Planesrunner (Everness Book One) (29 page)

“I am Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth of
Everness
. What's your business?”

“Captain Sixsmyth, descend to one thousand metres, stop all engines, and prepare to be boarded.”

“The two cutters have entered the jet stream and are closing with us,” Sharkey said.

“So noted,” Captain Anastasia said. She thumbed the talk button again. “
Indefatigable
, we are a registered merchant ship on a commercial flight to Berlin.”

“You have not filed a flight plan, you are in violation of air traffic control regulations, and we have it on authority that you are in illegal possession of a piece of technology that poses a security threat to this realm,” Captain Davenport said. He was a smart but pudgy-faced middle-aged man, hair neatly slicked, with the prim but disappointed look of a commander who knew that a naval cutter was the highest he would ever rise in the air service. This was the most action he would ever see.

“On what authority?”

Charlotte Villiers stepped between Captain Davenport and the lens. She smiled. The wide-angle lens made her lips look huge and vampire-red and devouring.

“My authority. Hello, Captain Sixsmyth. Everett. Happy Christmas. I really would advise you to follow Captain Davenport's orders. You are in possession of Plenitude property, and it is incumbent on me, as plenipotentiary, to safeguard it. I am in one of the fastest and most modern military airships. You are in a crippled cargo barge that, frankly, has seen better days. I have two squads of royal marines at my disposal. You have, well, we can see what you have. Children, Captain, children. Do the sensible thing. This need not be painful. Oh yes. In case you're entertaining notions of a last-minute brilliant idea or a daring escape, you might want to make another sweep with your radar.”

Charlotte Villiers reached up and turned off the camera.

“Mother and Mary and sweet Saint Pio,” Sharkey said softly. The screens lit up with a radar display: tracking down from the north, cutting in towards the coast of Norfolk, was a monster radar contact: a behemoth airship escorted by six smaller ones. Mchynlyth dialled up the magnification on the lens until he could clearly read the ident number on the radar contact.

“RAN 101,” Mchynlyth said, squinting. “That's her, all right. Me old mucker the
Royal Oak
. She must have been patrolling the Norwegian coast, keeping an eye on those perfidious Tsarists.”

“What's the
Royal Oak?”
Everett asked.

Mchynlyth spun a brass trackball on the main comptator, tapped some metal keys.

“This is.”

The illustration that appeared on the screen showed an airship hanging in the air above the mighty berths and polls and locks and channels of east London docks. It made them look like garden ponds, the ships unloading in them like little clockwork toys, the kind you got for the bath that worked once and never again. Everett knew he was looking at a monster. This made clouds look small. This was a flying city.

“If that picture's true; it—she—must be five, six hundred metres long.”

“That picture disnae do her justice. Two thousand Imperial feet, nose to tail,” Mchynlyth said proudly. “And an honour to serve on every one of them. And those wee flecks on the radar around her, those wee flies? Those are corvettes, each of them the size of our airbag here.”

Thirty impeller pods. Multiple command decks and flying bridges. Gun blisters and missile racks. On each side, three wings, each wing carrying aircraft—aeroplanes—perched on launch rails like perching pterodactyls, wings folded around their glass cockpits, propellers furled.

“Those fighters'll catch us before we get even close to Deutscher airspace. They can shoot us clean out of the sky and there's not a flyin' thing we can do about it.”

Everett frowned. High-speed cutters loaded with marines closing behind him, the Royal Air Navy's most powerful carrier with six escort ships each the size of
Everness
closing to intercept from the north. All this firepower. They could turn
Everness
to wisps of ash, blowing on the wind. But it didn't make sense.

“Captain Anastasia, can I have the jumpgun?”

She held it out at arm's length. It still felt oily and dirty and wrong down to its atoms to Everett, but he laid it on Mchynlyth's engineering bench and looked at it. Looked hard at it. Looked close at it. Looked long at it. Looked at every tiny notch and line and knurl of it. The controls were simple. The right wheel controlled the aperture: when he turned it, the little screen showed a fan-shaped display, lighting up higher and further to show the width of the jump effect. The other seemed to control recharge—the shorter the recharge time, the less wide the area of effect. The options for the jumpgun were lots of quick, small shots, or a few big, wide-angle ones. The charge meter read full. A panel on the bottom of the butt opened to show an oblong charge pack. Everett could make nothing of it. He slid it back into its housing. It locked with a smooth click. There was a safety ring around the trigger; you pressed and turned it to lock, and the trigger button sprang out and lit up. Everett quickly turned the safety lock back. The docking port. He lifted the gun close to his eyes. There were metal contacts in there. It looked very very like a USB port. The shape of the socket and the arrangement of the contacts were different, but Everett did not doubt that if he asked, Mchynlyth could work up an operating USB cable. The gun was intended to be connected to something computational. There was information inside it. Information about what?

