Night Flights

by Philip Reeve

  She let her eyes run over it, judging its lines, remembering other airships long ago, working out how this one would look when that frame was packed with gas cells and covered with an envelope. In her mind she fitted on the gold-painted tail fins that she could see stacked against the wall. It was going to be a strange-looking ship, she thought. But strange in a good way; fierce and fast. It was going to be beautiful, and it was so long since she had seen anything beautiful that tears came into her eyes.

  “She is called the Golden Arrow,” said Stilton Kael.

  Anna walked all round the new ship, looking up, letting the shadows of the aluminium ribs fall across her face, while Stilton watched her. She sensed that he was eager for her approval. She studied the half-built gondola. “That will catch the wind and slow her,” she said. “How many will be in the crew?”

  “Just two,” he told her. “Me and a co-pilot. That is one of the rules of the Boreal Regatta, no more than two flyers to each ship.”

  “You need a smaller gondola, then. It doesn’t need to be a house. There are ways of squeezing everything in. I can show you.”

  “Thank you!” said Stilton. “I’m so glad you’re here! That’s what I’ve needed, you see. Someone who really knows airships inside and out. My father lends me workers sometimes, to help assemble the larger parts of the structure, but they’re just stupid thralls, they don’t have your knowledge, Miss – er…?”

  It took her a moment to realize that he wanted to know her name. Nobody had wanted to know her name for a long time. If they wanted her they could call her by her number, which was stamped on the iron thrall collar round her neck.

  “Fang,” she said. “Anna Fang.”

  “Well, Miss Fang, do you know how rudder controls work? Gas lines? ’Lectrics?”

  Anna had been eleven when Arkangel ate her. She remembered helping Ma and Pa with little chores aboard the Mermaid. She remembered climbing out on the tail fins to scrape rust off the elevator cables. She remembered the smell of luftgaz as the gas cells were refilled at Airhaven docks. She had only dimly understood how those things worked; she’d just been copying what her parents did. But now she sensed an opportunity open like a golden doorway in the air between her and Stilton Kael. This was her way out of the work gangs. She would have taken it even if she had never set foot on an airship.

  She nodded.

  “Excellent!” said Stilton. “I’m going to inform Kael Industries that I’m transferring you to my private service. There’s a spare storeroom next door to this hangar where you can live. We’ll find you some new clothes and you can get yourself, ah, cleaned up a bit…”

  He waited for her to thank him, but she did not say anything.

  “It’s all right,” he promised. “It won’t be like the thrall yards. I’m not like your old overseers down there. I’m different. I don’t belong in Arkangel any more than you do, not really. I’m better than this place.”

  Stilton really was different. He thought of himself as a free spirit and a dreamer of great dreams. The rest of Arkangel thought of him as a fool.

  His mother had come from Venice, that improbable raft resort, more a dream than a city. She had been sadly unsuited to life aboard the Hammer of the High Ice, and she had died when Stilton was only small. But a few of her soft southern notions seemed to have seeped into the boy’s blood. The books she had brought to Arkangel with her had given him his love for poems. He was fascinated by the paintings that still hung in her former bedroom, like windows into a richer, finer world where beautiful women were always gazing down from battlements, or sleepily accepting the love of heroes who had fought monsters and won battles just to kneel adoringly before them.

  Romantic dreams of that sort had no place in Arkangel, but Stilton dreamed them anyway. Of course, the sensible Kael part of him knew that there were no monsters to fight and that battles were dangerous and expensive and best avoided, but perhaps he could win fame and love in other ways, with his poetry, for instance – or by building a ship that could win the Boreal Regatta. He had always been good with machinery…

  Stilton sent a note to the Kael Industries Human Resources Department, and suddenly Anna was not Thrall K-420 any more but Anna Fang, his personal mechanic. He had a bunk and two sets of good clothes brought to the storeroom next to the hangar, where she was to sleep. She was given access to a washroom nearby, where she cleaned the grease and lice out of her hair and scrubbed the filth of the salvage yards from her skin. Looking at herself in the metal mirror there was like seeing her face for the very first time. She was no longer the little girl who had vanished into Arkangel’s thrall holds.

