Night Flights Read online

  He giggled, quite unpleasantly. He was the sort of person who had been bullied at school, Anna thought. Humiliating all those rich, handsome, popular air racers would feel like sweet revenge to him. She decided that she was going to ditch him as soon as they touched down on Anchorage. She would sign on as crew with an air freighter, or stow away aboard a clipper. She would find her way to one of the strongholds of the Anti-Traction League. She would become a fierce warrior in their war against the cities. She would never see Stilton Kael again. She wondered if she would miss him, and decided that she wouldn’t; not at all.

  But she was going to miss his little airship.

  On the eve of the race, the Direktor of Arkangel held a grand ball. Stilton Kael bought a midnight-blue dress for Anna, and she rode with him in a first-class elevator all the way to the top of the city. The windows of the Direktor’s ballroom had been unshuttered, and the ice lay outside, grey as moths’ wings in the night-time dusk. Huge flues branched like the boughs of metal trees across the big room, warming the air with engine heat. Between the flues were glasshouses where trees and flowers and ferns grew. Between the glasshouses, and on the little winding paths which wandered through them, the Direktor’s guests were gathered in chatty little groups, the women in gowns of every colour, the men in formal robes of black and grey. Racers and their co-pilots strutted and preened like exotic birds blown in on the south wind. Handsome Rex Huntingtower of London, Dun Laoghaire’s Niall Twombley, the Kreuzer brothers from the Dortmund Conurbation. Angel Glass was the most beautiful creature Anna had ever seen, with her braided, honey-coloured hair and her long, red leather coat.

  Anna followed Stilton while he went from one group to the next, laughing over-loudly at the other racers’ jokes while he waited for them to notice him. They never did. Looking up through a skylight, she saw a bird hovering in the clear air above the city. It was some sort of hawk, she thought, and it was just hanging there, sometimes making tiny adjustments to the angle of its wings and tail feathers to keep it balanced on the wind. I’ll be free soon, she told herself. I’ll be just like that bird. I’ll fly where I please. I’ll fly to the lands of the Anti-Traction League. I’ll tell them what Arkangel is like, and they’ll give me bombs and rockets and I’ll come back and smash this place for ever…

  “Ah, Stilton,” boomed a man’s voice, and the man came with it, a big, red-faced, white-bearded old man with rich embroidery all over his black robes and not a flake of kindness anywhere in his face or eyes.

  “Father,” said Stilton. He bowed stiffly and stepped a little further away from Anna.

  “You’re still planning on entering this damned silly race in your damned silly airship, are you?”

  “Yes, Father. The Golden Arrow is to be moved up to the air harbour first thing in the—”

  “Then you’ll be needing a co-pilot, I suppose.”

  “I have one,” said Stilton, and waved vaguely at Anna. “This is Thrall K-420, she’s … she helped me with the construction…”

  Viktor Kael looked at Anna, but it seemed that thralls were made of some substance that his cold old eyes could not detect. He ignored Stilton’s stumbling introductions and said, “I’ve just had a word with the Direktor. His eldest boy is keen to have a go at this air-racing lark.” He pointed behind him at a clean, pink, overfed thug with cropped blond hair and a fancy flying jacket that had never left the ground. “There’s your copilot. Rudi Masgard. Be damn good for the family brand to link ourselves with the Direktor’s lad. Damn good.”

  Anna waited for Stilton to object. She waited for him to say, “Anna Fang is my co-pilot.” Because all that talk of love must have meant something, mustn’t it?

  But Stilton just said, “Yes, Father! Thank you, Father!”

  “Don’t mention it,” rumbled Viktor Kael. “Just make sure you bring young Masgard back in one piece. The air-trader Sheybal said he’d be interested in buying your ship after the regatta’s done. We’ll hold off on discussing a price, though. It’ll be more valuable if it wins.”

  When he had moved on Anna whispered, “But what about…”

  “It’s the Direktor’s son,” said Stilton. “I can’t turn him down.”

  “I’ll come anyway,” said Anna fiercely. “I’ll stow away. I’ll make a nest for myself up between the Arrow’s gasbags and…”

  “You can’t!” said Stilton. “The weight. Every ounce counts, you know. And what if they check the ships over before we leave, and find you? I’d be disqualified!”

