The view was magnificent, if terrifying. They had left the last few clouds behind them in the charge for the border, and the ship was lumbering through clear skies. The horizon seemed to be as high as the ship, as if the world were a great shallow bowl. Miss Barrow put this down to an optical illusion, and guessed that they were actually still several hundred feet up. This also turned out to be an illusion, punctured by the appearance of a hilltop, whose jagged crown was definitely above them, gliding past on the starboard side.
Roborovski was full of action, given new impetus by responsibility and perhaps the chance for some redemption, at least in his own eyes. He had been shepherding Miss Ambersleigh along as if she were a favoured aunt, checking that she was all right, and giving her assurances that he would get her out of there alive. Now, in the access room, he was able to show his special knowledge of the functions of a military ship. He opened an equipment locker and pulled out a pair of binoculars that he used to look along the length of the flight deck to where the two entomopters stood. “They look serviceable,” he said. “Herr Meissner, did you remember to apply the parking brakes?”
Cabal, who liked things to be tidy, replied tartly that, yes, of course he had.
Thus reassured, Roborovski opened a cupboard set flush into the access room’s wall. Inside was something like a railway signal lever — a great thing with a grip release at the end of the handle, and a great bolt at the hinge. He took the handle, squeezed the grip release closed, and then threw himself back. Vibrant twanging sounds, as of cables under tension, sounded through the wall.
“What are you doing?” asked Miss Barrow, but the diminutive Herr Roborovski was putting too much effort into it to be able to answer.
“I assume this is something important,” said Cabal, stepping past her and lending his strength, too. The lever was dragged back, complaining in strident metallic clicks all the way, and locked into position.
Roborovski took a moment to recover his breath. “It’s — ” He wheezed a couple of times and tried again. “It’s the arrestor … line lever. They should be back flush with … with the deck now. Shouldn’t … get in the way.”
Cabal climbed halfway up the steps and stuck his head up out of the hatch; the arrestor cables had indeed been withdrawn into long slots running across the runway.
“Won’t we need to bring the entomopters around so they can have a run up?” asked Miss Barrow.
“Not necessary,” said Roborovski. “They can take off vertically, if need be. They have lifting surfaces at the base of the wing stubs and the underside of the fairing, so they do fly better at speed, but they don’t need to get speed up for takeoff.”
“Oh,” said Miss Barrow, uncomfortable with a depth of ignorance that would have been spared her if she’d only read more boys’ comics. “Why all the business with arrestor lines, then?”
“Taking off is easy, Fräulein. Landing … well, imagine it. You might be approaching a rocking ship, in high winds, driving rain, and possibly under ground fire,” he said, nodding sincerely. “You need the biggest landing area you can get, and you won’t be coming in slow and easy. The arrestor lines mean that you just have to set your machine down, without worrying about going over the edge.”
Cabal had turned to listen, but now sat heavily on the step. “Fuel,” he said. “The trainer’s almost dry. How long will it take to refuel it?”
Roborovski put his hand to his mouth. “With a deck crew, five minutes. With just us, double that. You’d even used your reserve?”
“Reserve?”
“Secondary tank. You switch over to it when you run low.” He took Cabal’s blank expression as good news. “Don’t worry,” he said, slapping Cabal on the arm. “I’m sure you would have found out about it on your second lesson.”
They climbed up the steps and out onto the flattop, linking arms for mutual support as much as safety. They had to almost close their eyes as the wind tore the moisture from their skin and bared teeth. It took almost three minutes to walk the length of the deck, and all were glad to take some respite from the gale behind the waiting entomopters.
Roborovski climbed up on the side of the trainer and checked inside the cockpit. He climbed down again holding a flying helmet he’d lifted from the seat. “I’ll take the Symphony,” he bellowed into Cabal’s ear. “The reserve’s full. We should make Parila without any problems.”
“Parila?” shouted Miss Barrow, huddling against the cold.
