Johannes Cabal the Detective

CHAPTER 17 in which there is danger, disaster, and death

The detonation was that much closer and that much more violent, throwing Cabal and Marechal off their feet. The large windows on the starboard side of the salon exploded inwards, and suddenly the room was home to a howling gale and tumbling fragments of glass. The clouds outside seemed to buck backwards and forwards as the Princess Hortense yawed wildly. Miss Barrow and the other passengers were hurled from their seats, Lady Ninuka sent sprawling over Colonel Konstantin’s body. Her screams mingled with the other cries of surprise and terror.

“Cabal!” bellowed Marechal, climbing to his feet and standing with his legs well apart, braced against the rolling deck. “You’re insane! You’ll kill us all!” He looked around, and caught sight of Cabal taking refuge behind a sofa. It was no sort of cover; Marechal aimed and fired, the heavy slug tearing clean through it. The lurching deck had spoilt his aim, however, and the bullet hole went through the MirkAir antimacassar on the sofa top.

“Two bullets left,” called Cabal. “This is one of the many reasons you would make a bad ruler, Marechal — poor resource management. Also, you show appallingly weak anticipatory skills.”

“Oh? And how would anybody guess that you would be mad enough to do this?”

“Not this,” said Cabal, his tone dismissive. “This.” He leaned out suddenly. Marechal barely had time to register that Cabal had a gun in his hand before it fired. The swaying of the deck saved him, too, the round going high and punching a hole in an aft window, and he ducked low and scuttled away. “You think a city as close to a bunch of rabid dogs as Parila is to Mirkarvia wouldn’t have a good supply of gunsmiths?” Cabal called after the scampering noble.

He weighed the gun in his hand; the man behind the counter had looked at him quizzically when he’d enquired whether they stocked the Webley.577 revolver. Thwarted, Cabal had settled on a Senzan revolver, but at least had the mild pleasure of finding one in an equally untidy calibre — 10.35 mm. His mind was usually quite pristine, but — O secret sin! — he had always taken a perverse joy in dangling decimals.

“The ship’s going down and you two are having a gunfight?” shouted Herr Roborovski. “You’re both mad!”

“Sir, this may not be the best time for this,” agreed Fräulein Satunin, grimly holding on to the carpet. Behind her, the ground was briefly glimpsed through the aft windows as the ship’s tail dipped and swung.

“Shut up!” spat Marechal, his black hair askew and his composure shattered, from the end of the bar furthest from Cabal. “You, Satunin! You’re supposed to be a trained killer! Get him!”

“Sir,” she replied forcefully, “he has a gun. I have a knife. He has cover. I have open ground. Worst of all, you’ve told me in his hearing what you want me to do. Tactically, this is a very unsound proposition, sir!”

“I don’t give a flying pfennig for your damned tactical propositions, you stupid bitch! Just kill him!”

“No! You’re not listening to me!” interrupted Roborovski with urgent passion. “We’re all in dreadful danger!”

“Nice attempt, sir,” called Cabal from where he lay in moderate comfort behind the sofa. He was glad all the furniture was bolted down. With the Princess Hortense’s current perturbations, he would otherwise have been forced to chase his place of concealment around the salon. “But the line guides provide only forward motion, not lift. As long as the gyroscopic levitators continue to spin, we will not crash. We will just drift. Shortly, the Senzan airforce will come in pursuit of my stolen entomopter, and they will find us.”

“Oh, God,” said Miss Barrow, and Cabal had a sudden intimation that he may have made a miscalculation. “Cabal, the line guides are the ship’s main source of power! Didn’t you know that? It’s in the pamphlet!”

Cabal twitched. “Pamphlet?”

“The one about the ship! The one you got with your travel documents and itinerary!”

Cabal thought of an origami swan and swallowed.

“Not so mythical now, eh, Cabal!” Marechal started laughing — a coughing, barking laugh that contained little humour.

“She’s right!” Herr Roborovski was hanging on to a table support for dear life as the deck pitched violently beneath him. “With two of them destroyed, there’s barely enough to keep the levitators running! We need to land! We need to land immediately before the reserves are depleted!” He was interrupted by a shuddering groan that juddered through the entire fabric of the vessel. It ran through their bodies and shook their hearts in their chests. Roborovski swore something in a Mirkarvian dialect, a desperate and pleading jumble of words. “It’s the ship’s spine! She’s not designed to be thrown around like this! If we don’t set down soon, she’ll break her back!”

But beneath them was nothing but forest and steep hillsides.

Johannes Cabal was, though it pained him sorely to admit it, only human, and it is human to err. In his chosen profession, however, to err was to risk lynching, immolation, or ingestion. Cabal had so far kept his errors mainly on the small side — a singed eyebrow here, a deranged imp with a meat cleaver there — but overlooking the intimate connection between the etheric line guides and the gyroscopic levitators was beginning to look like one of the more final variety.

Furthermore, there was naught he could do about it while pinned down in the salon. While he and Marechal maintained their standoff, there was little chance of anybody getting out of there alive. He could bet that the crew members were too busy trying to restore trim to the ship to bother him for the moment, but this was an imperfect state of affairs. They would either succeed, and then he would have a lot of angry Mirkarvians after him, or they would fail, and Cabal would finish his life and career cremated on some anonymous Senzan hillside.

