by Ian McDonald
A bright orange speck moved into the edge of Sen's vision. Of course she was not alone. On the big ice, to be alone was to die. She glanced to her right as the second hedgehopper slipped in beside her. The pilot raised a thickly mittened hand from the steering bar and made a “pull-back” gesture. Sen replied with a palm-up “what?” gesture. Again, the mitten made a “slow down, draw back” movement. Slow down. Preserve battery life. Mchynlyth had been a little vague about how the hedgehopper batteries would perform in the extreme conditions on the ice.
“The numbers go everywhere,” he had complained. “Anything from five hours to five minutes. Now, if you could lend me a real mathematician…”
“Everett is otherwise engaged,” Captain Anastasia said.
“Could you even give me a wee loan?”
Captain Anastasia had widened her eyes in that way that every crew member quickly learned to recognize: I am the captain. The power situation was critical. Even guyed down Everness was burning charge to keep her head turned into the endless wind. And how much Everett would need to open the Heisenberg Gate when he finally figured out how to get the jumpgun and his dally comptator to talk to each other, well, that was anyone's guess. She had kept a close eye on the power meters as Mchynlyth charged the hedgehopper batteries.
Out over the ice, a plug crackled in Sen's ear.
“Slow down.”
“Aw, Ma.” Sometimes Annie could be no fun at all. The earphone went dead. Even communications consumed power. Use too much now and there wouldn't be any for when you really needed to talk. Sen eased back on the throttle cable and dropped back into formation with Captain Anastasia. The ice reached out beneath her feet and merged with the sky.
Somewhere out there was the thing. Sharkey's radar had revealed no shape or structure, only that the thing that had come through the gate to hunt them was big, and fast, and would be on top of them in a very few hours.
“Do we have Einst…Heisenberg Gates that big?” Captain Anastasia had asked as the entire crew huddled around Sharkey's radar monitor. The glow shining up through the magnifier lens lit their faces green.
“You don't,” Everett had said. “I mean…we don't.”
“The Thing from Another Universe,” Mchynlyth had said, and at that moment an ice tremor had shaken Everness like a November leaf on a tree, drawing a great moan, like a whale dying, from the lines and cables.
The monster, Sen had mouthed silently.
“Nonsense,” Captain Anastasia had snapped, breaking the spell. “Mr. Mchynlyth, get those little flibbertigibbits airship-shape. I want a varda at what's out there. Ignorance kills. Sen, with me. Mr. Sharkey, keep an eye on that thing. Mr. Singh, crunch numbers.”
At last, Captain Anastasia had something to captain. Crunching numbers, building machinery, scanning for threats, these were not things that needed her. Sen had seen her become bored and edgy and fidgety. She didn't like to depend on other people. Other people depended on her. Sen had grown fidgety with her.
Now they were zipping low over the ice in rickety harnesses slung beneath pirated air drones, just the two of them, her and Ma, doing the thing that no one else could do. Sen glanced over at Anastasia flying along beside her. Anastasia caught the glance, returned it with a nod of the head. Sometimes, Sen thought, they were more like sisters than mother and daughter.
Memory by memory, Sen was losing her mother—her birth mother, her real mother. The voice had been first. She could remember words but not the voice that spoke them. Then things like hands, and how tall her Ma had been, and the exact color of her hair. Now her face was vanishing. All Sen could remember was her mother's smile, her eyes, the tiny diamond stud in her nose. Details. Little by little, memory by memory, her real mother was disappearing. Someday she would vanish completely, blow away into ash like the Fairchild, burning up in the sky.
Tears froze painfully in the corner of each eye. Sen flicked them out with her fingers, and she saw something. Something in the ice, a dark streak, barely visible, moving in line with her, ahead. It could have been meters or miles deep. She saw it for only in instant, then another object grabbed her attention. Dead ahead. Right at the edge of her vision, where land merged into sky, white on white, a movement. It looked like a whirlwind of glitter. The white ice and the white sky took away any sense of scale: this new object too could have been kilometers away, or right in front of her. Sen waved to catch Anastasia's attention, pointed forward. Anastasia gave her a thumbs-up. They both pulled on their steering bars and swooped the hedgehoppers up to surveillance height. Anastasia stabbed a mitten at Sen. Sen nodded. She let go of the throttle cable and reached into the knitted sock. The gloves made her fingers thick and stupid. She could barely grasp the object inside. It was as slippery as wet glass.
