by Ian McDonald
“Captain, Dunsfold ATC is demanding we identify ourselves and file a flight plan,” Sharkey said.
“Ignore them, Mr. Sharkey. Maintain speed and heading, Sen. If they know where we are, then there's no point us fighting on through this murk. Take us up and out of it.”
Sen answered at the helm. The cloud and snow broke around Everness's prow like waves as she lifted out of the snow cloud into the clear air. A half-moon lay on the eastern edge of the world, lazing on a silvered blanket of clouds. The sky was brilliant with stars, each as sharp as a spear-point. Through the numbness, the shock, the unreality, Everett felt the sky touch him, call him out. It was the oldest mystery, the wonder on which all of science floated: the stars. He went to the window. The airship seemed to race over the endless landscape of moon-silvered cloud. Everett looked up at the constellations. He knew their forms, he knew their names; the gods and monsters and heroes that held truths more huge and marvellous than any legend. Moonshine lit his face. He became aware that Captain Anastasia was watching him.
Sharkey cupped an earphone to his head and held up a hand: silence in the bridge.
“I'm getting chatter on Frequency Two Eight.”
Nervous glances flew across the bridge.
“What's Frequency Two Eight?” Everett whispered to Sen.
“The militaries talk on it,” she said.
“Well, since they can see us we might as well have a look at them,” Captain Anastasia said. “Full radar sweep, Mr. Sharkey, but don't overdo it. We want to preserve a certain air of mystery.”
She bent over a monitor. The magnified display lit her face green. Like Tejendra's face when he looked into the Infundibulum, Everett thought. And then he looked at the stars and made a promise to them. I will find him. Through all the planes and all the worlds, I will find him. I have the Infundibulum. The Panoply is mine. And he is the man who built the Heisenberg Gate. Whatever world he's in, if the resources and the knowledge are there, he can build another one. You haven't beaten us, Charlotte Villiers.
“Captain, ma'am…,” Everett said.
Captain Anastasia held up her hand. Quiet.
“Two contacts?” she said, frowning at the screen.
“That's how I reckon it, ma'am,” Sharkey said. “On our heading. Small and fast and on our tail.”
“We'd better have Mr. Mchynlyth up here,” Captain Anastasia said. “He can put that time in His Majesty's Navy to good use.”
Mchynlyth was piped up from engineering.
“Mchynlyth was in the navy?” Everett asked Sen.
“Engineer on the Royal Oak,” Sen said.
What's the Royal Oak? Everett wanted to ask, but he was learning that of airships and their ways and their crews there was no end of questions.
Mchynlyth on the bridge looked as out of place as a tiara on a pig. “Aye,” he said, adjusting the magnifier lens and squinting into the green glow. “Two naval cutters, sure as eggs is eggs. There's no mistaking that signature.”
“We've outrun cutters before,” Captain Anastasia said.
“We've outrun old Deutscher customs scows on the Baltic patrol,” Mchynlyth said. “Those'll be Navy Class 22s; the nippiest wee buggers this side of the Atlantic.”
“If we rigged the spare engines?”
“It'll be two and a half hours before they run us down instead of two.”
Captain Anastasia returned to her charting table. Everett had felt Everness quiver a few minutes ago as she crossed the invisible thermal of the Smoke Ring, the chimneys that powered London hidden down beneath the snow cloud. He made calculations in his head. They would be out over the snow-covered flatlands of East Anglia, east by northeast. The coastline could only be minutes away, and the sea and German airspace. He saw Captain Anastasia make the same calculations and reach her own conclusions.
“Take us up, Miss Sixsmyth. Ten thousand metres.”
“Ma? Ma'am?”
“Ten thousand metres, Miss Sixsmyth.”
“That's the top limit of our operational envelope,” Mchynlyth said. “If we over-pressure…”
“I'm aware of that, Mr. Mchynlyth. I'm also aware that Sheerness Automated Weather Station is reporting a southerly deflection of the polar jet stream down to 51 degrees north. If we can get onto that air current, it'll give us an extra eighty knots and we can surf her right into the throat of Deutscher Bight.”
