Night Flights

by Philip Reeve

  PRAISE FOR THE MORTAL ENGINES QUARTET

  “BIG, BRAVE, BRILLIANT”

  GUARDIAN

  “A MARVELLOUS BOOK, UTTERLY CAPTIVATING IN ITS IMAGINATIVE SCOPE AND ENERGY. THE ONLY FLAW I CAN SEE IS THE DIFFICULTY OF PUTTING IT DOWN BETWEEN CHAPTERS”

  DAILY TELEGRAPH

  “SUPERBLY IMAGINED… REEVE IS A TERRIFIC WRITER”

  THE TIMES

  “A MASTERPIECE”

  SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

  “IF YOU’VE NEVER READ A PHILIP REEVE NOVEL BEFORE, YOU’RE IN FOR A TREAT. HIS STORYTELLING IS ACCOMPLISHED AND HIS USE OF LANGUAGE MOST INGENIOUS AND IRREVERENT”

  WATERSTONE’S BOOKS QUARTERLY

  “INTELLIGENT, FUNNY AND WISE”

  LITERARY REVIEW

  “WONDERFUL FANTASY… REEVE HAS MANAGED TO MARRY THE HUGENESS OF HIS IMAGINATION WITH AN UTTERLY COMPELLING STORY LINE”

  ANTHONY HOROWITZ

  “RIPPING AND INTELLIGENT”

  THE SUNDAY TIMES

  “ASTONISHING”

  SCOTSMAN

  “BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN WITHOUT A DULL WORD”

  INDEPENDENT

  “WHEN I FIRST READ MORTAL ENGINES, I FELT AS IF THE PAGES THEMSELVES WERE CHARGED WITH ELECTRICITY”

  FRANK COTTRELL BOYCE, GUARDIAN

  TO JIHAE, WHO PLAYS

  ANNA FANG WITH SUCH

  STYLE AND GRACE THAT

  I REALIZED SHE NEEDED

  SOME MORE STORIES.

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  DEDICATION

  FROZEN HEART

  TRACTION CITY BLUES

  TEETH OF THE SEA

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  Airhaven hung on the evening wind. The huge gasbags of the flying town were touched with golden light like sunset clouds, but the land below it was already in shadow, except where water reflected the sky in the flooded track marks that scarred the plains and hills. Here and there, a cluster of moving lights showed where a town or a small Traction City was making its way through the deepening twilight. A slow, old trading town was moving south through a gap in the mountains, and a pack of predator villages was milling after it, waiting for their chance to attack. It was hunt or be hunted down there.

  But no one in Airhaven had to worry about such things. Nothing hunted Airhaven, where aviators and air traders from the Traction Cities mingled on almost-friendly terms with flyers from the static strongholds of the Anti-Traction League. In the low-roofed, lamplit public rooms of the Gasbag and Gondola, Airhaven’s finest pub, traders from London did deals with merchants from Lahore, and travellers from the Traktiongrads learned the latest songs from Nuevo Maya. There was good food and good drink, and soft beds for aviators who wanted a change from the narrow bunks aboard their airships. And best of all, there were stories to be heard, for no one had such good stories as the men and women who made their lives upon the Bird Roads, and no one took such pleasure in the telling of them.

  That night, a large group had gathered around the circular table in the main bar, under one of the propellers from the old air-clipper Tardigrade, which had been repurposed as a ceiling fan. Nils Lindstrom was there, the captain of the freighter Garden Aeroplane Trap; he had been making everyone’s flesh creep with an account of unearthly things he had seen in the Ice Wastes. Now Yasmina Rashid of the privateer Zainab was telling of a running fight she’d had with pirate box-kites above the dry, red hills of Yemen, while Jean-Claude Reynault of the La Belle Aurore chipped in with his tale of a similar battle over the Yellow Sea. Coma Korzienowski, commander of Traktionstadt Coblenz’s armed reconnaissance vessel Todeswurst, listened with a look on her face that let the others know she had a story of her own to tell, and that it was going to be a good one.

  “So what about you, Anna Fang?” asked Reynault, when Yasmina had finished with her pirates. “You’ve flown further than any of us. Don’t you have a tale to share?”

