Predator's gold

16

The Aakiuqs were still asleep. Hester crept back to her room and took the money Pennyroyal had given her at Airhaven from its hiding place under her mattress, then went straight to the Jenny ’s hangar. Scrabbling away the snow that had drifted against the door, she dragged it open. She lit the working-lamps. The Jenny Haniver ’s red bulk loomed over her, ladders propped against half-painted engine pods, raw new panels covering the holes in the gondola like fresh skin over a recent wound. She went aboard and turned the heaters on. Then, leaving everything to warm up, she trudged back out into the snow, heading for the fuel-tanks.

Up in the hangar’s shadowy dome, something scuttled and clanked.

It was not hard to guess what she was planning. Caul thumped the control desk in front of him and groaned, “Hester, no! He was drunk! He didn’t mean it!” He perched on the brink of his chair, feeling like some impotent god who could watch events unfold but was powerless to alter them.

Except that he could. If Tom knew what was happening, Caul was sure he would go straight to the harbour, reason with Hester, apologize, make her understand. Caul had seen couples making up before, and he felt sure this silly rift need not be final — if only Tom knew.

But the only person who could tell him was Caul.

“Don’t be stupid,” he told himself angrily, pulling his hands back from the camera controls. “What do a couple of Drys mean to you? Nothing! Not worth risking the Screw Worm for. Not worth disobeying Uncle.”

He reached for the controls again. He couldn’t help it. He had a responsibilty.

He switched to the camera inside Tom’s bedchamber at the palace and made it rattle its legs against the inside of the duct it was hiding in. Tom just lay there, fast asleep with his stupid mouth open and no idea that his life was falling apart.

Leave it, thought Caul. You tried, you couldn’t wake him, it’s over. It doesn’t matter.

He checked on Hester, then sent a camera racing through the heat-ducts of the upper city villa where Skewer and Gargle were working, peering into each room in turn until he found them in the kitchen, slipping silver-plate into their carry-alls. The cam tapped the inside of the duct; three taps, then a pause, then another three. Return at once. The blurred figures on the screen leapt up, recognizing the code, clownish in their clumsy haste to stow the last of the loot and get back to the limpet.

Caul hesitated for one moment longer, cursing his soft heart and reminding himself what Uncle would do to him if word of this got out. Then he ran, scrabbling up the ladder, through the hatchway, out into the silent city.

She had been afraid that the fuel-tanks would be frozen, but she had reckoned without the ingenuity of eight hundred years of Anchorage harbour masters, who had found ways of adapting to the arctic cold. The fuel was mixed with anti-freeze, and the pump controls were housed in a heated building next to the main tank. She unhooked the fuel hose and heaved the big nozzle up on to her shoulder, stomping back to the hangar with it uncoiling across the snow behind her. Inside the hangar she attached the nozzle to a valve in the airship’s underside, then returned to the pump-house to switch on. The hose began to shudder slightly as the fuel started gurgling through it. While the tanks were filling she went aboard and started to make ready. The gondola lights weren’t yet working, but she found her way around by the work-lamps outside. As she began flicking switches on the control panels the instruments sprang into life, their illuminated dials filling the flight deck with a firefly glow.

Tom woke up, surprised to find that he had been asleep. There was a thick, silty feeling in his head, and somebody was in the room with him, leaning over his bed, touching his face with cold fingers.

“Freya?” he said.

It was not the margravine. A blue-ish torch flicked on, lighting up the pale face of a total stranger. Tom thought he knew everybody aboard Anchorage by sight, but he did not recognize this white face, this pale fire of white-blond hair. The voice was strange too, with a soft accent that was not the accent of Anchorage. “No time to explain, Tom! You’ve got to come with me. Hester’s at the air-harbour. She’s leaving without you!”

“What?” Tom shook his head, trying to shake the remnants of his dreams away, half-hoping that this was one of them. Who was this boy, and what was he on about? “Why would she do that?”

“Because of you, you idiot!” the boy shouted. He ripped Tom’s bedcovers away and flung his outdoor clothes at him. “How do you think she felt, watching you snog Freya Rasmussen?”

“I didn’t!” said Tom, appalled. “It was just — And Hester couldn’t have — Anyway, how do you know about — ?” But the stranger’s urgency was beginning to infect him. He pulled off his borrowed robe, fumbled his boots and cold-mask on, pulled on his old aviator’s coat and followed the boy out of the room, then out of the palace by a side-entrance he had never even noticed before. The night was wrenchingly cold, the city a dream of winter. Off the western side the mountains of Greenland hunched themselves up out of the ice, looking crisp-edged in the moonlight and close enough to touch. The Aurora flared above the rooftops, and in the silence Tom thought he could hear it crackling and buzzing like a power-line on a frosty morning.

The stranger led him down a stairway on Rasmussen Prospekt, along a maintenance walkway under the belly of the tier, up another stairway to the air-harbour. As they emerged into the open again Tom saw he had been wrong about the noise. The crackling was the sound of ice falling from the Jenny ’s hangar as the domed roof opened, and the buzzing was her engine pods swivelling into take-off position.

“Hester!” Tom shouted, pushing himself through the snow. In the open hangar the Jenny ’s running lights snapped on, reflections flaring across the drifts. He heard a ladder that had been propped against her side fall with a crash, heard the triple clang as the docking clamps released. It couldn’t really be Hester, could it, moving about behind the darkened flight-deck windows? He scrabbled and swam through an ocean of snow. “Hester! Hester!” he shouted, and still didn’t really believe that she would take off. She couldn’t know about that stupid kiss, could she? She had been upset when he told her he wanted to stay here; she was teaching him a lesson, that was all. He kicked and struggled his way through the drifts, faster now, but when he was still twenty yards from the hangar the Jenny Haniver lifted into the sky and turned south-east, sweeping away very quickly over the rooftops and out across the endless ice.

“Hester!” he shouted, suddenly angry. Why couldn’t she just tell him how she felt, like a normal person, instead of storming off like this? The west wind was rising: carrying the airship swiftly away from him, flinging powder snow into his face as he turned to look for his mysterious companion. The boy was gone. He was alone, except for Mr Aakiuq, who was stumbling towards him and shouting, “Tom? What’s happened?”

“Hester!” said Tom, in a tiny voice, and sat down in the snow. He could feel tears soaking into the fleece inside his cold-mask as the Jenny ’s stern-lantern, a tiny flake of warmth in that great cold, dwindled and dwindled, and merged at last with the Aurora.