Johannes Cabal the Detective

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, Schei?e,” 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