  “But we were going to… When we get to Anchorage, you said…”

  “It will be all right,” Stilton promised. She could feel his need to get away from her, before Rudi Masgard or his father noticed him having this urgent, whispered conversation with a thrall. Although she had never loved or even much liked him, she still felt shocked at how easily he had betrayed her.

  “Wait here, K-420,” he said. “I won’t be gone long.”

  He left her there and went off to talk to Masgard. She cursed herself for being so upset. She had broken her own rule and let herself care. Not about Stilton, but about his airship. He had been right about that. She had fallen in love with that little ship the moment she saw it, and she had loved it ever since with all the love in her frozen heart…

  She looked up at the skylight again, mainly to stop anyone seeing the tears in her eyes. The sky above the city was a deeper blue than before. The hawk had gone.

  Angel Glass stood in front of a huge mirror in the ladies’ restroom, repairing the black wings of mascara that tilted upwards from the corners of her eyes. She didn’t look round when Anna came in behind her. Perhaps she thought Anna was the attendant.

  “Stilton Kael’s ship is much faster than people think,” said Anna.

  That made the aviatrix look at her.

  “She has reconditioned Jeunet Carot engines, and a clever new compressor system that means she can change altitude quickly and easily without wasting gas,” said Anna. “But Kael has only one thrall to help him. If his ship were to be damaged somehow, there’s no way he could have her ready in time to join the race.”

  She took the mascara pencil from Angel Glass and wrote a number on the mirror. “That is the code that opens the access door into Kael’s hangar,” she said. There were little linen towels in a basket beside the sinks. She used one to wipe the mirror clean. “There will be nobody around down there now.”

  She threw the towel into the laundry bin and left, and Angel Glass watched her go.

  It was late, and the night had grown as dark as it was likely to. An eerie dusk lay over the ice, made eerier by the Northern Lights, which had chosen that moment to put on a rare summertime display. As the green veils swayed and glimmered above Arkangel, the Direktor’s guests crowded to his windows to watch, debating whether this was a good omen or a bad one. The Arkangelsk were uneasy, for they believed that on the nights when the aurora shone most brightly the ghosts of the dead came down to dance upon the High Ice. But the aviators said that the lights were just the banners of the gods, and anyway, they would much rather the dead were having a good time on the ice than up in the sky waiting to make trouble.

  Anna stood listening, watching the ghost lights ripple like wind-blown curtains. She heard Stilton Kael whinny with laughter at some feeble joke his new co-pilot made. She heard Angel Glass tell someone, “Well, it is time I was turning in; I must get my beauty sleep before the race! Oh no, you must stay! Enjoy yourselves…”

  Anna waited for five minutes, then followed the aviatrix out. Nobody noticed her leave.

  She took a public elevator down to the second tier, and stopped in at her quarters on the way to the hangar. She took a bag and filled it with her clothes and a few bits of food she had hidden away because hiding food away was what you did when you had lived in the thrall holds. Then she hurried through the empty corridors to the hangar.

  There was no way of telling whether anyone was inside or not. As she entered the combination into the lock,
Anna hoped she had not misjudged Angel Glass. But the Giaconda of the Jet Stream was already inside the hangar. She was standing under the Golden Arrow, looking up at its starboard engine pod, gripping a big wrench that she had taken from one of the open toolboxes. For a moment Anna felt a cold terror that she had wasted too long packing and the sabotage had already been done. But the pod was undamaged.

  She closed the door very softly behind her, and typed more numbers into the keypad beside it.

  Angel Glass seemed slightly surprised to see her, but she hid it well. “You were right, thrall,” she said. “She is a good ship.”

  “She has the wrong name, though,” said Anna. “I’ve never liked Golden Arrow.”

  “What would you call her?”