“Come on,” she hissed at the thick gloves, the dumb fingers, the freezing wind. “Got you.” She held Everett's crossplanes telephone. He'd trusted her with it before, when she wore it to send images back while she infiltrated the Tyrone Tower. It was a bonaroo piece of E10 tech and it was the only camera they had. He'd shown her how to use it. Tap here for still photographs, here for video. Slide that bar up and down to zoom. It focuses automatically. Tap to take a picture. Easy. Easy for you, Everett Singh. He wasn't swinging in a sling beneath four ducted fan engines, with the wind driving needles of ice into his face so he could hardly see, one hand needed for steering and only one hand free to operate the camera, a hand thick and numb with the cold, like there's a frozen cod there instead of a hand, flying headlong into something completely unknown. Yeah, easy Everett.
The flying ice storm was close, and it was big. Sen glimpsed a dark heart to it, something huge, half seen, relentless. The Dear, but it was fast. What was that thing?
Captain Anastasia circled her hand in the air, then pointed at the storm thing. Going in. Sen made sure her hand had a firm grip on the phone, pulled the steering bar back, and swooped in. She could see the dark at the heart of the ice blizzard. It was big, it was fast, it was scary. It was a hovercraft. She'd seen the Thames hovercraft, nifty little flitters that shuttled those poor people who had to go to jobs in offices, in buildings attached to the ground. This was nothing like those. This was one hundred and fifty feet of armored death on a cushion of air and shattered, scattered ice. It was a tank that could do ninety miles per hour. It was a battleship for a frozen ocean. It had not just one gun turret but three, two facing forward, one covering the rear. As Sen zoomed across it, phone shaking in her hand, hatches opened in the armored upper deck and missile arrays slid out. Chain guns turned this way and that on their mountings, tracking her. Click click click click click. The turbulence from the big fans engines sent her rocking dangerously in her fragile hedgehopper. The phone slipped. Sen shrieked and caught it.
Captain Anastasia glanced over, shook her head, and made a cutthroat gesture. Cut and run. Sen shook her head in reply, swung the hedgehopper so that she banked almost horizontally to the ground, and went back for a second run. Her gloved thumb danced over the tiny, fiddly controls. Video video video. She had it. She held the cameraphone out and shot a long tracking shot over the back of the leviathan. The guns tracked her as she zipped over the great battlecraft. She shrieked with the joy of fast movement and at her own cleverness, weaving and dodging between the propellers. They would shred her faster than thought, turn her into a red spray in the cascade of ice and snow thrown up by the aircushion, but Sen Sixsmyth was too fast and clever and cute for that. At the last moment she pulled up and over the command bridge, boot toes scraping the communications aerials, then she pushed the hedgehopper into a dive and turned around in her harness to take a shot of the crew behind the glass. They wore very smart frock coats and tightly wound turbans. Then up and away with a laugh and a dirty Airish finger gesture.
Anastasia crackled in her ear.
“You finished?”
“One more.”
“You're finished. Let's get the hell back to the ship. If that thing catches us on the gr
ound it will cut us up like Deutscher sausage. Where did Charlotte Villiers find a dally toy like that? It's almost as fast as we are. I'm going to call Sharkey and tell him to make ready for lift.”
“Ma!” Sen yelled as something fast and dark shot across the farthest edge of her vision. Captain Anastasia reacted with the speed and three-dimensional instinct of a Bristol-born Hackney-reared Great Port air-rat. A flick of the hand sent the hedgehopper peeling away from the fast, dark object that roared out of nowhere behind her. Sen saw the object come to a halt and spin with impossible agility. It had turned away from Captain Anastasia, and now it was coming directly at her. She pushed the steering bar all the way to the limit. Whirring rotor blades slashed so close to her feet that she could feel their updraft tugging at her Baltic suit. Sen fought to control the hedgehopper and went into a hover. She looked frantically around. There, standing off a hundred yards away. The air machine was shaped like a brass coffin standing upright in midair. The upper half of the coffin was a bubble of ribs and impact plastic. Inside was a man with a leather flying helmet on his head and a microphone to his lips, the pilot. What held him aloft were two sets of rotor blades, one on the right of the air coffin, the other on the left. Engine and fuel tanks were mounted on the rear of the coffin. The machine was brass and dull green, the lettering and numbering looked like Arabic. The symbol of two crescent moons, back to back, was the giveaway. Behind it, the hovering battleship drove on through its self-generated blizzard of ice shards.
