Skybreaker

by Kenneth Oppel

  “Here we are,” said Hal, “the treasure trove.”

  THE DEAD ZOO

  Nadira lowered her hood so she could take the key from the pouch around her neck. The door’s reinforced bulk was as defiant as any bank vault; I could well believe it was booby-trapped. I imagined trip wires embedded in the metal. Nadira slowly started to insert the key, frowned, pulled it back, and bent to look inside the keyhole.

  “There’s ice,” she said. “It won’t go in.” Dorje removed a small torch from his pack. Blue flame jetted from the tip, and he slowly waved it before the keyhole, careful not to get too close. A trickle of water ran from the hole and froze again before it was halfway to the floor.

  Nadira put the key into the lock. It didn’t seem to want to go very far at first, but then she rotated it slightly, and I heard small metal pieces clinking and falling. Then the key went in a little deeper. I found myself holding my breath. The lock was like a series of puzzles, one behind the other, and they needed to be aligned in a special way. Twisting and turning the key, Nadira slid it deeper, bit by bit, and when it seemed to go no farther, she gave it a slow full turn, clockwise. It was almost musical, all the metallic pings and chirps of the lock yielding to the key’s mysterious shape. The key went all the way around, and Nadira gave a cry as it was swiftly pulled from her fingers and sucked right into the keyhole.

  For a moment, no one spoke.

  “Was that good or bad?” I said.

  “Maybe it didn’t like the key,” Kate suggested.

  “That’s not a reassuring thought,” I told her.

  From inside the lock came a distinct ticking sound.

  “Run!” bellowed Hal.

  But a great clunk from inside the door froze us all in terror. The key was spat back out and landed on the icy floor. Then, with a hiss of air, the door opened, popping back and sliding to one side, flush with the inner wall.

  “That,” said Kate, “is the cheekiest door I’ve ever known.”

  Nadira bent down and snatched up her key. “Aren’t you glad I came along?”

  A frigid mustiness oozed from the pitch black rectangle before us. I saw Dorje’s nostrils flinch. This door had not been opened in forty years. Whatever was inside was undisturbed. We were the first. We stepped in.

  Row after row of enormous display cases, ten feet in height, stretched back as far as our torch beams could reach. Their glass was mostly coated in glittering ice, but I caught the occasional flash of fur or bone. Along both walls the mounted heads of all sorts of horned and antlered animals leered down at us. From the middle of the room, the neck and head of a gray giraffe thrust up above the cases. Suspended from the ceiling was the skeleton of some enormous leviathan. The entire chamber was arranged like a museum, with narrow aisles between the rows of cases. Old man Noah could not have crammed more birds and beasts into his ark.

  “It’s Grunel’s personal collection,” Kate breathed, and then she was off, rushing from case to case, scraping at the glass, shining her torch inside.

  “Why’d he bother putting all this mangy stuff under lock and key?” Hal grumbled. He’d expected a chamber stacked high with overflowing chests of loot and was clearly disgruntled. With Dorje he began a circuit of the room, making a map, and no doubt scouting for anything more lucrative than animal hides.

  “A quagga!” I heard Kate exclaim.

  I found her staring entranced at something that looked like a small zebra gone wrong. Its head and neck were fine, white with black stripes, but the rest of it was plain brown.

  “Now, these fellows,” Kate said, “were native to South Africa until they were exterminated by hunters. That was supposed to have been quite some time ago.”

  “How did he find it then?” I asked.

  “He paid big-game hunters all over the world to search for unusual specimens. If only he’d kept it alive, rather than shooting it. It would have been much better for science.”

  “And for the quagga too, I suppose.”

  “Mmm,” she said distractedly.

  And she was off again, like a child in Hamleys giant toy shop, whirling from one thing to the next, unable to stay still.

  “And look at this!” she cried out.

  Nadira and I walked over.

  “It’s a dodo!” Kate exclaimed.

  “It’s a great bloody turkey is what it is,” scoffed Hal, who’d crossed paths with us.

  “But I thought they’d been extinct for centuries,” Nadira said.

