Planesrunner (Everness Book One)

by Ian McDonald

  The airwaves crackled with the deed of Anastasia Sixsmyth, but she was not celebrating. She sat in her ready-room, a cup of chilli-warmed hot chocolate to hand. Her face was grim and heavy as the storm outside her window. She was marked, darker bruises on dark skin. Her ear was stuck all over with bright yellow plasters where two of her earrings had been torn away in the fight. She had refused to say anything about her hand-to-hand duel with Kyle Bromley. All she had said was, “I did not disgrace the ship.” Kyle Bromley would certainly never speak of it. Fought to a standstill by a woman. That was the greatest shame of their shameful defeat. The wounds, visible and invisible, the heavy damage her ship had sustained, were not the causes of her grim face. The cause was Everett Singh, standing before her, more nervous than he had ever been in his life.

  “So this Madam Villiers is holding your father prisoner in the Tyrone Tower,” Captain Anastasia said.

  “Yes.”

  “A plenipotentiary of the Plenitude.”

  “Yes.”

  “With almost limitless authority and access to resources.”

  “Yes.”

  “And a jumpgun.”

  “I saw it myself. Ask Sen….”

  “Who went into the Tyrone Tower.”

  “She volunteered.”

  “And now this Charlotte Villiers has traced you back to this ship, and she will stop at nothing to get her hands on your comptator—your Infundibulum.”

  “Yes.”

  “So I am involved whether I wish to be or not.”

  There was no answer Everett could give to that. Captain Anastasia continued.

  “And now you ask me to risk my ship, my crew, and my daughter to help you get your father back.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you go off with your dad and your family to some plane far far away and live happily ever after while we're left in this world facing the anger of the Plenitude.”

  “Yes,” Everett said. It was a terrible deal.

  “I could hand you over. I could take you down to the Tyrone Tower and tell the man on the desk who you are and what you've got. I could do that, and my ship would be safe and I would be safe and Sen would be safe. Why shouldn't I do that?”

  “There is no reason in the world.”

  “Sit down, Mr. Singh. I'm going to tell you a story. It's a good story, and a true one.”

  Everett unfolded a seat from the wall and sat down.

  “Long ago, or not so long ago, in the blue yondering, I was pilot on a ship called the Fairchild, as bona a ship as ever lifted out of Hackney Great Port. Her captain was Matts Hustveit, a second-generation Norwegian; his people came over during the Russo-Swedish War. His wife Corrie was the weighmaster; she was proper so—Hackney Airish back all the way to when they first put gas in a bag and flew. They were like family to me. They were family to me. My own family…well let's say that family is what works. I'm not from here, I'm not a Hackney polone; I'm Western Airish; I was born in Bristol Great Port, within the sound of the bells of St. Mary Redcliffe. You should see the ships, lined up nose to nose along the Floating Harbour, all the Transatlantic Fleet. Quebec, Boston, Atlanta, Miami; Havana and Caracas and Recife and Rio; Montevideo and Buenos Aires. I knew what ship flew where, and who flew her. My dad was the flyer, a pilot on the Montevideo run. My mum, she worked in the Gas Office, but she was proper Airish. My dad, he always promised he'd take me up, take me flying down to New York or Savannah or Salvador. But he walked away, so I walked away. What it's like to find someone not there, to not know why, to know that what you're being told isn't the truth and maybe wasn't the truth for a long time—I know that, Mr. Singh. I left them, so I could fly. I'm not proud of it; it was what I had to do.

  “So there I was, fresh out three years at Skysail House—the piloting academy—looking for a job on the ships. I owed. I owed a lot. I still do. Piloting jobs are few and far between; it's like dead men's shoes. The ships are close. Like family. Captain Matts had just lost his pilot—Hugh Bom Jesus. Hackney mother, Lisbon father. Good pilot but terrible drinker. Fairchild was due to lift for Dresden, but Hugh had been on a three-day bender. Someone, thank the Dear, locked him in the cellar at the Knights and refused to let him fly. He'd have wrecked that ship. But Captain Matts had a consignment; and in I walked. Luck? No such thing, Mr. Singh. You see patterns, opportunities, moments, you take them. And you make them. I took the commission and weighed in. I'll always remember it: one hundred and twelve pounds three ounces of ballast. I took the helm, we lifted and we made Dresden quick-smart.

