Mothstorm

by Philip Reeve

  I dressed quickly, thankful for the Trevithick generators which stopped my breeches drifting up to the ceiling and my collar studs tumbling about, and ran to the bridge. There I found Mother and Father already standing with Captain Moonfield, Dr Blears and a number of the ship’s officers at a large picture window. Beyond the glass the glowing caul of alchemical particles which had shrouded and shielded us upon the Golden Roads was fading away. A misshapen, lifeless moon swept past upon our starboard quarter, a shoal of aetheric icthyomorphs flitted out of our path, and there ahead of us waited a large, blue-green sphere, looking for all the world like a marble resting on a sheet of black velvet.

  ‘Georgium Sidus!’ said Father, peering at the planet through his spectacles, as though he were already trying to make out the strange flora and fauna which lived beneath its swirling clouds.

  ‘It hasn’t changed a bit!’ said Mother, which drew her a sharp glance from Dr Blears.

  Georgium Sidus! I cannot tell you how privileged I felt to be among the first human beings to set eyes upon that far-flung world! I gazed at it for fully twenty seconds before I started to feel bored.

  The truth is, one planet is pretty much like another when you have whirled about the Solar System quite as much as I. Georgium Sidus really did present rather a bland face from where we stood in high orbit around it. No glimpse of its surface features could be seen through those thick, blue-green and ever-swirling vapours. It looked another Jupiter, a gas-world, but cool and cheerless, as if it were a place of eternal fog. What moons we could see were small, rocky and barren, and although the planet boasted a few rings, which it wore at a jaunty angle, they were not jolly rings like those of Saturn, which provide a home to aether turtles, monstrous spiders and other oddities of the type which make a planet interesting. No, these Georgian rings were made only of gas, and rather dank and miserable-looking gas at that, as if a few skeins of the planet’s all-enshrouding mist had spilled out into space but lacked the nerve to go any further.

  ‘It looks rather dull,’ I complained.

  ‘Dull to your eyes, Art, perhaps,’ said Mother. ‘But not all eyes are like yours. When I was living as a native of Georgium Sidus one hundred million years ago, I was able to see all sorts of colours which human beings have not even names for. I would break from the surface of the ocean and fling myself into the sky just for the pleasure of looking at those rolling mists, which are woven from so many wonderful shades of blue and lilac, violet and grey, groon and flinge and sprew.’

  She spoke softly and to me alone, but I noted that Dr Blears glanced sideways at her and gave other signs that he was listening.

  ‘It is a world of mists,’ said Mother wistfully. ‘It has no surface, you know; the wet gases of its sky thicken imperceptibly into the wetter ocean, and the liquid ocean thickens similarly into a solid core. It is a place of soft and ceaseless rain, and eternal mist. Not unlike Scotland.’

  ‘And what sort of creatures live there, Emily?’ asked Father, greatly interested.

  ‘Well, when I was first there I was a vast, armoured whale,’ said Mother. ‘And then, later, I tried out life as a sort of mer-person. But that was long ago, and who knows what new forms may have evolved since?’

  ‘Giant moths!’ said Father excitedly.

  ‘It is possible, I suppose, though quite unlikely. Why do you say giant moths?’

  ‘Because I see one just there!’ cried Father. ‘Look!’

  Others on the Actaeon’s bridge had seen it too by then. There was a soft ripple of exclamations as men pointed out to one another the flashing, silvery wings of the creature which was flying towards us around the curve of Georgium Sidus. Then another ripple, louder, as it passed behind one of those dwarfish moons, and we understood just how big it was.

  ‘Great Scott! It’s longer than the ship!’

  ‘What a monster!’

  ‘Magnificent set of antennae! I say, Mr Bradstreet, fetch me my elephant gun.’

  And still the space moth kept flit-fluttering towards us, looking quite ghostly in the dim blue light of that alien world.

  ‘Hard-a-starboard, helm,’ called Captain Moonfield. ‘Wouldn’t do to risk a collision this far from a shipyard … ’

  I felt the deck beneath me tilt as the Actaeon slid gently out of the creature’s path. A moment later Myrtle came up the companionway and joined us at the picture window to see what had caught everyone’s attention.

