Larklight

by Philip Reeve

  ‘Little wonder, is it, that my Martian friends laugh at our famous Empire?’ said R. B., with that same unsettling smile. ‘Their own empire fell long ago, and they do not expect ours to last long.’

  He stood up, and pointed towards the canal shore. We were passing a place where one of the ancient Martian ruins stood, an old temple of translucent porcelain, cracked and decayed yet still very pretty. ‘ “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!”’ he exclaimed, quoting Mr Shelley. ‘Do you know, Miss Mumby, Ulla’s people have legends of how their ancient empire passed away – in a war with a race of titanic spiders? I wonder if ours is about to go the same way. Perhaps every race which gets above itself and travels outwards across the deeps of space arouses the ire of those white devils …’

  ‘Oh, Mr Burton,’ I cried, ‘we must do something!’

  ‘Indeed we must,’ he said. ‘Fear not, Miss Mumby. I have a chum whom I believe I can persuade to transport us directly to the Earth, and there, I hope, we shall be able to confound these spiders, and frustrate their knavish tricks.’

  How I pray that he is right!

  Later

  This evening our paper ship carried us into a small but bustling Martian town, whose paper houses crowd close about the walls of a fort where the British flag flies.

  Troopers of the Martian Light Infantry came striding along the canal banks aboard their mechanised fighting machines to ask our business, and when they learned that Mr Burton was aboard they turned and raced back to the fort to announce his arrival. By the time we drew in to the quay beneath the fort’s walls the district officer had put on his hat and come out to greet us, and a Martian band struck up a stirring if discordant tune, which made me suddenly homesick for Larklight and my own dear pianoforte. (It is so long since I practised, and I was growing quite accomplished at playing ‘Birdsong at Eventide’ – I do hope these interruptions will not have made me grow rusty!)

  But I digress. Mr and Mrs Burton stepped ashore, and as I followed I saw a naval gentleman standing among the welcoming committee on the quay. He was staring at me in such a strange way that I imagined for a moment prolonged exposure to the Martian sun had deranged his wits, but it turned out that he recognised me! ‘Great Scott!’ he cried. ‘It is the lass whom I saw in the clutches of that wretch Havock and his mutinous dogs!’

  It turned out that this was the chum whom R. B. had brought us here to see: Captain Moonfield of the HMS Indefatigable. Of course, he had the advantage of me, for I was in a swoon when his ship caused the Sophronia to ‘Heave To’ (as we aethernauts say). It seems that he and his men had been most concerned for Arthur and I, but since they did not know our names, or where we came from, or where Jack Havock had taken us, there was nothing they could do for us, and after the Sophronia evaded their trap they had been forced to return empty-handed to Mars, where the Indefatigable was stationed.

  ‘I am glad to see you escaped safely, miss!’ said Captain Moonfield, bowing most elegantly.

  I was able to put him right on one point. ‘Jack Havock’s crew are not mutinous,’ I said. ‘Nor are they dogs (with the possible exception of Mr Grindle). They would follow Jack Havock to perdition if he asked them to, and I confess that during my time aboard his ship I found him a perfect gentleman. I believe he has been entirely misrepresented. He may have caused a little mischief, and stolen a few insignificant items from people who can well afford to lose them, but there is no harm in him, no harm at all.’

  ‘No harm?’ said Captain Moonfield, very much surprised. ‘But what about all the ships gone missing with all hands since he began to prowl the space lanes? The HMS Aeneas, for instance?’

  ‘Not Havock’s doing, Davey boy!’ boomed Mr Burton, coming to my aid. ‘From what Miss Mumby and others have told me Havock’s a good lad, quite after my own heart. Indeed, if Government don’t soon up my pay and start to recognise dear Ulla’s contribution to my work, I’ve half a mind to join the Sophronia’s crew myself! No, the real threat out there isn’t from the Havock boy, but from those spiders.’

  ‘Spiders?’ said Captain M., not following. ‘Nasty creatures, Dick, I quite agree. Too many legs entirely – but how can they be a threat? Poisonous, are they?’

  ‘Poisonous, highly intelligent, and bent upon the destruction of the British Empire,’ said R. B., and proceeded to illuminate him as to our adventures at The Beeches.

