by Jay Barnson
“It's wonderful, Toby.” She peeked through doors and opened cabinets. “Toby! What's this?” She turned toward him.
There on her palm was the little brass box of the dancer.
“It's a reminder of where I have been and where we are going.” He took it from her and showed her how to make the dancer whirl.
She leaned into the circle of his arm. “What a cunning thing!”
He laughed. “You have no idea.”
“Toby, I don't expect you to tell me about the war. Papa never could give voice to the horrors of his soldiering, and I assume it is the same for you, but will you ever tell me why you looked so strange when we met?”
“If you are standing beside my deathbed, and I have the breath to speak, perhaps. Until then, you must let me have my secrets.”
She twined her fingers in his. “You've the devil's own way with you, Tobias Kincaid,” she pouted.
Toby started at her choice of words. He certainly hoped not!
Valerie stood by the heavy iron door at the end of the long, dark corridor in the city’s basement. From beyond the door came the sounds of fan blades and rushing air. The head lamp on her work helmet flickered, its battery almost drained. She wasn’t worried—her shift was almost over, and this last task wasn’t going to take long. She switched on the transmitter. Built into her breather was the microphone. “Cy?” she said. Cy’s gruff voice came through, scratchy in the headphones. “Here, Val. Where are you?”
“Filter chamber ten. Open it up.”
The whirring of fans ceased, then the heavy bolts on the door slid back with a clunk. Valerie pressed her shoulder against the door and forced it open against creaking hinges.
She closed the door—standard procedure to prevent incursions—and walked along the metal-walled chamber to the huge fan. The blades, each as long as she was tall, still turned slowly. She stopped them with a gloved hand and ran her light over them. “Fan blades are clean.”
“Right.”
She went to the six-foot-square filter at the other end of the chamber and adjusted the head lamp as she leaned close to the coarse fabric. Green tendrils wriggled toward the light, growing slowly but visibly.
Cy’s voice startled her. “What are you doing down there?”
“Checking growth.” She took a step back and looked all over the filter. Traces of green showed across the whole surface. “How long’s this one been in?”
She heard a rustle of paper at the far end of the connection. “Two days.”
“I swear, this stuff’s getting more aggressive. Send one down, then.” Making sure her heavy gloves were secure, she flipped the catches on the corners of the filter, and then with a grunt, planted a booted foot firmly into its copper edge. The filter came free and slid down the angled conduit, metal screeching against metal. Then it cleared the duct and disappeared, whisked away by the breeze.
She looked down the duct. Fifteen thousand feet below, trees cast lengthening shadows across greenery—grass, or something else; she couldn’t tell from that altitude.
A zipping sound followed by a heavy clunk signalled the arrival of a clean filter. She went to the chute, lifted the filter—and froze at the sound of buzzing.
“Cy?” she whispered, her voice tremulous. Cy didn’t answer. “Cy? There’s something in here. Cy!” She crouched, slowly, slipping her bolt gun from the holster strapped to her calf.
“I’m here. What’s happening?”
“I heard something. Sounded like wings.”
“Are you sure? No, never mind—I’m calling a crew right now.”
Valerie felt a trickle of sweat running beside her eye under the breather mask. She kept the gun pointed in front of her as she looked around the chamber for signs of movement, straining her ears for any hint of sound. Staying low, still scanning the walls, she backed slowly toward the door. As she reached it, the locking bars clunked into place.
“Cy! Open the door!”
“Can’t, Val. You know the rules. If something gets in . . .”
She cursed under her breath, but she knew he was right.
“Crew’s on the way. Three minutes.”
A fluttering sound. She whirled—and saw it, walking on the ceiling in the far corner, its transparent wings glistening as it moved. “Oh, scheisse. It’s a dragonfly.” One bite or sting and she would die. That was true of every surface life form, of course, but dragonfly venom was one of the worst. Days of agony, then death.
“How big?”
