Six Days (22 page)

H
undreds of barbed tails spring out from the walls. They glow and smoke, but still they move as one, like grass stems bowing in the wind. And they lift the pods one by one toward the shuttle hatch.

“Come on!” yells Peyto.

He snatches my hand and leaps toward the procession of pods. We latch on to the back of one and scramble through the gap into the shuttle. Already there’s hardly any space left – it’s rammed with body-shaped cocoons like tightly wrapped corpses. The last body to enter is Maleeva’s. Deep down, behind the helmet visor and the struts of her head frame, her dead eyes stare back at me.

The ship is a furnace now. Sheets of white fire rip out into space, as bright as lightning. And beyond them I can’t see nothing but stars. Then the hatch seals shut and the pods snap together around us, as the shuttle blasts away from the ship.

Then gravity kicks in. I clutch hold of Peyto. “We’re gonna burn.”

My voice ain’t no louder than a croak. I just ain’t got the strength to be scared no more.

“No, the shuttle’s much tougher than the ship, remember?” He pushes away from me and tries to force his way past the sleeper pods. “But right now, there’s nothing steering it!”

“What?”

“The ship’s breaking up! The bridge has gone – there’s no way to reset the shuttle! If we don’t do something, we’re going to crash! Help me!”

I try to reach out to the pods, but it’s no use – they’re locked around us and by now we’re falling so hard I’m pinned flat. I can’t even move my arms …

But then Maleeva’s body stirs next to me. It jerks into life and heaves the pods to one side. Then it grabs me by the helmet and drags me toward the edge of the shuttle.

“Peyto, help!”

Them mighty machine arms hurl me down, then one fist reaches back, punches right through the shuttle wall, and comes up with a handful of torn cables that spark and jitter about.

Maleeva’s limp face thrusts toward mine, and the girl’s voice hisses out, “You have a fighting heart, Cass. Prove it again now.”

“What?”

I stare back at this jumble of creature and machine, and I ain’t got a clue what it can truly be now – a ship’s mind inside a girl inside a frame. Layers of metal and skin, and at the heart of it a ghost, spun together by people over a billion years ago … It stuffs the frayed cables into my arms. They leap and wrestle like a net of live eels. And I can
feel
the surge of the shuttle engines. They thrum against my chest and beat into my ribs. And then the flinder round my neck starts to burn.

“I am just human flesh and blood now,” goes the ship. “I cannot command the shuttle. Only the power of your flinder can save us. Take control.”

I feel helpless. “How?”

“Steer it, Cass!” yells Peyto. “You’re the only one who can do it! Use your flinder.”

And my mind flips. It feels like when I rammed my hands into the innards of the ship and set the shuttle on its way. Like when I called up Halina’s shuttle from the ground at Arbor Low. It’s the same. I shut my eyes and just let go. I picture the Wash, and the racing tide, and the sunken buildings of Lincoln, and the
Lodestar
bobbing at anchor. And I picture Dad.

We’re hurtling through the wind, scudding over waves, slamming through spray, skimming from crest to crest like a flat stone.

The flinder closes tighter round my neck and it scalds into my skin, but I don’t let up. I just hug them leaping cables and fly.

The sea roars around us.

Then a hole opens up above me and a gale of air blasts in from outside. The cables in my arms go dead. The roof of the shuttle peels right back and the seawater floods in.

“Peyto!”

He’s out of reach, trapped by the sleeper pods, and as the weight of water collapses in he gets sucked farther back. I dunk my helmet into the bubbles, and it goes dark as we plummet farther down. Great clouds of silver air mushroom past me as I dive deeper.

There in the green gloom, I see a hand and I snatch at it. Then something yanks me from behind and I tear up through the currents and out into the dazzling bright air. Peyto bursts out next to me.

It takes me a few breathless moments to figure out what’s happened. It’s Maleeva’s frame that’s saved us from dropping to the seafloor. The
Aeolus
. It holds us both, one in each fist. We dangle there by the suit collars, water coursing down our helmets. It dumps us like landed fish onto some kind of raft. It ain’t that stable – I can feel myself pitching about on the logs, ready any second to topple back into the drink.

It’s only then that I twig that these ain’t logs. The raft I’m lying on is made of forty-eight floating sleeper
pods – seven by seven with a gap in the middle – held together with knotted tentacles that slither over each other like bronzed serpents.

I rip back the seals, toss away the helmet, and drink real air down into my lungs.

Next to me, Peyto’s done the same. We look at each other for a moment, scarcely believing we can still be alive.

The ship don’t say a word. It rips great fistfuls of Maleeva’s suit away and launches her helmet into the sea. Then it just stands there astride the pod-raft with outstretched arms. And strip by strip, the suit flies away from the frame into the wind. Maleeva’s beautiful face sits on top of the tower of scaffold that holds her together, like a hovering angel. And I wonder where her soul has gone, if she’ll ever come back.