  “I was pilot of Fairchild now, and I was hot, Mr. Singh. I was the talk and toast of Hackney. There wasn't a sinner wouldn't buy me a drink; there wasn't an omi in Hackney, and a fair few polones, didn't want me. And it was good; we were a tight crew. Captain Matts and Corrie had a daughter—I'm sure you can guess who she is. She was six when I came onto Fairchild—even more of a spoiled little brat than she is now. She could wrap anyone round her finger then as well—buy and sell the whole of Hackney, could Sen Hustveit. Good tight crew. Family.

  “I'd been piloting two years when we made the Sargasso run. We were primarily a Baltic line ship—Deutschland, Polska, the Empire of All the Russias, what was left of Scandinavia. But this was a government contract; they needed it done quick-smart and airship-shape. The regular ship was in for an overhaul. We were being touted for the Royal Mail, and I think they wanted to see how we could handle a tight deadline and a government contract. It was fast and simple, a resupply to a Royal Geographical Society Oceanography survey ship out in the blue Sargasso Sea. Fly drop, back home again. We wouldn't even have to wait around for a return consignment.

  “We lifted. It was August. The weather was hot and fine and clear. A great anticyclone had settled over Europe; people remember it as one of the great summers. We flew through blue skies over blue seas and not once did we see a cloud until we had recharged at Madeira and headed out west into the open ocean. August there is hurricane season, and if there's a high over Europe, there's a low over the central Atlantic. Not any low either; three low-pressure systems were spiralling together into the mother of lows. But our weather radar was tracking it, and Captain Matts made sure we kept wide steerage from what was brewing out there. The barometer was dropping towards lows I'd never seen before; the horizon was black from edge to edge. Even two hundred miles out, we could feel the wind shake us. The headwinds were ferocious. We made our drop, turned and headed back to recharge at Madeira. But sometimes things, when they get big enough, they become monsters, things no one can predict and no one can prepare for. She deepened, that storm, she deepened and she deepened, feeding off the heat in the Sargasso Sea; she deepened into nothing anyone had ever seen before. The survey ship cut and ran before it. We turned. We ran—we tried to run. But we'd used too much power battling the headwinds. We'd didn't have enough power to make it back to the Isle of Madeira. Without power, without impellers, that storm would have tumbled us across the sky like a leaf.

  “Matts made the decision. It was a terrible decision; it was the only decision he could make. So in the end there was no decision. He ordered me to turn the ship and head into the storm. It's not done often—but all ships come with the equipment: recharge from a thunderstorm. I turned the Fairchild. I set course for the heart of the hurricane.” Captain Anastasia glanced at her porthole, where wind-whipped snow was piling up. “You think this is a storm. This is not a storm. That was a storm. Renfield, our engineer, rigged the lightning-catchers. The sky looked burned and boiling; crazy with thunderbolts. Then the buffets caught us and I felt the steering yoke whip. I fought it. I fought that ship in among the lightning bolts. I held her steady, head-on into the eye of the storm. And we drew the lightning. When a ship hooks in the lightning, everything comes alive with electricity. Every rail and handle and lever sparks. Your hair stands on end. The glass crawls with St. Elmo's fire. Ball-lighting goes skittering across the decks. I held her there; I held her in the heart of the storm drinking down the ligh
tning. When the meters read full charge, I turned her for Madeira.

  “I still can't get rid of the idea that it was the turn that did it, that I was responsible. We'll never know. There was an arc from the dorsal lightning-catcher to the rudder, hot enough to ignite the carbon fibre. Nanocarbon doesn't burn easily, but when it does, it burns with an incredible heat and hunger. It consumes everything: skin, the struts, the skeleton. The very bones of the ship burn. We were on fire. You've never seen an airship burn. Few people have. Pray you never do. Have you ever seen a house burn? It's the most wrong thing in the world. It's someone's hopes and safety and all the things they love and cherish, burning up without any thought. The fire has no thought and no conscience. A ship's like that, but in the sky, like an angel burning.

