Predator's gold

5

Pennyroyal’s voice was still blaring away on the flight deck when Hester woke the next morning. Had he been there all night? Probably not, she realized, washing her face at the small basin in the Jenny ’s galley. He’d been to bed, unlike poor Tom, and had now come back down, lured by the smell of Tom’s morning cup of coffee.

She turned to look out of the galley porthole while she cleaned her teeth — anything rather than face her own reflection in the mirror above the basin. The sky was the colour of packet custard, streaked with rhubarb cloud. Three small black specks hung in the centre of the view. Flecks of dirt on the glass, thought Hester, but when she tried to rub them away with her cuff she saw that she was wrong. She frowned, then fetched her telescope and studied the specks for a while. Frowned some more.

When she reached the flight deck Tom was preparing to turn in for a nap. The gale had not abated, but they had flown clear of the mountains now and although the wind would slow them down there was no longer any danger of being blown through a volcanic plume or dashed against a cliff. Tom looked tired but contented, beaming at Hester as she ducked in through the hatchway. Pennyroyal sat in the co-pilot’s seat, a mug of the Jenny ’s best coffee in his hand.

“The professor’s been telling me about some of his expeditions,” Tom said eagerly, standing up to let Hester take the controls. “You wouldn’t believe the adventures he’s had!”

“Probably not,” agreed Hester. “But the only thing I want to hear about at the moment is why there’s a flight of gunships closing in on us.”

Pennyroyal squawked with fear, then quickly clamped a hand over his mouth. Tom went to the larboard window and looked where Hester pointed. The specks were closer now, and clearly airships; three of them, in line abreast.

“They might be traders, heading up to Airhaven,” he said hopefully.

“That’s not a convoy,” Hester said. “It’s an attack formation.”

Tom took the field-glasses from their hook under the main controls. The airships were about ten miles off, but he could see that they were fast and well-armed. They had some sort of green insignia painted on their envelopes, but otherwise they were completely white. It made them look absurdly sinister: the ghosts of airships, racing through the daybreak.

“They’re League fighters,” said Hester flatly. “I recognize those flared engine-pod cowlings. Murasaki Fox Spirits.”

She sounded scared, and with good reason. She and Tom had been careful to avoid the Anti-Traction League these past two years, for the Jenny Haniver had once belonged to a League agent, poor dead Anna Fang, and while they had not exactly stolen her, they knew the League might not see it that way. They had expected to be safe in the north, where League forces were spread thinly since the fall of the Spitzbergen Static the year before.

“Better go about,” said Hester. “Get the wind on our tail and try to outrun them, or lose them in the mountains.”

Tom hesitated. The Jenny was much faster than her wooden gondola and scrapyard engine pods made her look, but he doubted she could outrun Fox Spirits. “Running would just make us look guilty,” he said. “We’ve done nothing wrong. I’ll talk to them, see what they want…”

He reached for the radio set, but Pennyroyal grabbed his hand. “Tom, no! I’ve heard about these white ships. They aren’t regular Anti-Traction League at all! They belong to the Green Storm, a fanatical new splinter-group who operate out of secret airbases here in the north. Extremists, sworn to destroy all cities — and all city people! Great gods, if you let them catch us we’ll all be murdered in our gondola!”

The explorer’s face had turned the colour of expensive cheese, and pinheads of sweat gleamed on his forehead and his nose. The hand that gripped Tom’s wrist was shaking. Tom couldn’t imagine at first what was wrong. Surely a man who’d survived as many adventures as Professor Pennyroyal could not be scared?

Hester turned back to the window in time to see one of the approaching ships fire a rocket to windward, signalling the Jenny Haniver to heave to and allow herself to be boarded. She wasn’t sure she believed Pennyroyal, but there was something threatening about those ships. She was certain they hadn’t just encountered the Jenny by chance. They’d been sent to find her.

She touched Tom’s arm. “Go.”

Tom heaved on the rudder controls, swinging the Jenny about until she was steering north with the gale behind her. He pushed a sequence of brass levers forward and the rumble of the engines rose to a higher pitch. Another lever, and small air-sails unfolded, semi-circles of silicon-silk stretched between the pods and the flanks of the gasbag, adding a little extra thrust to help shove the Jenny through the sky.

