“Come on, Florein, let’s stop this nonsense. You know it’s not in my interests to hurt you. And this machine of yours—I’m telling you honestly, it doesn’t look too healthy.”
As he scurried across another narrow gap to the next clump of pods, a flash of liquid warmth in the meat of Florein’s arm told him the fast-breeder had completed its recycle. When he glanced at the crease of his elbow he could see the tiny sac embedded there, engorged with the crawling life within. They were monsters, the ones who’d done this to him—yet just now he was glad of their paranoia and their obscene science. He tensed the muscle, felt a reassuring purr go through it: a hum of violent potential.
Just in time. His opponent’s ploy had misfired; Florein was confident that he knew now where D’rik was. Or else D’rik was simply drawing him in. It hardly mattered. At least this way Florein would have his chance.
“Do you want that horror of yours to explode? Is that it? To explode and take me with it?” D’rik chuckled, as though he could appreciate the appeal of the idea. “But what about you, Florein? What about K’ren? And this entire queenship perhaps, and maybe the entire city-hive below. Do you even know what that monstrosity of yours might do?”
I don’t, Florein thought. I truly don’t. And for an instant he wondered if the sanest choice might not be to surrender himself to D’rik and hope they would let him live long enough to try and repair the damage he’d inadvertently wrought.
He ducked around the curve of the pod he was sheltering behind. There to his right, beyond the silken tangle of webbing in which smaller cargo items hung suspended, was the fleshy valve of the outer door. He had come full circle, circumnavigated the entire room. Even as it occurred to him, Florein thought to look for K’ren—and sure enough, there she was. Rather than retreat to the centre of the room with D’rik, she had chosen to crouch with her back to a storage pod, mirroring his own posture.
Did she think she was safer on her own? Perhaps she didn’t like the disregard with which Drik’s men had fired in her direction. Certainly she would not be panicking. K’ren had been under fire often enough, and in worse situations than this. Sure enough, she chose that moment to glance his way, and even at such a distance he could recognise the calm determination in her eyes. It said, Whatever happens I don’t intend to die here.
He wasn’t sure what made him do it, but Florein put a finger to his lips. Even as he did it he had no idea how she would react; whether she would call out. Yet her reaction still surprised him: K’ren shook her head.
What did it mean? Then he understood. Palimpsest was to his left now. D’rik, surely, was nearby. Even if he’d only been drawing Florein in, he couldn’t have got far. Don’t do it, that was what she meant.
But he had no choice. There wouldn’t be another chance.
Florein sprang forward, keeping low, twisting his body and dragging his wrist up as he broke into clear space. The biomechanism throbbed in anticipation. There, not far away, was Palimpsest, still writhing with its newfound life. Before it, D’rik stood almost casually. There too was one of the bodyguards, arm still raised, as though it were the only pose he knew—but pointed the wrong way, to where Florein had been and not to where he was. He had sensed the movement, was already beginning to turn. He wouldn’t be quick enough.
So Florein ignored him, focused instead on D’rik. Within his mind he whispered to the million murderous lives teeming in his arm: Him, he’s the one. In response they sang a high-pitched, furious note. Fire washed through the muscle of his arm, climbed into his shoulder, built and built.
Only something was wrong. If K’ren had wanted to stop him, why hadn’t she cried out?
No. She’d been trying to warn him.
Florein ducked, and it was all that saved him. The air above him crackled. A heat to match the one igniting in his arm flashed close enough that he smelt the sudden stink of his own scorched hair. Florein rolled, not gracefully. Behind him was the second bodyguard, stepping from his hiding place. The device they’d melded to his hand made a deformed stump of it, a confusion of shining black plates like a beetle’s jaw that still steamed greenish plasma. The bodyguard had already adjusted his aim. His next shot wouldn’t miss.
