A Box of Nothing (6 page)

Chapter 11: Secret Weapon

Half an hour later James was kneeling with his elbows on the edge of the basket, watching the two gulls circle past. It was not very interesting. There isn't much to do on an airship. Though the Burra had relaxed a bit once it had decided the gulls weren't going to try any more attacks, it was still too busy being an airship to have anything left to amuse James with. So he counted the times the gulls went by.

He made a sort of game of it. There was one bit of the circle where they flew directly in front of the sun. It was too bright for him to watch them pass, so he shut his eyes and swung his head and tried to be looking exactly at the gull when it came out beyond the brightness and he could open his eyes again.

A hundred and one. A hundred and two. A hundred and three. When he reached two hundred he'd think of another game. A hundred and …

And the gull wasn't there. Yes, it was. It was plummeting down, not flying. Loose feathers drifted above it. There was blood on one wing. The engine had started. No, it hadn't. Yes, it had now, but before that there'd been something like another engine, a sort of steady clatter. The other gull was hurtling around from the side. At the edge of the patch of glare where James couldn't look, a dark shape, black against the brightness, grew out of nothing. Its shadow swept across the gas bag and then it was out of the glare and he could see it, a two-seater biplane, swinging to meet the gull's attack. The gull was far faster, far more at home in the air, but the biplane had guns. James could hear their tokka-tokka above the airship's engine and the biplane's own engine roaring at full throttle. It must have come gliding out of the sun, silent as a bird, and caught the gulls by surprise. It had got one. Now it was battling with the second.

The fight didn't last long. A puff of feathers shot from the gull's wing. The bird jerked in midair, gave a violent clumsy flap, and rose out of the line of fire of the biplane's fixed front guns, though the rear gunner was still blasting away. The gull struggled clear, flying limpingly with one wing. Against the clear blue sky James could see a whole section of flight feathers had been shot clean away.

The biplane didn't try to follow it. Instead, while the rear gunner kept the gull at a distance, it turned slowly around and started in toward the airship. James could see it clearly now, just like a World War One fighter, with a radial engine and wings strutted and stayed. The propeller was a circular blur, behind which rose three bumps. The middle one was the head of the rat pilot in helmet and goggles, and the two smaller ones were the synchronized machine guns on the engine cowl.

Bright orange blobs winked at the muzzles of the guns. And the force field didn't work against bullets.

James heard the whum whum whum as they slogged into the gas bag. For a long, cool moment before things started to happen he had time to think about it. Perhaps the bullets were too small, or they came too fast, or they weren't properly alive, or something. Anyway, the Burra hadn't known there'd be a rat aeroplane, and the Burra knew a lot about the rats because the TV told it, even when it wasn't switched on. The biplane must be a state secret. General Weil's secret weapon. That was why he'd got in such a rage against the gulls in the speech James had watched. He was getting his rats ready to declare war on them. Typical …

And then James was gulping with fright. He could hear the gas whistling out of fifty holes. He clutched his blanket around him and felt, somehow, that it was frightened too. It'll be all right, he tried to think. When the biplane reaches the force field …

But it didn't. Perhaps the pilot had heard what had happened to the gulls. Rats down below must have seen them falling out of the air. Perhaps he didn't want to get too close in case the bag exploded. At any rate, when he was still well clear, he roared his engine and zoomed overhead, out of sight behind the bag, and then circling around, turning, slowly, slowly, pointing straight at the airship, coming in again.

The hissing had stopped, so the gas bag must have mended itself. But the engine had stopped too. James noticed that his blanket seemed to have gone dead. Apart from the drone of the approaching engine, everything was very still, so still that James noticed the dish of the gadget beside him swivelling around to point at the biplane. The other one was doing the same. They were the only things moving.

Perhaps the Burra would do something this time. Perhaps the computer had thought of a way. It better had.

The orange blobs began again. The bullets whumped in. The pilot wasn't shooting at the gas bag this time, but at the basket. Nothing you could do, except sit there waiting to be hit. No use cowering behind the side of the basket. That wouldn't stop a bullet. Better to watch.

Something jarred his right hand, making the whole arm tingle. He thought a bullet had hit him, only there was no blood. Then he saw it was the rope he'd been clutching that had been hit. He'd been gripping it so tight that the blow had travelled right up his arm, as though he were part of the airship too.

The rope wasn't quite cut through. Snaky worms of cord were unwinding themselves around the few tense threads that still joined the two halves and held the basket to the gas bag. That was all right. The Burra would make them wind up in a second. Only they didn't.

