Ghosts of War (20 page)

“What is it?” the spy asked, incredulous. Gabriel could see he was an intelligent man, but he was struggling to come to terms with what he was seeing. “Some sort of sea creature? The result of a eugenics program?”

Gabriel shook his head. “No. It's one of a race of creatures that live in a dimensional space that exists alongside our own. There are thousands of them, all around us, all of the time, but we cannot see them, or interact with them, because they are spatially out of phase with us.” He sighed, trying to figure out how to explain it to this man in a way that didn't make him sound utterly crazy. “Look, I know it's hard to swallow, but the evidence is there, right before your eyes. The people who did this are planning to set thousands of these things free over London. It'll be a massacre. They're almost impossible to stop.”

Robertson was still staring at the thing in the pit. “Who are you?” he said.

“I'm…my name is Gabriel Cross,” Gabriel responded, determinedly. “You might know me better as the Ghost.”

Robertson turned to look at him. “From the newspapers? The vigilante?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Yes. If you let me out of here I'll help you to stop them.”

Robertson looked uneasy. “How do I know I can trust you?”

“You don't,” Gabriel said drily. “But I'd imagine the fact I've been chained up by the bad guys gives you an idea of where my allegiances lie.”

Hesitantly, Robertson edged around the pit to stand before him. “With the British?”

Gabriel shook his head. “No. I wouldn't go that far. But certainly not with Senator Banks. I don't believe in this war he's trying to start, and I won't allow him to unleash those things on the world. Not while I still have a breath in my body.”

Robertson smiled. “All right. I'll let you out. But no funny business.”

Gabriel laughed at the man's accent, his plum-in-the-mouth Britishness. “Free the others first,” he said, and Robertson nodded, setting about unlatching the woman's cuffs.

“My name's not Robertson,” the spy said as he worked. “It's Rutherford. Peter Rutherford.” He turned to console the woman, who was now weeping openly with relief. She was barely responsive. “She's in shock. She's going to need help.”

“She can find help,” Gabriel said, firmly. “Her and the boy. We have to stop that weapon leaving for London.”

Robertson—or rather Rutherford, Gabriel corrected himself—gave a brisk nod of agreement and started work on the boy's cuffs. A moment later he had popped the child free, and he put a hand on the boy's shoulder. “Take this woman and find a police officer,” he said. “Get away from here as quickly as possible. You'll be able to find help at the fairground. Tell them everything.”

The boy looked terrified and didn't say a word, but he reached out and took the woman's hand in his own. She allowed herself to be led quickly toward the door.

Gabriel watched them go while Rutherford set about freeing his cuffs. “I promised I'd save her,” he said. “I promised to get her out of here alive.”

“And you did,” Rutherford replied, dropping the cuffs to the floor with a clang.

Gabriel rubbed at his sore wrists. “No, I didn't. You did.” He met the other man's gaze. “That was a timely arrival.”

Rutherford smiled. “I followed Banks here. I've been trying to work out where they'd housed the airship. I've been piecing together their plans for weeks.”

Gabriel nodded. “I know, I saw the wall at your apartment before it was burned to the ground.”

“Montague,” Rutherford replied, and he almost spat the name of the commissioner in distaste. “I'm sure he's responsible for that.”

“It seems he has a lot to answer for,” said Gabriel. He liked the British man, and he could tell from the haunted look in Rutherford's eyes—the same look he saw in the mirror when he cared to bother with it—that the man knew pain and suffering. Gabriel guessed he'd been a soldier too, during the war, like so many men of their generation, and like Gabriel he would stop at nothing to prevent it from happening all over again.

Gabriel turned to the creature in the pit. “What about this? We can't just leave it here? Somewhere round here there's got to be a vial of the poison that'll destroy it.”

“We'll have to come back for it,” Rutherford said urgently, already making a start toward the door. “Can't you hear that? We might already be too late.”

Gabriel could hear it now: the sound of chugging propellers and the grating of metal plates. The roof of the other hangar was sliding open, and the airship was already lifting toward the skies. He ran after the British spy.

Outside, the cold air hit him like a slap to the face. It was dark, with only the shimmering orb of the moon and the lights of the nearby fairground by which to see. But the scene before them was all too clear. The airship,
Goliath
, was rising steadily into the Manhattan night, a great, fat lozenge, a shining silver cylinder, pristine and new in the moonlight. The silhouette of its immense form blotted out much of the sky, stark against the frozen mantle of yellow-gray fog that hung above the city.

