by Ian McDonald
It took Everett three goes to get his numb fingers to drag a piece of multiverse address into the destination box. The JUMP button went from grey to green. He looked a long time at the long string of numbers. The way back. The code for this exact geographical location in his own world. He felt no sense of achievement, no exaltation, no need to punch the air or rejoice. Job done. The road home was open. Then he slipped Dr. Quantum inside his many layers of cold-proof clothing and ran up the frost-slippery stairs to the bridge.
Sharkey came from the communications desk to peer over Everett's shoulder while Everett connected the special USB cable to the jumpgun. Mchynlyth had built Everett his own station, beside Sen's flight control desk. He had wired it and cabled it and had built a cradle for the jumpgun so that it didn't look like what it was: a handgun that shot people into another universe. Everett carefully docked Dr. Quantum and hooked up the power. He stroked the screen and it came alive with a haunting, hypnotizing visual display of the dimensions-within-dimensions folds of the Infundibulum.
“‘He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names,’” Sharkey said softly. Everett did not like him so close. He had not trusted him since they had made their run for the border of High Deutschland, trapped between two pursuit frigates and the fighters of HMAS Royal Oak. Sharkey had called for Captain Anastasia to hand Everett over to Charlotte Villiers. He'd wanted to surrender the Infundibulum to save the ship. You quote the Bible, Everett thought, but do you live by it?
Sharkey looked up suddenly. He went to the great curving window of the flight deck. He pulled down a magnifier from in front of one of the ceiling-mounted computer monitors and moved it on its angle-poise arm over the glass until it was focused on the thing out there in the white glare that had distracted him. He pulled down a microphone on a scissor arm.
“Mr. Mchynlyth, the prodigals return.”
Everett felt a vibration run through the airship, through the decking, up through his feet. In his brief time as stowaway, cook, planesrunner, and now as a transuniverse navigator, he had learned the many shivers and shudders and twitches and tremors of Everness. This low hum was the cargo hatch lowering. He would not feel the hedgehoppers landing, they were too light and clever to make a heavy footfall, but he could feel the bridge shake to other feet, two sets, coming fast up the spiral staircase. He didn't look up. He worked on, steadily, surely connecting Dr. Quantum to the jumpgun in its cradle.
“Mr. Sharkey, Mr. Mchynlyth!” Captain Anastasia made every entrance voice first. “Prepare for flight.” She strode onto the bridge, pulling off her sheepskin-lined gauntlets. “I want us up up and away from that thing.” Every time she spoke, Captain Anastasia's tone of command made Everett jump. He had always had problems with authority, whether school teachers who insisted you play football in a Christmas sleet storm or E3 Hackney Great Port Airish airship commanders. Everett turned away so that Captain Sixsmyth would not see his smile of relief—and affection. It felt like pride to see her back where she belonged, standing at the great window, hands clasped behind her back, in command. Sen pulled off her flying helmet and shook ice crystals out of her amazing pure-white afro. The crystals rang from the decking like little bells. She pinched Everett as she slipped behind the piloting console.
“I's back, Everett Singh. Glad to see me or what, omi?”
Everett looked away, embarrassed. She was so direct, so cheeky, so aggressive. She scared Stoke Newington Everett, but she was irresistible to Punjabi Everett. Sen wiggled out of her orange Baltic suit and took the Everness tarot from its place next to her heart. She kissed the deck and set it on the control panel.
“Mr. Singh!” Captain Anastasia loomed over Everett's console. She held the smartphone up for him to see. The screen showed a blurred image of what looked like a hovercraft from hell, armed and armored and adorned with the back-to-back crescents of Alburaq, E2's strangely displaced Britain. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Thought so. Me neither. In your professional opinion, can we fight it?”
“Ma’am, not a hope.”
“Thought not. That thing is ten minutes behind us. Thank you, Mr. Singh. Is the Heisenberg jump operational?”
“I think so.”
Everett saw Sharkey glance over.
“Mr. Sharkey,” Captain Anastasia shouted, without ever taking her big, deep eyes from Everett, “cast off double quick. Get you up on that hull with a skinripper and cut us free.”
