Angelmaker

by Nick Harkaway

  To her surprise, Shem Shem Tsien raises his hand in salute. He looks almost human. And then, a moment later, she sees the pleasure in his eyes at her resignation. Not empathy. The sating of an appetite.

  He comes towards her, boots barely brushing the tiled floor. She feels clumsy and small, adjusts her guard. He smiles again. I am killing you piece by piece, Commander.

  Salvation comes, all undreamed of. With a sharp crack and a noise like a cornet call, Edie’s burdensome crate flies open, and out charges a small, angry grey object decked in ornate metal plates. It fixes eyes on her purple sash, and places itself stoutly between her and her enemies. Then it raises up its head, and the cornet call sounds again: a shrill, high note, amazingly loud and penetrating. In the near distance, something gives answer: a deep hallooing hunter’s horn, or a tuneless brass band with a tuba the size of a house.

  Edie does not recognise the grey object for what it is until the Door of Humility explodes inwards, and through the breach come massive, muscular shapes in a mighty rush, bringing a scent of sweat and dung and spice, and Shem Shem Tsien hurtles backwards away from her, sword tumbling in the air, swatted end over end in one furious motion of denial. She stares, then gives vent to a delighted yawp of victory.

  The greatest cavalry force ever raised up from one end of the great Addeh River to the other, from the topless Katir mountains to the wide blue Indian Ocean, stands ready to give answer to her need: in the vanguard, a wall of maternal indignation blotting out the light, ploughing into the soldiers of Shem Shem Tsien and sending them fleeing after their master. Behind this titan are other shapes even bigger, smashing walls and doors and charging onward, trumpeting unleashed fury. All are urged on by the armoured shape of Edie’s newest guardian, shoulder high at best, but bristling with affront and duty.

  Dotty Catty’s gift: a baby war elephant.

  The tide of the battle turns.

  Relative calm; this means there are no guns. All the same, Amanda Baines is doing a great deal of shouting. The reason for this is that her upper turret has a number of holes in it (holes are considered a Bad Thing in the submariner trade) and Edie was supposed to run a covert intrusion and appears instead to have declared war on a minor principality and reduced it to rubble. Worse, she has failed to kill or capture the offended party, which is apparently very important when you launch a de facto surprise attack on a foreign nation. The Cuparah is presently going at one-third ahead towards the open ocean, and no one seriously expects there to be anything between her and that ocean, because the last attempt to block her way is still burning. More than that, it is burning in a somewhat emphatic way which is the product of Amanda Baines completely losing her temper. It is burning in such a manner as to suggest that other ships constructed in the same place or around the same time may also be burning out of sheer sympathy. Amanda Baines has achieved the nautical equivalent of punching the enemy very hard in the crotch and then kicking them repeatedly as they lie incapable on the ground, and the assembled pirates and seamen of the Addeh maritime have noted this action and responded in time-honoured fashion by finding very important things to do on dry land. Not even the Opium Khan’s bounties are sufficient to tempt them into the path of Cuparah. This proactive indifference is not sufficient to quell the wrath of Amanda Baines, who is even now drawing breath to express her further lack of impressedness, but realises at the last minute that she has nothing else to say.

  “And,” yells Amanda Baines, as if trying to persuade herself that this is worse than unsponsored declarations of war, “there is a baby elephant in my stateroom!”

  “Yes,” Edie says, “there is.”

  “Well,” says Amanda Baines, trying not to think about the limpid-eyed beast and how delighted she was when he passed her a woolly hat from the rack, “what are we going to feed him? Eh?”

  And at this, Edie Banister is suddenly aware that she is not dead, and has survived, and even done well, and she starts to cry. Amanda Baines, hard-bitten woman of the open water, mutters something about highly strung people and how they should stick to making bad art, and trudges over to examine the wreckage of her periscope.

  “This is fascinating,” a new voice observes in Edie’s ear. “But the construction is quite wrong.”

  Amanda Baines peers at Frankie Fossoyeur. Frankie peers at the dials on Cuparah’s highly classified bridge. Mockley the Ruskinite, who personally built quite a lot of Cuparah, raises one eyebrow ever so slightly.