  “Apparently not,” said Kate. “I wonder where Grunel got himself a live one.”

  “Mauritius, probably,” I said, pleased with myself for remembering this little detail. “A couple years back, we stopped there to provision the Aurora. A local guide told me this was the only place a live dodo had been discovered. But he said the last one was spotted in 1681.”

  “Maybe it also inhabited other places,” Kate said. “Anyway, animals are always being declared extinct, then popping up again. Pomphrey Watt said the Tasmanian tiger was extinct, and then a whole group of them turned up in the Florida everglades. That was his career, over with.”

  Kate stared at the dodo. “Do you know that all we have in the whole world is a single skeleton of a dodo, and that’s made up of all sorts of little bits and pieces from other skeletons? Grunel’s got a complete specimen!”

  “He never showed it to anyone?” Hal asked.

  “No.”

  “Maybe he was saving it up for Christmas dinner,” I remarked.

  Hal gave me a chuckle, but from Kate all I got was a pair of disdainfully narrowed nostrils.

  “This is coming with me,” she said. “And the quagga.”

  Hal grunted. “There’s a lot of ship to cover first. We’ll deal with them later.”

  I don’t know that Kate heard him, for she was already heading down the next row of display cases. They were beautifully built things, with stout wood bases, slotted into deep, specially built anchoring bays bolted to the floor. Normally in a cargo freighter, these cases and their contents would have been separately crated, wrapped, stacked tight, and strapped into a hold. Yet Grunel had taken a great deal of care so he could arrange them like a permanent museum. And he had done his work well: nothing was toppled or smashed or cracked. The Hyperion seemed to have found serene skies and altitudes through which to sail her ghostly course.

  “Everyone!” came Kate’s excited voice. “Over here!”

  When we reached her, she was scraping frantically at the ice, clearing a larger window for us.

  Its feet were the first things I saw, two of them and impossibly huge, covered with reddish-gray fur. Five toes, with the middle ones bigger than the others. You could have fit six of my feet inside one of his. The legs were tree-trunk massive. I blushed when I saw his genitals, for they were enormous, and only half hidden in the dense fur of his coat. I couldn’t help glancing over at Kate, but her eyes were rising higher as she cleared away more ice, revealing the creature’s torso and finally his head. He stood nine feet high.

  His eyes were open and gave the unsettling impression of staring directly at you, and the look was a baleful one. He must have seen his death coming, and met it head-on. Indeed, in the jutting ridge over his left eye was a large, precise hole where a rifle shell had entered his skull. Around the hole, the fur was singed. That was not the only hole either. I saw two more in the massive chest, around the heart.

  The creature’s power transmitted itself even through its dead, motionless limbs. He could shatter the glass with a single flick of a wrist. He could pick up a man and shuck him like an ear of corn.

  “It’s the yeti,” Kate said.

  “No such thing,” Hal snorted dismissively, glancing at Dorje.

  Dorje stared at the creature, stricken. “My father, to his dying day, insisted he saw one.”

  “Surely it’s a fake,” said Hal. “Make someone a fine rug, eh, Cruse?”

  “Grunel didn’t have any interest in owning a fake,” Kate said. “These
things were for him alone. If it’s in his personal collection, it’s real.”

  “I can’t believe this is pleasing to the sky gods,” Dorje said angrily. “To see a creature of the great mountain, stuffed and displayed like this. It robs the creature of all its dignity, and the man or woman who performed the task too.” Dorje turned away from it. “This Grunel is a monster. There was a reason this ship met with tragedy. I would not want to guess at what has become of him in the next life.”

  This was sobering stuff, and I don’t think anyone knew quite what to say. I certainly didn’t much like the picture I was getting of Mr. Grunel. A rich man with no wants in the world, going around shooting rare animals to add to his collection—and one that didn’t even benefit the scientific world. It was ghastly.

  “I have only the greatest respect for the yeti,” Kate said, “but I would like to bring him with me.”

  “You won’t be getting him up the ladder,” Hal told her. “He’s too big.”