  ‘By Heaven!’ cried Captain M., when he had finished. ‘We must inform the Governor!’

  ‘No time, Davey,’ Mr Burton replied. ‘I was hoping rather that you could take us straight to Earth. Time is of the essence if we are to avert disaster.’

  I saw at once why he had chosen to turn to Captain Moonfield for help. That good gentleman did not waste time with any more questions, or dither about informing his superiors or waiting for written orders, signed in triplicate. Instead he sent straight to his ship, which was moored behind the fort, and we were soon joined by his chief alchemist, an elderly man named McMurdo.

  ‘How long before we can be over London?’ he demanded.

  McMurdo, a Scotsman of the gloomy sort, shook his head and opined that it would take at least ten days, and only then if his stocks of something called Rufous Mercury held out and his ‘main cogs’ had not been ‘nobbled’ by the Martian metal worms.

  ‘We shall do it in four!’ declared Captain M. ‘To your station, McMurdo! We take flight at midnight!’

  Mr McMurdo hurried off, muttering, ‘I cannae do it, Captain. I’m an alchemist, not an engineer.’ But I could see that Captain Moonfield has total confidence in his abilities, despite his uncouth manner.

  I write this in the District Officer’s residence, where Ulla and I have been invited to recuperate. Night is falling fast upon the desert, and the moons are rising. In a few days I shall be on Earth, at the Great Exhibition which I so longed to visit when I read of it in Larklight all those weeks ago. But my mind is filled with a turmoil of anxiety. Will we be able to put a stop to the spider’s machinations? And whatever shall I wear?

  And that is quite enough of Myrtle for the moment. She does nothing but blather on about frocks and dresses for the next few pages anyway, so I am sure you would rather read of ME; of how I went to Saturn, and what I found there – A. M.

  Chapter Fifteen

  In Which We Face Fresh Perils ’Mid Saturn’s Desolate Rings.

  To tell you the truth, I don’t remember much about our voyage to Saturn. Days and nights upon the Golden Roads, with nothing to look at but the swirling, shining stuff of our alchemical bow-wave wafting past the Sophronia’s portholes. I had tried to reason with Jack about the locket, which you may recall he had stolen from me, and was proposing to deliver to the spiders. But Jack would not talk to me, and I pretty soon gave up. Why had I ever trusted him? I wondered. Why had I ever thought him good, or admirable, or anything but a robber and a cad?

  Grindle and Mr Munkulus and the Tentacle Twins were all too wary of their captain’s anger to say much. They busied themselves with their work about the ship, casting worried glances from time to time at Jack. As for Ssil, she was shut in the wedding chamber, tending the great alembic and painstakingly calculating our course to Saturn. I don’t believe any of them liked Jack’s plan, but they were all too used to following him to try and talk him out of it. When Mr Munkulus tried to question him he said, ‘Fear not, Mr M. The old spiders have been tearing all around the Solar System hunting this trinket. I think they’ll be willing to do business.’

  In the end I crept into the little cabin which was mine alone now that Myrtle had been taken from us, and snuggled myself down in her bunk. I convinced myself that the bedclothes still held a comforting trace of her scent, but really they just smelled of mildew.

  Nipper came in later with a globe of broth for my supper. ‘Best keep your head down, Art,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen the young captain in such a strange taking.’

  ‘He robbed me!’ I sniffled. ‘He picked my pocket!’

  �
�Well, that’s his trade, ain’t it? You must see that. Maybe these spiders will pay so well for that little locket of yours that we’ll all be able to retire and set up our carriages, and go no more a-raiding.’

  ‘Thunderhead said we shouldn’t give it to them,’ I muttered. ‘What if they don’t pay us? What if they just murder us all, and take it?’

  Nipper had no answer to that. Trusting Jack Havock’s judgement had become a habit with him; it came as naturally as breathing, and I don’t believe he cared to entertain the notion that his young captain might be wrong. But talking to him cheered me a little. It reminded me that wherever the spiders were, there I would have a hope of finding Myrtle. Jack might care for nothing but gold, but once he delivered me into the domain of the white spiders I would find a means to slip away from him and search for my sister, or for some clue as to her fate.

