Johannes Cabal the Detective (33 page)

“Your duty is discharged. She has made her choice. Come with us.”

Miss Ambersleigh started to protest, but paused, looking regretfully at Lady Ninuka. “Orfilia?” she said, querulously. Her voice was lost in the winds that were singing over the edges of broken glass. Then, more firmly, “Orfilia! You must come with me! Come at once!”

Lady Ninuka did not respond at all. She simply held her father and stared into nothingness.

“It would be kinder to leave her here,” said Cabal, noting that—just for once—it was possible for the best course of action also to be the most convenient.

“Such a wilful girl,” Miss Ambersleigh said in an undertone. Then, to Miss Barrow, “Very well, I shall go with you.” She turned to Herr Roborovski. “Sir? You must come, too.”

He shook his head. “This is all my fault. It was my idea to disguise the ship. I never expected all this to happen. I swear.” The words tumbled out of him, thick with despair. “DeGarre, he was a great man, a hero to me. I had no idea what they would do to him. It was barbaric. It’s all my fault.”

“That’s settled then,” said Cabal. “Can we go now?”

Miss Barrow waved him to silence, much to his irritation. “Herr Roborovski, can you fly an entomopter?”

The unexpected question confused him out of his desolation. “What? Yes. Yes, I can.”

Cabal understood immediately. “Ideal. Both Marechal’s machine and the trainer I stole are two-seaters. His isn’t as damaged as I suggested; I just said that to aggravate him. Two pilots. Two passengers. This should work. We just need to get to the flight deck before impact.”

Ascending to the flight deck was both easier and harder to achieve than expected. Cabal had come down from there to the first-class deck via an access spiral stairwell that ran through all the decks. The doors from the circular well to each deck were secured by a door that opened easily going from the well to the deck, but which required a key to enter from all the passenger decks. Cabal had taken a minute to disable the lock when exiting the stairwell, and this foresight saved them a lot of time. The actual ascent, however, was accomplished in a claustrophobic metal tube, standing several storeys high, that was swinging violently, the bulkhead lights flickering on and off, sometimes leaving them in darkness for minutes at a time. Miss Ambersleigh faltered once, telling them to go on without her, but a remark from Cabal on the ephemeral nature of “British pluck” caused her to suddenly start climbing again in a stony, uncomplaining silence. Miss Barrow was going to congratulate Cabal on his grasp of psychology when she realised that he’d meant it.

At least they had not had to contend with crewmen running from deck to deck; the men were already at their emergency stations, and it would take a direct order from a superior to make them leave. Besides, even though most probably knew the ship was doomed, there was nowhere to run; Mirkarvia subscribed to the view that providing parachutes would only encourage indiscipline and the giving up of the ship when the situation was not yet irrecoverable. Even an experienced crew weighed less on the balance sheet than a combat aeroship.

It was a relief to reach the small room at the top of the stairwell. In its narrow confines, bad-weather gear swung on coat hooks, and equipment clanged heavily against the inside of wall-mounted lockers. On one side, a shallow metal staircase rose upwards, where twin doors were set into the ceiling. Cabal climbed quickly up to them and undogged the handles, before pushing upwards hard. The doors swung open and clanged down onto the flight deck, revealing a great blue rectangle of sky above.

The little party climbed out into a howling gale. The crew had managed to stabilise the
Princess Hortense’s
wild pitching and yawing, but the levitators were barely keeping the ship airborne. A crash landing on the forested slopes with who knew what exposed boulders and rocky outcrops beneath would be like driving a frigate onto a reef. She was a strong ship, but she had never been designed to suffer that sort of punishment. The only alternative was to run her for the Katamenian border in a headlong rush, hoping to clear the forest and put her down in the pasturelands beyond. Without full power, however, she was caught in a slow, blundering, onward wallow. The
Hortense
was drawing to disaster as surely as any storm-torn galleon caught with a rocky coast to leeward.

The view was magnificent, if terrifying. They had left the last few clouds behind them in the charge for the border, and the ship was lumbering through clear skies. The horizon seemed to be as high as the ship, as if the world were a great shallow bowl. Miss Barrow put this down to an optical illusion, and guessed that they were actually still several hundred feet up. This also turned out to be an illusion, punctured by the appearance of a hilltop, whose jagged crown was definitely above them, gliding past on the starboard side.

