Her traingirl sense stopped her in midstride. Here. She skipped back a step. The tunnel looked the same as all the others in this forsaken burg, but ripples in her water insisted: here, yes, really. She rounded a dog’s leg and saw sky. A lot of sky. Into which she was meant to jump with little more than her trust in the home-brew parafoil on her back. And she had done the Point of Worst Personal Threat bit. The Feisty and Resourceful (But Cute With It) Heroine was into narrative terra incognita. She edged up to the lip. Crosswinds buffeted her; the cathedral started and swayed as if taking evasive action. She could still hear gunfire from overhead. She crept forward, took a peek at the ground. Seen worse. Risked higher. Still far enough and hard enough to kill you dead dead dead.
“Why is there never a Plan B?” she pleaded with the Laws of Universal Narratology as she secured the Catherine bottle in a breast pocket of her track jacket and braced herself against the side. Wind whipped her hair into her eyes. She tried to comb the greasy, stinky, sticky stuff out of her eyes, lost her balance as the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family seemed to drop out from underneath her and fell into the void.
“Aaaagh!” she cried, staring at a plan view of the undulating drumlin country of Canton Thrench. Then her hands found the rip cord, thirty square metres unfolded above her and she was jerked up into the air. “Oooh,” said Sweetness Asiim Engineer, flying. Pharaoh had given her verbal instructions in the control of the parafoil but they had been strictly just-in-case. Sweetness shifted her weight in the harness, pulled on the guys to scoop air into the left winglet and went spiralling up the side of the cathedral.
The sound of gunfire grew louder and closer. Maybe not that way.
She spilled lift, slid downward and forward. She slid out from underneath the belly of the cathedral into clear air. Grand Valley opened before her.
“Weee!” she whooped. Beneath her feet the Grand Valley trunk line was four streaks of silver meeting in a wink of light at the vanishing point. There was a loco on those tracks. A deadheader, no train, but putting out a lot of steam. Someone was really whipping the tokamaks down there. The funnel configuration identified it as a Class 88. Black and silver livery, Bethlehem Ares. Sweetness peered closer. Those patterns on the roof, and that finial on the tender: a roaring Iron Lion? And, at the limits of vision, covering the boiler cap with her wings, was that a figurehead of a silver angel, proud-breasted?
“Pharaoh, look, look, it’s Catherine of Tharsis, I know it, I’d know that old train anywhere, we’re safe!”
Pharaoh. What had happened to him? She scooped deeply into the wind, bought altitude to rise level with the hole in the hull At the outward edge of her turn, she had seen other aircraft in full pursuit of Harx; one a small, minnow-like racing yacht, the other a big grampus, a heavy lifter. They seemed to be occupying the full attention of the gunners who were spraying black arcs of tracer indiscriminately toward them.
Pharaoh was standing in the gaping rent, looking down at the ground beneath him, fingering his harness. As Sweetness swooped past him, he waved.
“Pharaoh, they’ve come back for me!” she shouted. “Catherine of Tharsis. I knew they wouldn’t give me up. They’re down there, we’re safe! Come on!”
Hand on rip-cord, Pharaoh stepped into the air. In the same instant, a dark mass leaped from the shadows in the corridor and seized him around the waist. Serpio. The airfoil opened but the combined weight of two bodies was too much for Vertical Boy engineering. Air boomed, seams tore, the wing folded up in the middle, failed. Locked together in a final, ludicrous embrace, Serpio and Pharaoh plunged down in a fluttering, tearing death spiral to the meadowlands of Thrench below.
29
Skerry clung to the edge of the punctured corridor, riven with sick doubts. Seconds before, she had seen the two young men fight and fall to their deaths. No purpose, no logic, no great cause served, no noble sacrifice. Just the momentary blindness of aggression. Boys and their competition. Fight, and fight to the death.
Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.
They would still be falling.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. How we laughed.
“Bastards!” she suddenly swore, kicking and punching at the jagged exposed metal in the hope it would tear and hurt her. The soft airframe aluminium and plastic bent under her hard hands and feet. “Bastards bastards bastards!”
She was Skerry Scanland Ghalgorm. She could flip and swing and juggle. She could walk tightrope and walk on her hands and walk over fire. She could swing trapeze and sway-pole and do rope tricks that would make your mouth hang open in amazement. She could put both legs behind her neck. She was an entertainer. A provider of simple spectacle and wonder; a Good Night Out. She was not a secret government agent. She was not a Synodical warrior. She did kids’ parties. The Anarchs had no place, no place at all, asking her to run the End of the World, fight people, watch people fall to their deaths.
But what of the show, Skerry Scanland Ghalgorm? Always, the show. She took a deep centring breath and called Mishcondereya on the bindi-mike.
“Mish, I’ve lost her. She’s got away.”
Mishcondereya swore. Apparently the only subject her gentleladies’ finishing school taught well was Cursing and Advanced Cursing.
“I’m going after her. I need pick-up,” Skerry said.
After a pause clearly meant to be significant, Mishcondereya said, “It may have escaped your attention, but they’d shoot their own shadows back here.”
“Mishcon, I need pick-up. I know we can get her, I know we can get the Catherine artifact.” She saved the Portentous Line for last, though she doubted Mishcondereya had a functioning sense of portent. “If we don’t, Harx will.”
Heavy sigh. You love it, Skerry thought. If you hadn’t become a state comedian, you would have been a rich-girl terrorist. The action, the toys, the scent of men, the tang of alfresco sex, the adventure. You live it, you love it, you think. But you would think different if you had seen two boys who loved it as much as you, and for the same reasons, earn the bitter pay-off.
“All right, I’m coming in. Give me your fix.”
Buffeted by surface winds—Harx was taking this thing low and fast—Skerry touched her throat jewel. Seconds later, the blunt nose of the sky-yacht nudged into view beneath her. It crept up on the frantically pedalled airship until half its length underhung the much larger orange bulk, like a pilot fish pacing a shark. Skerry waited for Mishcondereya to lock engines. You get one shot at this.
She picked her spot on the skin.
Never a safety net, Skerry?
Arms spread, she swallow dived into the yielding cushion of the gas bag.
“I can take her out, one shot,” Sianne Dandeever said, rubbing her still-chafed wrists. His Holiness’s rescue party could have come a little more expeditiously. She rested her hand on the heavy Sharps’ rifle’s wooden stock, casually swung the sights toward the dwindling figure of Sweetness beneath her flying wing. She badly wanted to punish someone for her humiliation. The cathedral’s aux-con was an architecturally incongruous glass teat at the apex of the pseudo-classical portico of the Pilgrim’s Steps. From here two people could command and fight the full edifice and company.
“You will do no such thing,” Devastation Harx retorted. “We might still need it, in which case, I want it somewhere I can find it, not spread all over Grand Valley.”
“Do we need it?” Sianne Dandeever asked. “And if we don’t, can I have a shot anyway?”