Free Be My Enemy by Ian McDonald Page B

immediately E3 airship, land immediately,” the loudspeaker demanded. Captain Anastasia stood at the window, looking down. She spoke no word, she did not move.
    “We can't get away from them,” Sen said.
    “It's not them I'm getting away from,” Captain Anastasia said.
    The noise was so huge, so terrible that it broke through the whine of the straining impellers, the groans of Everness 's stressed airframe. It was an endless tearing shriek. It sounded like the world cracking open. It was the sound of a million miles of glass shattering at once. Everett and Sen rushed to the window. Everness was high now, enabling them to look down at the pursuing battlecraft, almost directly under them. Directly under the hostile ship, the surface of the ice was cracking in a web of lines and fissures that followed the direction of the hovercraft. Everett held his breath. From Everness 's bridge he could see what the crew of the hovercraft could not, a dark crack opening in the ice behind them, racing toward them, under them like jagged lightning. The ice wrenched apart. At the last moment the hovercraft pilot saw the peril and tried to steer out of it, but it was too late. The crevasse widened into a chasm, a canyonin the ice. The hovercraft wavered on the slip, then went down, end over end.
    “Oh the Dear,” Captain Anastasia said. “Those men, all those good men, those poor men.” Then Everett saw the bottom of the crevasse. It was vast and dark and it moved.
    “Ma, when we was out, I saw…” Sen's voice trailed off as she searched for the words to describe what she'd seen.
    “I saw too,” Captain Anastasia said in a voice Everett never wanted to hear again. “Return to your posts.” Everett tore himself away from the horror. Whatever was down there—something huge, something ancient, something that had been awakened by the vibrations of the hovercraft over the ice, something that could swallow Everness whole—it was moving.
    “Status, Mr. Singh.”
    Dr. Quantum had rebooted. Everett's fingers flew over the touchscreen, opening apps.
    “I'm getting the Jump Controller up.”
    “Mr. Mchynlyth!” Captain Anastasia bawled into the microphone. “Whatever power we have left, divert it to the jump gate. Sen, all stop impellers. Mr. Singh, we are in your hands.”
    Infundibulum open. Multiverse address up. The jump code to get out of there had been entered. But Everness had moved from the position that Everett had originally calculated as their exit point, and the ship was now drifting in the wind. Every jump began at a specific code and ended at another. Everett had to find his location in this world and then link it to the destination code. And the code he'd need to jump out of this world was changing by the second.
    “Dundee, Atlanta, and Sweet St. Pio,” Sen said. Sharkey's family curse. But there was no rage or hate in Sen's voice, just an ice-cold numbness. Everett looked up. The thing in the ice had risen, the eater of the hovercraft, the destroyer of worlds. It towered up from the chasm, taller than Everness was high, a worm, a dragon, a snake, an ice monster, all of these and none of these. Metal. It was made ofmetal. Metal and swollen, sun-starved flesh. Its blunt head weaved in the white sky, sensing with organs and abilities unknown to humans, questing, hunting. Finding. The head turned to look down on Everness. It was studded with brass portholes. The head opened. It kept opening. Everett had seen one of the drilling machines used to dig tunnels for the London Underground. It had been equipped with rings and rings and rings of teeth and grinders and diggers. The head of the Ice Thing opened like a flower, a flower all blades and grinding wheels.
    “Mr. Singh…” Captain Anastasia said.
    There. Everett grabbed the code and slid it into the Jump Controller. Then he opened up the destination window and dragged in the destination code. The button was grey. The button was grey. The button couldn't be grey. The