Terminal World (67 page)

By the time he returned to the bridge shots were ringing against the gondola every few seconds. They were coming up from the ledge below them, where the Skullboys had control. The target ledge was very close now: he could even see tiny figures near the edge, with wave upon wave of dark-windowed buildings rising behind them, jostling for space and height until they met the soaring edifice supporting the next ledge above. He saw roads and bridges, and more people moving on them, but no slot-cars, slot-buses, trains, funiculars or elevators. Tulwar had mentioned electricity, but there was obviously so little of it to go around that most of Neon Heights was still without power, pushed back to the level of Horsetown, only without the benefit of horses.

‘Less than half a league now,’ Curtana said. ‘We’re slowing, though. The wind’s losing its effectiveness, meeting the city. I just hope we’ve got enough drift to carry us all the way in.’

‘And if we don’t?’ Quillon asked, shocked that it had all come down to something so utterly arbitrary.

‘We only have to get close, that’s all. Then we can grapple in.’

‘How close?’

‘Best that you don’t know, Doctor, otherwise you’ll be a nervous wreck.’

‘And we wouldn’t want that to happen,’ Quillon said.

He willed the city closer, striving to blot the sound of gunfire from his mind. The shots were intensifying the closer they got to the landing point. The Skullboys must have occupied the tallest buildings on the underlying ledge, meaning that they had less distance to shoot across as
Painted Lady
drew nearer to her destination. With her own guns now all but derelict,
Painted Lady’s
crew had few options for retaliation. Airmen were firing muskets and crossbows down from the walkways and engine struts, but achieved little. The incoming bullets could be withstood: most of them ricocheted off the gondola’s heavy under-plating, or punched harmlessly through the envelope, never touching a gas cell. But then came the rockets, streaking up from rooftops on pillars of zigzagging flame. They were little more than fireworks converted into crude incendiary devices, most of them missing the airship even if they struggled to her altitude. But again the distance they had to span was lessening, and the proportion of misses was decreasing. ‘The fuckers,’ he heard Curtana say - he knew there was nothing an airman feared more than fire.

By then the wind had pushed
Painted Lady
almost side-on to the ledge, all vestiges of aerodynamic control surrendered. In the dense and darkling sprawl of buildings it was difficult to see where Curtana intended to put her down, assuming she had ever allowed herself the luxury of thinking that far ahead. On the roads, promenades and squares between the structures people were massing in bewildering numbers, drawn by the spectacle. Some of them held torches against the gathering gloom of dusk, creating feeble pools of moving light. Quillon wondered why Tulwar wasn’t keeping them free of possible landing sites, then reminded himself that no one, not even Tulwar, had that authority now.

There was a bell-like clang, quite distinct from the impact of a bullet, as a rocket glanced against the underside of the gondola. It might have been a lucky shot, but there was no doubt that
Painted Lady
had fallen within range of the Skullboys. Quillon tensed, realising that it now required an effort of will to keep breathing normally. In his estimation less than a quarter of a league now separated them from the ledge. As if in recognition of this, the massed citizenry were beginning to fan back from the square that now lay directly ahead. Buildings hemmed it from either side, surely squeezed too tightly together for the airship ever to fit between them. Not that fitting really mattered now, Quillon decided. It would be enough if
Painted Lady
rammed herself home, even if the impact mangled her once-proud frame.

Another rocket struck home, this one with more ferocity.

‘Don’t you have any defence against these?’ Quillon asked.

‘We do, actually. It’s called not ever getting in range of Skullboy rockets. Normally it works pretty well for us.’

‘What will happen if they hit the envelope?’

‘It’ll burn,’ Curtana said. She turned to Poitrel. ‘Grappling teams ready?’

‘All at station,’ he answered.

