Phillip Reeve: Mortal Engines

A rushing, brilliant thing slammed into the gondola, and the blast plucked him out of his seat. He clung to a stanchion and saw papers and instrument panels and sputtering lengths of cable and the shrine with its photographs and ribbons and Miss Fang’s half-read book all rushing out through a jagged hole in the fuselage, tumbling into the sky like ungainly birds. The big windows shattered and the air turned sharp and shimmery with flying glass.

He craned his neck, peering up through the empty windows, trying to see if the envelope was burning. There were no flames, but overhead a great dark shape slid past, moonlight slithering along its armoured envelope. It was the 13th Floor Elevator, pulling past the Jenny and performing a lazy victory-roll far over the foothills of Shan Guo before it came sweeping back to finish him.

Magnus Crome watches his guests crowd out into the square, gazing up at the glare and flicker of the battle taking place above the clouds. He checks his wrist-watch. “Dr Chandra, Dr Chubb, Dr Splay; it is time to deploy MEDUSA. Valentine, come with us. I’m sure you are keen to see what we’ve made of your machine.”

“Crome,” says the explorer, blocking his path, “there is something I must say…”

The Lord Mayor raises an eyebrow, intrigued.

Valentine hesitates. He has been planning this speech all evening, knowing that it is what Katherine would want him to say. Now, faced with the Lord Mayor’s arctic eyes, he falters, stammering a moment. “Is it worth it, Crome?” he says at last. “Destroying the Shield-Wall will not destroy the League. There will be other strongholds to defeat, hundreds of fortresses, thousands of lives. Is it really worth so much, your new hunting ground?”

There is a ripple of amazement among the bystanders. Crome says calmly, “You have left it rather late to have doubts, Valentine. You worry too much. Dr Twix can build whole armies of Stalkers, more than enough to crush any resistance from Anti-Tractionist savages.”

He starts to push past, but Valentine is in front of him again. “Think, Lord Mayor. How long will a new hunting ground support us? A thousand years? Two thousand? One day there will be no more prey left anywhere, and London will have to stop moving. Perhaps we should accept it; stop now, before any more innocent people are killed; take what you have learned from MEDUSA and use it for peaceful purposes…”

Crome smiles. “Do you really think I am so shortsighted?” he asks. “The Guild of Engineers plans further ahead than you suspect. London will never stop moving.

Movement is life. When we have devoured the last wandering city and demolished the last static settlement we will begin digging. We will build great engines, powered by the heat of the earth’s core, and steer our planet from its orbit. We will devour Mars, Venus and the asteroids. We shall devour the sun itself, and then sail on across the gulf of space. A million years from now our city will still be travelling, no longer hunting towns to eat, but whole new worlds!”

Valentine follows him to the door and out across the square towards St Paul’s. Katherine is right, he keeps thinking. He’s as mad as a spoon! Why didn’t I put a stop to his schemes when I had the chance? Above the clouds, the rockets flare and bang, and the light of an exploding airship washes across the upturned faces of the crowd, who murmur, “Oooooooooh!”

And Hester Shaw crouches at the Tier’s edge as the Resurrected Men stalk by, green eyes sweeping the walls and deckplates, steel claws unsheathed and twitching.

The Cat’s Creep ended in a small circular chamber with stencilled numbers on the sweaty walls and a single metal door. Bevis slipped the key into the lock, and Katherine heard it turn. A crack of light appeared around the door’s edge, and she heard voices outside, a long, tremulous, “Ooooh!”

“We’re in an alley off Paternoster Square,” Bevis said. “I wonder why they sound so excited?”

Katherine pulled out her watch and held it in the thin sliver of light from the door. “Ten to nine,” she said. “They’re waiting for MEDUSA.”

He hugged her one last time and whispered quickly, shyly, “I love you!” Then he pushed her past him through the door and stepped out after her, trying to look like her captor, not her friend, and wondering if any other Engineer had ever said what he had just said, or felt the way he felt when he was with Katherine.

Tom scrambled through the debris in the listing wreck of the Jenny’s gondola. The lights were out and blood was streaming into his eyes from a cut on his forehead, blinding him. The pain of his broken ribs washed through him in sick, giddy waves and all he wanted to do was lie down and close his eyes and rest, but he knew he mustn’t. He fumbled for the rocket controls, praying to all the gods he had ever heard of that they had not been blown away. And sure enough, at the flick of the right switch a viewing scope rose out of the main instrument panel, and he wiped his eyes and saw the dim upside-down ghost of the 13th Floor Elevator framed in the cross-hairs, growing bigger every minute.

He heaved as hard as he could on the firing controls, and felt the deck shift under him as the rockets went shrieking out of their nests beneath the gondola. Dazzling light blossomed as they hit their target, but when he blinked the bright after-images away and peered out the black airship was still there, and he realized that he had barely dented the great armoured envelope, and that he was going to die.

But he had bought himself a few more moments, at least, for the Elevator’s starboard rocket projectors were damaged and she was pulling past him and turning to bring her port array to bear. He tried to calm himself. He tried to think of Katherine, so that the memory of her would be what he took down with him to the Sunless Country, but it was a long time since he had dreamed of her, and he couldn’t really remember what she looked like any more. The only face that he could call to mind was Hester’s, and so he thought of her and the things that they had gone through together, and how it had felt to hold her on the Shield-Wall last night, the smell of her hair and the warmth of her stiff, bony body through the ragged coat.

And from some corner of his memory came the echo of the League rockets that had battered at the 13th Floor Elevator as she banked away from Batmunkh Gompa; the thick crump of the explosions and the small, bright, prickling noise of broken glass.

Her envelope was armoured, but the windows could be broken.

He lurched back to the rocket controls and re-targeted them so that the cross-hairs on the little screen were centred not on the Elevator’s looming gasbags, but on her windows. The gauge beside the viewscope told him he had three rockets left, and he fired them all together, the shattered gondola shivering and groaning as they sprang away towards their target.

For a fraction of a second he saw Pewsey and Gench on their flight-deck, staring at him, faces wide with silent terror. Then they vanished into brightness as the rockets tore in through their viewing windows and their gondola filled with fire. A geyser of flame went tearing up the companion-ladders between the gasbags and blew out the top of the envelope. By the time Tom could see again the huge wreck was veering away from him, fire in her ruined gondola and the hatches of her hold, fire flapping from her steering vanes, fire unravelling from shattered engine-pods, fire lapping inside her envelope until it looked like a vast Chinese lantern tumbling down towards the lights of London.