Empress of the Sun (22 page)

Everett M’s phone pinged again. A new SMS.

Back on
.

Nahn, you almost broke me and Noomi up
, Everett M thought at the buzzing node of communication channels behind the rooftops and aerials and satellite dishes of Green Lanes and Statham Grove.
You’re double dead now
.

‘Madam Villiers, do you think …?’

‘Madam Villiers, what can we …?’

‘Madam Villiers, help us …’

Madam Villiers … Madam Villiers …

Charlotte Villiers flipped down her veil and pushed through the press of clamouring Plenipotentiaries.
Madam Villiers, help us
. Help yourselves. You are the leaders of the Known Worlds. You are the power. Zaitsev would have made this easy. He would have cleared a path through the frightened, bleating politicians. He would have made sure she got the respect she deserved. She had not respected him. She had seen that in his eyes, as the Jiju blades came in and she operated the relay that bounced her back to the jump-room deep in the undercroft of the Tyrone Tower. The gate crew would have seen it too, in that moment of clarity as
the gate opened. They would have seen the Jiju, and the blood.

I treated you shamefully, Zaitsev
, Charlotte Villiers thought.
I hope at the end you understood the necessity
.

An Earth 5 symbiont stepped into her path, the tayve’s long, bejewelled arms and legs wrapped around its hrant host’s body, its feeding finger tapped into an artery in the neck.

‘Madam Villiers!’ the tayve announced in a thin, fluting voice. Charlotte Villiers swept past. ‘Our world may not enjoy your technical arts, but Earth 5 will not shirk its part in apprehending this criminal, Everett Singh!’ the hrant shouted. Charlotte Villiers said nothing but smiled behind her veil. If she had made Everett Singh the Multiverse’s Most Wanted she had won a great victory.

Palari was a tongue rich in swearing and Sen employed it joyfully, inventively and horribly. In the docks and warehouses of Old Hackney Captain Anastasia had heard every race abused and sexual practice accused and deity offended, but even she looked up at Sen’s outburst.

Sen sucked the burn on her forearm.

‘Dorcas, if you covered up a bit more,’ Captain Anastasia suggested.

Sen scowled and pushed her goggles up on to her head. Her face was greasy and smudged with smoke. Her hair smelled of burned insulation. The two women were at work on the power linkage to number-two impeller. It was cramped, intricate, high-voltage work. It involved power tools and welding guns. Sen usually loved working on the ship, wielding electrical tools like Sharkey his shotguns –
with bravado and serious purpose – but today the work felt like emergency surgery on a sick and dying creature. The ship had been wounded again and again and could never be whole again: number-three impeller was gone. Lost. The impeller, and the ship’s weighmaster and planesrunner. Sharkey and Everett.

Sen did not like to stop too long to think about Sharkey and Everett, or the great wound to the ship, like a missing foot. It made her feel as if the bottom of her world had opened beneath her feet, and below her was a endless drop through tinkling darkness. The ship – her home, her safe place, her heart – might never be whole again. Sharkey and Everett might never come back. She might never leave this hideous, hideous world. Sen patched, Sen cabled, Sen welded.

‘Tharbyloo!’ Sen looked up. High above, tiny in the fingernail-sized patch of brightness, Mchynlyth’s face looked down through one of the gashes the Genequeens had cut in the skin. If there was one thing Sen loved more than digging into
Everness
’s innards, it was working with the Chief Engineer out on the hull, the two of them whooping and yo-ho-ing with insane glee as they leaped and swung on drop-lines across the hull. But more than the missing impeller and the piercings and the gashings of the shipwreck and the Jiju hijacking, Sen hated to see
Everness
bound and captive in the steel tentacles of the Genequeen squidships. The ship looked like a picture she had once seen
in a cyclopeeja of a deer caught in the coils of a constricting snake, the loops drawing tighter and tighter, squeezing the life out of it. The deer’s eyes had been so calm. It was the calm of surrender to inevitable death. Sen shuddered at the thought of those filthy half-living, half-machine tentacles closing around the hull. It was as if the ship’s skin was her own. ‘Come on oot. I’ve a wee thing I want you to see.’