Gabriel watched as the behemoth finally cleared the hangar and ascended fully into the night. The passenger gondola was brightly lit with stark electric light, and innumerable propellers whipped and chopped the air as it turned slowly about, circling above the warehouses and hangars far below.

Gabriel felt his heart sink.
Goliath
had taken flight, and with it, the weapon that would ignite the war and destroy millions.

They were already too late.

In the hangar, unbeknownst to the two men, the creature in the pit began to stir.

Its surviving tendrils curled like serpents over the side of its prison, grasping for the discarded cuffs and chains and using them to heave itself up, sliding its bulk over the ruins of its victims, the heaps of rotting carcasses, bones, and mechanical limbs. Within moments it had levered itself over the side of the pit, and with surprising agility, it began to drag its bizarre, bloated form across the concrete floor of the hangar, trailing dead tendrils in its wake. It could smell humans, the stench of humanity; hear the fresh blood pounding through their veins. Nearby there were thousands of them, pressed together in close proximity like a vast herd of cattle, an enormous swarm of rats. It felt drawn to them, unable to prevent itself, every fiber of its damaged body singing out for the taste of fresh blood. It was hungry, and close by, the tide of humanity was waiting.

G
inny didn't know where to look or what to do.

She'd been wandering the docks for an hour now, searching frantically, and there was still no sign of what might have become of Gabriel, where the raptor might have taken him. Without mounting a search of every building, warehouse, hangar, or moored vessel in the area, they'd have no way of being sure. They could be anywhere by now, lost somewhere in the steaming metropolis.

She bit her lip in frustration. God, she needed a drink.

Ginny pushed her way through a crowd of people who were meandering about the fairground wearing cheery, carefree expressions. She envied them that naïveté—that unburdened state so at odds to her own. She was wrestling with feelings of guilt and responsibility. She wished she hadn't agreed to this ridiculous enterprise now. What had she allowed to happen? She'd enabled Gabriel with her enthusiasm, even argued to go along with him, to be abducted from the rooftop just as he was. Part of her wished she had been, too—at least that way she'd know what had happened to him. But part of her knew she'd been selfish to encourage him. She'd longed for adventure, for excitement, for meaning. She'd longed to be a part of something dangerous and important. She hadn't ever considered that it might go wrong, that it might end up like
this.

Was Gabriel suffering somewhere, tortured by the raptors and wondering where she and Donovan were, why they hadn't come to his aid as they had promised? Was he already dead?

She tried not to consider that. She had to focus on finding him. She had no idea what she'd do if she did, of course. Confronted by a nest of raptors, without Donovan and any backup—would she even be any use to Gabriel at all? Perhaps she'd be more of a burden.

Ginny crossed behind a stall selling cotton candy. The people in line were gabbling noisily and pointing at the Ferris wheel, revolving slowly against the evening sky. “You can see all of Manhattan from up there,” she heard someone say. And then: “I hear it's not very safe. People have been getting stuck up there for hours in the freezing cold.”

For a moment Ginny wondered about trying to get a place in one of the cars. Would that elevated perspective offer her a better chance of finding Gabriel, perhaps the opportunity to glance another raptor returning to the nest? But then she saw that the line of people for the wheel was even longer than the line for the cotton candy, and she couldn't bring herself to simply stand around waiting. She had to
do
something.

Donovan was off somewhere else, at the other side of the fairground, doing much the same. He'd said he was going to attempt to enlist the help of some of the uniformed men who were policing the fairground, tell them he'd seen the raptor abduct a man and get them combing the area too. A few extra pairs of eyes had to be of help, she supposed, but they needed to be smarter than this. Simply wandering around hoping they'd catch sight of something telling, or hoping they'd happen upon a likely site for the nest, wasn't going to get them anywhere. They needed a plan. They needed Gabriel.

Ginny looked up at the sound of chugging rotors overhead, thinking for a split second that it was the sound of another raptor, but her heart sank when she realized it was just a large dirigible taking off, rising out of its hangar toward the frigid skies. The lights from its passenger gondola cast lengthy shadows across the fairground as it slid fluidly overhead, turning around in a wide circle.

It seemed unusual for an airship of this immense size—a passenger liner—to be operating from here at the docks. Typically they'd be tethered at the birthing fields in New Jersey, from where they'd make their jaunts across the Atlantic to Europe and beyond. She supposed it could have been a cargo vessel, but even that seemed an unlikely proposition. It had no clear markings or liveries, and wasn't even displaying a flag to indicate its nationality. Whatever the case, she didn't have time to concern herself with the irregularity of it now.

