Competence

by Gail Carriger

  At the same time, the deckling above her, hanging out over the bowsprit (so she could see as much downwards as possible) shouted out, “Spotted!”

  “Rue, over here!” called Prim.

  Tasherit swung her rifle about and rested the barrel on the railing, standing up to sight down it. Prim tried not to worry that a woman with supernatural strength needed help holding up her weapon.

  The Spotted Custard was relatively small for a dirigible, sleek and fashion-forward but at root a pleasure craft, made for tourism not war or commerce. Prim had seen members of Her Majesty’s Airborne Floatillah. They were truly massive airships, impressive and mean looking, but still essentially an almond-shaped balloon (or two, or three stacked atop one another) with a boatlike gondola suspended beneath. They usually had an aetheric sail fore or aft and a propeller or two down below. Postal craft were similar.

  The thing in front of them right now had no more in common with a standard dirigible than a muffin did with a kipper. An odd analogy, Prim knew, especially as her favourite food was the muffin and Tasherit’s was the kipper.

  This thing had three tall teardrop-shaped balloons, two higher than the third. Prim assumed the higher ones held helium and the middle lower one was air ballast. They gave the distinct impression of bubbles in a glass of champagne. Except they were painted grey. The whole ship was painted grey.

  The gondola looked like nothing so much as a massive soup ladle, with a propeller off the front of the bowl, another propeller sticking directly down off the bottom, and a third about halfway down the long handle, which Prim supposed was an extraordinarily long and misshapen bowsprit. It was the oddest bowsprit she’d ever seen - twice as long as the ship itself, sticking far out in a hazardous and precarious manner. The bowsprit supported part of a sail, which was open and up, even though they were in atmosphere not aether. There was a gun at the very tip. The ship was ugly, and incongruous, and made no aeronautic sense whatsoever.

  And it had (Prim would swear to it) simply popped into existence in front of them out of thin air.

  “Where the hell did that come from?” Tasherit asked, finger on the trigger of her rifle.

  “I don’t know. It simply appeared there.”

  “The laws of physics and nature would make that impossible, little one.”

  Prim agreed. “It’s like it emerged from the grey, only we aren’t close enough to the aetherosphere for that to be possible.”

  “Add to that the fact that they are below us and the aetherosphere is above us.”

  “I can’t explain it any more than you can.” Prim tried not to sound annoyed.

  “Well, little one, let us hope we survive long enough to find out what the hell is going on.”

  God, she looks so tired and fragile. Primrose suppressed the urge to reach out and stroke Tasherit’s perfect face.

  “It wouldn’t hurt anyone,” said the werecat.

  “What wouldn’t?”

  “You kissing me.”

  “I… I…” Prim scrabbled for something, anything, to say.

  “You?” Chocolate eyes could be so warm.

  “Percy!” Rue’s shout cut through the moment. “Take us down to their level. Get us up close and intimate. I want to know what’s going on.”

  Prim felt relief and disappointment in equal measure.

  “You were saying?” Tasherit pressed.

  “Nothing. I was saying nothing. It is of no consequence.”

  Tasherit shook her head. “What hundreds of years haven’t wrought, you will manage in the space of mere months.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Prim glared at the werecat, convinced she was being insulted - being irritated was so much easier than any other feeling.

  “You will be the death of me. But such a lovely way to go.”

  “I quite dislike you sometimes,” said Prim, a touch unguarded.

  “I know,” said the werecat, cheerfully. Then she bumped her shoulder. “Gives me hope.”

  Prim enjoyed the nudge more than she ought.

  Percy depuffed them so that they were practically prow-to-prow with the enemy ship. A chubby ladybird dirigible facing up against a sublimely odd-looking midair soup ladle.

  Rue rejoined them on the forecastle deck. “That is the ugliest floating utensil I’ve ever seen.”

  A blast of gunfire. They were still not quite in range. Which is why Rue hadn’t swung them broadside to return fire with the Gatling gun yet.