  Comforted by these thoughts, I slept, and dreamed I was at Larklight, walking down the winding staircases into the heart of the old house. I found myself standing in the boiler room, and out from among the maze of old machinery there shone shafts of light, flickering and twisting like ropes of gold. And in their midst, a golden keyhole. Was this the lock the key would open? I stooped to put my eye to it, but before I could do so a ghastly shadow moved upon the wall, and I looked up to see Mr Webster dangling above my head, his clawed feet slashing at me like bony sickles …

  I woke with a cry, and found that the straps which held me into the bunk had snapped and that I was floating near the cabin ceiling. The whole ship was shuddering and lurching beneath me as if it was riding on a rough sea. I stumbled up and opened the door. Out in the hold the crew were flapping about, Grindle in his night attire with the long tassels of his nightcap flapping, Mr Munkulus hollering, ‘All hands on deck!’ The song of the chemical wedding was fading as Ssillissa doused the elements in her alembic.

  Nipper blundered past me, swimming through the fuggy air to help Jack, who was struggling with the wheel. ‘Aether storm!’ he said as he passed. ‘Or else some sort of gravitational tide-race …’

  ‘Ssil!’ hollered Jack Havock angrily as the blue girl emerged from the wedding chamber. ‘What have you landed us in?’

  ‘Ain’t her fault, Jack,’ said Mr Munkulus wisely. ‘There ain’t no charts to warn us of the tides and shoals out here in Saturn’s aether. Ssil’s been flying blind, haven’t you, Ssil?’

  Ssil nodded, blushing terribly at Jack’s harsh words. Jack turned away angrily. He knew that he was in the wrong, I think, but he was too proud to admit it.

  ‘At least we’re here,’ he said, glancing from a porthole as the Sophronia slowed and slowed.

  I looked too. Outside, a huge, dirty yellow world hung like a lamp against the star fields. A thin line of light seemed to have been drawn across its equator, stretching out into the blackness on either side. Ssil, still blushing, ducked back inside the wedding chamber and set us moving again, at low speed. As Jack started steering us towards the planet our view changed: the line of light broadened, and I saw that it was really a vast ring of glimmering dust, striped with concentric rings of darkness.

  We moved slowly now, our aether-wings flapping at the dark. I pressed my face against the glass and cupped my hands around it to block out the distracting reflections of the work going on behind me, where Grindle and the Tentacle Twins were preparing the space cannon. Outside, drifts of space frost glittered, and shoals of iridescent Icthyomorphs shot past. I did not recognise their species, and wished that Father was there to marvel at them. What wonders must await discovery in that uncharted ocean of aether!

  Slowly, slowly, that lonesome world drew closer, and the rings, which had looked like nothing but dust, started to reveal their true nature. Boulders of ice as big as comets and hunks of stone as large as moons mingled with the smaller particles, tumbling end over end, sometimes colliding one with another, but all held in their stately, circling dance by the iron grip of Saturn’s gravity. A soft shushing sound filled the Sophronia as she dipped into the outermost ring, nosing her way through clouds of tiny particles. Bomp, bomp, went larger bits, pebbles and drifting boulders, striking gently against the hull. Mr Munkulus ran aloft and started calling down directions to Jack, who had taken the helm. ‘Starboard half a point! Port! Port!’ the Ionian shouted, and Jack responded instantly to each instruction, steering us past huge, pitted chunks of space rock and shards of ice that could have split the ship in two.

  Things like blue stingrays flapped around the craters of a floating boulder; things like transparent tube worms wriggled through the dust, and reached up their blind heads to gulp down drifting animalculae. I saw no sign anywhere of spiders. I wondered what their home was like, down beneath the saffron clouds of Saturn, and whether they had set these rings here themselves to defend the approaches to their lonely planet. And then, as we crossed a band of open space and plunged into the next ring, I understood how wrong I was. The spiders did not live on Saturn’s surface, but among the rings themselves!

  ‘Cobwebs ho!’ bellowed Mr Munkulus, and Grindle and the Tentacle Twins ran out their cannon and stood ready to fire them.

