Despite Vanka’s confidence that the east wind would drive them towards ExterSteine, progress was agonisingly slow. The balloon seemed caught in a vortex of wind, spinning indecisively over the Rhine where the Reinhard Heydrich Railway Bridge crossed the river, giving the three passengers a marvellous view of the frantic efforts of the railway engineers who were trying to clear the carcass of the train derailed by Baron Dashwood’s men.
At first their sedate progress didn’t trouble Ella, but as time slipped by and the balloon refused to move at anything more than the aeronautical equivalent of a snail’s pace she became increasingly anxious. Vanka was obviously as worried as she was: he began to drum his fingers on the side of the wicker basket.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘There’s so much snow on the top of the balloon that it’s slowing us down. I’m worried that if we aren’t on the ground by dawn the wind will shift to the south and that will take us towards the centre of the Demi-Monde.’ He passed Ella his telescope. ‘If you look to your right, you can just see Mare Incognitum.’
Ella peered through the snow-drenched night, and sure enough, glinting in the moonlight was a large lake – at least two miles across, by her estimation – set slap bang in the middle of the Demi-Monde. She checked PINC, but all the information it had was that the centre of the Hub was an undeveloped area off-limits to Demi-Mondians and allocated to ABBA for future cyber-development. Rather disturbingly PINC named this area Terror Incognita.
‘Is that a problem?’
‘I don’t know how long this balloon is going to stay airborne: I think we’ve got a leak. And the last thing I want to do is come down in Terror Incognita.’
‘Why’s it called Terror Incognita? What’s there to be terrified of?’
‘The Terror’s full ov monsters an’ lots ov ovver horrible fings-’ began Rivets.
‘No one knows,’ Vanka interrupted. ‘Explorers have crossed the Wheel River but none of them has ever come back. And this Winter the ForthRight sent in a regiment of SS to have a look around and they were lost too. All we really know about the place comes from the drawings Speke made during his balloon ascent last year.’
‘And that is?’
‘Not much. We know that it’s heavily forested and that it’s home for one of the Wonders of the Ancient Demi-Monde. You can just see the Great Pyramid now, it’s almost directly south.’
Ella swung the telescope around and examined the horizon. PINC had made no mention of any pyramid but there, nevertheless, illuminated by the moonlight was a structure that looked for all the world like Khufu’s Great Pyramid. But it wasn’t the eroded and corroded monument Ella remembered from her history books; this one was white, sharp-sided and pristine. She didn’t remember Khufu’s pyramid having a hexagonal platform at its very summit either.
How odd.
‘It’s glowing!’
‘Everything made out of Mantle-ite glows in the dark. In the dark it emits green stuff scientists called LunarAtion. It’s the same effect you saw in the sewers.’
As she moved the telescope around the central area of the Demi-Monde, she saw several huge pictures drawn on the ground around Mare Incognitum. From what she could make out there was a spider, a snake, a shark and what looked like a man, and each of them was a good two or three miles in length and, just like the pyramid, they glowed under the moonlight. ‘Wow! Those pictures are like the Nazca geoglyphs.’
‘Oh, you mean the Speke Etchings. Yeah, we didn’t even know they existed until a year ago. As they’re invisible from ground level they were undiscovered until Speke went up in his balloon.’
‘Who made them?’ She had to ask because according to PINC they didn’t exist.
‘No one knows.’
‘They’re amazing. I’d really love to see them up close.’
There was a ripping sound from above Ella’s head. She looked up to see that part of the balloon’s canvas had torn away.
‘It looks, Ella, as though you’re going to get your wish.’
That the Baron and his men got as far as they did without any trouble was down to the Poles: the Baron had never realised just how much cheek, how much chutzpah Poles had. They were the ones who shouted the ribald replies to the SS guards when they were challenged and the ones who laughed and joked as they marched along, deluding the SS into believing they were just reinforcements on their way to the front. By dint of the Poles’ impertinence and by not firing at anyone the Baron’s regiment made it safely through the Ghetto, out through Southgate, along Odessa’s Deribasovskaya Street, and across the new railway track. And that’s when things had gone wrong. Obviously the ForthRight military had been shaken by Cassidy’s train attack and their reaction had been to dramatically increase the number of soldiers guarding the railway line.
Unfortunately the sentry whom Cassidy tripped over was young, overeager and one of the few men in his company who wasn’t drunk. The boy had been cowering away from the blizzard in the lee of a water tower when Cassidy, frozen and not in a very accommodating mood, fell over him. The conversation that ensued was brief and noisy.
‘Who goes there?’ said the boy through chattering teeth.
‘Someone who’s not as stupid as you are, that’s for sure,’ snarled Cassidy as he hauled himself out of the snowdrift he’d been tumbled into. ‘Spirits damn it, boy, what are you doing hiding away like that?’
The boy, with a terrified look on his face, did his best to face Cassidy down. ‘I-I-I s-s-said who goes there?’
‘Why-why-why,’ Cassidy mimicked a little unkindly, ‘should I tell a f-f-fucking idiot like you anything?’
‘Be-be-because I’m guarding this water tower.’
‘Well, P-P-Private, I’m Sergeant B-B-Bob Cassidy of the First Anglo Rangers and me and my f-f-friends have been ordered to get our a-a-asses over to Hub Bridge Number Two to help with the attack there.’
Cassidy was betrayed by the want of a button. If his ragged greatcoat still had had some of its buttons it wouldn’t have flapped open in the wind to display his blue jacket, the one he had worn when he had been fighting on the Royalist side during the Troubles. The boy saw the jacket, his eyes boggled and then he made what would prove to be a fatal mistake.
‘Royalists!’ he screamed. ‘We’re under attack by Royalists!’ And then to compound his mistake, he fired his rifle. By the time Cassidy had smashed his rifle butt into the boy’s head the damage had been done. The alert rippled around the ForthRight troops stationed along the railway line.
‘Royalists to me,’ screamed the Baron. ‘Captain Crockett, we’re to advance at the double, due south.’
The look he got from Crockett was very articulate. He knew as well as the Baron what lay to the south.
‘That’s the direction where there are the fewest enemy,’ the Baron shouted by way of explanation. ‘We’ll get to the Wheel River and then …’
It was lucky for the Baron that the shooting began when it did, otherwise he would have been forced to explain to Crockett just what he did plan to do. And if he had explained he doubted that Crockett or indeed any of his regiment would have followed him. But by his estimation a probable death was preferable to a certain one and, after all, someone, sometime had to survive Terror Incognita. He just hoped it would be him.
Fortunately for the balloonists, the blizzard eased and the wind shifted back, driving them to the east and blowing them – unnoticed in the snow-filled darkness – a hundred feet over the campfires that marked the SS cordon around ExterSteine. When the wounded balloon finally expired, they came to rest, by Vanka’s estimation, about a half-mile to the west of ExterSteine. The landing was what Ella described as a ‘soft crash’: the basket hit the ground with a considerable bump but as the ground was covered with a thick layer of snow the impact was cushioned. The three of them emerged from the tangle of ropes and wreckage and pronounced themselves grateful that none had any broken limbs. Barely pausing for breath, they set off towards the five stone columns that made up ExterSteine and which could be seen glinting ahead of them in the dawn’s half-light.
Dawn.
As Ella looked to the east, she could see the unmistakable smudge of red light on the horizon signalling that dawn was imminent.
‘How long before sunup, Vanka?’ she whispered – sound travelled easily in the Hub – as she slid and slipped over the pristine snow of the Hubland.
‘Half an hour at the most.’