  “They keep wasting bullets. If we know that we are out of range, they must know that too. Do you think they really have evil intent, or are they simply trying to scare us off?” Tasherit asked this, but did not leave off sighting down her rifle.

  Rue frowned. “Or they don’t know their own equipment.”

  “Stolen ship?” suggested Prim, thinking hard. It was odd behaviour.

  “Or they have better guns than we do and are terrible shots.” Rue shrugged, dismissing the discussion. In typical Rue fashion she was more concerned with the immediate crisis than the reasons behind it.

  “Any idea where they came from?” asked Tash.

  “None whatsoever.” Rue wandered back towards navigation and leapt down to the main deck to yell up at Prim’s brother. “Percy, ramp up the propeller and ease us towards them. Slowly now, bring us around at the same time, show them the starboard side. Willard, man your gun and prepare to fire, we’re almost in range!”

  Prim was briefly distracted by a press of sweet dry lips against her own. Yes, they were exactly as soft as she remembered from their encounter in the hallway. Only a brief kiss this time, though. Tasherit had nothing to prove.

  “What?” Prim blinked, surprised.

  “You weren’t paying attention to me. I don’t like it when you aren’t paying attention.” The werecat looked smug.

  Prim opened her mouth, could think of nothing snappy to say, sputtered slightly, and suspected she looked rather more like a fish than a cultivated young lady of superior understanding. So she shut her mouth and glared.

  “Ready to fire on my mark!” sang out Rue, her voice rather too full of delight for Prim’s comfort. My dearest friend is a bloodthirsty little creature. Or maybe she simply enjoys the power. Prim considered, Which would be worse?

  “Three, two, one, God’s teeth! What the hell?”

  Prim blinked.

  Everything around them vanished.

  They were surrounded by grey - closing in, muting, shrouding. The aetherosphere. But how?

  The enemy ladle ship, which had, mere moments before, been right there in front of them, had completely vanished.

  Prim turned to see Tasherit’s reaction.

  Only to find that the werecat was crumpled and insensate on the deck next to her.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Mystery, a Fez, and an Italian Mathematician

  Too many mysteries. Percy did not like mysteries. Far too many unexpected, unexplainable, and frankly unscientific things had just happened, and Percy felt stretched by improbability. He was a rubber band that had suddenly become less like rubber and more like a wet sock. His intellect was challenged. And Percy’s intellect hadn’t been challenged in years. It was a novel experience.

  An airship appeared from nothing. Then disappeared into nothing. And what a ship! I have never seen its like before - ridiculous. Why build a dirigible that looks like a large soup spoon? Everything must be interconnected. The ship, its appearance, our current plight. And… now I’m distracted.

  What the hell is that ghastly noise?

  Percy blinked and stood up on his toes to discern what was occurring at the very front of the forecastle deck, at the opposite end of the airship.

  That would appear to be my sister. Screaming. Screaming her nonsensical head off. Why is it my destiny to be chronically plagued by lesser intellects and hysterical females?

  Percy couldn’t quite tell, but it looked as though Primrose was bent over someone’s crump
led body.

  Oh, really! A death right now would be most incommodious.

  Primrose usually kept a calm and practical head in a crisis. It was one of his sister’s few admirable qualities. Very little caused his unflappable sister to start flapping her lungs in such a fashion. His own death, of course, might engender such hysteria.

  Yet I’m not dead. At least, I don’t believe I am. Does one know when one is dead? I must ask Formerly Floote.

  Rue’s death, most likely, would also cause Prim to squeal.

  But she is also not dead.

  And - he frowned - the death of Tasherit Sekhmet.

  So it’s the werecat who is collapsed. Not unlikely if we are in the grey. I shall take my sister’s histrionics as confirmation that, against all odds, we are, in fact, somehow back inside the aetherosphere.

  “Don’t be a ninnyhammer, Tiddles! She’s not dead, she’s only sleeping,” Percy yelled across the ship, without concerning himself further, knowing his theory was sound.