I watch Peyto then as he struggles out of his suit, but I’m too plain knackered to even move. He heaves the suit over the side and it drops away into the deep. When he stands up, he shields his eyes to the sun and starts laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“Good navigating, Cass!”

I look over to where he’s pointing. And there, in the distance, is a church spire rising from the water. The sunken town we passed in the
Lodestar
.

The tide sweeps us along then, tipping us into furrows of current, closer and closer to the islands that dot the coast. I figure we’re rudderless, the way we spin and lurch,
but then the tentacles at the edge of the raft start to work together, dipping and pushing, so that at last our course steadies.

Peyto helps me out of my suit, and I stand up with him to balance on the creaking pods. I gaze at all their faces – the sleepers that have found their home at last. Near the front of the raft is Wilbur, and next to him, Erin – both of them still locked in their dreams. Suddenly it hits me proper that scavving is over. It has to be now that the artifact – Halina’s flinder – ain’t buried in London anymore. For all the Vlads know, it’s lost in space now, out of their reach. And that means the scavs are free. The crushers of London won’t ever be heard again.

Soon there’s islands all around us, and, at last, nestling in the lee of the tide, I spot the
Lodestar
. I can see Dad scrambling to the edge of the deck and he’s hooting at the top of his lungs. Peyto grabs hold of me and lifts me off my feet.

“You did it!” he whispers to me.

“We
all
did it,” I go.

“No, Cass. You were ready to risk everything. I’d never have had the guts. That was the maddest, bravest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do.”

“Brave? I just had to stick to my guns. You don’t get it, do you? I
knew
it would back down. It
had
to.”

“What?”

“I figured it out, Peyto. The ship’s secret.”

I glance at the
Aeolus
, but it ain’t even looking at us no more, like it’s zoned out, staring at a world it’s only seen through people’s dreams.

“It can’t harm people. Remember what you and Erin told me? It’s alive but it ain’t a creature. Humans can kill. I can and you can. But it can’t. Its only reason for being alive is to create life, to nurture it. So it couldn’t stand by and watch all the sleepers die. It had to set them free.”

He draws away from me and looks at the sleepers that make up our raft.

“But you
were
ready to let us all die.”

“I had to be. The
Aeolus
wouldn’t have backed down otherwise.”

He turns back to me and grins. “I don’t care what you say, Cass Westerby. Mad, brave, headstrong …”

I grin back. “Headstrong’s about right. Worked, though, huh?”

Then I start proper belly laughing.

“What?”

“I don’t know – you wait a billion years for something to happen and then it all kicks off, eh?”

And I feel strong being on that raft as it bobs ever closer to the
Lodestar
. I reach up to my throat, and there’s a searing mark where the flinder burned me –
my flinder now
. But I don’t care no more. Cos I feel something then – something beautiful about all the flinders being together,
like the way this raft of pods is knitted together.
The flinders as one
, the
Aeolus
said.

Peyto hops about on the front edge of the raft, yelling and whooping with Dad, as we bump into the prow of the
Lodestar
.

Then he turns to me with a smile and goes, “Now what?”

C
ass’s voice is a mix of many sources but the main ones are three generations of women in my family: Elsie Quinn, my nan; Terry Webb, my mum; and Sophie Malcolm, my sister. Thanks for helping my writing come to life!

I want to thank my wife, Rebecca, for her support, patience, and priceless sanity-checking of early drafts.

Many thanks also to Veronique Baxter, who first rescued my manuscript from the slush pile and encouraged me to make it better!

Everyone from Chicken House has been a delight to work with and learn from, in particular Barry Cunningham and Imogen Cooper, who saw the potential in my complex tale and gave me enormous support to complete it.

There are lots of people without whom my efforts would have been so much scrap paper. So: Tony Webb, Chris Quinn, Clare Telford, John McCrone, Lorna Harty, Davey Fraser, Mark Proctor, Graham and Caroline Parker,
Anthony Fennel, Mark Lee, Katherine Pascoe, Natalie Davies, Alex Potterill, Suzanne Beishon, Olivia Boertje, Mario Constantinou, Claire Barber, Heather Swann, Kate Turnough, Corey China, Joe Ungemah, Kerry Hedley, Tracey Sinclair, Kara May and everyone on the Goldsmiths writing course, Laura Windley, Frankie Pagnacco (for the race), Jane Butterworth, and Mave and Al Bilham-Boult – thank you all for your advice, encouragement, and feedback.

It would take a lifetime for me to list all the artists and writers who managed to fire my imagination into strange and wonderful places. So here are just the ones who helped inspire
Six Days
: George Lucas, Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick, William Gibson, Iain Banks, Margaret Atwood, James Cameron, Danny Boyle, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Text copyright © 2011 by Philip Webb
Cover illustration © 2011 by Alun Edwards
Cover design by Whitney Lyle

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

First American edition, September 2011

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eISBN: 978-0-545-38829-0