Mortal Engines (29 page)

"I'll be dead in twenty minutes, Tom," she said. "Just get yourself safe away. Forget about me."

"I'll circle back..."

"I'll be dead."

"I'll circle back anyway..."

"There's no point, Tom."

"I'll circle back and pick you up."

She looked at him and saw tears shining in his eyes. He was crying. He was crying for her, because she was going into danger and he would not see her again, and she thought it was strange that he cared about her that much, and very sweet. She said, "Tom, I wish.. ." and, "Tom, if I..." and other little broken bits of sentences that petered out in silence, because she didn't even know herself what she was trying to say, only that she wanted him to know that he was the best thing that had happened to her.

A light loomed out of the swirling dark, then another. They were rising past Tier Three, and very close. Tier Two slid by, with people staring up from an observation deck, and then Circle Park with lanterns strung between the trees. Tom fumbled with the controls and the
Jenny
went powering forward, low over the rooftops of Knightsbridge and up towards the aft edge of Top Tier. He glanced quickly at Hester. She wanted to hug him, kiss him, something, but there was no time now, and she just gasped, "Tom, don't get yourself killed," slammed the hatch-controls to "open" and ran to it and jumped as the airship swung in a shuddery arc over the rim of Top Tier.

She hit the deckplate hard and rolled over and over. The
Jenny Haniver
was pulling away fast, lit by the sparkling trails of rockets from an air-defence battery on the Engineerium. The rockets missed, darkness swallowed the airship, and she was alone, scrambling into the shadows.

* * * * *

"A single airship, Lord Mayor." It is a nervous-looking Engineer, a shell-like radio clipped to his ear. "It has pulled clear, but we believe it may have landed a boarding party."

"Anti-Tractionists on Top Tier?" The Lord Mayor nods, as if this is the sort of little problem that crops up every day. "Well, well. Dr Twix, I think this might be a good opportunity to test your new models."

"Oh, goody!" trills the woman, dropping a plate of canapes in her excitement. "Come along, my chicks! Come along!"

Her Stalkers turn with a single movement and form up behind her, striding through thrilled party-goers to the exits.

"Bring me the boarders alive!" Crome calls after her. "It would be a pity if they missed the big event."

T om wiped at his eyes with the heel of one hand and concentrated on his flying, steering the
Jenny
away from London and up. He wasn't frightened now. It felt good to be doing something at last, and good to be in charge of this huge, wonderful machine. He turned her eastwards, pointing her nose towards the last faint gleam of day on the summit of Zhan Shan. He would circle for twenty minutes. It felt as if half that time had passed already, but when he checked the chronometers he saw that it was less than two minutes since Hester jumped down into London and—

A rushing, brilliant thing slammed into the gondola, and the blast plucked him out of his seat. He clung to a stanchion and saw papers and instrument panels and sputtering lengths of cable and the shrine with its photographs and ribbons and Miss Fang's half-read book all rushing out through a jagged hole in the fuselage, tumbling into the sky like ungainly birds. The big windows shattered and the air turned sharp and shimmery with flying glass.

He craned his neck, peering up through the empty windows, trying to see if the envelope was burning. There were no flames, but overhead a great dark shape slid past, moonlight slithering along its armoured envelope. It was the
13th Floor Elevator,
pulling past the
Jenny
and performing a lazy victory-roll far over the foothills of Shan Guo before it came sweeping back to finish him.

* * * * *

Magnus Crome watches his guests crowd out into the square, gazing up at the glare and flicker of the battle taking place above the clouds. He checks his wrist-watch. "Dr Chandra, Dr Chubb, Dr Splay; it is time to deploy MEDUSA. Valentine, come with us. I'm sure you are keen to see what we've made of your machine."

"Crome," says the explorer, blocking his path, "there is something I must say..."

The Lord Mayor raises an eyebrow, intrigued.

