Six Days (6 page)

W
e hurry up to the Embankment road and move away from the river toward the Old Admiralty Offices. I want to stick to semi-scavved areas cos of the cover and cos it’s quicker than crossing mud and potholes. I scout out the way where it’s open, then give them the signal to follow one at a time. Peyto’s not bad at the commando stuff, but Erin’s a nightmare – running bolt upright like a goose, and what with her earmuffs on, her head’s about twice as big as it needs to be. Talk about give the Vlads a bit more of a target to aim at. And blimey, she’s clumsy – tripping over her own feet and making a proper racket.

“Can’t you get down lower?” I hiss at her. “Might as well be waving a flippin’ flag the way you’re prancing about.” “I can’t help it,” she groans. “I can’t see anything!” “Just go slower, then. And d’you reckon you could get through London without kicking every bit of brick along the way?”

“You could plant your feet where I plant mine,” offers Peyto.

“Hey, if I need your advice on how walking works, I’ll be sure to ask you,” goes Erin.

“All right, don’t flip your gimbals – it was just a suggestion.”

They both eyeball each other, and Peyto looks stunned at what he’s just said, like he’s made it up.

“
Flip your gimbals?
What planet are you two from?”

They go blank as mudfish on me then, like I’ve just bad-mouthed the Queen. Which is just as well, cos I want to get on with minimum fuss.

It’s right creepy round Horse Guards Parade with weeds scraping in the wind and not a soul about. I ain’t used to being in the scav zone at night like that without the crushers going hell-for-leather and the
chock-chocking
of picks and hammers.

It’s all clear as we creep past the once-grand houses of Downing Street where the Lord President of London used to live. And in the dark and the silence, without the scav gangs swarming all over it, you can imagine this city as it once was. It don’t take much to think of the lights and the crowds, maybe folks like the Piccadilly Princess in the picture, rushing off to meet her fella, living it up.

We get to Little Sanctuary safe and sound, and I’m starting to think the whole jaunt is a breeze. Past the silent
crusher, up five flights of stairs, and into the rooms we scavved earlier.

Peyto scrabbles round in the dark for a bit, feeling along the edge of the skirting board.

“Switch on the flashlight – I can’t find it,” he goes.

“Where’d you stash it?”

“I hid it just here. I’m sure it was in this gap.”

“Come on, Peyto,” pleads Erin. “Don’t play around.”

“I’m not! It’s not here, I’m telling you!” Peyto’s voice is getting panicky.

“Hey, pipe down, will you?” I go. “You want the whole Vlad army up here?”

I push past him and shove my hand into the hole. At first there’s nothing. Just dirt and loose wires. The plaster’s so loose, it comes away in my fingers, and I start to pull at it one chunk at a time till I can see the cavity behind. There’s no need for the light – Peyto’s flinder glows blue through churning puffs of dust. He breathes a sigh of relief and reaches out for it, but I hold him back. There’s something there, moving in the shadows, and as the dust settles I see it clearly – a whole nest of spiders, big and small, crowding around the light. And they ain’t just milling about, they’re building a web. Together. Peyto and Erin edge closer.

“That is stand-out weird,” I go at last.

“Why? What are they?” says Erin, her face caught up in the wonder of it.

And it hits me slowly. She ain’t never seen spiders before.

“It’s like they’re trying to hide it,” breathes Peyto.

And he’s right – the tresses of the web are starting to cover the flinder like a cocoon. It gives me a shiver to think how long they’d have to be at it to blot out that light. It’s the first time for a hundred years anything new’s been
built
in London.

“Sorry,” I go to the spiders. Cos it’s a shame to break that gorgeous bit of weaving. Needs must. But then as my fingers push through the threads and close on the flinder, them lonely echoes rise up again, tingling through my arm, into my brain. Like faraway voices calling out to me. Not calling, more like singing. It’s a shock and I want to let go. But I don’t, I can’t, cos the touch of it
holds
me. It pulses softly, like Erin’s flinder, but it’s a different shape, more knotty with a hole through it.

“What’s wrong?” goes Peyto.

