Planesrunner (Everness Book One) (16 page)

“Consistently, sir. ‘Redeem the time, because the days are evil. Take ye heed every one of his neighbour, and trust ye not in any brother: for every brother will utterly supplant, and every neighbour will walk with slanders. For I will surely deliver thee, and thou shalt not fall by the sword, but thy life shall be for a prey unto thee: because thou hast put thy trust in me, saith the Lord.'”

“Do you know all the Bible?” Everett asked.

“Every bit of it,” Sen interrupted. “Old Testament best. It sounds better.”

“'Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and light unto my path,'” Sharkey quoted. “'Hear the word of the Lord, ye who tremble at his word.' Psalm 119, verse 105, and Isaiah 66, verse 5. We have not been properly introduced sir. Our previous meeting was a tad strained. I am Miles O'Rahilly Lafayette Sharkey, citizen of the Confederated States of America; weighmaster, soldier of fortune, adventurer, gentleman: Atlanta is my home and Heaven my expectation.” He swept off his hat. His hair was long and streaked with silver, though Everett guessed him to be in his mid thirties. Everett took the offered hand firmly.

“Everett Singh, sir.” Sharkey's way of talking was catching. “Goalkeeper, mathematician, traveller, planesrunner.”

Miles O'Rahilly Lafayette Sharkey's left eyebrow lifted a millimetre. He bowed.

“Honoured, sir.”

E
verett rode the lift line up through the inner organs of
Everness
. Beneath him, the loading deck where Sharkey was in careful negotiations with a stevedore over a consignment of containers bound for St. Petersburg. Above him, like clouds, the ranks of gas cells, and Sen, a body-length above him, riding the line high with the grace and ease of an angel. She grinned down at him. Thinking in three dimensions was easy—he had had to think in seven dimensions to fold Tejendra's random Heisenberg jump addresses into the Infundibulum. Living in three dimensions—effectively on the inside of a huger, hollow object—that was much less easy. But he was getting the feel of it, learning the timings and the orientations and to think that the shortest distance between two points was often
across
, not around. He thought of it as minding a goal the size of an ocean liner. Sen swung in over the central catwalk and dropped lightly to the mesh. Everett was right behind her.

Sen wanted to give him a tour of the ship before the weigh-in—the second time he had heard that faintly ominous phrase that day. She took him round the crew quarters first—
galley you know, captain's ready room you know
; showed him his own little cabin—
latty
was the Airish-speak; helped him sling his hammock and showed him how to use it without rolling straight out again. She had even graced him with a glimpse into her own latty. Everett got an impression of tubes of cosmetics crowding every surface, strewn underwear (rather small, it seemed to Everett) and posters of rugby players with their shirts off. The bridge: the heart of the ship. It was smaller than Everett had thought; with all the crew at their stations it would have been crowded. But the view from the floor-to-ceiling window was compelling: a winter afternoon in Hackney Great Port, airships drifting across the purple-and-gold December skyline, plumes of steam and smoke rising from along the edge of the world. Everett barely noticed the instruments and tools of airship command; the steering yokes, the lift levers, ballast pumps, the joysticks that trimmed the attitude, the binnacle, the computer displays glowing behind their magnifying monocles, the banks of closed-circuit monitors keeping eyes on all of
Everness's
huge body, inside and out. Then down a spiral staircase, bent double in the crawlspaces beneath the cargo deck, among the batteries; banks and banks of them wedged so close Everett could hardly squeeze between them. They were warm and humming and filled the claustrophobic crawl-ways with the thrilling, spicy smell of electricity.
Everness
, like all airships of her class, ran on electricity. In dock at Hackney Great Port she was recharging from the port grid, but she was configured to charge up from any available electrical source.

“Worst comes to it, we could even hook up to a thunderstorm,” Sen said. “Bit dodgy, though. If you gets that wrong…” She left the sentence unfinished. She looked uncomfortable, as if she had said too much.

Everett tried to calculate the amount of energy stored in the plates of batteries. There was technology here decades beyond anything on E10. These seemed to use the same carbon nanofibre as the ship's skin, skeleton and lift-cells. Yet their computer technology—their comptator technology—was how Victorians would build computers. Different worlds, different techs.

“I's taking you to the COG,” Sen said.

“Centre of Gravity,” Everett said, thinking aloud. “Of course, the cargo and the ballast all has to be equally placed around the centre of gravity to keep the ship stable.”