Except that he wouldn’t get the chance. For the biomechanism in Florein’s arm was a scream of white hot pain now, consumed with a life of its own, and he couldn’t have restrained it if he’d tried. A stream of black poured from his palm, and as they revelled in their newborn freedom, each microscopic flechette fly spread its razor wings. They scythed the air, their path only interrupted by the bodyguard’s face—and their high whine only broken by his scream. Then, reaching the end of their minute life spans, brittle bodies crackled and were gone.
Florein froze. It was partly through horror—for he could see the ragged wetness that was one side of the bodyguard’s face—and partly indecision. Adrenalin was trilling in his blood, and his every urge told him to rush D’rik, to pound him with bare fists if need be. A distant part of his mind swore it would be suicide; the rest hardly cared.
It was the second bodyguard who saved Florein from himself. He was still screaming, turning and clutching at his face, as if he wanted to touch it but didn’t quite dare. Then, in an instant, his manner changed. Professionalism was restored. Florein watched the man strain, as though trying to force his senses into compensation for a pulped eye, one shredded ear and nostrils clotted with blood. Then he raised his hand and fired.
Yet he was still firing blind—for though only one eye had been gouged out by the flechette flies, the other was spattered with gore. That first shot went wide of anything, embedding itself with a moist thud into the queenship’s hide. His second missed Florein, but caught the cargo pod behind him squarely, evicting its contents in a splatter of pinks and blues. His third, the wildest yet, tore through the chitin floor at K’ren’s feet.
The hole was small, but widened instantly. Its ragged edges flapped and tore and tore still further, an opening wound. Florein cried out K’ren’s name. She was looking at him, directly at him, even as she fell. Your wings! Open your wings, he thought, but there was no time to say it—no time for anything. Yet still, he found himself moving. She was twisting now, reacting finally, trying to reach for something. For a moment Florein imagined he’d have time to catch her clutching hand. Then she was gone, and there was nothing left to do. Even as another shot flashed by him, Florein was hurling himself forward, into nothingness.
He made certain he was clear of the still-widening hole before releasing his own wings. An interlacing of machinery and his own modified tissue, they’d never been meant for anything so dramatic. Through artificial nerves, he felt them strain against the buffeting air. He could see K’ren ahead, and sure enough she had her own wings out, iridescent blues and greens fluttering madly. She was trying to aim herself towards the maintenance gantry strung along the queenship’s tendril legs.
But she was moving too fast, and so was he. His wings were slowing him fractionally, but suffering themselves in the tearing currents. All Florein could do for K’ren was hope. All he could do for himself was brace against the coming impact.
It came hard—not like falling, but as if something had rushed up to meet her. Daniella Furian took a moment to gather her breath; it felt as if every scrappy vapour of air had been punched clean from her lungs. Yet a thousand feet above the surface of the sea was no place to gather her senses; in fact, the view only assailed them. Below her, the sea heaved, patched in oily black and rainbow hues. She could smell its rankness, even from so high above.
A heaving rattle of the great prop engines far above her head, a shift of trajectory that made the wind scream in her ears, and the island city of New Valencia slid into view, rooftops bright beneath the midday sun, airship ports tilting crazily into the ether. It would have been beautiful but for the filth lapping hungrily at its shores, the detritus of a civilisation choking on its own production. It was ample illustration, should she have needed it, of the crisi
s she’d sworn to remedy.
Furian caught hold of the nearest rope, took one more deep breath and then drew herself back to her feet. Glancing directly upward she saw the shattered hole in the belly of the airship’s cabin, the TransAtlantico’s colossal balloon bloating behind it. From within the hole a man and a woman stared down at her. The man’s face was a scorched horror: partly Furian’s own handiwork and partly a result of the ruptured fuel line that had gouged that yawning puncture. The woman was Harla Durrich, who until a few minutes ago had been barely more than a stranger and was now her enemy, her ex-husband’s lover, the thief of her life’s work. And was that uneven ticking behind them—that grind of out-of-control gears—the sound of Palimpsest slowly shaking itself apart? For just a moment Furian felt herself almost consumed with fear at what she might have let loose.