  ‘Oh, how horrible!’ she exclaimed, turning pale. At home, she always lives in fear of finding moth holes in her favourite clothes, so the sight of this monstrous specimen was doubly alarming to her; it could have devoured her whole wardrobe at a single gulp. Nor had either of us forgotten the dreadful Potter Moth of the Moon, whose loathsome grubs had once so nearly eaten us.

  I stared at the moth as it went blundering by. Despite its size, it flew in just the same frantic, aimless, dithering way as Earth moths. Reflections of the Actaeon’s running lights glimmered in the great greenhouses of its compound eyes, while antennae which looked like feathers torn from the wings of an angel whisked and batted at the aether ahead of it. And – was I dreaming it? – tiny, almost human figures were running about upon that vast, furry back, between the ever-beating wings!

  I heard Mother exclaim and knew I was not dreaming, for she had seen them too! ‘What are those things?’ she whispered. ‘They are not of my shaping … ’

  ‘Gracious!’ exclaimed Father. ‘It is turning towards us again! Do you think our lights have attracted it?’

  ‘Douse all lights!’ shouted Captain Moonfield, and as sailors on the bridge hurried to turn out the lamps above the helm and chart table I heard the order being relayed along the lower decks, like a roll of echoes. Now we all looked like ghosts, illumined only by the bluish radiance of Georgium Sidus which spilled through the windows and stole all the colour from our clothes and faces.

  And still the moth came on!

  ‘The brute’s trying to ram us!’ declared Dr Blears, and for once I agreed with him.

  ‘There are more of them!’ shouted Sir Richard. ‘Look! There in the rings!’

  He was right. The fogs that formed the planet’s rings were parting and dozens of the fluttering things were emerging, as if they were forming themselves out of the mist itself. The Actaeon swung sharply to port as the first moth swept past, almost brushing our hull with its great dusty wings. On its back one of those flea-like figures leapt up and whirled something about his head and let it fly. I had just long enough to see that he wore armour, like some elfin knight out of a fairy tale, and that, although he had two arms and two legs like me, he used a long tail to balance himself. Then the moth was past, and the Actaeon was moving again, turning to present a broadside to the swarm that was rushing towards us out of the rings. Bells rang below deck and the sailors’ feet pounded on stairways and ladders as they raced to clear the ship for action.

  ‘The brute’s trying to ram us!’ declared Dr Blears, and for once I agreed with him.

  And suddenly that thing that I had seen the moth-rider throw, which must have been tumbling leisurely towards us through the aether, struck our picture window with a startling crack and exploded in a splash of lime-green fire!

  All in an instant the order of the bridge was turned to chaos. Wherever I looked there were sharp shards of whirling glass and tongues of that actinic fire. The Actaeon’s gravity generators had failed, and those steady shakings and judderings that I could feel were undoubtedly more of the moth-riders’ infernal devices slamming into her hull and doing untold damage below decks! The bridge filled with shouted orders and cries of alarm and pain, and the ceiling suddenly tapped me on the shoulder. I looked around me, and saw Myrtle somersaulting past, crying out, ‘Oh, not again!’ and trying to keep her ankles decently veiled as her skirts flapped up over her head.

  A hand caught mine. It was Father’s, and in another moment he had me off the bridge and down the companionway to the mid-deck. Others were already there, and Mo
ther and Myrtle were swimming behind us, their hair wild and their clothes ballooning in the absence of decent gravity. Voices above were shouting, ‘Captain Moonfield! Captain Moonfield!’ Then someone slammed the hatch above us shut and things grew jolly quiet, though we could still hear the sounds of alarms and catastrophes going on in other portions of the ship.

  ‘Where is Captain Moonfield?’ demanded Ulla Burton.

  ‘He will certainly face a court martial for this!’ declared Dr Blears. ‘What incompetence! Defeated by a moth!’

  ‘He’s gone,’ said Mr Cumberbatch, the Actaeon’s first officer, his hair sticking up like a boot-brush atop his pale, startled face.

  ‘Gone? What do you mean, sir? Gone where? Gone how?’

  ‘Out into space,’ said Mr Cumberbatch. ‘We tried to grab him, Midshipman Bradstreet and I, but one whole side of the cabin was blown away and out he went with it.’