  Stretching across the face of Saturn I could see great bands and strands of gossamer, tying the larger of the drifting rocks together, sometimes binding great clusters to form enormous tents of web whose pale walls were pimpled with the captive boulders. The Sophronia edged closer, Mr Munkulus calling out constantly. I peered upwards as we slid beneath an arch of web. It was thick and tattered, encrusted with space dust and small, parasitic plants, and here and there amid the strands hung the rusty, web-enshrouded wrecks of other aether-ships, caught like flies in the snares of the white spiders.

  The ship’s hoverhogs began to squeak and twitter nervously, as if they sensed the danger she was sailing into. Jack flapped irritably at the plump, pink bodies which wheeled about his head. ‘Stow these somewhere,’ he ordered. ‘Ain’t there a hutch or a hamper we can put ’em in?’

  There wasn’t – Mr Munkulus had not thought to buy one – but Nipper gently caught the hogs, tied a thick length of string around each one’s middle, then tethered the whole lot to a brass ring in the wall, well out of Jack’s way.

  The webs grew thicker. We were sailing into the heart of the spiders’ domain, and yet still nothing moved except for the tumbling particles of dust and ice. I told myself that I wasn’t frightened, and almost believed it for a while, for although I was scared I was also excited. Jack Havock and I were the first human beings to visit this awful place since the Aeneas expedition. We alone knew what fate must have befallen poor Dr Ptarmigan and his people, blundering into these nets of web.

  And as I watched I saw the bridges and funnels of cobweb ahead of the ship come suddenly to life, crawling with the white forms of the spiders. At the same moment Mr Munkulus dropped in through the star-deck hatch shouting, ‘They’re all round us! It’s an ambush, Jack!’

  Jack spun the wheel, apparently thinking better of his plan, but it was too late. For as the Sophronia came about I saw that the spiders had been busy astern, and that the gap of open space we had come in through was now barred by a mesh of fresh webs.

  ‘Full speed astern!’ called Jack, and the aether-wings began to flap hard, the old ship’s timbers creaking as they jerked to and fro in their mountings. We struck the webs at speed, and for a moment I felt hopeful, remembering how the lifeboat had punched its way out through the shroud of webs which had enveloped dear old Larklight. But the webs Sophronia faced were stronger, and wherever a strand broke, there a score or more of the horrid spiders appeared, scuttling in nightmarish regiments along their gossamer bridges to mend the rent.

  Groaning, shuddering, the Sophronia slowed and came gently to a stop. The Tentacle Twins fired off their cannon, and gave a joint tweet of triumph as a strand of web parted and the spiders clinging to it were hurled off scrabbling into the aether. But before they could reload we all heard the awful scritch scratch of claws hurrying over the star deck and the outsi
de of the hull. Jack and the others primed their pistols, their upward-looking faces ghastly in the dim light which filtered in through our web-blind portholes. Even I armed myself with a cutlass from one of the weapons racks, and vowed that the spiders would not take me alive.

  ‘Full speed astern!‘ called Jack, and the aether-wings began to flap hard.

  No one spoke. We were all waiting for the spiders to begin stoving in our hatches and smashing the porthole glass to grope for us with their long, pale legs.

  Instead there was silence, and then a brisk, businesslike knocking at the main hatchway. A voice spoke, muffled by the thickness of the hatch, yet still familiar.

  ‘Step from your guns,’ it said. ‘Stand peaceful-like. You got that Mumby boy on board?’

  A few heads turned to look at me. Nipper pushed himself closer to me, and put a protective pincer around me. I said, ‘That’s Mr Webster!’

  ‘Better do as he says, Jack,’ said Mr Munkulus. ‘There’s dozens of ’em out there, and some are monstrous huge!’

  Jack motioned for Nipper to step in front of me, so that I was concealed behind his shell.

  ‘Art ain’t aboard!’ shouted Jack, looking intently at the hatch, as if he could discern the shape of the monster who squatted outside it. ‘We left him on Io. But I’ve got what you’ve been seeking. They key to Larklight. You can have it, in exchange for Myrtle.’

  ‘For Myrtle?’ I gasped. ‘I thought he would want gold, or ships, or something …’

  Nipper’s eye-stalks bowed down so that all four of his big, sad eyes were looking into mine. ‘Oh, Art,’ he whispered, ‘don’t you know why he came here? He thinks the spiders are keeping your sister captive, and he thinks that he can talk them into letting her go.’