“Get aboard!” shouted Wolf, shoving Wren up the Jenny’s gangplank. “We must be well on our way before reinforcements arrive.”
“All this, just so we can cross the line?” cried Tom. “You never said—”
“I said I would get you across.” Wolf shrugged. “I did not say how. I thought you realized there would be a little unpleasantness involved.”
“But the truce …,” said Wren.
“The truce will hold; we’ve given them no reason to think we’re part of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft…”
“All those poor people…”
Hurrying her onto the flight deck, Wolf grinned kindly at her, as if her softheartedness amused him. “They’re not people, Wren; only Mossies. They chose to live like animals on the bare earth. Now they will die like animals…”
Harrowbarrow had turned right around now; its bows pointed back the way it had come; its stern, and the open doors of the hangar, pointed east into Storm country. Tom was working frantically at the Jenny’s controls. Wren felt the engines coming to life, but she could not hear them above the louder roar of Harrowbarrow’s own engines and the battle going on outside. A few bullets sparked against the frame of the hangar doors, but most of the Green Storm defenses had been silenced. Wolf slapped Tom hard between the shoulder blades and shouted, “Go! Fly! Now!” Tom glanced at Wren and then, grabbing the control levers, he cut the power to the Jenny’s mooring clamps and took her quickly up and forward, out of the hangar, eastward along the foggy floor of the track mark.
Wren left the flight deck and ran aft to the stern cabin.
Through the long window there she had her last sight of Harrowbarrow, a leviathan wreathed in fog and battle smoke, rearing up to gobble and crush another Green Storm fortress before it sank down into the track mark and drove westward. The Jenny was flying fast, the branches of trees in the floor of the track mark scratching and snatching at the gondola’s keel. Soon even the glow of the fires faded into the fog astern, and there was no sound but the familiar purr of the Jeunet-Carot engines.
“I doubt any Mossies noticed us leave,” said Wolf. How long had he been standing behind her? Wren turned. He was watching her kindly, eager to allay her fears. “If they did, my boys will have killed them by now. Hausdorfer will smash a few more of their defenses and then head back into the badlands before reinforcements come. The Storm will think it was only a greedy scavenger town, hungry for scrap metal and Mossie blood. They won’t come looking for us.”
“You didn’t tell us,” said Wren coldly. “You said it would be easy to cross the line! You didn’t say we’d have to fight a battle.”
“That was easy,” said Wolf. “You can’t even imagine what a real battle’s like, Fräulein Aviatrix.”
Wren pushed past him and went back to the flight deck. Tom was staring out through the big forward windows: nothing out there but mist. Sometimes a buttress of earth and rocks where the wall of the track mark they were flying in had partially collapsed. Each time that happened, Tom would make a quick, calm adjustment to the steering levers, guiding the Jenny expertly around it. Wren envied him for having something to concentrate on. All she could think of were those struggling figures she’d glimpsed through the hangar doors. She felt guilty for having been part of the attack, and more and more afraid. Despite what Wolf said, she was sure the Storm must know that the Jenny Haniver had pierced their line; at any moment rockets or Stalker-birds would come howling out of the mist, and they would be the last thing she would see.
“I’m sorry,” said her father softly, sounding as shocked and miserable as her. “When he said he knew a place where we could cross, I just thought …”
Wren said, “How could he do that? All those people?”
“There’s a war on, Wren,” Tom reminded her. “Wolf’s a soldier.”
“It’s not just that,” she said. “I think he enjoys it.”
“Some people are like that,” agreed Tom. He had recognized the light in Wolf’s eyes as the battle raged; Hester had had the same look, that night at the Pepperpot when she’d murdered Shkin’s guards. He said, “Wolf has some strange ideas, but then he’s led a strange life. He’s very young, and he’s never known anything but war. Underneath, I think, he’s a decent young man.”
“Must be pretty deep underneath,” said Wren.
Tom smiled. “I knew a man called Chrysler Peavey once. A pirate mayor, boss of a suburb nearly as fierce as Harrowbarrow, but he wanted more than anything to be a gentleman. Wolf’s the other way round: a gentleman who wants to be a pirate. But there’s another side to him. He’s treated us well, hasn’t he? Now that we’ve got him away from his suburb, we might see that side of him again.”
Wren nodded cautiously, as if wishing she could believe him. Tom wished he believed himself. He had been wrong to accept Wolf’s offer, he was certain of that now. What would become of Wren if anything happened to him on this flight and she was left with only Wolf Kobold to look after her?
But as the Jenny flew on, mile after lonely mile, and no rockets or birds appeared, he began to feel more hopeful, and started to remember the sense of peace that had come to him with his dream of the museum. He did not like what Kobold had done, but at least they were on their way. From somewhere ahead, beyond these midnight plains, he could feel the tug of London’s gravity, drawing the Jenny Haniver and her passengers toward it like a dark star.
Chapter 18
That Colossal Wreck
After a few hours the fog thinned, and Wren was able to see properly for the first time the landscape that she was flying over—or rather flying in, for Tom was still keeping the airship as low as he dared, hiding her behind the steep fans of dried mud that towered between London’s old track marks. As far as Wren could see, the land around her was not much different from the plains the cities rolled across back on their side of the line. The Green Storm had cleared these eastern steppes of Traction Cities, but they had not yet built settlements of their own. Sometimes, through clefts in the walls of the track mark, the distant lights of forts or farmsteads showed, far off across the churned, weed-tangled land; but if they were keeping watch at all, they were not watching for a single small airship.
London’s wake ran ruler straight toward the east. Each of the city’s tracks had plowed a trench two hundred feet wide and often almost as deep. Tom steered the Jenny along the northernmost one until the ribbon of sky above him started to turn pale. Then he set her down to wait out the hours of daylight.
Later, sitting watch on the silent flight deck while he slept, Wren looked up into the sky and saw dozens of Green Storm airships pass over, very high and heading west. Then the rhythmic wingbeats of a flock of Stalker-birds caught her eye, also flying west. She pointed them out to Wolf Kobold, but he said, “Nothing to worry about. Routine troop movements.”
As angry as she had been at him the night before, Wren felt glad that he was there with them; glad of his soldierly certainty; his confidence. And already, as Harrowbarrow fell behind, he seemed to be softening, just as Tom had promised. His voice and his expression had grown gentler, and when Wren asked him to do something, he obeyed meekly, as if conceding that, aboard the Jenny Haniver, she was the expert.