  ‘Oh, poor Captain Moonfield!’ cried Myrtle. ‘But surely we may rescue him? Art is forever being flung into space, and yet he is invariably rescued.’

  ‘We are in no shape to rescue anyone until we have saved ourselves,’ said Sir Richard, putting an arm protectively around his wife as another violent lurch shook the stricken vessel. ‘That was the great alembic exploding, unless I’m much mistaken. We must abandon ship.’

  ‘Abandon ship!’ shouted Dr Blears. ‘Outrageous, sir! I will not hear of it! This is a brand-new, Viper-class gun-boat, representing a considerable investment on the part of the tax-payer … ’

  ‘Pardon me,’ said Mother sweetly. ‘I am only a civilian, and a mere woman at that, so perhaps I do not fully understand these things, but with poor Captain Moonfield lost is it not Mr Cumberbatch who commands this ship?’

  I could barely see Mr Cumberbatch, so great was the shaking and trembling of the ship, but I glimpsed the look of alarm that broke over his honest face as he realised that he was in charge. ‘Why, yes … ’ he agreed.

  ‘What do you say, Captain?’ asked Sir Richard.

  Mr Cumberbatch nodded once or twice, swallowed hard and said, ‘Yes – quite right – mean to say – abandon ship! To the lifeboats!’

  Dr Blears protested, of course, and vowed that the matter would be raised in Parliament, but his bleatings were quite drowned out by the lusty voices of the sailors relaying Mr Cumberbatch’s orders. Mother took Myrtle’s hand and then mine, and calling to Father to follow us she kicked off from a bulkhead and started to swim down through the ship to the under-deck, where we had been shown the lifeboats on our tour the day before. We crossed the gun deck, where I saw the heartening sight of great cannon leaping and roaring in clouds of smoke while their tireless crews stood by to clean and load and run them out again, doing their best to keep the moth-riders busy while the rest of us made our escape. But I also saw the guns that had been dismounted and the holes which had been torn in the Actaeon’s sides by the terrible explosive devices of our foes. And through those holes I glimpsed the great grey wings of the circling moths …

  Mother swims as gracefully in zero-BSG as any fish in water and she quickly had us down on the lifeboat deck. It was crowded already with men, some injured, all with smoke-blackened faces: sooty masks out of which their eyes stared white and wide. This being a British ship there was, of course, no panic; but there was a deal of confusion, especially since the place was filling with multi-coloured vapours from the blazing wedding chamber astern. I saw the first mate ordering groups of men into the waiting lifeboats. I saw Mr McMurdo led past in tears by his assistants and heard his doleful tartan voice lamenting, ‘Och, mae engines, mae bootiful wee engines!’ And somehow, in the crush and darkness and the din, I let Mother’s fingers slip from my grasp …

  That was how I ended up in one lifeboat, with Sir Richard, Ulla and a small midshipman named Tom Bradstreet, while my parents and Myrtle found themselves in quite another.

  As soon as I realised my mistake I hastened to put it right. ‘No!’ I cried, as the sailors outside slammed the hatch shut. ‘I’m in the wrong boat!’ I protested, hammering on the inch-thick crystal windows as they tugged at the launching levers. ‘Stop!’

  And then the spring beneath our lifeboat released, and the force of our acceleration squashed me into the upholstery as we were propelled out into space. Ahead of us, one of those vast and awful moths loomed up. I could see every hair upon its hill of a body, and its five riders crouching there with the light of Georgium Sidus silvering their spiky space armour. Then, with a mighty jolt, we crashed into the insect. It crumpled like a paper lantern and we tore clean through it and out the other side, and went tumbling into the blue eye of Georgium Sidus amid a swirl of silver dust.

  Chapter Six

  Of Shapes in the Fog and an Unexpected Meeting.

  You will recall, if you have been following my adventures, the old Daedalus lifeboat in which Myrtle and I once had to make a hasty departure from good old Larklight? Well, these naval lifeboats were quite similar, though rather more à la mode; they had a simple steering mechanism, an aetheric distress beacon, and in addition to a copy of the Bible they also carried the Book of Common Prayer and the Collected Poems of Lord Tennyson.