I realize I must look a bit dazed. I hand it to him.

I feel that wrench again, the same as when Erin took back her flinder. Except this time I’m distracted by a whole bunch of spiders clinging to the broken trails of web, scuttling to and fro over my hand, up my sleeve. And it feels a strange comfort that they’re there, not running away. So I let them be.

Peyto’s much more interested in the spiders than the flinder. He smiles at me and tries to catch them as they drop.

“You get the goose bumps when you touch the flinder?” I go.

“What do you mean?”

“Like voices inside.”

They both stare at me.

“No,” he goes. “But Erin does.”

I shrug. “Maybe it’s a girl thing.”

But straightaway I know it ain’t that. I see it in the way he holds the flinder. He don’t treasure it the way Erin treasures hers. To him it’s a thing he
should
look after, not a thing he wants. Erin would never have left hers anyplace, even if the whole Vlad army was on her heels. And maybe it
knows
that. Cos I reckon Gramps is right. It really
has
got something like a soul.

There’s about a squillion questions queueing up in my bonce now, but this ain’t the time or the place.

I hurry them both down to street level and peep outside the door. Still all clear. It’s all going so swimmingly that I’m starting to reckon we’re gonna get away with this. Which is the worst jinx ever.

Cos that’s precisely when it all goes pear-shaped.

We turn out of the top end of Little Sanctuary and there, coming from the park toward us, is a Vlad patrol – maybe a dozen soldiers.

We duck behind the skeleton of an old car and I check we ain’t being surrounded.

“Have they seen us?” whispers Erin.

The lead soldier makes a few hand signals, then the others peel off either side of him and start advancing up the road from car to car.

“They’ve seen us …,” I mutter.

Peyto goes, “The river.”

“No way! We’ll get cut off!”

“We won’t. Trust me.”

Before I can hold him back, he’s off, darting toward the river. The Vlads are closing. I can see the red beams from their rifles, and my guts go loose. It’s sheer panic that makes me grab Erin’s arm and charge after Peyto. Stealth’s out the window – we just leather it, not caring about our pounding feet. Peyto’s a fast runner and I have a job keeping up with him, but Erin’s slow. I keep dropping back to stay in touch with her, and she’s stumbling all over the shop. By now the soldiers are shouting – warnings maybe. But we don’t stop.

The paving crumbles away into sludge, and all that’s between us and the river is craters and rubble heaps. Peyto’s bounding over the waste ground ahead, and in front of him I can see the water lit up from search beams. There ain’t nowhere to go. I’m cursing myself for going after him, when Erin struggles up to me.

“What are you stopping for?” she cries.

“We’ve got to get back to the streets. We can’t shake them off here!”

“No, you don’t understand. Follow Peyto!”

She lurches after him, practically cartwheeling into the bog. When I look back over my shoulder, I can see swinging flashlights and then a couple of gunshots crack out. I’m thinking,
They’re gonna shoot us down like rats
. I slither into the mud and it drags me down. And I know then I won’t even make it to the water. Erin’s just ahead, reaching out to help me. Then I see Peyto hold his flinder up high, and he’s saying something over and over again. It sounds like a chant.

There’s a movement in the water, just a restless bubbling at first, but the skin of the river rises and parts, and out comes this big black shape, plowing up from the depths. I cry out, and all around me there’s these spurts of mud and I realize the soldiers are taking potshots from the road. But that seems like the least of our worries cos this huge humpbacked
thing
sends a wave slooshing up to our shoulders. But for the mud holding my legs, I’d have been swept away.

I’m so scared I can’t even breathe.

I figure it’s alive, the way it surges round in an arc between us and the bank, its bulk all slick and smooth like a giant fish. But then I hear gunfire bouncing off it.

Thunk! Thunk!

And suddenly a hole opens up and a searing light stabs into my eyes.

I
t ain’t like we go through the hole of our own accord. It’s more like the thing tips us up and swallows us up in one go, mud and all. I tumble down in a heap with the others and lie there for a moment, not believing any of it, as my eyes get used to the glare. Above me, the hole closes up and we’re moving now, fast and downward. The walls are covered with machines and dials, and in the middle, there’s a ring of six padded seats. Sludge from the Thames slops about on the otherwise clean floor. Peyto and Erin are glued to a couple of screens flickering with diagrams and weird symbols.