  “In what way?”

  “You make inadequate use of resources. This vessel could be far more impressive than it is.”

  “Could it?” Amanda Baines asks levelly.

  “Oh, yes,” Frankie Fossoyeur replies.

  “How very kind of you to notice.”

  “A matter of the greatest simplicity for someone of my capacity,” Frankie continues, matter-of-fact.

  “Is it?”

  “It is. The construction of your vessel is innovative, but not complex.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “I could design a schematic for you.”

  Amanda Baines unkinks slightly, in spite of herself, then glances guiltily at Mockley.

  “A schematic?”

  “Of course. Do you have paper? The mathematics is quite interesting, but the practical application is not difficult.”

  “That would be very kind,” Mockley interjects. “Have you studied this kind of system before?”

  “Non. It is unique, is it not? But very clever. The individual who designed it possesses considerable flair. I shall enjoy improving on his work.”

  Mockley hunches a little, then sets his expression in a look of monkish placidity. The face of Amanda Baines takes on a sour expression.

  “I suppose you know what to feed an elephant, too.”

  “Hein. Of course. A varied vegetable diet. Roots and leaves, bark … ah. I see the problem. We will improvise. Kelp, yes, some other weeds. I shall prepare a list. It would be best if he were not allowed to swim.”

  “They swim?”

  “Extremely well. And of course, the trunk functions like your snorkel, yes? But it would be very hard to get him back on board.”

  “I shall bear that closely in mind.”

  From the captain’s cabin, a noise like an accordion landing in a rice pudding. Frankie Fossoyeur shrugs, her narrow shoulders rising almost to her ears.

  “Elephants are like people,” she says, without great sympathy. “Not all of them are good sailors.”

  Six days later, Cuparah is five hundred foot down and diving, and Edie Banister can hear the riveted sections of the boat growl and yap. The faithful hound is struggling. Far from friendly waters, the Kriegsmarine and the Nippon Kaigun are too many, the cold and the pressure too harsh. Enemy ships have spotted Cuparah—tipped off by a spiteful Khan or merely put in her path by ill luck—and now they are searching the sea and listening for her quiet engine, pouring explosives down into the sheltering deep. Every few seconds the whole cabin shudders and the plates of the walls howl and shriek as Cuparah is kicked and harried, and the dull boom of another depth charge throws her one way and another. No dog should have to suffer this. Indeed, no dog can be expected to take it for long. Cuparah is in danger, here in the dark.

  Beneath and beyond all of which, Edie is apparently going mad, because she seems to hear choral music. When the door opens, she realises that no, someone is actually singing, low and weird and deranged, deep in the hull.

  “Commander Banister?”

  Edie is wearing her uniform and moustache, since she may in theory be called upon to do something devious if they surface and surrender. And here is Frankie Fossoyeur, that same desirable, distracted expression on her face as she explains that she thinks the Cuparah may be overcooking it, may be about to implode.

  Implode. A very, very bad word indeed. Edie had believed, until she heard it down here, that the worst bad words were Anglo-Saxon in origin and referred to parts of the body. Not so. Not one of the unspeakable
sexual terms she has heard is anything like as bad as bleak, measured, Latinate implode.

  “Do you think they will continue this …” Frankie waves her hands “… this dropping?” A wrenching impact causes the ship to heel over, and Edie is thrown upright. Frankie is holding onto the frame of the door, so they are suddenly very close. Edie nods.

  “I’m sure they will, yes. If they have the charges.”

  “The boat is strong. Remarkable, even. But not like this. The repeated stresses accumulate. The hulls will not hold.” Frankie stares into space as if she can actually see the fractures, the stresses.

  Edie, ungifted mathematically, is nonetheless inclined to agree. Cuparah’s groaning has taken on a distinctly frantic edge, a shearing, fatigued sound which is far more ominous than the bell-like tone it emitted when the first charge went off a few moments ago.

  “Well,” Edie says, “then we will probably die.”

  Frankie Fossoyeur stares at her.

