Philip Reeve - Predator's gold

“What was that?” asked Freya, whispering. “I thought I heard someone…”

Glad of an excuse to move away from her warmth and her luring smell, Tom backed to the door. “Nobody. Just the heat-ducts, I expect. They’re always rattling and scratching.”

“Yes, I know; it’s an awful bore. I’m sure they never used to before we came to the High Ice…” She came close again, holding out her hands. “Tom…”

“I must go,” he said. “It’s late. I’m sorry. Thank you.”

Hurrying up the stairs to his room, he tried to ignore the warm cinnamon taste of Freya in his mouth and think of Hester. Poor Het! She had sounded so lonely when he spoke to her on the telephone. He should go to her. He would just lie down for a bit and gather his thoughts, and then he would pull on cold-weather gear and head down to the harbour. How soft this bed was! He closed his eyes, and felt the room revolving. Too much wine. It was only the wine that had made him kiss Freya; it was Hester he was in love with. So why could he not stop thinking about Freya? “You idiot!” he said aloud.

Above his head the heat-duct rattled, as if something inside it was agreeing, but Tom didn’t notice, for he had already drifted off to sleep.

Hester was not the only one who had overseen Tom and Freya’s kiss. Caul, sitting alone in the forward cabin of the limpet while Skewer and Gargle went off housebreaking, had been flipping idly through the spy-channels when he was brought up short by the sight of them embracing. “Tom, you fool,” he whispered.

What Caul liked most about Tom was his kindness. Kindness was not valued back in Grimsby, where the older boys were encouraged to torment the younger ones, who would grow up to torment another batch of youngsters in their turn. “Good practice for life,” Uncle said. “Hard knocks, that’s all the world’s about!” But maybe Uncle had never met anyone like Tom, who was kind to other people and seemed to expect nothing more than kindness in return. And what could be kinder than going out with Hester Shaw, making that ugly, useless girl feel loved and wanted? To Caul it seemed almost saintly. It was horrible to see Tom kissing Freya like that, betraying Hester, betraying himself, ready to throw everything away.

And maybe, too, he was a little jealous.

He glimpsed a blurred face in the open doorway behind the couple; zoomed in just in time to recognize Hester as she turned and ran. When he pulled back the other two had broken away from each other; they looked uncertainly towards the door, talking in low, embarrassed voices. “ It’s late. I must go. ”

“Oh, Hester!” He flipped away from the Wunderkammer, checking other channels, searching for her. He didn’t know why it should upset him so, the thought of her in pain, but it did. Perhaps it was partly envy, and the knowledge that if she did something stupid Tom would end up with Freya. Whatever it was, it made his hands shake as he fumbled with the controls.

There was no sign of her on the other palace cameras. He moved a spare into a position on the roof and swung it around, checking the grounds and the surrounding streets. Her blundering feet had jotted a long, illegible sentence on the white page of Rasmussen Prospekt. Caul leaned closer to his screens, perspiring slightly as he started scuttling cameras into positions at the air-harbour. Where was she?

The Aakiuqs were still asleep. Hester crept back to her room and took the money Pennyroyal had given her at Airhaven from its hiding place under her mattress, then went straight to the Jenny ’s hangar. Scrabbling away the snow that had drifted against the door, she dragged it open. She lit the working-lamps. The Jenny Haniver ’s red bulk loomed over her, ladders propped against half-painted engine pods, raw new panels covering the holes in the gondola like fresh skin over a recent wound. She went aboard and turned the heaters on. Then, leaving everything to warm up, she trudged back out into the snow, heading for the fuel-tanks.

Up in the hangar’s shadowy dome, something scuttled and clanked.

It was not hard to guess what she was planning. Caul thumped the control desk in front of him and groaned, “Hester, no! He was drunk! He didn’t mean it!” He perched on the brink of his chair, feeling like some impotent god who could watch events unfold but was powerless to alter them.

Except that he could. If Tom knew what was happening, Caul was sure he would go straight to the harbour, reason with Hester, apologize, make her understand. Caul had seen couples making up before, and he felt sure this silly rift need not be final — if only Tom knew.

But the only person who could tell him was Caul.

“Don’t be stupid,” he told himself angrily, pulling his hands back from the camera controls. “What do a couple of Drys mean to you? Nothing! Not worth risking the Screw Worm for. Not worth disobeying Uncle.”

He reached for the controls again. He couldn’t help it. He had a responsibilty.

He switched to the camera inside Tom’s bedchamber at the palace and made it rattle its legs against the inside of the duct it was hiding in. Tom just lay there, fast asleep with his stupid mouth open and no idea that his life was falling apart.

Leave it, thought Caul. You tried, you couldn’t wake him, it’s over. It doesn’t matter.

He checked on Hester, then sent a camera racing through the heat-ducts of the upper city villa where Skewer and Gargle were working, peering into each room in turn until he found them in the kitchen, slipping silver-plate into their carry-alls. The cam tapped the inside of the duct; three taps, then a pause, then another three. Return at once. The blurred figures on the screen leapt up, recognizing the code, clownish in their clumsy haste to stow the last of the loot and get back to the limpet.

Caul hesitated for one moment longer, cursing his soft heart and reminding himself what Uncle would do to him if word of this got out. Then he ran, scrabbling up the ladder, through the hatchway, out into the silent city.

She had been afraid that the fuel-tanks would be frozen, but she had reckoned without the ingenuity of eight hundred years of Anchorage harbour masters, who had found ways of adapting to the arctic cold. The fuel was mixed with anti-freeze, and the pump controls were housed in a heated building next to the main tank. She unhooked the fuel hose and heaved the big nozzle up on to her shoulder, stomping back to the hangar with it uncoiling across the snow behind her. Inside the hangar she attached the nozzle to a valve in the airship’s underside, then returned to the pump-house to switch on. The hose began to shudder slightly as the fuel started gurgling through it. While the tanks were filling she went aboard and started to make ready. The gondola lights weren’t yet working, but she found her way around by the work-lamps outside. As she began flicking switches on the control panels the instruments sprang into life, their illuminated dials filling the flight deck with a firefly glow.

Tom woke up, surprised to find that he had been asleep. There was a thick, silty feeling in his head, and somebody was in the room with him, leaning over his bed, touching his face with cold fingers.

“Freya?” he said.

It was not the margravine. A blue-ish torch flicked on, lighting up the pale face of a total stranger. Tom thought he knew everybody aboard Anchorage by sight, but he did not recognize this white face, this pale fire of white-blond hair. The voice was strange too, with a soft accent that was not the accent of Anchorage. “No time to explain, Tom! You’ve got to come with me. Hester’s at the air-harbour. She’s leaving without you!”

“What?” Tom shook his head, trying to shake the remnants of his dreams away, half-hoping that this was one of them. Who was this boy, and what was he on about? “Why would she do that?”