  Stilton Kael had her heavy thrall collar removed and replaced with one so light that it was almost jewellery. Arkangel never permitted a thrall to be freed, but some thralls were trusted to mingle with free citizens in the higher parts of the city, and her new collar showed that Anna had become one of them. On errands to the air-chandlery, or in her odd free hours, she tried out the new sensation of walking alone like a free person along the busy streets and catwalks in Arkangel’s Core.

  “Aren’t you afraid I’ll run away?” she asked Stilton, while they worked on his ship.

  “Of course not. Where you would run to?”

  He had a point. It was winter. Arkangel was cruising the fringes of the Frost Barrens, feasting on the carcasses of towns that had died of cold. The shuttered city rang like a great bell as ice storms beat against its armour.

  “You wouldn’t run, anyway,” said Stilton. “I remember how you looked when I first brought you in here and you saw the Golden Arrow. People say there’s no such thing as love at first sight, but there is. You want to see her finished as badly as I do.”

  Once the Golden Arrow’s skeleton was complete, Anna supervised gangs of thralls scrounged from the salvage yards while they attached the gas cells to the inside of the frame. Then the envelope was fitted, acres of red silicon-silk dragged over the ship’s ribs, tightened with coat after coat of waterproofing dope.

  “It will have to be repainted,” said Stilton Kael. “She is called the Golden Arrow, she can’t be red.”

  “Red is a lucky colour in the sky,” said Anna, who was confident enough to disagree with him by then.

  “Of course – I forget, you know the customs up there, the moods of the sky gods…”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” said Anna. She had not thought about gods for a long time – the way they had let her be eaten up and enslaved by Arkangel suggested pretty forcefully that they either didn’t exist, or weren’t much interested in her. Now something made her pull up the sleeve of her overalls and show Stilton the tiny blue wings inked on the inside of her wrist. “My family didn’t have much to do with the main sky gods. We were Thursday’s Children.”

  “Who’s Thursday?”

  “He was a man who turned into a god,” said Anna. She remembered her mother telling her that story, and heard her own voice take on Ma’s sing-song delivery. “Arlo Thursday talked to the birds, and the birds showed him how to fly. Bad men tried to break his wings, so he flew away to a far land, and there he built the world’s first airship as a present for a boy king.”

  “Then we shall dedicate the Golden Arrow to this Thursday,” said Stilton.

  “I don’t know if he will help you win the race.”

  “He sent you to me,” said Stilton, blushing as red as his airship, “so I am already in his debt.”

  She was hungry for parts, that little red airship (Anna was already thinking of her as “she”). Gas-cell valves, lightweight ladders, bolts to hold the gondola to the airframe… Stilton had collected a lot before he found Anna, but Anna thought she had seen better in the salvage bins. When she told him so, he sent her down to the Gut to bring it back.

  It did not occur to him that the thralls down there might hate Anna, but it occurred to her. For the first few days and nights of her new life she had thought a lot about the comrades she had left behind. They hadn’t been her friends �
�� she had been careful not to care about any of them – but it was troubling all the same, to think of them still stuck down there, living the life her luck had lifted her above. She could not ask Stilton to rescue them all, or expect his family to listen to requests for better conditions for the city’s thralls: if she asked, she might end up being sent back to join them. So, since thinking about them made her feel guilty, and the guilt could serve no purpose, she simply stopped.

  It was unsettling to ride the elevators down into the Gut and walk among them all again. A lot of the thralls she passed didn’t recognize her as K-420, in her new clothes, with two security officers walking behind her, but a few did. The scowls and muttered insults and small bits of scrap they slung at her when her guards weren’t watching did not hurt as much as the desperate hope she glimpsed in some of them. That’s K-420, she imagined them whispering to one another as she moved through the bins where salvaged tech was sorted. She was one of us once; maybe she’ll help us.

