Mortal Engines (10 page)

Tom shook his head and she watched him closely, watched his eyes until he felt as if she were looking right into his soul. Then she laughed. “Well, no matter. I must get you to Airhaven, and we’ll find a ship to take you home.”

Airhaven! It was one of the most famous towns of the whole Traction Era, and when the warble of its homing-beacon came over the radio that evening Tom went racing forward to the flight deck. He met Hester in the companion-way outside the sick-bay, tousled and sleepy and limping. Anna Fang had done her best with the wounded leg, but she hadn’t improved the girl’s manners; she hid her face when she saw Tom and only glared and grunted when he asked her how she felt.

On the flight deck the aviatrix turned to greet them with a radiant smile. “Look, my dears!” she said, pointing ahead through the big windows. “Airhaven!”

They went and stood behind her seat and looked, and far away across the sea of clouds they saw the westering sun glint on a single tier of light-weight alloy and a nimbus of brightly coloured gas-bags.

Long ago, the town of Airhaven had decided to escape the hungry cities by taking to the sky. It was a trading post and meeting place for aviators now, drifting above
the Hunting Ground all summer, then flying south to winter in warmer skies. Tom remembered how it had once anchored over London for a whole week; how the sight-seeing balloons had gone up and down from Kensington Gardens and Circle Park, and how jealous he had been of people like Melliphant who were rich enough to take a trip in one and come back full of stories about the floating town. Now he was going there himself, and not just as a sightseer, either! What a story he would be able to tell the other apprentices when he got home!

Slowly the airship rose towards the town, and as the sun dipped behind the cloud-banks in the west Miss Fang cut her engines and let her drift in towards a docking strut, while harbour officers in sky-blue livery waved multi-coloured flags to guide her safely to her berth. Behind them the dock was crowded with sightseers and aviators, and even a little gaggle of airship-spotters who dutifully jotted down the
Jenny Haniver
’s number in their notebooks as the mooring clamps engaged.

A few moments later Tom was stepping out into the twilight and the chill, thin air, gazing at the airships coming and going; elegant high-liners and rusty scows, trim little air-cutters with see-through envelopes and tiger-striped spice-freighters from the Hundred Islands. “Look!” he said, pointing up at the rooftops. “There’s the Floating Exchange, and that church is St Michael’s-in-the-Sky, there’s a picture of it in the London Museum!” But Miss Fang had seen it many, many times before, and Hester just scowled at the crowds on the quayside and hid her face.

The aviatrix locked the
Jenny
’s hatches with a key that hung on a thong around her neck, but when a barefoot
boy ran up and tugged at her coat saying, “Watch yer airship for yer, Missus?” she laughed and dropped three square bronze coins into his palm. “I won’t let nobody sneak aboard!” he promised, taking up his post beside the gangplank. Uniformed dockhands appeared, grinning at Miss Fang but staring suspiciously at her new groundling friends. They checked that the newcomers had no metal toecaps on their boots or lighted cigarettes about their persons, then led them back to the harbouroffice where huge, crudely-lettered notices insisted NO SMOKING, TURN OFF ALL ELECTRICS and MAKE NO SPARKS. Sparks were the terror of the air-trade, because of the danger that they might ignite the gas in the airships’ envelopes. In Airhaven even over-vigorous hair-brushing was a serious crime, and all new arrivals had to sign strict safety agreements and convince the harbourmaster that they were not likely to burst into flames.

At last they were allowed up a metal stairway to the High Street. Airhaven’s single thoroughfare was a hoop of lightweight alloy deckplates lined with shops and stalls, chandleries, cafés and airshipmen’s hotels. Tom turned around and around, trying to take everything in and make sure he would remember it for ever. He saw turbines whirling on every rooftop, and mechanics crawling like spiders over the huge engine pods. The air was thick with the exotic smells of foreign food, and everywhere he looked there were aviators, striding along with the careless confidence of people who had lived their whole life in the sky, their long coats fluttering behind them like leathery wings.

Miss Fang pointed along the curve of the High Street to a building with a sign in the shape of an airship.
“That’s the Gasbag and Gondola,” she told her companions. “I’ll buy you dinner, and then we’ll find a friendly captain to take you back to London.”

