Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘You should have been born a steamman,’ said Ironflanks, in reluctant admiration of the commodore’s work. ‘Have you done what I think?’

‘If you think your short term memory board is now running as a facsimile of the main transaction-engine system for the entire brig, then you are thinking right,’ said the commodore. ‘Just don’t move and dislodge the cable, is all I am asking. While Quest’s transaction-engine chamber is talking to you, believing you are the lock, I shall be having my own conversation with the little engine inside here. Let us see how clever this lock is now it’s all on its own, with only a single drum turning inside it to outwit the great Jared Black. If I do this right, I can spring our cell door and Billy Snow’s at the same time.’

‘You must be joking,’ spat Bull. ‘That blind codger tried to kill us back at the lake.’

‘I like him already,’ said Septimoth.

‘He’s a Camlantean,’ said Commodore Black. ‘This is his city and I need his wily arts put to good use working in my service.’

‘Time for a promenade around the city square, then,’ said Cornelius.

‘Ah, if only I had a small drink to steady my nerves,’ wheezed the commodore as he worked away inside the panel, matching the encryption routines left running inside against his self-proclaimed genius. ‘A thick ruby-red claret of the sort that used to come from Quatershift when the Sun King still held sway across the border. Or a tot of jinn, even though a war hero of my respectability should only allow himself to be seen drinking on Beer Street rather than Jinn Lane. Yes, even a rare tot of jinn would do just fine to steel my mind for a miserable second or two against the perils of this dark, dangerous affair.’

With an almost frustrated whine, the transaction engine behind the panel finally gave up its fight with the commodore. The thick steel door of their cell slid open. ‘There it is,’ announced the commodore with satisfaction. ‘I have matched my wits against the toys of the cleverest man in Jackals, and, just as I promised you, it is Abraham Quest who has been found wanting, not Jared Black.’

Nobody was listening. Tasting freedom, the other prisoners piled out of the cell, Septimoth’s wings unfurling to stretch and fill the space of the brig’s corridor — but, as Ironflanks broke his connection with the cell’s lock, the transaction engine behind the panel started shuddering. The drum began spinning wildly inside the lock’s mechanism, filling the cell the steamman had just vacated with a vexed screech. Billy Snow stumbled out of his own high-security cell, his head just visible bobbing at the foot of the stairs leading up to the brig’s upper level. As the commodore exited their compartment, last to leave, the heavy steel door suddenly jammed shut behind him, causing him to stumble back.

‘That was a blessed close thing-’ the rest of the commodore’s words were cut off as Cornelius dived at him, both of them rolling backwards as a heavy bulkhead slammed down from a slot in the ceiling, only avoiding slicing the submariner in half by a couple of inches. Commodore Black stared in horror at the bulkhead. He and the face-changing lunatic were sealed off from the others.

Cornelius banged on the steel. ‘Septimoth, can you hear me?’

‘We are trapped,’ came the muffled reply. ‘Doors have come down on both sides of us.’

Cornelius looked frantically at the commodore. ‘Can you?’

‘He can’t,’ announced a voice behind them. Billy Snow walked forward and traced a hand down the steel barrier, as if he was feeling the mechanisms built into the bulkhead. ‘The brig has gone into lockdown. The guards will be coming down here in strength to secure the place long before any of us can crack these open.’

Cornelius banged on the wall in frustration. ‘Where’s Damson Beeton?’

‘Still in our cell. Her hex suit shocked her into unconsciousness when she tried to step over the threshold. The suit must need a counter ward to allow her to leave. Quest is damned clever, belts and braces on all his systems. Now she’s sealed back inside again.’

‘We can get her out. I’ll get you out, too,’ Cornelius called. ‘Septimoth, can you hear me, I’ll get you out?’

‘We’ll sell our freedom dearly when they come for us,’ came the tinny reply from Ironflanks. They could almost see him raising his four arms in defiance.

Billy laid a hand on Cornelius’s shoulder. ‘Sorry, but there’s no time for this. We only have minutes left at large at most. And Camlantis is outside, waiting for us. Jared, did you manage to get through to the Court of the Air before you were detained?’

‘No,’ said the commodore, miserably. ‘We didn’t even succeed in leaving Quest’s terrible floating flagship.’

‘Then we have work to do.’ Billy pointed down the stairs to the high-security level. ‘You’ve already been through the air vents once before and deactivated the snares I can sense hidden in there …’

‘Is that it, then?’ muttered the commodore. ‘We’re to be crawling around Quest’s rotten airship like rats in a trap, hunted by thousands of his wicked sailors and fierce fighting women. The three of us pitted against his rogue’s navy? What sort of hope is that?’

‘All the hope we have,’ said Billy Snow. ‘And unfortunately, right now, all the hope the world below has too.’

Quest stood in the shadow of the Minotaur , the airship having made the landing that was traditional when no Jackelian docking rail and hangar were available. Mooring rockets had been fired downwards into the dirt of what had once been a park — a ruin now, after cold millennia in exile from the warmth and nurture of mother Earth — sailors with drill clamps slung around their backs abseiling down lines to fix the anchorage. Heavy equipment was being winched down from the airship’s hangar, uni-tracked metal boxes with stubby cannons riveted into existence by engineers, carriages belching into life as compact steam engines were fed with bricks of coal from the House of Quest’s own mines. Their mobile fortress was partially erected on the high ground of the park’s slope, a defensible base of operations while the scouts reported in from every corner of the city: many with wondrous tales of awakening buildings and living machines, a few with reports of destruction left by the ancient floatquake, and a sad handful not at all — their glider capsules having failed to negotiate a safe landing among the spires and towers of Camlantis.

Robur stood bent over a camp table, twin trails of mist rising from his breather unit as he examined the scouts’ reports. ‘We have found no central source of power yet for the activity we are witnessing. No main generation station.’

‘Nor will you, Jules,’ said Quest. ‘The power is distributed evenly, part of the fabric of every building and street in Camlantis.’

‘You are so sure?’

‘It is the way I would do it if I had the necessary level of engineering available to me,’ said Quest. ‘A single point of energy generation is vulnerable to failure, to catastrophe, to the unexpected. These were a people who built to last.’

‘They should have lasted,’ said Robur. ‘How different would the world be today if their society had not fallen. Quatershift and Jackals would be provinces of a peaceful federation of nations living in harmony and enjoying the fruits of a super-science so advanced we might seem as demigods. An existence that would make the wild imaginings of the authors of celestial fiction look like the art of aborigines.’

‘And the Circle willing, we shall have that world again,’ said Quest. ‘Or rather our children will. We just need to find it, before the meddlers from the Court of the Air turn up to see if what has been returned to the world will endanger the stillborn vision of their sainted Isambard Kirkhill.’