Philip Reeve - Infernal Devices

Would he still love her if he knew what she was really like?

She reached the top of the stairs. The familiar smell was stronger up here, and Hester remembered suddenly what it was: a mixture of aviation fuel and lifting gas. She looked up.

The whole upper story was a single glass-roofed room, and in its center, on metal stanchions, sat an airship. It was old and tattered, and the name painted along its flank was The Arctic Roll, but Hester would have known that clinker-built gondola and those much-repaired Jeunet-Carot engine pods anywhere. She had lived in those narrow cabins for two years, and flown halfway around the world beneath that old red gasbag. It was the Jenny Haniver.

“Ugly old tub, ain’t she?”

Hester had not realized that the curator had followed her up the stairs, but here he was, standing just behind her and smiling amiably. “Hester Shaw bequeathed her to Professor Pennyroyal with her dying breath, and he flew her home to Brighton through polar storms and swarms of air pirates.”

A wooden walkway had been built beside the gondola. Half listening to the curator, Hester climbed the steps and peered in through the dusty windows, remembering the ship’s real history. There was the stern cabin, with the narrow bunk where she used to sleep with Tom. There was the pilot’s seat where she had spent so many long watches. There, on the scuffed planking of the flight-deck floor, Wren had been conceived…

She sniffed the air. “She smells ready to fly…”

“Yes indeed, madam. Aviatrix, are you?”

Hester looked round at him with a start, wondering if he had guessed who she was, but he was just being friendly. “Yes,” she said, and then, because he looked as if he wanted to know more, “I’m Captain Valentine of the Freya.”

“Ah!” said the curator, satisfied, and nodded to the Jenny again. “She’ll be leading the Flyby of Historic Ships tomorrow, Ms. Valentine.”

Hester touched the cool underside of an engine pod and imagined it roaring into life. She was starting to recover from her shock. After all, Tom knew that Pennyroyal was a liar. Why would he believe anything the old fraud said about her? Beneath her veil, she smiled her crooked smile.

“It should be a very fine display,” the curator was saying, smiling up at her. “There’s going to be a reenactment of one of Professor Pennyroyal’s most desperate adventures: a battle between The Arctic Roll and a bunch of old air tugs dressed up as pirate ships. Real rockets and everything…”

Hester looked around the big room. “How do you get her out?”

“Eh?” said the curator. “Oh, the roof opens. Opens right up, like a docking hangar. The mayor will just fly her out.”

Hester nodded, and checked the time by her pocket watch. She had forgotten her meeting with Tom, and she was already twenty minutes late. She went back downstairs, with the curator hurrying behind her. In the souvenir shop near the exit she helped herself to a copy of Predator’s Gold and flipped a couple of coins at him to pay for it.

“If I might make so bold, Ms. Valentine,” said the curator, rummaging in his cashbox for change, “I was wondering whether you might care to accompany me to the display tomorrow, and perhaps to dinner afterward?”

But when he looked up, the mysterious aviatrix was gone and the exit door was swinging softly shut.

Hester walked briskly across the Old Steine toward the café, stuffing Pennyroyal’s book into her pocket. The curator’s foolish, flattering request made her feel attractive and mysterious again, and the panic she had felt earlier had completely vanished. She knew now that everything would be all right. She would show Tom the book, and they would laugh together at all Pennyroyal’s lies about her. Then she would spring Wren from the slave pens, and they would reclaim the Jenny Haniver and fly away together.

The tables outside the café were busy, but there was still no Tom. She turned around, looking for him, annoyed. It was not like Tom to be late, and she wanted to tell him her plans.

“Hester?” asked one of the slave girls from the café, approaching with a folded piece of paper in her hand. “You are Hester, ain’t you? The gentleman said you’d be coming. He asked me to give you this.”

The paper was a handbill advertising the aquarium. On the back, in his neat handwriting, Tom had penciled, Dearest Het, I will see you back at the SW. Wren has been taken as a slave; I am going to a place called the Pepperpot to see about buying her back.

The air fleet had made good time since leaving Shan Guo. They had crossed the sequined turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf and were sweeping westward now over the hills of Jabal Hammar. The four destroyers flew in line astern, and around them the air throbbed and tore with the roar of engine pods as an escort of fighter airships—Murasaki Fox Spirits and Zhang Chen Hawkmoths—scoured the sky for townie privateers.

Through a slit in the armored gondola of the Stalker Fang’s flagship, the Requiem Vortex, Oenone Zero peered toward the distant ground. Nothing moved down there except the shadows of the ships, but wherever she looked she could see the deep gouges made by the tracks and wheels of passing towns. Jagged bite marks pitted the hillsides where mining towns had scooped out gutfuls of ore-bearing rock.

When she’d first heard that she was to go with her mistress on this mysterious expedition, Oenone had felt glad. Isolated in the sky aboard the Stalker’s flagship, surely she would find a chance to use her weapon? But the world she had seen on the way, scarred and ruined by Municipal Darwinism, made her wonder afresh if she really had the right. She hated the war, but she hated Traction Cities too. By killing Fang, might she not be handing victory to them? If the Green Storm collapsed, the whole earth might soon look like those wrecked rubble heaps below her. She did not want that on her conscience.

“Still finding reasons not to do what you came here for, Oenone,” she told herself in the disappointed tone her mother had used when Oenone was a child and shirked her schoolwork. “What a coward you are!”

She looked ahead, into a brownish haze that she knew was made partly from the exhaust smoke of cities. Beyond it somewhere lay the Middle Sea, not far off now. Oenone tried to crush her doubts. A battle was coming, and she knew enough about battles to feel sure that there would be moments of such chaos and confusion that she would be able to unleash her device upon the Stalker Fang without anyone understanding what she had done.

She turned from the gun slit and climbed up into the thundering passageways inside the envelope. As she neared the officers’ mess, she could hear the voices of some of her comrades, and she paused at the open door, unnoticed, listening.

“She says we are to target only Brighton!” Lieutenant Zhao, the gunnery officer, was saying, pitching her voice low for fear the Stalker Fang might hear. “Why Brighton? I’ve read the intelligence reports. Brighton is the least of cities, the merest pleasure raft.”

“She has spies of her own,” said Navigator Cheung, staring into his empty cup as though he could divine the Stalker’s plans from the tea leaves there. “She has deep-cover agents who report to nobody but her.”

“Yes, but why would she have placed one aboard Brighton?”

“Who knows? There must be something important about the place.”

“Such as?” Zhao shook her head. “There are fat predator towns lurking in these hills below us. Why must I save my rockets for Brighton when I could be blowing the tracks off predator towns?”