But there was nothing she could do about it now, and certainly nothing she could achieve trapped down here. Furian forced the doubts from her mind and turned her gaze downward, ignoring the stained waters this time to consider Kieran, who was half lying, half sitting where he’d landed on the catwalk.
“Anything broken?” Furian asked, offering him her hand.
Kieran shook his head—perhaps to confirm it was still fixed correctly. “I’m fine,” he said, “more or less.”
“So what now? Are you coming with me or would you rather wait for . . .”
Her sentence was interrupted by a prodigious crack from above, like a rock cleaving.
Kieran at least had the decency to make a show of having considered before he bounced to his feet, showing no signs of injury, and muttered, “I’ll come with you.”
Furian had already taken the lead. “Good choice,” she said, as another shot barked from above. They had no cover at all on the ’walk, which was a part of the airship’s docking collar, slung from the cabin on thick wire rope and with docking chains about its edges that would secure it to a tower’s protruding bay. It was navigable—for engineers would sometimes scurry about it, fixing loose connections and such—but it was far from safe.
Furian looked back. Kieran was moving with the steady grace of a tomcat upon a high wall. His face was taut, though, his eyes shadowed. Feeling her watching, he glanced up and said, “I didn’t expect it would come to this.”
Furian had no answer, except to accept that he was probably telling the truth. Her former husband had sometimes been terrible in his pragmatism, but he had never been cruel. She didn’t believe he would have willingly endangered her life, or have engaged in a plan that put her so dramatically in harm’s way. Just now, though, motives were irrelevant, facts were everything—and the fact was that a rope ladder was unfurling from the gouged cabin behind them.
“It can wait,” she said. Furian pointed ahead, to where the ropework came together in a half-funnel that rose to snag upon the prow of the TransAtlantico’s cabins. “We can climb up there . . . maybe reach the bridge.”
Perhaps there should have been some satisfaction in Kieran’s sudden understanding that his lover had kept secrets from him, his growing appreciation that their relationship had existed, at least in part, to allow Harla Durrich access to Furian’s research. Yet just now she lacked the energy for bile. Her forearm was leaden, sore from the kick of the dainty clockwork dart gun secreted in her sleeve. Her side and legs ached from her collision with the walkway, new bruises forming upon those she’d already sustained in the baggage store above. Her head was singing, her vision blurry, and trying to hurry upon the rocking catwalk was taking every iota of her courage.
Furian resisted the urge to look back once more to see what progress Durrich’s hirelings had made. She hoped the wounded man would be slowing them, especially upon the swinging rope ladder, but she dared not assume. The two were professionals, mercenaries perhaps from the fighting in Prussia; she knew better than to test herself against them again, for only luck had brought her through their last encounter. Her only hope lay in evasion, and perhaps in reaching the bridge—for so long as Palimpsest was in Durrich’s hands, she couldn’t run forever.
She had reached the point where the catwalk collar began to curve inward, bending in a vast horseshoe to meet its opposite flank. Manoeuvring the narrow platform had been difficult enough when it ran straight; now Furian found that all her concentration was consumed in keeping one foot ahead of the other. Making a sudden decision, she instead grasped a line and swung herself up, clutching the outer edge of the rigging.
Kieran, close behind, hesitated upon the catwalk. “This is your plan?” he asked.
Furian’s first reply was beneath her, and she was glad when the wind whipped it away before Kieran could hear. Sucking a deep breath, steadying herself upon the rigging, she tried again: “My plan is to stay alive for the next few minutes, and once I’m safe, to work out how I can get Palimpsest back.” And if we’re lucky, she added mentally, repair it before it tears this airship, this whole territory, perhaps this entire reality apart.
Kieran still didn’t move to join her. His eyes were narrowed, his cheeks sucked in, an expression she knew all too well: it was the way he looked when a question was eating at him, or when the answers he had were less than satisfactory. “Daniella,” he said, “I don’t feel right. My memory . . . it’s screwy. I fell, but I don’t remember how I didn’t break my neck. I hardly even remember boarding the TransAtlantico. I never asked . . . I figured you’d tell me when you felt the time was right . . . but what is that thing you built? What does it do?”