  “That is not necessary,” she says after a moment. “It is wasteful. There is much we have left to do. Boff.” She throws her hands up, as if all this drama is so typical of the silly people she has to deal with. “I will not permit it. Accompany me, please, Banister.”

  Since the alternative would appear to be waiting alone for the inevitable rush of icy water and ensuing death, Edie follows.

  Frankie is slight and determined, and Edie’s uniform counts for something on Amanda Baines’s ship, so they pass smoothly through the mill of shouting, frightened men doing their best to be cool under pressure. Also, the place they appear to be going to is not anywhere any of the sailors needs or wants to be. It is the place the weird, disturbing singing is coming from: Cuparah’s decoding chamber. Frankie opens the door and steps inside.

  The Ruskinites are praying. The coding machine is shut down—no need for it at the moment, obviously—so they are kneeling on the floor in front of it, facing one another to avoid the appearance of worshipping the machine, which is very much not what they’re about, and chanting like Gregorians. It’s monotone, and very sad. Now that she is inside the room with them, Edie recognises the chant as a prayer for the dying.

  Hear us, O Lord, and issue not the decree for the completion of our days before Thou forgivest our sins. There is no room in death for amendment. Deliver us not unto the bitter grave. Lord, have mercy.

  She shudders. There’s nothing like religion to make you feel utterly doomed.

  “Eh, bien,” Frankie Fossoyeur says, clapping her hands. “Ça suffit. That is enough. There is work.” The Ruskinites stop chanting and stare at her, a bit annoyed. Frankie in turn finds their lack of compliance vexatious, and grabs the nearest one by the cheeks and shouts into his face. “Get up! We. Have. Work. To. Do!”

  And whether it is because they take her sudden arrival as the answer to their morbid prayer, or because in all honesty they are just people looking for a way to divert their minds from the imminence of crush-depth and the endless drumming of the enemy above, they get to their feet, and Mockley asks what is to be done.

  “This,” Frankie says, waving her hand at the coding machine. “It gets hot?”

  “Yes,” Mockley says.

  “And you cool it with?”

  “We have ice-makers. Poseidon’s Net.”

  “Excellent. And we have my compressor for additional cold. Good. And do you also have wood? No, wait. Kelp. We have kelp for the elephant.”

  The Ruskinites look a bit shifty. The issue of the elephant has not been a happy one. They have been required to vacate some research space for him in Cuparah’s forward hold, and one very rash person suggested sotto voce that perhaps elephant steak might make a nice change from cod. Songbird chanced to overhear, and nearly throttled him. Edie’s team are a little irrational about the elephant, because so many of his relatives were injured or killed in the business of saving them from Shem Shem Tsien, and because without him there is every possibility that they would be hanging on hooks on the walls of the Opium Khan’s palace.

  “Yes,” Mockley says, “we have kelp.”

  “Bon. Then we must … hacher … the kelp, into little pieces, and make pulp. Slime. Yes? And then add water, very cold. Supercold. Then squirt it in the pipes. There are pipes everywhere, yes? Squirt squirt. Then we must overload the pipes. They will burst outwards? Good. How good are the pumps? Never mind, they are not good enough, I must make them better. Make kelp, what is the word? It is Scottish and disgusting, not haggis, the oats, yes: porridge! Make porridge, quickly! And you,” she adds, with a keen eye for the would-be eater of elephants. “Hoses! I will need all the spare hoses.”

  “What are we doing?” Edie asks, as she throws her jacket onto the floor to sit on it, and Frankie rips the cover off the first of Mockley’s refrigeration units.

  “We are making a new submarine,” Frankie Fossoyeur says, “before the old one is broken.” A particularly loud roar sounds through the boat. “Which will be very soon. So.” She gestures to the machine in front of her. “We work.”

  And they do. Edie’s fingers get red and her nails chip, threading washers and nuts onto bolts by hand, grabbing pliers and spanners to finish the job, passing the tools to someone else and starting again. Splice, fix, rotate, tension, and all the while the boat is dying around them, screaming and shuddering.

