Planesrunner (Everness Book One) (28 page)

“Everett, Everett, Everett,” Paul McCabe said. The tone of false sorrow in his voice made Everett want to punch him. “If only you'd been honest with me, if only you'd trusted me from the start. None of this is necessary. I'll take you home. Come on.”

“Silence, McCabe,” Charlotte Villiers snapped. “I could explain to you that your father grossly misrepresents us, Everett. Yes, of course we heard everything. Our world is threatened, your world is threatened, all our worlds are threatened. We are honest. We are good. We are right. But ultimately, why should I bother? I have all the power here. It is necessary that I have the device. Give it to me.”

“No,” Everett said. He clutched Dr. Quantum tightly to his chest.

“Oh, Mr. Singh, please. This is not the movies. Sergeant.” The SWAT team raised their guns. “Start with the woman. Then the American who is so fond of the Bible. He can find out the truth of the words he quotes.” The guns clicked round onto Captain Anastasia. “Mr. Singh?”

“She'll do it, Everett,” Paul McCabe said.

“Dad?” Everett said.

“Ev, give it to her.”

“But you said…”

“She can take it from us any time she wants. Give it to her.”

Everett set Dr. Quantum down on the floor and pushed it towards Charlotte Villiers.

“Sense has prevailed. Thank you.” Charlotte Villiers opened her little clutch bag. Suddenly, the jumpgun was in her hand. “Now, I've had quite enough of the Singh family.” She levelled it at Everett and Tejendra. “Good-bye.”

Everett went sprawling as Tejendra pushed him away as hard as he could. There was a flash of light. Tejendra was gone.

Charlotte Villiers gave a little animal shriek of anger, like a street cat facing off over a kill, and brought the jumpgun to bear on Everett. There was a sound like a mechanical cough. The jumpgun flew from Charlotte Villiers's fingers. She cried out in pain and grasped her wrist. A thumper bag lay on the ground next to the jumpgun. In the centre of the smashed window Sen hung in a drop-line harness, thumper in her hand. Laser beams danced in the air as every SWAT-team gun came to bear on her. She gave a little squeak. In the moment of distraction Sharkey pulled out his shotguns, Mchynlyth raised his thumper, and Everett rolled, grabbed the jumpgun. Everett aimed the jumpgun at Charlotte Villiers.

“Bring him back.”

“You know I can't do that.”

The SWAT team swung their laser sights onto the
Everness
crew. It was a standoff.

“I'll shoot.”

“And? I will live elsewhere, but you will all die. And we shall have the device. Your equation does not balance.”

Tejendra was gone. Tejendra was
gone
.

Everett scooped up Dr. Quantum and turned the jumpgun on it.

“It's gone forever. You'll never find it.”

“Now Everett, I need you to know that I do not condone…,” Paul McCabe began.

“Shut up, you buffoon,” Charlotte Villiers snapped.

“I'll do it,” Everett said.

“I believe you would, Everett,” Charlotte Villiers said.

“I've drop lines here!” Sen shouted from the window. She reeled the thumper bag back into her weapon. “Come on!”

“Tell them to put down their guns,” Everett said. He picked up Dr. Quantum and held it out at arm's length, the jumpgun pointed at it.

“As he says, Sergeant,” Charlotte Villiers said. “You have rewritten the terms of the equation, young man.”

Sharkey covered Everett with his shotguns as Captain Anastasia pushed him to the waiting drop line. The jumpgun was cumbersome and impossibly heavy in Everett's hand, as if it had taken into it all the wrong it had ever dealt out. He kept it trained on Dr. Quantum. The sheer adrenaline burn, the goalkeeper reflex, that let him dive to safety, see the spinning jumpgun, scoop it up and aim it all without conscious thought, all by pure physical instinct, was fading. The shakes, the fear were creeping over him. He had made the save of his life. No, he hadn't saved anything. He hadn't saved what mattered. Tejendra was gone. His dad was gone. His dad had been there for a moment, and that moment had been real, so real that it made all the other incredible things real. And in a flash of light, he was gone. Gone where no one could ever find him. He was dead to Everett. And nothing was real now.

“Hand here, foot there,” Captain Anastasia said. “You know how to do it, Everett. You know how to do it.”

She fastened him onto the line beneath Sen. Everett kept the jumpgun trained on Dr. Quantum though every muscle and sinew screamed with pain.