At last I go, “When I said, has anybody got a submarine, I was joking.”

“Get into one of those chairs,” orders Peyto. “We’re going to launch in twenty-five seconds.”

“
Launch?
Launch where?”

“The
Aeolus
,” goes Erin, like that explains everything.

“All right, I figure we had to get clear of them Vlads sharpish, I get that. And I ain’t even gonna ask how come you got a submarine. And how come you never mentioned it when we was risking our lives crossing the river in the first place. No problem. But for your information, I ain’t
launching
nowhere. You can just steer it back to the south bank where Wilbur is before the lad freaks out.”

“Can’t do that,” goes Peyto. “Please, Cass, just sit in a chair and strap yourself in …”

I slip-slide over to where he’s gawking at the screens.

“You ain’t listening! My brother is standing on his tod, freezing his buns off, worrying himself half to death about us!”

“I’m not in control! I can’t
steer
it anywhere!”

Erin’s is the calmest head. “Cass, listen to me. We’re in an evac shuttle – it’s just an offspring vehicle.”

I gape at her.
Evac shuttle?
It’s like someone’s opened this door to where Wilbur’s comics are real. I think about old Fred the pigherd. Lights in the sky and machine-men.

She holds up her flinder. “When you get in an evac shuttle with one of these, it just takes you back to the mother ship. It’s automatic in case you’ve become injured or you’re unconscious. We should be able to override that setting but, well, there’s some problems with the ship itself …”

“Oh, yeah, and another thing, I ain’t got a clue what you’re talking about.”

“I know you haven’t, but you have to strap yourself in or you could get really hurt. It’s a short journey. We’ll explain everything just as soon as we get out of here, I promise.”

“Explain everything,” I mutter, my voice all shaky. “Yeah, that’d be just peaches, that would. I want a bloody good
explanation
an’ all. With bells on.”

Both of them guide me to a chair and put these padded belts over my shoulders. When they strap in either side of me, the chairs tip back, then the vehicle starts shaking and humming so hard that everything goes blurry. My head slams back and I feel like a wall’s pressing down on me and there’s this crazy roaring. I yelp out but I can’t even hear my own voice. All this spit dribbles out my mouth but I can’t lift my hand to wipe it off. Next thing the roaring stops, and I feel all light and woozy. My spit sails past, wobbling around in slow motion.

“What the …?”

“It’s all right, you’re just weightless,” goes Erin.

“You mean we ain’t in the Thames no more?”

“No, we’re in orbit about thirteen miles above London.”

Then she just leans forward out of her chair and
floats
over to the screens.

“A submarine what can fly,” I say out loud to no one in particular.

It’s weird how my voice sounds all dreamy while my heart is thrashing about like a bee in a tin.
How is this
even happening, for crying out loud?
No one’s been in space since the Quark Wars, or so Wilbur says. Them old rockets and stations in the sky have been empty for years. And there just ain’t no way for me to get a handle on this. I think about the run to the river with all the Vlads chasing after us, taking potshots – that just feels like it never even happened. But still, the stink from the river is in my nostrils. And I keep thinking about Wilbur, about how he has to be done in with worry by now. He’d have heard the gunfire for sure.

“We’ve got to get back,” I go.

“We will,” says Erin. “When we dock up to the
Aeolus
, we’ll be free to return to London just as soon as we reset the shuttle …”

“And just exactly when’s that gonna be?”

“Don’t worry,” Erin says gently. “It’ll take no more than half an hour. Plus, going back is under our control – there’s no emergency protocol or anything. We can navigate straight to where Wilbur is. We’ll be there long before the two o’clock deadline. I promise you.”

I figure I’ve got to trust her. What else can I do? Peyto has kind of clammed up, but Erin’s completely the queen of the flying sub, cos she’s suddenly got this air of
confidence
.