“Big enough. A foot and a half.”
“Can you bolt it?”
She sighted along the metal and glass of the gun. The dragonfly fluttered, twenty feet from her, turning back and forth as it searched for food. The metal wall would absorb a good portion of the charge. “I can’t get a clean shot. Where’s the crew?”
“Two more minutes.”
“Plus time to seal the corridor before they can open the door. I won’t last that long. It’ll smell me any second.” She knew what was about to happen. She’d be bitten or stung before the crew could get to her. She had, at most, ten more seconds before it got her scent and attacked. She could wait for the inevitable, or . . .
“Sod this,” she said. She took a deep breath, and stood up, pointing the weapon at the dragonfly. The huge insectoid turned at the motion and launched itself at her, the raucous sound of its wings echoing from the walls. She pulled the trigger, and the gun whined as it charged to fire. The creature shot toward her chest like an arrow. Needle-sharp fangs flashed.
The gun discharged with a snap, and a white burst lit up the chamber. The fly fell to the floor and lay there, jerking. Valerie stood over it and fired again, point blank, and again. The fly stopped twitching—but it wasn’t dead. Things that lived in this place didn’t die that easily. Not as easily as people did.
The headphones crackled, “The crew’s at the door. One minute to get the seals in place.”
She had seconds to act before the monstrosity recovered. She grabbed it by the tail, careful to avoid the stinger, ran to the duct, and threw it off the city.
She thought of Cy sitting in the safety of his little control booth. It’s all right for you. She fought to keep her voice steady. “Too slow, as usual. I took care of it.”
She hurried to get the new filter in place before something else got aboard.
The sun had set by the time Valerie changed out of her contaminated working clothes and made her way up to the city’s topside. The streets were dark, but the glass eyes were watching despite the gloom. The horns on the gaslight poles announced the news, a confident voice over patriotic marching music.
Ten spies from the Rogue Cities eliminated. A cadre of Rogue saboteurs responsible for a food factory bombing in Sector Four arrested and executed. The war against the Rogues continued. Meat, vegetable, and bread rations reduced until the food factory was rebuilt. Much the same news as any other day.
A glittering optic sphere hummed overhead, leaving a thin trail of steam and soot as it crossed the street and disappeared behind the rooftops. Her location was known to the watchers, and all was well. How else could the government keep the citizens safe, unless it knew where they were and what they were doing?
A steam tram rode its rails along the street behind her, and she hopped aboard as it passed. She was close to home, but her feet ached from walking the basement tunnels all day. She stepped down from the tram as it passed her house, and she let herself in. She barely had time to remove her hat, coat, and goggles when the door whistle piped.
She opened the door to a stranger on the step. Then she saw the little eight-pointed star badge on his lapel. A government agent.
“I’m honoured,” she said, trying to sound sincere. “Please, come inside.”
The man removed his bowler as he stepped forward. “Thank you, Miss McGrath. Danforth’s the name. Your government has a request to make of you.”
Stiffly, Valerie showed the man to a seat in the parlour. She would really have lik
ed tea from the forever kettle by the fireplace, but she made a point of not doing so, and not offering Danforth a cup. “What kind of request, Mr. Danforth?” she asked as they sat.
“Perhaps things would be clearer if I said that I was, in truth, here to speak with Harriet Hill.”
Anger flared in her. She might have known. “Of all the nerve! The government took my work, ignored my warnings, and as if that wasn’t enough, they blamed me when people died. I lost my reputation, my profession, even my name. Harriet Hill doesn’t exist—you people saw to that. And now you have the gall to want more of me.” She stood. “I have nothing to say to you. Leave my house, sir, and don’t come back.”
Danforth remained in his seat. “Please, you must listen. Without your help, this city will fall, and everyone in it will die. We need your device.”
Valerie sat, suspicious—but her curiosity was piqued. “What do you mean?”
“You built a device to power the city’s suspensors—to eliminate the need for coal and oil.”
