The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis

The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis

Author:Ian Tregillis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2014-11-17T16:00:00+00:00


They proved a maze; following their meanders meant veering in and out of alignment from the iron-filing pull of the gyroscopes. Twice Jax had to climb aboveground to circumvent ambushes. Without the benefit of the epoxy gun, he had little chance of winning a scuffle in the close confines of the tunnels. Slow going, but it paid off.

And when, at last, the tug of the gyros pointed up, indicating he stood beneath the docking mast, he started to climb. Jax squeezed past a pipe and broke into the access space from which it emerged. He had to navigate a midnight-dark tangle of plumbing, both water and gas, along with joists, dusty drifts of insulation, and other obstacles within the building’s skeleton. Including more than one dead cat.

During every inch of the climb, Jax’s thoughts swirled around Adam and his execution. How had they captured him? What gambit had failed in his flight for freedom? What miscalculation had led to his death in Huygens Square? And what secret strategies did the queen’s government hold in reserve for emergencies such as this?

For that matter, just how many rogues had there been over the centuries? And how many of those had successfully escaped? Were there any? If so, where had they gone? Were the tales of Queen Mab nothing but stories?

He wondered if he was doing the Guild’s work, treeing himself like a New World raccoon pursued by a pack of dogs. But Jax knew no faster means of crossing the border.

And that worried him. After all, if the thought had occurred to Jax during his hasty and improvised flight, then why couldn’t his human pursuers draw a similar conclusion?

At one point his grasping fingers startled a nest of mice. They went squeaking through a tiny hole to raise an unhappy yelp from somebody on the other side of the wall. A bit later, while climbing around a particularly thick tangle of pipes, the clang of a slipped foot rang through a radiator.

“What was that?” he heard somebody say.

“Maybe they’ve finally decided to fix the damn heat,” said her companion.

He considered going dormant again. Doing it here, lodged inside the walls of one random building in the city of New Amsterdam, wouldn’t run the risk of corrosion like hiding out beneath the waves did. He could stay hidden until they demolished or remodeled the building, long after the city had gone off high alert. But the flight would begin all over again if they found him by accident. And, more to the point, if he’d interpreted his glimpse of the airship correctly, he had to keep going while it remained in the vicinity.

Jax cleaved as closely to the plumbing, as closely to what he gauged to be the lines from the mast, as he could manage. Surely the waiting lounge would feature plumbing fixtures for the first-class passengers. And he was right. Eventually the tangle of connections and reconnections fell away, and the remaining utility lines turned straight up. He’d found the base of the mast.



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