Mortal Engines me-1

by Phillip Reeve

  “We’re in an alley off Paternoster Square,” Bevis said. “I wonder why they sound so excited?”

  Katherine pulled out her watch and held it in the thin sliver of light from the door. “Ten to nine,” she said. “They’re waiting for MEDUSA.”

  He hugged her one last time and whispered quickly, shyly, “I love you!” Then he pushed her past him through the door and stepped out after her, trying to look like her captor, not her friend, and wondering if any other Engineer had ever said what he had just said, or felt the way he felt when he was with Katherine.

  * * *

  Tom scrambled through the debris in the listing wreck of the Jenny’s gondola. The lights were out and blood was streaming into his eyes from a cut on his forehead, blinding him. The pain of his broken ribs washed through him in sick, giddy waves and all he wanted to do was lie down and close his eyes and rest, but he knew he mustn’t. He fumbled for the rocket controls, praying to all the gods he had ever heard of that they had not been blown away. And sure enough, at the flick of the right switch a viewing scope rose out of the main instrument panel, and he wiped his eyes and saw the dim upside-down ghost of the 13th Floor Elevator framed in the cross-hairs, growing bigger every minute.

  He heaved as hard as he could on the firing controls, and felt the deck shift under him as the rockets went shrieking out of their nests beneath the gondola. Dazzling light blossomed as they hit their target, but when he blinked the bright after-images away and peered out the black airship was still there, and he realized that he had barely dented the great armoured envelope, and that he was going to die.

  But he had bought himself a few more moments, at least, for the Elevator’s starboard rocket projectors were damaged and she was pulling past him and turning to bring her port array to bear. He tried to calm himself. He tried to think of Katherine, so that the memory of her would be what he took down with him to the Sunless Country, but it was a long time since he had dreamed of her, and he couldn’t really remember what she looked like any more. The only face that he could call to mind was Hester’s, and so he thought of her and the things that they had gone through together, and how it had felt to hold her on the Shield-Wall last night, the smell of her hair and the warmth of her stiff, bony body through the ragged coat.

  And from some corner of his memory came the echo of the League rockets that had battered at the 13th Floor Elevator as she banked away from Batmunkh Gompa; the thick crump of the explosions and the small, bright, prickling noise of broken glass.

  Her envelope was armoured, but the windows could be broken.

  He lurched back to the rocket controls and re-targeted them so that the cross-hairs on the little screen were centred not on the Elevator’s looming gasbags, but on her windows. The gauge beside the viewscope told him he had three rockets left, and he fired them all together, the shattered gondola shivering and groaning as they sprang away towards their target.

  For a fraction of a second he saw Pewsey and Gench on their flight-deck, staring at him, faces wide with silent terror. Then they vanished into brightness as the rockets tore in through their viewing windows and their gondola filled with fire. A geyser of flame went tearing up the companion-ladders between the gasbags and blew out the top of the envelope. By the time Tom could see again the huge wreck was veering away from him, fire in her ruined gondola and the hatches of her hold, fire flapping from her steering vanes, fire unravelling from shattered engine-pods, fire lapping inside her envelope until it looked like a vast Chinese lantern tumbling down towards the lights of London.

  * * *

  Katherine stepped out of the alley’s mouth into a running crowd, people all around her looking up, some still clutching drinks and nibbles, their eyes and mouths wide open. She looked at St Paul’s. The dome had not yet opened, so it couldn’t be that that they were staring at. And what was this light, this swelling orange glow that outshone the argon-lamps and made the shadows dance?

  At that moment the blazing wreckage of an airship came barrelling out of the sky and crashed against the facade of the Engineerium in a storm of fire and glass and out-flung scythes of blackened metal. A whole engine broke free of the wreck and came cartwheeling across the square towards her, red hot and spraying blazing fuel. Bevis pushed her aside and down. She saw him standing over her, his mouth open, shouting something, and saw a blue eye on the blistered engine cowling as it tore him away, a whirl of limbs, a flap of a torn white coat, his scream lost in the bellow of twisting metal as the wreckage smashed against the Top Tier elevator station.