  The woman he was speaking to sat on the far side of the table. She had tipped her chair back so that it leaned against the wall and her face was in shadow. A handsome, wind-browned woman with streaks of white in her short black hair. She had listened to all the stories that evening, and laughed as loud as anyone at the funny parts, but she had said nothing, and she said nothing now, just smiled at Reynault. Her teeth were stained red with the juice of betel nuts.

  “Anna doesn’t tell her stories,” said Yasmina. “Short answers to long questions, that’s her way. She’ll tell you, ‘I grew up in the slave holds of Arkangel and built my airship out of parts I stole,’ but she’ll never tell you how or when.”

  “Or she’ll say, ‘I flew over the haunted deserts of America once,’” said Lindstrom, “but she’ll never tell you what she saw there. People tell stories about Anna, but Anna never tells them herself.”

  “She’s a spy for the Anti-Traction League,” said Coma Korzienowski. “She’s been trained to tell no one anything, and when she does tell you something it’s most likely a lie. Isn’t that right, Anna?”

  Anna Fang laughed. “Let’s hear Coma’s story,” she said. “She’s been itching to tell it all night.”

  Coma protested that she had not, then started telling it anyway. It was a story that Anna had heard before, so she did not bother following the words, just let herself enjoy the sound of Coma’s voice, the laughter of the others, their faces in the lamplight. She was fond of them all; some were old friends and some old adversaries, and here in Airhaven the difference did not matter much. But she did not want to share her stories with them. Stories changed when you told them. You made up new details to please your listeners, you exaggerated things or left things out, and soon even you came to believe the new story was the real one. Anna wanted hers to stay the same, as true as her memory could keep them.

  But perhaps she should tell someone, she thought. Perhaps when she next flew home to Shan Guo she would tell Sathya, the barefoot kid she’d rescued down in Kerala, who was the closest thing that Anna had to family. She would start at the beginning, with the one story about Anna Fang that everybody knew, of how she had escaped from the slave pens of Arkangel when she was just a girl, in an airship she had built for herself.

  Except that the real story had been, like all real things, more complicated than stories made it sound…

  Anna knew what they were as soon as she saw them. Twin Jeunet Carot engine pods, all the way from Paris. Her parents’ ship had been powered by pods like those. Anna’s father had always said they were the best aero-engines ever built. They had carried the Aerial Merchant Vessel Mermaid uncomplainingly along the Bird Roads for the whole of Anna’s childhood, and it had not been the pods’ fault when the wind changed unexpectedly above the Tannhäuser Mountains one day and they were choked with the fine ash from a volcano.

  Even then, they could have been fixed. Anna’s parents had steered the ship safely down on to a little traction town with a good air harbour and set to work, but before they could finish the repairs a storm swept down on the town, and in the heart of the storm came Arkangel, the Hammer of the High Ice, the greatest predator-city of the north.

  Anna had caught one dreadful glimpse into the city’s furnace-lined Gut as its huge jaws hinged open. When they slammed shut upon the helpless town, the part of it where Anna and her parents were cowering had buckled and her mother had lost her grip on Anna’s hand and tumbled through a gap that opened suddenly between two deckplates, down into the oily workings of the town’s massive caterpillar tracks. The tracks had been moving at full speed and had crushed Anna’s mother in an instant, but they could not pull the town free of Arkangel’s jaws, and it had been dragged backwards into the city’s Gut amid a cacophony of machinery and stressed metal. It was so loud that Anna had not even been able to hear
own screams as Arkangel’s soldiers separated her from her father and dragged them off to join the other slaves.

  Ever since, she had lived in Arkangel’s belly while it skated endlessly across the ice sheets on its huge runners. She had lost everything: even her name had been replaced with a number: K-420. She had become one of the countless thralls who serviced the dismantling machines and the huge engines. (“Thralls” was what they called their slaves in Arkangel. Anna supposed the people who lived on the city’s warm and comfortable upper tiers thought it sounded nicer.)

  And now Arkangel had eaten yet another town, and Anna’s work gang had been detailed to sort through the mounds of salvage that had been thrown off it so that the giant saws and cutting torches and mechanical pincers could start ripping its upperworks apart.