Ginny watched the airship for a moment longer as it drifted lazily overhead, and then returned to her search for Gabriel. She would do all that she could. She had no other choice. She would scan the skies for more raptors, anything that might give a clue as to the location of their nest. She would also continue to look for anything unusual in the vicinity of the fairground, anything that could suggest where the raptor bearing Gabriel had gone when it dipped below the cover of the buildings.

She had to hope that would be enough, that somewhere close by Gabriel was still alive, and that Donovan was having more success than she was.

Gabriel watched the airship rise above the nearby rooftops with a dawning sense of dismay. Could this really be it? Had Banks really managed to pull it off? If
Goliath
made it to England, then everything would be lost. Millions would die, the world would once again be engulfed in war, and worse, thousands of the alien creatures would be set loose to slowly consume the planet. There'd be no stopping them. They would wash across the world like an inexorable tide, devouring every living thing in their wake.

Of course, there'd be people who would work out how to stop them, eventually, but they'd be as dust motes on the wind, tiny specks of hope adrift on a sea of destruction and despair. No one would survive. He was sure of it. Banks had unwittingly engineered a catastrophe on a biblical scale.

Gabriel cursed himself for being unprepared. If only he'd had his rocket canisters with him he could have gone after the vessel, tried to fight his way on board,
do
something. As he was, as Gabriel, he felt weak and ineffectual, unable to act. Gabriel was nothing compared to the Ghost, a rich playboy with too much money and no real friends, a pilot invalided out of the force in his prime.

It was then that it struck him. He was a pilot. There
was
something he could do.

“Can you fly?” he said to Rutherford, who had the panicked look about him of a man trying desperately to work out what to do next, and failing.

“What?” said Rutherford, clearly distracted by the progress of
Goliath.

“Have you ever piloted an aircraft?” Gabriel asked, his tone firm and deliberate.

Rutherford shook his head. “No, I was a foot soldier during the war.”

Gabriel grinned. “Then I'll have to drive. Come on, there has to be a launch ramp around here somewhere.”

Rutherford looked confused. “You mean we're going to go up there?”

Gabriel had already set off at a run, searching the rooftops of the nearby buildings for any sign of a biplane emplacement. “We need to get up there, Rutherford, to stop that thing. We need to try to get on board. We can't do anything from down here.”

In truth, Gabriel wasn't entirely sure they'd be able to do anything up there, either, but it was the only chance they had. Any aircraft they managed to find down there at the docks would be designed for carrying cargo. They'd have to rely on their wits, and on the weapons they had about their persons.

“There!” Rutherford bellowed, and Gabriel spun about to see the British spy pointing up toward the roof of a redbrick building about two hundred yards away. He could just make out the silhouettes of three biplanes propped on their launch ramps, high above the ground. He ran over to join the other man.

“How do we get up there?” Gabriel said, trying to work out the quickest route to the roof. He glanced back at
Goliath
, watching the vessel scud lazily beneath the clouds, edging its way out over the docks. They'd have to break in to the warehouse and find the stairs to the roof.

“There's a fire escape. It looks a bit rickety, but it might hold.” Rutherford had already started toward the building, and Gabriel followed behind. Rutherford was right—a tall iron ladder resolved in the gloom, affixed to the brickwork with iron bolts. It terminated a few feet from the ground, so that Rutherford had to leap up to catch hold of the bottom rung. The ladder shook dramatically, swinging loose from the wall, and he called out in shock but managed to maintain his grip.

The ladder clanged back against the side of the warehouse, scattering rusted bolts and plumes of brick dust. But it held.

“I think we'd better take it one at a time,” Rutherford called down as he began to heave himself up, his feet scrabbling for purchase on the brickwork as he pulled himself up, one hand over another, until he managed to get one foot on the bottom rung. “I'm not sure it'll take the weight of both of us at once.”

“Hurry, then!” Gabriel called after him, glancing back at
Goliath.
Soon the airship would begin gathering momentum, and once it was out over the water and picking up speed, they'd be hard pushed to catch it.

The ladder swung out again as Rutherford almost lost his footing. Gabriel nearly jumped up to grab hold of the bottom rung in an attempt to steady it, but he was concerned he'd pull the whole thing away from the wall if he did.