“Fly!” Captain Anastasia shouted into Sen's earpiece. Sen did not need telling twice. She spun the hedgehopper in midair, yanked the throttle cable, and swung dangerously in her harness as the four fan engines kicked in. Captain Anastasia slid in alongside Sen. Her voice spoke in Sen's ear through the wind shrill, the whine of the fans, the clatter of the helicopter-coffin. “Sharkey. Get the ship airborne.” No Mr. Sharkey. No airship-shape or Hackney-fashion. Sen was scared now. She glanced over her shoulder.
“He's coming for us.”
The pilot had dipped the cockpit of his strange craft and angled the rotors; he was beating down on them at terrible speed. Sen could not take her eyes off the threshing death of those rotor blades.
“On my mark!” Captain Anastasia said, looking over her shoulder. “Three, two, one. Go!”
Sen peeled right, Anastasia peeled left as the gyrocopter came barreling through in a roar of engines and rotors. Sen looped high, looking for Captain Anastasia. She was the navigator. She knew the way home to Everness. The gyrocopter went into hover and pulled itself upright. Machine arms, needle tipped, unfolded from grooves in the shell.
“Oh the Dear,” Sen whispered.
“Sen,” Anastasia said. Her voice was clear as a blade of ice, clean through the clatter and fear. “Get the pictures back to Everett. You must do this. Keep on this heading. Sharkey will find you.” Then she went looping high into the sky and Sen could see what she was doing, like a bird decoying a hawk from a nest. “He's gasoline powered. He can run our batteries into the ground. I'll buy you time.”
“Ma, no!”
“I order it so, Miss Sixsmyth. Steer for home.” The hedgehopper soared away until Captain Anastasia was an orange fleck beneath it. Sen checked the little compass Mchynlyth had glued to the underside of the drone's body. It was their only navigation instrument. The needle jumped and quivered in the constant vibration, but it held true to north. Sen looked around her. There. At the peak of its climb the hedgehopper seemed to hang in the air. For a long moment it hung, the air frozen around it. Sen's earphone crackled. “I'll be bona, my love. There's not a ground-pounding E2er can outfly Anastasia Sixsmyth.” Then the crazy little flying machine spun and went plunging down in a dive, straight for the gyrocopter. And the gyrocopter answered, arms unfolding an array of claws and cutters and fingers as complex as an insect's mouth. They charged at each other. It was a game of midair chicken.
“Ma!” Sen screamed.
At the last minute the gyrocopter dived under Anastasia's hedgehopper. The E2 pilot was good. He skimmed the ice, pulled up to a safe altitude, turned instantly, and charged again. Sen saw Captain Anastasia glance over her shoulder, see the gyrocopter behind her, and pull the throttle cable hard down. Sen though she saw her raise a hand as the fans swiveled in their mounts and threw the hedgehopper away. The brass machine leaned into the wind and followed. Anastasia would never get away. She was in a rickety kite bodged together by Mchynlyth with a welding torch, some wiring, and a glue gun. The pursuer was in a fast, clever piece of E2 engineering, built to hunt. She had batteries. He had oil.
Sen watched them dwindle into the huge white. She understood lonely now, Everett-lonely. The compass told her one course to follow. Her heart told her another. Then she saw the thing beside the compass, a red bulb the size of her fist. The monofilament, the weapon of choice when the hedgehoppers were twin slice'n'dice attack drones.
“Ma!”
“Save your power,” Anastasia hissed.
“Ma, no. We can beat him. We's not helpless.”
“Get to Everness.”
“Ma, I's got the line. The cutty line. The one what cuts through everything.”
A pause, filled with wind in the wire and the shrill of blown ice.
“I'm coming in.”
It was silly and it was obvious and the last thing that should happen when you are engaged in desperate battle with an implacable enemy, but Sen's heart leaped in her chest. She felt the glow of warmth spread through her, to her face, fingers, frozen toes. Way out, where ice and sky met, she saw the orange speck that was Captain Anastasia stop getting smaller and start getting bigger. But the gyrocopter was behind her and it was bigger and it was stronger and it was faster. Anastasia would never make it. Sen swung in her sling, tilted the steering bar to the left, and banked toward her mother.