“Smart, aincha?”

“Thank you,” Everett said. His new boots clicked on the spindly spun-carbon catwalk, delicate as spiderweb. That was it.
Organic
. This was a body. He was inside a living thing, a whale-machine.

“Tell me about Mr. Sharkey.”

“What about him? He's first mate and weighmaster.”

“I mean, those were pretty cool-looking guns.”

“Cool, were they? Impressed you, did he? Charmed you, didn't he? He's a real charmer, all that Southern gentleman stuff, and the manners, and ‘sir,' and ‘ma'am,' then gives them a big hunk of that hokey Old Testament stuff and they just roll over and let him tickle their bellies. Weighmaster, soldier of fortune, adventurer, gentleman my arse. Miles O'Rahilly Lafayette Sharkey's not even his real name. And he ain't no gentleman. No natural gentleman. Oh he's Miles Sharkey, all right, his da was Reverend Jasper Sharkey, preacher and Bible salesman. He ran travelling tent missions all over Georgia and the Home States—that's where all that Word of the Dear comes from. Soon as he could he bailed and took himself off all over the Confed. That's where yer O'Rahilly Lafayette comes from. You get farther down there if you're a gentleman. The story he tells is that he shot his own da in a duel because he slapped Sharkey's mum at the Peachtree Ball in Atlanta. Now, I reckons he did shoot his da, but it weren't over his dear ol' ma. Reckon the old bugger got hammered on the mint juleps and started mouthing off. Don't like anyone looking cleverer than him, our Sharkey. Been all around the world, he says: debt collector, art dealer, con man, bodyguard, pearl fisherman, barman, diplomat. That's what he said he were when we picked him up in Stamboul. Spun us some tale about working with the tsarists against the Ottomans and the Ottomans against the tsarists, but he knew his way around a lading bill and he can negotiate anyone up. That was back in oh seven; I was a kid then. He's good, our Sharkey; love the omi, but he wants you to like him and sometimes, well, that's not good in a person.”

“In my world, the Ottoman Empire ended a hundred years ago. And we've got one America: the United States.”

“Gor, that's dull. We got three. There's the Confederated States of America; that's Sharkey's home. It's a rich rich place. It's all land, you see. No one ever went broke buying land. So now they got all these genetic-whatchermacallit crops and they're making a fortune. They even got this new genetically-thingied bean can produce oil—like your oil. Liquid fuel. Revolutionise the world, they say. ‘Cept I reckons we's gone too far in one direction to be able to turn back and head another direction. Sort of like turning an airship. Needs a long run up and a lot of airspace. Atlanta's beautiful, though, that wall of glass towers all gleaming and goldie in the morning light. Then there's the United States. Which is like what you have, I reckons. They think they're the real America coz they don't recognise the Confed, so they gets really angry if you mention the CSA or Atlanta or anything like that. They was the original and the best, they says. I mean, it's a hundred and sixty years. Get over it. Then on the other side of the Rockies it's Amexica. That's the bit that broke away from Mexico in the last civil war. Now that's a doss. Los Angeles, haciendas and orange trees and cool pools and everything. I could stay there forever. Beautiful. I likes a bit of sun on me back. Oh, and there's a fourth. I's forgetting Canada. Funny how you do that.”

Sen's toe tapped on metal. Everett looked down to see a small steel medallion set into the mesh. It was engraved with three triangles, superimposed on top of each other.

“The centre of gravity,” Everett said, looking up around him at the spaces and strut and stresses of the huge airship, all focused here, all balanced in equilibrium around this one point. He touched the little metal medallion. He felt he could balance
Everness
on the ball of a finger.

“'Tain't much. Come and see outside,” Sen said. Lateral walk-ways joined the main spine at the centre of gravity. Sen took the right catwalk. They walked between the gas cells, held in their nanocarbon nets.

“So, who is this Iddler?” Everett said, and remembering Sen's answer the last time he had asked her that question, said, “And don't give me that stupid rhyme again.”

“What's wrong with that rhyme?” Sen said. “I made it up.”

Everything she said was a question or a challenge. It was infuriating, it was fascinating.

“You could just tell me.”

Sen relented.

