Skybreaker

by Kenneth Oppel

  They disappeared. I looked at Kate.

  “It’ll be all right,” I said.

  Without warning one of the aerozoan’s tentacles silently retracted and whipped out in our direction. It snapped back not four feet from us. Kate gasped. The aerozoan tensed and glided toward us. For a split second I wondered if we should run for the door, but I did not like our chances. Those tentacles were long. I touched Kate’s arm and we stealthily moved back deeper into the room. I dared not make too sudden a movement.

  From the catwalk I heard voices, and looked around for a place to hide. But the aerozoan seemed to have a pretty good idea of where we were, and stalked us patiently. Maybe it was tracking our wake. Maybe it was tasting us. Its long tentacles nearly brushed the floor. As the tips passed close to metal, sparks flew.

  The voices were getting louder. I realized the aerozoan was backing us into a corner. I looked over my shoulder and saw Grunel’s coffin. My decision was instant. Three more steps and I grabbed hold of the coffin lid and heaved it up.

  “Get in!” I told Kate.

  She hesitated for a split second only, and then we swung ourselves into the casket. I lowered the lid as gently and quietly as I could. We were in total darkness. The thickness of the coffin and its plush lining muffled all sound. We backed against opposite ends, legs touching. I could feel Kate’s rucksack against my feet.

  I turned on the torch, illuminating the silky red interior. Over our heads we both heard a faint rasping noise.

  “Tentacles,” I said, and with a shiver pictured them slithering over the wooden lid.

  “This wasn’t a good idea,” Kate said.

  “I just saved our lives!”

  “How are we going to know when it’s safe to come out?”

  “Well, we’ll just have to use Grunel’s nifty little grave signaling apparatus, won’t we?”

  “Ahh. You’re brilliant.”

  “Can you hold the torch?”

  As Kate aimed it at the ceiling, I lay flat on my back to examine the controls. Maybe it was being in such confined quarters, but I felt rather flustered by the array of knobs and gears.

  “Honestly,” I muttered. “Look at all this! Do you think someone who’s just woken up in a coffin could figure this out?”

  “You probably wouldn’t be in top form,” Kate agreed.

  “It’d be pitch black. You wouldn’t be able to see anything.”

  “Maybe he meant to add a reading light.”

  “Why not throw in a few good books too, in case you had to wait a while?”

  I found a knob marked “periscope” and started turning. I heard the sound of well-oiled metal moving within the wood casing.

  “I think I’m raising it,” I said. I figured I only needed to put it up a few inches since we weren’t buried six feet under. Then I pulled the retractable eyepiece down to my face.

  It took a while for my eyes to adjust, for the light in the engineerium was quite dim, and the lens on the periscope gave a strange warped view, as though the room itself was a little planet, everything curving away at the sides. But it did let me see a great deal at once.

  “Where’s the aerozoan?” Kate asked.

  “It’s hard to see. It’s not like a spyglass. Everything’s all bulgy.”

  “It’s a fish-eye lens. I’ve used them for photography. Do you want me to have a look?”

  “I’m fine. I’ve spent three years in crow’s nests.”

  “I think this swivels the periscope,” Kate said, and I heard her turning something. The room careened suddenly to the left, and I instinctively rolled the other way and whacked my head against the casket.

  “Stop that,” I hissed. “You’re going too fast. I can’t see anything.”

  “Let me have a look,” she said. “You’re hogging.”

  “Hogging? We’re not sightseeing. Just keep turning. Slowly.”

  I went all the way around the room without seeing the aerozoan. Then, a tip of a tentacle dangled before my eyes.

  “It’s right over us,” I breathed.

  “Oh, dear.”

  “No, wait, it’s moving.” I watched as the aerozoan, looking much fatter and squatter through the odd lens, drifted away from the coffin, back toward the vivarium. Already the glass walls were frosted, concealing what was inside.

  “Shall we make a run for it?” Kate asked.

  “Hold on. Swivel me to the right…a little more…there.”

  Through the engineerium’s doorway, torch beams swept the catwalk.

  “No. They’re coming.”