“Everett,” Paul McCabe said, “I'm so sorry.” His voice sounded to Everett like a yappy little dog, the kind you want to kick. For him there was only one person in the room. He met Charlotte Villiers eye to eye. Her eyes were cold and they were pale and they were blue as the Atlantic and they held not one atom of pity. He saw respect there, and therefore hate. No one had ever bested her before, and for that she would be his undying enemy. She would hunt him to the edge of the multiverse to correct that error.

“Miss Sixsmyth, I expressly said that you were to remain with the ship,” Captain Anastasia bellowed as she strapped in.

“You also expressly said that I's had command,” Sen said.

“Yes I did. And you took command. Smartly done, Miss Sixsmyth.”

“Love you, Ma.” Sen grinned. “Going up fast in three, two…” She hit the wrist control. Everett was jerked out of the window and into the air so hard he almost dropped the jumpgun. Flying. He was flying up through the cold black night, through the flurrying snow. He looked up. Above him, seeming poised on the pinnacle of the Tyrone Tower, lit up by the tower's floodlights, was
Everness
. Below was the black Gothic facade of the tower, yellow light pouring from the shattered twenty-second floor apartment.

“Dad!” he screamed down into the dark. “Dad! Dad! Dad!”

S
en dropped into her seat behind the thrust controls. Sharkey took his position at the communications desk. The monitors showed a distorted close-up of Mchynlyth down on the engineering deck, grinning into the camera, both thumbs up. Captain Anastasia bent over a comptator, tapping keys.

“Your heading, Miss Sixsmyth.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Sen said. She tapped the bearing that had just appeared on her screen and slid it into the navigation comptator.

“Ahead full.”

Sen pushed the thrust levers to the furthest extent of their travel.
Everness
trembled as the impellers bit deep into the air. Mchynlyth had taken an engine from the starboard side and—in a thrilling operation involving ropes, slings, and abseiling—fixed it to one of the engine mounts in the port side damaged in the fight against the
Arthur P. Everness
was flying on six of her eight impellers, but she was trim and balanced, and Mchynlyth had spares in the engineering bay that he boasted he could rig in an hour each, if the ship needed to run. The story about refitting in Bristol had been a fiction to allow them to tack in across central London, within zip-line distance of the Tyrone Tower.

“Take us up into the cloud. Radar off, and observe radio silence, Mr. Sharkey. We go to dark running.”

“We will be flying blind, forgive me my insouciance, ma'am,” Sharkey said.

“Noted, Mr. Sharkey, and forgiven. All exterior cameras on monitors, please. Let's keep our eyes open. Sen, bona speed for the coast of Deutschland.”

“'And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch,'” Sharkey muttered as Sen turned to the lift levers and drew them slowly up. Wisps of cloud, flecked with snow, fringed the upper edge of the window; then
Everness
vanished into grey blankness.

“Mr. Singh.”

What was that? Sounds, voices, people moved around Everett like the snow in the cloud through which
Everness
flew. Nothing was real; nothing was solid. He knew he was on the bridge of the airship, that he was fleeing across a winter cityscape to the open sea, and beyond it Deutschland and safety, flying low and dark to avoid detection, but he had no idea how he had got there from hurtling up the drop line into the London night. He knew that the figures moving through the dazed numbness in his head were people he knew and cared about, trying to save their lives and their ship. He knew it, but he could not connect to it. He could not make it feel real. He should not be with these people. He should be with his dad, with Mum and Victory-Rose. Again and again his memory went back to the room on the twenty-second floor, to Charlotte Villiers, feet apart, the jumpgun clutched in both hands, the strange little emission-head—not like any gun muzzle at all—pointed at him. He could see the curl on her red red lips as she squeezed the firing stud. He could see hotel room carpet—so new it still had fluff-balls, but still ugly as all hotel carpet is ugly—loom up as Tejendra sent him sprawling towards it. He could see the flash of light as the jump-gate opened. What he could not see was the moment Tejendra went from
there
to
not there
. Not there. Never there. Never would be there again. Flicked out to some random world in the ten to the eighty of the Panoply. That sound again. His name. Captain Anastasia calling his name.

“Captain?”

“I'd like to see that weapon you took.” She beckoned Everett to the empty flight engineer station. Mchynlyth liked to be close and dirty with his machinery. It kept him a safe distance from Captain Anastasia.