  “The bones then,” said Kate.

  “You’re going to dissect him?” I asked.

  “This is very high-quality taxidermy,” she said. “They would have skinned him first, taken a plaster cast of the body, treated the hide, and then fit the skin back over the plaster model. The only thing real about this fellow is his skin and fur. The bones should have been preserved separately. I just hope they took photographs during the dissection. The organs and anatomy and so forth. Maybe here…”

  In the base of every display case were several deep drawers, and Kate bent down and pulled one open. Inside, under a layer of glass, were carefully labeled bones, nestled together in a bed of foam.

  “He was an organized man,” I said.

  “You can’t have any objection if I bring these back with me,” she said to Hal.

  “Mark them down on your wish list,” he said. “We’ll come back after we’ve finished inspecting the ship. I’ve wasted enough time in this dead zoo.”

  I watched Kate’s face, waiting for her reaction. I was eager to see her disagree with Hal, even though I shared his impatience. I wanted gold in my hands, not bones.

  “This is a floating treasure trove,” Kate said coolly.

  “For you maybe,” said Hal. “But an oversized chimp isn’t going to help the rest of us.”

  “It’s not a chimp at all,” Kate retorted. “A relation to the gorilla possibly. Or someone more like yourself perhaps.”

  “Very witty, Miss de Vries. Now let’s move on.”

  We left the dead zoo and continued aft along the keel catwalk. Only a few steps on we reached a second armored door, this time on the ship’s starboard side. Once more, Nadira took the key from around her neck, and, twisting and nudging, unlocked it. This time we were ready for the pomp and ceremony: the ticking, the great clunk, the key spitting.

  Throughout the entire ship, there was a horrid sense of expectation, that time had been only temporarily frozen and might at any moment bring all the ship’s inhabitants gruesomely back to life. But I felt it even more strongly now, as I stood on the threshold of this room, waiting for the door to slide open. Something was in there.

  Something was waiting.

  THE VIVARIUM

  Complete darkness did not greet us this time, but pale light, revealing a chamber even bigger than the last. Dark, silhouetted shapes hunched everywhere, as if ready to stand or spring. Our torch beams danced about nervously. Against the far wall was a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows, all iced over. Looming darkly in the corner was an enormous machine, bent like a gargantuan crone, peering out the window. It looked to me like a telescope. I’d seen the vast Lowell telescope once, and had even been allowed to gaze briefly through its powerful lenses at the canals of Mars. I wondered if Grunel was some kind of astronomer too.

  We entered cautiously, moving around the many ropes and pulleys and chains dangling from ceiling tracks. Obviously Grunel had used them to lift heavy things about the room.

  And there were many heavy things here. The airship yards at Lionsgate City did not have more tools. I saw drilling machines and grinders, lathes and riveters, welders, metal saws, all dormant now, their surfaces flecked with rust and ice. Shelves and pigeonholes soared up the walls, filled with all manner of hardware, jars of frozen chemicals, powders and pastes, as well as things that were altogether mysterious to me. Workbenches were everywhere, some still scattered with tools.

  “It’s his workshop,” I said.

  Again it struck me: the Hyperion was no simple freighter, hired to move Grunel’s personal belongings to a new home. This workshop had been in full use. I watched Hal’s face darken as he swept the room with his torch and saw nothing but machines and tools and labeled crates of copper piping and rubber hosing and metal plates.

  We made our way carefully through all the dangling chains and ropes, around the machines and workbenches. I paused at some kind of high-backed chair, from which sprouted a pair of mechanical arms.

  “What is that?” Nadira asked.

  “Must be one of his inventions,” Kate said.

  Luckily Grunel was an obsessive labeler, for a small brass plate had been fixed to the chair’s seat.

  I shone my light on it and read aloud, “Automatic Dresser and Undresser.”

  “Does it do corsets, I wonder?” Hal asked Kate, which I thought very bold of him.

  “Can’t be rougher than Miss Simpkins,” Kate said.