  It seemed this fact had been simultaneously ascertained up front, because Primrose abruptly stopped screaming. It could not be his yelling at her, because if history proved anything it was that Percy had little to no effect on his sister’s behaviour. Particularly when he yelled at her.

  In the blessed silence that followed, Percy turned his attention to the manifold mysteries at hand.

  Come on, Percy, you old chump, put it together. He cast his mind back over theories of aetheric conversion, Charybdis current formation, aetherosphere balance. Nothing he’d read or heard accounted for what they had just experienced.

  How could we end up back in the grey? How did we rise so far so suddenly? He checked his instruments. According to the Mandenall Pudding Probe, they were still well below aetheric levels.

  And then, to make matters worse, there stood Rue, in front of him, glaring.

  “Percy! Explain!” She made a wide expansive gesture.

  Percy growled, more frustrated than she could ever imagine. “I can’t!”

  “But Percy!”

  “It doesn’t make sense, Rue! There’s no theory to explain this. We can’t be in the aetherosphere. We simply can’t. The world simply doesn’t work like that. Even gravity is against us in this matter. I don’t know what to say or do. Dash it all, I’ve completely run out of science!”

  “Don’t you dare have an existential crisis on me right now, Percival Tunstell. Do you need help? Should I get Quesnel to figure this out for you? I’ll chivvy him up, shall I?” Rue reached for the speaking tube.

  Rue always knew exactly what to say to offend Percy the most. Well, to be fair, Primrose was slightly better at it than Rue, but only slightly.

  “How is my sister?”

  “What? Oh. She’s fine. A little perturbed to find Tash suddenly all floppy.”

  “Sounded worse than that.”

  “She’s stopped screaming, hasn’t she?” Rue was always more concerned with results than deductive reasoning.

  But Percy was, if nothing else, a man of reason. “I can’t understand this, Rue. I simply can’t. It doesn’t make a lick of sense. Nothing makes sense right now.” He knew it was as close as he would come in his lifetime to the pained cry of the truly heartbroken.

  “Yes it does, she was screaming because she’s in love with—”

  Percy held up a hand. “It’s not my sister I cannot understand. She’s regrettably simple.”

  “Oh. But—”

  “Rue. Captain. Please, give me a moment?”

  Rue opened her mouth.

  “A quiet moment.”

  Rue stood there, staring at him and twitching, but blessedly silent.

  Percy thought hard for a long minute and then he spoke the only possible conclusion out loud. “Very well. If we did not go up into the aetherosphere, then the aetherosphere must have come down to us.”

  “Is that not equally impossible?” Rue ground out. She couldn’t help herself.

  “No, just extremely implausible. Wait a moment…” Percy began to mentally tally up what he did know to be true, given that reality seemed to be squiffy right now. First, the aetherosphere was still up there, above the atmosphere, tight and confined. It didn’t move up or down and it didn’t leak. It just was. Second, the aether currents within it moved around, sometimes predictably, sometimes erratically. But to fall all the way down here, into the middle of the atmosphere…?

  Percy’s brain hurt.

  He searched back over his studies, over papers he’d read in university. Desperate for anything, anything at all, no matter how wild the hypothesis, no matter how disregarded the scientist, that explained what they’d just experienced.

  “Cappiocra!”

  “What?” Rue reared away from him as if she’d been slapped.

  Percy reached over and grabbed the speaking tube.

  “What?” said an aggrieved female voice at the other end.

  “Miss Phinkerlington, if you don’t want to talk to any of us up here, why do you keep picking up the tube that end?”

  “Because someone has got to. Himself is off shovelling coal like a peon, and him with a bum arm and all kinds of issues.”

  “I’ll thank you not to go into Mr Lefoux’s issues, we’ll be here all day.”

  A grunt met that statement of truth.

  “Miss Phinkerlington.” Percy made certain to sound as dry and acerbic as he knew how. “Unless you know anything about the Italian mathematician Cappiocra, I suggest you get Mr Lefoux to converse with me forthwith.”

  “Well, there’s no need to throw Italian mathematicians at me.”

