Infernal Devices

by Philip Reeve

  He could hear her behind him, scrambling through the wreckage of the ballroom, shouting out as if to encourage him, "The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree ..."

  Breaking free, he drove the blades of his right hand through Fang's chest in a spray of sparks and lubricants. The new claws were good, harder than Stalker skin. Fang hissed again, her gray robes in tatters, her armor ripped open and running with thick rivulets of the stuff that served her for blood. Oenone Zero was behind her, shouting, "You can't harm him! I built him to kill you, and I gave him the weapons to do it! Reinforced armor! Tungsten-alloy claws! Strength you can only dream of!"

  Irritated, the Stalker Fang lashed backward and caught Dr. Zero a glancing blow that flung her across the dance floor. Grike broke into a run and hit the other Stalker hard, the impact driving her away from the fallen woman, out into the moonlight on the sundeck. More battle-Stalkers grabbed at him, but he kicked their legs from under them and drove his claws through the couplings in their necks. Necks seemed to be the weak point of Popjoy's Stalkers: Their severed heads clattered on the paving like dropped skillets, green eyes

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  going dark. Grike smashed the flailing bodies out of his way. One of them tangled itself in the rags of curtain hanging inside the shattered windows, and the sparks spraying from its neck set the fabric alight. Flames spilled up the curtain and spread quickly across the ballroom ceiling, their light filling Fang's armor as she scrambled away across the sundeck, one leg trailing, one arm hanging by a tangle of wires, dented and leaking like a half-squashed bug.

  Grike wanted to give up this fight. He wanted to go back into the blazing ballroom and help Dr. Zero. But his rebel body had other ideas. He strode toward the Stalker Fang, and when she lunged at him, he was ready for her, caught her by the head, and drove the blades of his thumbs in through her eyes so that the green light died and he felt his claws grate against the machine inside her skull.

  She hissed and shrieked and kicked at him, tearing the armor of his torso--she had blades on her toes too; he had not foreseen that--and he slammed her hard against the balustrade at the deck's edge. Stonework splintered, fragments of pillar and architrave exploding whitely in the moonlight and Fang tumbling through it. Grike, all his nerves buzzing with the fierce joy of a fighting Stalker, leaped after her.

  And Wren? And Theo? Abandoned by their captors, they stood gawking at each other on the crescent terrace, not quite daring to believe that they had been forgotten, and too alarmed by the terrible noises coming from above them to risk a break for freedom. Now fragments of balustrade came

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  showering down around them, and the Stalker Fang and her attacker dropped like spiky comets from the deck above. Huddled against Theo, Wren watched, wide-eyed. The clash of Stalker against Stalker was something nobody had seen for centuries, not since the Nomad Empires of the North sent their undead armies against each other back in the lost years before the dawn of Traction, when men were men and cities stayed where you put them.

  "But I thought that he was on her side," complained Wren.

  "Shhh!" hissed Theo urgently, afraid that her words would reveal their presence to the Stalkers.

  But the Stalkers had other things on their minds. Fang sent Grike reeling backward with a kick, but lacked the strength to follow through; instead, she looked about for an escape route, calling out in her whispery voice for help. She gripped the handrail at the terrace's edge and, as Grike recovered and struck viciously at her back, heaved herself over and dropped down into the gardens.

  Grike jumped after her. He could hear the shouting of alarmed Once-Borns behind him and, looking back, saw Naga and his men running to the broken balcony, staring down. He ran on, following the trail of oil and ichor that the injured Stalker had left. She seemed at first to be heading toward the Requiem Vortex, but she was blind now, and perhaps her other senses were damaged too. Grike followed the sick machine smell of her through thick shrubbery, through the green corridors of an ornamental maze, down the steep slope of the park. Against the railings at the brim she turned, at bay. The trailing arm hung uselessly, and she barely had

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  strength to raise the other. Her claws slipped and grated like broken scissors.

  Filled with pity, Grike blurted out, " I'm Sorry."

  "The Zero woman!" hissed the Stalker Fang. "She is a traitor, and you are her creature. I should have been wiser than to put my faith in the Once-Borns...."