“Ma’am…”
“Double quick, sir.” Without another word, Sharkey rose from his seat and went to the companionway. Everett saw a quick backward glance, saw the set of his shoulders, the way he pulled the skinripper—the Airish knife designed to cut and repair airship nanocarbon—from his boot top. Captain Anastasia pulled down a microphone and thumbed the talk button of the palari-pipe. “Mr. Mchynlyth, I have two questions for you. Can we fly? Can we make a Heisenberg jump?”
Mchynlyth's Glasgow accent was flat and hard as a spade in the charged atmosphere of the bridge.
“We can fly, we can jump. We cannae do both.”
“I need both, Mr. Mchynlyth.”
“I dinnae have the power, and even if I did, the impeller pods are frozen solid. And that's before I get on to the steering gear. And the ballast; it's ten tons of solid ice in there. I cannae work miracles.”
“I'm afraid nothing less than a miracle will do, Mr. Mchynlyth.” Captain Anastasia turned her gaze to Everett. “Mr. Singh, two questions for you. What is the difference between ‘think so’ and ‘know so’?”
“‘Think so’ means the power hookup mightn't work. We fire up the jumpgun and go nowhere. Or the interface mightn't mesh, and we'd go nowhere. Or there could still be a bug in the system and we wouldn't go nowhere, we'd go everywhere. Each atom would be sent to a different universe. Like vammm! So fast you wouldn't even know it.”
“My next question: how long until we get from ‘think so’ to ‘know so’?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes.”
“That thing will be on us in five. We were lucky once, we will not be so again. Sen, on my command. Mr. Singh, bona speed.”
“Ma’am.”
As Captain Anastasia turned back to the window, Everett saw Sen slyly turn up a card from the Everness tarot. She saw him see. She showed it to him. It was not one Everett had seen before, but that did not surprise him. He was beginning to suspect that Sen owned many, many more cards than she carried in her deck at one time. The picture on the card, drawn in ink, was of a flock of crowned butterflies—or were they moths?—chained together wingtip to wingtip, flying up to the smiling moon. The name of the card, written in very old, beautiful, faded handwriting, was Powdered Wings.
What does it mean? Everett mouthed silently.
“They travel together to a far goal, and that can be like a big hope thing, or a completely hopeless thing,” Sen whispered. Everett had noticed that Sen's voice, the words she used, the structure of her sentences, changed when she spoke of the Everness tarot. Who had taught her the voice of the cards? How had she come by the cards? “Or, they want to fly free, but they never can. Always two meanings.” She folded the card back into the deck. She turned away from Everett to her flight controls, but he could read from the set of her shoulders and the tension in her arms that she was troubled by what she had read in the card. She would never tell him. He was not Airish, so he would see bright Sen, sassy Sen, feisty Sen, brave Sen, smart Sen, but he would never see scared Sen. Her fears, her dreads, these she would always keep closed up with the cards, next to her heart. Forced to live close to each other, the Airish built subtle, strong walls around their lives. It made him sad. When Captain Anastasia had asked him his professional opinion, he had glowed with pride. He was respected, accepted, one of the crew. Family. Now, in the way Sen turned her back and turned her face to a mask of everyday and busy work, nothing wrong and don't ask, he saw that there were places in the lives of
all these people around him where he could never go.
The power hookup lit green on Everett's control console. Lights came on in the handle and barrel of the jumpgun. They shifted red to orange to yellow back to red. What they meant he had no idea. But when he touched the jumpgun, it felt warm, it felt charged, it felt alive and powerful. He dragged a multiverse address from the Infundibulum into the Jump Controller window. The code sat there, the JUMP button remained grey. Everett hissed a shit through his teeth and went down into the code. From the corner of his eye, past Captain Anastasia, who was once again at her accustomed place by the window, he could see what looked like a blizzard on the forward horizon.
Everness shook. Everness shook hard. Loose fittings rattled. Dust and dead, dried spiders fell from the many cavities and crannies of the ceiling. Everyone on the bridge looked up from what they were doing. That's the biggest one yet, Everett thought. He looked over at Sen. She silently mouthed the words I's seen it. It's real. The thing in the ice.
Captain Anastasia pulled down the palari-pipe.