‘They’d better not mess this up. We’ll get maybe one chance before the thermals push us up and out again, and I don’t fancy our hopes of ever finding our way back to Spearpoint without engines.’ She reached for the speaking tube, wiping dried spit from her mouth before bringing it to her lips. ‘Curtana here. This might be my final announcement as captain of
Painted Lady
, so I’ll keep it brief. We’re coming in fast, so I can’t promise you an easy stroll to the ground or a smooth docking. A crowd of good people down there want our medicines very badly, but we can’t just hand them out like candies. The supplies have to go through Tulwar’s distribution network so that they reach everyone who needs them, not just those within grabbing distance. We have sick and injured to offload and hospitalise. It’s going to take discipline and organisation and the best damned crew in Swarm working like a well-oiled machine. The ship’s done us proud to get us this far. Let’s show her what she meant to us.’

She hung up the speaking tube.

‘If that doesn’t do it, nothing will,’ Quillon said.

A rocket slammed past the gondola, its tail still spitting fire. He could hear the crowd now, the massed roar of all those people waiting on the ledge, the crackle of guns as men directed fire down onto the Skullboys.

‘The ship won’t be the safest or most secure place once we’re grappled in,’ Curtana said.

‘Meaning what?’

‘You’ve done your bit for us. You shouldn’t feel obliged to put yourself at further risk.’

‘Am I still the surgeon on this mission?’

‘You haven’t been formally discharged from duty.’

‘Then I will continue to perform those duties, if you have no objection.’

She gave him a smile, cracked at the edges with fatigue. ‘None whatsoever, Doctor Quillon.’

‘It’s not as if I’m going to be massively popular down there when they find out what I am.’

‘They’ll adapt. We did, in the end.’ She looked through the gondola’s side window, the ledge - which had looked so far away for so long - now rushing closer like a black tidal wave, a froth of tiny figures massing at its crest. At the last minute, a side-gust began to rotate the airship again, bringing the ledge back into the forward windows. Curtana must have been out of options, but still she could not relinquish her grip on the controls. ‘One hundred spans,’ she said, in not much more than a whisper, estimating their distance by eye. ‘Fifty.’

Quillon felt a soft fist grab the ship and begin arresting its forward drift. He had to grab a handhold to remain standing.

‘Grapples ... now,’ Curtana said, but she was not issuing an order, merely voicing a prayer. The task of firing the grappling lines, Quillon surmised, required such expert timing and aim from the individual teams that it could never be directed from the bridge. Perhaps for the last time, Curtana had placed her utmost faith in the ability of her crew.

The grappling lines sang out, whipping through the air as their spring-loaded launchers were released. The first fell short, its iron fingers scratching down the black wall of the shelf. There would not be time to reel it in, re-arm the launcher and try again. But the second found its mark, the grapple tangling with railings, the line tautening as the grappling crews worked the manual windlasses. The third whipped out and overshot the railings, crashing down in what looked like the middle of the crowd.

‘I told them to clear us a landing zone,’ Curtana said dolefully, as if it was no more or less than she had expected. ‘I told them that if there were too many people, it was going to get messy.’

‘They’d be dead in a month anyway, if we hadn’t come,’ Quillon said.

‘That’s very pragmatic, Doctor. I think you’ve spent too much time with us.’

Now
Painted Lady
had lost all forward motion, and for a moment she hung in space, serenely becalmed, separated from the ledge by little more than her own length. A brave man could have crossed the gap hand-over-hand. Then winds began to tug her away from Spearpoint, and the lines, which were already taut, instantly became as rigid as iron cables. The railing began to buckle outwards under the load. Even in the gondola, Quillon heard the creak and groan as the windlasses resisted the tension. Then the grapple ripped itself free of the railing, dragging its horrible cargo with it, and
Painted Lady
jerked viciously as the second grapple took her entire burden. He watched the claw slide down the railing, the railing bowing out in a sinuous curve as it struggled to hold the airship. For a moment he was struck by the sure and certain knowledge that they were going to fail. Then two more grappling lines whipped out and found their mark, and the airship was once again secured. The lines were tightened and then began to haul in
Painted Lady.
The pace was excruciatingly slow, for the only motive power now available was human muscle. But though the winds continued to buffet her, Quillon finally dared to believe that she was safe.

‘You did it,’ he told Curtana, when he had seen another two grappling lines be deployed. ‘You got us here. You got us to Spearpoint.’