  But despite these innovations our progress towards the surface of Georgium Sidus was just as alarming as the fall of Larklight’s old boat on to the dark side of the Moon if not worse. For when we looked back through the isinglass window in the top of the craft we could see the HMS Actaeon blazing above us in the depths of a wild swarm of giant moths – a swarm from which a few insects were breaking away to pursue the lifeboats of our shipmates. But none came after us. I think that when we crashed through that brute as we departed, the storm of drifting fragments and the blizzard of dust from its collapsing wings had served to screen us until we were too far away for the moth-riders to give chase.

  Naturally I was most concerned for Mother and Father, and even for Myrtle, but it seemed wrong to blub about it; I was certain Mr Bradstreet was just as concerned for his fellow aethernauts, and even Sir Richard and Ulla, while they still had one another, must surely have felt unhappy at the prospect of being shipwrecked on the surface of a world so mysterious and so far from England – a world so alien, indeed, that Mother had said it did not have a surface at all. I looked down with apprehension at the slow dance of the clouds below us and watched as Sir Richard opened the hatch which housed the lifeboat’s controls.

  Of course there was no room for an alembic on board so small a vessel, and even if there had been we could none of us have performed the chemical wedding. Instead, four brass rockets were bolted to the lifeboat’s sides. By firing one at a time, Sir Richard was able to change the angle of our descent and direct our fall towards a point on the planet’s northern hemisphere.

  ‘I am taking us down in the region from which the missionary’s distress flare was reported to have come,’ he said.

  We sank into the fog. The winds of Georgium Sidus seized our little boat and shook her furiously, but it was nothing compared to the buffetings I’d endured when I fell with Jack Havock into the wind-race of Jupiter, and I resolved to endure it without grumbling or being sick. Unfortunately my fellow passengers were less resolute, and the interior of the boat was in a most disagreeable state by the time its plummeting progress slowed and finally ended, with a colossal SPLAT and a certain amount of bouncing, as if we had come to rest on some immense trampoline.

  When all was still, Mr Bradstreet unscrewed the hatch and out we climbed. Wraiths of mist wavered about us, half concealing the strange shapes of alien vegetation which rose all around. It seemed that our boat had come to rest amid a field of giant green cabbages. Each was about the size of a London hansom cab, though without the horse or driver. Indeed, there was no sign of any animal life in this world of mists; wherever we looked we saw nothing but those silent, towering cabbages. The ground beneath us was invisible, hidden beneath a dense, rubbery web made from their interwoven roots.

  ‘What a perfectly beastly spot!’ I exclaim
ed. ‘I do not even like cabbage!’

  ‘They are more like sprouts,’ suggested Ulla. ‘How seasonal – for I believe sprouts are a part of your traditional Christmas dinner, are they not?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, but they are every boy’s least favourite part,’ I told her.

  ‘Then I hope you soon develop a taste for them,’ said Sir Richard. ‘It may be some weeks before a rescue expedition can reach us, and there seems little else to eat upon this God-forsaken sphere … ’

  ‘We must find the others,’ said Mr Bradstreet in his shrill little voice.

  ‘Judging by the way those moths were hunting down their lifeboats, I think it quite possible that none of our shipmates has reached the surface,’ said Ulla.

  ‘Do you mean they may all be dead?’ I cried.

  ‘Let us pray that they were just made prisoners,’ said Sir Richard. ‘But we must not forget that one or more of those insects may have followed us. What weapons do we have?’

  We had precious few, as it turned out. Mr Bradstreet carried a short knife or ‘dirk’. Mrs Burton had one of her splendid Martian throwing blades concealed about her person. And I suppose the Book of Common Prayer and Collected Poems of Lord Tennyson might have been pressed into service as makeshift clubs or missiles (though naturally we could not use the Bible for such a purpose). Otherwise, we were as defenceless as Babes in that unearthly Wood.

  Still, like true Britons we did not sit about and mope at our misfortunes, but resolved to begin learning whatever we might about this strange world we had fallen into. Mr Bradstreet was technically in command of our party, for despite being only nine-and-a-half he was the senior naval officer present. He solemnly shared out a ration of ship’s biscuit. Then he gladly let the role of leader pass to Sir Richard, who was so much better suited to it, and we set off together into the ever-swirling mist.