by Philip Reeve
“I know where we can get an airship,” she went on. “Cynthia Twite told me you used to be an aviator.”
Theo almost smiled at that. “Cynthia Twite is a fool who understands nothing.”
“True. But if you can fly an airship…”
“I did not fly airships. I flew Tumblers.”
“Tumblers?” asked Wren. “What are they? Are they like airships? I mean, if you know the basics…” But Theo had clammed up again, narrowing his eyes and staring past her at the horizon. “Oh, come on!” Wren whispered impatiently. “Do you like being Pennyroyal’s slave? Don’t you want to escape? I should have thought you’d be itching to get back to the Green Storm…”
“I would never go back to the Storm!” Theo said suddenly, angrily, almost dropping the mayoral goggles as he turned to face her. “It is a lie; their great war, the World Made Green Again; my father was right; it is all lies!”
“Oh,” said Wren. “Well, what about your home, then? You must want to go back to Zagwa…”
Theo stared at the horizon again, but it was not the sea and the sky and the distant shore that he was watching. Even here, in the expensive sunlight of Cloud 9, he could see that last, desperate fight above the Rustwater. The light of guns and rockets and burning ships had glittered in all the little winding waterways below him as he fell. A doomed suburb had been bellowing its distress calls across the marshes and the exultant voices of his comrades had crackled in his headphones, shouting as they began their own drops, “The World Made Green Again!” and “Death to the Pan-German Traction Wedge!” He had thought that those would be the last sounds he would ever hear. But here he was, months later and half a world away, still alive. The gods of war had spared him so that he could stand beside a swimming pool and be talked at by this stupid, skinny white girl who thought herself so clever.
“I can never go home,” he said. “Didn’t you hear me? I disobeyed my father. I ran away. I can never go home.”
Wren shrugged. “All right, suit yourself,” she told him, and stomped away before Pennyroyal woke up and saw them talking to each other. She would show Theo Ngoni! She would steal the mayor’s yacht on her own, and pilot it back to Vineland herself. It was only a silly airship, after all! How hard could it be?
Dusk settled over Brighton. Along the promenades at the edges of its three tiers strings of coloured bulbs were switched on. Lights blinked and swirled on the fairgrounds and the pleasure-piers. Powerful lamps were lit atop each cabin of the revolving Pharos Wheel, which was mounted near the city’s bows and served as both a joyride for the tourists and as a lighthouse to guide night-flying airships to Brighton.
The city was swinging eastward. Soon it would thread itself through the narrow strait which separated Africa from the Great Hunting Ground, and swim proudly into the Middle Sea. Brighton’s businessmen were hoping for plenty of visitors when they anchored for Moon Festival. Word of the campaign against the Lost Boys would have spread along the Bird Roads by now, and the captured limpets displayed in the Brighton Aquarium would add a certain educational element to the attractions of the usual MoonFest celebrations. Already sightseers had started arriving from some of the small towns whose lights could be seen on the shore.
Above the coming and going of balloons, the shadows of evening pooled between the cypress groves of Cloud 9, and coloured floodlights made the Pavilion blush pink and gold. A few airships circled it, up from Brighton on an evening pleasure trip. The amplified voices of their pilots were faintly audible on Cloud 9, pointing out features of interest, but new security arrangements prohibited them from coming too close. None of the sightseers noticed a small window swing open in one of the Pavilion’s domes, or the bird which flew out of it and up through the web of hawsers to join the cloud of gulls hanging ghostly in the city’s wake.
Although it was white like a gull and had a gull’s soaring flight, this bird was not a gull; not any more. Its bill had been replaced with a blade, and in the spaces of its skull glowed dim green lights. It rose through the circling flocks and flew away into the deepening twilight.
On and on it flapped, untiring, while days and nights came out of the east to meet it. It crossed the town-torn spine of Italy, and skirted the plumes of erupting volcanoes in Asia Minor. At a Green Storm air-base in the Ziganastra mountains it landed to let the base commander peer at the slip of paper which it carried in a cavity inside its chest. She cursed under her breath when she saw who the coded message was addressed to, and summoned a sleepy surgeon-mechanic to recharge the gull’s power-cells.