‘We’re not touching dirt yet,’ she said, as irked as if he had broken some sacred taboo of airmanship.

‘You can’t take any pleasure in this, can you? I suppose if you still had the ship in one piece it might be different.’

‘I’ll worry about
Painted Lady.
You worry about the sick men and the Serum-15. I want the crates ready to be lowered in sixty seconds. The mission’s not over until we’ve delivered our cargo. Understood?’

‘Of course.’

Those able-bodied airmen who were not already manning the windlasses were beginning to gather in the gondola, some of them bearing stretchers, others hefting the cupboard-sized medicine crates, ready to lower them down through the belly hatch as soon as they were over solid ground. The medicine crates, Quillon realised, were one of the few commodities that hadn’t already been thrown overboard to lighten the load. He took a crate himself and stood back from the belly hatch as an airman let it hinge down, revealing a rectangle of distant rooftops. The Skullboys were still down there, still firing guns and rockets, but it would take extraordinary luck for one of them to find that tiny open door in the gondola’s underside. Nonetheless Quillon kept well back from the edge, willing time to pass more quickly. The rooftops were sliding by, but the rate at which the airship was being hauled in was agonisingly slow.

Then, suddenly, the black wall of the ledge began to hove into view, and as suddenly again they were over the buckled railing, the gondola’s lowered hatch almost scraping the top of it as they came in. Whatever altitude she had been at when the grapples were fired, the tautening lines had brought the gondola almost level with the square. They were passing over a seething mob of people now, hands reaching up to grab at anything that came within reach. The roar from the crowd was overwhelming, but there was more to it than simple jubilation. There was something frayed and desperate about it, something that could turn the crowd into a frenzied, indiscriminate mob at the tiniest provocation.

Now ropes were being dropped down from the gondola and engine struts to augment the grapples. The airship came to a sudden halt, almost knocking Quillon off his feet and through the open hatch. Either the windlasses were tight or the envelope had jammed against the surrounding buildings. He supposed that it didn’t matter much now. With the anchor lines tight and the gas cells still providing some lift, the gondola was safe for the time being.

The crowd was clearing around a party of red-hatted militia approaching the belly-hatch. They had guns, aimed at the sky, but ready to be brought to bear on anyone hindering their progress. Behind them, clearing a wider swathe, came a steam-powered truck with another group of armed men riding on its running boards. The militia cleared a circle under the gondola, forcing back the crowd with threatening jabs of their guns. The crowd capitulated without much fuss, even clearing a path of their own volition to allow the truck to halt just beneath the open hatch.

Curtana emerged from the bridge, grabbed a loaded double-barrelled pistol from the armoury rack, tugged back its paired flint-tipped hammers and swung down onto the ladder, holding on with one hand and grasping the pistol in the other. She tried to say something to the red-hatted men, but she couldn’t make herself heard over the crowd. Gritting her teeth, she aimed the pistol at the sky, angling her shot so that it would skim past the envelope. She fired.

The crowd subsided into an uneasy, belligerent silence.

‘I’m Captain Curtana. Where’s Tulwar?’

One of the red-hatted men spoke up. ‘Tulwar can’t make it.’

‘He was meant to be here.’

‘He’s having medical issues. He said to bring you to the Red Dragon Bathhouse.’

‘Just like that? On trust? Us not knowing who the hell any of you are?’

‘My name is Kargas,’ said the red-hatted man. ‘You’ll have to be satisfied with that for now. Do you have the medicines?’

‘Got the advance supply here,’ Curtana said. ‘It’ll have to tide you over for now. I take it you’ve got a distribution plan in place?’

‘Tulwar’s got it all worked out,’ Kargas said. ‘There are local bosses for every district, every quarter. They’ve all been allocated consignments, depending on how many people are under them. No one goes without.’

‘So there’ll be no skimming, and none of the medicines will ever turn up on the black market?’ Curtana said.

‘I won’t make promises I can’t keep. This is a city without a government. Things get porous. All I can tell you is that if you hand over those medicines, Tulwar and the rest of us will do our damndest to make sure most of them get to the people who need them.’