  “My father’s ship was called the Mermaid,” said Anna. “So I thought about calling this one Mermaid 2. But she doesn’t look like a proper mermaid. She’s all made of bits and pieces. Once, when we landed on a raft city, someone told me they had a real mermaid in the museum there and I made my ma take me to look, but it was a fake, just an old skate carved into a sort of figure, with hair glued on. Ma thought I’d be disappointed, but I thought it was clever. It was called a Jenny Haniver. So that’s what I’m going to call this ship, now she’s mine. My Jenny Haniver.”

  “Now she’s yours?” asked Angel Glass.

  “Yes. I’m stealing her. I’m going to get in and start the engines and you’re going to release the mooring cables and open the hangar doors. That’s why I needed you down here.”

  “To help a slave escape?” said Angel Glass. “I don’t think so!”

  “Oh dear!” said Anna. “Then I shall have to raise the alarm! Everyone will be terribly shocked that the great Angel Glass has broken into a rival’s private hangar, planning to nobble his airship…”

  “I didn’t break in! You gave me the combination!”

  “I don’t remember doing any such thing.”

  “In the loos, upstairs, you stupid girl! You wrote it on the mirror, you said—”

  “I don’t remember ever speaking to you before, Miss Glass.”

  Angel Glass strode furiously towards her. Anna wondered just how far the other woman was prepared to go, wondered whether she was about to be attacked – but the aviatrix just dropped the wrench and keyed the number that Anna had given her earlier into the door lock.

  The door did not open.

  “You changed the combination!”

  “It will only take a few moments for you to open the doors and release the cables,” said Anna. “You wanted the Jenny out of the race, didn’t you? She will be. I will fly her far away.”

  “Is she fully fuelled? Provisioned?”

  “She’s got fuel enough to get me away from Arkangel, and I’m used to going hungry.”

  The aviatrix gave an exasperated snort. She wasn’t really pretty at all, thought Anna, not with that hard, angry look on her face. But she nodded, and said, “Hurry, then. Get aboard your ship, thrall.”

  “Shall I show you how to release the cables?”

  “I know how to release mooring cables, kiddo.”

  Anna snatched up her bag and scrambled through the hatch, into the fresh-woodwork smell of the little airship’s gondola. She turned on the cabin electrics, and the dashboard lights set green shadows in the hollows of her face. She watched Angel Glass move around the hangar, releasing the mooring cables, and listened to her own heart thud inside her chest. When she started the engines, people were going to hear and come running, and when they found the door locked they were going to break it down. When they found her gone they would launch pursuit ships, and she couldn’t be completely sure that she had enough fuel and skill to stay ahead of them. She would be alone and hunted. Her life would be measured in desperate moments. But she would be free.

  So she switched on the engines, and their music drowned out the rumble of hydraulics as Angel Glass pulled the lever that opened the hangar doors. A shaft of midnight sunlight reached into the hangar and widened as the big doors slid apart. The aurora flowed across the sky outside. Angel Glass ran to the open hatchway of the gondola and said, “How do I get out? What’s the new combination?”

  “Your coat!” shouted Anna.

  “What?”

  “Your coat. It’s really nice. Give me it and I’ll tell you.”

  The aviatrix started to say something unladylike, then gave up, pulled off her long, red coat and flung it into the gondola. Anna told her the combination. “But hurry,” she added. “Kael security will already be on their way!”

  Angel Glass did say something unladylike then, but it was lost in the song of the engines as Anna switched them to full ahead and the ship sprang forward. She had never steered an airship from its hangar before, but she had watched her ma and pa do it many and many a time. She felt as if they were with her, standing behind her in the gondola, watching over her as she worked the controls.

  The Jenny Haniver slipped out into the arctic twilight, rising up and away from Arkangel as fast as an airship could go, and the gods of the sky hung out their glowing flags to welcome her.

  The Gasbag and Gondola was getting too busy for storytelling. On the low stage by the window, Patigul Akhun was tuning up her forty-string guitar, and aviators were already shouting requests to her to play the old songs they loved. A girl came pushing through the crowd, a skinny, fair-haired girl wearing the white uniform of the Traktionstadt Coblenz Luftkorps. She was part of Coma Korzienowski’s crew, and when she reached the table she leaned down to whisper a quick, urgent message in her ear. Anna watched a frown appear on Coma’s large, pretty face. Coma, catching her eye, shrugged, deciding that the message was not so secret, and too interesting not to share. “London is still moving east,” she said. “It ate a town called Salthook in the old North Sea, and it’s coming our way at high speed. I can’t think what Lord Mayor Crome is thinking of. Doesn’t he know the big Panzerstadts will eat his city up?”