“Yes,” he replied. “I don’t want to go to Katamenia, and I don’t think I want to go back to Mirkarvia, either. There’s nothing there for me anymore. I’ll ask for political asylum. With what I can tell them, they’ll grant it.”
“Isn’t that treason?” asked Miss Ambersleigh, her reedy voice almost lost on the wind.
“My country right or wrong …” Roborovski shook his head. “They killed my country when they killed DeGarre for the sake of convenience. They killed it when poor old Konstantin was put down like a dog for saying what was right. I’ll go home one of these days, but not while it’s being run by butchers like Marechal and the crooks that backed him.” He gave Miss Ambersleigh his hand, and helped her onto the inset rungs in the side of the entomopter’s fuselage. “Come along, ma’am. We’re leaving.”
Miss Ambersleigh was commendably prompt under the circumstances, not even showing an unhelpful demureness in the face of the wind whirling her skirts around and the necessary loss of dignity imposed by clambering into a cockpit. Once he was assured that she was getting along perfectly well without assistance, Roborovski climbed up into the aft cockpit of the tandem arrangement.
He was just strapping himself in when Cabal appeared at the cockpit edge. “Herr Roborovski, when you reach Parila I would be obliged if — ”
“I don’t know any Johannes Cabal,” said Roborovski. He smiled. “I’ve never heard of the man. I’m sure Miss Ambersleigh hasn’t, either.” Cabal said nothing more, but nodded once in thanks and farewell before climbing down again.
“You’d better get clear,” Roborovski shouted to Cabal and Miss Barrow. “You don’t want a love tap from the wings when they start up.”
They moved back as the starter banged and the engine turned over. It was still warm from its previous flight and caught immediately, growing to an eager snarl to be off, which became a crescendo of engineered fury as Roborovski opened the throttle. He shouted something to Miss Ambersleigh, who plainly didn’t catch it. It was almost certainly something along the lines of “Brace yourself!” because in a moment the entomopter flung itself off the front of the flight deck and dropped like a cannonball from a leaning tower, immediately vanishing from sight.
“I wonder if he had enough altitude to do that,” said Cabal into Miss Barrow’s ear in a tone of mild scientific interest. It wasn’t even a question, simply a remark. Despite which, it was promptly answered by the sight of the Symphony dashing up ahead of them in a steep climb, before banking to port, and sweeping by at speed on a reciprocal of the Princess Hortense’s course.
Cabal climbed up the rungs in the side of Marechal’s entomopter. It was a very different machine from the Symphony trainer, and he was already regretting being left with it. Where the Symphony was designed to be friendly and forgiving, this one was lean and antagonistic. It had brackets on its side panels that were probably intended to act as gun mounts and the root of weapon-bearing wings. Its livery was a matt camouflage green, with a discrete Marechal crest painted onto the fuselage below the edge of the pilot’s cockpit. Cabal assumed it was a fighter that had been stripped down for a reconnaissance rôle, lending it the range and the speed to travel undetected over Senza. By flying low over the treetops and staying away from populated areas, it was unlikely to be spotted from the land or the air. Also unlike the Symphony, the cockpits were fully enclosed, with the aft pilot’s position set higher than the co-pilot’s. He found a catch and tried to unfasten it. It proved recalcitrant, and he barked his knuckles sharply on it, drawing blood and
expletives.
“We do not have time for this,” he muttered, trying to free the catch. He had momentarily feared that it was somehow locked, but now saw that it was just awkward by accident rather than design.
“Come on, Cabal!” shouted Miss Barrow. “We don’t have time for this!”
He favoured her with an old-fashioned look, and went back to wrestling with the mechanism. He had a further worry, one that he decided not to mention to her, as then she would become all recriminatory and the explanation, combined with the inevitable theatrics, would eat into the very time that they both knew they didn’t have. As soon as the phrase “third bomb” passed his lips, he knew she’d be impossible, so he kept that little piece of intelligence quiet and congratulated himself on a wise calculation.