*

‘That’s a nasty enough wee burn you got there,’ Mchynlyth commented as Sen and Captain Anastasia stepped out on to the balcony on
Everness
’s midline. He belayed down off the tentacle that coiled up over the top of the hull and dropped lightly to the metal grating. Sen found herself looking down along the tentacles on to the bridge of the Genequeen squidship. There were graspers and cutters and a clatter of mechanical manipulators at the centre of the knots of tentacles, and half a dozen goldfish-bowl eyes. Behind each transparent bubble, a Genequeen. Over the curve of the hull, a second squidship grasped
Everness
’s starboard side. The third ship held
Everness
by the head. Looking down through the metal mesh, Sen saw treetops move lazily far below her feet. They were not out of Crechewood yet.
Everness
was a big fish, to be landed carefully.

‘Hates it,’ Sen whispered for her own ears only. She hugged herself and gave a yelp as she set off her still-seeping burn.

‘You’ve something for us,’ Captain Anastasia said. Sen could see that she also found the sight of her beloved ship trussed and helpless, like a great and noble whale hunted and harpooned.

‘Aye.’ Mchynlyth pulled a fist-sized device from one of his orange coverall’s many pockets and held it out. A white egg, flattened on one side.

‘What is it?’ Captain Anastasia asked.

‘I dinnae sabi, but it was down at the tail end, stuck to the skin, and sure as eggs is eggs it’s nae part of the general schematics of a cargo airship.’

‘Someone put it there?’ Captain Anastasia checked.

Sen picked the thing up, dropped it as if it was hot lava. ‘Plastic!’

‘Oho,’ said Captain Anastasia.

‘Aha,’ said Mchynlyth. Earth 3 possessed no usable reserves of crude oil. No oil age, no plastic age. This device could only come from another plane than Earth 3. ‘How do you think yon Villiers woman dropped her wee toy soldiers right on to our main catwalk?’

‘Give it to me, Sen,’ Captain Anastasia ordered. The Captain held the device up in front of her face. Her large eyes narrowed. ‘Evil thing. How did it get … Never mind.’ She dropped it to the mesh and brought her heel down sharply. Plastic splintered.

‘What you doing?’ Sen shrieked. ‘Everett could …’

Captain Anastasia stamped it into shards, then kicked
the shards through the mesh. They snowed down on the crimson treetops.

‘Everett could, I have no doubt. But Everett’s not here. And this is my ship. And she’s suffered enough.’

‘Don’t say that. Everett’s not …’ Sen began, then cut herself off before the word took root in her mind. To say
dead
meant that he might be. But Everett was the planes-runner: he was too smart, too quick, too important to let something as slow and stupid as death catch him. No, death is quick and smart and catches everyone. You learnt that early among the Airish. Friends had fallen, ships had burned, captains had been lost in storms. Death was a frequent visitor to the Airish.

‘Oooh the Dear,’ Mchynlyth said suddenly, in a voice that snapped Sen and Captain Anastasia’s attention away from the fragments of the tracking device. He was looking to stern, body tight as a hunting dog. ‘Our wee ship’s no done suffering yet. Not by a long chalk.’ Sen looked where he pointed. Far astern, half hidden by tail fins, was a swarm of black specks. Sen knew at once that they were large and far away, not small and close. And they were moving fast. In the few seconds she had been observing, they had gained shape and definition.

Captain Anastasia pulled her monocular from the holster on her belt and focused on the objects. Sen saw her bare her teeth, hiss an intake of breath.

‘Ma, can I?’

Captain Anastasia handed her the monocular without a word. Sen adjusted the focus. The objects came into resolution. Three-hulled aircraft; two hulls above, one below, mean as daggers. Ten, eleven, twelve … twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five of them. Big. Half the length of
Everness
. No obvious lift-cells, or even wings like the air-o-planes she had seen on other Earths, but they moved like they owned the sky. Air shivered around them like heat-haze; light glinted from dozens of windows. Sen clicked the monocular up a notch. The pursuing aircraft leapt in magnification and she saw that the heat-shiver was a cloud of much smaller flying objects. Nanobots: swarms of them. Even their aircraft had haloes.

The Genequeens were already aware of the closing fleet. Jiju moved in frenzied action behind the eye-ports.
Everness
lurched under Sen’s feet as the tentacles shifted their grip. She grabbed the railing. The entire two hundred metres of hull gave a terrible straining creak. Sen felt her centre of gravity move as the ship accelerated.

‘You’ll tear my ship apart!’ Captain Anastasia shouted. ‘You’re killing her!’

‘Who are they?’ Sen asked.

‘Kax’s people,’ the Captain said. ‘There’s only one possibility …’

‘The Sunlords know about the Infundibulum,’ Mchynlyth said. Again,
Everness
shifted and groaned as the Genequeens struggled to press the ungainly flying circus to greater speed.