They strode towards it, the aviatrix in the lead, Hester hiding from the world behind her upraised hand, Tom still looking about in wonder and thinking it a pity that his adventures would soon be over. He didn’t notice a Goshawk 90 circling among a shoal of larger vessels, waiting for a berth. Even if he had, he would not have been able to read its registration numbers at this distance, or see that the insignia on its envelope was the red wheel of the Guild of Engineers.

T
he inn was big and dark and busy. The walls were decorated with airships in bottles and the propellers of famous old sky-clippers with their names carefully painted on the blades,
Nadhezna
and
Aerymouse
and
Invisible Worm.
Aviators clustered round the metal tables, talking of cargoes and the price of gas. There were Jains and Tibetans and Xhosa, Inuit and Air-Tuareg and fur-clad giants from the Ice Wastes. An Uighur girl played “Slipstream Serenade” on her forty-string guitar, and now and then a loudspeaker would announce, “Arrival on strut three; the
Idiot Wind
fresh from the Nuevo-Mayan Palatinates with a cargo of chocolate and vanilla,” or, “Now boarding at strut seven;
My Shirona
outbound for Arkangel…”

Anna Fang stopped at a little shrine just inside the door and said her thanks to the gods of the sky for a safe journey. The God of Aviators was a friendly-looking fellow – the fat red statue on the shrine reminded Tom of Chudleigh Pomeroy – but his wife, the Lady of the High Heavens, was cruel and tricky; if offended she might brew up hurricanes or burst a gas-cell. Anna made her an offering of rice-cakes and lucky money, and Tom and Hester nodded their thank-yous just in case.

When they looked up the aviatrix was already hurrying away from them towards a group of aviators at a corner table. “Khora!” she shouted, and by the time they caught up with her she was being whirled round and round in the arms of a handsome young African and talking quickly in Airsperanto. Tom was almost sure he heard her mention “MEDUSA” as she glanced back at
him and Hester, but by the time they drew near the talk had switched into Anglish and the African was saying, “We rode high-level winds all the way from Zagwa!” and shaking red Sahara sand out of his flying helmet to prove it.

He was Captain Khora of the gunship
Mokele Mbembe
and he came from a static enclave in the Mountains of the Moon, an ally of the Anti-Traction League. Now he was bound for Shan Guo, to begin a tour of duty in the League’s great fortress at Batmunkh Gompa. Tom was shocked at first to be sharing a table with a soldier of the League, but Khora seemed a good man, as kind and welcoming as Miss Fang herself. While she ordered food he introduced his friends: the tall gloomy one was Nils Lindstrom of the
Garden Aëroplane Trap,
and the beautiful Arab lady with the laugh was Yasmina Rashid of the Palmyrene privateer
Zainab.
Soon the aviators were all laughing together, reminding each other of battles above the Hundred Islands and drunken parties in the airmen’s quarter on Panzerstadt-Linz, and between stories Anna Fang pushed dishes across the table to her guests. “More battered dormouse, Tom? Hester, try some of this delicious devilled bat!”

While Tom poked the strange foreign food around his plate with the pair of wooden sticks he had been given instead of a knife and fork, Khora leaned close and said softly, “So are you and your girlfriend crewing aboard the
Jenny
now?”

“No, no!” Tom assured him quickly. “I mean, no, she’s not my girlfriend, and no, we are just passengers…” He fumbled with some mashed locust and asked, “Do you know Miss Fang well?”

“Oh yes!” laughed Khora. “The whole air-trade knows Anna. And the whole of the League too, of course. In Shan Guo they call her ‘
Feng Hua’,
the Wind-Flower.”

Tom wondered why Miss Fang would have a special name in Shan Guo, but before he could ask, Khora went on, “Do you know, she built the
Jenny Haniver
herself? When she was just a girl she and her parents had the bad luck to be aboard a town that was eaten by Arkangel. They were put to work as slaves in the airship-yards there, and over the years she managed to sneak an engine here, a steering vane there, until she built herself the
Jenny
and escaped.”

Tom was impressed. “She didn’t
say,”
he murmured, looking at the aviatrix in a new light.

“She doesn’t talk about it,” said Khora. “You see, her parents did not live to escape with her; she watched them die in the slave-pits.”