  With a savage blow, Grike smashed the bronze mask from her face. Her head lolled backward on damaged neck joints, and moonlight fell across the face of the dead aviatrix: a gaunt gray face, black lips drawn back from olive-stone teeth, smashed green lamps where eyes should have been. She raised her maimed steel hand to hide herself, and the familiar gesture startled Grike. Where had he seen it before?

  She turned suddenly away from him, awkward and broken, her blind eyes staring up at the stars. "Do you see it?" she asked. "The bright one in the east? That is ODIN, the last of the great orbital weapons that the Ancients set in heaven. It has been waiting up there, sleeping, since the Sixty Minute War. It is powerful. Powerful enough to destroy countless cities. And the Tin Book of Anchorage holds the code that will awaken it. Help me, Mr. Grike. Help me to awaken ODIN and Make the World Green Again."

  Grike severed her neck with three fierce blows, her long scream dying as the head came free.

  He pitched her body over the handrail, then picked up the head and the fallen mask and flung them after it. The mask flashed in the moonlight as it fell, and Grike's rage and his new strength seemed to drain out of him. Jagged interference patterns crackled across his mind as the secret instincts Oenone Zero had installed there shut down.

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  Memories came flying at him like bats. He raised his hands to ward them off, but still they came. They were not the calm, sad human memories that had filled his mind while he lay dying on the Black Island, but just the memories of every terrible thing he had done since he'd become a Stalker: the battles and the murders, the Once-Born outlaws butchered for a bounty, the beggar boy he'd broken once in Airhaven for no better reason than the simple joy of killing. How had he done such things? How had he not felt then the guilt and shame that overwhelmed him now?

  And then a scarred face rose in his memory like something surfacing from deep water, so clear that he could almost put a name to it: "h ... hes ..."

  "There it is!" shouted voices close behind him: Once-Born soldiers blundering out of the shrubbery. "Stop it! Stop, Stalker, in the name of the Green Storm!" Led by Naga in his clanking battle armor, the Once-Born approached cautiously, leveling huge hand cannon and steam-powered machine guns.

  "Where is she?" Naga demanded. "What have you done with the Stalker Fang?"

  "she is dead," said Grike. He could barely see the soldiers; the scarred face filled his mind. "the stalker fang is dead. she is twice-dead. i have destroyed her."

  Naga said something more, but Grike did not hear. He had a feeling that he was flying apart, dissolving into rust, and all that held him together was that memory, that face. She was the child whom he had saved, the only good thing that he had ever done. "hes ... hest ..."

  Forgetting the soldiers, he started to run. Stalkers came at

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  him, and he smashed them aside. Bullets danced on his armor, but he barely noticed. Damage warnings flashed inside his eyes, but he did not see them. "HESTER!" he howled, and the gardens swallowed him.

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  32 The Flight of The Arctic Roll

  ***

  ON OCEAN BOULEVARD BENEATH a lid of smoke, streamers and paper hats lay in drifts on the tilting pavements, the debris of street parties that had ended suddenly when the air attack began.

  Tom, Hester, and Fishcake crept along in the shadows, trying to avoid the gangs of looters and rebellious slaves who roamed the smashed arcades. Troupes of flames were dancing on the stage of the open-air theater, and every few minutes
the deck plates shook as one of the gas tanks at the air harbor exploded, sending wreckage sleeting across the rooftops and prickling the Sea Pool into a thousand white splashes. The elaborate, tattered costumes of dead carnival-goers stirred gently in the night air like the plumage of slaughtered birds.

  "They're still rioting on the underdecks," said Tom, listening to the noises that came echoing up the stairwells. "How

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  are we going to get back to the Screw Worm?"

  Hester laughed. She was still feeling happy and proud at the way she had been able to free Tom from Shkin's lockups, and even his insistence on bringing Fishcake with him had not dented her good mood for long. "I forgot!" she said. "Can you believe it? In all the excitement it went clean out of my head. Tom, we don't need the Screw Worm anymore. After all, we can't fly up to Cloud 9 in a limpet, can we?"

