Infernal Devices (29 page)

"They aren't here for Brighton," said Theo, taking her hand. "They've come for the book! Whoever it was who set the gull on guard and killed these men must have called these ships here, and they've cut us adrift so we can be boarded more easily."

From somewhere outside came the screech of air-raid alarms, like fingernails dragging down the blackboard of the sky.

"We've got to get away," said Wren. "How?" asked Theo.

"On the
Peewit,
of course. I don't suppose anybody had time to drain her fuel tanks after last night."

Theo shook his head. "Even if we made it to the boathouse, the Storm would shoot us down before we were out of Cloud 9's airspace."

"But the
Peewit's
a yacht, not a warship!"

"The Storm don't care about details like that."

"But don't you know codes and passwords and things? Couldn't you radio them and tell them you're one of their own people?"

"Wren, I'm
not
one of their people," said Theo. "Not anymore. I failed them. If they capture me, they'll have me sent to Batmunkh Tsaka and killed."

Wren wasn't sure what that meant, but she could see that he was scared, perhaps as scared as she was. The control room shook as something hit the deck plate overhead, and a rain of sparks and burning wreckage came tumbling down past the windows. She looked up into Theo's face and tried to sound brave. "Theo," she said, "my dad's waiting for me in Brighton, and your mother and father are waiting for you in Zagwa, and they'll all be really miffed if we just hang about up here and let ourselves get killed. Come on. We have to try!"

Still holding hands, they ran up the stairs to the ground-floor entrance, the door the murderer must have left by. It opened into a corridor outside the kitchens. There was no one about. Above them they could hear screams and shouts and the rumble of feet as people fled the ballroom. Explosions in the sky outside splashed skewed diamonds of

sour yellow light on the floor under the kitchen windows, and glinted on fallen pans and trays of sweetmeats dropped by slaves who had left in a hurry.

They ran to the nearest exit and blundered out into the gardens in front of the Pavilion. Crowds of party guests were hurrying across the lawns like frightened sheep. There was no way off Cloud 9, but they wanted to get as far as they could from the Pavilion for fear the Green Storm were about to bomb it. Anyway, they were wealthy, and used to getting everything they needed. Even if the cable car was gone, surely there would be a ship there, or an air taxi, or some plucky Brightonians organizing a rescue with air pedalos and sky yachts?

Not wanting to be caught up in the stampede, Theo pushed Wren into the shelter of one of Pennyroyal's abstract statues. They huddled together and watched moonlit exhaust trails billow in the sky around Cloud 9 like skeins of spider silk as the Flying Ferrets buzzed and tumbled, hurling themselves at the Storm's airships. It was as if each ship had a seed of fire inside it and the Flying Ferrets were patiently probing for it with streams of incendiary bullets. When they found it, the airship would begin to glow from inside like a MoonFest lantern; then blinding patterns of light would checker the envelope; and finally the whole thing would become a dazzling pyre, casting eerie shadows from the cypress groves as the wind carried it past Cloud 9.

But the airships were fighting back, and so were the clouds of Resurrected eagles and condors that flew with them. The birds descended in flapping black clouds upon the

Ferrets' flying machines, slashing at the wings and rigging and the unprotected pilots, and as the Ferrets stuggled to evade them, they made easy targets for the airships' rockets and machine cannon. Wings were shredded; fuel tanks blew apart; rotor blades came flipping and fluttering across the Pavilion's lawns like bits of an exploding Venetian blind. The
Bad Hair Day,
its wings ripped off, plunged burning into the cable car station. The
Group Captain Mandrake
veered sideways into the
Wrestling Cheese,
and both machines crashed together through the flank of a Green Storm destroyer and went down with it, a vast barrel of fire sinking gracefully toward the sea.

Just off the edge of the gardens, a larger ship circled, waiting for the fighters to finish off the Ferrets, and beyond it Wren could see the upper tiers of Kom Ombo rising like an armored island from a sea of smoke. A fat airship was hanging above the city, showering down clouds of tumbling, twirling things that looked like silver seedpods until they struck a fortress or a gun emplacement, where they burst with white flashes and flung wreckage high into the night. Wren felt the explosions in her chest, like the beat of a huge drum.