And the weirdest thing? I slow right down. Bonkers stuff is happening all around, like floating people and
flying ships with mothers, but my brain just freezes over and pretends everything’s fine and dandy. Like, that world you knew about all of thirty seconds ago, well, that has just gone, so welcome to this new world. Where your spit don’t stay on the ground where it belongs.

“Right, then,” I go at last. “I’m just about ready for that explanation now.”

Erin taps the screen a couple of times and the view switches to something floating in the night sky. It’s shaped like a bone – narrow in the middle with bulbs at either end – and it’s twirling very slowly.

“What’s that?”

“That is the
Aeolus
,” says Peyto without much of a fanfare. “The ship.”

He unstraps me and I float out of my chair. It’s like swimming without holding your breath. But I don’t like it much – it feels like you ain’t really there.

The
Aeolus
gets bigger till it fills the screen. I can’t tell how large it is, but the surface looks pretty close now, like wrinkled shell and shot through with pink webs and blue streaks. And then these tentacles peel out of the surface, swaying like reeds underwater.

“What are
them
things?”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” mutters Erin. “It’s just the ship docking with us.”

There’s a soft thump on the roof above us and a squelching noise.

“Them feelers,” I go. “It’s … alive?” “Yes,” answers Peyto. “It’s alive and it’s smart.” “Whoa, that thing’s a creature. And we’re going inside it?” “No, not a creature. It’s an organic machine for space travel.”

“But you’re saying it’s got a brain?”

“Not exactly,” goes Erin. “Its intelligence was designed separately using a machine, then transferred into a living organic shell. The process is like fusing body and mind – we call it birthing.”

I must be gawping like a loon. “You made a spaceship what can live and think?”

Peyto tries to explain. “Not us, our ancestors. Ordinary machines just break down in space. The best way to make a ship really last is to make it alive so it can repair itself.”

“Docking complete,” goes Erin.

Then something grows out of the wall opposite me. It bulges like a giant zit, before popping open and squirting me with a warm gust of cheesy air.

“Blimey, gut rot! Does it usually guff like this?” Erin ain’t amused. “It’s not in prime condition.” “You can say that again – smells like it’s been eating something right dodgy …”

“It doesn’t
eat
anything,” she sighs.

I suppose that should put my mind at rest a bit, but as we squeeze past the zit flaps into the ship proper, there’s
these ridged walls flickering with bluish light, and I can’t help thinking it looks like the inside of a giant gob.

Erin calls out, “Hello?”

Nothing.

“Should it be saying stuff back?” I go. I psych myself for a huge, booming voice to reply.

“It should,” mutters Peyto. “But there’s some kind of communication fault.”

“Like what? Is it deaf or asleep or something?”

“No, the messages are just getting lost in transit, I think. It’s just malfunctioning,” goes Erin. “Communication has been … patchy since the emergency.”

“
Emergency?”

“There’s a hull breach.”

“You mean there’s a flippin’ hole in it?” Even I know that ain’t good news. “Ain’t we gonna run out of air or something?”

“Don’t worry, we’re sealed off from where the breach is in the central shaft. We’re safe in here.”

Safe? Inside a wounded space monster? Safe is tucked up in my sleeping bag in our hut … in Elephant and Castle … thirteen miles away. But it seems to me we’re a good deal farther away than thirteen miles.

I glance about at the walls like they’re all set to cave in. “What made the hole?”

“I told you it’s
safe
,” insists Erin. “The
Aeolus
might
not be a hundred percent, but it’s not ready to fall apart just yet.”

Neither her nor Peyto seems that freaked out right now by the “emergency” – maybe it’s under control. I try to relax a bit.

The main chamber inside the ship is speckled green, and ever so gently it
throbs
. And it’s wet – not something you really want to touch, but I ain’t got a choice on that front cos the only way to move is to shove yourself off the walls. Waving your arms and legs like you’re underwater just leaves you where you are. The
Aeolus
walls are warm and stringy – the gunge glues itself to your fingers, but that makes it easier to get a grip on things so you can swing from one hold to the next. It don’t seem to bother Erin and Peyto, but I don’t like the way the gunk clings to your skin.