  It was in one of those mounds that Anna found the engines. There was a lot of old machinery there, probably the contents of some air-chandler’s store. Most of it was junk, and the two engine pods lay side by side among it, rusty and dusty and missing their propellers, so that anyone who hadn’t lived aboard an airship might not have known what they were at all. But Anna knew. She wiped the grime off a brass plaque with the cuff of her overalls, and there was the makers’ logo, the curly-tailed dragon she had liked so much when she was little.

  It was confusing to have such a vivid memory of her childhood called up so suddenly and so clearly. Mostly Anna tried not to remember those times. It wasn’t because the memories were bad ones: it was because they were good. She had been happy in the sky with Ma and Pa, and she knew that if she thought about that time too often, it would make her so sad that she would die.

  People died often in the thrall yards; from accidents, from illness, or just worn out by endless work. Thralls were allowed few comforts, and precious little food, especially in deep winter when prey was scarce. Anna’s father had been assigned to a different part of the Gut, but for the first few months he kept finding ways to visit Anna and slip a little extra food to her. Each time he looked thinner. At first he would tell her that they would find a way out, but she soon realized that he did not believe that, and before long he stopped bothering to say it. His eyes, which had been twinkly and full of fun and love for her when she lived in the sky, turned as dull as the windows of an empty house. One day he did not come at all, and after a week without seeing him Anna asked her overseer what had become of him and the overseer talked with an overseer from Pa’s work gang and then told her with a small shrug, “Dead.”

  The overseer’s name was Verna Mould. She was a hard woman, but she was not unkind (it was she who had allowed Anna’s father to visit, and asked only a small part of the extra rations in return). Seeing Anna’s mouth start to tremble as the bad news sank in, she added helpfully, “He’s as dead as you’ll be, girly, if you waste your time in grieving. If you want to survive down here, you got to stop caring about anyone but yourself. You start fretting about others, or moping and mourning and thinking about old times, you’ll waste away and die like he did, or get careless and stand in the way of a salvage grab, or fall into a smelter. Forget all that stuff and you can thrive down here. You might end up being made an overseer yourself one day. That’s the best life a thrall can hope for aboard the Hammer.”

  So Anna had tried to forget everything, or at least to bundle her memories up and stuff them away in some dark room deep inside herself. But now she was running the tips of her fingers over the cute little embossed dragons on a pair of Jeunet Carot engine pods, just as she had as a little girl, and it was as if a key had come to unlock that room and let the cold, clear sunlight of long ago shine in painfully on everything.

  She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her greasy overalls and tried to think straight. There were rewards for thralls who found valuable pieces of salvage. There would be extra rations of food, and Verna Mould would let Anna keep some of it for herself. Even so, she still hesitated for a moment before she let anyone know of her discovery. She felt that the aviator whose ship these engines came from must have been proud of them once and would think it a shame that they had ended up here, in the belly of Arkangel.

  But she knew that if she didn’t claim the bonus, one of her comrades would, so she turned and shouted, “Here! Here! Salvage! Two old aero-engines, might still be good for parts…”

  That night, in her metal bunk in the thrall hold, Anna was shaken out of her uneasy dreams by Verna Mould. “Wake up, K-420!” the overseer ordered. “The bosses want to see you! It is about those engines that you found!”

  She rolled off her bunk and went blearily after the older woman through Arkangel’s Gut. Massive circular saws were biting into the chassis of the captured town, making trees of sparks whose tops brushed the Gut’s steel roof. Above that roof was the rest of Arkangel, the warm Core where the bosses lived. Anna had never been up there, never thought about it much. She knew she worked for a company called Kael Industries, and she knew it was run by a man called Viktor Kael because his ugly old face was on posters in the thrall holds. His white beard and chilly eyes made him look like an ice giant in a story. Was he the one who wanted to talk to her? Anna shivered.

