Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  “I’m not a Lost Girl!” Wren shouted through the tight wet mesh of the net. “I was a prisoner aboard the Autolycus, Fishcake took me from my home…”

  The woman sneered at her. “I don’t care who you are, girl. We are slave-dealers You are just merchandise, as far as we’re concerned.”

  “But I’m – you can’t make me a slave!”

  “Au contraire, child; our contract with Mayor Pennyroyal is perfectly clear; anyone we dredge up in one of those parasite machines becomes the property of the Shkin Corporation.”

  “Mayor Pennyroyal?” cried Wren. “You don’t mean… Not Nimrod Pennyroyal?”

  The woman seemed surprised that a Lost Girl should recognize that name. “Yes. Nimrod Pennyroyal has been Mayor of Brighton these past twelve years or more.”

  “But he can’t be! Who’d want Pennyroyal for mayor? He’s a fraud! A traitor! An airship thief!”

  Miss Weems made some notes upon a clipboard. “Take her to the slave-pens,” she told one of her men. “Inform Mr Shkin of the catch. I believe it’s a good sign. We may be drawing close to the pirate nest.”

  11

  FOUR AGAINST GRIMSBY

  On the morning of their departure, when the Screw Worm was ready at last and Hester and Tom were waiting for Caul to run a few final tests on the engines, Freya Rasmussen came down to the mooring beach and announced that she was coming too. Nothing that Tom or Hester could say seemed to change her mind.

  “It’ll be dangerous.”

  “Well, you’re both going.”

  “You’re needed here.”

  “Oh, Anchorage-in-Vineland runs itself perfectly well without me. Anyway, I told Mrs Aakiuq that she can be Acting Margravine while I’m away, and you don’t want to disappoint her, do you? She’s made herself a special hat and everything…” Beaming, Freya clambered up the Screw Worm’s boarding ladder and dumped her bulky going-away bag through the hatch.

  “Don’t you understand, Snow Queen?” Hester said. “We’re not off to Grimsby to pay a social call. We’re going to get Wren back, and if I have to kill every Lost Boy who stands in my way…”

  “You’ll only make things worse,” said Freya tartly. “There’s been too much killing already. That’s why you need me along. I can talk to Uncle and make him see reason.”

  Hester let out an exasperated howl and looked to Caul, sure that he would not want Freya along for the ride, but Caul was saying nothing, staring away across the shining water.

  So it was settled, and the voyage began like a picnic trip, with Tom and Freya waving from the Screw Worm’s open hatchways as the limpet nosed out into the lake, and all of Anchorage-in-Vineland lining the beach to cheer them on their way.

  As the city passed out of sight behind the headland and the Screw Worm folded in its legs and prepared to submerge, Freya went down into the cabin, where Caul was hunched over the rusty controls. But Tom stayed out on the hull until the last moment, watching the passing shorelines, the green slopes reflecting in the rippled water. Birds were calling in the reed-beds, their songs echoing the car-alarms and mobile phone trills which their distant ancestors must have heard; sound-fossils of a vanished world. They made Tom think of the Ancient settlements he had begun to excavate in the Dead Hills and the relics of forgotten lives he had unearthed there. Would he ever return with Wren to finish his work?

  “We’ll come back,” promised Tom, as he climbed inside to join Hester. But Hester said nothing. She did not think that she would ever see Anchorage-in-Vineland again.

  In the cramped control cabin of the Screw Worm there was no way for Caul to avoid talking to Freya Rasmussen. He wondered if that was half the reason for her deciding to come. As the waters closed over the nose windows she sat down beside him and spread Snøri Ulvaeusson’s ancient map upon the pilot’s console and said, “So, do you remember the way back to Grimsby?”

  He nodded.

  “I was sure you would,” she said. “I’m surprised you haven’t made the trip before.”

  “To Grimsby?” He turned to look at her, but the kind, careful way she was watching him made him uneasy, so he stared at the controls instead. “Why would I want to go back to Grimsby? Have you forgotten what happened the last time I was there? If Gargle hadn’t cut me down…”

  “But you still want to go back,” said Freya gently. “Why else did you repair the Worm?”