He considered his options. How much of a threat was Marechal? Assuming he had the same sort of revolver that Cabal had stolen from him back in Harslaus, it was a six-chamber design. Assuming, further, that he wasn’t the cautious type and therefore carried a round under the hammer, that left him with two rounds. Might he have reloaded? Possible, but unlikely; given the softness of Cabal’s cover, it would have been an obvious tactic to place three or four rounds in judiciously chosen points through the sofa with a guarantee of at least one hit. Even if not fatal or debilitating, it would give him an advantage. That Marechal had not done so suggested that he had come out unprepared to shoot more than six peasants. Cabal had five rounds remaining, and was bitterly regretting not having brought some more with him. Like Marechal, however, he had not been anticipating a gunfight. So, he had a small advantage, but time was wasting. He risked a peep along the side of the sofa away from the bar and saw Miss Barrow and the others clinging to the furniture.

Not so long ago, he thought, I would have been safe on a train at this point. Harlmann could have said what he liked, and I wouldn’t have cared a fig.

The ship pitched upwards amidst shouts and screams. Everybody who could, clung on for their lives. Unattended, Konstantin rolled heavily back and up against the base of the bullet-damaged window in a half-sitting position. With a hollow musical tone, a long crack formed between the hole and the base of the window. It held for a second longer, then shattered, great shards of glass falling down to the treetops. Konstantin lolled like a rag doll with nothing to support him, and slipped backwards out of the window. Cabal watched the old soldier vanish, and ground his teeth together. So, this is what a conscience does for one, is it?

He’d had enough. Precipitate action would kill him just as surely as indecision, but at least he would be doing something. He quickly analysed his situation, recalled that almost everything aboard an aeroship is built to save weight, and decided that the wood panels of the bar could not be as substantial as they appeared to be. In the moment between the Princess Hortense swaying this way and that, he stood up and put three judiciously aimed bullets through the side of the bar. The scream of rage from behind it told him his gamble had paid off, thus far at least.

Moving quickly towards the huddled group of passengers, he tried to get an angle on Count Marechal — a clear shot that would finish all this now. The wind roaring through the two broken windows whipped through his clothes and made his tie flutter like a black pennant as he strode forwards, gun aimed at the bar edge, waiting to see his target.

He never heard the metallic hiss of the blade being drawn; there wasn’t the faintest possibility that he ever could, in that maelstrom of sound and whirling newspaper sheets and napkins. He would have died there and then but for Miss Barrow calling, “Cabal! Behind you!” He didn’t look at her first, which also saved his life. He simply turned immediately, gun leading, and found Fräulein Satunin standing behind him with a stiletto in her hand, the same blade she had used to kill Cacon. It wasn’t raised dramatically high — she was a killer, not an actress — but out to her right, blade pointing in, ready for her to step close behind Cabal and grab him with her free hand over his mouth or throat as the blade drove in just below the sternum and up into his heart. But even the coldest killer may balk a second when her target turns and she finds herself facing a gun barrel at mouth level. In that second, Lisabet Satunin looked over the gun into Cabal’s eyes and, in them, she saw … nothing at all.

Cabal fired, and turned away.

Marechal, believing he was being shot at again, leaned out of his bullet-riddled cover and fired at Cabal. It was an impulsive shot, but still a narrow miss, and Cabal shied to his left, away from the path of the bullet. It was a sudden movement that caught him as much by surprise as it did Marechal, and took him clear past the end of the bar, leaving both him and the count entirely without cover.

Suddenly, it was no longer a gunfight. They faced each other, both armed with heavy revolvers containing but a single round apiece and — in a shared thought that occurred to each man simultaneously — they realised that this was a duel. It was the same duel they had started with swords three days ago, and this was where it would finally end. Their guns barked, a fraction of a second apart.

Count Marechal was swift, but Cabal was sure.

He lowered his gun as Lady Ninuka threw herself wordlessly across her father’s body.

Cabal reached down and took Miss Barrow by the upper arm. “We should leave now,” he said in a terse undertone.

“No! Cabal, we can’t. I can’t.”

She was looking at the surviving passengers: Herr Roborovski pushed back up against a chair, unable to look away from Satunin’s body; Miss Ambersleigh, hands to her mouth, trapped in incomprehension; Lady Ninuka, her dark lace cuffs darkened further by blood as she held her father tightly. “What has happened?” she asked nobody in particular. “What has happened?”

For his part, Marechal lay with his eyes open and with the calmest expression Cabal had ever seen him wear, his brow now troubled only by a dark hole a mite over 10.35 mm wide, the brain behind it forever stilled by the addition of 179 grains of lead.

Cabal grimaced. “They can look out for themselves. Come on. Every second wasted narrows our chances.” It seemed unnecessary to expound upon the fact that their chances were already as narrow as the leg of an emaciated giraffe.

Miss Barrow was having none of it. She shook off his hand. “Why did you come back?” she demanded through taut lips.

“It wasn’t for you, if that’s what you’re thinking. Are you coming or not?” They glared at each other.

Coming to a decision, she turned to the others. “If we stay here, we’ll die. Come on.”

Two of them looked at her with eyes like hunted animals, but Lady Ninuka’s hunt was over. Her eyes were as glassy as a vixen’s in a museum. “Daddy,” she said with faint certainty. “Daddy will make everything right.” She hugged Marechal’s corpse more tightly yet, a still point in a shattering world.

Miss Ambersleigh moved to follow her, but Miss Barrow stopped her. “I have to go to her,” said Miss Ambersleigh. “I have a duty.”

