Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  Nabisco Shkin sat very still, one leg crossed over the other, one patent-leather shoe blinking with reflected light as his foot tapped ever so slightly up and down, his only movement. A dove-grey suit; grey gloves; grey hair; grey eyes; grey face; grey voice. He said, “I am delighted to meet you, my dear,” but he didn’t sound delighted. Didn’t look it either. Didn’t look as if he’d know what delight was. He said, “Monica tells me that you claim to come from Anchorage.”

  “I do!” cried Wren, grateful that someone was prepared to listen to her at last. “My name is Wren Natsworthy, and I was kidnapped—”

  “Nobody comes from Anchorage.” Shkin stood up and circled her. His eyes were on her all the time. “Anchorage sank years ago, west of Greenland.”

  “No, it didn’t!” blurted Wren. “It—”

  Shkin raised one finger and turned to his desk. Turned back with something in his hands. It was the book that Wren had stolen from Miss Freya. She had forgotten all about it until now.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “That’s the Tin Book,” she said. “Just an old curio from the Black Centuries. It’s why the Autolycus came to Anchorage. I think it’s got something to do with submarines. I helped the Lost Boys steal it but it all went wrong and Fishcake ended up taking me hostage, and if you could take me back there, sir, I’m sure my mum and dad and Miss Freya would reward you…”

  “Anchorage again.” Shkin put the book down and studied her. “Why do you persist in this ridiculous story? Anchorage is home to no one but fish. Everyone in Brighton knows that. Our beloved Mayor Pennyroyal made rather a lot of money with his book about its final days. Predator’s Gold ends with Anchorage sinking to what our ever-original mayor describes as ‘a watery grave’.”

  “Well, Pennyroyal’s a liar!” Wren said angrily, thinking how unfair it was that Pennyroyal should have survived at all, let alone grown rich from his fibs. “He’s a coward and a liar, and he shot my dad and stole Mum and Dad’s airship so he could run away from Anchorage when he thought Arkangel was going to eat it. He can’t possibly know what happened after that. Whatever he wrote, he must have made it up.”

  Nabisco Shkin raised one grey eyebrow about an eighth of an inch, which was his way of showing surprise. At the same instant, Wren had an idea. She was the only person in the whole of the outside world who knew the truth about Anchorage. Surely that must make her valuable? Far too valuable to be auctioned off with the rest of the Lost Boys as an arena slave!

  She felt as if a tiny door had opened very far away from her, on the other side of an enormous, darkened room; she could see a way out.

  She said, “Anchorage found its way to a green bit on the Dead Continent. It thrived there, and I’m proof of it. Don’t you think Pennyroyal would like to know that?”

  Nabisco Shkin had been about to silence her again, but when she said that he hesitated, and his eyebrow shot up a full quarter-inch. He settled into his chair again, his eyes still fixed on Wren. “Explain,” he said.

  “Well, he’ll want to know about Anchorage, won’t he?’ Wren stammered. “I mean, if he’s made all that money telling people about us, think how interested he’ll be to learn what really happened. He could write a sequel! He could have an expedition to take me home, and write a book about it!” And even if he couldn’t, she thought, at least life as a slave in that floaty palace thing would be better than the arenas of Nuevo Maya. She said eagerly, “He’ll be dying to talk to me.”

  Shkin nodded slowly. A smile flickered for a moment around his thin mouth, then gave up the effort. He had been irritated by the crack that Pennyroyal had made about the underdeck in his interview in the Palimpsest, reminding everyone of Shkin’s beginnings as a child thief in the dank alleys of Mole’s Combe. Maybe this girl was a gift from his gods; a way to get his own back on Brighton’s absurd mayor.

  “If your story is true,” he said, “you might indeed be of interest to Mayor Pennyroyal. But how can you prove it?”

  Wren pointed to the Tin Book, which lay on his desk. “That’s the proof. It’s a famous artefact from the margravine’s library…”

  “I do not recall Pennyroyal mentioning it in his tediously detailed account of Anchorage’s treasures,” said Shkin. “What if he does not recognize it? That leaves only your word, and who would believe the word of a slave and a Lost Girl?”