Everett set the jumpgun on the desk. He wiped his fingers on the hem of his shorts. He imagined that it left a film of oil on his fingers that he would never quite get out, stained down to the skin cells like a tattoo. He never wanted to touch it again. Captain Anastasia carefully picked the jumpgun up with her fingertips. She studied it with distaste. It was small, squat, chubby, but it sat in the hand as if it changed shape to fit the contours of the individual palm and fingers. There were two thumb-wheel controls on the top, a trigger contact on the handle, and a data port in the rear. None were marked; none gave any sign as to how they operated. The barrel was a short, thick cylinder that ended in a small concave dish.

“Unhallowed thing. Mr. Singh—Everett—I need your help. I need to know everything about this device. Can you do that for me?” She looked Everett full in the eye, daring him to look away, daring him to push her away into something foggy and blurred and unreal. “Will you do that for me?”

Then the floor tilted. Engines screamed.
Everness
pitched nose-up. Everett reeled towards the open door. He grabbed the edge of the desk and clung on. The jumpgun slid. Captain Anastasia lunged across the engineering station and grabbed it with both hands. The nose pitched higher. Loose debris avalanched across the floor. Everett saw Sen hauling back on the control yoke with all her strength. The ship shuddered. Every switch, every screen, every dial and magnifier rattled. Everett hung on to the desk for his life. Through the great window he saw the snow-covered back of an airship. It filled the glass. Still
Everness
climbed, metre by metre, trying to clear the airship crossing its flight path. There was a sound like the steel jaws of the wolf that ate the sun closing. The ship shook to its very atoms. Then Sen pushed the yoke forwards. Captain Anastasia fought her way to the intercom, handhold by handhold.

“What was that?” she said.

“Iberian Skylines 2202
Infanta Isabel
, on route Madrid—London,” Sharkey said. “Close enough to read El Capitano's shoulder tags.”

“It just came up out of nowhere,” Sen said. Her face was whiter than pale. Her voice was thin as winter.

Captain Anastasia thumbed open the intercom. “Mr. Mchynlyth, status?”

On the monitor, Mchynlyth threw up his hands in resignation.

“Ach, between Bromleys and the sharpies and the Plenitude, the Goodwin Sands and the Tyrone Tower, what's a couple of centimetres off the rudder? We'll live; we'll fly.”

“Captain.” Every head turned to Sharkey's communication post. No one had ever heard him call Anastasia by her title. “They know we're here now. The Iberian put out a near-miss report.”

Captain Anastasia grimaced. She pressed her hands to the glass and looked out into the fog and snow.

“We're not even over the Smoke Ring.”

“Captain, Dunsfold ATC is demanding we identify ourselves and file a flight plan,” Sharkey said.

“Ignore them, Mr. Sharkey. Maintain speed and heading, Sen. If they know where we are, then there's no point us fighting on through this murk. Take us up and out of it.”

Sen answered at the helm. The cloud and snow broke around
Everness's
prow like waves as she lifted out of the snow cloud into the clear air. A half-moon lay on the eastern edge of the world, lazing on a silvered blanket of clouds. The sky was brilliant with stars, each as sharp as a spear-point. Through the numbness, the shock, the unreality, Everett felt the sky touch him, call him out. It was the oldest mystery, the wonder on which all of science floated: the stars. He went to the window. The airship seemed to race over the endless landscape of moon-silvered cloud. Everett looked up at the constellations. He knew their forms, he knew their names; the gods and monsters and heroes that held truths more huge and marvellous than any legend. Moonshine lit his face. He became aware that Captain Anastasia was watching him.

Sharkey cupped an earphone to his head and held up a hand: silence in the bridge.

“I'm getting chatter on Frequency Two Eight.”

Nervous glances flew across the bridge.

“What's Frequency Two Eight?” Everett whispered to Sen.

“The militaries talk on it,” she said.

“Well, since they can see us we might as well have a look at them,” Captain Anastasia said. “Full radar sweep, Mr. Sharkey, but don't overdo it. We want to preserve a certain air of mystery.”

She bent over a monitor. The magnified display lit her face green. Like Tejendra's face when he looked into the Infundibulum, Everett thought. And then he looked at the stars and made a promise to them. I will find him. Through all the planes and all the worlds, I will find him. I have the Infundibulum. The Panoply is mine. And he is the man who built the Heisenberg Gate. Whatever world he's in, if the resources and the knowledge are there, he can build another one. You haven't beaten us, Charlotte Villiers.