“Your duty is discharged. She has made her choice. Come with us.”

Miss Ambersleigh started to protest, but paused, looking regretfully at Lady Ninuka. “Orfilia?” she said, querulously. Her voice was lost in the winds that were singing over the edges of broken glass. Then, more firmly, “Orfilia! You must come with me! Come at once!”

Lady Ninuka did not respond at all. She simply held her father and stared into nothingness.

“It would be kinder to leave her here,” said Cabal, noting that — just for once — it was possible for the best course of action also to be the most convenient.

“Such a wilful girl,” Miss Ambersleigh said in an undertone. Then, to Miss Barrow, “Very well, I shall go with you.” She turned to Herr Roborovski. “Sir? You must come, too.”

He shook his head. “This is all my fault. It was my idea to disguise the ship. I never expected all this to happen. I swear.” The words tumbled out of him, thick with despair. “DeGarre, he was a great man, a hero to me. I had no idea what they would do to him. It was barbaric. It’s all my fault.”

“That’s settled then,” said Cabal. “Can we go now?”

Miss Barrow waved him to silence, much to his irritation. “Herr Roborovski, can you fly an entomopter?”

The unexpected question confused him out of his desolation. “What? Yes. Yes, I can.”

Cabal understood immediately. “Ideal. Both Marechal’s machine and the trainer I stole are two-seaters. His isn’t as damaged as I suggested; I just said that to aggravate him. Two pilots. Two passengers. This should work. We just need to get to the flight deck before impact.”

Ascending to the flight deck was both easier and harder to achieve than expected. Cabal had come down from there to the first-class deck via an access spiral stairwell that ran through all the decks. The doors from the circular well to each deck were secured by a door that opened easily going from the well to the deck, but which required a key to enter from all the passenger decks. Cabal had taken a minute to disable the lock when exiting the stairwell, and this foresight saved them a lot of time. The actual ascent, however, was accomplished in a claustrophobic metal tube, standing several storeys high, that was swinging violently, the bulkhead lights flickering on and off, sometimes leaving them in darkness for minutes at a time. Miss Ambersleigh faltered once, telling them to go on without her, but a remark from Cabal on the ephemeral nature of “British pluck” caused her to suddenly start climbing again in a stony, uncomplaining silence. Miss Barrow was going to congratulate Cabal on his grasp of psychology when she realised that he’d meant it.

At least they had not had to contend with crewmen running from deck to deck; the men were already at their emergency stations, and it would take a direct order from a superior to make them leave. Besides, even though most probably knew the ship was doomed, there was nowhere to run; Mirkarvia subscribed to the view that providing parachutes would only encourage indiscipline and the giving up of the ship when the situation was not yet irrecoverable. Even an experienced crew weighed less on the balance sheet than a combat aeroship.

It was a relief to reach the small room at the top of the stairwell. In its narrow confines, bad-weather gear swung on coat hooks, and equipment clanged heavily against the inside of wall-mounted lockers. On one side, a shallow metal staircase rose upwards, where twin doors were set into the ceiling. Cabal climbed quickly up to them and undogged the handles, before pushing upwards hard. The doors swung open and clanged down onto the flight deck, revealing a great blue rectangle of sky above.

The little party climbed out into a howling gale. The crew had managed to stabilise the Princess Hortense’s wild pitching and yawing, but the levitators were barely keeping the ship airborne. A crash landing on the forested slopes with who knew what exposed boulders and rocky outcrops beneath would be like driving a frigate onto a reef. She was a strong ship, but she had never been designed to suffer that sort of punishment. The only alternative was to run her for the Katamenian border in a headlong rush, hoping to clear the forest and put her down in the pasturelands beyond. Without full power, however, she was caught in a slow, blundering, onward wallow. The Hortense was drawing to disaster as surely as any storm-torn galleon caught with a rocky coast to leeward.

The view was magnificent, if terrifying. They had left the last few clouds behind them in the charge for the border, and the ship was lumbering through clear skies. The horizon seemed to be as high as the ship, as if the world were a great shallow bowl. Miss Barrow put this down to an optical illusion, and guessed that they were actually still several hundred feet up. This also turned out to be an illusion, punctured by the appearance of a hilltop, whose jagged crown was definitely above them, gliding past on the starboard side.

Roborovski was full of action, given new impetus by responsibility and perhaps the chance for some redemption, at least in his own eyes. He had been shepherding Miss Ambersleigh along as if she were a favoured aunt, checking that she was all right, and giving her assurances that he would get her out of there alive. Now, in the access room, he was able to show his special knowledge of the functions of a military ship. He opened an equipment locker and pulled out a pair of binoculars that he used to look along the length of the flight deck to where the two entomopters stood. “They look serviceable,” he said. “Herr Meissner, did you remember to apply the parking brakes?”

Cabal, who liked things to be tidy, replied tartly that, yes, of course he had.

Thus reassured, Roborovski opened a cupboard set flush into the access room’s wall. Inside was something like a railway signal lever — a great thing with a grip release at the end of the handle, and a great bolt at the hinge. He took the handle, squeezed the grip release closed, and then threw himself back. Vibrant twanging sounds, as of cables under tension, sounded through the wall.

“What are you doing?” asked Miss Barrow, but the diminutive Herr Roborovski was putting too much effort into it to be able to answer.

“I assume this is something important,” said Cabal, stepping past her and lending his strength, too. The lever was dragged back, complaining in strident metallic clicks all the way, and locked into position.

