Jez thought for a moment. ‘They’re giving us relative altitude,’ she said. ‘The first set of numbers show the distance we are from the object. The second show how far it is above or below us.’
Frey caught on. ‘So then the ones ahead of us . . . one is fifty-seven metres above us and the other is forty-three metres below?’
‘That’s why we didn’t see anything the last time,’ Jez said. ‘We passed by it. It was thirty metres above us.’
Frey felt a mixture of trepidation and relief at that. It was reassuring to believe that they’d figured out the compass and could avoid these unseen things, at least. But somehow, knowing where they were made them seem all the more threatening. It meant they were really there. Whatever they were.
‘Crake, keep reading out the distances,’ he said. Crake obliged.
‘Twenty . . . ten . . . zero . . . needle’s swung the other way . . . ten . . . twenty . . .’
Frey had him continue counting until they were out of range and the compass reset again.
‘Okay, Cap’n,’ said Jez. ‘The bottom’s going to drop out of this defile any minute. We come down to seven hundred and take a heading of two-eighty.’
Frey grunted in acknowledgement. There was enough space between the mountain walls for a much bigger craft to pass through, but the constant need to prevent the Ketty Jay from drifting was grinding away at his nerve and giving him a headache. He dearly wished he hadn’t indulged quite so heavily the night before.
Just as Jez had predicted, the defile ended suddenly. It fed into a much larger chasm, far too vast to see the other end. The fog was thinner here, stained with a sinister red light from below. Red shadows spread into the cockpit.
‘Is that lava down there?’ Frey asked.
Jez craned over from the navigator’s station and looked down. ‘That’s lava. Drop to seven hundred.’
‘Bringing us closer to the lava.’
‘I’m just following the charts, Cap’n. You want to find your own way in this mist, be my guest.’
Frey was stung by that, but he kept his mouth shut and began to descend. The fog thinned and the red glow grew in strength until they were bathed in it. The temperature rose in the cockpit, drawing sweat from their brows. They could feel the radiant heat of the lava river flowing beneath them. Pinn came up from the mess to complain that it was getting stuffy down there, but Frey barked at him to get out. For once he did as he was told.
Frey added aerium at seven hundred metres to halt their descent, and pushed onward along the length of the chasm. Visibility was better now. The mist offered hints of their surroundings. It was possible to see the gloomy immensity of the mountains around them, if only as smudged impressions. To descend a few dozen metres more would bring the lava river into detail: the rolling, sludgy torrent of black and red and yellow. The heat down there would be unimaginable.
‘Contacts,’ said Crake again. ‘Ahead and to the left a little. We - oh, wait. There’s another. Two of them. Three. Three of them.’
‘There’s three?’
‘Four,’ Crake corrected. He showed Frey the compass. The needles were in a fan, all pointing roughly ahead. Frey frowned as he looked at it, and for a moment his vision wavered out of focus. He blinked, and the feeling passed. He swore to himself that he’d never again drink excessively the night before doing anything life-threatening.
‘Any
