Be My Enemy (9 page)

“Sen, take her forward. Easy, dead easy.”

“Bonaroo.”

Her touch on the controls was light and precise, but the sudden motion was enough to send Everett reeling toward the drop. He almost took his hand from the winch control. Almost. The power connector cable amplified the ship's power and sent Mchynlyth swinging across the sky. He was coming very, very close to the power lines. If the cable from the ship touched two lines at the same time, they would short circuit. Twenty-five kilovolts would turn you to ash so fast you wouldn't even know it, let alone feel any pain. But if he let Sen carry Mchynlyth too far, he might miss the power line entirely.

“Dead stop, Sen.” There were no brakes on airships. Sen could only bring
Everness
to a halt by applying reverse thrust, and that took distance and time. Distance and time were things Everett could work with. It was all relativity. Everett looked down between his feet through the hatch. Mchynlyth's wild swinging was dying down. Everett knew the physics: simple harmonic motion. A pendulum swing always took the same time: long and fast at the start, short and
slow when it wound down. A simple, basic principle—the story Tejendra had told him was that in the sixteenth century Galileo had watched a lamp swinging on its chain in Pisa cathedral, measured it against his own pulse, and shown that the period was constant. Everett had never thought he'd see the principle demonstrated using a man on the end of a power cable swinging from the belly of an electrically powered post-steampunk airship.

Mchynlyth grinned up at Everett. His orange-gloved hand gave a thumbs-up, then he pointed down.
Lower away.
Everett worked the winch, never taking his eyes off Mchynlyth. The engineer was not harnessed directly to the power converter; he rode a drop line that ran with the main cable. He would hook the converter to the line, then ride the drop line back up through the hatch and complete the circuit. Everett's job was to get him within arm's length of the power line without crossing the lines. The hand kept waving, patting air:
lower, lower.
The wind was treacherous, gusting, blowing Mchynlyth far out of reach, then heart-stoppingly close.
Lower, lower
—the orange thumb went up.
Cease lowering.
Everett hit the stop button hard. Now Mchynlyth reached around to unfasten the hooked stick from his utility belt. It was fumbling, clumsy work in his heavy, insulated gloves. One mistake, one slip, and he would drop the stick—the
hotstick
, as it was known among the Airish—and he would have to run the risk of a sizable shock, bonding on to the line himself. Everett understood the physics too well. The circuit was not complete. It would be complete, allowing electricity to flow, only when the earthing cable was dropped, but both the power line and
Everness
had picked up different charges of static electricity, just from the movement of air over the wires, or the movement of a two-hundred-meter-long airship through the air. But those static charges were different, and when Mchynlyth connected ship to line, they would equalize.
Equalize spectacularly
, Everett thought. He held his breath. Mchynlyth lunged with the hook and missed. Well short. Again; again a miss. A third time,
and little lightnings ran along the hotstick and cracked between hook and power line.

“Oh the Dear!” Sen exclaimed over the intercom. “He's burning, he's burning! Everett, help him!” Up on the bridge, she, Captain Anastasia, and Sharkey had been keeping one eye on the feed from the hull cameras. The other they kept on Sharkey's radar screen. And the interceptor jets scrambled by the French Air Force were seconds away.

“He's all right, he's all right.” Everett shouted into the intercom. “It's part of the process.” Mchynlyth had hooked securely onto the line and was hauling himself in. He clipped a carabiner to the power line. He was hooked to the four hundred kilovolts. Everett understood Sen's fear. She had lost one ship, one home, one family to the lightning when the captain of the doomed
Fairchild
had tried to rekindle its batteries from an unorthodox source. Now Mchynlyth was wrestling the power connector over the cable, hitting the clamps that locked the contacts to the live line.
Close to half a million volts are running through that
, Everett thought. Mchynlyth was safe, they were all safe. It was the reason birds could perch on power lines. Everything was safe as long as it was connected to earth. Electricity was flow, high potential to low potential, charge to ground.

Captain Anastasia came on the intercom.

“Are we near charging yet? I can see those airoplans on Sharkey's screen and they're a little too close for my liking.”

