Deep Beneath the Sea — 12
The moment I step through the entrance, the clockwork machine at the controls twists its head a full hundred and eighty degrees to look this way. Then it lets go of the stick and comes charging, intent on attacking at once.
Hm. Dumber than I expected, this one.
The best move here would have been to wrench the controls, throw the ship off balance immediately, and charge in on the heels of that. Coming after me is the blunder of all blunders.
Crunch. Polaris, right behind me, is already rushing into the perfect place to hit it. Every time her fists land — one to the body, one to the head — the tin caves in, and once I see that, I decide there's no trouble here and head over to where the corpse lies.
I make a show of examining the pilot's body, and all the while I take its warmth.
Ah. This one's gone quite cold. I should have come here first.
While I sift through the pilot's memories, Polaris takes the machine completely apart.
Not Polaris. Polarbear.
Mmm. The controls. A great deal of the memory has evaporated, so it's hazy, but I know how to fly it now. Sorting through the various memories, I find it can't drop vertically the way an airplane does. It must be that this isn't a craft that makes its lift by moving forward. Flying comes easily enough in this world that aerodynamics never really developed, and the speeds stay on the slow side because of it. So — how did they manage a landing?
"You know how to pilot it?"
"I only know it as knowledge. I'll give it a try."
The only living person aboard right now is Polaris, so it has to be me.
Me?
I'm not a person, so I don't count.
"What the……. That. Don't tell me that's Berne City?"
A city pouring out pitch-black smoke. Anyone with good eyes would see that it has been wrecked so thoroughly you can hardly find a single building still standing.
"What in the world happened?"
Polaris asks, her voice shaking. I know all of it, but I don't answer. She doesn't seem to be waiting for an answer from me either; she only stares blankly outside.
Here, I'll answer as if I've only just found out myself.
"So there was a reason the letter sent to Victoria's parents came back."
And the way the clockwork is running wild now is different from the accident in Berne City. Back then, the machines lost control and broke down, and in the same moment overheated until they caught fire or exploded. This time, they moved in order to kill people. In other words, there is intent behind it.
But does this place have a technique called cracking, too? If anything here corresponds to a wireless network, it wouldn't be impossible. Or a program like that may have been built in from the start.
"It's been a while since the place was destroyed. What on earth happened? No — something like this happens, and it doesn't make the news?"
Polaris presses herself flat to the window, muttering as she stares out at Berne City.
Turn the stick left or right and the ship banks left or right; raise it or lower it and you climb or descend. Speed is a pedal, like a car. Take your foot off and it eases to a stop. There are no brakes.
The user interface is intuitive. In principle, though, this is no airplane that flies by making lift out of engine thrust. It is closer to an airship, kept aloft by buoyancy, the way one filled with a gas lighter than air would be. In the world within my faded memories, the volume had to grow enormous relative to the weight, but here the same effect can be had with a solid instead of a gas, and so it floats.
Even under attack there is no danger of a chain explosion. If the linkage between the buoyant material and the hull is destroyed, however, the buoyant material rises and the hull drops to the ground. In short, anywhere the weight bears down becomes a weak point. There even seems to be a plan to liquefy the solid and circulate it through the interior of the hull, lessening that weakness in order to build a fighter — but that is unnecessary information, so I set it aside.
"Where should I take this?"
"Ah. Um."
Polaris, glued to the window, whips her head around to look at me, then turns away again and aims her gaze back outside. Unlike before, she shifts little by little along the semicircular front, taking in the whole of the view.
"Not Berne City. Before that, as a premise — you. Can you actually move this ship?"
"Yes."
Even if the memories are broken, so long as there are memories of flying this ship many times over, I can lay them one atop another and work out the method. Cutting memories apart and examining them in parallel is a bit of a bother, but it isn't impossible.
"A vehicle? No — that's a special vehicle built to punch through the wilderness. Those are supposed to be hard for an ordinary person to run. No, never mind that. What's that up there? Some strange sphere?"
Then, all at once, Polaris rushes over to me.
"Bell. Drop us down, right now! Anti-air guns have us in their sights. They're probably coming to destroy the evidence!"
Destroy the evidence?
Ah. I see. So there is someone who thinks it would be dangerous if word got out that they killed people with clockwork machines.
Following the memories, I bring the airship's altitude down.
"Like this, we're in trouble……. How. What do we do?"
Polaris looks left and right, her face gone pale — toward the place where she had manifested something. When I look that way myself, something no bigger than a bean is coming toward us.
Polaris must have good eyes. I can tell something is approaching, but I can't see it well enough to make out what it is.
"Ugh. Ah! You see that mountain up ahead? Once the ship drops below the peak, turn us sideways and go down in a spiral."