“And you people threw it off the city.”
“Indeed. Now our power sources are almost exhausted. There isn’t enough fuel to keep the city in the air for much longer. We need the device, and we need it quickly. If the city falls . . .”
Danforth didn’t need to explain. When the suspensors failed, the city would slam into the ground below. The death toll would be enormous, but those who died would be the lucky ones. Once the city was on the surface, the animals and plants would come. Valerie shuddered. Of the eight million people in the city, not one would survive.
“Why do you need me? The device was dumped out on the September Plains. Move the city there and pick it up.”
Danforth shook his head. “It’s not there. One of the Rogue Cities—Belvedere, we think—passed over that area a few days after the device was dropped. They took it.”
She shrugged. “Then it’s gone. I don’t see how I can help. Unless you want me to build another one.”
“There isn’t time. We could build the reaction vessel and the containment shell, but we still need protonium, and it would take at least four months to mine and refine enough of it.”
Apprehension began to settle heavily in the pit of Valerie’s stomach as she realised what Danforth was asking. “You want me to get the protonium from the original device. Get aboard Belvedere—if that’s even possible—and find the stuff, and bring it back here. Again, why me? The Rogue Cities are terrible, dangerous places. Surely you have trained people who could do that and have a better chance of succeeding.”
“We have spies, yes, but they don’t know what to look for, and they don’t know how to handle protonium safely.”
“Assuming that I can even find it, just how am I supposed to move eight hundred pounds of it back here?”
“By any means at your disposal. Throw it over Belvedere’s edge, if that’s the only way, and my people can collect from the surface. You must understand—this is the city’s last option. The chance of success is slim, but it’s the only chance we have. We have to try. You have to try.”
Valerie’s mind was a whirl. They wanted her to go to an enemy city, find the protonium, and steal it back. She was an engineer by training, and right then not much more than a janitor. Surely there must be someone better? Someone trained and experienced?
No, it was too ridiculous to even contemplate. She’d be caught, and then she’d be dead. But if she didn’t, what then?The city could fall. Eight million people. My home. All lost.
Her government had come to her. They thought she could do it. And surely they’d give her some help—training, equipment, perhaps even someone at her back in case she got into trouble.
She took a deep breath. “How long do we have?”
“The fuel will be gone in ninety days. We need ten days to reassemble the device and get it running. So you have eighty days. Be ready early tomorrow.”
City Twenty-seven floated in the rear viewport. Dark smoke from the tall factory stacks drifted over the buildings, then blew away as it reached the fringes of the ten-mile disk. Thin trails of liquid glistened in the sunlight as they fell from drains and gutters in the city’s base, dissipating into mist long before they could reach the ground far below.
I’ve taken leave of my senses. What was I thinking? Self-doubt filled Valerie’s mind. The city got smaller and smaller with distance, and yet she felt it was herself getting smaller, an insignificant speck cutting herself off from her home and everyone she knew.
It wasn’t too late to go back and tell Danforth to find someone else. She got up, intending to turn the flyer around—and the sight of the city, and the thought of its millions of inhabitants, stopped her. If there was someone better for the job, Danforth hadn’t had any luck finding them.
The flyer passed into a cloud bank, and the city was lost to sight. Valerie returned to the control room in the bow, checked the clockwork pilot settings, and prepared herself for a long voyage.
Danforth had assured Valerie that the flyer could stay aloft for eight days without refuelling. City Twenty-two—her first scheduled stop—was six days out from City Twenty-seven, according to Danforth’s information. On the evening of the sixth day, Valerie had still seen no sign and began to worry that the flyer’s clockworks had been set wrong. She didn’t sleep that night.
On the morning of the seventh day, City Twenty-two came into sight on the horizon.
Where City Twenty-seven was the biggest of the Royal Cities, City Twenty-two was the smallest—half a million people on a disk a fifth of the size. It didn’t matter to Valerie. She wouldn’t be staying long.