“Mr. Sharkey, how close are you to cast off?”
Sharkey's voice came through a shriek of ice wind.
“Two more, Captain. ‘He casteth forth his ice like morsels, who can stand before his cold?’”
“Spare me the word of the Dear, Mr. Sharkey. Inside now.”
“There are still two—”
“Cut a hole in the skin if you must, but I want you in now, Sharkey.”
There was a dark eye in the heart of the coming ice storm. As it bore down on Everness, it grew in resolution, from shadow to the vague outline of a machine to something with ducted fan engines and artillery turrets and machine-gun pods and missile racks. What the photograph had failed to capture was the size of the thing. This was a battleship riding a cushion of air. This was a killing machine. He tried the JUMP command again. The button remained greyed out. Back down into the set-up menu. Everness trembled again to the strange vibration.
“Mr. Mchynlyth, I need everything you have to the engines,” Captain Anastasia cut her engineer off before he could complain. Everett had learnt learned this about Mchynlyth: he would moan and gripe and complain and invent a thousand reasons why any request was unreasonable, illogical, impossible, but then he would deliver, every time. “Sen. Take us straight up.”
“Bona, ma’am.” Sen swiveled the impeller-attitude control, turning the engine pods into lift mode, and pushed the power levers all the way to the end of the slot. “Power is at—”
“I am aware of the power situation, Miss Sixsmyth.”
Everness lifted by the nose. Two mooring lines held her down by the tail. Everett grabbed Dr. Quantum to stop it from sliding off the console. The deck tilted higher. Every centimeter of Everness's two hundred meters creaked and strained.
“Trying to code here!” Everett shouted. The airship shook again to another of the strange vibrations that seemed to emanate from deep inside the ice. Then the deck lurched with a jolt that knocked everyone from their feet and rolled the ship to the left. The right rear mooring line had snapped. Everness was still held to the ice by the single left rear line. Sen climbed back to the helm and tried to balance the lift and thrust controls to bring the ship on to an even keel.
“Half the impellers is meese and the ballast's froze solid,” Sen hissed. Slowly, slowly, Everness rolled on to the horizontal. “Go on polone!” Sen yelled, playing the levers like a musical instrument. Everness strained at the remaining anchor line like an animal tugging at an ankle trap. The main communication board crackled.
“Attention airship, attention airship.” The voice spoke in the oddly accented English of E2. It was not these people's native language, Everett remembered. There was no English language, there were no English people. They were a mixture of Moorish and Hispanic. Plenipotentiary Ibrim Hoj Kerrim—Everett always thought of him as an ally—had learned his English through an implant plugged directly into his brain. People who possessed the technology to do that would have no difficulty destroying Everness. “We are targeting you with numerous and overpowering weapons systems. Land immediately, land immediately.” But you won't use them, Everett thought. You daren't risk destroying the Infundibulum. But they would know that theirs was an empty threat. They must have secret, smart ways of crippling an airship.
“Are we there yet, Mr. Singh?” Captain Anastasia asked.
A single button glowed at the center of Dr. Quantum's screen: this change requires a restart. “I'm rebooting the system.” My TV-Tropes moment, Everett thought as the application shut down and the screen went blank. The Last Minute System Reboot. Another jolt: the final line parting. Sen gave a small shriek as Everness climbed rapidly. Her hands danced over the board, trimming and stabilizing and balancing impellers.
“Land immediately E3 airship, land immediately,” the loudspeaker demanded. Captain Anastasia stood at the window, looking down. She spoke no word, she did not move.
“We can't get away from them,” Sen said.
“It's not them I'm getting away from,” Captain Anastasia said.
The noise was so huge, so terrible that it broke through the whine of the straining impellers, the groans of Everness's stressed airframe. It was an endless tearing shriek. It sounded like the world cracking open. It was the sound of a million miles of glass shattering at once. Everett and Sen rushed to the window. Everness was high now, enabling them to look down at the pursuing battlecraft, almost directly under them. Directly under the hostile ship, the surface of the ice was cracking in a web of lines and fissures that followed the direction of the hovercraft. Everett held his breath. From Everness's bridge he could see what the crew of the hovercraft could not, a dark crack opening in the ice behind them, racing toward them, under them like jagged lightning. The ice wrenched apart. At the last moment the hovercraft pilot saw the peril and tried to steer out of it, but it was too late. The crevasse widened into a chasm, a canyon in the ice. The hovercraft wavered on the slip, then went down, end over end.