Burning! They were on fire! A foul hot smell like a plastic cup put down on a hot cooker. It was the blue milk crate under the computer beginning to melt. Some of the wires inside it were red-hot.

There was a violent, tearing bang. Shafts of blue light, too bright to look at, beamed from the antennas at the ends of the basket. The antennas melted with their heat as they shot through. The bolts of energy came and went so fast that James hadn't time to blink before they were gone. They met and crossed right where the biplane was storming in. The biplane exploded. Wings, tail, engine, fuselage, pilot, gunner went tumbling through the sky in all directions. Done!

The Burra must have put everything into those twin bolts of energy. Not just what it had to spare—everything it had. The force had been terrific. It was all over in a second, but as the beams blasted out they made the flimsy basket kick the other way, as if it had been buffeted by a solid lump of air. It swung up and sideways, tried to flip right over, slapped into the gas bag, which stopped it, slumped back onto its ropes. The sudden strain was too much for those last few threads of the one James had been holding. They snapped. The basket tilted again, downward this time. Somehow the Burra managed to use its last few scraps of energy to keep itself together and prevent any of its parts from falling out, but James wasn't one of them.

Desperately he scrabbled for a hold as the basket tipped farther, spilling him right out. The rope was wrenched from his grasp, and he was falling head over heels through the air.

Chapter 12: Captured

Falling, falling. Air rushing faster and faster. Head over heels. Sky and land whirling upside down. Great white cloud coming. Whump!

Whump into soft white cloud, only it wasn't a cloud, more like some kind of bulgy bed, or a soft white trampoline that has somehow got stuck at the bottom of your jump and won't push you back. Still falling, but not so fast. Sky steady overhead.

Very carefully, because the cloud thing was wobbly and he was scared of toppling off it, James sat up and looked around. Not far off and a bit above him he saw a rat dangling under an enormous parachute. Even then, it took him time to understand that he had fallen on top of the other parachute—there'd been two rats in the biplane, pilot and gunner. This one was falling faster because of James's extra weight. The white cloth bulged up around him so that he couldn't see the ground.

They'd fallen a long way already. High overhead a white gull with a tattered wing was trying to tow the airship away. It had the broken rope in its beak. The gas bag looked floppy. The basket still dangled sideways and James could just see the Burra lolling limp by the engine. It must still be in some sort of a daze after the fight. Perhaps it would wake up and mend itself and come and rescue him.

He wasn't ready for the landing. He heard a bump below. The bulge of the parachute went out of shape, began to flop, stopped holding him, sent him slithering down, clutching at nothing … thump.

A wild squeak. Another thump. He'd landed.

Wasn't hurt, either, only thumped. Fallen on something. The parachute was still flopping softly down as James stood up. A rat with the parachute harness attached was lying on the ground with its eyes open. Dead?

No—its whiskers were quivering. He must have fallen on top of it and stunned it—yes, thump, squeak, thump, like that. The other parachute was still in the sky. First thing was to get away from the rats and hide somewhere until the Burra came and rescued him. No trees, no bushes, just the bare slopes of a small valley. Get up over the ridge for a start.

He scrambled up the slope, noticing as he did so that it was a bit different from the slope he'd climbed by the iron sea. Not so steep, but that wasn't it. No, it was made of different things. Not cookers and fridges but bits of old wagons, and ploughs, and things like that, all gone fossil. He understood without thinking about it that this was an older kind of place.

He ducked over the ridge, panting, and began to leap from jut to jut down the far slope, watching all the time for his next foothold, so that it was not until he reached the bottom of the valley and took a quick look around for a hiding place that he saw the gull.

It lay on its side near a small black stream. The white feathers were striped with blood. He thought it was dead, but then it moved a great yellow foot.

He ran over and gazed down. It was big enough to help him fight the second rat if it wasn't too wounded, but when he got near he saw it was really dying. He stood and gazed down at it and the yellow unreadable eye stared back. If only he could do something.

Mop up the blood? No use. Get it a drink of the foul black water? Nothing to carry it in. Better leave it and find somewhere Perhaps the rat would forget about him once it had found the gull.

James had actually turned away when he remembered his box of nothing. It probably wouldn't do any good, but it had helped when the computer had gone mad. And it couldn't do any harm, not if the gull was dying.

He pulled it out of his inside pocket and placed it against the largest patch of blood. His idea, if you could call it that, was that it might somehow unbullet the bullet inside the wound.