Roborovski took a moment to recover his breath. “It’s — ” He wheezed a couple of times and tried again. “It’s the arrestor … line lever. They should be back flush with … with the deck now. Shouldn’t … get in the way.”

Cabal climbed halfway up the steps and stuck his head up out of the hatch; the arrestor cables had indeed been withdrawn into long slots running across the runway.

“Won’t we need to bring the entomopters around so they can have a run up?” asked Miss Barrow.

“Not necessary,” said Roborovski. “They can take off vertically, if need be. They have lifting surfaces at the base of the wing stubs and the underside of the fairing, so they do fly better at speed, but they don’t need to get speed up for takeoff.”

“Oh,” said Miss Barrow, uncomfortable with a depth of ignorance that would have been spared her if she’d only read more boys’ comics. “Why all the business with arrestor lines, then?”

“Taking off is easy, Fräulein. Landing … well, imagine it. You might be approaching a rocking ship, in high winds, driving rain, and possibly under ground fire,” he said, nodding sincerely. “You need the biggest landing area you can get, and you won’t be coming in slow and easy. The arrestor lines mean that you just have to set your machine down, without worrying about going over the edge.”

Cabal had turned to listen, but now sat heavily on the step. “Fuel,” he said. “The trainer’s almost dry. How long will it take to refuel it?”

Roborovski put his hand to his mouth. “With a deck crew, five minutes. With just us, double that. You’d even used your reserve?”

“Reserve?”

“Secondary tank. You switch over to it when you run low.” He took Cabal’s blank expression as good news. “Don’t worry,” he said, slapping Cabal on the arm. “I’m sure you would have found out about it on your second lesson.”

They climbed up the steps and out onto the flattop, linking arms for mutual support as much as safety. They had to almost close their eyes as the wind tore the moisture from their skin and bared teeth. It took almost three minutes to walk the length of the deck, and all were glad to take some respite from the gale behind the waiting entomopters.

Roborovski climbed up on the side of the trainer and checked inside the cockpit. He climbed down again holding a flying helmet he’d lifted from the seat. “I’ll take the Symphony,” he bellowed into Cabal’s ear. “The reserve’s full. We should make Parila without any problems.”

“Parila?” shouted Miss Barrow, huddling against the cold.

“Yes,” he replied. “I don’t want to go to Katamenia, and I don’t think I want to go back to Mirkarvia, either. There’s nothing there for me anymore. I’ll ask for political asylum. With what I can tell them, they’ll grant it.”

“Isn’t that treason?” asked Miss Ambersleigh, her reedy voice almost lost on the wind.

“My country right or wrong …” Roborovski shook his head. “They killed my country when they killed DeGarre for the sake of convenience. They killed it when poor old Konstantin was put down like a dog for saying what was right. I’ll go home one of these days, but not while it’s being run by butchers like Marechal and the crooks that backed him.” He gave Miss Ambersleigh his hand, and helped her onto the inset rungs in the side of the entomopter’s fuselage. “Come along, ma’am. We’re leaving.”

Miss Ambersleigh was commendably prompt under the circumstances, not even showing an unhelpful demureness in the face of the wind whirling her skirts around and the necessary loss of dignity imposed by clambering into a cockpit. Once he was assured that she was getting along perfectly well without assistance, Roborovski climbed up into the aft cockpit of the tandem arrangement.

He was just strapping himself in when Cabal appeared at the cockpit edge. “Herr Roborovski, when you reach Parila I would be obliged if — ”

“I don’t know any Johannes Cabal,” said Roborovski. He smiled. “I’ve never heard of the man. I’m sure Miss Ambersleigh hasn’t, either.” Cabal said nothing more, but nodded once in thanks and farewell before climbing down again.

“You’d better get clear,” Roborovski shouted to Cabal and Miss Barrow. “You don’t want a love tap from the wings when they start up.”

They moved back as the starter banged and the engine turned over. It was still warm from its previous flight and caught immediately, growing to an eager snarl to be off, which became a crescendo of engineered fury as Roborovski opened the throttle. He shouted something to Miss Ambersleigh, who plainly didn’t catch it. It was almost certainly something along the lines of “Brace yourself!” because in a moment the entomopter flung itself off the front of the flight deck and dropped like a cannonball from a leaning tower, immediately vanishing from sight.

“I wonder if he had enough altitude to do that,” said Cabal into Miss Barrow’s ear in a tone of mild scientific interest. It wasn’t even a question, simply a remark. Despite which, it was promptly answered by the sight of the Symphony dashing up ahead of them in a steep climb, before banking to port, and sweeping by at speed on a reciprocal of the Princess Hortense’s course.

Cabal climbed up the rungs in the side of Marechal’s entomopter. It was a very different machine from the Symphony trainer, and he was already regretting being left with it. Where the Symphony was designed to be friendly and forgiving, this one was lean and antagonistic. It had brackets on its side panels that were probably intended to act as gun mounts and the root of weapon-bearing wings. Its livery was a matt camouflage green, with a discrete Marechal crest painted onto the fuselage below the edge of the pilot’s cockpit. Cabal assumed it was a fighter that had been stripped down for a reconnaissance rôle, lending it the range and the speed to travel undetected over Senza. By flying low over the treetops and staying away from populated areas, it was unlikely to be spotted from the land or the air. Also unlike the Symphony, the cockpits were fully enclosed, with the aft pilot’s position set higher than the co-pilot’s. He found a catch and tried to unfasten it. It proved recalcitrant, and he barked his knuckles sharply on it, drawing blood and expletives.