"Tumblers," Theo muttered.

"What, those silver things?" asked Wren. "No, those are bombs. You can tell by the way they go off, bang! You told me you used to
fly
Tumblers."

Theo nodded.

"You mean those things have
pilots?
But they'll be blown to bits!"

Another nod.

"Then how come ... ?"

"How come I'm not dead?" Theo shook his head and would not look at her. "Because I'm a coward," he said. "I'm a coward, that's why.

The
Requiem Vortex
prowled through the veils of smoke and ash that hung above the coast. Panic had broken out among the clustered towns and cities there, who all assumed the Green Storm fleet had come for them. Some were running for the shelter of the desert; some inflated buoyancy sacs and splashed into the sea; some took advantage of the confusion to try to eat their neighbors. Benghazi and Kom Ombo launched clouds of fighter airships, which were torn apart by the faster, fiercer Fox Spirits and by flocks of Stalker birds.

A gas cell had exploded somewhere near the
Requiem Vortex's
stern, and spidery Mark IV Stalkers were crawling around on the sheer sides of her envelope, training extinguishers on the blaze. There was damage to the steering vanes too, and frantic voices echoing from the speaking tubes claimed that the rear gondola had been destroyed.

The Once-Borns on the bridge were pale and tense; Grike could see their faces shining with sweat in the hellish light that blazed in through the windows. Beneath her steel helmet, Oenone Zero was weeping with fear. The radio crackled out distress calls and damage reports from other ships: The
Sword Flourished in Understandable Pique
had been rammed amidships and was going down in flames; the

Autumn Rain from the Heavenly Mountains
was rudderless and drifting into the flank of Benghazi. Someone aboard a doomed corvette kept screaming and screaming until the signal suddenly cut out.

The Stalker Fang ignored it all. Standing calmly beside the helmsman, she gazed out at Cloud 9 as it drifted slowly away from its parent city.

"Follow that building," she said.

The ships that had attacked Brighton had quickly veered away to tackle other targets, but the raft resort's troubles were not over. Its engine room was in flames, and half its paddle wheels were wrecked. It had slipped its moorings as the attack began and was now adrift, trailing black smoke and saffron flame, leaking burning fuel. Everyone who could have taken charge was either dead or at the mayor's party.

In all the confusion, no one paid any heed to the alarms jangling inside the Pepperpot, not until the Lost Boys overpowered the last of their guards and came swarming out to join the fun. From the engine rooms and the sewage farms of the undertier and the stinking filter beds beneath the Sea Pool, the slaves of Brighton saw their chance and rushed to join them. Arming themselves with wrenches and pool rakes and meat tenderizers, they swarmed up the city's stairways, looting antique shops and setting fire to art galleries. The good-natured actors and artists of Brighton, who had spent so many dinner parties agreeing with each other about what a terrible life the slaves led and organizing community art projects to show how they shared their pain, fled for their lives,

spilling out of the city aboard overloaded airships and listing motor launches.

Indeed, so much was happening, and so dense a pall of dirty smoke hung above the battered city, that hardly anyone had noticed Cloud 9 was no longer attached to the rest of Brighton.

***

wren and Theo, waiting for the battle to subside, sat down in the shadow of the big statue, their backs to the plinth that it perched on. A few glasses of punch had been abandoned there earlier in the evening, and Wren drank one. How long had this nightmare been going on? Five minutes? Ten? It seemed a lifetime. Already she had learned to tell the high yammer of the Ferrets' machine cannon from the throatier stutter of the Storm's guns. The rockets were harder to tell apart, but she always knew when a Tumbler went off, because Theo would jump and hunch his shoulders and squeeze his eyes shut.

"Do you want to tell me about it?" she asked. "These Tumbler things?"

"No."

"You might as well. There's not much else to do."

Theo flinched at the distant sounds of another Tumbler salvo exploding on the skirts of Kom Ombo. Then, in a soft voice that she could barely hear over all the noise, he told her of his brief career as a flying bomb.