  Mere moments later, Quesnel’s mellow voice said, “You summoned, Professor?”

  Percy didn’t bother with a greeting. “Cappiocra? Did you ever study him in school?”

  “Wasn’t he laughed out of Europe and roundly discredited for some silly unsubstantiated theory about the properties of aether? Didn’t he die in poverty and obscurity?”

  “I’m not interested in the man himself, only his theories.”

  “Well, we do have an Italian on board. Why don’t you go ask him, you wiffin?”

  Percy returned the tube to its cradle. “I must go speak with Rodrigo Tarabotti immediately.”

  “Right now?” Rue glared. “Percy, this is not the time for moral philosophy.”

  “No, as I just intimated, this is the time for obscure Italian mathematicians. Please excuse me.” Percy climbed out of the navigation pit intent on this new line of possibilities.

  Rue grabbed his sleeve. “Percy, really, must you?”

  “Prudence Akeldama, if you wish to know what is going on, I need an Italian and I need one now. Let me go to him.”

  “You get more peculiar by the hour.”

  Percy did not dignify that with an answer. She let go and he was already jumping down to the main deck so he could climb below and beard the Italian in his lair.

  Rodrigo was waiting for him, or waiting for someone, looking concerned and curious and a little shaken. Anitra was with him, and he held her hand in a white-knuckled grip as though to reassure her, or himself, or possibly both. Percy supposed it was scary to be trapped below decks during an air battle with no idea as to whether one was being shot out of the sky or not. He spared a brief moment of sympathy for Quesnel and his staff, perennially stuck in the boiler room. But only a brief moment.

  As to hand-holding intimacy between ship’s interpreter and prisoner? Percy did not find this as odd as others might. They suited one another admirably. He approved. Anitra was a good person, for all she was Lord Akeldama’s spy. Percy fancied that she’d be good for Rodrigo. In fact, seldom had Percy approved a match as much as this one. Assuming they made a match of it. Difficult to tell with foreigners. Not quite the same perspective on marriage as the home battlegrounds, so to speak.

  Percy greeted them both as warmly as he was able under the circumstances. Which was, he had no doubt, one degree
off from an icicle at the best of times. “Miss Anitra, Mr Tarabotti, good afternoon.”

  The Italian did not care for niceties. Percy respected that. “Professor, why is it people are always throwing the gun at this ship?”

  “Throwing guns? Oh, you mean shooting. Why are they always shooting at us?”

  Anitra explained, “We heard the uproar above decks.”

  Percy shrugged. A bad habit that he refused to admit he’d picked up from Quesnel Lefoux. “I believe we chronically irritate people.”

  “Si. So now we are in grey? Hiding?”

  “Yes, but by accident. I didn’t take us up into it. It sort of happened around us, while we were down floating inside the atmosphere.”

  “How?” Rodrigo looked fierce. Well, fiercer than normal.

  Anitra frowned as well. “It is not possible.”

  “Precisely. Yet it has happened. You see my current predicament? Mr Tarabotti, did the Templars ever teach you about Cappiocra?”

  “Matematico? Si. He had the idea of, how you say, tasca with aether.”

  “Tasca?” Not a word Percy knew.

  “Si. Tasca.” Rodrigo reached forward and touched the pocket of Percy’s waistcoat. Tugging at the top, opening it slightly. Percy was suddenly very glad he did not, in fact, have a gun stashed there. He liked Rodrigo, but he still didn’t trust the man.

  Anitra said, “Open? No, that’s aperto.”

  “No noun,” insisted Rodrigo.

  “Pocket? Tasca means pocket? Oh? Oh! Now I remember. His was the theory of spontaneous aetheric pocket phenomena!”

  “Si.”

  “Of course! Thank you.”

  “But Professor, what—” It was unpardonably rude to interrupt a lady, but Percy did not let Anitra finish.

  He left the room. He had to get back on deck. He remembered most of the theory now, at least he thought he did. And what he could remember entirely explained the odd shape of their enemy’s ship perfectly. In fact, it explained everything!