Infernal Devices

Theo shook his head. “Even if we made it to the boathouse, the Storm would shoot us down before we were out of Cloud 9’s airspace.”

“But the Peewit’s a yacht, not a warship!”

“The Storm don’t care about details like that.”

“But don’t you know codes and passwords and things? Couldn’t you radio them and tell them you’re one of their own people?”

“Wren, I’m not one of their people,” said Theo. “Not anymore. I failed them. If they capture me, they’ll have me sent to Batmunkh Tsaka and killed.”

Wren wasn’t sure what that meant, but she could see that he was scared, perhaps as scared as she was. The control room shook as something hit the deck plate overhead, and a rain of sparks and burning wreckage came tumbling down past the windows. She looked up into Theo’s face and tried to sound brave. “Theo,” she said, “my dad’s waiting for me in Brighton, and your mother and father are waiting for you in Zagwa, and they’ll all be really miffed if we just hang about up here and let ourselves get killed. Come on. We have to try!”

Still holding hands, they ran up the stairs to the ground-floor entrance, the door the murderer must have left by. It opened into a corridor outside the kitchens. There was no one about. Above them they could hear screams and shouts and the rumble of feet as people fled the ballroom. Explosions in the sky outside splashed skewed diamonds of sour yellow light on the floor under the kitchen windows, and glinted on fallen pans and trays of sweetmeats dropped by slaves who had left in a hurry.

They ran to the nearest exit and blundered out into the gardens in front of the Pavilion. Crowds of party guests were hurrying across the lawns like frightened sheep. There was no way off Cloud 9, but they wanted to get as far as they could from the Pavilion for fear the Green Storm were about to bomb it. Anyway, they were wealthy, and used to getting everything they needed. Even if the cable car was gone, surely there would be a ship there, or an air taxi, or some plucky Brightonians organizing a rescue with air pedalos and sky yachts?

Not wanting to be caught up in the stampede, Theo pushed Wren into the shelter of one of Pennyroyal’s abstract statues. They huddled together and watched moonlit exhaust trails billow in the sky around Cloud 9 like skeins of spider silk as the Flying Ferrets buzzed and tumbled, hurling themselves at the Storm’s airships. It was as if each ship had a seed of fire inside it and the Flying Ferrets were patiently probing for it with streams of incendiary bullets. When they found it, the airship would begin to glow from inside like a MoonFest lantern; then blinding patterns of light would checker the envelope; and finally the whole thing would become a dazzling pyre, casting eerie shadows from the cypress groves as the wind carried it past Cloud 9.

But the airships were fighting back, and so were the clouds of Resurrected eagles and condors that flew with them. The birds descended in flapping black clouds upon the Ferrets’ flying machines, slashing at the wings and rigging and the unprotected pilots, and as the Ferrets stuggled to evade them, they made easy targets for the airships’ rockets and machine cannon. Wings were shredded; fuel tanks blew apart; rotor blades came flipping and fluttering across the Pavilion’s lawns like bits of an exploding Venetian blind. The Bad Hair Day, its wings ripped off, plunged burning into the cable car station. The Group Captain Mandrake veered sideways into the Wrestling Cheese, and both machines crashed together through the flank of a Green Storm destroyer and went down with it, a vast barrel of fire sinking gracefully toward the sea.

Just off the edge of the gardens, a larger ship circled, waiting for the fighters to finish off the Ferrets, and beyond it Wren could see the upper tiers of Kom Ombo rising like an armored island from a sea of smoke. A fat airship was hanging above the city, showering down clouds of tumbling, twirling things that looked like silver seedpods until they struck a fortress or a gun emplacement, where they burst with white flashes and flung wreckage high into the night. Wren felt the explosions in her chest, like the beat of a huge drum.

“Tumblers,” Theo muttered.

“What, those silver things?” asked Wren. “No, those are bombs. You can tell by the way they go off, bang! You told me you used to fly Tumblers.”

Theo nodded.

“You mean those things have pilots? But they’ll be blown to bits!”

Another nod.

“Then how come… ?”

“How come I’m not dead?” Theo shook his head and would not look at her. “Because I’m a coward,” he said. “I’m a coward, that’s why.

The Requiem Vortex prowled through the veils of smoke and ash that hung above the coast. Panic had broken out among the clustered towns and cities there, who all assumed the Green Storm fleet had come for them. Some were running for the shelter of the desert; some inflated buoyancy sacs and splashed into the sea; some took advantage of the confusion to try to eat their neighbors. Benghazi and Kom Ombo launched clouds of fighter airships, which were torn apart by the faster, fiercer Fox Spirits and by flocks of Stalker birds.

A gas cell had exploded somewhere near the Requiem Vortex’s stern, and spidery Mark IV Stalkers were crawling around on the sheer sides of her envelope, training extinguishers on the blaze. There was damage to the steering vanes too, and frantic voices echoing from the speaking tubes claimed that the rear gondola had been destroyed.

The Once-Borns on the bridge were pale and tense; Grike could see their faces shining with sweat in the hellish light that blazed in through the windows. Beneath her steel helmet, Oenone Zero was weeping with fear. The radio crackled out distress calls and damage reports from other ships: The Sword Flourished in Understandable Pique had been rammed amidships and was going down in flames; the Autumn Rain from the Heavenly Mountains was rudderless and drifting into the flank of Benghazi. Someone aboard a doomed corvette kept screaming and screaming until the signal suddenly cut out.

The Stalker Fang ignored it all. Standing calmly beside the helmsman, she gazed out at Cloud 9 as it drifted slowly away from its parent city.

“Follow that building,” she said.

The ships that had attacked Brighton had quickly veered away to tackle other targets, but the raft resort’s troubles were not over. Its engine room was in flames, and half its paddle wheels were wrecked. It had slipped its moorings as the attack began and was now adrift, trailing black smoke and saffron flame, leaking burning fuel. Everyone who could have taken charge was either dead or at the mayor’s party.

In all the confusion, no one paid any heed to the alarms jangling inside the Pepperpot, not until the Lost Boys overpowered the last of their guards and came swarming out to join the fun. From the engine rooms and the sewage farms of the undertier and the stinking filter beds beneath the Sea Pool, the slaves of Brighton saw their chance and rushed to join them. Arming themselves with wrenches and pool rakes and meat tenderizers, they swarmed up the city’s stairways, looting antique shops and setting fire to art galleries. The good-natured actors and artists of Brighton, who had spent so many dinner parties agreeing with each other about what a terrible life the slaves led and organizing community art projects to show how they shared their pain, fled for their lives, spilling out of the city aboard overloaded airships and listing motor launches.

Indeed, so much was happening, and so dense a pall of dirty smoke hung above the battered city, that hardly anyone had noticed Cloud 9 was no longer attached to the rest of Brighton.

Chapter 29 The Unexploded Boy

Wren and Theo, waiting for the battle to subside, sat down in the shadow of the big statue, their backs to the plinth that it perched on. A few glasses of punch had been abandoned there earlier in the evening, and Wren drank one. How long had this nightmare been going on? Five minutes? Ten? It seemed a lifetime. Already she had learned to tell the high yammer of the Ferrets’ machine cannon from the throatier stutter of the Storm’s guns. The rockets were harder to tell apart, but she always knew when a Tumbler went off, because Theo would jump and hunch his shoulders and squeeze his eyes shut.

“Do you want to tell me about it?” she asked. “These Tumbler things?”

“No.”