  “He can ask me stuff,” said Wren desperately. “He can ask me things about my mum and dad and Mr Scabious and Miss Freya, stuff that’s not in his book, stuff that only somebody who’d lived in Anchorage could know about.”

  “Interesting.” Shkin gave another of his slow-motion nods. “Monica,” he said, “this girl is to be transferred to the second tier. Make sure she is treated as a luxury item from now on.”

  “Don’t forget Fishcake,” said Wren. “He’s been to Anchorage too.”

  “Indeed,” said Shkin, and with a glance at Miss Weems, “Arrange for that boy to be brought to the questioning room. It’s time I had a word with him.”

  13

  DR ZERO

  As the airship that had carried her from Batmunkh Tsaka swung into the shoals of other ships above Tienjing, Oenone Zero looked down from the gondola windows, delighted by the gaily painted houses balanced on their impossible ledges, the gardens like window-boxes, the sunlight silvering high-level canals, and the bright robes of the citizens thronging on the spidery bridges and the steep, ladder-like streets. This city, high in the central mountains of Shan Guo, had been the birthplace of Anti-Tractionism. Here Lama Batmunkh had founded the Anti-Traction League, and here the League had had its capital ever since.

  But the League was gone now, the old High Council overthrown, and the signs of the Green Storm’s war were everywhere. As the airship descended towards the military docking pans at the Jade Pagoda, Oenone found it harder and harder to ignore the hideous concrete rocket emplacements which disfigured Tienjing’s parks and the armies of ugly windmills flailing and rattling on the mountainsides, generating clean energy for the war-effort. For fourteen years no one had been allowed to do anything that was not part of the war effort, and the civilian quarters of the city showed signs of long neglect. Wherever Oenone looked, buildings were falling into disrepair, and the shadows of patrolling dreadnoughts slithered across decaying roofs.

  The Jade Pagoda was not made of jade, nor was it a pagoda. The name was just a relic that Tienjing’s founders had brought with them when they first fled into these mountains; it had probably belonged once to some pleasant summer palace in the lowlands, long since devoured by hungry cities. It didn’t suit the grim stone fortress which loomed over Oenone as she disembarked on the snow-scoured pan. On spikes above the outer gates the heads of anti-war protestors and people who failed to recycle their household waste were turning dry and papery as wasps’ nests in the mountain air. Huge slogans had been painted on the walls: THE WORLD MADE GREEN AGAIN! and ONE LAST PUSH WILL SMASH THE PAN-GERMAN TRACTION-WEDGE!

  Soldiers of the Stalker Fang’s elite air-legion manned the inner gate, and stepped out to bar the way as Oenone heaved her pack on to her shoulder and started up the steps from the docking pan.

  “Papers, young man,” barked the sub-officer in charge. It was a mistake which Oenone was used to. In the Storm’s lands all surplus food was earmarked for the fighters at the front, and the yearly famines of her childhood had left her as slight and flat-chested as a boy of fourteen. She waited patiently while the sub-officer checked her pass, and saw his face change when he realized who she was. “Let her through! Let her through!” he shouted, lashing at his men with the flat of his sword, punishing them in the hope that Dr Zero would not punish him. “Let her through at once! This is Dr Zero, the leader’s new surgeon-mechanic!”

  Oenone had been four years old when the Green Storm seized power, and she had no clear memories of the time before the war. Her father, who had been killed in a skirmish with pirates at Rogues’ Roost, was just a face in a photograph on the family shrin
e.

  Oenone grew up shy and clever on an airbase in remote Aleutia where her mother worked as a mechanic. At school she sang propaganda songs like “The East Is Green” and “We Thank The Stalker Fang For Our Happy Childhoods”. At home her bedtime stories were the tales her aviator brother Eno told, of victories on distant battlefields. Her playthings were broken Stalkers, shipped back from the fighting in Khamchatka and piled up behind the base. She felt so sorry for them that she started trying to make them better, not understanding then that they were dead already, and would best be left in peace. She learned the secrets that lay beneath their armour, the braille of their brains. She grew so good with them that the base commander started calling for the Zero girl instead of his own surgeon-mechanics when one of his Stalkers went wrong. She earned extra rations for her mother and herself that way, until she was sixteen, when the Green Storm heard of her talents and sent her to a training facility, then to a frontline Resurrection unit in the Altai Shan.