“We’re gaining!” he shouted, peeking into the periscope at the grainy, upside-down image of the view astern. But the Fox Spirits were persistent. They altered course to match the Jenny ’s, and coaxed more power out of their own engines. Within an hour they were close enough for Tom and Hester to make out the symbol painted on their flanks — not the broken wheel of the Anti-Traction League, but a jagged green lightning bolt.

Tom scanned the greyish landscape below, hoping for a town or city where he might seek sanctuary. There were none, except for a couple of slow-moving Lapp farming towns leading their herds of reindeer across the tundra far to the east, and he could not reach them without the Fox Spirits cutting him off. The Tannhauser Mountains barred the horizon ahead, their canyons and pumice-clouds offering the only hope of shelter.

“What shall we do?” he asked.

“Keep going,” said Hester. “Maybe we can lose them in the mountains.”

“What if they rocket us?” whimpered Pennyroyal. “They’re getting terribly close! What if they start shooting at us?”

“They want the Jenny in one piece,” Hester told him. “They won’t risk using rockets.”

“Want the Jenny? Why would anyone want this old wreck?” The tension was making Pennyroyal tetchy. When Hester explained he shouted, “This was Anna Fang’s ship? Great Clio! Almighty Poskitt! But the Green Storm worship Anna Fang! Their movement was founded amid the ashes of the Northern Air Fleet, sworn to avenge the people killed by London’s agents at Batmunkh Gompa! Of course they’d want her ship back! Merciful gods, why didn’t you tell me this ship was stolen? I demand a full refund!”

Hester shoved him aside and went to the chart table. “Tom?” she said, studying their maps of the Tannhausers. “There’s a gap in the volcano-chain west of here: the Drachen Pass. Maybe there’ll be a city there we can put down on.”

They flew on, climbing into thin air above the snowy peaks and once skirting dangerously close to a plume of smoke that belched thickly from the throat of a young volcano. No pass, no city did they see, and after another hour, during which the three Fox Spirits steadily narrowed their lead, a flight of rockets came flashing past the windows and exploded just off the starboard bow.

“Oh, Quirke!” cried Tom — but Quirke had been London’s god, and if he couldn’t be bothered to save his own city, why would he come to the aid of a battered little airship, lost in the sulphurous updrafts of the Tannhausers?

Pennyroyal tried to hide under the chart table. “They are firing rockets!”

“Oh, thanks, we wondered what those big explodey things were,” said Hester, angry that her prediction had proved wrong.

“But you said they wouldn’t!”

“They’re aiming for the engine pods,” said Tom. “If they disable them we’ll be dead in the sky and they’ll grapple alongside and send a boarding party across…”

“Well, can’t you do something?” demanded Pennyroyal. “Can’t you fight back?”

“We don’t have any rockets,” said Tom miserably. After that last terrible air battle over London, when he had shot down the 13th Floor Elevator and watched her crew burn inside their burning gondola, he had vowed that the Jenny would be a peaceful ship. Her rocket projectors had been empty ever since. Now he regretted his scruples. Thanks to him, Hester and Professor Pennyroyal would soon be in the hands of the Green Storm.

Another rocket slammed past. It was time to do something desperate. He called again on Quirke, then swung the Jenny hard over to larboard and took her powering down into the maze of the mountains, flashing through the shadows of wind-carved basalt crags and out again into sunlight.

And below him, far below him and ahead, he saw another chase in progress. A tiny scavenger town was scurrying southwards through a cleft in the mountains and behind it, jaws agape, rolled a big, rusty, three-tiered Traction City.

Tom steered the Jenny towards it, glancing from time to time into his periscope, where the three Fox Spirits still hung doggedly on his tail. Pennyroyal gnawed at his fingernails and gibbered the names of obscure gods: “Oh, great Poskitt! Oh, Deeble, preserve us!” Hester turned the radio on again and hailed the fast-approaching city, demanding permission to dock.

A pause. A rocket struck steam and splinters from a mountainside thirty yards astern. Then a woman’s voice crackled out of the radio, speaking Airsperanto with a heavy Slavic accent. “This is Novaya-Nizhni Harbour Board. Your request is denied.”

“What?” screamed Pennyroyal.

“But that’s not-” said Tom.

“This is an emergency!” Hester told the radio. “We’re being chased!”

“We know,” the voice came back, regretful but firm. “We want no trouble. Novaya-Nizhni is peaceable city. Keep clear, please, or we fire upon you.”