Valentine hesitates. He has been planning this speech all evening, knowing that it is what Katherine would want him to say. Now, faced with the Lord Mayor's arctic eyes, he falters, stammering a moment. "Is it worth it, Crome?" he says at last. "Destroying the Shield-Wall will not destroy the League. There will be other strongholds to defeat, hundreds of fortresses, thousands of lives. Is it really worth so much, your new hunting ground?"

There is a ripple of amazement among the bystanders. Crome says calmly, "You have left it rather late to have doubts, Valentine. You worry too much. Dr Twix can build whole armies of Stalkers, more than enough to crush any resistance from Anti-Tractionist savages."

He starts to push past, but Valentine is in front of him again. "Think, Lord Mayor. How long will a new hunting ground support us? A thousand years? Two thousand? One day there will be no more prey left anywhere, and London will have to stop moving. Perhaps we should accept it; stop now, before any more innocent people are killed; take what you have learned from MEDUSA and use it for peaceful purposes..."

Crome smiles. "Do you really think I am so shortsighted?" he asks. "The Guild of Engineers plans further ahead than you suspect. London will never stop moving.

Movement is life. When we have devoured the last wandering city and demolished the last static settlement we will begin digging. We will build great engines, powered by the heat of the earth's core, and steer our planet from its orbit. We will devour Mars, Venus and the asteroids. We shall devour the sun itself, and then sail on across the gulf of space. A million years from now our city will still be travelling, no longer hunting towns to eat, but whole new worlds!"

Valentine follows him to the door and out across the square towards St Paul's.
Katherine is right,
he keeps thinking.
He's as mad as a spoon! Why didn't I put a
stop to his schemes when I had the chance?
Above the clouds, the rockets flare and bang, and the light of an exploding airship washes across the upturned faces of the crowd, who murmur, "Oooooooooh!"

* * * * *

And Hester Shaw crouches at the Tier's edge as the Resurrected Men stalk by, green eyes sweeping the walls and deckplates, steel claws unsheathed and twitching.

* * * * *

The Cat's Creep ended in a small circular chamber with stencilled numbers on the sweaty walls and a single metal door. Bevis slipped the key into the lock, and Katherine heard it turn. A crack of light appeared around the door's edge, and she heard voices outside, a long, tremulous, "Ooooh!"

"We're in an alley off Paternoster Square," Bevis said. "I wonder why they sound so excited?"

Katherine pulled out her watch and held it in the thin sliver of light from the door. "Ten to nine," she said. "They're waiting for MEDUSA."

He hugged her one last time and whispered quickly, shyly, "I love you!" Then he pushed her past him through the door and stepped out after her, trying to look like her captor, not her friend, and wondering if any other Engineer had ever said what he had just said, or felt the way he felt when he was with Katherine.

* * * * *

Tom scrambled through the debris in the listing wreck of the Jenny's gondola. The lights were out and blood was streaming into his eyes from a cut on his forehead, blinding him. The pain of his broken ribs washed through him in sick, giddy waves and all he wanted to do was lie down and close his eyes and rest, but he knew he mustn't. He fumbled for the rocket controls, praying to all the gods he had ever heard of that they had not been blown away. And sure enough, at the flick of the right switch a viewing scope rose out of the main instrument panel, and he wiped his eyes and saw the dim upside-down ghost of the 13th Floor Elevator framed in the cross-hairs, growing bigger every minute.

He heaved as hard as he could on the firing controls, and felt the deck shift under him as the rockets went shrieking out of their nests beneath the gondola. Dazzling light blossomed as they hit their target, but when he blinked the bright after-images away and peered out the black airship was still there, and he realized that he had barely dented the great armoured envelope, and that he was going to die.

But he had bought himself a few more moments, at least, for the
Elevator's
starboard rocket projectors were damaged and she was pulling past him and turning to bring her port array to bear. He tried to calm himself. He tried to think of Katherine, so that the memory of her would be what he took down with him to the Sunless Country, but it was a long time since he had dreamed of her, and he couldn't really remember what she looked like any more. The only face that he could call to mind was Hester's, and so he thought of her and the things that they had gone through together, and how it had felt to hold her on the Shield-Wall last night, the smell of her hair and the warmth of her stiff, bony body through the ragged coat.

