Johannes Cabal the Detective by Jonathan L. Howard Page B

a salute that was a lot of everything but brief. “He’s been spotted, sir! A customs officer at the port got suspicious and checked the wanted list.”
    “Trying to leave the country, eh?” It always paid to state the obvious when dealing with men like Hasso—it would save a lot of explanation later. “We’ve got him now. I want a patrol of the household guard ready in five minutes, understood?”
    U naware of the excitement at the palace, Cabal took a long minute to gaze up in appreciative silence at the Princess Hortense . She sat in her cradle, a huge basket of pylons and girders that supported the hull where it was designed to bear this weight. Despite appearances when airborne, aeroships like the Hortense were not lighter-than-air dirigibles. Instead, they nullified their weight with banks of Laithwaite gyroscopic levitators and pulled themselves through the air using magneto-etheric line guides that located and attached the vessel to the earth’s own magnetic fields. The gyroscopes were out of sight within the aeroship’s upper hull, but the line guides—four massive aerodynamically smoothed nacelles twenty feet in length and ten square—were held at a distance from the ship’s skin by pylons jutting out just below the dorsal surface, fore and aft port, fore and aft starboard. Although these provided both propulsion and steering, there were also four great rudders set wide to aft, two thrusting downwards and two—bearing the MirkAir colours and the crest of the Imperial Warrant—up. Along her sides were the rectangular cabin portholes and, to aft, the wide picture windows of the salon. At her prow, the nose was constructed almost entirely of glass panels exposing the bridge, its command stations, control linkages, and aluminium mesh floor plates. From either side of the bridge thrust covered walkways, each ending in glass observation spheres that contained a crew station, reminding Cabal a little of the horns of a snail. These would be “flying bridges” analogous to those on a large oceangoing vessel, he guessed, there to give clear sight of the docking cradle during the approach. Members of the bridge crew were visible moving around the bridge and looking out at the field. Cabal nodded slightly with satisfaction; he respected good engineering for its purity of thought, and the Princess Hortense was clearly that.
    Passengers were embarking from a balcony that extended directly from the side of the departure lounge, and he belatedly realised that he had come out of the wrong entrance. Rather than walk all the way back around again, he made for an iron spiral staircase within the cradle itself that seemed to be the crew’s entrance. Deciding not to stand on ceremony, he hefted his bag and started up the stairs. His footsteps clanged harshly as he stepped up the iron helix and the shadows the metalwork made in the low light of the dying day swept around and around him as he rose, spiralling twenty, thirty, forty feet above the field. He paused, as the gloom of the aeroship’s underside enveloped him, and looked back at the port buildings.
    Past the sweep of the customs house, he thought he saw mounted soldiers, but a girder interrupted his view and he couldn’t be sure. He sniffed; there was no point getting paranoid at this juncture. He’d done what he could. Now he could only hope it had been enough.
    H asso had ridden his horse into the customs area, scattering nervous refugees. The horse, disappointed at not being allowed to ride down the common people—a favourite pastime of both rider and steed—was consoling itself by stepping surreptitiously on non-military feet. Muffled shrieks marked its progress.
    Hasso stood up in the stirrups. “Where’s the cove who called the secret police?” he roared, before adding conversationally, “That’s us, y’know.”
    Marechal, who had taken a moment to dismount, walked past him. “Have you ever heard of ‘discretion,’ Lieutenant?” he asked as he