  “Are they inside?” she said.

  “Not yet.” I watched as the blaze of their lights strengthened. Two figures stopped in the doorway. More were behind them. They seemed enormous as yetis in their reddish mountaineering garb, fur-rimmed hoods all but concealing their faces. Oxygen masks hung at their throats. The two in front were talking, pointing at the open door.

  A third man came forward and inspected the doorway. He wore special lighted spectacles, like a jeweler, and he took his time.

  “I think they’re checking the door for booby traps,” I whispered to Kate. “I can’t hear what they’re saying.”

  The walls of the coffin were too thick and well insulated to let sound in.

  “Wait, they’re coming in. I wish we could hear them.”

  “Grunel had a horn,” said Kate. “Maybe it also doubled as a listening trumpet.”

  “Do you think?”

  “Well, it would’ve been nice to know what people were saying about you at the funeral. What’s this here?”

  I could scarcely believe it, but Kate was right. Behind a small hatch was a little trumpet that could be pulled down and placed against your ear.

  “I want to hear as well,” she said. She started sliding toward me, and I shifted to make room for her.

  “Careful,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “You nearly tooted the horn.”

  “That would be bad. Extremely bad.”

  She lay down beside me. It was a tight squeeze.

  “Well, isn’t this romantic?” I said.

  “Side by side in our very own coffin.”

  We had a little giggle. Being so near her, I felt absurdly happy. It made no sense, given the peril we were in. It must have been the thin air, finally taking its toll on my brain. I should have been terrified by our predicament, but it seemed far away, as if the walls of the coffin formed our own impervious little world. I leaned closer and kissed her.

  We shared the listening trumpet, and I pulled the periscope’s eyepiece once more to my face. I was getting the hang of it, and could reach up with a free hand and swivel it myself now. I only hoped the periscope jutting up from the coffin did not catch their attention. I suddenly realized what a conspicuous hiding place this was—a coffin in the middle of a workshop. Anyone would want to have a peek inside.

  There were eight of them, walking into the room, laden with gear. My heart sank. Giants they seemed, carrying portable battery packs and tall pole lamps. I could not make out faces yet. They moved slowly, like arctic explorers bogged down in snow. Even with their tanked oxygen, their bodies were struggling with the altitude and thin air. I wondered if they’d climbed too quickly and hadn’t had a chance to acclimatize as we had. We were weak—but without their oxygen, they’d be even weaker. It didn’t matter, though, because holstered in each of their belts were large pistols.

  Their torch beams spun a spider’s web of light around the room. I could not see the rogue aerozoan anywhere. I watched all this as I might watch a film in the cinema. I was somewhere else, safe. You need to be afraid, a voice inside my head told me, but it was not a very loud voice, and I did not want to listen right now. I was feeling calm and controlled.

  A thin man fixed his torch beam on Grunel’s huge machine, then turned to the larger man beside him.

  “Set the lamps up over here!” that man shouted to the others.

  The sound through the li
stening trumpet was surprisingly crisp. Grunel was a genius.

  The big man turned, and light washed over his face. His ginger goatee was frosted with ice.

  “It’s Rath,” I said to Kate. I was not surprised, but it still made my guts contract to behold his big, brutal face. “They seem to know what they’re looking for.”

  As the crew busily set up the lamps, Rath and the thin man stepped back out of the way, stopping near the coffin. I’d been hoping we could make a break for it—but not now.

  The man beside Rath nodded. “This is it, most certainly,” he said, his voice thin as bone china. He turned. Within his fur hood I saw an elderly, frail face and bushy eyebrows.

  “It’s the old fellow from the newspaper!” I whispered to Kate.

  “And now that we’ve found it,” said Rath, “perhaps you can tell me what it is, Mr. Barton.”

  “Barton,” Kate breathed in amazement. “George Barton?”

  I nodded. Nadira was right. There could be no question now: he was the same man who’d been speaking to Rath at the heliodrome; he was the man from the Aruba Consortium.

  “This machine,” said Barton, “is Theodore Grunel’s greatest invention. It creates power from nothing but water.”