“We do not have time for this,” he muttered, trying to free the catch. He had momentarily feared that it was somehow locked, but now saw that it was just awkward by accident rather than design.

“Come on, Cabal!” shouted Miss Barrow. “We don’t have time for this!”

He favoured her with an old-fashioned look, and went back to wrestling with the mechanism. He had a further worry, one that he decided not to mention to her, as then she would become all recriminatory and the explanation, combined with the inevitable theatrics, would eat into the very time that they both knew they didn’t have. As soon as the phrase “third bomb” passed his lips, he knew she’d be impossible, so he kept that little piece of intelligence quiet and congratulated himself on a wise calculation.

As is often the way with self-congratulation, it proved premature; unlike the bomb, which was grotesquely tardy. The intention — back in those happy halcyon days when Cabal still believed that the levitators were in no way dependent upon the etheric line guides — had been to destroy three of the four guides. Destroying all four would have been more thorough, as well as more aesthetically pleasing, but he had insufficient materials with which to engineer a fourth device. The plan had been for one to go off first, to distract the crew and give him some bargaining time should it be necessary. Then the second and third bombs had been due to detonate within a minute or so of each other, crippling both starboard line guides, so that the ship would have been capable of only a slow clockwise circle, trapping it within the Senzan frontier. He had been displeased that only one device had detonated, but not too concerned until the flaw in his plan — vis-à-vis plunging out of the sky and everybody dying — had been exposed. Since then, he had been hoping that some flaw in the reagents had rendered the third bomb entirely ineffective (the alternative, that he had made an error in its construction, had not occurred to him at all), rather than just slow. Hope, in the same manner as self-congratulation, all too often invites a good crushing.

The third bomb was mounted in No. 2 Etheric Line Guide, at the ship’s forward starboard quarter. This was also, incidentally, the line guide they were closest to. The explosive force was not great — it was not required to be — but it was loud, flamboyant, and unexpected even by its creator.

Miss Barrow leapt sideways onto the deck with a scream of surprise, and so was in a good position to reach into one of the grooves running laterally across the deck and hang on to the arrestor cable that lay there. This was to prove advantageous when the ship dipped its prow thirty degrees.

Thirty degrees does not seem a great deal when drawn on paper during a geometry lesson. When hanging on to the side of an entomopter, the deck angles down by such an amount, and the entomopter — brakes or no — starts to slide forward, it seems a very great deal indeed. Cabal looked down and saw the entomopter’s wheels squeeeeing urgently across the rubberised surface, leaving white burrs as the machine slid sideways towards the deck edge. He ran rapidly through the various options. If he lost the entomopter, he would lose the only way off the Princess Hortense before she belly-flopped into the forest. To use the entomopter, he needed to open the cockpit. The cockpit canopy was being difficult. Once inside, he needed to start the engine, and bring the wings up to operational speed before the entomopter fell, or very shortly after it started to fall. He was not familiar with the cockpit layout. The canopy was still being difficult. He was running out of deck to scrape across. The verdammt cockpit canopy was still —

It opened suddenly under his hand, just as he felt the machine angle up under him as it started to topple off the edge. He had no choice; he threw himself backwards and twisted partially in the air to land on his side. He flattened his hands across the deck surface in an attempt to stop sliding off himself, as the entomopter flipped over the edge and plunged into the treetops a hundred metres below. He was only partially successful. He wasn’t moving as rapidly as the entomopter had, but he was still sliding relentlessly towards the edge. He saw Miss Barrow some ten feet away, hanging on for her life with one hand. Her expression was fearful but determined, and — astonishingly — her free hand was reaching out towards Cabal, as if somehow she could extend her grasp beyond the length of her arm by pure force of will. It was a hopeless endeavour, but Cabal appreciated the sentiment. He raised his eyebrows at her in a “Heigh-ho, here we go again,” sort of way, as if plummeting from aeroships was something he did as a hobby.

Somebody at the helm presumably didn’t appreciate the idea of the Princess Hortense ploughing into the forest quite so soon, either. Finding power from somewhere in the ship’s dwindling resources, her prow was brought up vigorously. While Miss Barrow held on to her cable despite being hurled vertically as if performing a one-handed stand, Cabal was flipped into the air like an especially sociopathic pancake, only to crumple heavily onto the deck a moment later, driving the breath from him in an explosive exhalation.

He did not rise or react, but simply lay there on his back, his arms slowly moving from the elbow. Miss Barrow feared that he might have been knocked unconscious, and half rising to walk in a crouch, her fingertips low in case the deck moved again, she went to him. “Cabal! Cabal? Are you all right?” She saw that his eyes were open, and he was looking straight up. He spoke quietly, and she half made out what he said, and managed to half translate that from what little German she knew. From the quarter sense she thus derived, she made an educated guess that he was commenting on how blue the sky was and how pretty. When Cabal touched upon the purely aesthetic, it was time for extreme measures.

A few stinging slaps later, and he was more or less composed. “Did I say anything?” he muttered, sweeping his hair back in a distracted fashion.

She considered Cabal’s fiercely guarded dignity, and that it would be kind for her to preserve it. Then again …

“You were raving about how pretty and blue the sky was.” Then she wilfully added, “I think you also said something about gathering flowers and dancing.”