Everett heard the distant thunder of military jet engines. He glanced down between his feet into the dizzy drop. Mchynlyth had swung from the cable on his drop line. Two thumbs up. Everett hit the button on the drop line. Mchynlyth was jerked away from the power connector, clamped like a brass leech to the line, up into the air. He shot up through the tiny hatch, hit the harness release, and dropped off the line to land light and agile, one foot on either side of the rectangle of empty air. One mistake and he would have tumbled straight down to the ground, screaming all the way. Everett had
been a great goalkeeper, and he could think in three dimensions and more, but it would take him years to learn the Airish way, which was to live in many dimensions.

Years.

He didn't intend to spend years among the Airish to learn that skill.

“I thoroughly recommend that as a life experience,” Mchynlyth said. “Bein’ that close to power lines gives ye a wee tingle all over. Right. Come on. This'll be worth seeing.”

With a crook of his finger Mchynlyth beckoned Everett across the hull. They ran, crouched in the cramped access ways between the battery stacks, beneath the low ceiling of the cargo deck. They flickered on the edge of death, Sen drawing the last watts of power out of them to hold
Everness
over the power line. On the far side of the hull was a second hatch in the ship's belly, near where the other half of the power connector was stored. When
Everness
was in port, the charging arm ran underneath her and she was connected by two cables, one the live, the other the ground, allowing the power to run through the charging circuitry. The ship was effectively a giant plug. The ground line hung above Everett and Mchynlyth's heads.

“Before I press any buttons, tell me. Yer sure about this?” Mchynlyth said.

“The standard high-tension voltage in France is 400 kilovolts. I looked it up. Online.” That expression was unknown in Mchynlyth's world. “The interweb,” said Everett, and Mchynlyth nodded understanding. “The rest was easy, just basic mathematics.”

“Aye, you see, it's that last wee bit I'm nervous about, the basic mathematics.”

“From what you told me, the step-down transformer should be able to handle it.”

“Oh, that's dolly. If we go up like a Catherine wheel, it's all my fault.”

Everett was about to protest that the equations were never wrong, but only as good as the numbers they were given. Then the fighters
went over. The noise knocked the words, the breath, and all thoughts from him. Everett had never been so close to turbojets before. They sounded like the sky ripping right down the middle, from the edge of space right through the heart of
Everness
to the earth below.

“Right then!” Mchynlyth bawled over the diminishing roar of the French Air Force jets. “That makes our minds up for us.” He punched the release button. The hatch opened. The earth connector dropped. Mchynlyth and Everett both craned over the aperture. “Keep your eyes peeled,” Mchynlyth said. “This'll be quite a show.” The cable unreeled with a hissing shriek from the spool. Then the connector end, falling to earth, erupted in a blaze of lighting. Thunder rocked
Everness.
The railing, the cable, every centimeter of metal and nanocarbon crawled with glowing ghosts. St. Elmo's fire, Everett recalled. A name like that you remember. Electricity was arcing across the air gap between the falling cable and the earth. That meant current was flowing. Batteries were charging.

“Aye, you get yer dish up to the bridge and work whatever dally magic you do with thon machine,” Mchynlyth shouted. He pulled his goggles down against the hard blue arc light. Everett scuttled back through the maze of access ways to the main staircase. The battery casings seemed to thrum and glow with power. He could feel the energy prickling against his skin, like tiny electric spiders. He could smell the thrilling ozone tang of electricity. It always made him think of fairgrounds and summer. Everything was alive.
Everness
seemed to stretch, as if waking from a long, cold sleep.

“We've blacked out most of Northwest Paris,” Sharkey said as Everett arrived on the bridge. The American sounded impressed. Captain Anastasia did not turn from her place at the window.

“Do you think we could manage it this time without a last-minute, cliff-hanger, hairs-breadth escape, Mr. Singh?” she asked. Everett took up his station and opened the Infundibulum. Sen nodded. Her concentration was total, her fingers playing the controls like a musical instrument, her eyes flicking from monitor to monitor,
holding
Everness
over the power line. Everett saw a bead of sweat on her lip. He wanted to dab it away with a fingertip. He shook the image out of his head.