"Wouldn't that show them our flank?"
"Turn as hard as you can, hide behind the mountain, put it at our backs, and run as far as we can. No. No, that's wrong. They're assuming the clockwork already killed everyone aboard. It was never charged, so if we flee, there's a chance they'll try some other method."
Polaris clutches her head in both hands. Now and then a mutter slips out of her — think, think.
"We're below the summit. Shall I turn?"
"Turn!"
As she says, I swing us sideways along the mountain. It is an airship, so the turning radius isn't all that large, and yet even so it isn't a clean circle — more the feeling of a spiral spreading outward.
Polaris dashes back to the window and stares hard at the group coming this way.
"Bank harder!"
Harder than this?
The balance is precarious, but I do as I'm told. The instant I bank hard, centrifugal force heels us over until the floor is all but the wall.
Boom.
A flash of light shears past, missing the place where the ship had been by a hair.
"You crazy bastards! They actually fired? This ship has the royal crest on it — are they trying to commit treason?"
In the meantime, the ship finishes its turn with the mountain at our back.
"Shall I go straight like this?"
Polaris looks straight ahead, then sinks down onto the floor and draws something there with her finger. Nothing is actually drawn. She is drawing it inside her head.
"Bell. Slow down. And do you know what happens if you take your hands off the stick?"
I let go of it once. Perhaps from inertia, the stick slowly turns back on its own. Since I have taken my foot off the accelerator, the speed falls as well. Polaris watches with an anxious face, then fetches the wreckage of the clockwork machine near the entrance — the one with a chair where its head used to be — and with her bare hands seizes its arm and rips it free.
"See that ridge? We're jumping there."
She points to the mountainside beyond the window, then comes over to where I am and uses the wreckage to lock the stick in place. Brass ought not to bend so easily, and yet she flexes it over and over without effort and fixes it fast. What remains, she drags over and sets down nearby.
"We have to jump out before we clear that ridge. Go over it and we'll tumble down the far side, and that's dangerous. So we jump before we crest it, no matter what. Understood?"
"Yes."
At my answer she pats my shoulder, looking immensely pleased with me, and points outside.
"Go get ready now. I'll be right behind you."
"You mean to set this on the pedal."
When I indicate the clockwork machine, missing its head and one arm, Polaris nods.
"Right."
I understand what she is thinking. She means to use it as bait. We will jump and slip away, and the people chasing us now will chase the ship. Circling along the mountain was never only to dodge the fire — it was so they would not see us jump.
She is using her head.
I nod and pass straight through the cockpit into the passenger cabin, then on through that cabin — several seats gone, a clockwork machine lying in pieces — and into the corridor. Past the corridor, caked with corpses and blood, I open the door that leads outside.
Clank.
The door slides aside, and the wind tears out in a rush. Below, the trees are drawing nearer and nearer. The ship is not descending; the ground is rising. I step outside, holding the door, and look ahead. Within a minute the treetops will sit at a height to just barely brush the underside of the hull.
So I back away and look down the corridor. From far off, Polaris shouts for me to jump. At her word, I jump at once.
There is a brief sensation of floating, and then I strike the branches. Crack. Stabbed this way and that by the limbs, I drop to the ground. A few scrapes, but I reach the earth safely. When I look up, Polaris is leaping from the airship, which is gradually gathering speed.
Unlike me, who hit everything on the way down, she catches a branch at the crown of a tree, turns her body like an acrobat, and surveys the surroundings from the top. She gazes off into the distance as if reading the lay of the land, then comes straight down the trunk to the ground.
Measured against the world within my faded memories, that is a body beyond human. In other worlds, it is a physical capacity that can exist. This side uses mana as well, so strictly speaking it seems a different kind of thing from the world in my faded memories…….
Setting that aside, the pain one would call a sting vanishes so unnaturally fast that I look down at the scraped wound — and it is closing. It is not flesh filling in. Thin threads shuttle back and forth around the wound and draw it shut. A search turns the cause up in Daegon's memories, under the entry for the functions of an artificial body. So long as there is caloric energy, it can regenerate something on the order of a limb.
Mm. That's right. This body is not human, so there is no need to press down on reality merely to treat a wound. If I build up the specifications of the body I descend into, I don't have to spend any power of my own.
I've grown wiser.
"You okay? You in one piece?"
Watching Polaris come straight over to me, I nod.
"Yes. Polaris. What do we do now?"
"We move. No telling when monsters might hit us out here, so first we're heading for the coast. Far as I know, the dangerous ones don't come once you get that far."
This is a region where the wild still holds, too — a wilderness harsh enough that Daegon's advance party failed to secure so much as a foothold.
I nod, and at once I fall in behind Polaris as she picks a direction and starts to move.