Tom felt a rush of sympathy for poor Miss Fang, his fellow orphan. Was that why she smiled all the time, to hide her sorrow? And was that why she had rescued Hester and himself, to save them from her parents’ fate? He smiled at her as kindly as he could, and she caught his eye and smiled back and passed him a plate of crooked black legs. “Here, Tom, try a sautéed tarantula…”

“Arrival on strut fourteen!” blared the loudspeaker overhead. “London airship GE47 carrying passengers only.”

Tom jumped up and his chair fell backwards with a crash. He could remember the little fast-moving scout ships that the Engineers used to survey London’s tracks and superstructure, and he remembered how they didn’t
have names, just registration codes, and how all the codes started with GE. “They’ve sent someone after us!” he gasped.

Miss Fang was rising to her feet as well. “It might just be coincidence,” she said. “There must be lots of airships from London… And even if Valentine has sent someone after you, you are among friends. We are more than a match for your horrible Beefburgers.”

“Beef
eaters
,” Tom corrected her automatically, although he knew that she had made the mistake deliberately, just to break the tension. He saw Hester smile and felt glad that she was there, and fiercely determined to protect her.

Then all the lights went out.

There were shouts, boos, a crash of falling crockery from the kitchens. The windows were dim twilight-coloured shapes cut out of the dark. “The electrics are off all over Airhaven!” said Lindstrom’s gloomy voice. “The power-plant must have failed!”

“No,” said Hester quickly. “I know this trick. It’s meant to create chaos and stop us leaving. Someone’s here, coming for us…” There was an edge of panic in her voice that Tom hadn’t heard before, not even in the chase at Stayns. Suddenly he felt very frightened.

From the far end of the room, where crowds of people were spilling out on to the moonlit High Street, a sudden scream arose. Then came another, and a long crash of breaking glass, shrieks, curses, the clatter of chairs and tables falling. Two green lamps bobbed above the crowd like corpse-lanterns.

“That’s no Beefeater!” said Hester.

Tom couldn’t tell if she was frightened, or relieved.

“HESTER SHAW!”
screeched a voice like a saw cutting
metal. Over by the doorway a sudden cloud of vapour bloomed, and out of it stepped a Stalker.

It was seven feet tall, and beneath its coat shone metal armour. The flesh of its long face was pale, glistening with a slug-like film of mucus, and here and there a blue-white jag of bone showed through the skin. Its mouth was a slot full of metal teeth. Its nose and the top of its head were covered by a long metal skull-piece with tubes and flexes trailing down like dreadlocks, their ends plugged into ports on its chest. Its round glass eyes gave it a startled look, as if it had never got over the horrible surprise of what had happened to it.

Because that was the worst thing about the Stalkers: they had been human once, and somewhere beneath that iron cowl a human brain was trapped.

“It’s impossible!” Tom whimpered. “There
aren’t
any Stalkers! They were all destroyed centuries ago!” But the Stalker stood there still, horribly real. Tom tried to back away, but he couldn’t move. Something was trickling down his legs, as hot as spilled tea, and he realized that he had wet himself.

The Stalker came forward slowly, shoving aside the empty chairs and tables. Fallen glasses burst under its feet. From the shadows behind an aviator swung at it with a sword, but the blade rebounded from its armour and it smashed the man aside with a sweeping blow of one huge fist, not even bothering to glance back.

“HESTER SHAW,”
it said.
“THOMAS NATSWORTHY.”

It knows my name!
he thought.

“I…” began Miss Fang, but even she seemed lost for words. She pulled Tom backwards while Khora and the others drew their swords and stepped between the creature and its prey. But Hester pushed past them. “It’s
all right,” she said in a strange, thin voice. “I know him. Let me talk to him.”

The Stalker swung its dead-white face from Tom to Hester, lenses whirring inside mechanical eyes.
“HESTER SHAW,”
it said, caressing her name with its gas-leak hiss of a voice.

“Hello, Shrike,” said Hester.

The great head tilted to stare down at her. A metal hand rose, hesitated, then touched her face, leaving streaks of oil.

“I’m sorry I never got the chance to say goodbye…”

“
I WORK FOR THE LORD MAYOR OF LONDON NOW
,” said Shrike. “
HE HAS SENT ME TO KILL YOU.
”

Tom whimpered again. Hester gave a brittle little laugh. “But… you won’t do it, will you, Shrike? You wouldn’t kill
me
?”

“
YES,
” said Shrike flatly, still staring down at her.