  We moved on, opening crates as we went, but none of them yielded crisp banknotes or gold coins—just more tools and raw materials for Grunel’s inventions. In some boxes we found his finished creations, nested in wood chips. Grunel’s labels were almost as odd as the creations themselves: A vaporous and aromatic propulsion device for the extinguishing of fires large and small; and another: A revolutionary watertight lock for bathyspheres, submersible vehicles of all types, and automated washing machines; and yet another: A form-fitting diaper for domesticated birds, particularly well suited for toucans, parrots, and macaws.

  Hal stopped before a huge wooden chest that looked uncomfortably like a coffin, for it was surely too ornamented to be a simple storage crate.

  “Why would there be a coffin in a workshop?” Nadira asked.

  “You don’t suppose he buried himself in that, do you?” I said.

  “Let’s find out,” said Hal. “Maybe he can tell us where he hid his loot.”

  I didn’t want him to open it; I’d had my fill of cadavers for one day.

  “There’s no lock,” Hal said and heaved up the hinged lid.

  He swore when he saw it was empty. I breathed easier.

  “It must have been built for a very large person,” Kate observed.

  “Or meant to sleep two,” I added.

  A roomier casket you could not have asked for. It was lined with red silk and looked invitingly soft.

  “What’s all that?” I asked, for built on the underside of the lid, near where the head would have rested, were all sorts of mechanical contraptions.

  “Apparatus for Signaling from the Grave,” Dorje read from one of Grunel’s useful brass plates.

  “What kind of fellow would invent such a thing?” I said.

  “He was very morbid, from all I’ve read,” Kate explained. “He had a phobia about being buried alive. There’s a scientific name for it, but I’ve forgotten.”

  “I think I see how it works.” I pointed at a long narrow drill bit. “You could make a hole with this. I guess you use these cranks and handles to turn it and you can keep going through the soil until you hit the surface.”

  “And look,” said Kate, “there’s an extendable breathing straw you can send up through the hole. So you won’t suffocate.”

  “And a periscope!” I added, pointing. “So you can see all the fun you’re missing.”

  “There’s even a little signal horn you can toot!” Nadira commented in amusement.

  “I hope it was loud,” Kate remarked.

  I reached into the box and gave the bu
lb a squeeze.

  The sheer volume of the toot made everyone jump. My ears rang. The sound echoed through the cavernous cargo hold.

  Dorje looked at me sternly. “If anything were likely to be awoken, that would do it.”

  “Well,” said Hal, “I’m sure the grave signaler would have been a huge success for old Grunel. Of course, it only works if your relations were actually sad to see you go. I can just picture the burial. ‘Well, thank goodness we’re finally rid of the old cow!’ Toot toot! ‘What was that noise? It seems to be coming from her grave!’ Toot toot! ‘Let’s just keep walking, shall we?’”

  I smiled, but managed to stop myself from laughing: Kate was doing enough of that, and I could not bear to hear the sound directed at Hal. He was hugely taken with his little joke, and as we continued to explore the inventing room, he’d periodically give a vigorous toot toot!

  “What’s phrenology?” asked Nadira, peering at the plate on yet another odd-looking machine. There was an open-sided booth with a stool; mounted directly overhead was a contraption that looked for all the world like an enormous mechanical spider. The spider had too many legs, each with many joints, and tipped with calipers.

  “Phrenology?” said Kate, coming closer. “It’s the study of the shape of the human head. Some people think you can tell an awful lot from all the bumps and ridges.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, intelligence, potential for success, bravery, secretiveness, loyalty, and so forth.”

  I ran my fingers over the sharp tips of the calipers.

  “I wouldn’t want my head being handled by these things.”

  “I’m sure,” Kate remarked tartly.

  “I’ve had enough of Grunel’s little toys,” said Hal. “Let’s move on. I don’t think we’ll find anything of value here.”

  “What about that?” I asked, nodding at the vast telescope-like machine in the far corner.

  We drew closer. The huge bank of windows along the hull’s curving outer wall was completely frosted, and though we could not see out, enough midday light passed through that we could switch off our torches and save the batteries.