“There's some mathematics to do,” Everett said. “It's not a simple point-to-point transition, the same set of coordinates in different universes.” He did not want to say how tricky the math really was. It involved a Fourier transform. His maths teacher hadn't even known what a Fourier transform was.
A mathematical operation that transforms one complex-valued function of a real variable into another.
There was no way to understand it other than technically.

“They're coming back,” Sharkey said. Everett glanced up as the Mathika software, the program he had used to calculate the many-dimensional folds of the Infundibulum, opened on the screen. He saw silver wings flash out there in the winter sky, aircraft turning to make a second pass over the airship. “We're being targeted.”

“I'm on it,” Everett said. A Fourier transform on non-Euclidean space. He entered
Everness
's present coordinates in this universe. The process was instantaneous, but the results needed interpretation. He had to match the location code with that for the place where he intended to jump the ship, and that involved things like the curvature of the Earth. Get it wrong one way and they might jump in at a height way above
Everness
's operational ceiling, with the ship over-pressurized, and explode. Get it wrong the other way….
Don't think about that
, Everett told himself.
You're good. Like you said to Mchynlyth, the mathematics is always perfect.
He reopened the Infundibulum and called up a search menu. In went the output from the Fourier transform. The veils and clouds of Panoply codes whirled and swirled, the camera plunged through glowing walls of jump points. There. Everett highlighted it, copied it. He pulled up the Jump Controller and dropped the code into the window. The board lit green.

“Heisenberg jump is ready.”

“’He delivereth and rescueth, and he worketh signs and wonders in heaven,’” Sharkey murmured.

Captain Anastasia thumbed the intercom.

“Status, Mr. Mchynlyth?”

“We can jump and we can fly.”

“Mr. Singh—”

“Now hold on one wee moment,” Mchynlyth shouted from the speaker. “I'm going to need my power cables back.”

Captain Anastasia bit back a curse.

“How long?”

“Two minutes.”

“Make it so. Sen, hold our position. Mr. Singh, on my mark. Mr. Sharkey, how far away are those airoplans?”

“They're here, now,” Sharkey said, and the ship shook as three dazzling deadly fighters speared out of nowhere, engines a howl of speed and aggression. Everett ducked. Captain Anastasia stood boldly at the great window.

“Oh, but you are beautiful,” she whispered as they knifed over the top of the ship.

“We're being hailed again,” Sharkey said. “If we do not land immediately we will be fired upon.”

“Cables stowed,” Mchynlyth reported. “We can leave any time you want.”

“Everett, at your convenience.”

Everett touched the jump button.
There should be sound effects
, he thought. There should be a noise like engines powering up. There should be some
Babylon 5
kind of
schwummm
noise, like when the starships came out of hyperspace, or even that
Doctor Who
sound, like a dinosaur in pain, when the TARDIS dematerialized. All there was in a Heisenberg jump was white…

…and then somewhere else.

“Did you say something, Everett Singh?” Sen asked.

“No,” Everett said.

“‘Funny, cos I's sure I heard you say something.”

“I didn't say anything.”

“Well, maybes not so much say something as make a sound.”

“A sound? What like?”

“Well, sort of like…
voom.
”

“What?”

“Voom,” Sen said. “Only long.
Vooooom
.”

“I did not go voom.”

“Yes you did you did you did.”

“The Heisenberg jump's done something to your hearing,” Everett said, but it was a lie. He had made a noise. He had gone voom.
Vooooom.
The kind of noise an airship jumping between parallel universes through a Heisenberg Gate should make. Sen pouted at him in annoyance, but out of the corner of his eye he caught Captain Anastasia smiling.

Voom!
she mouthed silently.

Snow had fallen on the city. For a moment Everett did not recognize his London, his Tottenham. Then the shadows and shapes and slumpings of slush and melted snow made a pattern, a pattern he knew. That must be the curve of Northumberland Road, there were the tracks and platforms at Angel Road Station. That dark body of water, like a dead eye, could only be Lockwood Reservoir. There was the plaza off the High Road. He and his dad had walked up that road so many Saturdays. Everett pulled down a monitor and clicked up the belly cameras. Directly beneath the hull were the snow-covered stands and the rectangle of grass between them.