“Captain, ma'am…,” Everett said.

Captain Anastasia held up her hand.
Quiet
.

“Two contacts?” she said, frowning at the screen.

“That's how I reckon it, ma'am,” Sharkey said. “On our heading. Small and fast and on our tail.”

“We'd better have Mr. Mchynlyth up here,” Captain Anastasia said. “He can put that time in His Majesty's Navy to good use.”

Mchynlyth was piped up from engineering.

“Mchynlyth was in the navy?” Everett asked Sen.

“Engineer on the
Royal Oak
,” Sen said.

What's the
Royal Oak? Everett wanted to ask, but he was learning that of airships and their ways and their crews there was no end of questions.

Mchynlyth on the bridge looked as out of place as a tiara on a pig. “Aye,” he said, adjusting the magnifier lens and squinting into the green glow. “Two naval cutters, sure as eggs is eggs. There's no mistaking that signature.”

“We've outrun cutters before,” Captain Anastasia said.

“We've outrun old Deutscher customs scows on the Baltic patrol,” Mchynlyth said. “Those'll be Navy Class 22s; the nippiest wee buggers this side of the Atlantic.”

“If we rigged the spare engines?”

“It'll be two and a half hours before they run us down instead of two.”

Captain Anastasia returned to her charting table. Everett had felt
Everness
quiver a few minutes ago as she crossed the invisible thermal of the Smoke Ring, the chimneys that powered London hidden down beneath the snow cloud. He made calculations in his head. They would be out over the snow-covered flatlands of East Anglia, east by northeast. The coastline could only be minutes away, and the sea and German airspace. He saw Captain Anastasia make the same calculations and reach her own conclusions.

“Take us up, Miss Sixsmyth. Ten thousand metres.”

“Ma? Ma'am?”

“Ten thousand metres, Miss Sixsmyth.”

“That's the top limit of our operational envelope,” Mchynlyth said. “If we over-pressure…”

“I'm aware of that, Mr. Mchynlyth. I'm also aware that Sheerness Automated Weather Station is reporting a southerly deflection of the polar jet stream down to 51 degrees north. If we can get onto that air current, it'll give us an extra eighty knots and we can surf her right into the throat of Deutscher Bight.”

“An extra eighty knots,” Mchynlyth said. “And we're flat-out as it is.”

“Do you concur, Mr. Mchynlyth?”

“We've the structural integrity of a fart in a hurricane.”

“Do you concur?”

“I concur, ma'am.”

“Take her to the ceiling, Miss Sixsmyth.”

“'Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,'” Sharkey muttered.

Everness
obeyed Sen swiftly and sweetly. She shied and bucked in the turbulence as she entered the fast-moving stream of high-altitude air. The cloud layer was so far below it looked to Everett like a landscape in its own right, a nation made of night. He could see three hundred miles in every direction. Those red-and-green sparks moving across the cloud-scape were the riding lights of airships. He stood among the stars. Everett became aware that Sen was beside him.

“Hey, how, who…”

“Autopilot. So, it's bijou bumpy, but the machine can handle that without Sen. Everett Singh, I's made you something.”

Everett felt her press a soft square of card into his hand: a trump from the Everness tarot, facedown in his palm.

“The deck, well, it's a living thing like? So it needs to grow, coz if a thing stops growing it starts dying. So every once in a while it tells me it needs to be able to talk about a new person or a new adventure or a new start or a new possibility, so I makes it a new card.”

“This is my card?” Everett curled his hand to look at the card's face. Sen touched him quickly and lightly.

“No, Everett Singh. You turns it when you needs it.”

He slid the card into one of the side pockets of his shorts.

“We're being hailed,” Sharkey announced. “One of the Navy cutters.”

“On screens, please,” Captain Anastasia said. Everyone pulled magnifiers over the tiny display tubes. The screens crackled with static that cleared to show an airship bridge. Pilot, navigation, engineering, and command posts were crewed by smart-haircutted men in sky-blue military jackets and round berets with red pompoms. The captain was distinguished by his peaked hat and a lot of gold braid.

“LTA
Everness
, this is HMAS
Indefatigable
,” the captain said. “I am Captain Davenport. I wish to speak to your commanding officer.”

Captain Anastasia pulled down an intercom on its boom-arm and pressed the transmit button.