  “Fairchild was burning, and we were a hundred miles from land. Corrie put out a distress call to the RGS survey ship. Captain Matts gave me Sen and told me to take her to the escape pods. Get to the pod. Get out of here. She was only eight then. And she saw her home, her ship, burn.

  “She burned from the tail. I picked Sen up and I was running with her, and ahead of me I could see the tail end a mass of white flame. Nanocarbon burns hot as magnesium, and it goes straight to soot, no ashes, no cinders. I saw the fire crawl along the hull, and the skin just vanished. It was like a disease or something, skin turning to gas and blowing away. I saw the ribs glow white-hot and then disappear.

  “I didn't see another pod come off the ship. I think they had a desperate plan to vent the helium; it would have snuffed the fire out. But nothing else came off the Fairchild. I was terrified until the parachutes blew, and even then I was terrified because bits of burning ship-skin were whirling down, and if they caught the chutes, we were dead. I can still see her there, half-consumed by fire, in the sky, glowing from the inside as the ribs burned inside the skin. Then the skin would catch and vanish in flame. The wreck of the Fairchild must have been visible for hundreds of miles, if anyone but us had been insane enough to be out in that storm. Last of all the gas cells broke free. I saw them go bowling off, blazing, in the hurricane winds. Nothing else came off that ship. Then we splashed down and I had too much to do to think about what I'd seen. I blew the parachutes so we didn't get dragged, and deployed the sea-anchor and the emergency beacon. And we held on, tossed about in the middle of a storm in the middle of the ocean. Ocean scares me. It's bigger than anything. Even a great ship the size of the Fairchild is nothing compared to the ocean, a match struck in the dark. Poof. Gone. And ocean hates us. It always has. Maybe not hates us, but cares nothing for us and our achievements. It's not human. I stabilised the pod, got the radio working, and we ran with the storm all night. Just us, a young woman and a child, in an escape pod on the ocean.

  “And the ocean is strange, Mr. Singh. The strangest thing there is. I think that's what scares me most. We slept, I don't know how, and the great storm flicked its tail and turned back into the west again and left us bobbing like a cork. I woke to calm waters and clear skies and the sun shining on my face through the porthole. And there was a ship out there. But it wasn't the RGS survey ship, which had been tracking my beacon through the night. And here is the part I know you will have difficulty believing, though the evidence is staring you right in the face, Mr. Singh.” She rapped the table with her bruised knuckles. “Not a watership at all, an airship, lying about three miles south of us at about three hundred metres, trailing landing cables in the water. Just hanging there, engines dead, nothing on the Common Channel. A ship, Mr. Singh, in dead air. This ship. Everness. I could tell you long about how I caught her by the landing line, and shinnied up in a climb-cradle, and found her empty—not a soul, Mr. Singh. I could tell you about how I brought her home, and the mysteries at Jane's Airshipping Registry, and the Court of Salvage, and how I came to be the owner, master and commander of an airship that didn't exist. I could tell you, Mr. Singh. I don't need to. The evidence is all around you. What you need to know is that I watched the Fairchild burn and fall from the sky, and Sen's mother and father with her, and in that moment, I became Sen's family. I'm not a superstitious or particularly religious woman—no more or less than any Airish—but I feel in my bones that Everness was given to me to be a home for her.

  “Sen's never told you about her family. I know you've been asking. She tells me these things. She never will tell you, Mr. Singh. The nightmares have gone—it's been a couple of years now—for both of us, but they're never far. I've done my best for her; I'm not her mother, I'm not a mother. But Matts and Corrie, they gave me a family and a home, and I've given her a family and a home. As I said, Mr. Singh, family is what works.

