Night Flights

by Philip Reeve

  F. Slim: Salvage, said the sign above the low doorway, but Fatberg’s definition of salvage was a slippery one. He did buy clothes and furniture from the salvage yards when London ate a smaller town, but he had other sources too. A box of tools or a crate of machine parts lost anywhere in the lower parts of London would find its way to Fatberg’s gaff. Watches and purses and tie pins and brooches that went mysteriously missing on the higher tiers turned up there too. The place was stuffed with stuff; a maze of shelves groaning softly under the weight of all that junk and treasure, and at the centre of the maze sat Fatberg himself, filling out his stained white suit the way a sausage fills its skin.

  His large, pink face arranged itself into a smile when Anna came through the maze to him that night. Business had been slack since the climb started; everyone was busy in the Engine Districts, or put off by the heat and noise that filled Base Tier. “A customer!” he said. “And such a pretty one! What can I tempt you with, little lady? I’ve got all sorts of trinkets here…” (He spun on his straining swivel chair and waved a plump hand at the glass cabinets where he kept the jewellery.) “The great advantage to living in the chassis of a Traction City is that the stuff rich folk drop on tiers above comes down to us. Maybe a lady on Tier One feels the clasp of her blast-glass necklace break while she’s taking the air in Circle Park. Before she can stop it – oh, heavens! oh, help! – it’s slithered through one of the gratings in the deck! It lands in the busy streets of Bloomsbury, where the wheels of one of those newfangled electric carriages clip it and send it through another grating, down to Tier Three. And slowly, if we’re lucky and no sharp-eyed bugger on the higher levels spots it, the ceaseless movements of our mighty city shake it down from level to level, through grating after grating, until it lands at last where all things must, here on Base Tier, where myself and my team of highly trained associates can gather it up and pass it on to those who are pretty enough to deserve it. For a suitable consideration, of course.”

  “I’m not interested in jewellery,” said Anna Fang.

  “Oh.” Fatberg glanced at her long, red coat and wondered where she’d pinched it. “What, then?”

  “I was told you sell … equipment.”

  Fatberg’s narrow eyes grew narrower. He leaned towards her. “Can you be more specific?”

  “I want a magnetic demolition charge.”

  “Explosives, eh?” Fatberg rose from his chair. Anna was tall, but he towered above her. His fatness no longer looked soft; there was muscle under it. “It would be illegal for me to sell explosives. Especially to a foreigner.”

  “I imagine it would be very expensive,” said Anna, and took out her purse.

  Fatberg heard the coins chink even above the thunder of his city. He sniffed, and, without looking away from Anna, said, “Ernie, fetch one of those items from the store cupboard.”

  A young man with tattoos on his face emerged from the shadows nearby and hurried off into the deeper ones that lay at the rear of the shop. A few moments later he was back, carefully carrying a flat silvery disc that looked like a metal chocolate box or the lid of a tiny manhole. Cities that didn’t have London’s vast dismantling yards used such charges to break up small towns they caught. Attach them to a weak point on the hull, turn that switch to start the timer, stand well back, and boom. Use a few hundred and there’s no more town, just chunks of useful scrap.

  Anna placed one of the gold coins from her purse in the sweaty centre of the hand Fatberg held out. He conjured the coin into one of his many pockets, watching her all the while with a look of great seriousness, then held out his hand again. She hesitated for just a moment, then gave him another coin. When he had taken four his face suddenly spread into a grin again. “Nice doing business with you, miss. I hope you’ll be very careful what you do with this little toy, and if you ain’t, well, I don’t know anything about it.”

  Anna could feel his eyes on her as she put the charge into her bag and left the shop. The charge was surprisingly heavy. She stopped at the end of the alley to set her bag down and adjust the strap. Then, instead of going back towards the air dock, she turned deeper into Base Tier, making for the district called Mortlake.