‘Everett!’ Sen exclaimed. ‘That’s how they know. Everett told them about it. Everett’s all right.’

‘And Sharkey,’ Mchynlyth said. Captain Anastasia took the monocular from Sen and shifted the focus from Sun-lords to squidships, Sunlords to squidships. Sunlords to squidships.

‘Miss Sixsmyth, you know Everett better than any of us.’ Sen was always suspicious when Captain Anastasia addressed her by her crew name. Ship stuff coming. ‘You remember I told him to hide the Infundibulum – where would he have hidden it?’

‘That’s easy! He’s so naff at hiding things. I mean, I know where he’s put everything.’

‘Well, so bring me the Infundibulum. I will get the jumpgun. Mr Mchynlyth!’

‘Yes, ma’am!’ Mchynlyth too knew the tone and words of command.

‘Prepare the escape pod.’

‘Captain, due respect and all that, but I’m no likin’ what you’re implying,’ Mchynlyth said.

‘In a very few minutes we may find ourselves in a fight between the Sunlords and the Genequeens that will make our barney with the Bromleys look like a Sunday-school picnic. I fear that the Genequeens will destroy the Infundibulum rather than let it fall into the hands of the Sunlords.’

Sen’s mouth fell open, her eyes went hollow, her breath faltered with horror. ‘They wouldn’t do that!’ she said.

‘Polone, people do it all the time,’ Mchynlyth said. His jaw was tense, his face grim.

‘And they’re not even people, but yes, they would,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘I am captain of
Everness
and I love her with all my heart and my hope and my dear life, but my duty is to its crew. Prepare to abandon ship.’

‘No!’ Sen shouted. ‘No! You can’t! The ship—’

‘And I am its captain. You have your orders, Miss Sixsmyth. Mr Mchynlyth?’

‘Aye, ma’am.’

‘Quick’s the word, sharp’s the action.’

The Jiju skyqueens were big, fast, powerful and absolutely thrilling to fly aboard. From the moment the royal flagship led the fleet from their docks in the wall of the hole in the world, Everett had not moved from the observation deck. Like the royal yacht, the skyqueens of the Sunlord navy were catamarans – twin hulls joined at the rear – but the warships carried a third hull beneath the main booms, at an angle that suggested the open claw of some hunting raptor, ready to strike. Everett reckoned that was entirely the idea. There was a clue in the ship’s name:
Death Falls from an Azure Sky
. The observation deck was in the lower part of the port-side hull; Everett was surrounded by glass, even beneath his feet. Below the third hull, the red roof of Crechewood moved at a speed that made Everett dizzy if he looked at it too long. Sunlord pilots liked to fly low and very, very fast.

‘In your world, Mr Singh, do you have anything to compare with this?’ Captain Anastasia had asked, when
Everness
had flown out through the Smoke Ring to join in kris, the duel of honour, with the Bromley flagship
Arthur P
. ‘No,’ he had answered. It had been true then. This was something beyond. On
Everness
he had been amazed by the sensation of being lighter than air, drifting silent and unseen over the winter world. Aboard
Death Falls
, with crystal-clear glass beneath him, in front of him and on either side of him, he felt as if he was flying. Flying fast and free.
If I had a secret superpower, it would be this
, Everett thought. If you could fly, why would you ever do anything else?

Sharkey had been less impressed. ‘Who puts windows in warships?’ he had sneered before curling up on an oddly shaped Jiju couch and going to sleep.

That’s nice for you; you have a good sleep
, Everett scowled. He was still furious with
Everness
’s weighmaster. Sharkey had thrown the decision of whether or not to surrender the Infundibulum on to Everett. Yes, the Infundibulum was his; yes, no one else had the right to make that decision, but Sharkey was an officer and an adult. Responsibility was his job, and guilt the price of his decisions. You don’t load that on to a teenager, no matter what your Down-South Daddy taught you about standing on your own two feet and shooting your own food. There was no other decision that Everett could have made, but that didn’t mean that he was the right person to make it. What hurt him the most was
the deep needle of guilt in his heart. He was the bad guy. He had no other choice but to be the bad guy, but he still felt dirty and dark inside: darkness walking. Everett Singh: betrayer of worlds. Was this the lesson Sharkey had wanted to pass down to Everett – that sometimes all adults have is your choice of darknesses?