  "You mean an airship?' asked Tom doubtfully. "How can we hope to get hold of an airship? They've been pouring out of the air harbor ever since the battle, and all overloaded, by the sound of them."

  Hester stopped walking and stood and beamed at Tom, while Fishcake cowered behind him. "The Jenny Haniver is here," she said. "In Pennyroyal's stupid museum. She's been waiting for us, Tom. We'll steal her. We used to be good at that."

  She explained quickly, and then they hurried on toward the Old Steine. Shouting and the sound of smashing glass came through the smoke, and sometimes shots rang out. The bodies of minor council officials and promising performance artists dangled from the lampposts. Hester walked with her gun ready, and Fishcake watched her and remembered the promise he had made to kill her. He wished he had the nerve to do it, but she scared him too much. And there was something about the way she looked at Tom, a tenderness, that unsettled him and made him think she might not be entirely evil, and that it might be lovely to live with the Natsworthys. Shyly, he took Tom's hand.

  "Did you mean it, what you said?" he asked. "About me

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  coming with you? You'll really take me home with you to Vineland?"

  Tom nodded, and tried to smile encouragingly. "We just have to make a stop at Cloud 9 on the way...."

  But when they reached the Old Steine, he saw the severed hawsers strewn around the cable car station. Cloud 9 had gone.

  "Oh, Quirke!" he shouted. "Where is it?"

  It had never occurred to him that it would not still be hanging there, damaged like the rest of Brighton but airborne, and with Wren somewhere aboard it, waiting to be rescued. Now he saw how foolish he had been. That flying palace with its cloud of gasbags must have been a sitting duck for the Storm's air destroyers.

  "Wren ..." he whispered. He could not believe that the gods had brought her so close to him, only to snatch her away.

  Hester took his hand and gripped it hard. "Come on, Tom," she said. "If we can get off this dump, we might still find the stupid place, ditched in the sea or adrift. It's Pennyroyal who runs it, remember: He won't have put up much of a fight."

  She pointed to the stained white frontage of the Nimrod Pennyroyal Experience. The front wall had a few nasty cracks in it and was sagging out over the pavement. The doors had been blown off their hinges too, and as Hester led Fishcake and Tom inside, she began to feel a terrible fear that she was too late, that some other desperate refugee would have come here before her and taken the Jenny away. But when she ran up the stairs, she found the old airship sitting where she had

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  left her. The glass roof of the museum had shattered, scattering shards across the floor and the Jenny's envelope, but she looked completely undamaged. She had actually been cleaned up a bit since Hester last saw her, and a large number I had been pasted to her flank, ready for the regatta. There were even a couple of small rockets in her rocket racks.

  Behind her, Tom reached the top of the steps and stopped. "Het," he said. "Oh, Het--" Tears ran down his face, and he laughed at himself as he wiped them away. "It's our ship!"

  "What a pile of junk!" exclaimed Fishcake, pulling on a coat that he'd taken from one of the waxworks down below.

  "Fishcake, see if you can turn the lights on," Tom said, and climbed up into the gondola. The old ship smelled like a museum. He ducked under dangling cords and ran his hands over the control panels, recognizing the familiar instrument arrays. Lights came on in the room outside, shining in through the Jenny's freshly squeegeed windows.

  "Remember how it works?" asked Hester, behind him. She spoke in the sort of whisper you would use in a temple.

  "Oh, yes," Tom whispered back. "You don't ever forget...." He reached out reverently and pulled a lever. An inflatable dinghy dropped from a compartment in the ceiling and knocked him over. He shoveled it under the chart table and tried another lever. This time the Jenny shivered and shifted, and the museum was filled with the rising thunder of her twin Jeunet-Carot engines.

  Outside, hands clamped over his ears, Fishcake was coughing in the exhaust smoke and shouting, "How do you get it out?"

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  "The roof opens!" Hester yelled back, pointing upward.

  Fishcake shook his head. "I don't think so...."

  Tom killed the engines. Leaning out of the Jenny's hatch, he looked up at the ceiling. With the lights switched on, it was easy to see why no one else had bothered coming in here to steal the Jenny. A huge hawser, one of the cables that had once linked Brighton to Cloud 9, had crashed down across the Nimrod Pennyroyal Experience, smashing the glass above the Jenny Haniver and buckling the delicate struts and girders of the roof.