The gull stirred at the touch. Then, quick as a blink, it shrank. One moment there'd been a huge, wounded bird lying on its side, and the next there was an ordinary seaside gull struggling to its feet. It strutted a couple of steps and rattled its feathers into place, sending a spatter of little bright things onto the ground. Then it gave James a gull's typical haughty one-eyed stare, stretched its wings, and flew off.

James put the box back into his pocket as he watched it go, then picked up one of the bright things that had fallen out of its feathers. It was a scrap of silver paper … a sweet wrapping or something … roughly twisted into the shape of a bullet. He was still looking at it and wondering, when something squeaked sharply behind him.

He turned. A rat airman was standing there, only a few feet away. It was pointing a huge revolver straight at James's head.

A little later James was walking along a narrow track, with the rat he had stunned in front of him and the other rat, the one with the revolver, behind. Far away to his right he could see the airship, like a coloured speck in the sky, being towed by several gulls. It was too small for him to see whether the Burra had mended itself and got the basket straight, but anyway none of the gulls had come to look for him, or for their fallen comrade.

The rats marched on all fours. The one behind carried the revolver, cocked, in its teeth. Before they'd started it had shown James how quickly it could get into the firing position. Still, James kept thinking that he ought to be able to escape by using his box, somehow getting close enough to touch a rat and turn it back into an ordinary animal. If only there weren't two of them. But the one in front had a revolver in its belt, and it would have time to draw and fire while James was dealing with the one behind. And, anyway, he couldn't be sure whether the box would work on rats. It had on the gull, but then the gull had been dying. Suppose a rat shot at him while he was carrying the box. Would the bullet turn into a bit of silver paper before it had hit him? Or after? If only he could be sure how the box worked.

He was still trying to get up the nerve to do something when they met the patrol. Or perhaps it was a search party, because four of them were carrying stretchers. The rest were rat soldiers. They all became very excited when they met. The rat officer rubbed whiskers with the pilot and gunner and then the whole group gathered in a chattering ring around James. The officer pranced up and squeaked at him. James shook his head. The officer pulled out a pistol and began to jump up and down, which seemed to be the rats' habit when they were angry. James became frightened, but at last the officer must have grasped that he couldn't understand rat language. It stopped jumping around and squeaked orders to the others. They all marched down the track.

By the time they reached the railroad line James was extremely tired. The rats let him sit down while they got a meal ready. It was just water with a soapy taste and a grey dry mess, like oatmeal before it's cooked. James found he could eat it by mixing some water with it, but it was too nasty for more than a few mouthfuls. The sun was almost overhead by now. Except for the two who were guarding James, the rats lay around panting in the desert heat.

At last, from far across the plain, a faint hoot came floating. Everyone jumped up and stared along the dead straight line of the tracks. James could see nothing at first, then there was a blob of smoke, then a dot below the blob, and now a louder hoot and the wuff wuff wuff of the pounding engine. The officer pulled out a huge pistol and fired it into the air. A flare soared up and burst into pink light, which drifted slowly down. The engine hooted in answer. Its wheels screeched on the track and it came to a halt close by where they were waiting. It was a great black beast of a machine, far more impressive than the gibbering rats, but its driver was a rat too.

After a lot of furious squeaking the soldiers cleared all the passengers out of three compartments and James was made to climb into one. The officer and the two air-rats came too. The engine started with a tremendous burst of wuffing, but almost at once the officer insisted on tying a blindfold around James's eyes, so that he couldn't see anything at all.

He must have slept, despite the hard seat and the rat smell, because the next thing he knew he was being prodded to his feet and pushed through the carriage door, still with the blindfold tight around his head. Rats gripped both his wrists in their teeth and hustled him through a squeaking crowd. He was yanked up onto a sort of platform, which jerked beneath him, toppling him off his feet to the sound of squeaky rat jeers all around him. He realized that he was on the back of a truck, guarded by rat soldiers.

The truck roared through clattering streets. Traffic honked. A siren whooped ahead. The street was very bumpy, but it didn't last. The truck roared for a short while over a smoother surface with no traffic nearby. It halted twice while rats squeaked around. When it stopped for the third time James was lifted roughly down and the bandage taken from his eyes.

After all that darkness he blinked blindly through the glare. It wasn't daylight. The sky overhead was murky and almost dark. He must have slept all afternoon. Now he was standing in a brilliantly lit space with a great ring of lights all around. The only shadows were cast by rows of huts. As his pupils narrowed in the brightness he began to see, rising above the ring of lights, the watchtowers that guarded one of the camps where General Weil kept his prisoners. James was inside it.