Skybreaker (28 page)

“They’re trying to turn it on,” I whispered to Kate.

“Without the key?” she asked.

“I don’t know that this fellow needs keys.”

“You’ll forgive my skepticism, Mr. Barton,” said Rath, “but it sounds like a lot of make-believe to me.”

“Not at all,” said Barton. “In theory, nothing could be simpler. Were you well schooled, Mr. Rath?”

“Until the teacher had a nasty mishap.”

“It was one of Grunel’s most amazing discoveries. Water contains both oxygen and hydrogen atoms. But it’s a deucedly difficult business to separate them. Grunel focused the sun’s light to split them.” He pointed at the enormous brass cylinder that looked like a telescope. “Miraculous. So now he has hydrogen and oxygen in abundance and he uses both of them to create an electrical current. I won’t bore you with the details, but the process creates power, water, heat, and hydrium, which is stripped from the air. There are no moving parts, no soot, and no end to the supply. He called it the Prometheus Engine.”

Again, Barton lifted his mask to his face and breathed hungrily.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Rath.

As if on cue, the ceiling lights in the engineerium flared on; the heaters clacked, water gushed through the pipes.

“Good Lord,” said Rath.

Barton stared at the machine in sheer admiration. “As you can see, Mr. Rath, it’s an act of genius. Grunel did it. That’s
why you and I are here. To finish the job I failed to complete forty years ago.”

“What do you mean?” Rath asked.

“Grunel went aloft to finish the engine in secret. To get away from the Consortium. I pursued him.”

I glanced excitedly at Kate. “He’s B.,” I whispered. “From Grunel’s diary. Grunel was right. It wasn’t pirates. It was Barton stalking them!”

“I was nearly upon him,” Barton told Rath. “But he flew into a storm, and we lost them. Like everyone else, we assumed they’d crashed. Until the ship was sighted last week. And now we’re here, Mr. Rath, to make sure Grunel’s invention never reaches earth.”

“You mean to destroy it?” Rath said, and his astonishment matched my own.

“Correct,” replied Barton.

“Seems a pity,” Rath said.

“We’re not paying you to have an opinion, Mr. Rath.”

I caught my breath, hearing him speak to Rath like this.

“Certainly,” said Rath, and I saw all his dislike and anger compressed into a frigid smile. “But perhaps you wouldn’t mind satisfying my simple-minded curiosity, Mr. Barton. I can see how it might be a threat—”

“Not a threat, Mr. Rath. An end. The Aruba Consortium has spent more than sixty years drilling and refining Aruba fuel. At great expense we now control the vast majority of the world’s supply.” He paused to suck some oxygen from his mask. “We’ve just discovered a huge new Aruba field;
perhaps you’ve read about it in the papers. Finding it nearly bankrupted us—that, you wouldn’t have read in the papers. All will be well once we extract and sell the fuel—but how can we sell it if Grunel’s water engine comes along and makes us obsolete?”

“But presumably,” said Rath, “only you would have the machine. You would still be the world’s power-brokers.”

“A seductive thought,” wheezed Barton, breaking off to take frequent puffs of oxygen. “But if the secret of this machine were to get out—and it surely would, given time—we would lose our monopoly. Anyone could build their own Prometheus Engine. And we would have nothing to sell them. Huge fortunes would be wiped out, nations would collapse, thousands would be out of work. It would turn the entire world on its head.”

Rath gave a wry smile. “Ah, I see. You’re acting for the good of all mankind.”

“For such a moralist, Mr. Rath, you seemed to have no trouble opening fire on the
Sagarmatha
.”

“That was your order, Mr. Barton.”

“And my machinery that made it possible. Do you think we would’ve found the
Sagarmatha
without my echolocator?”

Kate caught my eye. “Nadira wasn’t lying,” she said. “She didn’t help Rath find us.”

I nodded, relieved I hadn’t been foolhardy in trusting her.

“The echolocator is a handsome device, to be sure,” Rath said placatingly.

“As is the skybreaker,” Barton went on, “which is yours
upon completion of this enterprise. Until then, you’re required to do nothing but follow orders.”

