Airship City

Chapter 37

JOSEPH

Someone was calling his name, someone far away, and he wished they would stop. He fought his way up to consciousness, and as he opened his eyes, the light seemed to flare the pain in his temple from a dull ache to a blinding throb, and he closed them again and groaned.

“Joseph! It’s me, Harry! What happened to you?”

He opened his eyes more cautiously, rubbing his wrists, which ached abominably. He was lying on his back next to a metal chair. Harry was bending over him, concern and confusion on his open face.

The last moments of consciousness came back to him in a rush, and he sat up quickly, looking around him. This caused a spike of pain through his head, and he nearly cried out, hunching his shoulders as if to ward off the blow.

“Where are Ione and Vanross?”

Harry frowned. “I was with Miss Hughes before we decided to split up. I ain’t seen Mr Vanross at all.”

Joseph nodded wearily, forcing himself to get to his feet. He felt dizzy and nauseous, but the sight of the detonators embedded in the gas bag envelopes drove him to action. He turned to face his friend.

“Harry, this is very important. Aeropolis is in grave danger, and it’s up to us to save her!” He explained what Vanross had told him about the detonators, and Harry’s face drained of colour as he listened. He turned and ran to the nearest detonator, examining it closely.

“Don’t touch it!” Joseph made his way slowly over to join him. Up close, the detonator made a ticking noise.

Harry’s face was a picture of concentration as he stared at the stub of the detonator embedded in the fabric of the gas cell. “Well, we’ve got to try to do something. If we don’t, it’ll go up anyway. So we’ve nothing to lose by touching it.”

Joseph had to admit that the logic was correct, but he felt himself cringe away from the little tube as Harry reached out a tentative hand. He held his breath as Harry gently took hold of it just below the knurled knob, and tried to twist it in its hole.

Nothing happened, and both of them released their held breaths cautiously.

“It feels stuck in there quite solid.”

“There are barbs, pointing backwards, in a ring just below where you grabbed it,” said Joseph. “They must have caught in the cloth of the envelope.”

Harry frowned. “So that means we can’t pull it back out again. At least, not without ripping the gas envelope to shreds.”

Joseph felt hope draining away again. If they ripped the envelope, hydrogen would come pouring out, escaping into the access passageways, and it would only be a matter of time before a spark or a flame ignited it. And it would asphyxiate them as well. “So there’s nothing we can do.”

“Well, we can’t pull it out. But we could push it all the way in,” said Harry.

Joseph stared at him. “What good would that do?”

“If we could get it turned around inside there, we could pull it out the other way. The barbs must fold down when it’s going forward.”

“But we can’t get inside the gas envelope. Can we?” Joseph looked hopefully at the young apprentice.

Harry shook his head. “No, we’d die from lack of oxygen. But I’ve got some string.” He pulled out a length of stout twine from his tool-belt. “We could tie it around the base of the knurled knob here, so when we push the detonator through the hole, we can pull it back up again.”

It sounded desperately unlikely to Joseph. But he couldn’t think of anything else to do. “It’s worth a try, I suppose. What do we have to lose?”

“Nothing.” Harry tied the twine tightly around the base of the detonator, then pushed it slowly and carefully until it was entirely through the hole, keeping the twine taut. The detonator dropped down gently into the void of the gas envelope, coming to rest against the inside of the fabric, just below the hole, with only the knurled knob visible.

Harry produced a pair of needle-nosed pliers from his tool-belt, and grasped the barrel of the detonator through the hole. By angling the pliers downwards and gently pulling up on the twine, he managed to work the jaws of the pliers down the barrel until they were grasping the spike at the end of the detonator. He carefully rotated the detonator until the spike protruded through the hole, so that he could get a grip on it with his fingers. After that it was nothing more than a slow pull through the hole, and the rest of the detonator soon followed. With a triumphant smile, Harry handed it to Joseph, and it lay in his palm, ticking softly.

He found one of the caps that Vanross had discarded, and screwed it back on, but this did not disarm it as he had hoped. In the meantime Harry had found some rags, and was using one to stuff into the hole left by the detonator, to slow the escape of the hydrogen.

Joseph looked at his friend, frowning. “That was very well done. But I’m sorry to say that there are five more detonators to take care of.”

Harry nodded, and got to work on the next one. Joseph was feeling a lot less dizzy and the pain in his head was down to a dull ache. But he felt useless watching Harry at work. There was nothing he could do to help: Harry had only one pair of pliers.

Joseph made up his mind. “You’ve got things well in hand here. I’m worried about what Vanross has done with Ione. I’m going to try to find them.”

Harry nodded. “If he’s gone and taken her with him, he must be trying to get off Aeropolis. You should probably get to the main deck.” He frowned. “Although it might be too late by now.”

His words were like a dagger to Joseph’s heart. “I have to try!” he shouted over his shoulder as he ran off along the corridor, trying to retrace his steps. He took the first passage off the curved corridor, and managed to find a staircase leading upwards. It emerged onto a landing that gave out onto a familiar-looking corridor. He tried to remember when he had seen it before. And then it came to him.

He ran down the corridor towards the glimmer of daylight that he could see at its end, and emerged onto a walkway that encircled an open space. The airshaft soared upwards above him. The mesh was anchored just below the railing that guarded the walkway. Beneath the mesh, a fan turned lazily. He looked at it with a shiver of recognition.

Then he jumped over the railing and made his way across the mesh to the very centre, lying down flat on his stomach, willing the fan to start up in earnest. 

The seconds ticked by, and he began to think that he hadn’t been as clever as he had thought in choosing this method of getting onto the main deck. If I’d found a lift, I could be half-way up by now!

Just as he decided to get up, the fan blades began to whip by below him with more urgency, and very soon the updraft began to blow his hair and clothing. In seconds he had lifted off, and was soaring up the airshaft, the lower decks flashing by.

I just hope the fan carries on spinning long enough to get me all the way to the surface.

The walls of the shaft were growing brighter, and before long he was bathed in shafts of sunlight. He craned his head up as far as he dared to try to see the top of the shaft, but suddenly he was out, in full sunlight, and the deck itself was below him. He was hovering high above it: as the air spilled out of the shaft and over the deck it seemed to be only strong enough to hold him up, not lift him any further. He manoeuvred himself cautiously, trying to orient before landing.

There was a man running towards him. With a shock of recognition, Joseph realised it was Vanross. He had his head down, intent on a destination behind Joseph, and didn’t seem to have noticed the figure hovering some twenty feet above the level of the deck. Joseph frowned, and shifted his arm position so that he began to drift towards the edge closest to Vanross’s path.

As he did so, he felt the airflow below him begin to falter. The fan must be slowing down! He fought down the panic and pulled in his arms even more, speeding up his forward motion. He shot over the edge of the shaft, still about ten feet off the deck, and dropped right on top of Vanross, who went down like a nine-pin, breaking Joseph’s fall nicely.