“An extra eighty knots,” Mchynlyth said. “And we're flat-out as it is.”
“Do you concur, Mr. Mchynlyth?”
“We've the structural integrity of a fart in a hurricane.”
“Do you concur?”
“I concur, ma'am.”
“Take her to the ceiling, Miss Sixsmyth.”
“'Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,'” Sharkey muttered.
Everness obeyed Sen swiftly and sweetly. She shied and bucked in the turbulence as she entered the fast-moving stream of high-altitude air. The cloud layer was so far below it looked to Everett like a landscape in its own right, a nation made of night. He could see three hundred miles in every direction. Those red-and-green sparks moving across the cloud-scape were the riding lights of airships. He stood among the stars. Everett became aware that Sen was beside him.
“Hey, how, who…”
“Autopilot. So, it's bijou bumpy, but the machine can handle that without Sen. Everett Singh, I's made you something.”
Everett felt her press a soft square of card into his hand: a trump from the Everness tarot, facedown in his palm.
“The deck, well, it's a living thing like? So it needs to grow, coz if a thing stops growing it starts dying. So every once in a while it tells me it needs to be able to talk about a new person or a new adventure or a new start or a new possibility, so I makes it a new card.”
“This is my card?” Everett curled his hand to look at the card's face. Sen touched him quickly and lightly.
“No, Everett Singh. You turns it when you needs it.”
He slid the card into one of the side pockets of his shorts.
“We're being hailed,” Sharkey announced. “One of the Navy cutters.”
“On screens, please,” Captain Anastasia said. Everyone pulled magnifiers over the tiny display tubes. The screens crackled with static that cleared to show an airship bridge. Pilot, navigation, engineering, and command posts were crewed by smart-haircutted men in sky-blue military jackets and round berets with red pompoms. The captain was distinguished by his peaked hat and a lot of gold braid.
“LTA Everness, this is HMAS Indefatigable,” the captain said. “I am Captain Davenport. I wish to speak to your commanding officer.”
Captain Anastasia pulled down an intercom on its boom-arm and pressed the transmit button.
“I am Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth of Everness. What's your business?”
“Captain Sixsmyth, descend to one thousand metres, stop all engines, and prepare to be boarded.”
“The two cutters have entered the jet stream and are closing with us,” Sharkey said.
“So noted,” Captain Anastasia said. She thumbed the talk button again. “Indefatigable, we are a registered merchant ship on a commercial flight to Berlin.”
“You have not filed a flight plan, you are in violation of air traffic control regulations, and we have it on authority that you are in illegal possession of a piece of technology that poses a security threat to this realm,” Captain Davenport said. He was a smart but pudgy-faced middle-aged man, hair neatly slicked, with the prim but disappointed look of a commander who knew that a naval cutter was the highest he would ever rise in the air service. This was the most action he would ever see.
“On what authority?”
Charlotte Villiers stepped between Captain Davenport and the lens. She smiled. The wide-angle lens made her lips look huge and vampire-red and devouring.
“My authority. Hello, Captain Sixsmyth. Everett. Happy Christmas. I really would advise you to follow Captain Davenport's orders. Y
ou are in possession of Plenitude property, and it is incumbent on me, as plenipotentiary, to safeguard it. I am in one of the fastest and most modern military airships. You are in a crippled cargo barge that, frankly, has seen better days. I have two squads of royal marines at my disposal. You have, well, we can see what you have. Children, Captain, children. Do the sensible thing. This need not be painful. Oh yes. In case you're entertaining notions of a last-minute brilliant idea or a daring escape, you might want to make another sweep with your radar.”
Charlotte Villiers reached up and turned off the camera.
“Mother and Mary and sweet Saint Pio,” Sharkey said softly. The screens lit up with a radar display: tracking down from the north, cutting in towards the coast of Norfolk, was a monster radar contact: a behemoth airship escorted by six smaller ones. Mchynlyth dialled up the magnification on the lens until he could clearly read the ident number on the radar contact.
“RAN 101,” Mchynlyth said, squinting. “That's her, all right. Me old mucker the Royal Oak. She must have been patrolling the Norwegian coast, keeping an eye on those perfidious Tsarists.”