“When the pay’s this handsome,” said Rath, “I have no opinion on the matter.”

“Very good. Turn off the machine now, Mr. Zwingli! And destroy it!” Barton turned back to Rath. “Instruct your men to search the ship for the blueprints. Any technical drawings or plans must be brought to me.”

“But the ship will be scuttled,” Rath told him. “We’ll blast it to pieces. Nothing will survive.”

“That is not an assumption the board can afford to make. The machine’s blueprints will come back with us to Brussels.”

Barton was wheezing now like a veteran smoker, and he put his oxygen mask back on. Rath turned to his men and relayed Barton’s orders.

“I want a look,” said Kate, and pulled the eyepiece from my grip. “They’re starting to cut into the machine. Oh, Matt, they’re tearing it apart!”

I didn’t like it at all, but right now I was more concerned with how we might escape. Getting out of the coffin would be a major production—pushing the lid high, leaping out, running for cover. How could we do it without being spotted?

“Oh, no,” said Kate suddenly.

“What?”

“One of them’s looking right at me.”

“Don’t move the periscope!” I wondered how obvious it was, jutting up from the lid of the coffin. “Let me see,” I said. “Could you move a bit?”

Kate pushed up with her elbows and tried to shift herself out of the way, but she lost her balance and fell right against the horn’s bulb. A great honking noise echoed through the engineerium.

Kate and I stared at each other, frozen.

“I tooted the horn,” she said in a very small voice.

I grabbed the eyepiece. Rath and his men were looking around in bewilderment.

“What the blazes was that?” someone said.

“Where’d it come from?” another asked.

There seemed to be a huge amount of confusion over the source of the noise. Pistols were drawn, some aimed at the catwalk, others at various points in the room.

One fellow pointed straight at the coffin.”It came from over there.”

“What’s a coffin doing here?” asked Rath angrily.

“The sound came from there!”

“Then go and open it if you’re so sure,” Rath said testily. “It’s big enough to fit the Vienna Boys’ Choir.”

The pirate gripped his pistol and started walking over.

I looked at Kate. “This is going to be bad,” I said.

She nodded.

“When he opens the lid, just run.”

“He’ll think we’re ghosts. He’ll be scared witless.”

“More likely to squeeze the trigger.” My hands were shaking as I pulled a pry bar from Kate’s rucksack. I would try to smack the pistol from his hand and buy us a few moments.

“We could just surrender,” said Kate.

I peered through the eyepiece. Just as the pirate neared the coffin, there was a shout from one of the others. The man before us whirled in alarm, and the next thing I knew he was screaming and convulsing and tentacles were flailing all about with great lightning cracks. A terrible smell reached me even through the coffin.

Kate gripped my arm, terrified.

“The aerozoan got him,” I said.

A chorus of curses and exclamations rose from the other pirates and gunfire cracked the air. Several bullets smacked the coffin’s wall but amazingly didn’t come through.

I kept watching. The aerozoan had been hit and was slewing around the room like a punctured weather balloon.

“Get ready,” I said. “We’re making a run for it.”

We crouched.

“Oh!” said Kate.

Worried she’d been hit by a stray bullet, I looked over.

“Something poked me,” she said, and I spotted a tiny switch jutting from the side of the coffin. Before I could stop her, Kate reached over and touched it. A door dropped open in the coffin’s bottom, and she disappeared.

T
HROUGH THE TRAP DOOR
I
SAW STAIRS
, and quickly threw myself down them. Kate was picking herself up at the bottom and shining her torch around. We were in a tunnel. I could almost stand upright, but had to stoop a bit. I pushed the trap door firmly shut, just in case the pirates opened the coffin.

Kate began to speak, but I hushed her. We were directly beneath the floor of the engineerium, and I did not know how easily we might be heard. One passage led forward, another led across the ship to the port side. I took Kate’s hand and started forward. The corridor was narrow but, like everything in Grunel’s ship, very well constructed, with wall panelling and light sconces, now dark. The floor was a metal catwalk, and beneath our feet I could see the
Hyperion
’s ribs and her outer skin. I paced out the distance as I walked, keeping silent until I reckoned we were well past the engineerium.

