by Philip Reeve
She sat in the hold, listening to Fishcake clattering about on the bridge. Her stomach rumbled, but the Lost Boy had offered her no food, and she was afraid to ask for any. It was a bit embarrassing, being held prisoner by someone so much younger than her, but Fishcake’s feelings were balanced on such a knife-edge that Wren was still afraid he might kill her if she annoyed him. Better stay quiet. She drank foul-tasting water from the sink faucet and thought about escape. Daring plans formed in her mind, only to burst like bubbles after a few seconds. Even if she somehow overpowered her little captor she would never be able to steer the limpet back to Vineland. She was stuck here, and it was all her own fault. She had been incredibly, dangerously stupid; she could see that now, and it made her ashamed, because she had always thought herself clever. Hadn’t Miss Freya always said that Wren had more brains than any of the other young people in Vineland?
“Well, Wren,” she said, hugging herself for comfort, “if you’re going to stay alive, and find your way back to Mum and Dad, you’ll have to start using them.”
The Autolycus was a hundred miles from shore when the signal came in. Fishcake thought at first that it must be a message from another limpet, although he didn’t know that any others were operating on this side of the ocean. Then he noticed something strange; the signal was being broadcast simultaneously on the limpet-to-limpet frequency and on the wavelength which the limpets used to receive pictures from their wireless crab-cams.
He flicked some switches, and the bank of circular screens above his station slowly flooded with light.
Huddled on the floor of the hold, Wren heard voices. She crept to the door of the control cabin and peeked through. Fishcake was staring up at the screens. All six showed the same strange image; a city, seen from above, cruising on a calm sea. It was hard to tell on this grainy, ghosting picture what size of city it was, but it looked pleasant, with many ornate white cupolas and domes, and lots of long pennants streaming in the wind.
“What’s that?” asked Wren.
Fishcake glanced round, but if he was surprised to find her standing there, he didn’t show it. He turned his face to the screens again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. It keeps repeating. Watch.”
The picture changed. A kindly looking man and woman sat side-by-side upon a sofa. They seemed to be looking straight at Wren and Fishcake, and although they were strangers, and dressed in the robes and turbans of rich townspeople, something in their sad and gentle smiles made Wren think of her own mum and dad and how they must be missing her.
“Greetings, children of the deep!” said the man. “We are speaking to you on behalf of WOPCART: the World Organization for Parents of Children Abducted from Raft Towns. For half a century boys – and lately girls too – have been vanishing from cities which cross the Atlantic and the Ice Wastes. Only in recent years, thanks to the explorer Nimrod Pennyroyal, have we become aware of the parasite pirates who secretly burgle and infest such cities, and who steal children away to train as thieves and burglars like themselves.”
“Pennyroyal again!” said Wren crossly.
“Shush!” said Fishcake. “Listen!”
The woman was speaking now, still smiling, but weeping too, as she leaned towards the viewers. “Now the good people of the raft resort of Brighton have brought us north into your home waters. If you tune your radio equipment to 680 kilocycles, you will pick up the signal of Brighton’s homing beacon. We know that you probably have no memories of the mummies and daddies from whom you were stolen when you were so very little, and who have been missing you so very much. But if you come to us, come in your submarines to meet us here in Brighton, we are sure that many of you will recognize your own families, and they you. We do not want to harm you, or take you from your new friends or your exciting new life beneath the waves. We only want a chance to see our dear lost boys again…”
Here, the woman’s voice grew high and wobbly; she hid her face in her handkerchief while her husband patted her arm and took over.
“WOPCART has many members,” he explained, and the picture changed again to show a crowd of people gathered on one of the city’s observation platforms. “Every one of us has lost a child, and longs to see him again and learn what has happened to him. Or, indeed, her. Oh, children of the deep, if you can hear this message, we beg you, come to us!”
