Phillip Reeve: Mortal Engines

“This is my Museum, Miss Valentine,” he reminded her, “and this is where I’ll stay. I’d only get in your way up there.”

She hugged him, pressing her face into his robe and savouring its smell of mothballs and pipe-tobacco. “Your poor Museum!”

Pomeroy shrugged. “I don’t think the Engineers would have let us keep hold of our relics much longer. At least this way we’ll go down fighting.”

“And you might win…”

“Oh, yes,” the old Historian gave a rueful chuckle. “We used to thrash them regularly in the inter-guild football cup, you know. Of course, they didn’t have machine-guns and Stalkers to help them…” He lifted her face and looked into her eyes, very serious. “Stop them, Katherine. Stick a spanner in the works.”

“I’ll try,” she promised.

“We’ll meet again soon,” said Pomeroy firmly, hefting his blunderbuss as he turned away. “You’ve got your father’s gift, Kate: people follow you. Look at the way you stirred us up!”

They heard the cannon roar again as he closed the door on them, and then the clatter of small-arms, closer now and tangled with faint screams.

“There!” said Tom.

They were flying high through thin drifts of cloud, and he was looking down at London, far ahead.

“There!”

It was bigger than he remembered, and much uglier. Strange, how when he lived there he had believed everything the Goggle-screens told him about the city’s elegant lines, its perfect beauty. Now he saw that it was ugly; no better than any other town, just bigger; a storm-front of smoke and belching chimneys, a wave of darkness rolling towards the mountains with the white villas of High London surfing on its crest like some delicate ship. It didn’t look like home.

“There. …” he said again.

“I see it,” said Hester, beside him. “Something’s going on on Top Tier. It’s lit up like a fairground. Tom, that’s where Valentine will be! They must be getting ready to use MEDUSA!”

Tom nodded, feeling guilty at the mention of MEDUSA. He knew that if Miss Fang were here she would be coming up with a plan to stop the ancient weapon, but he did not see what he could do about it. It was too big, too terrible, too hard to think about. Better to concentrate on what mattered to him and Hester, and let the rest of the world look after itself.

“He’s down there,” whispered the girl. “I can feel him.”

Tom didn’t want to go too close, in case the Lord Mayor had set men to watch the skies, or sent up a screen of spotter-ships. He tugged on the controls and felt the big, slow movement as the airship responded. She rose, and London faded to a smudge of speeding light beneath the cloud as he steered her southward and began to circle round.

They climbed out of darkness into darkness, Bevis Pod’s torch flittering on stair after identical metal stair. Their big shadows slid up the walls of the shaft. They didn’t speak much, but each listened to the other’s steady breathing, glad of the company. Katherine kept looking back, expecting to see Dog at her heels.

“Five hundred steps,” whispered Bevis, stopping on a narrow landing and shining his torch upward. The stairs spiralled up for ever. “This must be Tier One. Halfway.”

Katherine nodded, too out-of-breath to speak, too on-edge to rest. Above them the Lord Mayor’s reception must be in full swing. She climbed on, her knees growing stiff, each intake of breath a cold hard ache in the back of her throat, the too-heavy satchel banging against her hip.

Through the windows of the airship Hester could see the Out-Country streaming past, only a hundred or so feet below, scarred with the same ruler-straight trenches that she and Tom had stumbled along on the days after they first met. And there was London, red tail-lights in the darkness, dimming as Tom brought the airship up into the thick poison-fog of the city’s exhaust. He was good at this, she realized, and thought what a pity it was that his plan was not going to work.

The radio crackled into life; London Docks and Harbour Board, demanding their identity codes.

Tom looked back at her, scared, but she knew how to handle this. She went to the radio and flipped the “transmit” switch up and down quickly, garbling her message as if the communications system was shot. “London Airship GE47,” she said, remembering the code name that had come crackling over the inn’s loudspeakers in Airhaven all those weeks before. “We’re taking Shrike back to the Engineerium.”

The radio said something, but she snapped it off. Black smog pressed against the windows, and water droplets condensed on the glass and went quivering off this way and that, leaving wriggly trails.

“I’ll circle the city for twenty minutes and then come in and pick you up,” Tom was saying. “That should give you time to find Valentine and…”

“I’ll be dead in twenty minutes, Tom,” she said. “Just get yourself safe away. Forget about me.”

“I’ll circle back…”

“I’ll be dead.”

“I’ll circle back anyway…”

“There’s no point, Tom.”

“I’ll circle back and pick you up.”

She looked at him and saw tears shining in his eyes. He was crying. He was crying for her, because she was going into danger and he would not see her again, and she thought it was strange that he cared about her that much, and very sweet. She said, “Tom, I wish…” and, “Tom, if I…” and other little broken bits of sentences that petered out in silence, because she didn’t even know herself what she was trying to say, only that she wanted him to know that he was the best thing that had happened to her.

A light loomed out of the swirling dark, then another. They were rising past Tier Three, and very close. Tier Two slid by, with people staring up from an observation deck, and then Circle Park with lanterns strung between the trees. Tom fumbled with the controls and the Jenny went powering forward, low over the rooftops of Knightsbridge and up towards the aft edge of Top Tier. He glanced quickly at Hester. She wanted to hug him, kiss him, something, but there was no time now, and she just gasped, “Tom, don’t get yourself killed,” slammed the hatch-controls to “open” and ran to it and jumped as the airship swung in a shuddery arc over the rim of Top Tier.

She hit the deckplate hard and rolled over and over. The Jenny Haniver was pulling away fast, lit by the sparkling trails of rockets from an air-defence battery on the Engineerium. The rockets missed, darkness swallowed the airship, and she was alone, scrambling into the shadows.

“A single airship, Lord Mayor.” It is a nervous-looking Engineer, a shell-like radio clipped to his ear. “It has pulled clear, but we believe it may have landed a boarding party.”

“Anti-Tractionists on Top Tier?” The Lord Mayor nods, as if this is the sort of little problem that crops up every day. “Well, well. Dr Twix, I think this might be a good opportunity to test your new models.”

“Oh, goody!” trills the woman, dropping a plate of canapes in her excitement. “Come along, my chicks! Come along!”

Her Stalkers turn with a single movement and form up behind her, striding through thrilled party-goers to the exits.

“Bring me the boarders alive!” Crome calls after her. “It would be a pity if they missed the big event.”

T om wiped at his eyes with the heel of one hand and concentrated on his flying, steering the Jenny away from London and up. He wasn’t frightened now. It felt good to be doing something at last, and good to be in charge of this huge, wonderful machine. He turned her eastwards, pointing her nose towards the last faint gleam of day on the summit of Zhan Shan. He would circle for twenty minutes. It felt as if half that time had passed already, but when he checked the chronometers he saw that it was less than two minutes since Hester jumped down into London and-