  A blue eye on the cowling. She knew it should mean something, but she could not think what.

  She stood up slowly, shaking. There were small fires on the deck all round her, and one great fire in the Engineerium that cast Hallowe’en light across the whole tier. She stumbled to where the blazing engine lay, its huge propeller blades jutting out of the deck-plate like megaliths. Raising her hand to shield her face against the belching heat, she looked for Bevis.

  He was lying broken in a steep angle of the debris, twisted in such impossible ways that Katherine knew at once there was no point even calling out his name. The flames were rising, making his coat bubble and drip like melting cheese, heat pressing against her face, turning her tears to puffs of steam, driving her backwards over wreckage and bodies and pieces of bodies.

  “Miss Katherine?”

  A blue eye on the engine cowling. She could still see the outline, the paint peeling under the tongues of the fire. Father’s ship.

  “Miss Katherine?”

  She turned and found one of the men from the elevator station standing with her, trying to be kind. He took her by the arm and led her gently away, gesturing towards the main part of the wreck, the scorching firestorm in the Engineerium. “He wasn’t in it, Miss.”

  She stared at his smile. She didn’t understand. Of course he had been in it! She had seen him there, his dead, gaping face and the flames rising round him. Bevis, whom she had led here, who had loved her. What was there to smile about?

  But the man kept smiling. “He wasn’t aboard, Miss. Your dad, I mean. I saw him not five minutes ago, going into St Paul’s with the Lord Mayor.

  She felt the sinister weight of the satchel still hanging from her shoulder, and remembered that she had a job to do.

  “Come on, Miss,” said the man. “You’ve had a nasty shock. Come and have a sit down and a nice cup of tea…”

  “No,” she said. “I have to find my father.”

  She left him there and turned away, stumbling across the square, through panicked crowds in smoke-stained robes and party-frocks, through the long, shivering bray of sirens to St Paul’s.

  * * *

  Hester was darting towards the Guildhall when the explosion lifted her off her feet and flung her out of the shadows and into the harsh spill of light from the blazing Engineerium. She rolled over and over on the quaking deckplate, stunned, her pistol skittering away, her veil torn off. There was a moment of silence, then noises came crowding in; screams, sirens. She shuffled through her memories of the moments before the blast, trying to put them in some sort of order. That light above the rooftops, that burning thing sliding down the sky, had been an airship. The Jenny Haniver. “Tom,” she said, whispering his name to the hot pavement, and felt smaller and more alone than ever before.

  She pushed herself up on all fours. Nearby, one of the new Stalkers had been caught by the blast and cut in half, and its legs were stamping aimlessly about and bumping into things. The shawl that Tom had given her blew past. She caught it, knotted it around her neck and turned to look for the fallen gun, only to find another squad of Stalkers, quite unharmed, closing in upon her from behind. Their claws were fire-coloured slashes in the darkness, and firelight lit their long, dead faces, and she realized with a hollow stab of disappointment that this was the end of her.

  And above the black, silhouetted rooftops of the Guildhall, beyond the smoke and the dancing sparks, the dome of St Paul’s was s
tarting to open.

  35. THE CATHEDRAL

  The Jenny Haniver’s shattered gondola moaned like a flute as the west wind blew through it, carrying it swiftly away from London. Tom slumped exhausted at the controls, crumbs of broken glass clinging like grit to his face and hands. He tried to ignore the wild spinning of the pressure gauges as hydrogen leaked from the damaged envelope. He tried not to think about Pewsey and Gench, burning inside their burning gondola, but every time he closed his eyes he saw their screaming faces, as if the black zeroes of their open mouths were etched for ever on to his eyeballs.

  When he raised his head he saw London, far to the east. Something was happening to the cathedral, and torrents of pink and green fire were gushing from the Engineerium. Slowly he started to understand what had happened. It was his fault! People must be dead down there, not just Pewsey and Gench but lots of people, and if he had not shot down the 13th Floor Elevator they would still be alive. He wished he had never fired those rockets. It would be better to be dead himself than to sit here watching Top Tier burn and know that it was all his fault.

  Then he thought, Hester!