The image lingered for a moment, while sad music swelled and the members of WOPCART all smiled and waved at the camera and the sea breeze plucked at their coats and robes and hats. Then it was replaced by a printed sign which read, WOPCART – Summer Expedition. (In Association with the Mayor and Council of Brighton.) The music faded, there was a moment of blackness, and the transmission began again. “Greetings, children of the deep…”
“See?” asked Fishcake, turning to Wren. He had forgotten that she was his hostage, so eager was he to share the astonishing message with somebody. His eyes were shining; his whole face was radiant, and Wren realized for the first time how young he really was; just a small boy, far from home and longing for love and comfort.
“What do you think I should do?” he asked. “I checked for Brighton’s homing beacon. They’re close. About fifty, sixty miles south-west of us. I never heard of a city coming that near to the Dead Continent…”
Wren could feel the sense of yearning building in the cramped cabin as Fishcake imagined that city full of mums and dads floating fifty miles away. What if she could persuade him to rendezvous with Brighton? She was sure that she would be far better off there than down in Grimsby. So would Fishcake, probably, so she need not feel guilty about it.
She came into the cabin and sat down in the swivel chair beside his. “Maybe they’ve come here because they’re searching for Lost Boys,” she said. “They could have been zigzagging their way north for weeks, transmitting that message over and over. Gargle told me that limpets had gone missing. He thought something bad had happened to them, but what if they just heard that message and went to find their families…?”
“Why haven’t they contacted Grimsby, then?” asked Fishcake.
“Maybe they’re having too much fun,” suggested Wren. “Maybe they were scared that Gargle would punish them for going to Brighton without his orders.”
Fishcake gazed up at the screens. “Those people look so rich. The Lost Boys only take kids nobody’s going to miss; orphans and urchins from the under-decks who nobody wants…”
“That’s what Gargle and Uncle told you,” said Wren. “What if it isn’t true? What if they take children from rich families sometimes, too? Anyway, probably even an orphan would be missed by somebody. Probably even an urchin’s mummy and daddy would want to find him, if he got himself stolen away…”
Two big tears ran down Fishcake’s face, pearly in the light from the screens.
“I’ll send a message-fish to Grimsby and ask Uncle what to do,” he decided.
“But Fishcake,” said Wren, “he might tell you not to go!”
“Uncle Knows Best,” said Fishcake, but he didn’t sound very certain.
“Anyway, by the time you get a reply, Brighton might have sailed away. Autumn’s coming. Storms and high seas. Miss Freya always taught us that raft cities head for sheltered waters in the autumn. So this might be your only chance…”
“But it’s one of the rules. What they teach us in the Burglarium. Never show yourself. Never give the Drys a chance to find out about the Lost Boys, that’s what Gargle says…”
“These Drys seem to know all about you already,” Wren reminded him.
Fishcake shook his head and smudged the tears away with the heel of his hand. His Burglarium training was fighting against the rising hope that his own mother and father might have been among that crowd of smiling faces on the screens. He did not remember them, but he felt sure that if he met his parents in the flesh he would know them at once.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll go closer. We’ll have a good look at this Brighton place,
get crab-cams aboard if we can. Check these WOPCART people are on the level…” He looked at Wren, and pitied her; after all, she had no hope of finding her parents aboard the waiting city.
“You must be starved,” he said.
“Pretty hungry,” admitted Wren.
Fishcake smiled shyly at her. “Me too. ’Mora used to do all the cooking. Do you know how to cook?”
10
THE PARENT TRAP
Usually at this time of year the raft resort of Brighton would have been cruising the Middle Sea, anchoring now and then so that visitors from the mobile towns and cities which prowled the shores could come out by balloon and motor-launch to explore its amusement arcades and aquarium, its beaches and boutiques. But business had been poor these past few seasons, and so the council had agreed to venture into the North Atlantic in search of parasite pirates.