“Oh the Dear,” Captain Anastasia said. “Those men, all those good men, those poor men.” Then Everett saw the bottom of the crevasse. It was vast and dark and it moved.
“Ma, when we was out, I saw…” Sen's voice trailed off as she searched for the words to describe what she'd seen.
“I saw too,” Captain Anastasia said in a voice Everett never wanted to hear again. “Return to your posts.” Everett tore himself away from the horror. Whatever was down there—something huge, something ancient, something that had been awakened by the vibrations of the hovercraft over the ice, something that could swallow Everness whole—it was moving.
“Status, Mr. Singh.”
Dr. Quantum had rebooted. Everett's fingers flew over the touchscreen, opening apps.
“I'm getting the Jump Controller up.”
“Mr. Mchynlyth!” Captain Anastasia bawled into the microphone. “Whatever power we have left, divert it to the jump gate. Sen, all stop impellers. Mr. Singh, we are in your hands.”
Infundibulum open. Multiverse address up. The jump code to get out of there had been entered. But Everness had moved from the position that Everett had originally calculated as their exit point, and the ship was now drifting in the wind. Every jump began at a specific code and ended at another. Everett had to find his location in this world and then link it to the destination code. And the code he'd need to jump out of this world was changing by the second.
“Dundee, Atlanta, and Sweet St. Pio,” Sen said. Sharkey's family curse. But there was no rage or hate in Sen's voice, just an ice-cold numbness. Everett looked up. The thing in the ice had risen, the eater of the hovercraft, the destroyer of worlds. It towered up from the chasm, taller than Everness was high, a worm, a dragon, a snake, an ice monster, all of these and none of these. Metal. It was made of metal. Metal and swollen, sun-starved flesh. Its blunt head weaved in the white sky, sensing with organs and abilities unknown to humans, questing, hunting. Finding. The head turned to look down o
n Everness. It was studded with brass portholes. The head opened. It kept opening. Everett had seen one of the drilling machines used to dig tunnels for the London Underground. It had been equipped with rings and rings and rings of teeth and grinders and diggers. The head of the Ice Thing opened like a flower, a flower all blades and grinding wheels.
“Mr. Singh…” Captain Anastasia said.
There. Everett grabbed the code and slid it into the Jump Controller. Then he opened up the destination window and dragged in the destination code. The button was grey. The button was grey. The button couldn't be grey. The button could not be grey. Grey was death. He glanced up. The death mouth of the Ice Thing was descending on them. The glance distracted him, made him able to see the thing he hadn't seen for looking too hard: a dialogue box.
Is this your intended destination? Accept/cancel.
Accept.
Sen shouted something in a language Everett did not understand. Captain Anastasia was a black shadow against a universe of blades and fangs and swirling teeth. The button went green. Jump. Everett hit it. The world went white.
“Where is we?” Sen's voice said, somewhere in the white. Then the white turned to blue, with clouds, clouds that weren't made of teeth, clouds that didn't want to eat you, clouds that were just clouds. Little fluffy clouds. Beyond them, an airplane glittered in the sun.
“Home,” Everett said.
He came out of the white into gloom so thick that he could not see. Then Everett M remembered that he could do something about that. He could do something about almost anything since he came back from the Moon. A thought opened up the image-amplification system Madam Moon had inserted into his brain. Every minute, it seemed, Everett M discovered some new Thryn improvement or enhancement or augmentation. The scale of what had been done to him was terrifying, like suddenly discovering yourself on the edge of a very tall building, looking down. They had opened doors in every part of him. At home—wherever home was now—there had been an Advent calendar on the kitchen wall, beside the signed photograph of radio 2 DJ Chris Evans and some of Vickie-Rose's splodge drawings. Twenty windows opened, five still to go. Beneath each window, a picture, a snapshot, a glimpse of a surprise. He was like that, with alien weapons and superpowers rather than snow scenes and robins and wise men pointing at a star.