Be My Enemy Read Free Page A

been in Engineering, Mchynlyth had taken them apart and rebuilt them to his own specifications.
    Sen was already halfway to the central staircase. She looked over her shoulder.
    “You coming, omi?”
    Everness trembled. Sen seized the handrail. Everett pushed his technology to the safe side of the table. The vibration was deep and huge; every part of the ship and everyone on her was shaken to the core.
    “I hates it when it does that,” Sen declared. Since tying down in its mooring, the ship had been shaken by irregular but deep tremors. Not from Everness herself, but from deep in the ice. “What's doing it?”
    “How would I know?” Everett said.
    “You's the scientist.”
    “Yes, but….” There was no arguing with Sen. “Let's go.”
    “I bets its some big ice monster, deep down there,” Sen said. Everett thought a moment about explaining how scientifically unlikely it was that a giant monster could exist in the ice. Pointless. At least there might be some heat in Mchynlyth's dim, electricity-smelling, junk-stuffed cubbyhole.
    It was the eighth day of Christmas, on the great ice that in another universe was the North Sea, twenty aerial miles from the airspace of High Deutschland. In the Airish version of the song, on that day my true love gave to me “eight breezes blowing.” Wind, hard, unceasing, and icy, had been a constant since Everett had triggered the Heisenberg jump into this white world. Wind shrilling over the hull with a hiss like knives. Wind drawing long moans like the songs of alienwhales from the guy lines. Wind pulling and tugging and worrying at every rough or protruding feature, ice fingers seeking for something they could hold on to, work at, tear free, and strew across the ice. Wind shaking Everness like a dog with a rat as Captain Anastasia navigated her away from the jump point. If Everett's theory was correct—that every Heisenberg jump left a trail behind it—she didn't want special forces dispatched by the Order arriving on top of them, or even inside the ship. E3's Heisenberg Gate technology was sophisticated enough to follow that trail and open a jump point right on the bridge. The wind shrieked over the hull as Everett made Christmas dinner up in the galley, every pan and pot and piece of cutlery rattling as he skinned and gutted the pheasants and made naan dough. Everness held her nanocarbon skin close and tight against the icy wind. Captain Anastasia had brought her down to a handful of meters above the great ice. Mooring lines, driven hard into thirty thousand years of ice, held the airship against the titanic draft of air rushing down out of the north. Everness creaked and strained and shivered at her anchors, but the anchors held.
    “Now,” Captain Anastasia declared, “we eat.”
    Everett carried the red gold and green saris he had bought from Ridley Road Market back in Hackney Great Port to the tiny galley table and spread them out. He lit little candles in empty jars. Sharkey gave a long and magnificent grace in the thunderous language of the Old Testament. Then Everett served: pheasant makhani with saffron rice and naan bread, which he puffed up on the end of a fork over a naked gas flame in a piece of kitchen theatre. To follow was his festive halva—Captain Anastasia's favorite—and his signature hot chocolate with a spark of chili. The tiny cabin was bright and fragrant with Punjabi cooking, but the spicy dishes could not win over the mood of the crew. Everyone ate elbow to ribs, knee to knee, in silence, looking up at every creak of the ribs, every change in the shirr of wind-whipped ice across the ship's skin. Snow piled in the porthole window. Everett looked out of the frosted porthole and thought, my dad is out there . When Tejendra had pushed Everett away from Charlotte Villiers's jumpgun the weapon had fired him into a random parallel universe. Everett had done the same thing when he jumped Everness out from under the guns and fighters of the Royal Air Navy.