Now they were beginning to regret it. There had been much excitement when the first three limpets made contact, east of the Azores. Crowds of visitors had come swarming out by airship from the cities of the Hunting Ground to see the strange new arrivals. But that had been weeks ago. There had been no sign of Lost Boys since, and the long banners which were stretched along the city’s bows, declaring WOPCART Summer Expedition and Brighton Welcomes Parasite Pirates were starting to look tattered and a little bit sad.
Fishcake brought the Autolycus up to periscope depth about a mile from Brighton. A night had passed since he first picked up the transmission from WOPCART. The morning sky was the colour of the inside of a cowrie-shell, and big grey waves heaved up and down. When Wren took a turn at the periscope she could not see Brighton at all, just the waves, which now and then allowed her a glimpse of a big island away to windward, ringed by dirty white cliffs, with clouds hugging its summit.
And then she realized that it was not an island at all; what she had taken for cliffs were rows of white buildings, and the clouds were steam and exhaust fumes rising from a dense thicket of smoke-stacks. It was a city, a three-tiered raft city with two outrigger-districts linked to its central hull by spidery gantries, and a bank of huge paddle wheels beating the sea to foam astern. “Oh!” cried Wren, amazed. She’d seen pictures of cities in books, but she had never grasped how big they really were; far bigger than Anchorage-in-Vineland. Airships moved to-and-fro above a jagged skyline of spires and domes and rooftops, and a circular deckplate held up by immense gasbags hung a few hundred feet above the upper tier, anchored to it by thick hawsers. Wren could see green trees on the edge of the deckplate, and a building with unlikely onion domes.
“What’s that?” she gasped.
“That’s called Cloud 9,” said Fishcake, who had managed to get a picture of the city from a crab-cam which he had sent up to perch upon the periscope. He had fetched out the Autolycus’s tattered old copy of Cade’s Almanac of Traction Towns (Maritime Edition), and was comparing Ms Cade’s diagram of Brighton with the image on the screen. “It’s a sort of airborne park. The big building in the middle is where the Mayor of Brighton lives.”
“Gosh!” breathed Wren. “I mean – Gosh!”
“No jaws,” said Fishcake, checking the screens to make sure Brighton had not added anything nasty since Cade’s Almanac went to press. There were a few air-defence cannon mounted on revolving platforms on the promenades, but no more weapons than any town carried in these troubled times. “It’s just a pleasure resort.”
He lowered the periscope. As he switched off the crab-cam signal the screens filled again with the transmission from Brighton, clearer and stronger now that the limpet was so close. “We only want to see our dear lost boys again,” the woman from WOPCART was saying. Fishcake felt a silly, happy hopefulness rising up inside him. What if she was his mummy? Mums and dads are a chain that binds, a pain, a strain, they stop boys being boys. That’s what he’d been taught to chant down in the Burglarium. Now that he was faced with the prospect of meeting his own mum and dad he found that he’d never really believed it. He’d been missing his parents his whole life long, and he’d not even known it until he heard the message from WOPCART.
He took the Autolycus deeper, nearer; down into the shadows beneath Brighton’s hull. Trailing cables and a huge, complicated steering-array loomed out of the murk; green forests of weed swirled through the cone of light from the limpet’s nose-lamp. Near the city’s bows a metallic sphere dangled on cables; Fishcake guessed it was the machine which WOPCART used to transmit their message through the sea.
A metallic ping rang through the cabin. Wren thought that something must have fallen over in the hold, but the sound came again and then again, chiming out a rhythm, as if someone were carefully tapping the outside of the hull with a hammer.
“Oh, gods!” said Fishcake suddenly.
“What?” asked Wren. “What is that noise?”
Fishcake was frantically working the limpet’s controls, steering for brighter water beyond the edge of the city. “Gargle told us he ran into something like this once, under a big predator-raft. It’s a type of Old-Tech listening device… The mummies and daddies know we’re here now!” He wasn’t sure if he was scared or happy.