As is often the way with self-congratulation, it proved premature; unlike the bomb, which was grotesquely tardy. The intention — back in those happy halcyon days when Cabal still believed that the levitators were in no way dependent upon the etheric line guides — had been to destroy three of the four guides. Destroying all four would have been more thorough, as well as more aesthetically pleasing, but he had insufficient materials with which to engineer a fourth device. The plan had been for one to go off first, to distract the crew and give him some bargaining time should it be necessary. Then the second and third bombs had been due to detonate within a minute or so of each other, crippling both starboard line guides, so that the ship would have been capable of only a slow clockwise circle, trapping it within the Senzan frontier. He had been displeased that only one device had detonated, but not too concerned until the flaw in his plan — vis-à-vis plunging out of the sky and everybody dying — had been exposed. Since then, he had been hoping that some flaw in the reagents had rendered the third bomb entirely ineffective (the alternative, that he had made an error in its construction, had not occurred to him at all), rather than just slow. Hope, in the same manner as self-congratulation, all too often invites a good crushing.
The third bomb was mounted in No. 2 Etheric Line Guide, at the ship’s forward starboard quarter. This was also, incidentally, the line guide they were closest to. The explosive force was not great — it was not required to be — but it was loud, flamboyant, and unexpected even by its creator.
Miss Barrow leapt sideways onto the deck with a scream of surprise, and so was in a good position to reach into one of the grooves running laterally across the deck and hang on to the arrestor cable that lay there. This was to prove advantageous when the ship dipped its prow thirty degrees.
Thirty degrees does not seem a great deal when drawn on paper during a geometry lesson. When hanging on to the side of an entomopter, the deck angles down by such an amount, and the entomopter — brakes or no — starts to slide forward, it seems a very great deal indeed. Cabal looked down and saw the entomopter’s wheels squeeeeing urgently across the rubberised surface, leaving white burrs as the machine slid sideways towards the deck edge. He ran rapidly through the various options. If he lost the entomopter, he would lose the only way off the Princess Hortense before she belly-flopped into the forest. To use the entomopter, he needed to open the cockpit. The cockpit canopy was being difficult. Once inside, he needed to start the engine, and bring the wings up to operational speed before the entomopter fell, or very shortly after it started to fall. He was not familiar with the cockpit layout. The canopy was still being difficult. He was running out of deck to scrape across. The verdammt cockpit canopy was still —
It opened suddenly under his hand, just as he felt the machine angle up under him as it started to topple off the edge. He had no choice; he threw himself backwards and twisted partially in the air to land on his side. He flattened his hands across the deck surface in an attempt to stop sliding off himself, as the entomopter flipped over the edge and plunged into the treetops a hundred metres below. He was only partially successful. He wasn’t moving as rapidly as the entomopter had, but he was still sliding relentlessly towards the edge. He saw Miss Barrow some ten feet away, hanging on for her life with one hand. Her expression was fearful but determined, and — astonishingly — her free hand was reaching out towards Cabal, as if somehow she could extend her grasp beyond the length of her arm by pure force of will. It was a hopeless endeavour, but Cabal appreciated the sentiment. He raised his eyebrows at her in a “Heigh-ho, here we go again,” sort of way, as if plummeting from aeroships was something he did as a hobby.
Somebody at the helm presumably didn’t appreciate the idea of the Princess Hortense ploughing into the forest quite so soon, either. Finding power from somewhere in the ship’s dwindling resources, her prow was brought up vigorously. While Miss Barrow held on to her cable despite being hurled vertically as if performing a one-handed stand, Cabal was flipped into the air like an especially sociopathic pancake, only to crumple heavily onto the deck a moment later, driving the breath from him in an explosive exhalation.