  It was an old industrial section, part of a huge complex called the Wombs. Back in the golden age of Municipal Darwinism, London had built whole suburbs for itself there, refitting handy little towns it caught and sending them off covered in bunting and civic pride, carrying some of London’s excess population away with them. But it was sixty years since the last suburb had been launched, and Mortlake had fallen into disuse. DANGER – KEEP OUT said signs on the chain-link fences that barred all the approaches. Under the words was a toothed red wheel, the symbol of the Guild of Engineers.

  Anna reached one such fence, looked left and right to check she was alone, then went over it as easily as a monkey and on into Mortlake’s corroded gloom.

  There were no lights here. No names above the rusty shopfronts. Fly-posters on the huge support pillars advertised shows and patent cure-alls from fifty years before. The district’s few narrow streets wound around the flanks of the colossal hangars in which suburbs had once been built. In the rare places where daylight could reach, clumps of nettles sprouted wanly among the rust flakes on the deck.

  Anna took a flashlight from her pocket. The beam fingered drifts of debris that had collected against forward-facing walls as the city climbed. It poked through dark doorways, and once lit up the edges of a huge rust hole in the deck, through which Anna could see the wheels turning beneath the city.

  “Hello!” she called nervously, into the immense dark of one of the old Wombs. “Collector?”

  Only echoes came back to her.

  She turned away and walked on, keeping the flashlight aimed at the deck ahead, afraid she might fall down another of those holes. Instead, it lit up a danger she had not foreseen: the polished toecaps of a pair of boots.

  She raised the light, and her eyes. Above the boots was a stained white suit. Inside the suit was Fatberg Slim. Behind him stood the tattooed man from his shop, and another so like him that he must be a brother, if not a twin.

  Fatberg snatched the torch from her and turned it so it pointed in her face. “Looking for something, are we?” he asked.

  “I paid you,” said Anna, blinded, trying to shield her eyes. “I paid you well. It’s none of your business what I do here.”

  “But I think it is,” said Fatberg Slim. “Don’t you, lads? A stranger, a foreign stranger, wandering off into our city with a dangerous explosive item. We’ve got our civic duty to consider. For all we know you could be one of them Anti-Tractionist savages come to sabotage London.” He held out his massive hand. “Give me the bag.”

  Anna cursed herself for ever dealing with him. He had her money, and now he was going to take back his merchandise. He knew she wouldn’t go for help to the authorities. He would probably steal the rest of her money too. He would probably kill her and leave her down here in the dark where no one would ever find her…

  “Give me the bag,” said Fatberg Slim again, and when she only shook her head and cowered against the rusty wall behind her the tattoo twins stepped forward and grabbed her, dragging the bag off her shoulder.

  Then something came out of the dark behind Fatberg. Big as he was, it knocked him off his feet. There was a scream. The men holding Anna’s arms let go. She ran, not knowing what was happening behind her and not wanting to know, just desperately hoping to get away. In the dark, and her panic, she did not see the rust hole in the deck ahead of her until she was falling down it, into the wind beneath the city and the sudden, shocking cold of open air.

  Nets of metal mesh were strung across the gulfs between London’s banks of caterpillar tracks. They were meant to save hapless workers who tumbled off the city’s underside while they were repairing it. The nets were rusty, and in some places they were missing altogether, but the one that Anna landed on held like her luck. She crashed down on it and lay there half stunned. The da
rkness was full of the scherlink, scherlink, scherlink of the huge treads passing, the grumble of the wheels, the squeal and grind of massive axles. Other sounds came from above; awful screams that cut off suddenly to leave a silence that was worse. Then heavy footfalls, as if (Anna thought) one of London’s statues had sprung to life and started pacing about up there.

  Something dropped towards her through the rust hole and Anna saw it falling and rolled aside just in time so that it did not crush her. It landed in the net beside her, slack and weighty, unmoving until London’s movement set it swinging. It was Fatberg Slim, or had been until very recently. The dead man’s left hand still gripped Anna’s flashlight. By its glow she noticed that his right hand was missing: chopped off at the wrist.