Patterns, coincidences, intentions began to fall into place.

“Captain…,” he said.

Then everyone on
Everness
's bridge ducked as two small, white, incredibly fast objects shot out from under the hull, scorched across the window, and hung in midair ahead of the ship, holding station in the rocking, rolling jet-stream.

“Get a light on those, Mr. Sharkey,” Captain Anastasia ordered. Spotlights stabbed out from under the great window and illuminated the hovering objects. They were two remote drones, holding precise position side by side, ten metres apart. The control was perfect; they precisely matched
Everness's
velocity.

“So, the wee lady Villiers is taking a personal hand in it,” Mchynlyth said.

“Explain please, Mr. Mchynlyth.”

“You'll not have seen those. They're not standard issue—not yet. I know what they are because there's old navy ratings drink down the Knight. Snipships, Captain. What you can't see is that between them there's a nanocarbon fibre. Like the one I opened up that lock with, but a lot stronger. I think you get the picture. They'll lop off our impeller pods one at a time snippity snappety and then slice us up like Polska sausage.”

“Captain, a word with you,” Sharkey said.

“Speak, Mr. Sharkey,” Captain Anastasia said. The snipships held position in perfect formation.

“Ma'am, with your permission, in your ready room.”

“Impossible, Mr. Sharkey.”

“What I need to say, well, it ain't for, shall we say, public consumption.”

“Not possible, Mr. Sharkey. Whatever it is, say it here and say it quick. We are running out of options.”

“Very well, ma'am.” Sharkey turned his chair into the centre of the flight deck. “I did give you the opportunity—let all here be witness to that. Give him to her. The boy. Give him to the Villiers woman. She can take that comptator thing he's been lugging around any time she wants. We're in no position to stop her. Give her what she wants. That way, we might be able to save the ship. We might be able to fly the trade routes like we always have. We might be something other than rebels and renegades and vile offenders. We might have a life better than being hunted like dirty thieving magpies down the rest of our days. Give her the boy, Captain. Save the ship.” Sharkey looked at every face in turn. He held Everett's look the longest. Everett's eyes were very still. “I'll call them myself.”

And Sen vaulted over the flight station, snatched a screwdriver from engineering, and in three heartbeats had the blade pressed to the corner of Sharkey's left eye. His hands hovered over the handles of his shotguns.

“You never ever ever say that,” she said in a voice like winter. She leaned over him as close as a kiss. “You never ever ever do that. You never ever ever think that, you dirty bad faithless man. This is
Everness
. This is us. All of us. We's family. Everett's family. Family's all we got.”

“Sen, return to your post!” Captain Anastasia thundered. Sen slowly drew the screwdriver away from Sharkey's eye, but she never took her eyes off his. “Miss Sixsmyth, your station! Speed, heading, and altitude are unchanged. Mr. Sharkey, maintain radio silence.”

“
Royal Oak
has launched fighters,” Mchynlyth said, bent close to the radar screen.

“Why?” Everett shouted. All the disconnected, flocking, wheeling thoughts and doubts and suspicions turned as one, became one understanding. “Why? I still have the jumpgun. I can blow the Infundibulum into some random universe. If Charlotte Villiers attacks me, she loses. So why does she threaten us? Unless—unless she thinks I won't do it. Why would she think that? Because there's something she knows that she thinks I know too. Something that makes the Infundibulum as valuable to me as it is to her. What is it?”

“Captain, those fighters will be on us in three minutes,” Mchynlyth said.

“So noted, Mr. Mchynlyth. Continue, Mr. Singh.”

Everett held up the jumpgun in his right hand, Dr. Quantum in his left.

“Is it that this has never existed before? This plus this? Jumpgun plus Infundibulum? There's a computer socket in the jumpgun—it's designed to get information out of it. Maybe you can put information into it as well. It's like a little Heisenberg Gate you can carry in your pocket. But I can programme Heisenberg Gates. It's how I got here. I can make them take me anywhere. And now I'm asking, so what information can you get out of it? It sends you to a random world. That's a quantum effect. Quantum effects are random. But they're not meaningless. Listen to me, listen to me: there's a thing in physics called quantum entanglement. Two particles, once they're in the same quantum state—entangled—they remain connected no matter how far you separate them. You could send one to the end of the universe, and whatever you did to the particle here on Earth, it would be reflected in that other particle, instantly. And it's the same for that particle, whatever happens to it, no matter how far away, the particle here on earth responds instantly. They're entangled. Could it be, this gun opens a random gate, but the entanglement leaves a trace inside the gun, if only we could find it? Maybe it never was a weapon at all; maybe it was some kind of exploration device, like for mapping the Panoply? Open a window into another universe, then read the coordinates. Because, if it is, if it can do that, then there'll be some trace, some record inside, of where it sent my dad. And I think it can do that, and that's why Charlotte Villiers thinks that I won't destroy the Infundibulum. I need them both. I need the information from the jumpgun to find that trace, and I need the Infundibulum to be able to control the gun.”