Roborovski was full of action, given new impetus by responsibility and perhaps the chance for some redemption, at least in his own eyes. He had been shepherding Miss Ambersleigh along as if she were a favoured aunt, checking that she was all right, and giving her assurances that he would get her out of there alive. Now, in the access room, he was able to show his special knowledge of the functions of a military ship. He opened an equipment locker and pulled out a pair of binoculars that he used to look along the length of the flight deck to where the two entomopters stood. “They look serviceable,” he said. “Herr Meissner, did you remember to apply the parking brakes?”

Cabal, who liked things to be tidy, replied tartly that, yes, of course he had.

Thus reassured, Roborovski opened a cupboard set flush into the access room’s wall. Inside was something like a railway signal lever—a great thing with a grip release at the end of the handle, and a great bolt at the hinge. He took the handle, squeezed the grip release closed, and then threw himself back. Vibrant twanging sounds, as of cables under tension, sounded through the wall.

“What are you doing?” asked Miss Barrow, but the diminutive Herr Roborovski was putting too much effort into it to be able to answer.

“I assume this is something important,” said Cabal, stepping past her and lending his strength, too. The lever was dragged back, complaining in strident metallic clicks all the way, and locked into position.

Roborovski took a moment to recover his breath. “It’s—” He wheezed a couple of times and tried again. “It’s the arrestor … line lever. They should be back flush with … with the deck now. Shouldn’t … get in the way.”

Cabal climbed halfway up the steps and stuck his head up out of the hatch; the arrestor cables had indeed been withdrawn into long slots running across the runway.

“Won’t we need to bring the entomopters around so they can have a run up?” asked Miss Barrow.

“Not necessary,” said Roborovski. “They can take off vertically, if need be. They have lifting surfaces at the base of the wing stubs and the underside of the fairing, so they do fly better at speed, but they don’t need to get speed up for takeoff.”

“Oh,” said Miss Barrow, uncomfortable with a depth of ignorance that would have been spared her if she’d only read more boys’ comics. “Why all the business with arrestor lines, then?”

“Taking off is easy, Fräulein. Landing … well, imagine it. You might be approaching a rocking ship, in high winds, driving rain, and possibly under ground fire,” he said, nodding sincerely. “You need the biggest landing area you can get, and you won’t be coming in slow and easy. The arrestor lines mean that you just have to set your machine down, without worrying about going over the edge.”

Cabal had turned to listen, but now sat heavily on the step. “Fuel,” he said. “The trainer’s almost dry. How long will it take to refuel it?”

Roborovski put his hand to his mouth. “With a deck crew, five minutes. With just us, double that. You’d even used your reserve?”

“Reserve?”

“Secondary tank. You switch over to it when you run low.” He took Cabal’s blank expression as good news. “Don’t worry,” he said, slapping Cabal on the arm. “I’m sure you would have found out about it on your second lesson.”

They climbed up the steps and out onto the flattop, linking arms for mutual support as much as safety. They had to almost close their eyes as the wind tore the moisture from their skin and bared teeth. It took almost three minutes to walk the length of the deck, and all were glad to take some respite from the gale behind the waiting entomopters.

Roborovski climbed up on the side of the trainer and checked inside the cockpit. He climbed down again holding a flying helmet he’d lifted from the seat. “I’ll take the Symphony,” he bellowed into Cabal’s ear. “The reserve’s full. We should make Parila without any problems.”

“Parila?” shouted Miss Barrow, huddling against the cold.

“Yes,” he replied. “I don’t want to go to Katamenia, and I don’t think I want to go back to Mirkarvia, either. There’s nothing there for me anymore. I’ll ask for political asylum. With what I can tell them, they’ll grant it.”

“Isn’t that treason?” asked Miss Ambersleigh, her reedy voice almost lost on the wind.

“My country right or wrong …” Roborovski shook his head. “They killed my country when they killed DeGarre for the sake of convenience. They killed it when poor old Konstantin was put down like a dog for saying what was right. I’ll go home one of these days, but not while it’s being run by butchers like Marechal and the crooks that backed him.” He gave Miss Ambersleigh his hand, and helped her onto the inset rungs in the side of the entomopter’s fuselage. “Come along, ma’am. We’re leaving.”

