Mortal Engines me-1: Mortal Engines by Phillip Reeve Page B

“Don’t you know nothing, Sukey Blinder? Ain’t Mr Valentine himself being sent off on a hexpedition to spy out the land ahead? Him and Magnus Crome have got their eye on some vast great prize, you can be sure of it!”
    Some vast great prize perhaps, but nobody knew what, and when Valentine came home at lunchtime from another meeting with the Guild of Engineers Katherine asked him, “Why do they have to send
you
off on a reconnaissance flight? That’s a job for a Navigator, not the best archaeologist in the world. It’s not fair!”
    Valentine sighed patiently. “The Lord Mayor trusts me, Kate. And I will soon be back. Three weeks. A month. No more. Now, come down to the hangar with me, and we’ll see what Pewsey and Gench have been doing to that airship of mine.”
     
    * * *
     
    In the long millennia since the Sixty Minute War, airship technology had reached levels that even the Ancients had never dreamed of. Valentine had had the 13th Floor Elevator specially constructed, using some of the money that Crome had paid him for the Old-Tech he found on his trip to America, twenty years before. He said she was the finest airship ever built, and Katherine saw no reason to doubt him. Of course he didn’t keep her down at the Tier Five air-harbour with the common merchantmen, but at a private air-quay a few hundred yards from Clio House.
    Katherine and her father walked towards it through the sunlit park. The hangar and the metal apron in front of it were busy with people and bugs as Pewsey and Gench set about loading the
Elevator
with provisions for the coming flight. Dog went hurrying ahead to sniff at the stacks of crates and drums: tinned meat, lifting gas, medicines, airship-puncture repair kits, sun lotion, gas-masks, flame-proof suits, guns, rain-capes, cold-weather coats, map-making equipment, portable stoves, spare socks, plastic cups, three inflatable dinghies and a carton labelled “Pink’s Patent Out-Country Mud-Shoes -
Nobody Sinks with Pink’s!”
    In the shadows of the hangar the great airship waited, her sleek, black, armoured envelope screened by tarpaulins. As usual, Katherine felt a rising thrill at the thought of that huge vessel lifting Father up into the sky—and a sadness too, that he was leaving her; and a fear that he might not return. “Oh, I wish I could go with you!” she said.
    “Not this time, Kate,” her father told her. “One day, perhaps.”
    “Is it because I’m a girl?” she asked. “But that doesn’t matter. I mean, in Ancient times women were allowed to do all the same things men did, and anyway, the air-trade is full of women pilots. You had one yourself, on the American trip, I remember seeing pictures of her…”
    “It’s not that, Kate,” he said, hugging her. “It’s just that it may be dangerous. Anyway, I don’t want you to start turning into an old ragamuffin adventurer like me; I want you to stay here and finish school and become a fine, beautiful High London lady. And most of all I want you to stop Dog from peeing over all my crates of soup…”
    When Dog had been dragged away and scolded they sat down together in the shadow of the hangar and Katherine said, “So will you tell me where you are going, that is so important and dangerous?”
    “I am not supposed to say,” said Valentine, glancing down at her out of the corner of his eye.
    “Oh, come on!” she laughed. “We’re best friends, aren’t we? You know I’d never tell anybody else. And I’m desperate to know where London is going to! Everyone at school keeps asking. We’ve been travelling east at top speed for days and days. We didn’t even stop when we ate Salthook…”
    “Well, Kate,” he admitted, “the fact is, Crome has asked me to take a look into Shan Guo.”
    Shan Guo was the leading nation of the Anti-Traction League, the barbarian alliance which controlled the old Indian sub-continent and what was left of China, protected from hungry cities by a great chain of mountains