  London climbed higher and higher as the night drew on. Through gaps in the clouds the people on the upper tiers could see the lakes and rivers of the lowlands glinting in moonlight far behind. Their city had never ventured to such altitudes before. They held parties to celebrate; the music of string quartets mingling with the wolf howls of the mountain wind. If London could conquer the Shatterhorns, it could do anything!

  On the edge of Base Tier, snow blew in between the tier supports and melted as it settled on warm metal pavements. It would be a quiet night, thought Sergeant Anders as he strolled towards Airdock Green Police Station to start his shift. But then, most nights were quiet at Airdock Green. Sometimes there might be a drunk or two from the pubs on Crumb Street to deal with, sometimes a pickpocket working the crowds of engine labourers around the elevator station on payday, but by and large there was not much crime on Base Tier to add interest to an old copper’s life.

  Karl Anders had been thirty years a policeman, but only three of them aboard London. Before that he had been chief of police on a little town called Hammershoi, just three tiers tall, that roved around the north country, right up into the Frost Barrens in the arctic summertime, stopping to trade with other towns it met. It had been a happy place, right up until that bleak February morning when it met London, hunting in the north.

  Anders still missed his quaint old police station, the park on Obertier, and the wooden cupolas of the Temple of Peripatetia. But Hammershoi’s engines had been just cheap gimcrack copies of the great inventions that drove London. The chase had lasted all of fifteen minutes before London’s jaws closed on Hammershoi’s chassis and the town was dragged into London’s gut, looted, and broken up to feed the hungry city.

  There were far worse cities to be eaten by. At least London didn’t enslave the people of the towns it ate. They were free to leave if they had anywhere to go, or welcome to stay and become Londoners, as so many had before them. So Anders stayed, using his long experience as chief of police to get a job with the London force. But new refugees from eaten towns weren’t welcome on the higher tiers or in high-ranking jobs. He had started at the bottom again; down on Base Tier, a lowly sergeant running the quietest cop shop in the city.

  He buttoned the collar of his blue uniform and pushed open the door, stepping into the hard, flickery light from the electric bulbs in their big tin shades that swung from the ceiling as the city moved. Young Constable Pym pulled himself smartly to attention and saluted when Anders came in. A keen lad, just three weeks out of school. Anders thought he might make a decent policeman in twenty years or so.

  “Good evening, Pym,” he said, in his careful Anglish. “Anything to report, or shall I put on the kettle?”

  Pym did have something to report. He could barely keep himself from blurting it out before his sergeant had finished speaking. “Corporal Nutley’s got a prisoner, sir!”

  Anders put the kettle on anyway, clamping it carefully into the special fitting on the stove that would keep it there however steeply London tilted. He struck a match and lit the gas. “What’s this prisoner charged with, Pym?”

  “Murder, sir!” said Corporal Nutley, coming out of the holding cell at the back of the station and locking the door behind him. “Some foreign Mossie vermin, come in at the airdock on a tramp airship, looking to blow us all up. She murdered Fatberg Slim and two of his lads! Someone heard the screaming, and we found the bodies on the edge of the Wombs. The girl – the perpetrator had tried to escape by jumping down one of them rust holes what we’re always telling the Engineers to patch up.”

  Nutley had been a policeman for as long as Anders, and he was not easy to shock, but he had seen something tonight that had shocked him badly, Anders thought. He left the kettle to boil and went over to the cell. The peephole on the door had lost its cover long ago. He peered through. A young woman sat on the bench at the back of the cell. Not really a woman, just a girl, or at that in-between stage, the age Anders’s daughter would have been if she had lived. Only this girl was an easterner: amber skin, black hair, black eyes.

  “She doesn’t look like a murderer,” he said.

  “That’s why the Mossies sent her, I reckon,” said Nutley. “Those bozos at the customs house didn’t look twice at her when she came aboard. Just a girl, they thought. But you should have seen what she did to Fatberg and his lads, Sarge. Smashed them. Slashed them. Cut off their hands.”