“No wonder the crew never saw Grunel,” I whispered. “I can’t fathom this fellow. He has a perfectly good passageway along the keel, but he’d rather scuttle about like a ferret.” I nearly brained myself on a low beam, and cursed under my breath.

“He was very short, you know. This would have been perfectly comfortable for him.”

“Odd little man,” I muttered.

“I feel extremely grateful to him right now. Where do you think this leads?”

“Right back to his stateroom. And I bet that other branch back there keeps going to the dead zoo. He probably popped up inside the yeti case.”

The passage ended with a spiral staircase, and at the top was a small landing and door. I reached for the handle, praying it would not be locked. It turned, but when I pushed, the door didn’t move. I put my shoulder to it, with no good effect.

“Try pulling,” suggested Kate, and I felt like a fool, for I could now see the hinges were on my side.

I pulled hard, but the door was stubborn. I heard a faint crackling of ice and it shifted a smidgin. The effort left me winded. Kate grabbed hold too and we hauled with all our weight. Loose ice showered down on us as the door slowly swung open.

Kate was wheezing from exertion and held her mask to her face so she could catch her breath. We stepped into Grunel’s bedroom. The door was not simply a door, but an entire bookshelf. A burst water pipe had filmed it with ice. Hal had swept most of the shelves clean of books when searching, but had never noticed they hid a secret passageway.

Kate gasped when she saw Grunel. His sheet was on the floor, several feet from his body, as if he’d thrown it off in a fury. He was staring at us. It seemed no matter where you were in the room, he was looking at you. I hoped he hadn’t heard me call him an odd little man. I saw the snapped fingers on his right hand, where Hal had wrenched the watch from
his grasp. I wished I had the photograph of his daughter to return to him. I did not like to think of him separated from it in death. Of all the things he’d taken aloft with him, this was what he’d clung to at the end.

“I’m sorry,” I said to him, under my breath.

Before I closed the secret door, I had a quick look around to find out where the catch was. Now that the shelves were empty, it was easy to discover that one of them could be tilted up slightly, and behind it was a little brass button.

“We should go,” said Kate. “They’ll come looking for the blueprints here.”

Warily, listening all the time for Rath and his men, we left the apartment and made our way forward. Once past the officers’ quarters and the ladder down to the Control Car, the keel catwalk began its upward curve to the ship’s bow. We laboured up the steps, pausing several times so Kate could gulp some tanked oxygen. I was breathing hard, and my temples throbbed. We reached the top of the stairs and were inside the ship’s nose cone. There was a small landing and workspace here, where the crew could tend to the mooring lines and forward gas cells. Running aft, through the ship’s very centre, was the axial catwalk, disappearing quickly into the gloom.

“Where are they?” Kate whispered.

“Cruse,” hissed Hal.

I turned to see his head sticking out from a large storage locker. We’d walked right past it. Hal ushered us inside and slid the door shut. The locker was filled with harnesses and fleece-lined coats and patching gear, but deep enough to fit
all four of us. Hal’s choice of hiding place was a good one, for even if the pirates did search the bow, we had two possible retreats: back the way we’d come to the keel, or along the axial catwalk.

“You had me worried,” wheezed Hal. He did not look at all well.

“We hid in the coffin,” said Kate, and quickly told him of our escape.

Hal nodded, though his eyes seemed unfocused. I didn’t think he was taking much in.

“So Nadira had nothing to do with Rath finding us,” Kate told Hal pointedly.

“Good to hear,” said Hal vaguely.

Nadira’s breathing was quick and shallow, even though she was sitting and breathing tanked air.

“How are you feeling?” I asked her.

“Fine,” she said, her voice muffled through the mask.

“She’s not fine,” said Hal. “She fainted when we got up here. She came around once I got the mask on her. I think her lungs are filling with fluid.”