  “And that's why I am going to help you. You might have heard around—maybe even from Sen—that I have an amriya; an unbreakable vow in our palari. If I do, it's one I've taken on myself. I promised myself that I would give as I had received. I'm nowhere near the end of that yet. I will help you. My ship and crew are at your service. There's an accounting to be had as well, for poor bugger ‘Appening Ed. We may bicker and fight among ourselves, but if anyone offends one of us, they offend all of us. Madam Charlotte Villiers needs to learn that we are not her servants. And you helped me. You saved my ship, I hear. Arthur P would have left us out there on the Goodwin Sands, another broken wreck. Now I help you.”

  There was a great singing noise in Everett's head. It was different from the great singing noise when he was laying out his big ask to Captain Anastasia. That had been the high-pitched noise you get in your head when you are doing something you absolutely must do but absolutely hate doing, when you hear yourself saying the words and hate the words and hate your voice saying them and hate the hateful way they make you feel. This was the noise—very different—you hear when you have convinced yourself that they are going to say no, that everything you have said can only lead up to a no: and then they say yes. Yes: so small you miss it, and then trip over it like an unseen crack in the pavement and have to go back and actually see that there is something there that sent you sprawling. Yes. Everett rocked on his feet. Yes. He could feel the bones in his eye sockets. His face was flushed. He thought he might cry. She had agreed. She had said yes.

  “You could thank me, Mr. Singh,” Captain Anastasia said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you what?”

  “Thank you, ma'am.”

  “You're welcome, Mr. Singh. The bridge, sir. Call the crew to posts. I shall follow you up shortly. I need to put on a bit of slap first. We arrive in Hackney in short order, and by the Dear, we'll look airship-shape and damn hot. Away with you.”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  “Lift to holding altitude,” Captain Anastasia said.

  “Aye, ma'am.”

  Sen slid forward the elevation levers, and Everness rose soft and silent as a prayer from her docking cradle. Snow from the east and the season of the year had driven Great Hackney indoors. This was Christmas Eve, when people close their doors and pull down their shutters on the world and turn to the lives of others. Those few out—the chestnut sellers, the coffee stalls, the brass band of the mission to the Airish playing carols by the Clapton Viaduct, the late revellers heading out with their party clothes under their heavy winter coats, the early drunks reeling home from the corner pubs and the half-repaired Knights of the Air—looked up at the hum of impellers, the slight displacement of air as something huge passed through it. No matter how commonplace, no matter how many ships lifted and landed each day, there was no soul in Hackney Great Port too small to look up at the touch of an airship shadow, and smile. Everett knew he would never tire of standing by the great window of an airship and seeing the world laid out at his feet. Never tire and never forget, because after this night, after this flight, he would never do it again. He would never come back to this world—he could never come back to this world. In a short time—less than an hour—he would see his dad. That was an excitement so huge it was almost a dread. It made him feel sick. It seemed so long—weeks, months—since he
had waited outside the ICA on the Mall in another London and seen Charlotte Villiers's agents knock him off his bike and take him away to this world. It was little more than a week. It was so easy to mix up space with time: a few days became mixed up with the distance of whole universes. Excitement he felt, and anticipation, and dread, and also loss. His reunion with his dad would be his farewell to the crew of Everness, Mchynlyth and Miles O'Rahilly Lafayette Sharkey, Sen and Anastasia Sixsmyth. They would go back to their ship and take flight for a safe port beyond British extradition treaties. He and his dad would go their way, out across the worlds, to a place they could never be found. Everett wished he could bring the crew of the Everness back to his Stoke Newington. How much easier would it be to explain to Laura that they would have to flee to another universe with a two-hundred-metre airship hanging over Roding Road. It couldn't be. Only individuals could jump between worlds.

  Sharkey at his station, one earphone pushed up on top of his head. Everett didn't doubt that the shotguns were still tucked into the lining of his coat. Sharkey the talker, quick with the word of the Lord and the manners of a Southern gent. And how much of those were true? When you're far from home, when you're an exile, you cover yourself with stories. Weighmaster, soldier of fortune, adventurer, gentleman, he'd called himself. Goalkeeper, mathematician, traveller, planesrunner, Everett had replied. Say it enough and it will come true.