Rutherford seemed unfazed by the danger, however, and continued his climb, quickening his pace when he realized he was nearing the top of the building. A moment later he disappeared, hoisting himself over the lip of the building. A scattering of tiny stones rained down on Gabriel from where Rutherford's movements had disturbed them, shaking them loose from the rooftop. He brushed them away from his face.

“Come on up!” Rutherford bellowed down to him, and Gabriel did as the British spy suggested, leaping up to catch hold of the ladder and pulling himself up. The going was precarious, and more than once he thought the whole thing was going to come down, sending him crashing to the concrete far below. Still he persevered, and within a few moments he was pulling himself up onto the roof to join Rutherford, who was waiting for him and leaned over, grabbing him by the shoulders and helping to pull him up.

Gabriel scrambled to his feet, dusting himself off.

Up here they had a much better view of the airship and could see almost directly into the brightly lit interior of the passenger gondola. Dark shapes moved around inside—members of the crew, no doubt, buzzing about preparing
Goliath
for her long journey across the ocean.

Below, the lights of the fairground were almost hypnotizing, so gaudy, lurid, and bright. Gabriel could see swarms of people mingling like worker bees in a hive. He turned his attention to the three aircraft, all sitting ready on their perches like large, mechanical birds.

“This one looks like it's in the best shape,” Rutherford said, indicating the one on the far right. Gabriel walked over to it, running his hands along its flank. It was in poor condition and didn't look like it had been airborne for weeks, if not longer. The wheel blocks were caked in a thick rime of dirt, and there was no windshield, leaving the pilot and passenger both open to the elements. Nevertheless, compared to the other two, which were in more of a sorry state, it was the best option they had.

“I'll try to get it started,” Gabriel said, clambering into the pilot's pit at the rear of the vessel. He didn't bother wrapping the webbing around himself, figuring that he might need to quickly fling himself free if things didn't go to plan. Not that he had a parachute to hand if the occasion did present itself.

He wiped the controls with the sleeve of his jacket and grabbed hold of the ignition lever. “Stand clear!” he shouted to Rutherford, and waited until he could see the Englishman had given the rocket engine a wide berth. He gave the lever a sharp tug and felt the aircraft buck slightly in its moorings, but the rocket failed to ignite.

In the distance, over the nose of the biplane, he could see
Goliath
slowly sliding away into the night. He pulled the lever again, and this time the rocket shaft burst into life, a bright plume of roaring flame gushing out of the launch tube.

“Get in!” he called to Rutherford, who ran up the steps to the side of the plane, placed his hands on the edge of the passenger pit, and vaulted in. Gabriel gave him a moment to right himself and then pulled the second lever on the control panel, slipping the wheel blocks and sending the plane darting forward, up and over the nose of the ramp, riding away into the sky on a plume of searing rocket flame.

Gabriel grasped the rudder controls and fired up the propeller. The polished wooden blades gave a single, pathetic revolution, and then stuttered to a stop. He tried the controls again, but got only the same response: a fitful start, and then nothing. He cursed as the rocket flames—only ever intended to launch the aircraft over the side of the building to dispense with the need for a runway—guttered and died, and the biplane went into a steep nosedive toward the ground.

He heard Rutherford cry out in surprise as he fought with the controls, trying desperately to both pull up the nose and force the propeller to start working. He yanked furiously at the start lever, listening for the telltale whine of the engine firing, and, just as he thought they were about to crash headlong into the concrete below, the propeller caught. He heaved back on the controls with all his strength, and the nose of the aircraft came up, slowly. They swept along the ground, only twenty feet above the concourse, narrowly missing losing two of their wings against the corner of a hangar. Then they were arcing up into the sky once more, twisting around so that the vast bulk of
Goliath
hove into view.

“Did you always cut it that fine?” Rutherford called back to him. His voice was nearly lost on the wind as they sped toward the leviathan that hung low in the sky above the fairground, and Gabriel noticed with a smile that the Englishman's knuckles had gone white where he was clutching the edges of the passenger pit.

“No,” Gabriel called back. “Sometimes I actually
hit
the ground, too.”

He heard Rutherford laughing as they banked sharply, the engine groaning in protest.

As they drew closer to
Goliath
, Gabriel couldn't help but feel dwarfed by the sheer size of the thing. The biplane was like a tiny mote against the vastness of the great liner, a flea buzzing in the ear of an immense beast. He felt the tug of an almost prehistoric fear in his belly—the feeling of being in the presence of something huge and dangerous, something that caused him to feel utterly insignificant. His instinct was to turn the biplane around and flee, but he fought it, holding the controls firm, remaining focused on his goal.