“What's the Royal Oak?” Everett asked.
Mchynlyth spun a brass trackball on the main comptator, tapped some metal keys.
“This is.”
The illustration that appeared on the screen showed an airship hanging in the air above the mighty berths and polls and locks and channels of east London docks. It made them look like garden ponds, the ships unloading in them like little clockwork toys, the kind you got for the bath that worked once and never again. Everett knew he was looking at a monster. This made clouds look small. This was a flying city.
“If that picture's true; it—she—must be five, six hundred metres long.”
“That picture disnae do her justice. Two thousand Imperial feet, nose to tail,” Mchynlyth said proudly. “And an honour to serve on every one of them. And those wee flecks on the radar around her, those wee flies? Those are corvettes, each of them the size of our airbag here.”
Thirty impeller pods. Multiple command decks and flying bridges. Gun blisters and missile racks. On each side, three wings, each wing carrying aircraft—aeroplanes—perched on launch rails like perching pterodactyls, wings folded around their glass cockpits, propellers furled.
“Those fighters'll catch us before we get even close to Deutscher airspace. They can shoot us clean out of the sky and there's not a flyin' thing we can do about it.”
Everett frowned. High-speed cutters loaded with marines closing behind him, the Royal Air Navy's most powerful carrier with six escort ships each the size of Everness closing to intercept from the north. All this firepower. They could turn Everness to wisps of ash, blowing on the wind. But it didn't make sense.
“Captain Anastasia, can I have the jumpgun?”
She held it out at arm's length. It still felt oily and dirty and wrong down to its atoms to Everett, but he laid it on Mchynlyth's engineering bench and looked at it. Looked hard at it. Looked close at it. Looked long at it. Looked at every tiny notch and line and knurl of it. The controls were simple. The right wheel controlled the aperture: when he turned it, the little screen showed a fan-shaped display, lighting up higher and further to show the width of the jump effect. The other seemed to control recharge—the shorter the recharge time, the less wide the area of effect. The options for the jumpgun were lots of quick, small shots, or a few big, wide-angle ones. The charge meter read full. A panel on the bottom of the butt opened to show an oblong charge pack. Everett could make nothing of it. He slid it back into its housing. It locked with a smooth click. There was a safety ring around the trigger; you pressed and turned it to lock, and the trigger button sprang out and lit up. Everett quickly turned the safety lock back. The docking port. He lifted the gun close to his eyes. There were metal contacts in there. It looked very very like a USB port. The shape of the socket and the arrangement of the contacts were different, but Everett did not doubt that if he asked, Mchynlyth could work up an operating USB cable. The gun was intended to be connected to something computational. There was information inside it. Information about what?
Patterns, coincidences, intentions began to fall into place.
“Captain…,” he said.
Then everyone on Everness's bridge ducked as two small, white, incredibly fast objects shot out from under the hull, scorched across the window, and hung in midair ahead of the ship, holding station in the rocking, rolling jet-stream.
“Get a light on those, Mr. Sharkey,” Captain Anastasia ordered. Spotlights stabbed out from under the great window and illuminated the hovering objects. They were two remote drones, holding precise position side by side, ten metres apart. The control was perfect; they precisely matched Everness's velocity.
“So, the wee lady Villiers is taking a personal hand in it,” Mchynlyth said.
“Explain please, Mr. Mchynlyth.”
“You'll not have seen those. They're not standard issue—not yet. I know what they are because there's old navy ratings drink down the Knight. Snipships, Captain. What you can't see is that between them there's a nanocarbon fibre. Like the one I opened up that lock with, but a lot stronger. I think you get the picture. They'll lop off our impeller pods one at a time snippity snappety and then slice us up like Polska sausage.”
“Captain, a word with you,” Sharkey said.
“Speak, Mr. Sharkey,” Captain Anastasia said. The snipships held position in perfect formation.
“Ma'am, with your permission, in your ready room.”
“Impossible, Mr. Sharkey.”
“What I need to say, well, it ain't for, shall we say, public consumption.”