“So this ain’t normal, then, the way it’s all sick?” I go.

“It’s not an animal, Cass,” answers Erin a tad wearily. “It doesn’t catch illnesses, it doesn’t feel pain, it doesn’t get tired or sleep …”

“But it has
changed
since we got here,” Peyto chips in. “It’s not the ship we set out in, is it? All perfect and clean …”

“What do you expect?” she goes. “It’s damaged so badly it can’t self-repair. Its systems are in a critical state.”

Just as I’m poking at the walls, I spot a rogue spider
that’s hitched a ride on me – it spins away from my sleeve, legs akimbo, paying out thread as it goes. And when it brushes the surface of the ship, it sinks in and disappears.

“Hey! I thought you said it doesn’t eat stuff!”

But just as suddenly as it swallows the spider, it spits him out again right as rain. I scoop him up and he tethers to my collar. Erin smiles at me then. It’s the first time I’ve seen her do that, and just for a second she’s someone else, someone proper beautiful. Then she brushes her ruined earmuffs against the wall, and all the mud from the Thames just drains out of them. They come up fresh as dandelion heads.

We venture farther into the chamber, and it’s much deeper than I first figured. It’s spooking me out cos by now I can’t see if I’m facing up or down. Past my dangling feet I spot where the blue light’s coming from – there’s this diamond shape made from lanterns that flicker together like they’re disturbed by a breeze, though there ain’t no movement in the air. I count up the lights on each side – seven by seven. Except there’s gaps in the grid.

In an effort to get a better look, I lose my balance and end up nudging into Peyto. And that’s lesson number two about this new world – once you’re moving, you don’t slow down, you just float onward till you hit something.

“Keep zigzagging across the chamber till you reach that square of lights,” explains Peyto.

“Easy for you to say. I’m about as good at this as a pig on wheels.”

I’m putting everything into getting my zigzag moves right, so I don’t really get a decent view of the grid of lights till I’m practically on top of it. And so it’s a shock when I see what it’s made up of.

Each light is at the head of something that looks like a long see-through blister.

And inside each blister, submerged in milky-blue liquid, is a body.

A human body.

The faces are pale and empty. And round every neck is a flinder, twinkles of blue and white light. Somehow I know they’re just sleeping, not dead. It’s the way the hair’s sprouting across their arms and legs. And the nails, curling out from fingers and toes, like ribbons. It fills me with dread to think how long they must have been lying like this, not moving, just growing, more like trees than people. Symbols flicker and swarm over the surface of the blisters, casting light and shadows on the skin below, sometimes spinning, sometimes drawing lines or nets
. Busy
.
Watching
.

Three of the blisters are open and empty, wrinkled as walnut shells. And then it dawns on me that this was where Peyto and Erin have come from. Except there’s
three
empty blisters, not two. And I remember Peyto talking by the village well about a woman they needed to find …

Erin comes alongside me. “This is the sleeper bay. Forty-nine of us in total.”

“You live here, like this, asleep?”

“These are the pods. They’re life-support capsules, like a kind of quarantine so no germs can reach the people inside,” explains Peyto. “They’re more
preserved
than asleep, kept on slow-life –”

“You mean frozen?”

“Sort of … It’s called stasis. You don’t live but you don’t die. Like animals that hibernate. That way the ship can replace your cells when they grow old. It’s the flinders that make it possible, though we don’t really understand how they work.”

“What?”

“The flinders are old, very old,” goes Peyto. “From a time when our ancestors had a greater understanding. But we lost that knowledge aeons ago. We know they’re powerful, but they keep their secrets. Some say that each flinder is itself alive and that it draws the vitality, the soul, of a sleeper deep into its core for safekeeping.”

“But how come you’re asleep in the first place?”

“Because of the distance we traveled,” says Erin. “We’d all have died long ago without stasis. It takes so long to move between stars, between galaxies …”

I just gawp at them. I want to laugh, I want to scream. But what’s the point? I can see with my own eyes that
the impossible is real. My turn to make like a mudfish.