Now or never.
Verity made for the tri-wheel, urging Embrey to keep as quiet as he could while she supported his limp frame. Her stealth lasted but a moment. A gunshot rang out from the rubble behind, and two panicked, middle-aged Whitehall men dashed for the tri-wheel. One of them fired again at the baryonyx. Reckless, insane. The dinosaur thrust its crocodilian jaw around at forty-five degrees and unleashed a terrifying roar.
“You bloody fools.” She hissed as they tried to toss Embrey aside from the vehicle. One of them climbed in, frantically started up the steam engine. The other yanked her hair and kicked Embrey to the ground, desperate to gain the passenger seat.
Enough was enough.
Furious, she jabbed the second man’s throat and pulled him out by the scruff of his neck. He coughed hard but swung even harder-his fist to Verity’s gut left her bent double. The baryonyx stalked through the mud, drawn by the frantic action. In a few moments it would be upon them, and Embrey! He’d collapsed again and was shivering on his side. Whatever happened she had to get him inside the tri-wheel.
Luckily the first man had made a hash of operating the valves, his curses generating more heat than anything inside the steam engine. The second man did his best to fend Verity off with kicks but she seized his legs and dragged him off the passenger seat. As if to avenge his lunkheadedness at the controls, the driver immediately leapt to his colleague’s aid across the seats. He swung a vicious punch at Verity. She ducked, dealt him a quick uppercut, then planted a terrific boot on his kneecap. The bone cracked. She leapt to one side. As he bent to nurse his wound, she quickly raised her right leg as high it would go and then brought the heel down with wrecking force upon the back of his neck. A deadly blow she’d learned from Amyn’s brother in Zanzibar.
The man crumpled beside Embrey. His colleague had seen enough. He scrambled to his feet in the mud and made a beeline for the factory. Giant, swinging rows of daggers caught him mid-stride and plucked him screaming into the air. The baryonyx tossed him and chewed him for a few moments before its mighty tail whipped round against the tri-wheel, knocking it onto its side. The vehicle crushed the unconscious Whitehall man and narrowly missed Embrey.
Verity crouched behind the overturned car at his side, heart a’gallop. Any kind of movement now-even though Embrey was running out of time-would be suicide. The dinosaur didn’t appear to notice her. She covered Embrey’s mouth with her palm to quell his groans.
The air heated, thickened all of a sudden, as though a tropical summer heatwave had bled through the wintry chill. She found it hard to breathe. Blue sparks leapt from Embrey’s skin to her fingertips.
As she looked up, the baryonyx lumbered away up the side of the factory, skirting a pale, lilac glow.
“Oh my God. Not yet!”
A crackle from behind drew her gaze. Purple light snaked up from the ground onto the lines of the Empress, and shot around her envelopes and cables like St. Elmo’s Fire run amok. Christ, here we go. Verity was sure the time bubble had spread too far once again. It would envelop the entire area, not just the factory. Any moment now, London would reform around the ruins, the airship would find herself afloat on the Thames, and everything would be fine.
The end of her world came swiftly, in the flicker of a gaslight. She turned and heard a waspish buzz and saw the mirage of a great city through obsidian glass where the factory should be. A web-like bubble of white-purple light swelled, intensified from its base to its crown, then wavered like a giant candle flame in a heavenly draught. In an instant it was gone. The bubble. The factory. The light.
No farewell. Nothing.
Oh God.
A cold vice, colder and more crushing than the deepest suit dive, froze her heart. Slivers of lilac light floated and spiralled down through the empty space as fizzing leaves and spinning jennies. None of them reached the ground, instead evaporated with gentle crackles. All around the site, wisps of steam gathered on the faint outline of a sphere and then faded away.
She gazed up at Big Ben. Its clock face read five past eight. She dabbed a sleeve on her brow, trying to wipe a little reality into her shocking new world but it was too sudden, too impossible. The clock had read five past eight over a week ago, when they’d first arrived. From now on, it would always read that time.
The baryonyx paced around the far side of the vanished light-show, questing through the empty, adjacent buildings. Verity shook the bitter fog from her brain and turned her attentions back to saving Embrey-a battle she at least knew how to fight. Hell, she’d helped pluck bullets out of wounded men and women before…in a past life…
The baryonyx stalked through the empty ruins all through the evening, perhaps fascinated by the extraordinary smell left in the wake of the time jump. Acrid and sooty, it reminded her of bonfire night. When it left, a pack of curious dromaeosaurs pottered about the site. She watched them from Embrey’s bedside in her cabin, a rifle stood against the window sill for protection.
Though she’d retrieved the bullet and a tiny fragment of his shirt, he’d contracted a vicious fever. His pale skin dripped with perspiration, and every now and then she dabbed his brow with a damp cloth. The more he muttered insensibly, the clearer she glimpsed her end-the loneliest end imaginable, millions of years from another soul. She’d been a fool to let anyone — even her own men-near Billy or Reardon. If she’d managed it more prudently, where would they be right now? Was the city she’d glimpsed really London? If Reardon was still alive, would he ever come back for them?
There was always a chance.
“If you ever make it to Piccadilly, Tangeni…” she lay Billy’s dinosaur book next to her glass of brandy on the desk, “be sure to buy the boy an ice cream.”
She stared out into prehistory as one confined to its savage isolation forever. If only things had turned out differently. If only.
“ Enda nawa, my friend. Enda nawa. ”
One week later…
An eager easterly breeze prodded the balloons overhead while she paced about A-deck, tracing cables and rails with her fingertips as though it might reawaken precious memories of her adventures in the corps. But the Empress was a ghost ship. Her spirit had departed with Tangeni and the last of the aeronauts. Verity would fly her as far and as long as she was able, and when her gas was spent, the Gannet would slowly rust and crumble with the rest of man’s anachronisms. Bleak, yes, but she had served her purpose. She had kept enough of her crew alive to enable the return trip through time. Whatever else happened, she had at least done that.
“You finished yet?” she called to Embrey, who’d been writing in his blasted journal for hours. Verity had prepared the boiler and secured the water barrels and salted the meat and made enough hydrogen to buoy the balloons for days, and still she waited for him. “You’d better not have writer’s cramp. You’ve a boiler to stoke, Dickens.”
“Has the wind changed, then?” he hollered.
“Changed and sick of waiting for you.”
A clatter and a growl emerged from her cabin, and he appeared from beneath the steps looking trim and handsome in his waistcoat. He rolled up his shirtsleeves. “A hundred million years and still I get no peace. That’s women for you.”
Fists on hips, she glared playfully at him. “If it’s peace you’re after, I can arrange a lasting one. Now haul your backside to the engine room, Marquess.”
“Yes, ma’am. And may I have permission to see you in your cabin later?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On what kind of stoking you have in mind.” She blew him a kiss. He caught it and held it against his heart.
When they were airborne, Embrey returned to the quarterdeck wheel and, hand in hand, they both steered the ship ahead of the wind, away from London-that-was, perhaps for the last time. Geyser clouds shrouded the way east, but without the weight of a diving bell and a crew, the Empress quickly rose higher than she’d ever climbed before.
“Quatermain would be proud.” Embrey treated her to a slow, tender kiss that lifted her heavenward. “Although…he never liked to fly.”