  "Oh, Quirke Almighty!" cried Tom. He was starting to get the feeling that his god was playing games with him. If he survived this, he was going to think seriously about finding himself a different deity.

  He ran back to the flight deck, and Hester. "The roof's smashed. We'll never get her out!"

  "Someone's coming!" yelled Fishcake, peering from one of the museum windows. "A big gang of them. Lost Boys, I bet, come to see what the noise was about!"

  Hester stared through the Jenny's nose windows at the roof. "Reckon we could shift that debris?"

  Tom shook his head. "That hawser is fatter than the two of us put together. We're trapped in here!"

  "Don't worry," Hester said. "We'll think of something." She closed her eye, concentrating, while Fishcake ran from window to window, hollering something else about Lost Boys. Then she looked up at Tom and grinned.

  "Thought of something," she said.

  She started flipping switches on the long, dusty control desks. The Jenny Haniver lurched, throwing Tom backward.

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  Amid all the racket of engines starting up and docking clamps releasing, he didn't realize at first all of what Hester had done. Then, as the shock wave of the twin explosions bowed the windows, as the Jenny lifted and surged forward, he saw that she had emptied the rocket projectors into the damaged front wall, blasting it into the street and leaving a hole large enough to let the little airship out into the sky.

  "You've forgotten Fishcake!" he yelled over the long screech of an engine pod grazing the museum wall.

  "Oh, dear!" Hester shouted back.

  "Go back!"

  "We don't need him, Tom. Not Wanted On Voyage."

  Tom scrambled back to the open hatch and reached out, shouting Fishcake's name. The boy was running toward the lifting gondola, hands outstretched, face white and horrified beneath a clown mask of powdered plaster. Over the roar of the engines and the dull hiss of the explosion still echoing in his ears, Tom could not hear the words, but he didn't need to. "Come back!" Fishcake was shouting as the Jenny Haniver rose through the smoke and dust and swung across an Old Steine full of the startled upturned faces of Lost Boys and looters, up into the sky where she belonged. "Don't leave me! Mr. Natsworthy! Please! Come back! Come back! Come back!"

  The Jenny Haniver flew on, weaving unsteadily this way and that because Tom and Hester were struggling with each other at the controls.

  "For Quirke's sake!" Tom shouted. "We've
got to turn back! We can't just leave him behind!"

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  Hester pulled his hands free of the steering levers and flung him aside. He crashed against the chart table and fell heavily, shouting out with pain. "Forget him, Tom!" she screamed. "We can't trust him. And he said the Jenny was a piece of junk! He's lucky I didn't knife him!"

  "But he's a child! You can't just leave him! What will happen to him?"

  "Who cares? He's a Lost Boy! Have you forgotten what he did to Wren?"

  The Jenny came up suddenly into clear air and moonlight. The smoke lay like a field of dirty snow fifty feet beneath the gondola, with the fire-flecked upperworks of Kom Ombo and Benghazi poking out of it a few miles to larboard. Airships were buzzing about, but none showed an interest in the Jenny Haniver. Hester scanned the sky ahead and saw, far away toward the south, the tattered envelopes of Cloud 9. She pointed the Jenny's nose at it, locked the controls, and knelt beside Tom. He looked up with an odd expression, and she suddenly realized that he was afraid of her. That made her laugh. She took his face between her hands and kissed him, and licked away the salt tears that had gathered at the corners of his mouth, but he turned his head away. She started to feel afraid herself. Had she gone too far this time?

  "I'm sorry," she told him, though she wasn't. "Look, Tom, I'm sorry, I made a mistake. I panicked. We'll turn back if you like."

  Tom pulled away from her and scrambled up. He kept remembering the strange smile that had flickered on her face as she'd led him from the Pepperpot. "You enjoy it," he said.

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  "Don't you? Like when you killed all those people at Shkin's place, you were enjoying it...."

  Hester said, "They were slavers, Tom. They were villains. They were the ones who sold Wren. They sold our little girl. The world's a better place without them in it."