It went on its way, flying into the haze of smoke above the Rustwater Marshes, where artillery duels were rumbling like autumn storms. A squadron of enormous Traction Cities was crawling eastward, trying to head off a Green Storm counter-attack. On their lower tiers whole buildings had been converted into snout guns. Railways carried huge, high-explosive shells out of the city’s innards, and the guns hurled them into the marshy Out-Country ahead, which was said to be crawling with Stalkers and mobile rocket units. Buffeted by passing airships and the fluffy white thistledown of anti-aircraft bursts, the gull let the leading city’s slipstream carry it eastward for a while, then rose above the battle and flapped on towards the white mountains that stood on the rim of the world.
The sky grew cold, and the ground rose. The gull flew through zones of high, white silence and over regions where the Storm’s troop-movements gave the mountains the busy, scuttling look of ant-hills. At last, on a night of snow and starlight a week after it left Brighton, it landed on a window-sill of the Jade Pagoda, and tapped its bill against the frosty pane.
The window opened. The Stalker Fang took the gull gently in her steel hands and opened its chest. The message she took out had been written by someone called Agent 28. Her green eyes flared slightly brighter. She tore the message into small pieces, and sent for General Naga, commander of her elite air-legion.
“Make ready an assault unit,” she told him. “And prepare my ship for battle. We leave for Brighton with the dawn.”
22
MURDER ON CLOUD 9
Late October. In Vineland, Wren thought, the grass would be white and stiff with frost until mid-morning; fog would blanket the lake, and perhaps the first snow was already falling. But here on the Middle Sea it was still as warm as midsummer, and the only clouds in the sky were small, white, fluffy ones that looked as if they’d been put there for decoration.
Brighton had cruised slowly along the southern shores of the Hunting Ground for several weeks. Then, with Moon Festival drawing near, it headed south to its appointed rendezvous. Boo-Boo went with her handmaidens to watch from an observation balcony at the edge of Cloud 9 as the land came into view. “Look girls, look!” she cried happily, indicating the coastline with a theatrical sweep of her hand. “Africa!”
Wren, standing at the mayoress’s side with an enormous parasol, tried to be impressed, but it was quite difficult. All she could see was a line of low, reddish bluffs rising out of a landscape the colour of biscuits, with a couple of big, ragged mountains lost in the haze beyond. Wren knew from things her father and Miss Freya had told her that Africa had been both the birthplace of mankind and its haven in the centuries of darkness which followed the Sixty Minute War; but the civilizations which once thrived upon those shores had left no traces – or, if they had, they had long since been snaffled up by hungry scavenger towns.
One of the towns that might have done the snaffling came into view soon afterwards. A small, three-tiered place, it was rumbling along on broad, barrel-shaped sand-wheels, trailing a swirl of red dust like a windblown cape. Wren glanced at it without very much interest. It felt strange to remember how, two weeks before, she had deserted her post in the middle of Mrs Pennyroyal’s hairstyling routine to run and stare in wonderment at a little townlet trundling down on to the shore. She’d seen so many towns and even small cities since then that they seemed quite ordinary now, and certainly not the fabulous things that she had imagined when she
lived in Vineland.
And then she looked again, and felt as silly as she had on that long-ago day when she first saw Brighton through the Autolycus’s periscope, and mistook it for an island. The things she’d thought were distant mountains were not distant at all. Nor were they mountains. They were Traction Cities so large that, when she first looked at them, her brain had simply not understood what her eyes were showing her. They were lumbering seaward, and through the dust and the drifting exhaust smoke Wren could see that each had nine tiers bristling with chimneys and spires.
“The one on the left is Kom Ombo,” the mayoress told her girls. “The other is Benghazi. Mayor Pennyroyal has contracted to meet them here so that their people may taste the delights of Brighton this Moon Festival. They have been hunting sand-towns in the deep desert, poor things, so you can imagine how they will relish good food, fine entertainment and a refreshing dip in the Sea Pool.”