A rocket from the lead Fox Spirit came winding in to burst just off the stern. The harsh voices of the Green Storm aviators drowned out the threats from Novaya-Nizhni for a moment, then the woman was back, insisting, “Stay clear, Jenny Haniver, or we will fire!”

Tom had an idea.

There was no time to explain to Hester what he was about to do. He didn’t think she would approve anyway, since he had borrowed this manoeuvre from Valentine; from an episode in Adventures of a Practical Historian, one of those books he had thrilled to back in his apprentice days, before he found out what real adventures were like. Spewing gas from her dorsal vents the Jenny dropped into the path of the oncoming city and went powering forward on a collision course. The voice on the radio rose to a sudden scream, and Hester and Pennyroyal screamed too as Tom steered the ship low over the rusty factories on the brim of the middle tier and drove her between two enormous supporting pillars into the shadow of the tier above. Behind him, two of the Fox Spirits pulled up short, but the leader was bolder, and followed him into the heart of the city.

This was Tom’s first visit to Novaya-Nizhni, and it was rather a fleeting one. From what he could see, the city was laid out in much the same way as poor old London, with broad streets radiating out from the centre of each tier. Along one of these the Jenny Haniver raced at lamp-post height, while shocked faces gaped down at her from upper windows and pedestrians scattered for cover on the pavements. Near the tier’s hub loomed a thicket of support-pillars and elevator shafts, a slalom-course through which the little airship slipped with inches to spare, grazing her envelope and scraping paint from her steering vanes. The pursuing Fox Spirit was not so lucky. Neither Tom nor Hester saw quite what happened, but they heard the rending crash even over the roar of the Jenny ’s engines, and the periscope showed them the wreckage crumpling towards the deck, the gondola swinging drunkenly from an overhead tramway.

Out into sudden, blinding sunlight on the far side of the city. It seemed they had escaped, and even the petrified Pennyroyal cheered in the sudden rush of happiness that united them all. But the Green Storm did not give up so easily. The Jenny swung through the fog of exhaust smoke which hung behind the city, and in the clear air beyond the two remaining Fox Spirits were waiting.

A rocket slammed into the starboard engines, the blast blowing out the flight-deck windows and flinging Hester to the floor. She scrambled up to find Tom still crouched over the controls, his hair and clothes frosted with powdered glass. Pennyroyal was slumped against the chart table with blood trickling from a gash on his bald head where one of the Jenny ’s brass fire-extinguishers had struck him a glancing blow as it fell. Hester dragged him to a window seat. He was still breathing, but his eyes had rolled up until only two half-moons of white showed under the lids. He looked as if he was studying something very interesting on the inside of his head.

More rockets struck. A buckled propeller-blade hummed past, whirling down towards the snowfields like a failed boomerang. Tom was still heaving at the controls, but the Jenny Haniver no longer obeyed him — either the rudders were gone, or the cables which operated them had been severed. A fierce gust of wind, howling through a gap in the mountains, swung her towards the Fox Spirits. The nearer of the two made a sudden move to avoid collision, and collided with her sister-ship instead.

The explosion, barely twenty yards to starboard, filled the Jenny ’s flight deck with a lurid glare. When Hester could see again the sky was full of tumbling litter. She could hear the rattle and crash as larger fragments of the Fox Spirits bounded away down the mountainsides into the pass below. She could hear the grumble of Novaya-Nizhni’s engines a few miles astern, the squeak and thunder of its tracks as it hauled itself southwards. She could hear her own heart beating, very loud and very fast, and she realized that the Jenny ’s engines had stopped. From the increasingly frantic way that Tom tugged and hammered at the controls, it looked as if there was little hope of starting them again. A bitter wind blew in through the shattered windows, bringing with it flakes of snow and a cold, clean smell of ice.

She said a quick prayer for the souls of the Green Storm aviators, hoping that their ghosts would hurry down to the Sunless Country and not hang about up here to make more trouble. Then she went stiffly to stand beside Tom. He gave up his useless struggle with the controls and put his arms around her, and they stood there holding each other, staring at the view ahead. The Jenny was drifting over the shoulder of a big volcano. Beyond it there were no more mountains, just an endless blue-white plain stretching to the horizon. They were at the mercy of the wind, and it was carrying them helplessly into the Ice Wastes.