  He had promised her he would go back. She would be waiting, down there among the fires. He couldn’t let her down. He took a deep breath and leaned on the controls. The engines choked back into life. The Jenny Haniver turned sluggishly into the wind and started inching back towards the city.

  Katherine moved like a sleepwalker through Paternoster Square, drawn towards the transformed cathedral. Around her the fires were spreading, but she barely noticed. Her eyes were fixed on the terrible beauty above her; that white cowl unfolding against the night sky, turning towards the east. She no longer felt afraid. She knew Clio was watching over her, keeping her safe so that she could atone for the dreadful things Father had done.

  The guards on the cathedral door were too distracted by the fires to pay much attention to a schoolgirl with a satchel. At first they told her to clear off, but when she insisted that her father was inside and flashed her crumpled gold pass at them they simply shrugged and let her through.

  She had never been inside St Paul’s before, but she had seen pictures. They hadn’t looked anything like this.

  The pillared aisles and the high, vaulted ceilings were still where they had always been, but the Guild of Engineers had sheathed the walls in white metal and hung argon globes in wire cages from the ceilings. Fat electric cables snaked up the nave, feeding power towards something at the heart of the cathedral.

  Katherine walked slowly forward, keeping to the shadows under the pillars, out of the way of the scores of Engineers who were scurrying about checking power-linkages and making notes on clipboards. Ahead of her, the dais under the great dome was filled with strange machinery. A mass of girders and hydraulics supported the weight of the huge cobra-hood that towered up into the night, and around its base stood a forest of tall metal coils, all humming and crackling in a slowly rising surge of power. Engineers were hurrying between them, and going up and down the central tower on metal stairways, and many more were clustered around a nearby console like priests at the altar of a machine god, talking in hushed, excited voices. Among them she saw the Lord Mayor, and beside him, looking grim, was Father.

  She froze, safe in the shadows. She could see his face quite clearly. He was watching Crome, and frowning, and she knew he would rather be outside helping with the rescue-work and only the Lord Mayor’s orders kept him here. She forgot for a moment that he was a murderer; she wanted to rush over and hug him. But she was in Clio’s hands now, the agent of History, and she had work to do.

  She edged closer, until she was standing in the shelter of an old font at the bottom of the dais steps. From there she had a good view of what Crome and the others were doing. Their console was a cat’s cradle of wires and flexes and rubberized ducts, and in the middle of it sat a little sphere no bigger than a football. Katherine could guess what that was. Pandora Shaw had found it in a deep laboratory of lost America and brought it back with her to Oak Island, and Father had stolen it the night he murdered her. The Engineers had cleaned and repaired it as best they could, replacing damaged circuits with primitive machines that they had cobbled together from Stalkers’ brains. Now Dr Splay sat in front of it, his fingers spidering over an ivory keyboard, typing up green, glowing sequences of numbers on a portable Goggle-screen. A second screen showed a murky image of the view ahead of London, cross-hairs centred on the distant Shield-Wall.

  “The accumulators are charged,” somebody said.

  “There, Valentine!” said Crome, resting a bony hand on her father’s arm. “We are ready to make history.”

  “But the fires, Crome…”

  “You can play at firemen later,” snapped the Lord Mayor. “We must destroy the Shield-Wall now, in case MEDUSA is damaged by the blaze.”

  Splay’s fingers kept clattering on the keyboard, but the other sounds of the cathedral faded away. The Engineers were staring in awe at the coil-forest, where weird, rippling wraiths of light were forming, drifting upwards towards the sky above the open dome with a faint, insectile buzz. Katherine began to suspect that they didn’t really understand this technology that her father had dug up for them; they were almost as awed by it as she.

  If she had run forward then, primed her bomb and flung it at the ancient computer, she might have changed everything. But how could she? Father was standing right beside the thing, and even when she told herself that he was not her father any more and tried to weigh his life against the thousands about to die in Batmunkh Gompa, she still could not bring herself to harm him. She had failed. She turned her face to the vaulted roof and asked, What do you want me to do? Why have you brought me here?

  But Clio didn’t answer.