Furian remembered then how she’d craved to answer that very question, in the months before Kieran had left; how subtly and yet how deeply it had wounded her that he’d never tried to probe her secret world. Could it be that all along he’d felt the same, hurt by her own reticence? The look in his eyes said it could. It made it all the worse that she could only reply, raising her voice against the howl of the wind, “Not now, Kieran.”
He followed her gaze—saw as she had that Durrich’s two thugs had successfully alighted on the far end of the catwalk, with their rope ladder twitching and trailing behind them.
“Oh,” he said. Kieran leaped up, caught the ropes below her, and together they began to climb, in silence except for the screech of torn air and the whip and snap of the rigging.
Yet their progress was slow—too slow. It was all Furian could do to hang on, let alone ascend, for her muscles were a single ache now, and numbed by the cold. Durrich’s men must be closing in; must be already near. And if a shot from the windswept collar would be tricky, she made for an easy enough target, crawling the rigging like a glutted spider. Furian looked up, and the lip of the cabin was too far away. No, running was fine and good, all the more so when one was outgunned and outnumbered, but it wouldn’t save her. Perhaps five minutes had passed since she’d sworn off the possibility of meeting violence with violence, but she hadn’t made it this far without bending to circumstance.
As though in tune with her thoughts, two things happened then, almost together: first, a piercing tick-tick-TICK from the device strapped inside her wrist told her its mechanism had finally rewound; and second, a shot boomed nearby. It was impossible to judge its angle, and the noise was thunderous, but Furian felt confident it had missed by some distance. Most likely it had been meant to measure range. The next would be more accurate, as would the one that followed—and sooner or later they would hit her, for she doubted they had any shortage of ammunition.
Furian wished she could say the same herself. The clockwork weapon, designed first for discretion and second—a distant second, she felt now—for emergencies, was good for six shots, and took as many minutes for its tiny spring to rewind itself.
To all intents and purposes, she would have one try. It wouldn’t be enough.
She came to a decision. The brief pause had restored a little strength to her racked muscles; Furian began again to climb. The renewed prospect of imminent death, too, was an incentive. The second shot, as she’d expected, went wide once more. She wondered if
they’d stopped to fire or were trying to hit her while navigating the catwalk; either, here upon the violently motive nether-regions of the TransAtlantico, would be difficult. Still, for her sake, Furian hoped they were still drawing nearer. If they weren’t, her one slender chance was gone.
She climbed on. The cabin was not so far now. She could see a maintenance hatch in its belly, and she hoped against hope it wasn’t locked. But the third shot, when it came, was far too close for comfort. Its crack was deafening, even over the background howl of the wind. It took Furian a moment to be certain she wasn’t hit, for shock had locked her every muscle rigid. Then an abrupt terror overwhelmed her: she was suddenly sure that Kieran hadn’t been so lucky. When she looked down, however, though his face was frozen in a grimace, he appeared to be unhurt.
Still . . . she had no more time. The hatch was too far. Another shot wouldn’t miss. No more time, and one chance only.
Furian made sure of her grip and then, reaching with her left hand, fumbled at the gadget on her wrist, found the minuscule pin secreted in its side and with her thumbnail clicked it upward. It had always amused her that, when the device was intended for only the most calamitous circumstances, its unknown designer had still thought to include this emergency setting. What catastrophe had that diligent mechanic envisioned? Had it been anything like this? In any case, she was grateful to the man or woman who’d understood that however dire the crisis, it could always grow worse.
Furian hooked her left arm into the rigging, shook her right arm free. Her brain struggled to make sense of rope and wood and sky and sea, and then she’d separated out the docking collar and Durrich’s two thugs upon it. One had hung back; from his crouched posture and the way he’d braced himself on the catwalk, she felt sure that it was he who’d been firing. The second was continuing towards them, not hurriedly. He was the one she’d wounded earlier, and from the flayed, blackened horror that was the right side of his face, Furian doubted he had much in the way of depth perception anymore.
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