  She found some of the things she needed in the bins, and sent for an overseer to arrange their transport up to Stilton’s hangar. The overseer on duty turned out to be Verna Mould. The woman kept her head bowed, eyes down, as befitted a thrall from the Gut addressing one from the Core. But once the guards stepped out of earshot, she turned to Anna with a terrible look of entreaty and said, “Can you get me up there? I was always good to you, girly. You’ll put in a word for me with the masters, won’t you? I’m not as young as I was, it’s getting too much for me down here.”

  Anna looked away. “I don’t care,” she said. “You told me once that if I wanted to survive down here I had to stop caring about anyone but myself, and I have. You’re an overseer, Verna Mould. That’s the best life a thrall can hope for, aboard the Hammer.”

  “You’ve got a cold heart, you have!” shouted Verna, as Anna turned away. Her voice rose to a bitter shriek that made the guards take notice. “It’s nobbut an old snowball, frozen hard inside your ribs!” she yelled, while their leather truncheons knocked her to her knees.

  It wasn’t true, Anna told herself, as the elevator carried her back up. She did care. It was only that she hadn’t the power to help all the thralls of Arkangel, and even if she could help a few in some small way, how did she choose which ones? An evil like Arkangel could not be fought that way, by one young woman. She wished the Anti-Traction League would come, in armoured airships full of bombs and rockets, smash Arkangel to a standstill, and blast open the iron prisons of the Gut.

  But all she said when she got back to Stilton was, “I found the valves we need, and twenty fathoms of good cabling.”

  And Stilton smiled at her and said, “You’re wonderful!”

  Stilton had started to look at her in a strange way. He had started bringing her gifts: a warm blue jacket; jewels and rings to show her value to all of Arkangel – you were no one in Arkangel unless you wore jewellery. He filled her storeroom home with fine furniture and a rug made from the skin of an ice bear, a creature that Anna had thought mythical until she came in late after a long day in the hangar and stubbed her toe on its snarling head.

  Even then, she could not really believe that Stilton Kael had fallen in love with her. Sometimes in the thrall holds she had heard other girls boasting that they were going to catch the eye of some rich man who would pluck them out of the Gut as if they were a piece of likely salvage, but she had never known it to actually happen, and she had certainly never imagined it happening to her. But here was Stilton, smiling his smiles at her, speaking all gentle, blushing as he passed her a piece of paper on which he’d written his latest poem, which began,

  O Anna Fang

  I feel a pang

  Whene’er I look at you…

  Anna hadn’t the heart to remind him that her family name was pronounced more like fung than fang. Anyway, she thought that maybe “Fang” was a better name for the new Anna, the Anna who had emerged from the thrall holds hard and sharp as a tooth. She did not return Stilton’s love. She did not think she would ever love anyone. Her heart had frozen, down there in the thrall-holds. She told Stilton so, and he said that he understood, and that he would wait, and hope, and perhaps one day she would come to love him as much as he loved her. Anna didn’t think he did understand, but she said that he could wait and hope if waiting and hoping was what he felt like doing.

  What else could she do? She was a thrall and he was her master. She supposed she should be glad that Stilton was treating her with such respect, but somehow she wasn’t; she thought it was another sign of his weakness. The more she saw of him, the more she felt her first impression of him had been right. It wasn’t just his body that was spindly and spidery; he had a spindly, spidery soul.

  Still, she had to admit that Stilton was clever. His poems were truly bad, but he had a kind of genius with machines. She had known that ever since she saw him fix the engine pods she’d found. He had worked on them with the patience of a vet doctoring a sick animal, till they were better than they had been when they were new.

  Sometimes, while she watched him work, she almost liked him.

