Phillip Reeve: Mortal Engines

Tom shrugged and mumbled something. Out of the corner of his eye he saw some newcomers pushing their way between the tables. “Look, Uncle Wreyland!” he heard one of them shout. “Here they are! We’ve got ’em!”

Tom looked round and saw Wreyland and a couple of his boys closing in, carrying heavy clubs. He grabbed Hester, who was leaning against the counter, barely conscious. One of the Speedwell men moved to cut off their escape, but the woman in the red coat barred his way and Tom heard her say, “These are my passengers. I was just arranging a fee.”

“They’re our slaves!” shouted Wreyland, pushing past her. “Tom Nitsworthy and his friend. Found ’em in the Out-Country, fair and square. Finders keepers…”

Tom hurried Hester across the metal deck, past stairways leading up to the quays where the airships moored. He could hear Wreyland’s men splitting up, shouting to each other as they searched, then a grunt and a crash as if one of them had fallen over. Good, he thought, but he knew that the others would soon find him.

He dragged Hester up a short iron stairway to the quays. There were lights in some of the ships that hung at anchor there, and he had a vague idea about forcing his way aboard one of them and making them take him to London. But he had nothing that would serve as a weapon, and before he could look for one there were feet ringing on the ladder behind him and Wreyland’s voice saying, “Please try and be reasonable, Mr Nitsworthy! I don’t want to have to hurt you. Fred!” he added. “I’ve got the rotters cornered. Fred?”

Tom felt the hope drain out of him. There was no escape now. He stood there meekly as Wreyland stepped forward into the light from the portholes of a nearby airship, hefting his club. Hester slumped against a dock-side winch and moaned.

“It’s only fair,” said Wreyland, as if he thought she was complaining. “I don’t like this slaving lark any more than you do, but times are hard, and we did catch you, there’s no denying it. …”

Suddenly, faster than Tom would have thought possible, Hester moved. She dragged a metal lever out of the winch and swung it at Wreyland. His club went whirling out of his hand and hit the deck with a glockenspiel sound, and the metal bar struck him a glancing blow on the side of his head. “Ow!” he wailed, crumpling to the floor. Hester lurched forward and raised the bar again, but before she could bring it down on the old man’s skull Tom grabbed her arm. “Stop! You’ll kill him!”

“So?” She swung towards him, snaggle teeth bared, looking like a demented monkey. “So?”

“He’s right, my dear,” said a gentle voice. “There is no need to finish him.”

Out of the shadows stepped the woman from the bar, her red coat swirling around her ankles as she walked towards them. “I think we should get aboard my ship before the rest of his people come looking for you.”

“You said we didn’t have enough money,” Tom reminded her.

“You don’t, Mr Nitsworthy,” said the aviatrix. “But I can hardly stand by and watch you taken away to be sold as slaves, can I? I was a slave myself once, and I wouldn’t recommend it.” She had taken off her glasses. Her eyes were dark and almond-shaped, and fine webs of laughter lines crinkled at their corners when she smiled. “Besides,” she added, “you intrigue me. Why is a Londoner wandering about in the Hunting Ground, getting into trouble?” She held out her hand to Tom, a long, brown hand with the thin machinery of bones and tendons clearly visible, sliding under papery skin.

“How do we know you won’t betray us like Wreyland did?” he demanded.

“You don’t, of course!” she laughed. “You will just have to trust me.”

After Valentine and the Wreylands, Tom didn’t think he would ever be able to trust anybody again, but this strange foreigner was the only hope he had. “All right,” he said. “But Wreyland got my name wrong, it’s Natsworthy.”

“And mine is Fang,” said the woman. “Miss Anna Fang.” She still had her hand outstretched as if he was a scared animal she wanted to tame, and she was still smiling her alarming red smile. “My ship is on air-quay six.”

So they went with her, and somewhere in the oily shadows under the quays they stepped over Wreyland’s companions, who lay slumped against a stanchion with their heads lolling drunkenly. “Are they…?” whispered Tom.

“Out cold,” said Miss Fang. “I’m afraid I just don’t know my own strength.”

Tom wanted to stop and check that the men were all right, but she led him quickly past and up a ladder to Quay Six. The ship that hung at anchor there was not the elegant sky-clipper Tom had been expecting. In fact, it was little more than a shabby scarlet gasbag and a cluster of rusty engine pods bolted to a wooden gondola.

“It’s made of junk!” he gasped.

“Junk?” laughed Miss Fang. “Why, the Jenny Haniver is built from bits of the finest airships that ever flew! An envelope of silicon-silk from a Shan Guo clipper, twin Jeunet-Carot aero-engines off a Paris gunship, the reinforced gas-cells of a Spitzbergen war-balloon… It’s amazing what you can find in the scrapyards…”

She led them up the gangplank into the cramped, spice-smelling gondola. It was just a narrow wooden tube with a flight-deck at the front and Miss Fang’s quarters at the stern, a jumble of other little cabins in between. Tom had to keep ducking to avoid braining himself on overhead lockers and dangerous-looking bundles of cables that hung from instrument panels on the roof, but the aviatrix flitted around with practised ease, mumbling in some strange foreign tongue as she set switches, pulled levers and lit dim green electrics which filled the cabin with an aquarium glow. She laughed when she saw Tom’s worried look. “That is Airsperanto, the common language of the sky. It’s a lonely life on the bird-roads, and I have a habit of talking to myself…”

She pulled on a final lever and the creak and sigh of gas-valves echoed through the gondola. There was a clang as the magnetic docking clamps released, and the radio crackled into life and snapped, “ Jenny Haniver, this is the Stayns Harbour Board. You are not cleared for departure!”

But the Jenny Haniver was departing anyway. Tom felt his stomach turn over as she lifted into the midnight sky. He scrambled to a porthole, and saw the market town falling away below. Then Speedwell came into view, and soon the whole cluster was spread out below him like a display of model towns in the Museum.

“Jenny Haniver,” insisted the loud speaker, “return to your berth at once! We have a request from the Speedwell town council that you give up your passengers, or they will be forced to—”

“Boring!” trilled Miss Fang, flicking the radio off. A home-made rocket battery on the roof of Speedwell town hall spat a fizzing flock of missiles after them. Three hissed harmlessly past, a fourth exploded off the starboard quarter, making the gondola swing like a pendulum, and the fifth came even closer. (Anna Fang raised an eyebrow at that one, while Tom and Hester ducked for cover like frightened rabbits.) Then they were out of range; the Jenny Haniver was climbing into the cold clear spaces of the night, and the trading cluster was just a distant smear of light beneath the clouds.

It rained that night on London, but by first light the sky was as clear and pale as still water, and the smoke from the city’s engines rose straight up into the windless air. Wet decks shone silver in the sunrise and all the banners of Tier One hung limp and still against their flagpoles. It was a fine spring morning, the morning that Valentine had been hoping for, and Katherine had been dreading. It was perfect flying weather.