"It was back at the start of the Battle of the Rustwater," he said. "Enemy suburbs had broken through all along the line, and the fleet was falling back toward the western borders of Shan Guo. None of us were expecting to go into action. Then the order came in; this place called the Black Island had to be held for a few hours more, because some surgeon-mechanic from the Resurrection Corps was digging up a valuable artifact that mustn't be allowed to fall into townie hands...."

Theo could still feel in his belly the sudden, sickening motion of the carrier going about, and the panic in the companionways as Tumbler pilots scrambled for their ships.

"The waiting was worst," he said. "Strapped into our ships, hanging there in the racks in the Tumbler bay with the doors open under us. You could see the guns going off below. Then the order--'Tumblers away!'--and we went for it."

They went for it, releasing their clamps, and then the long fall, down and down, slaloming between the lovely, deadly blasts of enemy rockets. The earliest Tumblers had been automatic, fitted with Stalker brains, but Stalker brains couldn't zigzag through ground fire the way a human pilot could, and why waste Stalkers when there were young men like Theo, eager for glory and ready to die in the name of The World Made Green Again?

"The target was a city called Jagdstadt Magdeburg," he told Wren. "I hit somewhere on the middle tiers; I thought I

was heading for an armored fort, but it turned out to be just a thin plastic roof over some sort of farming district. I landed in a great deep pile of silage bales. I suppose that's why I wasn't killed, just knocked out for a minute or two. I suppose that's why the Tumbler didn't blow. They're supposed to go off automatically when you hit, but there's a manual override in case of a failure like mine, and I reached for it as soon as I came to, but I couldn't... I couldn't bring myself to ..."

"Of course not," said Wren softly. "You'd missed your target. You couldn't blow up workers. Civilians. It would have been murder."

"It would," said Theo. "But that's not what stopped me. I just didn't want to die."

"Bit late to decide that, wasn't it?"

Theo shrugged. "I just sat there and cried. And after a while, they came and defused my Tumbler and dragged me out and took me away. I thought they were going to kill me. I wouldn't have blamed them. But they didn't.

"All my life I'd been hearing stories about the cruelty of the barbarians, the way they tortured prisoners, and maybe some are like that, but these ones tended me like I was one of their own sons. They fed me, and explained how sorry they were that they'd have to sell me as a slave. They couldn't afford to keep Green Storm prisoners aboard, you see, for fear we'd band together and revolt. But I wouldn't have revolted. They'd made me realize how wrong the Storm are. How stupid it all is, this fighting."

He looked up at Wren. "That's why I gave up on the Storm. And now, when they catch me and they find out what I am and what I did, they're going to kill me."

"They won't!" promised Wren. "Because we won't let them catch you! We'll get away somehow...."

A growl of engines drowned her out. She stood up cautiously and looked out across the gardens. A huge, battle-scarred white airship was shoving her way in through Cloud 9's rigging.

"Great gods!" said Theo, looking over Wren's shoulder. "That's the
Requiem Vortex]
That's
her
ship!"

Snub-nosed projectors mounted on the airship's engine pods swiveled this way and that, effortlessly blasting any Flying Ferret that came within range. The
Visible Parity Line
and the
Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Machiney
were smashed apart by rockets, showering shreds of balsa wood and singed canvas over the crowds who cowered on the Pavilion lawns. An ornithopter called
Is That All There Is?
fluttered around the airship like a gnat pestering a dinosaur, but it could not pierce the reinforced envelope, and after a few seconds a flight of Stalker birds found it and ripped it into kindling.
Damn You, Gravity!
plunged toward the airship's gondola in a desperate attempt to ram it, but more rockets battered it aside, and it went plowing through the flank of one of Cloud 9's outer gasbags. The Pavilion shuddered, the screaming guests on the lawn began to scream still louder, and the whole deck plate tilted steeply as some of the gas that had been supporting it went spewing into the night.

Orla Twombley and the other surviving Ferrets, realizing that they could do no more, turned tail and sped away.

Wren shielded her face against the dust and smoke as the
Requiem Vortex
swung her engine pods into landing position