  Crome stepped towards the keyboard. “Give MEDUSA its target coordinates,” he ordered.

  Splay’s fingers rattled over the keys, typing in the latitude and longitude of Batmunkh Gompa.

  “Target acquired,” announced a mechanical voice, booming from fluted speakers above Splay’s station.

  “Range: 130 miles and closing. Input clearance code Omega.”

  Dr Chubb produced a sheaf of thick plastic sheets, the laminated fragments of ancient documents. Faint lists of numerals showed through the plastic, like insects trapped in amber, as he flipped through the sheets until he found the one he wanted and held it up for Splay to read.

  But before Splay could begin typing in the code-numbers there was a confused babble of voices down by the main entrance. Dr Twix was there, with some of her Stalkers close behind her. “Hello, everybody!” she chirped, hurrying up the aisle and beckoning for her creations to follow. “Just look what my clever babies have found for you. Lord Mayor! A real live Anti-Tractionist, just as you asked. Though I’m afraid she’s rather ugly…”

  “Input clearance code Omega,” repeated MEDUSA. The mechanical voice had not really changed, but to Katherine it sounded slightly impatient.

  “Shut up, Twix!” barked Magnus Crome, staring at his instruments, but the others all turned to look as one of the Stalkers lurched up on to the dais and dumped its burden at the Lord Mayor’s feet.

  It was Hester Shaw, her hands tied in front of her, helpless and sullen and still wondering why the Stalkers had not killed her straight away. At the sight of her ruined face the men on the dais froze, as if her gaze had turned them all to stone.

  Oh, great Clio! whispered Katherine, seeing for the first time what Father’s sword had done. And then she looked from Hester’s face to his, and what she saw there shocked her even more. The expression had drained from his features, leaving a grey mask, less human and more horrible than the girl’s. This was how he must have looked when he killed Pandora Shaw and turned round to find Hester watching him. She knew what would happen next, even before his sword came singing from its sheath.

  “No!” she screamed, seeing what he meant to do, but her mouth was dry, her voice a whisper. Suddenly she understood why the goddess had
brought her here, and knew what she must do to make amends for Father’s crime. She dropped the useless satchel and ran up the steps. Hester was stumbling backwards, lifting her bound hands to ward off Father’s blow, and Katherine flung herself between them so that suddenly it was she who was in his path, and his sword slid easily through her and she felt the hilt jar hard against her ribs.

  The Engineers gasped. Dr Twix gave a frightened little squeak. Even Crome looked alarmed.

  “Input clearance code Omega,” snapped MEDUSA, as if nothing at all had happened.

  Valentine was saying “No!”, shaking his head as if he couldn’t understand how she came to be here with his sword through her. “Kate, no!” He stepped back, pulling the blade free.

  Katherine watched it slither out of her. It looked ridiculous, like a practical joke. There was no pain at all, but bright blood was throbbing out of a hole in her tunic and splashing on the floor. She felt giddy. Hester Shaw clutched at her but Katherine shook her off. “Father, don’t hurt her,” she said, and took two faltering steps forward and fell against Dr Splay’s keyboard. Meaningless green letters spattered the little Goggle-screen as her head hit the keys, and as Father lifted her and laid her gently down she heard the voice of MEDUSA boom, “Incorrect code entered.”

  New sequences of numbers spilled across the screens. Something exploded with a sharp crack among the looping webs of cable.

  “What’s happening?” whimpered Dr Chubb. “What’s it doing?”

  “It has rejected our target coordinates,” gasped Dr Chandra. “But the power is still building…”

  Engineers rushed back to their posts, stumbling over Katherine where she lay on the floor, her head on Father’s lap. She ignored them, staring at Hester’s face. It was like looking at her own reflection in a shattered mirror, and she smiled, pleased that she had met her half-sister at last, and wondering if they were going to be friends. She started to hiccup, and with each hiccup blood came up her throat into her mouth. A numb chill was spreading through her body, and she could feel herself beginning to drift away, the sounds of the cathedral growing fainter and fainter. Am I going to die? she thought. I can’t, not yet, I’m not ready!