And from some corner of his memory came the echo of the League rockets that had battered at the
13th Floor Elevator
as she banked away from Batmunkh Gompa; the thick crump of the explosions and the small, bright, prickling noise of broken glass.

Her envelope was armoured, but the windows could be broken.

He lurched back to the rocket controls and re-targeted them so that the cross-hairs on the little screen were centred not on the
Elevator's
looming gasbags, but on her windows. The gauge beside the viewscope told him he had three rockets left, and he fired them all together, the shattered gondola shivering and groaning as they sprang away towards their target.

For a fraction of a second he saw Pewsey and Gench on their flight-deck, staring at him, faces wide with silent terror. Then they vanished into brightness as the rockets tore in through their viewing windows and their gondola filled with fire. A geyser of flame went tearing up the companion-ladders between the gasbags and blew out the top of the envelope. By the time Tom could see again the huge wreck was veering away from him, fire in her ruined gondola and the hatches of her hold, fire flapping from her steering vanes, fire unravelling from shattered engine-pods, fire lapping inside her envelope until it looked like a vast Chinese lantern tumbling down towards the lights of London.

* * * * *

Katherine stepped out of the alley's mouth into a running crowd, people all around her looking up, some still clutching drinks and nibbles, their eyes and mouths wide open. She looked at St Paul's. The dome had not yet opened, so it couldn't be that that they were staring at. And what was this light, this swelling orange glow that outshone the argon-lamps and made the shadows dance?

At that moment the blazing wreckage of an airship came barrelling out of the sky and crashed against the facade of the Engineerium in a storm of fire and glass and out-flung scythes of blackened metal. A whole engine broke free of the wreck and came cartwheeling across the square towards her, red hot and spraying blazing fuel. Bevis pushed her aside and down. She saw him standing over her, his mouth open, shouting something, and saw a blue eye on the blistered engine cowling as it tore him away, a whirl of limbs, a flap of a torn white coat, his scream lost in the bellow of twisting metal as the wreckage smashed against the Top Tier elevator station.

A blue eye on the cowling. She knew it should mean something, but she could not think what.

She stood up slowly, shaking. There were small fires on the deck all round her, and one great fire in the Engineerium that cast Hallowe'en light across the whole tier. She stumbled to where the blazing engine lay, its huge propeller blades jutting out of the deck-plate like megaliths. Raising her hand to shield her face against the belching heat, she looked for Bevis.

He was lying broken in a steep angle of the debris, twisted in such impossible ways that Katherine knew at once there was no point even calling out his name. The flames were rising, making his coat bubble and drip like melting cheese, heat pressing against her face, turning her tears to puffs of steam, driving her backwards over wreckage and bodies and pieces of bodies.

"Miss Katherine?"

A blue eye on the engine cowling. She could still see the outline, the paint peeling under the tongues of the fire. Father's ship.

"Miss Katherine?"

She turned and found one of the men from the elevator station standing with her, trying to be kind. He took her by the arm and led her gently away, gesturing towards the main part of the wreck, the scorching firestorm in the Engineerium. "He wasn't in it, Miss."

She stared at his smile. She didn't understand. Of course he had been in it! She had seen him there, his dead, gaping face and the flames rising round him. Bevis, whom she had led here, who had loved her. What was there to smile about?

But the man kept smiling. "He wasn't aboard, Miss. Your dad, I mean. I saw him not five minutes ago, going into St Paul's with the Lord Mayor.

She felt the sinister weight of the satchel still hanging from her shoulder, and remembered that she had a job to do.

"Come on, Miss," said the man. "You've had a nasty shock. Come and have a sit down and a nice cup of tea.. ."

"No," she said. "I have to find my father."

She left him there and turned away, stumbling across the square, through panicked crowds in smoke-stained robes and party-frocks, through the long, shivering bray of sirens to St Paul's.