She guided the flyer into the dock complex at the city’s edge, where Danforth’s people refuelled it and restocked food and water. She checked the bearings to City Thirty-one—her next stop. Three hours after docking at City Twenty-two, she was in the air again.
Four days later, on City Thirty-one, Valerie allowed herself half a day to walk and get some space away from the cabin fever of the flyer, and to buy more book spools to occupy her time on the lonely journey. She bought a bottle of brandy; she would save it, and open it to celebrate her return to City Twenty-seven.
There was no word of City Twenty-seven’s troubles, and she hadn’t expected any. Danforth had told her the city’s predicament was being kept secret to avoid a panic. Other, smaller, cities were moving toward City Twenty-seven, but they wouldn’t be able to take more than a tiny fraction of the populace. By the time any of the bigger cities could get there, it would be too late. The protonium device was the city’s only hope.
Huxley—Danforth’s contact on City Six—waited for Valerie on the dock as she landed. “Danforth told you the plan?” he asked.
Apart from a two-hour stop at City Fifteen, Valerie had been in the air ten days since leaving City Thirty-one. She wanted a hot bath and a real bed, and she’d half a mind to open her celebration brandy early. She didn’t want to get into this conversation yet. “Not exactly. He said you’d have a way to get me onto Belvedere. He didn’t give away any details.”
“I’ll give you the specifics later. You’ll be leaving here the day after tomorrow. When you reach Belvedere, you should be able to lose yourself in the city. They’re not like us. Not organised. People come and go as they please, and no one cares. You’ll be able to do the same.”
“Then what?”
“Find the protonium. Get it onto an outbound supply ship if you can, then signal me—I have a transmitter for you—and we’ll do the rest. If you can find the reaction vessel and the containment shell too, that’s all the better—the protonium is the key.”
“What if I can’t get it onto a ship? Danforth suggested throwing it off the city.”
Huxley shrugged. “That’s an option. Just get it off Belvedere however you can, then contact me.”
The robot supply airship was precisely where Huxley had said it would be. Valerie guided her flyer underneath it, matched speeds, set the clockworks, and went back to the hatch
in the ceiling of the flyer’s central corridor. Wind whistled as the hatch opened, and she shuddered at the thought of what she was about to do. She wondered for the hundredth time why Huxley couldn’t have come up with a less dangerous plan.
She checked the shoulder strap on her bag again and tightened it one more notch. It was heavy, weighed down with the book spools and the brandy bottle and her other things. She could have left it behind . . . but the books were all she had to keep her sane.
She looked up through the hatch, at the belly of the airship. She had no alternative. She steeled her nerves and climbed up the ladder, then clambered out on all fours onto the top skin of the flyer. The hatch slid closed behind her automatically—now there was no going back, for there was no way to open it from the outside.
The metal struts and supports of the larger ship were five feet above her head, but she was frozen, unable to stand for fear of being blown off the aircraft by the rushing slipstream. She had only moments before the clockworks engaged and the flyer turned back to City Six, with her stuck up there on the roof. She forced herself to stand, grab the metalwork and lift herself up. A moment later, she was crouched in the angle between two struts. The flyer’s clockworks engaged, and she watched as the little craft dropped and turned.
And now she saw the ground, three miles below, and her fingers ached as she gripped the metalwork, afraid to move. She stayed that way for a full minute, petrified. The chill of the wind began to cut through her clothes. She couldn’t stay there. She’d freeze to death. She had to get moving, and quickly. She forced herself to stand.
The wind whipped her hair around her face as she made her way along the superstructure, stepping carefully on the girders and struts and weaving her way between taut support wires, looking for the service hatch Huxley had told her would be there. The cold had gone through her gloves, and she could barely feel her fingers. With relief, she found the hatch, climbed inside, and slumped to the deck with her back against the wall. Her teeth were chattering and her fingers and toes were numb, but she was safe.