  Caul squinted into the silty darkness ahead of the limpet, pretending to be keeping a lookout for sunken rocks. “I thought about it,” he admitted. “That’s the trouble. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Even in the first weeks at Vineland, when there was so much to do and everybody was so kind and welcoming and you…”

  He glanced sideways at her and away. She was still watching him. Why was she always so kind to him? Sixteen years ago she had offered him her love, and he’d turned her down, for reasons he still couldn’t quite understand. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d banished him back to the sea.

  “That’s why I live down in the under-deck,” he admitted. “Because it’s the bit of Anchorage that’s the most like Grimsby. And every night, when I’m dreaming, I hear Uncle’s voice. ‘Come back to Grimsby, Caul,’ it says.” He looked at Freya nervously. He’d never told anyone this, and he was afraid she might think he was mad. He thought it himself, sometimes. “Uncle whispers to me, the way he used to whisper out of the speakers on the Burglarium ceiling when I was small. Even the waves on the beach talk with his voice. ‘Grimsby’s your home, Caul, my boy. You don’t belong with the Drys. Come home to Grimsby.’”

  Freya reached out to touch him, then thought better of it. She said, “But when Gargle showed up, asking for you to help him, you turned him down. You could have given him the Tin Book and gone back with him on the Autolycus.”

  “I wanted to,” said Caul. “You don’t know how much I wanted to.”

  “But you didn’t. You chose Anchorage over Grimsby.”

  “Only ’cos I was afraid,” said Caul. “Only ’cos I was afraid that when I got there I’d find I don’t fit in any better with the Lost Boys than I do with you Drys. Maybe I’m not either any more. Maybe I’m nothing at all.”

  Freya did touch him then. She laid her hand on his shoulder and felt him flinch away from her, quick and shy, like a frightened animal. Sometimes she thought that Caul was as much of a mystery to her now as he had been all those years ago when he first came to her out of the sea. He would have been so much happier if he had just let her love him. And so would she. It hadn’t exactly ruined her life, for so many other good things had happened to her, but sometimes she did feel sad that she had no husband and no children of her own. It seemed to her that there were some people – and Caul was one, and Hester Natsworthy another – who just didn’t have the knack of being happy.

  Or was there more to it than that? She thought of the waves on the beach whispering to Caul with Uncle’s voice, and felt spooked and uneasy. If Uncle could speak to him in Vineland, what would it be like for him when they reached Grimsby? And if things went badly there, and it came to a fight, would Caul be on her side, or on Uncle’s?

  12

  BUSINESS IN GREAT WATERS

  “That’s right, your worship! Hold it! Smile!”

  A tray of flash-powder exploded with a soft chuff, and a ball of smoke rose into the sunlit air of Cloud 9 like a party balloon. Nimrod Pennyroyal, explorer, author and mayor, was having his photograph taken for the Brighton Evening Palimpsest again, posing this time with Digby Slingback and Sardona Flysch, the actor and actress who played the grieving spokespeople of WOPCART in the messages Brighton was beaming into the Atlantic.

  “So, your worship,” the Palimpsest’s reporter asked, while the photographer loaded a fresh plate into his camera, “can you remind our readers what gave you the idea of this expedition against the parasite pirates?”

  “I considered it my duty,” said Pennyroyal, beaming, and adjusting his chain-of-office, which twinkled prettily in the sun. “Af
ter all, it was I who first alerted the world to the existence of these maritime miscreants; you can read of my encounters with them in my interpolitan bestseller Predator’s Gold (just twenty-five Brightonian Dolphins from all good bookshops). In recent years, we have had more and more reports of their raids and burglaries and have started to deduce how their organization operates. I considered it my duty to take our city north and capture as many of them as I could.”