  “Their hands?”

  “Just the right hands. All three of them. Must be a Mossie thing.”

  “Did you find the weapon she used?”

  “Not yet…”

  “Did you find the missing hands?”

  “No, Sarge. But I found this.”

  He pointed to an object that lay on Anders’s desk.

  “A demolition charge…”

  “That’s right, Sarge. In her bag, it was. I figure she bought it off Fatberg and then lured him and his lads into the Wombs and did them in so they couldn’t report her. She was probably planning to blow us all sky high.”

  “With one demolition charge?” asked Anders. “And why would Fatberg Slim have reported her? He wasn’t exactly a model citizen.”

  Nutley shrugged. “I haven’t worked it all out yet, Sarge.”

  “Do you know the girl’s name?”

  Nutley picked up the arrest form he had been filling in and carefully read the name aloud, as if a good Londoner couldn’t possibly keep foreign names in his memory. “Anna Fang…”

  Anders unlocked the cell door with a key from the ring on his belt, went inside, and released the girl’s handcuffs with another. She didn’t speak or even move; just sat there with her skinny legs stuck out in front of her and her hands resting close together on her lap as if they were still cuffed. Pym and Nutley watched from the doorway while Anders held the demolition charge in front of her face.

  “What were you planning to do with this, Anna Fang?”

  The girl just stared at him. Her eyes looked older than her face. London shuddered, scrambling over boulders almost as big as itself. The bare bulb on the ceiling sloshed shadows around the cell.

  Anders squatted down in front of the girl, holding the demolition charge with both hands. “It seems to me that there may be a simple explanation for all this. Did you kill Mr Slim and his associates? Perhaps it was self-defence. Were they threatening you? What were you planning to do with this charge?”

  Anna Fang said nothing.

  “If you won’t talk to me, Anna,” said Anders gently, “I will have to call upstairs. The Guild of Engineers is responsible for dealing with Anti-Tractionists, and they are not nice people. Once we hand you over to them, I won’t be able to help you. So please talk to me.”

  But Anna Fang said nothing.

  Anders tried not to think about the things the Guild’s interrogators would do to her. He tried to think instead about how catching an Anti-Tractionist saboteur would help his career. Maybe there would be a captaincy in it for him. Maybe a better posting, up on one of the higher tiers. He left the cell, shooing Pym and Nutley ahead of him.

  “Do you want me to send for the Engineers, Sarge?” asked Pym.

  “All in good time,” said Anders. “First, I want to take a look at where these murders took place.�
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  Corporal Nutley had sent a salvage crew to drag the bodies away, and the murder scene was dark and empty again. Blood had dried in dark stains on the rusty deck. The stains were surprisingly large. Anders shone his torch on them. Around their margins bright scratches showed in the rust.

  “What made those?”

  “Boot nails, maybe.”

  “I’ve never seen anyone wearing hobnail boots on London. The girl certainly wasn’t.”

  “So?” Nutley said. “You’re being too soft on that Mossie minx, Sarge. My old sergeant would have handed her straight over to the Engineers.”

  “But what if she isn’t guilty?”

  “She’s a foreigner,” said Nutley. “She must be guilty of something…”

  “I am a foreigner myself, Corporal.”

  “That’s different! You were eaten fair and square. That makes you a Londoner. You didn’t just show up out of nowhere and invite yourself aboard and start murdering people…”

  “That girl murdered no one.”

  “Then if she didn’t, who did?”

  “Quiet!” said Anders suddenly.

  A few yards ahead, in the shadows beneath a huge old crane, something had moved.

  “You’d best come quietly,” Anders said to the shadows. “I’m armed.”

  Above his head big chains swung, clanking, stirred by the lurching movements of the city. He went cautiously forward into the rust-scented dark and heard Nutley following. The light from their torches wavered over strewn ducts and rusting chunks of machinery. “I don’t know why they don’t just clear this district,” Anders muttered. “The council tells us to recycle everything. Why not recycle these old machines?”