I nodded calmly, hoping my face did not betray my worry. I knew that at its worst, hypoxia could drown you, or make your brain swell fatally. Nadira was still conscious, which was a good sign, but I didn’t know how long she could last. I had no idea how high the
Hyperion
was now; at least she was no longer climbing, held in check by Rath’s ship.

“Is there anything else we can do for her?” Kate asked.

“Just keep her on oxygen and resting,” said Hal.

“The only real cure is going down,” I said.

“A bit beyond our control right now,” Hal added grimly, and started coughing.

“Hal,” I said, looking at him, “do you need some oxygen?”

“What? No, I’m fine,” he spluttered. “Save it for the girls.” He looked at Kate. “How’re you making out? Getting enough air?”

“After wearing a corset, this is a walk in the park,” Kate said.

I chuckled. Maybe that was why she was faring surprisingly well. I’d always assumed it would be Kate who flagged first, that Nadira’s harder life would make her more resilient. But altitude sickness could strike anyone at any time, even the most fit.

“Cruse, what about you?” Hal asked.

“I still feel all right.”

“Lying’s not going to change anything.”

“I’m not lying.” It vexed Hal that I wasn’t harder hit. He’d spent far more time at high altitudes than me—or so he said—but maybe not this high, or for so long. I felt it sorely, I surely did, but it was not crippling me the way it was the others. I felt as if my body was calibrated for lofty heights. For me, the cold was the hardest part.

“Did Rath see you?” Hal asked.

“We’re still the ship’s ghosts,” I told him, and regretted my choice of words. The possibility of the
Hyperion
adding us to its eternal crew seemed far too likely right now.

“We’re all going to die if we don’t get down soon,” said Hal. “That’s the long and short of it.”

“We need to radio the
Saga
again,” I said. “They might be able to pick us up.”

“What if they can’t?” said Kate.

“There are two ornithopters,” I said uncertainly.

Kate’s eyes widened. “But they weren’t even invented in Grunel’s time!”

“Well, he invented his own, and kept it quiet. Nadira and I saw them in a hangar near the stern. Weird-looking things.”

“You’ll not get me in one of those,” said Hal. “We don’t even know if they work. And where would you propose to land? We’re in the middle of the Antarctic Sea.”

“We need some way off, Hal,” I said.

“I’d rather try to steal Rath’s ship. There were eight men, you said? So probably at least three back on board …”

I started shaking my head, the idea seemed so impossible. “How would we board her in secret, Hal? Anyway, they’re all heavily armed.”

“I’ve still got four bullets. Their ship may be the only way off this floating morgue.” His anger billowed from his mouth like dragon’s smoke.

“The
Saga
may be all right,” I said. “We need to find out at least. I’ll try to raise her again.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Kate.

I looked at Hal; he nodded. I was the only one who knew Morse code, and someone needed to stay with Nadira in case Rath came. It took all her strength just to breathe.

We would have to be careful. Even now Rath’s crew was probably fanning out through the ship, looking for the blueprints.
The Control Car wouldn’t be an obvious place to search, but they might have their own reasons for making a visit.

We took the stairs down to the keel catwalk and then the ladder into the Control Car. With Kate’s help I hurriedly connected my torch batteries to the wireless. I put on the headphones. Kate climbed the ladder to keep watch. I did not want to be cornered down here.

I sparked out my message to the
Sagarmatha
, then paused for a minute to listen to the static. After transmitting a second SOS, I heard only more dead air. Fearing the worst, I sent a third distress message, and the moment I lifted my fingers from the spark key, I heard a return beep.

I snatched at the notepad and wax pencil, so surprised I almost missed the first few letters.

Dorje here. Cruse?

Yes, I typed back jubilantly.

Others okay?

Yes. Hiding. Rath aboard. Oxygen almost gone. Can you come?

Need three hours. Will come.

Decoding the last two words I almost started crying.

Will dock under Control Car. Be ready.

Yes.

I unhooked the batteries, took the message pad, and ran to the ladder. Kate looked down at me expectantly.

“You got through!”

I nodded. “They’re coming to get us.”