  At the edge of the salvage yards were big freight elevators; metal cages inside metal cages. Anna stepped into one. Verna Mould closed it behind her and said, “Good luck, K-420.” She watched as the cage went rattling up into the drifts of fumes that hung beneath the roof. Then she shrugged, and turned away, and carefully put K-420’s frightened sleepy face out of her mind as she trudged back to her own bunk. She had known other thralls who had been summoned up top, and none of them had ever been seen again.

  When the elevator reached the next level, Anna found two Kael Industries security men waiting for her. They beckoned her out of the cage and went with her along a corridor to a doorway, which they said she should go through. It led into a scruffy little room where an electric lamp swung from the low ceiling. There was a desk with two chairs. The chair on Anna’s side of the desk was empty. In the other, facing her, sat a young man. He wasn’t much to look at, with his wan, bony face and limp red hair, but he was wearing fur-lined silk, and rings on his fingers, and a look that let Anna know he was from one of Arkangel’s ruling families.

  “You are the thrall K-420? The girl who found those Jeunet Carots?” he asked, pushing aside a notebook in which he had been scribbling. He smiled. “Please, take a seat.”

  No one had said “please” to Anna since the day she first became a thrall. No one smiled at thralls. No one ever offered them a seat. She glanced behind her, suspecting a trick. But the door she had come through had been closed, and the security men were on the other side of it, and the young man said again, “Sit down. Please.”

  Warily, Anna settled herself on the seat he kept pointing at. She saw his face twist in dismay as the stench of her filthy overalls and unwashed body crept across the desk and up his nostrils. “Great gods,” he muttered, and then, recovering, “It is about those engines…”

  “I didn’t mean no harm,” said Anna, who still assumed that she had done something wrong. “I thought there was still some use in them, if only as parts.”

  “Oh, there is! There is!” said the young man. “What interests me is how you knew that. Not many people would. Not many … people of your class, I mean.”

  “I was in the air trade.” Anna said. “My parents were, when I was growing up. Before I was caught.”

  “I see! And your parents are…?”

  “Dead,” said Anna, with a little shrug.

  The young man made a noise that he probably thought sounded sympathetic. He stuck out a clean white hand for Anna to shake, then thought better of it and just smiled at her some more. He wanted her to like him, she realized. How weak would someone have to be to need a thrall’s approval?

  “I’m Stilton Kael,” he said. “I’m Viktor Kael’s youngest son. I’m working on a private project, sort of a hobby, really; my father doesn’t exactly approve, but he’s agreed I can transfer one thrall from g
eneral duties to help me. I’m looking for one who knows about airships.”

  He turned the notebook around and slid it across the desk to Anna. The pages were so white that she was afraid to touch them with her grimy fingers. Stilton Kael turned them for her, as if he was eager for her to see the spidery black writing he had covered them with. Writing, and numbers, and diagrams. Anna realized that she was looking at the plans for an airship.

  “The Boreal Regatta is setting off from Arkangel this coming summer,” he said. “It’s the greatest air race in the northern hemisphere. Two thousand miles, right over the pole, to the finishing point where the city of Anchorage will be waiting. ‘High above Earth’s icy crown, those daring flyers seek renown!’ That’s how I describe it in a poem I’m writing. But I am not just a poet, K-420! I mean to enter the Boreal Regatta, and I mean to win it! I am building my own ship. I have some ideas about aerodynamics, you see. I’ve gathered quite a few bits for her these past six months – the airframe from a Helsinki warship, a silicon-silk envelope, reinforced gas cells – it’s amazing what you can find in the scrapyards. Those engines you spotted today are just what I need to power her. Come on! I’ll show you!”

  So she followed Stilton Kael through metal corridors, past the warehouses where Kael Industries stored their salvage and the workshops where they repaired it, or rebuilt it into new things to sell to the people of the city. He led her to a door near the outer hull, one of many stencilled with the Kael logo. His pallid fingers skittered over the keypad of an old-tech lock. The door opened, and Anna stepped through into a space that she could tell at once was really big, even though it was in darkness. She could hear the wind skirling and whinnying somewhere nearby.

  In the dark beside her, Stilton touched a switch. Lights came on high above, and Anna saw that she was standing in a huge hangar with enormous doors at the far end. The frame of the new airship loomed above her like the skeleton of a metal whale.