  Rath gave a chuckle. “I wouldn’t have thought such a thing was possible.”

  “None of us did at first,” said Barton. “But Grunel was an unusually brilliant man. I knew him well. The Consortium funded his work on the internal combustion engine, and it made us all rich. But he was never satisfied with it. He said it was dirty and wasteful. That there were purer forms of power. We wanted to know what he had in mind, but he wouldn’t share his designs with us. Later we learned he was secretly working on some new form of engine, one that didn’t require Aruba fuel. Of course we were eager to acquire it.” He gave a reedy laugh. “It only took us forty years.”

  The speech seemed to tire Barton out, and he put the oxygen mask over his face and breathed deeply.

  “Let’s have some light!” Rath shouted at his men.

  All the portable electric lamps came on at once, and shadows leapt for cover in the room’s corners. There was no sign of the aerozoan, and no one had noticed the vivarium yet, for its glass walls were now completely frosted over. Everyone’s attention was directed at Grunel’s enormous machine, gleaming in the lamp’s glare.

  “It’s an impressive-looking thing,” Rath said, “but how can you be sure it works?”

  Barton lowered his mask. “Our fine locksmith Mr. Zwingli should be able to resolve that question shortly. Grunel was well known for his extravagant locks. Luckily, in the forty years since his demise, locksmiths’ tricks have advanced somewhat. Mr. Zwingli! Might I prevail upon you to see if the machine functions?”

  The man with the lighted spectacles nodded and proceeded to Grunel’s machine. From his rucksack he removed a bristling tool belt and set to work on the control panel.

  “They’re trying to turn it on,” I whispered to Kate.

  “Without the key?” she asked.

  “I don’t know that this fellow needs keys.”

  “You’ll forgive my skepticism, Mr. Barton,” said Rath, “but it sounds like a lot of make-believe to me.”

  “Not at all,” said Barton. “In theory, nothing could be simpler. Were you well schooled, Mr. Rath?”

  “Until the teacher had a nasty mishap.”

  “It was one of Grunel’s most amazing discoveries. Water contains both oxygen and hydrogen atoms. But it’s a deucedly difficult business to separate them. Grunel focused the sun’s light to split them.” He pointed at the enormous brass cylinder that looked like a telescope. “Miraculous. So now he has hydrogen and oxygen in abundance and he uses both of them to create an electrical current. I won’t bore you with the details, but the process creates power, water, heat, and hydrium, which is stripped from the air. There are no moving parts, no soot, and no end to the supply. He called it the Prometheus Engine.”

  Again, Barton lifted his mask to his face, and breathed hungrily.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Rath.

  As if on cue, the ceiling lights in the engineerium flared on; the heaters clacked, water gushed through the pipes.

  “Good Lord,” said Rath.

  Barton stared at the machine in sheer admiration. “As you can see, Mr. Rath, it’s an act of genius. Grunel did it. That’s why you and I are here. To finish the job I failed to complete forty years ago.”

  “What do you mean?” Rath asked.

  “Grunel went aloft to finish the engine in secret. To get away from the Consortium. I pursued him.”

  I glanced excitedly at Kate. “He’s B.,” I whispered. “From Grunel’s diary. Grunel was right. It wasn’t pirates. It was Barton stalking them!”

  “I was nearly upon him,” Barton told Rath. “But he flew into a storm, and we lost them. Like everyone else, we assumed they’d crashed. Until the ship was sighted last week. And now we’re here, Mr. Rath, to make sure Grunel’s invention never reaches earth.”

  “You mean to destroy it?” Rath said, and his astonishment matched my own.

  “Correct,” replied Barton.

  “Seems a pity,” Rath said.

  “We’re not paying you to have an opinion, Mr. Rath.”

  I caught my breath, hearing him speak to Rath like this.