  “Of course, your worship, some of your critics have suggested that it is all a publicity stunt, designed to attract more visitors to Brighton and sell more copies of your books…”

  Pennyroyal made scoffing noises. “My books sell well enough without publicity stunts. And if news of our quest to rid the oceans of these parasites brings more tourists to Brighton, what is wrong with that? Brighton is a tourist city, and it’s the mayor’s job to help boost it. And may I remind you that our little fishing expedition is not costing Brighton’s ratepayers a penny. Thanks to the partnership deal I worked out, all the underwater sensing equipment and limpet-traps are paid for by one of our most eminent businessmen, Mr Nabisco Shkin. This fake organization for pirates’ parents was all Shkin’s idea. I know some people think it’s rather cruel, but you must admit it’s worked a treat. Shkin understands the psychology of these parentless louts perfectly, you see. He was an orphan himself, you know; an urchin from the underdeck who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, so he knew just how to appeal to them.”

  “And does your worship think we shall catch more pirates soon?”

  “Wait and see!” chuckled Pennyroyal, presenting his best profile to the camera as the photographer lined up another shot. “The boys we took from the first three limpets were hard-nuts who refused to divulge the location of their base. This latest catch includes a younger boy, and a girl too; much easier to crack. I believe the next few days will bring big results!”

  In fact, what the next few days brought was a change in the weather. A storm sweeping off the Dead Continent chopped the ocean into steep, white waves and threw Brighton up and down so violently that even the residents felt queasy, and a lot of the visitors who had flown in from the Hunting Ground to watch Pennyroyal’s people fishing for pirates took to their airships and sky-yachts and went hurrying home. The Brightonians (those who were not feeling too ill to walk about) glared up through the blustering rain at the underbelly of Cloud 9 hanging in the wet sky and wondered why they had agreed to let Pennyroyal bring them out on to this wild, unfriendly ocean.

  Down below the pitching decks, on Brighton’s lowest level, Wren lay on the floor of her narrow cage in the Shkin Corporation’s holding pens and wished she were dead. Above her head an argon lamp swung to and fro, splashing light across the metal walls and the rows of cages which sat waiting for more Lost Boys to be lured aboard. Fishcake lay in one; the others held the crews of the limpets which had been captured earlier. The burn on Wren’s hand hurt terribly. She supposed she would bear that raised weal for the rest of her life – although that might not be very long.

  “Are we sinking?” she asked, when the Shkin Corporation’s guard came round and flashed his torch at her to check that she was still alive.

  The guard chuckled. “Feels like it, don’t it? But Brighton’s ridden out worse than this. Don’t worry; we’ll soon be hoovering up the rest of your chums.”

  “They’re not my chums,” said Wren bitterly. “I’m not a Lost Boy…”

  “Change the record, love,” the man said wearily. “I heard you telling Monica Weems that same story down on Fishmarket Hard when we first dredged you up. The answer’s still the same. Don’t matter who you are. You’re merchandise now. You’ll fetch a good price in Nuevo Maya.”

  Memories of old geography lessons stirred in Wren’s brain; the big globe in the schoolroom at the Winter Palace, and Miss Freya saying, “Here is Nuevo Maya, which used to be called South America before the isthmus which linked it to North America was severed by Slow Bombs in the Sixty Minute War.”

  Nuevo Maya was thousands of miles away! If they took her there, how could she ever find her way home?

  The guard leaned on her cage and leered at her through the bars. “You don’t think Mr Shkin’d try and sell a bunch of lairy pirates off as house-slaves and nursemaids, do you? You’ll end up as fighters aboard one of them big Nuevo-Mayan ziggurat cities. Lovely shows they have in them arenas. Gangs of slaves pitched in against each other, or fighting souped-up dismantling machines and captured Green Storm Stalkers. Blood and guts all over the shop. But it’s all done in honour of their funny Nuevo-Mayan gods, so it’s quite spiritual really.”

  Spiritual or not, Wren didn’t think she fancied it. She had to find a way out of this horrible mess. But her brain, about which Miss Freya had said such nice things, was too addled by the pitching of the city to think of anything.

  “I hope we do sink!” she shouted weakly after the guard as he went on his way. “That’d serve you right! I hope we sink before you trap any more poor Lost Boys!”

  But next day the storm slackened and the waves subsided, and that evening the crews of three more limpets were dragged sheepish and weeping into the slave-pens. There were four more limpets that night, and another three the following day; one of them sensed a trap and fled before the magnetic grapples caught it, but Brighton gave chase and dropped depth-charges until a white plume of water burst from the ocean to drench the cheering spectators on the starboard observation decks, and bits of limpet and Lost Boy came bobbing to the surface.