  “Perhaps he wants it to be eaten,” said Anna. “London has been in hiding for years. Perhaps its rulers have grown tired of skulking in the western hills and decided to end it all. Perhaps Crome’s gone mad.”

  But she didn’t really think that. Magnus Crome was the cleverest, most cunning lord mayor London had ever had, and if he was driving his city back into the Hunting Ground he must be sure that it could defend itself against larger predators. That troubled her. It suggested that the rumours she had heard were true: Crome had some long-laid scheme that he was putting into action. While the others started arguing about what London’s plans might be, she stood up and buttoned her coat and went outside and down a ladder to the docking ring where the Jenny Haniver was moored.

  These shards had been mountains once. In Ancient times they had been called the Alps. But bad things had happened to them in the centuries since: earthstorms and ice ages; a Slow Bomb strike in the Sixty-Minute War. Now they were just the Shatterhorns, a steep land of rubble riven by clefts and rat runs where the mining towns crawled.

  But tonight the mining towns had fled, and the Shatterhorns shivered at the coming of a new disaster. Up from the lowlands, engines roaring, smokestacks spewing thunderheads, a city was advancing. Banks of gigantic caterpillar tracks ground granite to gravel under it. Above the tracks, stacked in seven tiers like the layers of a wedding cake, the body of the city towered; factories and work yards fume-wrapped on the lowest level, shops and houses on the ones above. The higher tiers were smaller and had parks about their edges, though the wild winds of the Shatterhorns had stripped the trees of leaves. On the tiny topmost tier, among the council offices and politicians’ palaces, an ancient temple had been rebuilt in honour of the city’s past. Even the wretched Anti-Tractionists, watching from their hilltop hovels as it lumbered by, recognized the famous dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. It told them that this juggernaut was not just any moving city. This was London, first and greatest of all the Traction Cities of the Earth, and it was making its way across the high passes to hunt
upon the plains of Italy.

  Anna Fang steered her red airship, Jenny Haniver, into the little air harbour on the Base Tier. Those quays were not much used since the new harbour had opened higher up, and the only things moored there were some London scout ships with blank white envelopes like the speech bubbles of cartoon characters with nothing left to say. The customs officials were lazy, bored, and easily bribed. They accepted Anna’s story about collecting a cargo as easily as they pocketed the gold coins she slipped them.

  It was a whole year since she had fled from Arkangel. The Jenny Haniver had carried her easily to the Spitzbergen Static, where she had hoped to join the Anti-Traction League in its fight against the moving cities. But the Anti-Tractionists of Spitzbergen were not interested in fighting. So she had let a trapper hire the Jenny to carry his cargo of furs to Airhaven, and on Airhaven she had picked up another cargo, and quite quickly she had found herself a free trader on the Bird Roads.

  But just being free was not enough. The further she flew from Arkangel, the more angry she grew at what had happened to her there. The whole system of Municipal Darwinism, which made things like Arkangel possible, seemed to her a poison upon the Earth. She felt that she had a duty to strike some blow against it, and if the League would not help her, then she would have to strike alone.

  She walked out of the air dock and into the warren of streets that filled that part of London’s Base Tier. It was busier than she had expected. Crowds of workers were spilling from the elevator stations to go on duty in the Engine Districts, laughing and shouting jokes at each other as they stumbled down the steeply tilted pavements. London didn’t venture often on to slopes as steep as these. It was a novelty for Londoners when their streets turned into hills. Anna walked among them with her head down, her long red coat buttoned, an empty canvas shoulder bag flapping against her side. At intersections she sometimes paused to study the palm of her hand, on which she had copied the map that an air trader in Peripatetiapolis had drawn for her. It led her from busy places into quieter ones, past Limehouse elevator station and a pub called the Sense of Doubt, and eventually down an alleyway between two massive ducts to the shop of Fatberg Slim.