The news warmed me. We hurried back up to our hiding place in the ship’s bow, and I told Hal and Nadira of our good fortune.

“She’s well made, the
Saga
,” Hal said with pride. “They’ll be patching like mad.” He looked at his watch. “Three hours.”

“Won’t Rath see them coming?” Kate asked.

“Not if Dorje brings her up from below,” I said. “Rath’s right on top. He’s got no sightlines straight down.”

“And their cannons will be useless,” Hal said. “They’ll have no clear shot. Dorje will nudge up beneath the Control Car. It’ll be a tricky business.”

I knew there was an emergency hatch in the Control Car floor. We’d have to get a line between the two ships, and then clip on with our harnesses and lower ourselves down.

“Just three more hours,” I told Nadira.

“They still don’t know we’re here,” Hal said.

“Exactly,” I said, wanting to reassure Kate and Nadira. “All we have to do is sit tight. They’ll never find us.”

“We can sit tight,” said Hal, looking at me, “or we can get the blueprints.”

I would be a liar if I said the thought had not occurred to me, but I wouldn’t have been bold enough to voice it.

“They could be anywhere,” I said.

“How many of those … things … buttons were there on the pneumatics?” Hal wanted to know. His sentences were starting to falter, which I knew was a bad sign. I recited all the buttons I’d seen below Grunel’s message tubes: servant’s
room, engineerium, dead zoo, gardens, animal paddocks, captain’s cabin, landing bay.

“But Hal,” I reminded him, “the capsule might be trapped inside the system.”

“It’s too dangerous,” said Kate. “Why risk getting caught?”

“You got what you came for,” said Nadira, removing her mask and looking fiercely at Kate. “If we don’t get those blueprints, I’m sunk. I’ve got nothing to go back to. You’ve got your specimens. You’ve got each other.”

Her eyes drifted over to me. I looked down, not knowing what to say. I suppose she’d seen Kate and me holding hands, or maybe just noticed the way we’d been talking—and that had been enough. I somehow felt responsible for Nadira. She was alone in the world and hadn’t had any breaks—and wouldn’t unless we found the blueprints. I wanted to make things right for her.

“I don’t want anyone’s pity,” Nadira said, starting to wheeze, “but I do want a nice big pile of gold.” She fixed the mask over her mouth and breathed hard.

“Nadira’s right,” said Hal. “This job’s yielded nothing for the rest of us. But those plans are worth a lot.”

I could not deny my own temptation. It wasn’t just the money the plans would bring, it was the notion of preserving Grunel’s Prometheus Engine. The machine that would change the world and make all sorts of wonders possible. The aerial city of my dreams.

“There aren’t that many places to check,” said Hal. “What
was it? Eight or nine? It’s easily enough done if we’re careful. And Rath still doesn’t know we’re here.”

Kate was shaking her head. “There will be other salvages, Hal.”

“No,” he said savagely. “There won’t. All my hopes were hanging on this one.” He looked at me. “I’ve not done as well as you might think. The
Saga
’s mine in name alone; it’s the bank that nearly owns her. I was counting on this trip to clear my debts. If I go home empty-handed, they’ll seize my ship. I clawed my way to where I am, through luck and sweat, and I’ll not be ruined.”

I did not know what to say, I was so shocked. All along I’d imagined Hal to be as strong and triumphant as the Eiffel Tower. He was all success: suave, handsome, wealthy, the captain of his own ship. I didn’t know whether to pity or hate him, for his big talk had made me feel so puny and worthless. And yet, I did not like to see him laid low.

“I’m still against it,” said Kate.

“For,” huffed Nadira.

“For,” said Hal. “Cruse, what d’you say?”

“For,” I said.

Kate stared at me, shocked. “Matt!”

“We can’t let Rath destroy the blueprints as well as the machine.”

“Is that it or is it the money?” she demanded.

“Both,” I said. “It’s both.”

“That’s three out of four,” said Hal. “Clear majority.”

“Oh, it’s a democracy now, is it?” said Kate.

“Not at all. I’d have done it my way regardless.”