  In that underground world of trenches and dug-outs she toiled through the long, murderous winter of ’22. Dead soldiers were dragged out of the frozen mud by salvage teams and dumped on the Resurrection slabs, where Oenone and her comrades turned them into Stalkers and sent them marching back into the line.

  She was surprised at how quickly she stopped feeling horror, and pity. She learned not to look at the faces of the people she worked on. That way they weren’t people at all, just broken things that had to be stripped down and repaired as fast as possible. There was a sense of comradeship in the Resurrection room, which Oenone liked. The other surgeon-mechanics joked and teased each other as they worked, but because Oenone was so young they called her “little sister” and took care of her. They were impressed by how quickly and carefully she worked, and the easy way she solved problems that they could not. Sometimes she heard them talking about her, using words like “genius”.

  Oenone felt proud that she had pleased them, and proud that she was playing a part in the struggle for the Good Earth. Again and again that winter the cities of the enemy tried to advance across the shell-torn stretch of Hell which separated their Hunting Ground from the territories of the Green Storm, and they were so vast and so many that it sometimes seemed to Oenone that nothing would be able to stop them. But Green Storm guns and catapults hurled shells against their tracks, and Green Storm carriers flung Tumblers down upon their upperworks, and Green Storm warships routed their fighter-screens, and brave Green Storm rocket units crept between their huge wheels and blasted holes in their undersides through which squads of Green Storm Stalkers could swarm. And always, in the end, when enough of their people had been killed, the cities gave up and slunk away. Sometimes, when one was badly damaged, the others would turn on it and tear it apart.

  At first Oenone was terrified by the howl and crump of the incoming snout-gun rounds, and the whistle of snipers’ bullets slicing the cold air above the communications trenches. But weeks went by, and then months, and she slowly grew used to the terror. It was like working on the bodies in the Resurrection room; you learned to stop feeling things. She didn’t even feel anything when word came from Aleutia that her mother’s airbase had been eaten by amphibious suburbs.

  And then, during the spring offensive of ’23, she recognized one of the bodies that the salvage teams dumped in front of her. There was a pattern of moles on his chest which she knew as well as the constellations he had taught her when she was little. Even before she peeled aside the bloody rag that someone had draped over his face she knew that he was her brother Eno. Because their letters to each other had been censored, she hadn’t even known that he was in her sector.

  She stared at him while she mechanically pulled on her rubber gauntlets. She did not want to Resurrect him, but she knew what would happen to her if she refused. Sometimes soldiers on the line tried to stop the Corps taking the bodies of their comrades for Resurrection; the Green Storm denounced them as Crypto-Tractionists, and they were shot and Resurrected with their friends. Oenone did not want to be shot. At the sight of Eno all her feelings had returned, and her fear of death came back so suddenly and so powerfully that she could barely breathe. She did not ever want to be like Eno; cold and helpless on a slab.

  “Surgeon-Mechanic?” asked one of her assistants. “Are you unwell?”

  Oenone wanted to be sick. She waved him away and tried to control herself. It was wrong to even think of not Resurrecting Eno. She told herself that she should be happy for her brother, because thanks to her his body would be able to go on fighting the barbarians even after death. But she was not happy.

  Her assistants were staring at her, so she said, “Scalpel. Bonesaw. Rib-spreaders,” and set to work. She opened Eno’s body and took out his internal organs, replacing them with engines, battery-housings and preservative pumps. She cut off his hands and replaced them with the steel hands of a Stalker. She cut off his private parts. She took out his eyes. She took off his skin, and wired a mysterious net of electrodes into the fibres of his muscles. She opened his skull and fitted a machine the size of a peach-stone into his brain, then watched him writhe and shudder as it unspooled wire-thin cilia down his spinal cord, connecting to his nervous system and to the other machines she had installed.

  “This isn’t really you,” she told him, whispering to him constantly as she worked. “You are in the Sunless Country, and this is just a thing you’ve left behind, that we can use, like recycling a bottle or a crate. Doesn’t the Green Storm tell us to recycle everything, for the sake of the Good Earth?”