Everness
had flown to the edge of the night. Dawn was a line of yellow light on the eastern horizon, shading to star-spattered indigo in the vault of the sky. The cloud layer was an unbroken carpet of black and purple. The fighters came out of the dawn light, three of them, howling in on twin propeller engines, as lean and mean and hungry as sky-sharks. They ripped in low and fast down the length of
Everness's
spine, turned, and came back for another pass. Cannon unfolded from the wings; missile racks slid from the gull-white bellies.

“This is what I've been saying,” Sharkey said. “Give it to her! Give it to Charlotte Villiers. That way, everyone wins.”

“Silence, Mr. Sharkey,” Captain Anastasia said. “No, everyone does not win. Everett does not win. We've seen once before what Charlotte Villiers would do when she has the jumpgun and the Infundibulum. She is stronger now because she believes Mr. Singh has no choice but to surrender to her. I do not believe in no-win scenarios. Mr. Singh: this weapon, it's designed to be programmed?”

“Yes.”

“You can make it work?”

“Yes. I think so. Yes, I know it. It'll take a bit of time.”

“I can give you time. Jump us out of here.”

Sharkey was on his feet.

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Jump us out of here, Mr. Singh,” Captain Anastasia said. “All of us.” The fighters raked
Everness
again, tail to nose, and turned out in the breaking dawn. The two snipships moved apart from each other. And in the heart of the sun-glow lay a black flaw, the carrier
Royal Oak
and her escorts.

“Ma?” Sen said in a very small voice.

“Mr. Singh?”

Everett rolled the click-wheel all the way to maximum aperture.

“I think it should get the whole ship in.”

“Oh, that's reassuring,” Mchynlyth said.

Everett offered the jumpgun to Captain Anastasia. She shook her head.

“No, Mr. Singh. The decision must stand with you.”

“They're coming,” Mchynlyth said.

Everett turned the jumpgun on himself. He closed his eyes. No. He had to see it, see the Heisenberg Gate open before him. Where would they go? No one could know. He opened his eyes and looked into the black metal concavity of the jumpgun muzzle.

“Snipship contact in three, two…” Mchynlyth said.

Everett pulled the trigger. The world went white. Then it went away.

T
he world came back. And it was white.

It still didn't hurt a bit.

“We're still here!” Mchynlyth said.

“That, I rather think, is a moot point, sir,” Sharkey said.

“Radar and radio, Mr. Sharkey,” Captain Anastasia said. “I want to know where we are. Mr. Mchynlyth, status report at your earliest convenience. I want to know if everything made it through. I was expecting something a little more…dramatic. Mr. Singh, is you all right?”

The jumpgun fell from Everett's fingers. It clattered on the decking and lay dead and cold as ice.

“Nothing on radar, nothing on radio,” Sharkey said. “We are alone.”

“And intact,” Mchynlyth said, clicking through the closed-circuit cameras, internal and external. “Pretty much.”

“All engines stop,” Captain Anastasia ordered. Sen slapped all the levers back to their zero position. The gentle but constant vibration of the impellers stopped. “Now, where the hell are we?”

The crew of
Everness
lined up in front of the great window.

“That's what I call a white Christmas,” Mchynlyth said.

“'By the breath of God frost is given: and the breadth of the waters is straitened,'” Sharkey said.

Dawn was spilling over a world of ice. Horizon to horizon the sea-ice extended, pressure ridges and cracks and faults casting long purple shadows in the low light. Even from altitude Everett could see snow-devils and storms of glittering ice-dust swirl across the frozen sea and drift in the lee of the pressure ridge. Ice, endless ice. He could feel the bottomless cold through the tough glass.

Everett felt Sen's hand slip into his. Her fingers were warm; they were life and contact and people. He'd looked into the blank muzzle of the jumpgun and seen cold and destruction and randomness.

“We have work to do,” Captain Anastasia said. “But first, Mr. Singh, I believe we have well-hung pheasants and Ridley Road's finest manjarry in the galley. In your best time; rattle us up a fantabulosa Christmas dinner. We're going to celebrate.”

“Aye, ma'am.”

“Only when you're ready, Everett.”

The fingers of Everett's free hand traced the outline of the Everness tarot Sen had made for him. He slipped the card out and turned it faceup. Like many of Sen's trumps, it was a collage, pieces snipped from a bizarre mix of magazines and newspaper carefully arranged and pasted. A male figure in a military-style jacket and baggy shorts stepped from a blank white doorway. The figure's arms were stretched out on either side: in one upturned hand he held a globe, in the other a spiral galaxy. In the background, low on the hand-drawn horizon, was a tiny cut-out airship. In the blank space at the bottom Sen had written the card's name in her clumsy, loopy handwriting.

Planesrunner
.