“Cut you!” she screamed into the protecting scarf, stiff with ice crystals. “I's gonna cut you to pieces, you bastard! I hates you, you needs to die!” All she had seen of the gyrocopter pilot was a glimpse of goggles and helmet but she hated him. She hated that his flying craft was bigger and stronger and faster. She hated that he kept coming and coming and coming, that he would never stop, that he would never go away. She hated that he did not care who Sen or her mother were, that he did not care to care, that to him they were just targets. She wanted to cut him. She wanted to wrap him in monofilament and snap it tight. She wanted him to fall from the sky in bloody, quivering chunks to the ice. “I hates you more than anything!” she screamed.
Anastasia was coming in low and fast. Sen pulled the red handle free and felt the weight of it in her hand. She swung the steering bar and put herself on a course that would take her past Anastasia, fan blade almost to fan blade. This was the difficult bit. She would have one shot, one only. No. It wasn't difficult. It was impossible. The closing speed was terrifying. Behind Anastasia was the gyrocopter, closing fast, and the wind was snatching and shaking Sen's hedgehopper. She squinted through her goggles, hefted the handle. Closing. Closing. And now. She threw the handle and caught a glimpse of Anastasia swerving to catch it, then Sen was past, the gyrocopter in front of her. She pushed hard on the steering bar, making the hedgehopper climb. Sen pulled her feet up. Her boot toes barely cleared the gyrocopter's rotor blades. She looked up. The monofilament was shrieking off the reel. Anastasia had it. Sen pulled the hedgehopper round into a slow curve. Out in the sky she saw Anastasia mirror the same maneuver. They weren't prey any more. They were armed. They were the hunters. But Sen could see how she was in danger from her own weapon. Steer wrong, cross the line of the monofilament, and it would carve her as readily as it would carve the gyrocopter. The two hedgehoppers looped around in the sky until they were in formation, side by side, a hundred yards apart, the gyrocopter dead ahead.
Sen snarled with rage as she bore down on the gyrocopter. On this course the monofilament would hit it dead center, cut metal and man and machine clean in half through the waist. Her earpiece crackl
ed.
“Sen. Go high.”
She ignored the voice and pulled on the throttle cable. She wanted him dead. She did not care who he was. He had no name, he had no face, he was just a part of the machine. But he had tried to kill her, he had tried to kill her, and now Sen could kill him, kill him a way he would never guess, he would never know, kill him so fast he wouldn't realize how stupid he had been, how clever Sen had been.
“Sen. Go high. Take the blades!”
The aircraft leaped toward each other. One moment they were half a sky apart, the next they were staring at each other.
“Sen!”
She saw the pilot. She saw his eyes. She imagined him leaping apart in two neat halves, the gush as all the blood and all the bowels and organs and bones of his body dropped out into the air. She saw herself kill a man.
“No!” she cried. At the instant of contact she pushed the steering bar forward. The hedgehopper climbed. The monofilament sheared clean through the rotors blades without even a jolt. She heard engines scream. A shard of carbon-fibre blade shot past her, fast and deadly as a missile. The gyrocopter, shorn of its rotors, dropped. She saw the pilot's eyes go wide and wild. Sen raised a hand to him. Then the front of the gyrocopter blew open. The pilot ejected in a burst of launch rockets, and a parachute opened above him. The dead gyrocopter beat him to the ground. It exploded in orange flame. Fire on the ice. The wind caught the pilot and carried him away.
“Reel it in Sen,” Anastasia said. “Reel it in and set course. We're going home to Everness.”
The gate was a ring of neon, green inside blue inside red. Through the gate and he was out, and the last soldier was down. There was nothing between him and the white light. He didn't know how he sensed the soldier pop up behind him. He saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing, but he knew the soldier was there, and he spun, rolled, came up on target all in one thought. The paint ball whistled past his ear and splattered in mashed-insect green on the maze wall. He used a single thought to fire a dart from the gun that emerged from an open hatch in his arm. The dart took the model soldier clean between the eyes. Everett held the dart gun on target, swept the maze with it, once, twice. Clear. Up and out.