  When she had finished she handed him over to a junior surgeon-mechanic who would fit the exoskeleton and finger-glaives. Then she went outside and smoked a cigarette, and watched airships on fire above no-man’s land.

  It was after that that the dead started talking to her. It seemed strange that they should be so chatty when her own brother had said nothing at all, but when she looked into their faces, which she always made a point of doing after Eno, she could hear them whispering in her mind.

  They all asked her same thing. Who will end this? Who will put an end to this endless war?

  “I’ll do it,” Oenone Zero promised, her small voice drowning in the thunder of the guns. “At least, I’ll try.”

  “Treacle!” cried Popjoy cheerfully, when she finally arrived at his offices, high in the pagoda. He was packing. In the big trunk that sat open on his desk Oenone could see books, files, papers, a framed portrait of the Stalker Fang and an enamel mug with the logo of the Resurrection Corps and the slogan You Don’t Have To Be A Mad Scientist To Work Here – But It Helps! Popjoy was standing on a chair to unhook a picture of the Rogues’ Roost airbase, which he dusted with his cuff before stowing in the trunk. Then he blew Doctor Zero a kiss.

  “Congratulations! I’ve just been to see Fang, and it’s official! She’s so impressed with your work on old Shrikey that she’s decided to let me retire at last! I’m off to my weekend place at Batmunkh Gompa for a well-earned rest. A spot of fishing; tinkering with a few pet projects; I might even write my memoirs. And you, Treacle; you’re to be my replacement.”

  How strange, thought Oenone. This was what she had been working for ever since her epiphany in the trenches; to be the Stalker Fang’s personal surgeon-mechanic. For this she had overcome her natural shyness and fought for a transfer to the central Stalker Works. For this she had put up with Dr Popjoy’s unpleasant sense of humour and wandering hands. For this she had spent years tracking down the grave of the notorious Stalker Shrike, and months repairing him, proving to everyone that she was at least Popjoy’s equal. Yet now that the moment had arrived, she could not even find a smile. Her knees felt weak. She gripped the door-frame to stop herself from falling.

  “Cheer up, Treacle!” Popjoy leered. “It’s good news! Power! Money! And all you have to do in return is check Her Excellency’s oil-levels from time to time, buff up her bodywork, keep a weather-eye open for rust. She’s basically indestructible, so you shouldn’t have too many
problems. If you have any worries, send word to me. Otherwise…”

  Otherwise, I’m on my own, thought Oenone Zero, climbing the stairs to the highest level of the pagoda, the Stalker Fang’s own quarters. It was all wrong, of course; if there were justice in the world a man like Popjoy, who had unleashed so much suffering and evil, would suffer himself. Instead, he was going to end his days in luxury, doing a spot of fishing, tinkering with a few pet projects. But at least by retiring he would allow Oenone Zero a chance to fulfil her promise to the dead.

  Sentries clattered to attention as she passed. Flunkeys bowed low before her and swung open the doors that led into the Stalker Fang’s conference chamber. Clerks and staff officers looked up from a big map of the Rustwater and did not bother to return Oenone’s low bow. Fang looked up too, her green eyes flaring. She had returned from the front line only a few hours before, and her armour was crusted with dried mud and the blood of townie soldiers. “My new Surgeon-Mechanic,” she whispered.

  “At your service, Excellency,” murmured Oenone Zero, and dropped to her knees before the Stalker. When she found the courage to lift her head, everyone had gone back to their war-maps, and the only eyes that lingered on her were those of Mr Shrike.

  So everything was in place. She was on the inside; a member of the central staff. Soon she would put in motion the plan she’d thought of in her louse-infested bunk on the Altai Front. She would assassinate the Stalker Fang.

  14

  SOLD!

  Later, Wren would sometimes tell people that she knew what it was like to be a slave, but she didn’t, not really. The old trade was thriving in those years. Prisoners taken by both sides in the long war were sold wholesale to men like Shkin, who packed them into leaky, under-heated air-freighters and shipped them off along the Bird Roads to work on giant industrial platforms or the endless entrenchments and city-traps of the Storm. Slavery for them meant grinding labour, the ripping apart of families, random cruelty and an early death. The worst Wren had to put up with was Nimrod Pennyroyal’s writing.