Cabal’s eyebrows rose in baffled astonishment, before lowering again into a suspicious stare. “I’m sure I didn’t,” he said, albeit not quite as self-assuredly as usual. He climbed to his feet and walked away from the ship’s leading edge in a crouch; being quite that close to imminent extinction had lost its allure.

“Now what shall we do?” asked Miss Barrow, as he walked by her. He stopped and considered. They had only a few more minutes of flying time left before the inevitable crash, and every plan he could think of required more time, more materials, and a great deal more altitude. Meanwhile, the ship was performing the wide clockwise circle he had predicted, which was currently bringing it into the mouth of a wide tree-lined valley. Through the trees he could make out rocky escarpments that, while very scenic, boded ill for a painless crash landing.

He drew in his attention closer, to the ship itself. Three of the line guides were blackened and smoking from the impromptu bombs he had planted inside convenient maintenance hatches. The devices had been small, merely intended to damage a few components and cripple the line guide. Instead, the great louvred casings were smoke-blacked and buckled. He knew the strength of the explosive mixture he had used, and there was no earthly way he had miscalculated to this degree. It was possible — No, it was likely there was something inside the guides — probably some sort of coolant or oil reserve — that had proved unexpectedly excitable when blown up. The guide at the ship’s forward starboard quarter had detonated so spectacularly that its pylon was bent, the guide itself waggling slowly back and forth in the slipstream a few feet like the tail of an uncertain dog, creaking ominously. Cabal looked at it and made a decision. It wasn’t much of a plan, but assuming the rest of the ship carried the same flammable fluid, then staying where they were and hoping for the best seemed even less likely as a strategy for survival.

“Follow me,” he ordered Miss Barrow peremptorily, and set off for the line guide.

“Where are we going?” she asked, carrying her shoes as she ran beside him.

“That thing,” replied Cabal with a nod of his head. “It will probably come off as soon as we hit the valley wall. The plan, if I can dignify it so, is that we climb onto it and hang on. With a little luck — I misspeak … with a great deal of luck it will take the majority of the impact, tear loose, and get us down to the ground relatively unscathed. Provided the impetus doesn’t throw us off and dash us against the ground just before the line guide rolls over us. As you can see, the aft guide on this side is mounted closer to the hull, so at least we shall fall outside its path, and won’t have to worry about being crushed into paste by it.”

Miss Barrow’s pace faltered. “It’s one less thing to worry about,” he offered.

“This is your plan?”

“The alternative is to stay aboard when the ship crashes and probably bursts into flames. Between the crew and all the vegetables aboard, I imagine the smell will be something akin to bacon pie.”

They had reached the base of the pylon. “So,” Miss Barrow recapped, “we can either die suddenly on that thing or be burnt to death if we stay here. Is that it?”

“Yes. With a footling chance of survival if we go the former route.”

Miss Barrow grimaced, hitched up her skirt, and tested one foot on the base of the pylon. “Cabal? If we should live through this, please, promise me — ” She stepped forward, falling to all fours as she did so to grab the pylon edges.

“Yes?”

“Promise me that you’ll never become a motivational speaker.” And, so saying, she crawled rapidly across the pylon in a few sharp, deliberate movements, her concentration completely on the metal beneath her and pointedly not on the hundred yards or so beneath it, all that separated them from perdition. The treetops ran by in a blur of hard greens variegated with black shadow, the lack of distinction in her peripheral vision giving the impression of a great sea, waiting to drown them. She reached the other side and used the louvred vents to hold on to as she climbed up on to the line guide’s top, getting covered in carbon black in the process. Once she was more or less secure, she turned to see if Cabal was following.

He was, and exhibiting no sign of enjoying the experience. Down on all fours and with a face like the wrath of Jove, he crept slowly forwards onto the pylon, his gaze focused entirely upon it. Miss Barrow made one halfhearted and unconvincing attempt at saying something encouraging, but Cabal shot her such a testy glance that she decided to leave him to it. He was about a third of the way across when his unreliable luck failed him once again.

Somewhere in the labouring innards of the Princess Hortense, a tortured relay finally overloaded, and failed in a spray of sparks to a chorus of swearing engineers. Three gyroscopic levitators in the fore starboard array died, their constant reassuring hums diminishing al niente. Like a puppet with a string cut, the corner of the aeroship where Miss Barrow clung and Cabal crawled dipped sharply.

Anyone who has ever ridden quickly over a humpbacked bridge or experienced the first descent of a roller coaster will know the sudden sense of falling while the stomach seems to carry on rising. It is a thrilling sensation when enjoyed in safety, but, as this was not the case with Cabal at the moment, the sudden horrid sense of helplessness created by the pylon’s moving quickly away from him, momentarily causing him to fall, made him cry out. The pylon stopped, even swung up a little, and Cabal smashed heavily into it and rolled off the edge.

For the second time in his life, he found himself dangling by one hand from an aeroship. Miss Barrow was shouting, no, screaming at him, telling him to hang on, to pull himself up, to do all the obvious things that he intended to do anyway if only he could. He looked down and was surprised to see the treetops so close below. He wondered briefly if a fall would be survivable, but then saw in a gap amongst the trees how tall they stood and decided against it. Then he realised that Miss Barrow was screaming about a tree, too. He was just thinking what a coincidence it was that they were both so concerned with trees when the particular specimen Miss Barrow was talking about — a monarch of the forest, growing well above its neighbours — struck.