  “Certainly,” said Rath, and I saw all his dislike and anger compressed into a frigid smile. “But perhaps you wouldn’t mind satisfying my simpleminded curiosity, Mr. Barton. I can see how it might be a threat—”

  “Not a threat, Mr. Rath. An end. The Aruba Consortium has spent more than sixty years drilling and refining Aruba fuel. At great expense we now control the vast majority of the world’s supply.” He paused to suck some oxygen from his mask. “We’ve just discovered a huge new Aruba field, perhaps you’ve read about it in the papers. Finding it nearly bankrupted us—that, you wouldn’t have read in the papers. All will be well once we extract and sell the fuel—but how can we sell it if Grunel’s water engine comes along and makes us obsolete?”

  “But presumably,” said Rath, “only you would have the machine. You would still be the world’s power brokers.”

  “A seductive thought,” wheezed Barton, breaking off to take frequent puffs of oxygen. “But if the secret of this machine were to get out—and it surely would, given time—we would lose our monopoly. Anyone could build their own Prometheus Engine. And we would have nothing to sell them. Huge fortunes would be wiped out, nations would collapse, thousands would be out of work. It would turn the entire world on its head.”

  Rath gave a wry smile. “Ah, I see. You’re acting for the good of all mankind.”

  “For such a moralist, Mr. Rath, you seemed to have no trouble opening fire on the Sagarmatha.”

  “That was your order, Mr. Barton.”

  “And my machinery that made it possible. Do you think we would’ve found the Sagarmatha without my echolocator?”

  “Nadira wasn’t lying,” Kate said to me. “She didn’t help Rath find us.”

  I nodded, relieved I hadn’t been foolhardy in trusting her.

  “The echolocator is a handsome device, to be sure,” Rath said placatingly.

  “As is the skybreaker,” Barton went on, “which is yours upon completion of this enterprise. Until then, you’re required to do nothing but follow orders.”

  “When the pay’s this handsome,” said Rath, “I have no opinion on the matter.”

  “Very good. Turn off the machine now, Mr. Zwingli! And destroy it!” Barton turned back to Rath. “Instruct your men to search the ship for the blueprints. Any technical drawings or plans must be brought to me.”

  “But the ship will be scuttled,” Rath told him. “We’ll blast it to pieces. Nothing will survive.”

  “That is not an assumption the board can afford to make. The machine’s blueprints will come back with us to Brussels.”

  Barton was wheezing now like a veteran smoker, and h
e put his oxygen mask back on. Rath turned to his men and relayed Barton’s orders.

  “I want a look,” said Kate, and pulled the eyepiece from my grip. “They’re starting to cut into the machine. Oh, Matt, they’re tearing it apart!”

  I didn’t like it at all, but right now I was more concerned with how we might escape. Getting out of the coffin would be a major production—pushing the lid high, leaping out, running for cover. How could we do it without being spotted?

  “Oh, no,” said Kate suddenly.

  “What?”

  “One of them’s looking right at me.”

  “Don’t move the periscope!” I wondered how obvious it was, jutting up from the lid of the coffin.

  “Let me see,” I said. “Could you move a bit?”

  Kate pushed up with her elbows and tried to shift herself out of the way, but she lost her balance and fell right against the horn’s bulb. A great honking noise emanated and echoed through the engineerium.

  Kate and I stared at each other, frozen.

  “I tooted the horn,” she said in a very small voice.

  I grabbed the eyepiece. Rath and his men were looking around in bewilderment.

  “What the blazes was that?” someone said.

  “Where’d it come from?” another asked.

  There seemed to be a huge amount of confusion over the source of the noise. Pistols were drawn, some aimed at the catwalk, others at various points in the room.

  One fellow pointed straight at the coffin. “It came from over there.”

  “What’s a coffin doing here?” asked Rath angrily.

  “The sound came from there!”

  “Then go and open it if you’re so sure,” Rath said testily. “It’s big enough to fit the Vienna Boys’ Choir.”

  The pirate gripped his pistol and started walking over.

  I looked at Kate. “This is going to be bad,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “When he opens the lid, just run.”

  “He’ll think we’re ghosts. He’ll be scared witless.”

  “More likely to squeeze the trigger.” My hands were shaking as I pulled a pry bar from Kate’s rucksack. I would try to smack the pistol from his hand and buy us a few moments.

  “We could just surrender,” said Kate.