He did not rise or react, but simply lay there on his back, his arms slowly moving from the elbow. Miss Barrow feared that he might have been knocked unconscious, and half rising to walk in a crouch, her fingertips low in case the deck moved again, she went to him. “Cabal! Cabal? Are you all right?” She saw that his eyes were open, and he was looking straight up. He spoke quietly, and she half made out what he said, and managed to half translate that from what little German she knew. From the quarter sense she thus derived, she made an educated guess that he was commenting on how blue the sky was and how pretty. When Cabal touched upon the purely aesthetic, it was time for extreme measures.
A few stinging slaps later, and he was more or less composed. “Did I say anything?” he muttered, sweeping his hair back in a distracted fashion.
She considered Cabal’s fiercely guarded dignity, and that it would be kind for her to preserve it. Then again …
“You were raving about how pretty and blue the sky was.” Then she wilfully added, “I think you also said something about gathering flowers and dancing.”
Cabal’s eyebrows rose in baffled astonishment, before lowering again into a suspicious stare. “I’m sure I didn’t,” he said, albeit not quite as self-assuredly as usual. He climbed to his feet and walked away from the ship’s leading edge in a crouch; being quite that close to imminent extinction had lost its allure.
“Now what shall we do?” asked Miss Barrow, as he walked by her. He stopped and considered. They had only a few more minutes of flying time left before the inevitable crash, and every plan he could think of required more time, more materials, and a great deal more altitude. Meanwhile, the ship was performing the wide clockwise circle he had predicted, which was currently bringing it into the mouth of a wide tree-lined valley. Through the trees he could make out rocky escarpments that, while very scenic, boded ill for a painless crash landing.
He drew in his attention closer, to the ship itself. Three of the line guides were blackened and smoking from the impromptu bombs he had planted inside convenient maintenance hatches. The devices had been small, merely intended to damage a few components and cripple the line guide. Instead, the great louvred casings were smoke-blacked and buckled. He knew the strength of the explosive mixture he had used, and there was no earthly way he had miscalculated to this degree. It was possible — No, it was likely there was something inside the guides — probably some sort of coolant or oil reserve — that had proved unexpectedly excitable when blown up. The guide at the ship’s forward starboard quarter had detonated so spectacularly that its pylon was bent, the guide itself waggling slowly back and forth in the slipstream a few feet like the tail of an uncertain dog, creaking ominously. Cabal looked at it and made a decision. It wasn’t much of a plan, but assuming the rest of the ship carried the same flammable fluid, then staying where they were and hoping for the best seemed even less likely as a strategy for survival.
“Follow me,” he ordered Miss Barrow peremptorily, and set off for the line guide.
“Where are we going?” she asked, carrying her shoes as
she ran beside him.
“That thing,” replied Cabal with a nod of his head. “It will probably come off as soon as we hit the valley wall. The plan, if I can dignify it so, is that we climb onto it and hang on. With a little luck — I misspeak … with a great deal of luck it will take the majority of the impact, tear loose, and get us down to the ground relatively unscathed. Provided the impetus doesn’t throw us off and dash us against the ground just before the line guide rolls over us. As you can see, the aft guide on this side is mounted closer to the hull, so at least we shall fall outside its path, and won’t have to worry about being crushed into paste by it.”
Miss Barrow’s pace faltered. “It’s one less thing to worry about,” he offered.
“This is your plan?”
“The alternative is to stay aboard when the ship crashes and probably bursts into flames. Between the crew and all the vegetables aboard, I imagine the smell will be something akin to bacon pie.”
They had reached the base of the pylon. “So,” Miss Barrow recapped, “we can either die suddenly on that thing or be burnt to death if we stay here. Is that it?”
“Yes. With a footling chance of survival if we go the former route.”
Miss Barrow grimaced, hitched up her skirt, and tested one foot on the base of the pylon. “Cabal? If we should live through this, please, promise me — ” She stepped forward, falling to all fours as she did so to grab the pylon edges.
Johannes Cabal the Detective jc-2 Page 29