There was the great sound of glass smashing as the treetop dealt the starboard flying bridge position a fearsome blow. A moment later, it hit the pylon. Cabal heard the collision at the same moment that he felt it, the tree smashing into the pylon halfway along its length. Suddenly, he was swung forwards to bang harshly against the pylon’s underside as a mass of pine fronds whipped against his back. The Hortense, massive and imperturbable, was not to be slowed by such a thing and was in the process of sheering off as much of the treetop as possible, and bending back the rest. It was not a one-way act of destruction, however. Cabal grabbed a second handhold and hugged himself as close to the ship’s hull as he could, as the tree tore away the pylon’s skin and much of the girder work beneath it. Miss Barrow cried out in terror as the line guide sagged on the pylon tip and lurched backwards on the ruined pivoting mechanism that connected it to the pylon.

With a loud crack, the tree was behind them, leaving only shredded fronds hanging from the ripped metal, and a pleasantly fresh scent. A rapidly diminishing series of crashes sounded as the trunk scraped along the starboard promenade, shattering every surviving pane of glass as it went.

The collision had done Cabal a little good; where before he had been able to reach nothing but smooth steel, snapped and bent girders now jutted out of the pylon just behind him. He tested one before trusting his weight to it, pushed his foot into the bend at the torn end, and slid back towards the upper surface and relative safety. Miss Barrow, fingers driven deep into the line guide’s uppermost louvred slot, was surprised to see him emerge, and then even more surprised to feel relief. She watched him heave himself onto the pylon top and roll back onto the deck edge. He lay there, breathing heavily and watching the sky for several long seconds as he recovered his strength and his composure.

“Cabal?” she called. “Cabal? Are you all right?”

He turned his head to look at her. “Never been better,” he said, too exhausted to put even a whit of the sarcasm he would usually have employed into it. “Give me a moment to catch my breath, and I’ll join you.”

“Yes, about that … I was thinking, actually, maybe if I came back.” Something bent and snapped in the line guide’s swivel mount, making it swing and tilt by a few more degrees from the horizontal. Miss Barrow suppressed a cry, and tightened her grip until the metal edges dug painfully into her fingers. “It’s just … I don’t think I feel very safe over here.”

“You shouldn’t feel safe anywhere aboard,” replied Cabal, truthfully if undiplomatically. “Stay where you are.”

“I think … it’s going to fall off,” she said in a very careful and moderated tone, as if the line guide might hear her and fall off in spite.

“That is the idea,” said Cabal. He got painfully to his feet, grunting at his sprains and bruises. “It will come off easily on impact, not before. It is our best chance to survive this. Stay where you are and — ” He paused as he glanced forwards. “Ach, Scheiße,” he snapped. With seconds to spare, he glanced at the shattered pylon with the line guide wagging slowly at its tip and decided he would never make it in time. Instead, he ran forwards onto the landing strip and threw himself full length at the nearest arrestor-cable slot. He hooked his fingers around the cable, pressed his face against the deck, and hoped for the best.

The rocky outcrop Cabal had seen jutting proudly out of the hillside, like a glacier awaiting the next unsinkable ship, smashed into the forward dining-room windows and tore through the structure, rupturing the next deck up. The sound of the smash of rock, metal, and glass meeting in a cacophonic orgy was visceral in its force. Cabal gripped the arrestor cable with the fierce determination of a man who knows that there is no second chance. His head was jerked down as his body snapped straight behind him, and for long, long seconds, the roar of destruction and the black rubberised decking were his entire world.

Gushing coolant, hydraulic fluid, and root vegetables from her dreadful wound like a gut-shot haemophiliac, the Princess Hortense crashed downwards, spearing her belly on the great trees in that rarely travelled deep forest. But her momentum was massive, and she tore trees up by the roots in her headlong charge down the hillside; those that wouldn’t be uprooted were ripped atwain.

Miss Barrow had followed Cabal’s glance and was already securing her grip on the line-guide housing as he’d run for the landing strip. She saw Cabal hang on for his life and, just momentarily, thought he glanced up at her, but then she had to put her own face down against the metal of the line guide and brace herself. She closed her eyes, cherishing and fearing every second to come.

The incredible roar of destruction battered her, the dreadful tones of disintegration buffeting through her like a fierce, endless beat upon a bass drum, the resonations pouring through her, making her stomach and her heart feel as if they would explode in sympathetic vibration, and that she would welcome such a rapid release. Beside her, the aeroship lost its first and last battle, fought against an implacable and invincible foe. The Princess Hortense died screaming her last, as the earth itself tore out her guts and smeared them across the hillside.

When it suddenly became quieter, Leonie Barrow assumed she had been fatally injured, life and senses ebbing from her. She couldn’t bring herself to lift her head for the longest time, afraid of what she might see. But even fear can be defeated by curiosity or, failing that, boredom, and she looked.

Almost a mile ahead of her, the Hortense was still sliding, but slowly, so slowly. She would smash into a tree and start to roll up it until her immense weight cracked the trunk, and the ship lurched on again, with small shreds of rediscovered momentum, until she struck the next. She was alight, angry orange flames boiling out from rolling circular clouds of evil black smoke that moiled and hovered in the air like the Devil’s fingerprints. Amidst the smoke, Miss Barrow thought she once saw the figure of a man standing at the forward end of the flight deck, black jacket fluttering about him, but then the black clouds closed around him and she wasn’t sure she had seen anybody there at all.