To Wren, the approaching cities looked at first just like the pictures she remembered from her dog-eared copy of A Child’s Guide to Municipal Darwinism back in Anchorage. Then, as they drew closer, she began to make out differences. These cities were armoured, the exposed buildings on the edge of each tier screened with steel plates and anti-rocket netting. And although the land around their massive tracks was dotted with small, scurrying towns and suburbs and traction villages, these cities were making no attempt to swallow them.
“Moon Festival is a sacred time,” said the mayoress, when Wren pointed this out. “A time when, according to tradition, no city hunts or eats another.”
“Oh,” said Wren, feeling disappointed, for it would have been thrilling to watch a good old-fashioned city chase.
“Of course,” Boo-Boo went on, “with the war on and prey so scarce not every mayor abides by tradition nowadays, but if any of those cities tries to eat another, Ms Twombley and her friends will sort them out. It’s high time that aëro-floozy made herself useful.”
Bang on cue, the Flying Ferrets went tearing through the sky towards the cities, rolling and tumbling and firing off coloured rockets to demonstrate how they would deal with any predator that threatened to break the Moon Festival fast. One peeled off, trailing lilac smoke, to write, WELCOME TO BRIGHTON across the sky. As the thunder of their engines rolled away across the desert, Wren heard the rattle of heavy chains drifting up from Brighton. The city was dropping anchor.
“I have a feeling that this will be a wonderful MoonFest!” said Mrs Pennyroyal brightly, as the girls around her oohed and aahed and applauded the aviators’ daring. “Now, come on, all of you; I wish you all to be photographed in your costumes for the mayor’s ball.”
She turned back towards the Pavilion, and Wren, with a last glance at the towering cities, hurried after her. All the other girls were busy talking about tomorrow night’s ball, and about the charming costumes the house-slaves were to wear. Listening to their excited chatter, Wren found herself feeling almost sorry that she was going to miss the fun. But miss it she must. Tonight, while the household was asleep, Wren meant to creep down to the boathouse and steal the Peewit. By the time the sacred moon rose she would be a long, long way from Brighton.
The Pavilion echoed and rang to the sound of preparations for the MoonFest Ball. In the ballroom under the central dome painters and curtain-fitters were hard at work, and musicians were practising, and electricians were covering the ceiling with hundreds of tiny lights. Crates of wine and hampers of food came creaking up from Brighton in the cable car, and the militia drilled in the Pavilion gardens.
It was all costing Pennyroyal a fortune, which he thought rather unfair. The people of Brighton surely wanted their mayor to put on a good show for Moon Festival; it seemed a bit rich that they expected him to pay for it all out of his own pocket. So he felt not the tiniest pang of guilt about inviting Walter Plovery to an informal dinner-party he was holding that night. Between dessert and coffee, while the other guests were discussing their plans for MoonFest and the latest scandals in the Artists’ Quarter, Pennyroyal led the antiquary off to take a look at some of the precious antiques in the Pavilion’s collection. Together the two men wandered from room to room, studying Stalker’s brains and ground-car grilles, fragments of circuit-board like careful embroidery, flattened drinks cans and suits of ancient armour. They made notes of pieces which Plovery thought might fetch a tidy sum from some collectors he knew in Benghazi, and which Pennyroyal reckoned nobody would miss.
Over coffee, Mr Plovery mentally totted up the commission he stood to make on all these sales, and found that he was going to do very nicely. Full of Pennyroyal’s food, and charmed by the wit and sophistication of his fellow guests, the antiquary regretted that he had ever made that deal with Shkin about the Tin Book. But Mr Shkin had promised him a very great deal of money, and Plovery, whose aged mother lived in an expensive nursing-home at Black Rock, needed all the money he could get. When the evening ended and the other guests made their way noisily back to the cable car, he doubled back and hid himself in one of the Pavilion’s galleries.
The night air made Wren shiver inside her silver lamé nightgown as she stepped out through the servants’ entrance into the cold of the garden. She could hear the sea far below, the wind soughing through the rigging, and someone burbling a drunken song down in the streets of Brighton. Clutching the bag of food she had stolen from the kitchens, she hurried across the damp lawn towards the boathouse and the lights of the Flying Ferrets’ aërodrome.