  Huge tanks of lifting gas were trucked down from the air harbour. The gasbags were inflated, one by one, until the new airship rose slowly into the air, just high enough above the hangar deck for the tail fins to be fitted and the half-finished gondola to be rolled underneath and attached. Anna busied herself with the cables that would operate the rudders and elevators. She threaded them through eyelets in the envelope fabric, ran them down into the gondola, connected them to the levers and pulleys that would operate them when the ship was in flight. The gondola bobbed gently as she moved around inside it, six feet above the hangar floor. The gasbags were not yet full, but the little airship was already yearning to fly higher.

  When they tested the engines, the hangar filled with a thunder so loud that Stilton clapped his hands over his ears, but Anna liked it. It wasn’t like the din of city engines. There was music in that sound, if you listened carefully enough to hear past the sheer noise of it. It was the same music that had lulled her to sleep each night when she was little, in her tiny cabin aboard the Mermaid.

  “It will be fast, this ship,” she said, when the thunder faded.

  “I couldn’t have done it without you, Anna,” Stilton told her, looking at her in that soupy way he’d borrowed from lovestruck knights in paintings. “When the race begins, I want you to be my co-pilot.”

  Anna felt dizzy at the thought of leaving Arkangel. She didn’t want to let herself believe that it could really happen, because she knew that the death of hope was more painful than never having hope at all. “Is that allowed?” she asked. “Even though I’m a thrall?”

  “There is nothing in the rules to say that only free citizens can compete. You were born in the air, so Thursday and all the other sky gods will look more kindly on our flight with you aboard. And anyway, we make a good team, don’t we? I was thinking that you should not just be my co-pilot for the race, but for all time, Anna – my co-pilot in life. We should marry.”

  “We can’t,” she said. “What would your family say?”

  “I don’t think they care what I do. I have told my father about the Golden Arrow, but he can’t even be bothered to come down from top tier and look at her. Why would he care who I marry?” He thought a moment, then said, “At the end of the race, whether we win or lose, I shall ask the Margravine of Anchorage herself to marry us. We will come back to Arkangel as husband and wife. My family will not be able to do a thing about it.”

  Anna laughed with happiness then. It was not a sound she’d often made before, and it startled her as it echoed around the hangar. Stilton thought it was because of him, but it wasn’t. It was just the same joy that a captive bird would feel if someone opened the door of its cage.

  The Boreal Regatta was drawing near. High summer had come to the High Ice, and the sun never set. Sleek racing yachts began to arrive at Arkangel’s air harbour; the Glory B from London, the Summer Lightning from Taji
kograd, the Mossy Hare from Dun Laoghaire.

  Stilton took Anna with him to the air harbour to see Angel Glass arrive. Angel Glass was this year’s favourite; the Giaconda of the Jet Stream; the greatest racer of the age and the only woman ever to win the Trans-Global Cup. Her ship, the Aëronette, had the streamlined elegance of a predatory fish. When it docked, Stilton asked Anna, “Is it faster than our Arrow, do you think?”

  She looked seriously at it for a moment and said, “No.” She didn’t say it just to please him; she felt that it was true. The Aëronette was prettier than their Golden Arrow, but she did not think it would be faster.

  The Golden Arrow was almost ready. At Anna’s suggestion they had rebuilt the gondola so that it looked less like a flying chalet and more like a little clinker-built boat tucked snugly under the belly of the envelope. Anna sat at the controls and worked the switches that made the engine pods rotate, the levers that angled the rudders and elevators. She longed to open the hangar doors and steer the ship out into the light of the midnight sun, but Stilton Kael said there could be no test flight. “We don’t want the other entrants to get wind of what I’ve built,” he said. “We’ll move her to the main air harbour on the morning of the race.”

  He was becoming paranoid as the race drew near. He had asked his father for men to guard the hangar, and when his father said none could be spared, he started making Anna change the combination on the door lock every day, and sometimes more often. He claimed that Angel Glass and some of the other aviators were desperate to get a look at the Golden Arrow. “‘Stilton’s Folly’ my family call her,” he said. “But those aviators know I’ve got a good ship down here. I don’t want them to know just how good until the race begins and she leaves them bobbing in her tailwind. Think of the looks on their faces!”