With a grinding clang the limpet lurched awkwardly sideways, throwing Wren off her feet. At first she thought it was because of something Fishcake had done. “You might have warned me,” she complained, rubbing the elbow she’d banged on a bulkhead. Then she saw that the boy looked just as startled as her.
“What’s happening?” she whispered.
“I don’t know, I don’t know!”
No mistaking the next sensation. The Autolycus was rising quickly upwards. Water foamed white as it broke the surface, and sunlight burst into the cabin, blindingly bright after so many days in the dark. When Wren could see again the limpet was hanging high above the waves, and being swung sideways over a broad metal deck which jutted out from Brighton’s bows. People were running across the deck; not the smiley, well-dressed mums and dads she’d seen on the screens but rough-looking, tough-looking men in rubberized overalls. Wren felt a jolt of fear at the sight of them. Then, looking past them, she relaxed, for overlooking the deck was a pleasant promenade, and the people lining the railings there looked much more like Parents of Children Abducted from Raft Towns; beaming, happy, pointing down excitedly at the limpet as it was dumped on the deck.
Fishcake was already halfway up the ladder which led to the hatch on the roof. As he popped it open the sound of cheering burst into the limpet, and a big, amplified voice began shouting something, the words confused and echoey.
Wren followed him up the ladder. Out on the hull, Fishcake was crouched against the periscope mounting, looking nervously about him, confused by the sunlight and the thundering cheers. The magnetic grapple which had dragged the limpet from the sea had been released, and dangled dripping overhead, attached to the jib of a crane. The people on the promenade were shouting and cheering and waving their arms in the air. Wren touched Fishcake’s shoulder to reassure him. The rubber-suited men had formed a loose ring around the limpet and were closing in cautiously. Wren supposed they must be dockers or fishermen hired to pull the limpets aboard. She smiled at them, but they did not smile back. Straining her ears, she began to make out what the booming voice was saying.
“… and for those of you who have just joined us,” it bellowed, through squalls of feedback, “Brighton has captured a fourth pirate submarine! There are the crew, creeping out on to the hull – as desperate-looking a pair of young cut-throats as you could hope to meet! But don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen; the world will soon be rid of these parasites for ever!”
“It’s a trap!” said Wren. Fishcake, who hadn’t understood what the announcer was saying, turned a shocked white face towards her. “It’s not real!” she cried, standing up, shouting. “Fishcake! It’s a—”
And two men came up the limpet’s side, unfurling something between them which turned out to be a net. They dropped it over Fishcake, who kicked and struggled and shouted and reached for Wr
en’s hand. “Does this mean they aren’t our mummies and daddies?” he asked her, his voice going squeaky and ready to cry. “You lied! You lied to me!”
Then strong hands grabbed him from behind and tore him away from Wren, and more hands grabbed her, rough hands in rubber gauntlets that stank of fish and oil. A net went over her, and though she wriggled and lashed out with fists and feet she could not stop her captor throwing her over his shoulder, carrying her down the limpet’s flank and dumping her heavily on the deck. She heard Fishcake’s sobs turn suddenly to a sharp squeal, and a moment later she understood why. A man grabbed her arm and burned the back of her hand with a hot iron stamp, branding her with a sort of logo:
Shkin
“Mummy! Mummy!” Fishcake was howling as they dragged him away, still not wanting to believe that WOPCART and all the smiley parents had been nothing but bait.
“Leave him alone!” screamed Wren, weeping with the pain of her seared hand. “He’s only ten! How can you be so beastly? He thought you were his parents!”
“That’s the idea, boy.” A big, burly man in a waterproof cape stooped over her, belching out a hot fug of whiskey fumes as he peered into her face. “Hang on,” Wren heard him say. “Look, Miss Weems – this one’s a girl.”
A brittle, beautiful woman in black shoved him aside. She had a brand on her hand just like Wren’s, but hers was old, and had faded to a raised scar, not much darker than the surrounding skin. “Interesting,” she said, looking at Wren. “We’ve heard rumours of female parasites, but she’s the first we’ve seen.”