d be pitch black. You wouldn’t be able to see anything.”

“Maybe he meant to add a reading light.”

“Why not throw in a few good books too, in case you had to wait a while?”

I found a knob marked “periscope” and started turning. I heard the sound of well-oiled metal moving within the wood casing.

“I think I’m raising it,” I said. I figured I only needed to put it up a few inches since we weren’t buried six feet under. Then I pulled the retractable eyepiece down to my face.

It took a while for my eyes to adjust, for the light in the engineerium was quite dim, and the lens on the periscope gave a strange warped view, as though the room itself was a little planet, everything curving away at the sides. But it did let me see a great deal at once.

“Where’s the aerozoan?” Kate asked.

“It’s hard to see. It’s not like a spyglass. Everything’s all bulgy.”

“It’s a fish-eye lens. I’ve used them for photography. Do you want me to have a look?”

“I’m fine. I’ve spent three years in crow’s nests.”

“I think this swivels the periscope,” Kate said, and I heard
her turning something. The room careened suddenly to the left, and I instinctively rolled the other way and whacked my head against the casket.

“Stop that,” I hissed. “You’re going too fast. I can’t see anything.”

“Let me have a look,” she said. “You’re hogging.”

“Hogging? We’re not sightseeing. Just keep turning. Slowly.”

I went all the way around the room without seeing the aerozoan. Then, a tip of a tentacle dangled before my eyes.

“It’s right over us,” I breathed.

“Oh, dear.”

“No, wait, it’s moving.” I watched as the aerozoan, looking much fatter and squatter through the odd lens, drifted away from the coffin, back towards the vivarium. Already the glass walls were frosted, concealing what was inside.

“Shall we make a run for it?” Kate asked.

“Hold on. Swivel me to the right … a little more … there.”

Through the engineerium’s doorway, torch beams swept the catwalk.

“No. They’re coming.”

“Are they inside?” she said.

“Not yet.” I watched as the blaze of their lights strengthened. Two figures stopped in the doorway. More were behind them. They seemed enormous as yetis in their reddish mountaineering garb, fur-rimmed hoods all but concealing their faces. Oxygen masks hung at their throats. The two in front were talking, pointing at the open door.

A third man came forward and inspected the doorway. He wore special lighted spectacles, like a jeweller, and he took his time.

“I think they’re checking the door for booby traps,” I whispered to Kate. “I can’t hear what they’re saying.”

The walls of the coffin were too thick and well insulated to let sound in.

“Wait, they’re coming in. I wish we could hear them.”

“Grunel had a horn,” said Kate. “Maybe it also doubled as a listening trumpet.”

“Do you think?”

“Well, it would’ve been nice to know what people were saying about you at the funeral. What’s this here?”

I could scarcely believe it, but Kate was right. Behind a small hatch was a little trumpet that could be pulled down and placed against your ear.

“I want to hear as well,” she said. She started sliding towards me, and I shifted to make room for her.

“Careful,” I whispered.

“What?”

“You nearly tooted the horn.”

“That would be bad. Extremely bad.”

She lay down beside me. It was a tight squeeze.

“Well, isn’t this romantic,” I said.

“Side by side in our very own coffin.”

We had a little giggle. Being so near her, I felt absurdly happy. It made no sense, given the peril we were in. It must have been the thin air, finally taking its toll on my brain. I
should have been terrified by our predicament, but it seemed far away, as if the walls of the coffin formed our own impervious little world. I leaned closer and kissed her.

We shared the listening trumpet, and I pulled the periscope’s eyepiece once more to my face. I was getting the hang of it, and could reach up with a free hand and swivel it myself now. I only hoped the little periscope jutting up from the coffin did not catch their attention. I suddenly realized what a conspicuous hiding place this was—a coffin in the middle of a workshop. Anyone would want to have a peek inside.

There were eight of them, walking into the room, laden with gear. My heart sank. Giants they seemed, carrying portable battery packs and tall pole lamps. I could not make out faces yet. They moved slowly, like arctic explorers bogged down in snow. Even with their tanked oxygen, their bodies were struggling with the altitude and thin air. I wondered if they’d climbed too quickly and hadn’t had a chance to acclimatize as we had. We were weak—but without their oxygen, they’d be even weaker. It didn’t matter though, because holstered in each of their belts were large pistols.

Their torch beams spun a spider’s web of light around the room. I could not see the rogue aerozoan anywhere. I watched all this as I might watch a film in the cinema. I was somewhere else, safe. You need to be afraid, a voice inside my head told me, but it was not a very loud voice, and I did not want to listen right now. I was feeling calm and controlled.

A thin man fixed his torch beam on Grunel’s huge machine, then turned to the larger man beside him.

“Set the lamps up over here!” that man shouted to the others.

The sound through the listening trumpet was surprisingly crisp. Grunel was a genius.

The big man turned, and light washed over his face. His ginger goatee was frosted with ice.

“It’s Rath,” I said to Kate. I was not surprised, but it still made my guts contract to behold his big, brutal face. “They seem to know what they’re looking for.”

As the crew busily set up the lamps, Rath and the thin man stepped back out of the way, stopping near the coffin. I’d been hoping we could make a break for it—but not now.

The man beside Rath nodded. “This is it, most certainly,” he said, his voice thin as bone china. He turned. Within his fur hood I saw an elderly frail face and bushy eyebrows.

“It’s the old fellow from the newspaper!” I whispered to Kate.

“And now that we’ve found it,” said Rath, “perhaps you can tell me what it is, Mr. Barton.”

“Barton,” Kate breathed in amazement. “George Barton?”

I nodded. Nadira was right. There could be no question now: he was the same man who’d been speaking to Rath at the heliodrome; he was the man from the Aruba Consortium.

“This machine,” said Barton, “is Theodore Grunel’s greatest invention. It creates power from nothing but water.”

Rath gave a chuckle. “I wouldn’t have thought such a thing was possible.”

“None of us did at first,” said Barton. “But Grunel was an
unusually brilliant man. I knew him well. The Consortium funded his work on the internal combustion engine, and it made us all rich. But he was never satisfied with it. He said it was dirty and wasteful. That there were purer forms of power. We wanted to know what he had in mind, but he wouldn’t share his designs with us. Later we learned he was secretly working on some new form of engine, one that didn’t require Aruba fuel. Of course we were eager to acquire it.” He gave a reedy laugh. “It only took us forty years.”

The speech seemed to tire Barton out, and he put the oxygen mask over his face and breathed deeply.

“Let’s have some light!” Rath shouted at his men.

All the portable electric lamps came on at once, and shadows leapt for cover in the room’s corners. There was no sign of the aerozoan, and no one had noticed the vivarium yet, for its glass walls were now completely frosted over. Everyone’s attention was directed at Grunel’s enormous machine, gleaming in the lamp’s glare.

“It’s an impressive-looking thing,” Rath said, “but how can you be sure it works?”

Barton lowered his mask. “Our fine locksmith Mr. Zwingli should be able to resolve that question shortly. Grunel was well known for his extravagant locks. Luckily, in the forty years since his demise, locksmiths’ tricks have advanced somewhat. Mr. Zwingli! Might I prevail upon you to see if the machine functions?”

The man with the lighted spectacles nodded and proceeded
to Grunel’s machine. From his rucksack he removed a bristling tool belt and set to work on the control panel.