Miss Ambersleigh was commendably prompt under the circumstances, not even showing an unhelpful demureness in the face of the wind whirling her skirts around and the necessary loss of dignity imposed by clambering into a cockpit. Once he was assured that she was getting along perfectly well without assistance, Roborovski climbed up into the aft cockpit of the tandem arrangement.

He was just strapping himself in when Cabal appeared at the cockpit edge. “Herr Roborovski, when you reach Parila I would be obliged if—”

“I don’t know any Johannes Cabal,” said Roborovski. He smiled. “I’ve never heard of the man. I’m sure Miss Ambersleigh hasn’t, either.” Cabal said nothing more, but nodded once in thanks and farewell before climbing down again.

“You’d better get clear,” Roborovski shouted to Cabal and Miss Barrow. “You don’t want a love tap from the wings when they start up.”

They moved back as the starter banged and the engine turned over. It was still warm from its previous flight and caught immediately, growing to an eager snarl to be off, which became a crescendo of engineered fury as Roborovski opened the throttle. He shouted something to Miss Ambersleigh, who plainly didn’t catch it. It was almost certainly something along the lines of “Brace yourself!,” because in a moment the entomopter flung itself off the front of the flight deck and dropped like a cannonball from a leaning tower, immediately vanishing from sight.

“I wonder if he had enough altitude to do that,” said Cabal into Miss Barrow’s ear in a tone of mild scientific interest. It wasn’t even a question, simply a remark. Despite which, it was promptly answered by the sight of the Symphony dashing up ahead of them in a steep climb, before banking to port, and sweeping by at speed on a reciprocal of the
Princess Hortense’s
course.

Cabal climbed up the rungs in the side of Marechal’s entomopter. It was a very different machine from the Symphony trainer, and he was already regretting being left with it. Where the Symphony was designed to be friendly and forgiving, this one was lean and antagonistic. It had brackets on its side panels that were probably intended to act as gun mounts and the root of weapon-bearing wings. Its livery was a matt camouflage green, with a discrete Marechal crest painted onto the fuselage below the edge of the pilot’s cockpit. Cabal assumed it was a fighter that had been stripped down for a reconnaissance rôle, lending it the range and the speed to travel undetected over Senza. By flying low over the treetops and staying away from populated areas, it was unlikely to be spotted from the land or the air. Also unlike the Symphony, the cockpits were fully enclosed, with the aft pilot’s position set higher than the co-pilot’s. He found a catch and tried to unfasten it. It proved recalcitrant, and he barked his knuckles sharply on it, drawing blood and expletives.

“We do
not
have time for this,” he muttered, trying to free the catch. He had momentarily feared that it was somehow locked, but now saw that it was just awkward by accident rather than design.

“Come on, Cabal!” shouted Miss Barrow. “We don’t have time for this!”

He favoured her with an old-fashioned look, and went back to wrestling with the mechanism. He had a further worry, one that he decided not to mention to her, as then she would become all recriminatory and the explanation, combined with the inevitable theatrics, would eat into the very time that they both knew they didn’t have. As soon as the phrase “third bomb” passed his lips, he knew she’d be impossible, so he kept that little piece of intelligence quiet and congratulated himself on a wise calculation.

As is often the way with self-congratulation, it proved premature; unlike the bomb, which was grotesquely tardy. The intention—back in those happy halcyon days when Cabal still believed that the levitators were in no way dependent upon the etheric line guides—had been to destroy three of the four guides. Destroying all four would have been more thorough, as well as more aesthetically pleasing, but he had insufficient materials with which to engineer a fourth device. The plan had been for one to go off first, to distract the crew and give him some bargaining time should it be necessary. Then the second and third bombs had been due to detonate within a minute or so of each other, crippling both starboard line guides, so that the ship would have been capable of only a slow clockwise circle, trapping it within the Senzan frontier. He had been displeased that only one device had detonated, but not too concerned until the flaw in his plan—vis-à-vis plunging out of the sky and everybody dying—had been exposed. Since then, he had been hoping that some flaw in the reagents had rendered the third bomb entirely ineffective (the alternative, that he had made an error in its construction, had not occurred to him at all), rather than just slow. Hope, in the same manner as self-congratulation, all too often invites a good crushing.