The boathouse doors were never locked, and big as they were they were easy to move, rolling aside on well-oiled casters when Wren leaned her weight against them. The Peewit’s sleek envelope gleamed inside the hangar as Wren crept to the gondola. She found that she had been holding her breath, which was silly, because there was nobody about. Over at the aërodrome a gramophone was playing a popular tune. Wren reached for the gondola door, and that was not locked either. She crept inside and used the small electric torch she had pinched from the Pavilion’s caretaker to study the dials on the chromium instrument panels, remembering the diagrams in a book she’d looked at in the Pavilion library, Practical Aviation For Fun And Profit.
The gas-cells were full, just as Cynthia had told her. The fuel gauge was still on empty, but Wren had thought of a way to deal with that. She took her nightgown off and stashed it behind the instrument panel. Underneath, she was still wearing her day-clothes. She said a quick prayer to the gods of Vineland, then left the airship and walked briskly across the apron in front of the boat-house and through the trees towards the Ferrets’ base.
In an old summerhouse which had been commandeered by the mercenary air force, Orla Twombley and a few of her aviators were playing cards. They looked up suspiciously when Wren came tapping at the door.
“Who’s that?”
“Looks like one of Boo-Boo’s girls.”
The aviatrix stood up lazily and opened the door. “Well?”
“I’ve come with a message from Mrs Pennyroyal,” said Wren. Her voice caught a little as she said it, but the aviatrix didn’t seem to notice. She looked worried. Maybe she thought Boo-Boo had sent Wren here to tell her off for flirting with the mayor. Wren started to feel more confident. “Mrs Pennyroyal wants the Peewit to be fuelled at once,” she explained. “She is going across to Benghazi tomorrow morning. Very early tomorrow morning, so she can find lots of bargains at the bazaar. She wonders if your ground-crew would oblige?”
Orla Twombley frowned. “Why ours? Is it not the mayor’s men that should be refuelling the old gasbag?”
“Yes,” said Wren. “His Worship was supposed to ask them this afternoon, but he forgot, and they’ve gone off duty now. So if you wouldn’t mind getting your people to do it, Mrs Pennyroyal would be ever so grateful.”
The aviatrix thought for a moment. She did not want to upset the mayoress. Boo-Boo had powerful relatives who might force Pennyroyal to dispense with the Flying Ferrets’ services and hire some other freelance air-force instead. Orla Twombley knew for
a fact that the Junkyard Angels and Richard D’Astardley’s Flying Circus were both angling to take over the Brighton contract.
She nodded, and turned to her men. “Algy? Ginger? You heard what the young lady said…”
Grumpy but obedient, the two aviators set down their cards and their mugs of cocoa and went out with Wren into the night, muttering about what a waste of good fuel it was and wondering why anyone still bothered with airships when heavier-than-air was the way of the future. Wren trailed after them at a distance, and watched as they ran fuel-lines from the big tanks behind their airstrip and linked them to nozzles on the Peewit’s underside.
“She’ll take a good ten minutes,” one of the men said, turning to Wren with a friendly wink. “No need for you to hang about in the cold, kiddo.”
Wren thanked him and ran back to the Pavilion. Ten minutes would give her just enough time to fetch Cynthia.
She had decided right from the start that she would not tell Cynthia about her scheme. Cynthia was much too giggly and forgetful to keep a secret, and would probably have blurted out the whole thing to Mrs Pennyroyal. But Wren had no intention of leaving her friend behind. While the Peewit was being fuelled she would slip into the dormitory where the girls slept, wake Cynthia as quietly as she could, and bring her down to the boathouse. By the time they got there, the yacht should be ready for take-off.
Mr Plovery used a novel lock-pick which Shkin’s people had taken from the Lost Boys to open the door of the mayor’s private office. The office was in a tower room, with long windows reaching up towards a shadowy ceiling high above. The blinds were open and the moon shone brightly in, showing the antiquary Pennyroyal’s cluttered desk, and the drawing by Walmart Strange behind which Pennyroyal’s private safe was hidden.
As he crossed the room, Plovery sensed a movement way up above him in the domed ceiling, and had the oddest feeling that he was being watched. He went cold with panic. What if Pennyroyal had got hold of one of those crab-camera things and was using it to guard his safe?