  Cuparah yaws and rolls all the way over. Edie clings to the compressor and Frankie clings to Edie, the two of them clinched together. Edie’s arms do not have time to hurt. Then the boat slams back over and they fall to the deck. One of the Ruskinites has cut his own finger almost entirely off in the confusion. He holds it up for inspection. Frankie tells him to pull it off and keep working, because he can live with nine fingers, but not with multiple atmospheres of water shattering his body like an empty eggshell. He shrugs, and does as he’s told. Shock. Or courage. Edie isn’t sure there’s a difference. Being dead is a sure remedy for pain … She suddenly remembers being very young, hearing an old woman say:

  Tes a zertin cure, Mam, I ’zure ’ee, starps ’ey bagg’rin’ wetchess f’om g’wen te zay in eggbote.

  It took her years to work out what it means. She says it now, and Frankie stares at her.

  “It is a certain cure, madam, I assure you; it stops those buggering witches from going to sea in an eggboat!” Cuparah, eggboat. Far below crush-depth, metal shell fit to fail. It’s just right, somehow; meaningless, idiotic, and right.

  One of the Ruskinites laughs, and repeats it. His voice is Cornish—the woman she heard, Edie reckons, must have been from Dorset—and Mockley says it, too, miming eggs and toasted soldiers, and it becomes the rhythm of their work, an antidote to the percussion all around. Frankie swears in French that they have all gone utterly mad, but they connect the compressor and the pumps to the pipes as she requires, and fire them up. Frankie peers at the switch, then starts to scribble in chalk on a bulkhead.

  “Yes, yes, seawater, good, so far, so good, yes … cold, of course, very good, better! So. The pressure is a factor, and the salt … The units will have to work hard initially. The cold inside the vessel will be … it will be cold. Everyone must dress warm. We have no time for that. After it is done, we can warm the interior, yes. Then there will be … bon. Then …” and she’s off, seconds ticking, bombs kicking, until Edie realises she’s gone abstract, and nudges her hard. “Oh, mordieux, I am an idiot, there is an issue of trapped air,” Frankie mutters, and begins drilling a hole in the bulkhead wall, which is when one of Amanda Baines’s sailors comes in and screams at her to stop.

  The visceral horror in his voice is enough to cut through the other sounds of fear and horror on the boat, and another man looks around the door. He screams as well.

  “Idiot!” Frankie Fossoyeur is shouting. “I am a professional!”

  Twenty seconds later, and it has all gone significantly to hell, as if the previous situation—depth charges, water pressure, deteriorating vessel, general doom—had not been bad enough. Now the bosun is holding
a gun on Frankie and Frankie won’t stop drilling, and sailors are starting to shout at the chief to shoot her down. Any second now the whole thing will become moot because, with the sailors here instead of where they should be, vital tasks are not getting done, and in any case Cuparah is responding only sluggishly, with one engine’s bearings not doing their job and a shriek of dying metal ripping and buzzing through the air. Up above, the enemy knows they’re on the edge of the kill. One of the Ruskinites starts to mutter: Into Thine arms, O Lord, I commend my soul, that Thou hast made and nourished. Look kindly on me now, that am flawed, and then Edie treads on his toe.

  And then there comes a moment of perfect quiet. Edie can’t understand how, at first, and then she realises that a charge has gone off right on top of the boat, and the pulse of pressure has burst her left eardrum and the other one is shrieking. The pain is so awful that she can only feel it in slivers, little bright fragments which punctuate everything. In between times the world is grey and purple as if she is in the dark and her agony is the only illumination. Everything happens in pieces.

  She sees the water welling up, up, up from below them, far too fast.

  The chief of the boat waves his hands, ordering everyone out of the compartment.

  Frankie Fossoyeur ignores him.

  The flood door swings shut, sealing them in.

  The water rushes up, so cold Edie can actually feel it over the pain. But she can’t move. She has nothing left.

  Through the deck, she can feel bad things happening all around. Cuparah is wallowing, rebounding off one blast after another, reeling like a drunkard in a bar brawl. Another blast kicks her sideways, and she does not right. She begins to fall. Edie can feel it in the hairs on the back of her neck. Cuparah is going down, down in an anticlockwise spiral, not sinking but plummeting.