Then the aeroship hit several trees simultaneously, and this time they bent, but they did not break. The ship lay still, and burned.

Leonie Barrow stood atop the shattered remains of the line guide, lying where a tree had interceded between the hull and the guide itself and neatly bisected the supporting pylon. She stood, and she watched the ship burn. She chose to ignore the bodies she could see scattered along the path of crushed trees, bark and branches stripped upwards by the passage of the aeroship over them.

She was still standing there an hour later when a flight of Senzan combat entomopters flew overhead and started circling. One sighted her and flew low, dropping the pilot’s pack of survival supplies by her with a hastily scribbled note that the terrain was too difficult for the fighters to land, but that help was on its way. Miss Barrow did not react, even when the rescue mission arrived. They could get little sense from her, but this was only to be expected; a wreck is a traumatic event, an air wreck doubly so. She was drugged and removed from the site of such carnage, and flown back to Pa rila in the company of doctors while the search for other survivors continued.

But they found only corpses.

Miss Leonie Barrow, a British national, was the only known survivor of the catastrophe. In the two days of bed rest she had before her doctors declared that she could be questioned for short periods, the investigators at the crash site had already begun to have grave suspicions that the Princess Hortense was not what she appeared to be. Senzan mechanics and engineers would not be fooled as customs officers might be: they studied the line guides and levitators, and found them to be of military grade; they examined the aeroship’s skeleton, exposed by collision and fire, and noted the concealed frames and hard points where armour could be welded and weapons mounted. So when Miss Barrow told them of Marechal’s subterfuge, it came as no great surprise to them. When she told them of his death, it came as no great sorrow.

They had found Marechal’s remains — “body” was altogether too composed a description — and tentatively made an identification based on clothing and artefacts. It was good to have his unexpected presence and death confirmed. Now all they required was an explanation. Some useful data had come from the man Roborovski, but when it was realised how deeply he was involved in the Mirkarvian armament programme he was spirited away by Senzan Intelligence, and the crash investigation saw no more of him. The Ambersleigh woman had been even less helpful, saying that she wasn’t interested in local politics, crossing her arms, and demanding to be taken to the British Consulate in increasingly strident terms until the investigators acquiesced for no better reason than to be rid of her.

This left Miss Barrow, and even she was evasive, pleading that shock had affected her memory. She asked to see a list of casualties, which they were reluctant to give her at first, until she suggested that it might help her recall. It turned out to be a very short list; the Princess Hortense had burned fiercely and consumed flesh and bone. Marechal, whose body had fallen from the ruined salon windows before the conflagration and been left in the ship’s shattered wake, was one of the few that they had been more or less sure of.

Miss Barrow read the few names and the short physical descriptions and effects of those still unidentified, and she bit her lip. “He may still be alive,” she said quietly to herself.

Not quite quietly enough to escape the attention of the police officer assigned to her; a chit of a girl barely out of the academy, but who burned with an intelligence and perceptivity that would either see her to the top of the force, or resigned within a year. “Alive, signorina?” she prompted. “Who may be alive?”

Miss Barrow started, and then relaxed. It would be a relief to tell somebody, she realised. The only consideration was how much to tell. “It’s time,” she began slowly. “It’s time to tell you what happened. Time for you to know. I think I’ve put it all together properly in my mind now.” The officer had already produced her notebook and flipped it open. She sat, pencil hovering and eyes intent upon her charge. Miss Barrow hesitated a moment longer, unsure if she was being wise. Then, trusting to fate and judgement, she began.

“There’s a man central to all this. He may still be alive. You have to find him. Dead or alive, you have to find him.” And, with Officer Frasca’s shorthand flowing, Leonie Barrow told her story.

Through the forest, he walked alone. His jacket still stank of smoke, and it reminded him of another time, not so long ago, when he had been walking home smelling much the same, albeit with a more sulphurous note to it. He hoped this wasn’t going to become a recurring feature of his life.

His escape from the stricken Princess Hortense had been so pathetically simple that he felt faintly ashamed that he had placed Miss Barrow on the line guide. She was probably dead now, he thought, and that was his fault. His conscience prickled him and, for once, he did not chide it into silence. To be fair to himself, he had thought the aeroship would explode on impact, but instead it had burned and that had given him time. Time, as the ship ground along the hillside at little more than a fast walking pace, to take up station at the end of the pylon at the shattered tip where once Miss Barrow’s line guide had been, time to wait for a likely tree bough to approach, and time to grab it as it passed. That part of the operation had been no more difficult than boarding an escalator or a paternoster; descending the tree after all of its branches beneath him had been torn away by the passage of the aeroship proved more exercising. He had finally managed it by going back to the trunk and clambering gracelessly around to the undamaged side of the tree, before making an inelegant descent that left him sweaty, swearing, and bruised.

Once on the ground, he had contemplated going in search of the missing line guide to check whether Miss Barrow had survived, but the arrival of a flight of Senzan entomopters had dissuaded him. By the time he worked his way back up the hillside, he decided, rescuers would be arriving in force, and he had no desire to answer their questions. Besides, if she was dead, she was dead. That didn’t put her beyond his particular brand of help, but he doubted that she would appreciate anything he could do for her. Well, then. Her fate was her fate, and his was his.

His looked as if it would involve a lot of walking.

Through the towering trees, dismaying the wildlife by his very presence and never pausing to apologise, went a pale man. Johannes Cabal was walking home.