  “Word must have reached Grimsby by now,” said Krill, one of the boys who’d been taken earlier, watching white-faced from his cage as the pens around him filled with captives. “Old Uncle will do something. He’ll rescue us.”

  “Word has reached Grimsby,” said the new arrivals.

  “That’s where we came from…”

  “We picked up that message a couple of days ago.”

  “Uncle said it was a trap and we shouldn’t listen, but we sneaked out anyway.”

  “We thought our mums and dads would be here…”

  Krill hung his head and started to cry. He had led raiding parties against statics in the Western Archipelago, slaughtering any Dry who stood against him, but here in the Shkin Corporation’s warehouse he was just another lost teenager.

  Wren reached through the bars and tugged at Fishcake’s sleeve. The newbie was curled up on the floor of the neighbouring cage. He had not spoken to Wren since they were brought in, and she guessed he blamed her for what had happened to him. Maybe he was right. If only she hadn’t been so keen to persuade him to come to Brighton!

  “Fishcake,” she asked gently. “How many Lost Boys are there? Altogether, I mean.”

  Fishcake would not look at her, but after a moment he muttered, “About sixty, I s’pose. That’s not counting Uncle, and the newbies too young to ride limpets.”

  “But there are at least forty of you here!” Wren said. “Grimsby must be nearly empty…”

  The warehouse door rattled open, letting in another bunch of people. More prisoners, Wren thought, and didn’t even bother to look at them; it was too depressing. But the sound of tramping feet stopped beside her cage, and she glanced up to see that the newcomers were not Lost Boys, just two Shkin Corporation guards and the odious Miss Weems.

  “Fetch her out,” Miss Weems commanded. Wren was alarmed. Had Miss Weems finally accepted that she was not a Lost Girl? Perhaps the Shkin Corporation had realized that she would never cut the mustard in those Nuevo-Mayan arenas, and were planning to throw her overboard rather than waste any more food and water keeping her alive?

  “The master wishes to see you,” said Miss Weems. The captive Lost Boys watched from their cages as Wren was led away.

  A door behind the slave-pens opened on to a room no bigger than a cupboard. The guards shoved Wren inside, then crowded in behind her. It was only when Miss Weems pulled a lever on the wall and Wren felt the floor jerk under her that she realized this was an elevato
r. The elevators of Anchorage had all been out of order for years, but this one was working perfectly; it rose so fast that Wren felt as if her stomach had been left behind.

  Having been dragged to the slave-pens in a net, Wren did not really understand the layout of the Shkin Corporation building. It was a tower, whose lower storeys, down in Brighton’s depths, held the captive slaves. The middle floors, on the city’s second tier, housed a few special cells for luxury goods and the offices of administrators. The higher levels, which poked up through the resort’s top tier in a fashionable district called Queen’s Park, were the offices of the Corporation’s founder, Mr Nabisco Shkin. This topmost part was as white and beautiful as any iceberg, and gave no hint of the dangerous nine-tenths which lurked below. Local people called it the Pepperpot.

  The elevator stopped on the top floor, and Wren stepped out into a large, circular room. It was beautifully furnished, with plush black draperies, black carpets, and black pictures in golden frames hanging on the black walls. But what made Wren catch her breath was the view from the windows. She was looking out over the rooftops of Brighton; the sun was shining, bright flags were flying, sky-yachts and air-pedalos were rising from the harbour and legions of gulls were wheeling and soaring around the chimney-pots and far out over the sparkling sea. Spray from the paddle-wheels blew across the city on a gentle breeze, and the sunlight shining through it filled the streets with drifting rainbows.

  For a moment Wren almost forgot her misery, her hunger, the pain of her branded hand. Joy bubbled up in her. She was on a raft city; on one of the wonderful cities she had always dreamed about, and it was even more beautiful than she could have hoped.

  “The girl, Mr Shkin,” announced Miss Weems, with an ingratiating whine in her voice which Wren had not heard before. One of the guards turned Wren around to face a man who sat quietly watching her from a black swivel chair.