“Not possible, Mr. Sharkey. Whatever it is, say it here and say it quick. We are running out of options.”
“Very well, ma'am.” Sharkey turned his chair into the centre of the flight deck. “I did give you the opportunity—let all here be witness to that. Give him to her. The boy. Give him to the Villiers woman. She can take that comptator thing he's been lugging around any time she wants. We're in no position to stop her. Give her what she wants. That way, we might be able to save the ship. We might be able to fly the trade routes like we always have. We might be something other than rebels and renegades and vile offenders. We might have a life better than being hunted like dirty thieving magpies down the rest of our days. Give her the boy, Captain. Save the ship.” Sharkey looked at every face in turn. He held Everett's look the longest. Everett's eyes were very still. “I'll call them myself.”
And Sen vaulted over the flight station, snatched a screwdriver from engineering, and in three heartbeats had the blade pressed to the corner of Sharkey's left eye. His hands hovered over the handles of his shotguns.
“You never ever ever say that,” she said in a voice like winter. She leaned over him as close as a kiss. “You never ever ever do that. You never ever ever think that, you dirty bad faithless man. This is Everness. This is us. All of us. We's family. Everett's family. Family's all we got.”
“Sen, return to your post!” Captain Anastasia thundered. Sen slowly drew the screwdriver away from Sharkey's eye, but she never took her eyes off his. “Miss Sixsmyth, your station! Speed, heading, and altitude are unchanged. Mr. Sharkey, maintain radio silence.”
“Royal Oak has launched fighters,” Mchynlyth said, bent close to the radar screen.
“Why?” Everett shouted. All the disconnected, flocking, wheeling thoughts and doubts and suspicions turned as one, became one understanding. “Why? I still have the jumpgun. I can blow the Infundibulum into some random universe. If Charlotte Villiers attacks me, she loses. So why does she threaten us? Unless—unless she thinks I won't do it. Why would she think that? Because there's something she knows that she thinks I know too. Something that makes the Infundibulum as valuable to me as it is to her. What is it?”
“Captain, those fighters will be on us in three minutes,” Mchynlyth said.
“So noted, Mr. Mchynlyth. Continue, Mr. Singh.”
Everett held up the jumpgun in his right hand, Dr. Quantum in his left.
“Is it that this has never existed before? This plus this? Jumpgun plus Infundibulum? There's a computer socket in the jumpgun—it's designed to get information out of it. Maybe you can put information into it as well. It's like a little Heisenberg Gate you can carry in your pocket. But I can programme Heisenberg Gates. It's how I got here. I can make them take me anywhere. And now I'm asking, so what information can you get out of it? It sends you to a random world. That's a quantum effect. Quantum effects are random. But they're not meaningless. Listen to me, listen to me: there's a thing in physics called quantum entanglement. Two particles, once they're in the same quantum state—entangled—they remain connected no matter how far you separate them. You could send one to the end of the universe, and whatever you did to the particle here on Earth, it would be reflected in that other particle, instantly. And it's the same for that particle, whatever happens to it, no matter how far away, the particle here on earth responds instantly. They're entangled. Could it be, this gun opens a random gate, but the entanglement leaves a trace inside the gun, if only we could find it? Maybe it never was a weapon at all; maybe it was some kind of exploration device, like for mapping the Panoply? Open a window into another universe, then read the coordinates. Because, if it is, if it can do that, then there'll be some trace, some record inside, of where it sent my dad. And I think it can do that, and that's why Charlotte Villiers thinks that I won't destroy the Infundibulum. I need them both. I need the information from the jumpgun to find that trace, and I need the Infundibulum to be able to control the gun.”
Everness had flown to the edge of the night. Dawn was a line of yellow light on the eastern horizon, shading to star-spattered indigo in the vault of the sky. The cloud layer was an unbroken carpet of black and purple. The fighters came out of the dawn light, three of them, howling in on twin propeller engines, as lean and mean and hungry as sky-sharks. They ripped in low and fast down the length of Everness's spine, turned, and came back for another pass. Cannon unfolded from the wings; missile racks slid from the gull-white bellies.