“You know everywhere there's always some big fat bugger who don't exactly run everything, because if he did that, he'd draw attention to himself, but can like, sort things, knows people, makes things go away. And in this business, sooner or later you runs into something you wish you could make go away. Annie, now she tells me things she won't tell another living soul, not even Sharkey—and there was this time, early on, just after we got the ship, and she got this tax bill she couldn't pay. New captain with a bona ship: the only kind of loan she'll get is from a bank wanting to foreclose on
Everness
and sell her on. So she goes to the Iddler and he makes it go away. Like that. Gone. ‘Cept instead of owing the bank, now she's owing him. So every so often, and it's not that often, he asks her to run a little consignment for him on the QT. Extra special like—there's always some cove of his at the other end to take receipt in out-of-the-way places, kind of off the normal landing sites. ‘Coz we may be big, but I can drop her on the head of a pin.

“So it's all dally until two months ago, when the Iddler's sharpies come calling and ask her to take a consignment over to St. Petersburg. Annie's not in a position to say no, so she does, but up over Reugen she gets hailed by an Imperial Deutscher Customs cutter. They order us to stand to, drop anchors, and make ground. These consignments, they're not exactly as you might say, bijou. The moment they comes aboard, it'll be in their faces like a dog's bollocks. We daren't outrun and we can't outgun it. So Annie orders me to take her out over the Baltic like we haven't heard, and then on the third hail, as they're getting above us to force us down, we turn and drop the consignment into the sea. In the drink. Oh, sorry Mein Kapitan, radio problems; of course we'll comply. We make ground at Stralsund, they come aboard, and we're clean as a nun's fanny.

“The problem is, the Iddler don't like it when he loses a consignment. He's out of pocket. He wants compensation. Hard dinari. And our captain, she's not one of the bigger families, like the Gallacellis or even the Bromleys. They got relatives and deep pockets. Us, we got ourselves, and
Everness
. It's about cash flow—so Sharkey tells me. Dinari coming in quicker than dinari going out. Problem is, it's other way round too much of the time. So, the Iddler's sending his sharpies to give us little reminders.”

“Would they have cut you up?”

“Them fruit-boys? Like to see ‘em try. Hey, you're in luck, Everett Singh.”

The crosswalk ended at a hatch in
Everness
's skin. Sen peered up through the porthole and waved at something Everett could not see. Sen spun the hatch wheel; lugs unfastened; the hatch swung inwards.

“Come on then, Everett Singh.”

Everett stepped out onto a balcony as delicate and elegant as a spider's nest. He resisted the temptation to glance down at what was beneath his feet. He looked out. A hundred metres away lay
Everness's
neighbour, nosed in at the docking arm. She carried—airships, Everett had learned, are always female—a crest of three golden crowns on a blue shield and the name
Leonora Christine
. She was offloading; pallets and containers running down on hoists from her cargo holds into the receiving arms of busy, scuttling forklifts and loaders. The last of the small fast clouds had been cleared from the sky; the wind had dropped; the air was intensely clear and still. The smoke from the eternal chimneys rose straight up, a palisade along the edge of London. Everett shivered at the promise of deep winter cold. It was only six days to Christmas.

Next he looked
along
. The balcony was on
Everness's
exact centreline. To Everett's right were the forward impeller pods and stabilisers. The windows of the bridge and the crew quarters were hidden by the forward curve of the hull. To his left were the aft impellers and the elegant sweep of the tail fins.
Everness
, you are a beautiful girl, Everett thought. He gripped the railing. This was real. This was here.

“Look up,” Sen suggested, smiling wickedly. Everett almost went back over the rail with surprise. Mchynlyth's face grinned down into his from a distance of a few centimetres. He was standing on the hull; facing a peeled-back flap of ship-skin a metre on a side. A harness buckled over his baggy orange flight-suit connected him by a line to the rail that ran the length of
Everness's
back. Mchynlyth was abseiling on the outer hull of an airship. As Everett watched, Mchynlyth rolled down the skin to cover the exposed ribs and then ran what looked like a knife along the edges. Wherever the knife passed, the join vanished. The skin was whole and entire. Mchynlyth noticed Everett and Sen beneath him, grinned between his legs at them, then jumped off the hull, paid out line, and dropped lightly onto the balcony beside them.

“How did you do that?” Everett asked. “The hull, I mean, it's nanocarbon.”

Mchynlyth held up his tool. It was indeed a knife, curiously curved. The edge of the blade seemed blurred, like a heat-haze.